Just When I Thought I Had It All Figured Out

After 8 months, I had weight loss down to a science. I knew what helped with keeping the weight loss going, I knew what made me plateau and stall (ALCOHOL in excess... haha). I had my menu down perfectly, not a bit of junk food in my house (except that one bag of Dove caramel chocolates... a rare treat). I busted my plateau that lasted all of August just by doing what I've been doing, with adding some extra cardio in and cutting back on the drinking. I've been doing Chalean Extreme and Turbo Fire and LOVING it, and the muscles that I've found in my arms and legs (abs, you're next!).

And then the last few days have shaken things up. I haven't been losing weight very fast in the past couple months, I average a pound a week. I was very content with that, as I'm only 20 pounds from my goal of a healthy weight. But this week... not even this week, the last 4 days, I've gone from 160.1 lbs to 158.7 lbs! That's 1.4 lbs in 4 days... what?????

So I looked at my food diary... what's different than my usual? I'm exercising the same, aside from switching my running/walking to outside instead of a treadmill. However, my sodium has been low... much lower. That was the one thing I had trouble keeping under every day. But the past week I've been doing much better. And my calories were lower, closer to 1200-1350 than 1300-1500 that I had been eating. And I wasn't starving or anything, in fact I've been much better with my protein. And the weight has been falling off... whoa!

So, maybe I just needed to shake things up a bit, kick start things again. My body fat percentage is down to 32.3%, which is over a percent in a month and within the 21-33% that is healthy (I'm shooting for 28%). I'm going to focus on keeping that sodium number down. It'll mean eating out less and relying less on what's in my freezer (or at least shopping smarter to fill the freezer), but seeing the results makes the effort worth it. I'm gonna keep up with running outside as well, at least til I'm too freezing and it's dark at night (the path I run on is not lit). But I'm really excited that things are picking up! I was kinda bummed about hitting my 160 lb mini goal a month late, but now I might make up for it by hitting 155 by my birthday on Oct 22nd. And I've ordered my Halloween costume, a pin-up girl!!! I'm really excited about it. Here's a picture below, I think it's the perfect look for me and I don't need a wig since my hair really is long, curly and red! I'll be spending Halloween weekend in California (Palo Alto at Stanford with two of my best guy friends) so I wanted a fabulous costume. 3.3 more lbs to go until my mini goal! And 2 weeks to go... let's do it! I want to be completely fit and fabulous for my 24th birthday!