Life is Healthy

According to my jeans, I weigh less than I did when I bought them four pounds ago. Four pounds less ago, to be specific.

My favorite jeans are a pair of Guess skinny jeans I bought in March 2008. They are a European size 29, one inch smaller than the 7 (the brand name) jeans I wore on Oprah. I weighed 128 when I bought the Guess jeans and 132 when I wore the 7s. Today, I’m 132 and the Guess jeans fit great while the 7s are baggy.

What the…? Where the heck did those four pounds go?

My guess is there are three things happening:

1. I’m 46 and things (a polite way of saying body fat) have shifted.
2. I’ve lowered the cardio and upped the strength training time and intensity, therefore increasing muscle mass.
3. I’m retaining water.

I wrote a few months ago how I was backing off the carbs and taking that once-a-day chocolate fix out of my diet. This seems to have worked well for my overall health, but it’s done nothing in terms of the scale. I weigh the same now as I did when I cut 100-150 calories from my daily intake. But I feel different, in a good way, particularly around my midsection.

Mid summer, my Guess jeans were snug around the middle so I didn’t wear them. I dug them out last Sunday “just to see” and they fit like a glove with a little wiggle room!

Maybe my scale needs a new battery. My friend Barbara wrote to me a few weeks ago about how her scale was weighing her higher every week and she couldn’t figure out why. She bought a new battery and bingo! Four pounds were gone. I’m not, however, holding out hope that that is the solution.

I plan to talk to my doctor in January about this water retention issue, which makes me a little physically uncomfortable, and she might decide to put me on a water pill. But like the battery, I’m not counting on it to change the scale.

So again, I come to another fork in the “weight road.” I can either accept 132 and enjoy the fact that my favorite jeans fit again, despite having not lost weight or I can get pissed and fight to get back to 128. That would mean cutting even more calories from my daily intake and upping the exercise. To be honest, I just don’t have it in me. I like how much I eat. I am comfortable with how much I work out. Five hours a week (or less some weeks) is all I can give right now.

So I’ll give up bragging rights to the 120s for awhile or perhaps forever. No biggie. I can still rock a pair of size 29 jeans and a size 4 skirt. Where those four pounds went, I can only guess. All I know is they’re definitely not in my boobs!
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NOTE: I know blog reading goes down a little the closer we get to Christmas, but in my next blog which I’ll post by Monday, I’ll be giving away a holiday gift to one of you as my way of saying thanks for being the most awesome readers a girl could ever ask for. The gift? A one-year subscription to my favorite nutrition publication, Nutrition Action Newsletter. I’ll tell you how to put your name in the pool, so to speak, in my next blog.

Also, in my last blog I said I’d be posting a Q&A with “Today Show” nutrition expert Joy Bauer next week. I am soooo screwed up on my dates. I meant the week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you’d like to ask Joy a question about nutrition or dieting, send me an email at lynnbering@verizon.net or post a comment.

Joy’s book, “Joy’s LIFE Diet” (you’ll recognize the woman on page 240!) is coming out in paperback later this month under the title “Your Inner Skinny: Four Steps To Thin Forever.”

I’ll be giving away a signed copy of the hardcover edition, so look for the Q&A in two weeks for info on how to win!
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One more thing. To those of you who write a blog, have you noticed an upsurge in spam comments posted to your blog lately? It’s all I can do to keep up with erasing the damn things every day. Just wondering if it’s just me or if the spammers are out in force all over the Internet. Thanks for your input!