Motivation Zero

So I did a little math yesterday and discovered something really depressing. I'm not sure if I mentioned it when I started writing or not, but when I first decided that I was going to try to lose this weight once and for all, I gave myself one year to do it. I needed to lose 222 pounds to get to my goal weight of 175, which works out to about 4.25 pounds per week. That seemed to be a reasonable sort of number. From another perspective, I wanted to lose about 56% of my body weight, so I needed to lose just over 1% of my weight per week, which seems even more doable.

Now I'm 27 weeks in, and I've managed to lose a whopping 24.4 pounds. In order to succeed on my diet, I would need to lose 7.9 pounds per week from now until Sept. 6, which marks the one-year deadline. That's obviously not going to happen. Even people on weight-loss TV shows who have professional trainers and medical support and so on don't average that kind of weight loss. So basically no matter what I do, no matter how well I follow my program and how good I am about exercising, I'm absolutely guaranteed to fail. My motivation just went to zero. How do you stay motivated to do something when you've got no chance at all to succeed at it?

Realizing this is somehow even more depressing because I've been doing so well over the last couple of weeks and I was feeling really proud of myself. Except for one meal last Saturday, I've been right on track with my eating. I exercised for 15 minutes every day last week, and for 30 minutes every day so far this week. I lost 3.2 pounds at Monday's weigh-in, I've started the weekly meal planning, I've written every day but one, and I've even been doing really well on my daily schedule...and all this in spite of the refrigerator being broken! And now it seems like it's all for nothing. I know, I know, each of these things is good in and of itself, but with the knowledge that a little less than 6 months from now I'm going to have failed at the overall plan, they seem pretty pointless.

It's been suggested to me by a couple of different people that I change the deadline based on the fact that of the 27 weeks since I started, I've only actually been on program (either Atkins or WW) for 17 weeks. To me, that seems rather like rewarding myself for screwing up. And a deadline is a deadline, isn't it? Deadlines aren't the sort of things you can just change around to suit your whims. To try to see if there was any justification for this suggestion, though, I did a little more math. It seems like I spent the entire day yesterday and most of today doing math. In the 17 weeks on one program or the other, I've lost 36.6 pounds - 12.2 pounds of it I've lost twice because of the weeks off program - for a net total of 24.4 pounds. Even using those numbers, though, I only come out to 2.1 pounds per week on program, which is only half of what I needed to lose. If I add 10 weeks to my deadline based on the 10 weeks I was off program, it reduces the number I need per week to 5.7 pounds, which is still probably out of reach. I haven't lost even close to that much in a single week since I started. The best week I had I lost 4.4 pounds.

The other idea I had, also involving changing the deadline, is to make January 3 my "new" starting date. The justification for this, such as it is, is based on the fact that I was off Atkins almost as long as I was on it and that I started "fresh" with a totally new program when I switched to Weight Watchers. That would make my weekly number 4.7 pounds, which might be just barely reachable, although very difficult. So far I've averaged about 2.3 pounds per week on program with WW.

I'm still quite doubtful about changing the deadline, though - it seems to me to be cheating, "justification" or not. Please give me some feedback on this, guys...comment on the post, comment on FB, email me, IM me, text me, whatever. I really need some input here.

I think the only reason I was able to stay on plan yesterday was that I had the meal plan already in place. There's another item for the "plus" column...weekly meal planning is very helpful in case of personal emotional meltdown. Anyway, yesterday's food...

Breakfast: Oatmeal, banana - 10 points
Lunch: Tomato-beef broth, salad - 14 points
Snack: Greek yogurt with applesauce - 3 points
Dinner: Chicken with teryaki, Rice-a-Roni, green beans, milk - 21 points
Dessert: Pudding with Cool Whip - 4 points
Total: 52 points

Sorry today's post was so long-winded. Thanks for wading through it, and please let me know what you think.