Just a brief post to note that weighing in on my home scale first thing New Year's day morning, I'm nearly 10 pounds North of goal, which means I need to shed 8 pounds by Tuesday evening if I want another free month of WW.
We shall see if that's do-able -- some of it can be done with trickery (dehydration, clothing choices), but not all.
Part of the question will be how much of this weight is "real" and how much is water-weight from salty snacks over the past couple of days.
Regardless, it is incredible how easy it is to put on weight quickly. I've eaten some Christmas cookies, yes, and let myself slip on tracking for probably 5 days total, 3 of them without a scale to keep me honest in the morning (out of town). But on none of those days did I eat like I used to -- even when I felt "out of control" for my current habits, I was way more disciplined than I'd been before weight watchers. And yet... and yet...
Part of the slip in tracking for me was resentment of the new SmartPoints, which make Christmas cookies pretty absurdly expensive. There's something much worse about losing 30 points to a Christmas cookie binge than losing 15 or 20, and it does make me more inclined to just say to hell with it altogether. In this sense, it reminds me a bit of grading policies and the dreaded "0."
In grading, the 0 in the 100 point scale is like a super-punishment. I've always been puzzled by it: why should the difference between missing work and failing work (60 points) be so much larger than the difference between failing work and exceptional work (only 40 points) after all? More importantly still, if 0's stay fixed in a gradebook, as ours used to have to after work was missing for a week due to a misguided school policy, then you very quickly end up making it impossible for student to ever pass your class at all, which takes away all incentive they had to try in the first place. I worry the new SmartPoints may have precisely the same effect.
More likely, though, my drift northward is an entirely predictable result of the holiday season that would have happened with PPV, with SP, or without tracking at all. It's even more frightening to think what would have happened if I'd decided to stop caring at all over the holidays. If I put on nearly 10 pounds trying to limit sweets, making sure to get lots of veggies all day, and loading up on protein rather than sugar whenever I could, just imagine what I could have done if I'd really gotten into the holiday spirit altogether. Amazing once you've put the work into losing weight just how little it takes to slide back.
