Step up.

I feel like in so many ways I am always thinking about my weight or weight loss. It has changed my life this year and it feels like it's both something I daily strive towards and just can't escape.

I started losing weight at the end of February 2011 but things have changed since then. It started with me going to the gym and being proud I could go 15 minutes (and that was pushing it) at a low resistance on the elliptical to trying to teach myself to run almost 90lbs lighter.

I guess I did assume unintentionally it would get easier, but honestly I'm not sure I ever really believed I would make it this far. Still sometimes it feels like I'm faking it or I have lost the weight I have by accident. Some days it feels like I'm going to wake up and find I am the same weight I was ten months ago. I think about weight loss and weight gain all the time, it's often the last thought I have before I go to bed, the one that always comes with me clothes shopping, the one I push away when I want to eat something without thinking or make an unwise choice. The thing that has made me feel differently about almost everything, myself, what I can do, the world.

I didn't do much at first and I found it hard, I ate somewhat less but I didn't jump on a 1500 calorie diet. I overate, I ate things that were bad for me, I just did it slightly less than I used to. I also started going to the gym, which was terrifying and embarrassing at first. The only thing that forced me to go that first day was sheer stubbornness and maybe a little (or a lot) of desperation.

That involved into going to the gym almost everyday but still not eating fantastically. Incorporating more vegetables and water into my meals but still eating a lot. As the months have gone by I have made gradual improvements to my diet, eyeballing but not counting calories and starting to think more about actual hunger vs emotional hunger.

In this way I think it has gotten harder in maybe a different way. Now half way through my weight loss or so, it feels like I began with two left feet. I feel like from February up until now I have been learning to dance. It's taken time and it wasn't easy, but I know how now. I know the basic steps, what's needed to make them and how to perform them. It's like just having learned how to dance and then being presented with swan lake as a goal.

I have seventy or eighty more pounds to lose. But lately I feel like the game has changed. That I need to step up MY game to keep playing. That eyeballing calories might not be enough. That all the times I eat things I know I shouldn't or even too much of things I should, need to come to a slower, much slower, pace. That my exercise needs to be pushed and that I need to push physically, more than I have thus far. The more weight you lose, the harder it is to lose it.

I am not belittling what I have done. On average I have lost 2.2 pounds a week since the end of last February. I could have lost it a lot faster, for all that I let thoughts of it override me, I know I could have. But I wanted this to be something I could live with for the rest of my life. So how do I balance that with stepping up my game?