Gonna be a long, windy road from here.

I took a progress picture yesterday to reassure myself that I AM making progress. Its... erm... one of the sorts of progress pictures that I won't be sharing with anybody LOL, but something that is motivating and reassuring for me.

I gotta say... I'm actually kind of amazed at how different my body looks with the 25lb difference between yesterday's pictures and the first ones I took. My stomach is smaller, my hips are smaller, my arms are smaller, I imagine my thighs have shrunk too, but its hard to tell for sure. I've still got plenty of flub, but it is nice to look at the old pictures and see for myself that its not as MUCH flub as it was in December. Its easy to forget that sometimes.

I'm also reassured that my boobs are not disappearing LOL. Silly thing to worry about, but I was fretting that they were shrinking instead of the parts of my body that actually need to shrink. They aren't. So... PHEW! :P

I'm adjusting my calories again. I was eating about 2400 per day, I've adjusted it back a bit to about 2100 per day, aiming to go up to 2400 only if I am still actually hungry after the 2100. I'm just finding that the 2400 is 'too many' calories in the sense that I feel like it gives me permission to eat whatever the heck I want, so I'm not necessarily making the healthiest choices. I'm hoping that by cutting back by a couple hundred calories per day, I will be encouraged to eat healthier instead of filling up on junk. (I ate way too many cookies yesterday and that prompted me to reconsider my calorie goal, haha)

Eating more to weigh less is a strange concept, and its taken me a little while to adjust my thinking to it, but its really working for me. I feel better and I am losing weight, but I think I'm losing fat and not muscle. After doing more reading on it, its possible that the super low calorie diet I was doing was making me lose muscle mass because I wasn't consuming enough to fuel my body. Its hard to explain really... but I just feel SO much better doing it this way.

I plan to weigh myself tomorrow or the next day, since its been a few days and I'm feeling smaller. I guess I'll see how early my baby wakes up and how I'm feeling. The less often I jump on the scale, the less obsessed with the number I am, which is just better for my mental health. :) I'm always scared that I'm going to see a gain, and we all know that's not the best for motivation. So in the morning I'll have to decide if I want to see the number or if I want to continue on with the motivation I got from the nakey progress pictures for a few more days. Tough decisions for the crack of dawn! ;)

Hope everybody has a good weekend!
-Rachel