the end of the upswing?

The scale said 183 today. I'm riding it out, hoping that this is the top of the hill and my weight roller coaster is about to make the plunge. Hoping. I am a little alarmed about how fast the number is climbing, though. 176.5 last Monday. 181 this Monday. 182 Tuesday. 183 Wednesday. If I hit 184 tomorrow, I will be officially freaking out*.

Not that you can see that alarm in my actions, mind you. I entered all my points into the tracker today for the past 2 days, and I've got 14 flexpoints left. It's been two days. 21 flexpoints in two days. In my defense, most of the flexpoints yesterday were packaged as a cheese danish that was--OMG!--12 points. I had unwittingly blown 15 points before noon, and it's hard to recover from that. I ended the day with 38, I think, and 4 activity points. In the most rudimentary of calculations (1 point = ~50 calories), that's still only 1900 calories. The last time I calculated my ballpark BMR, I think I burned 1700 doing nothing. With the 200-300 (I only count 3/4 of the displayed calories, because those displays are notoriously optimistic) burned on the precor, I broke even. Sometimes math is comforting.

Today, I'm not doing too badly, with 11 points total so far...however, it's 10:30 and I've already eaten the lunch I packed. This is disturbing, because I KNOW I can't really expect a meal at 10:30 am to carry me through till 6 pm. I'm going to have to eat again, and it's going to have to be something more substantial than a cheese stick. On the bright side, I've always heard that several small meals are better than 2-3 large ones, so we'll see how it goes today. If it works well overall, it may be something I want to do regularly.

I'm sort of enjoying bringing my lunch to work. I started doing it Monday, solely because I found myself flat broke until payday (today). To my surprise, I found that it was a nice change to break out my brown bag when I got hungry, instead of agonizing over which anonymous chain restaurant was going to get my business that day. It doesn't even take that much more time in the morning...make a sandwich, throw some chips in a bag, piece of fruit, away I go. It saves me a ton of money, and honestly? I was getting tired of eating out every day. (Never thought I'd ever say that!)

*I know no one ever really gives me grief about this, but I always feel compelled to mention that weighing every day works for me. I know the popular wisdom says that it will make you crazy, demoralize you, whatever. And yes, for a while, it did that to me. And when I started to recognize that it did, I had enough sense to put the scale away for a while. My progress wasn't any better or worse during that time. I'm doing okay with daily weighing for now, but if the number keeps climbing and it starts making me crazy, the scale will be banished again. So if you're thinking of commenting that I shouldn't weigh every day, just don't, mmkay?