Battle of the 10 pound bulge

Why is the first 10 pound gain always the last 10 pounds to loose and the hardest? Kind of the opposite of LIFO (Sorry, inventory reference-If you don’t know what I’m talking about look it up…FIFO/LIFO).

After Child #3 was born, I was up about 35 pounds from my post marriage weight. Figuring I had three babies in three years, there wasn’t much time for myself let alone exercise. It took me a year and half to loose 25 pounds. You ask, how did I do that? I exercised four times a week (in my basement on my treadmill, I know extremely boring) and never ate after 7:00pm (except for my one night out a month when I party like a rock star). I basically stopped snacking at night. Apparently, your metabolism doesn’t like to be comforted at night.

Anyway, my last ten pounds and I have a special relationship. We have been together for a good five years. I am ready to move on, but every time I try to detach myself, it comes back. I loose a couple pounds and then I get lazy and they find their way home again. Now, I have to take some of the blame here, I haven’t exactly encouraged it to move on. On the other hand, I have maintained my current weight for the last year (pat myself on the back), but I would like to become a lean mean athletic machine for my triathlon this summer (did I mention I am a little competitive, I have to beat my time from last year).

My intentions are to try to loose 10 pounds before July. I would even be happy with 8 pounds. This is completely attainable if I buckle down so I decided I would start as I refer to it as “my food reduction project” this week. I do have to eat regularly or, well, let’s just say you don’t want to meet that personality. The game plan is to minimize portion size for lunch and dinner. Breakfast is not a problem. I never have enough time to eat a whole heck of a lot anyway.

This leads to problem number one. One of my personality flaws is whenever you tell me I can’t do something I tend to do it any way (maybe that’s why I wasn’t a good teenager). What do they call that? This doesn’t bode well with restricting food consumption either so my goal might be a long agonizing haul.

Basically I’m writing about this because if it is written down I actually have to follow through with it. Right?