Another Milestone...

Today was my last weekly visit at PHC for weigh-ins. I am somewhat "off the leash" now - I only have to go once every two weeks to check my status.

 

I had them look up my stats today. When I started on my maintenance plan, I weighed 215 pounds on their scale (that's fully clothed, including shoes). During most of the summer, I held my weight at a very consistent 216 pounds. I recently regressed upwards, but all in all, I'm only about 6 pounds heavier than I was six months ago, and I'm currently on the way down again. My goal is to hit 208 on the PHC scale - that will put me right at my lowest reasonable weight, which is what I weighed before that insane push to the end of the competition, when I lost 9 pounds in 11 days just for the privilege of being able to say I broke the 200 pound barrier.

 

There was a fair amount of external pressure to get below 200, and I suppose it fueled my inner desire to do it, as well. But with a penultimate weigh-in of 208 pounds, I would have still won the competition - my closest competitor was 18 pounds away. I guess now the motivation to get back down to that 208 number is the fit of my clothes and the shape I see in the mirror. It won't happen by next weigh-in, because that would be a pound a day, and those days are long gone. Besides, I don't want to do it the way we finished. The push of the contest drove most of us to near-starving diets and excessive workouts (we're talking THE Biggest Loser-style workouts - 4-5 hours a day is what we were being encouraged to do, for the final 11 days, and those workouts would consist of the highest calorie-burning exercises our trainer could find). No, not going there again. It will come, though, in time.