After seeing those awful pictures of myself I have become super aware every time I pass a mirror. I keep looking to see if I’m delusional.

Why don’t I look that bad when I look in a mirror?

Every time I take a peek at myself I don’t think I look half bad. In fact I feel like I’m getting to where I look pretty good. I mean… I’m not a fitness model or anything but at the same time I don’t think I need to wear a sign that has “Tons of Fun” printed on it either.

Last night Bridget was looking through the camera at the pictures she had taken of herself. (She has embraced the whole duck face phenomenon.) After a while she would look at me and then look at the camera. Look back at me again and then back at the camera. I finally asked her what she was doing and she politely said, “When I look at you, you look like you’re getting thinner. Then, when I look at these pictures you don’t look thin at all.”

“I know!” I just wanted to kiss her for giving me the best backhanded compliment ever.

I really do feel good. I’ve kept on track and I’ve worked my butt off this week.

Things have made a full 180 from when I first started writing this blog in a desperate attempt at motivating myself to shed the weight. I’m definitely headed in the right direction. For some reason it seems to be taking forever to get where I’m going… but I’m going.

I am deceptively strong and in really great shape. I should show up at random gyms and hustle people because just by looking at me they would have no idea what I was capable of pulling off.

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been doing that has caused this process to take longer than I had expected. Then the other day I stumbled upon this blog post that seemed to clarify what I already knew.

Katheats Real Food is a blog written by a registered dietician. She has recently had a baby and has changed to format of her blog somewhat but basically writes posts about eating a healthy balanced diet and enjoying your life at the same time.

In this particular post she was talking about maintenance and how some days you will splurge. In order to balance that out some days you need to eat less. She illustrates per point using this chart.

If you click on the picture of the chart it will take you to the post and you will see another chart she made based on how she ate when she was traveling and backed on some weight.

I loved this post because this will be how I eat once I’ve hit my goal weight in order to maintain. The problem is that I’ve already been eating that way but I’m not to the maintenance part of my journey yet. In other words I need to have more downsloping days.

The majority of what I eat is clean and healthy. I’ve really become aware of how I’m fueling my body. That was the first step now I’ve got to monitor how much I’m eating and making sure that I don’t sneak in unnecessary cheat days in.

While I work on that I’ll keep on working out…

BUT I’m not going to be wearing any tank tops when I do 😉