Losing weight sucks - part deux

Late September 2010. I'm back from vacation but not back into the groove of weight loss. I still go to the gym four or five or six times a week but I start (gasp) hanging out with friends again. I don't use my calorie counter app but after months of eating healthy, it's more of a habit now. Weighing myself weekly (Monday morning) is more of a hindsight rather than a necessity for keeping myself on track. The holidays start coming full force and we all know what that means. There's a lot of baking and cooking and parties and drinking, lord the drinking. I do love a good cocktail.

I LOVE to bake and cook. It wasn't always my favorite, I'd need a glass (or two or three) of wine while trying not to skip an ingredient in the recipe. SPOILER ALERT: I usually did. But this Christmas I found an amazing cookbook: 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by a woman from Portland. There are some seriously delicious recipes in there but just because they're vegan (and the way I make them, gluten-free as well) does not make them healthy. There's lots of sugar and vegan butter and cream cheese is just as gnarly calorie and fat wise as the real stuff. Baking the recipes from that book changed my outlook on cooking and I do it as often as possible now. German feasts, eggplant parmesan, I even made lasagna with quinoa noodles and homemade tofu ricotta (thanks Skinny Bitch in the Kitch)! I hadn't had lasagna in over three years. That alone is a travesty.

I know where you think this is going. The new year comes around and I get back on the scale only to be horrified by what I'd done. But that totally didn't happen! I know, twist ending, right?

Of course I didn't lose weight, that would've been ridiculous and my gym buddy probably would have wondered if something nefarious was going on *cough* eating disorder! *cough*. But I weighed exactly the same as I did when I left that morning in September. That alone was a victory. I'd survived the holidays without even trying. Maintaining is a huge deal for me, as my constant battle with weight can attest. I realize now that I will have to work out at least four days a week for the rest of my life if I don't want to gain weight.

But now it was time to start losing again.