liar, liar, scale on fire

Thinking that I'd get a jump on my weight loss for 2011, I started almost two weeks ago with the Slim Fast diet.

In quite a few attempts, I've never gotten slim, but I've gotten hungry fast.

I almost immediately started getting crabby. Crabby because I'd clock out for my thirty minute lunch and in a matter of eight minutes, I'd be done with my "meal" bar and a twenty ounce diet Coke.

But I was gonna white-knuckle my way through, PMS and all. Who starts diets hours before a monthly bout of becoming the hardest person to live with on the face of the earth anyway?

Apparently, I do.

This week, I decided that I needed to unbury the treadmill, put some rockin' music on my ipod and get to working out. I even did running sprints (30 sec run, 1 min walk, repeat, repeat, repeat...) twice this week. And I couldn't really walk well afterward without some shooting pains in my back and my toes going numb as I was running.

But no pain, no gain, right?

Imagine my disgust when I eat boiled shrimp and garden salad at last night's company christmas dinner rather than fried onion rings and french fries as everyone around me was doing and still see a gain on the scale this morning.

Immediately that little voice in my head starts screaming: "See? I told you this wouldn't work! You're eating bars that only taste like chemicals and for what? Not to mention how your back feels after that torture you call running- what a waste of time! Stop trying to see a magic number on the scale, you're never gonna get there. Go sit on the couch, eat potato chips and just resign yourself to the failure."

For a couple of hours today, that's where I lived. Give up. It's not worth it. You're not worth it.

Then I started thinking. Let's look at this rationally. I've already lost almost twenty pounds since the first week of August. The waist on all my pants are big; I'm constantly pulling them up. There are subtle changes about my body that my husband has noticed and I can start to see when I look in the mirror.

And the exercise has been good for me. Even though I hate almost every second of the time on the treadmill, I love how I feel when I'm finished. And I really feel kinda accomplished when I can crank the speed up to five miles per hour and run without tripping and falling off the treadmill.

Even in my own home, that'd be embarrassing.

So what if it takes weeks for the lying scale to catch up with the way my pants fit? Maybe measuring my success by my pant size is better.

Because the scale and I are not on speaking terms.