3%

After 4 days of not weighing myself, I was chagrined to notice a gain on Saturday morning instead of the two-pound loss I'd been hoping for. I hadn't been able to exercise as much or as vigorously due to a couple of strained muscles, but I still made it to the gym 3 times by Friday morning and did one morning of resistance bands training at home. As for food, I definitely ate like someone in loss mode.

I did not feel like I was going to see a loss even before the weigh-in, but I was still hopeful. I thought I discerned even more room in some pants and then there was the milestone of getting, comfortably, into those size 10s mid-week, so I thought my body might just surprise me.

On Friday night, I did splurge a bit on green tea ice cream after sushi (relatively reasonable rolls--1 spicy tuna and 1 spicy salmon), but that certainly wouldn't have yielded a pound overnight. I felt betrayed, discouraged, and angry. I still put forth a good effort on the elliptical on Saturday morning (50 minutes of the cross country program--burned roughly 640 calories), even after the disheartening digital read out.

I didn't eat beforehand, so I wolfed down two bowls of cornflakes (with skim milk) afterward. I didn't eat again until later in the afternoon. The rest of my food choices were in no way conservative. Today was better. In fact, now that I've been grocery shopping I can say that the whole week for food will be good. I am stocked up on all my favourite staples: tilapia, oranges, pears, light laughing cow cheese wedges, chicken sausage links (for breakfast), carrot juice, fat free yogurt, etc.

Because my strain is better, I will be exercising every day this week with the exception of next Saturday. Sunday the 14th is Race for the Cure--and though I'll be walking, it is a 5K. That's going to be good for me and feel exhilarating. I know people say you don't need to go to the gym everyday, that you shouldn't, in fact, but I don't see results in a given week if I don't.

In addition to the fact that I haven't been as consistent with food choices as I could have been, I think I am also retaining water (I consumed at least 1.5 liters a day M-F). Fruit and vegetable consumption was on the wane because I was at the end of a grocery cycle last week.Will remedy that over the next severl days.

Tonight, before I did two DVD routines (resistance bands and sculpt/strength), I had the bright idea to check my body fat percentage. 36%. 3% less than the last time I checked.

This is the hard part. The part where I am actively building more muscle so the trade off is that I don't see the scale number descend. I'd thought about going back to my daily weighing, but that might really mess me up. I can't very well stop lifting (I was tempted to go this route). That's the ticket to reaching my goal in the long run.