Food Guilt

I haven't posted much about bench marks in weight loss for the last several months because there haven't been any. Starting in September, after I'd reached my goal birthday weight, things went awry. For one reason or another, my gym attendance was sporadic and I started indulging. Just a little. Here and there. I've managed to maintain that weight, going up and down about 7 pounds until now... but it's difficult.

My initial motivation, devastation, is no longer a factor--and I've yet to find an equally powerful substitute. My lifelong dream of being thin and elegant is not enough to get me going these days. I just can't seem to get out of the 160s range, and I can't seem to muster up the discipline to break myself out of this weightloss inertia by being hardcore about my food intake. Now that I'm down from an original weight of 222, I have to reduce my caloric intake if I want to see loss, but I'm just hungry a lot. and When I am working out and lifting, my metabolism is so amped up that it's hard to eat less. But I'm not really worried about eating that is metabo-related, because I know my body is putting that to good use. It's the emotional eating that I know I'm doing more and more often. I do think that some of this is self-sabotage at work. And it's the fact that while I still make more healthy choices overall, I'm not really that interested in denying myself the baked goods that people bring into the office, or the Hershey's kisses, or the food I see on the menu when I go out.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the low fat, low(er) cal foods I ate last spring and summer; I really did come to a point where I preferred vegetables and water (don't even get me started on water; It's so hard for me to force my daily intake of that to be what it needs to be right now)and fruit to lard, cheese, and a carbohydrates-heavy diet (I am by no means anti-carbs, but too much is not good. everyone knows this).

Anyway, I don't like how I'm feeling these days. I'm trying to be accountable to myself and a few good friends about how I'm eating, and I find that I'm prefacing a lot of my statements with "Well, I'm an awful person, but I ate..." Or my accounts are peppered with rationalizations like "well, I wanted it, so I ate it..." but I don't really mean that. I couldn't possibly, because my tendency is to gloss over or to omit my less than stellar choices.

It's no longer organic for me, as it was last year, to refuse, on principle, foods that are antithetical to progress.

I need a kick start. Unfortunately, it has to come from within,and my internal monologue is not on that track at the moment.