34/54: Weigh In

I weighed 246.0 this morning, down 1.8 from a week ago. That's it for hard facts. Now, I need to explain something...

I read a book called "Procrastination". It was very interesting, and if you have any trouble with this leave a comment or message me and I'll find it and give you the authors, publisher, etc. Anyway, there was one section where they went through all the different reasons why people do this. I fit several of those bills, but one in particular stands out. This type of person is abnormally afraid of failure while also being a perfectionist. You may be thinking, wouldn't that drive them to do really well? Not when those two are joined by crippling self-doubt. When you combine an unrealistically high standard for yourself with the belief, deep down, that you'll never actually reach that standard, and are also quite afraid that you or, in particular, anyone else might find out that you are such a failure, weird things can happen. With this person, stalling on a project creates in their mind this kind of setup: "I only got an A minus on that paper because I didn't have much time", which reads: "I could do better if I had more time". Do you see what just happened? The true "potential" of that person will never be seen, because there will always be something that held them back. They never have to face what they assume/fear is the truth: that they're worthless failures. And no one else has to know either.

I do that. All the time. And last night I realized that I do it with weigh-ins. Because I know it's coming, I freak out inside. I ate bad things yesterday. Fatty, salty things. If you'd asked me why, I would have said that I was just weak that day. But the truth is, last week I had relatively little trouble sticking to my plan. I said "no" to many things that were offered for free or were my favorites or were easy. I did really well for the first part of the week, but then I started thinking about the weigh-in and I started thinking about (or making up) ways in which I coulda/shoulda done better this week. In my mind, the water I didn't drink and the extra half a mile I didn't walk added up to FAILURE. And I imagined the scale telling me that what I thought was a good job in the moment was actually crap, worthless attempts, failure. So I did what I usually do: I found a way to create "circumstances" under which the actual weigh-in couldn't be construed to reflect my actual performance. "Well, I only lost 1.8, but I had a lot of water retention going on, I'll be perfect next week, you'll see". I self-sabatoged. I freaked out and made it worse so I wouldn't have to see what actual results my actual performance created, out of the fear that they weren't inhumanely stellar.

Here's how I fix this: avoid the knowledge of an oncoming weigh-in. Every morning I will roll a d10. If I roll a 10, I'll weigh myself. If not, I won't. Now, I know that this is a band-aid and I'm not saying that this pathetic self-sabatoging thing isn't something I should fix, it's just that it will take time to fix it (I've BEEN working on it!) and right now, I just really need to stop doing this to myself. I need to lose weight, and I'll fix this and other things along the way. (I'm a very results-oriented person, can you tell?)

Right, so, I'll let you know as soon as I do next time I know how much I weigh! (I will of course still weigh in on the last day of my competiton, however, and just try really hard not to screw it up).

-Amber