T - 34 hours

The holiday party is tomorrow night. As of this morning, I weigh 184.5 lbs. The good news is, this is about 2.5 lbs less than when I started the challenge(that never really got off the ground). The bad news is, it's half a pound more than what I weighed at last year's holiday party. I'm hoping to drop a little more tonight, so hopefully I can at least get down to the same weight as I was then.

Objectively, I didn't do well at all with the weight loss this year. Over the course of the year, my weight was on an upward trend far more often than it was on the way down. My lowest (officially recorded) weight for the year was 176.5, and the scale never showed me lower than 176. In this entire year, I've lost 15 lbs (from 191 at the end of last year) and gained 8.5 back.

While I'm a tad disappointed by my performance, I'm ultimately okay with it, and here's why. While I didn't start obsessively weighing myself until 2003, I have a general idea of how things were going. Before I was pregnant with Noah, I was in the high 130s. My pregnancy high was 168 lbs. I hovered in the 160s for a while, and when I met Rob in 1996, I weighed about 175. By the time I got my TX driver's license in 1999, I was listing my weight as 190--and everyone knows that you always lie on the driver's license, right? I was probably closer to 195. In 2000, I saw a personal trainer who managed to work my weight down to 201 in 6 weeks. When I got my new job in 2001, I had to buy bigger pants because none of the (pre-trainer) business casualwear I wore in 2000 would fit anymore. A year and a half later, we launched this journal with my starting weight at 217 lbs.

So, in the 10 years from 1993 to 2003, I went from 130s to 217. That's a gain of around 70 lbs in 10 years--7 lbs per year(granted, 1994 was the bulk of that, because I never lost any of the pregnancy weight). From 2003-2004 thus far, I have gone from 217 to 184.5...a loss of 32.5 in two years, 16ish lbs average loss per year. Even though I'm not losing it as fast as I'd like, I'm losing it faster than I gained it.

Here's another reason I'm not too upset that I haven't made much progress this year--for the past...oh, I don't know...3 months or so, I haven't been really trying. I mean, I work out when I feel like it, and I don't go out of my way to eat junk, but I haven't been actively following any sort of plan. I only gained back 11 lbs. At around the 10-lb mark, my gotta-get-back-on-track kicked in, and I've been losing again. I'm confident that I can revisit 180 by the end of the year, giving me an 11-lb loss for 2004.

So really, while I'm not doing as well this year as I did last year, I'm not having to try nearly as hard. And I'm still doing about 300% better than the 10 previous years. Overall, my core habits are much better than they have been in the past, and I know what it takes to get the results I want--my problems have been with making the choice to actually do those things. I'm not the least bit worried about whether I'll be able to maintain weight loss, either, because my 10-lb-gain alarm seems to be intact. I'd like it to be a 5-lb alarm, but I suspect that will come over time.

Still, tomorrow night, when I pose in front of the green screen for the annual picture, I'll be a little sad that I'm not 10, or 20, or 50 lbs lighter. And I'm sure that I'll look at the resulting print and say to myself, "Couldn't you have skipped the muffin a couple times? God."

But I'll also remember all the pictures that came before it, and how much worse it would have been if I was standing up there 14 lbs. heavier than 2002, instead of 33lbs lighter.

You are doing fine, you can lose more if you work at it and next year is right around the corner. Just be glad you didn't pack on pregnancy pounds like I do. I always end my pregnancies at 197 pounds -- all three pregnancies ended at the same weight.