Today was weigh-in #3, and I lost 3 lbs. but got no measurements as neither Jo-Ann or Jane were there. (As I understand it, Jo-Ann was at a conference and Jane told me last week she is changing jobs, to a managerial nurse position. Congrats to her.)
I was a bit disappointed by the loss being just three. I understood that after the first big loss, the pace would settle down some, but they tell me on average it's 3-5 lbs. per week for women, and my plan has been to be on the upper end, i.e. five per week. That would get me to my goal by Sept. 1.
But I also had been expecting it to be more because of how I now look. I have begun to love seeing myself in the mirror. My hair looks more luxuriant, I think because it frames my face more thickly since there is less face to make it fade to insignificance. My face looks younger, because it's harking back to years ago when I weighed less. My shoulders are more square. It's like watching myself grow more attractive. It's the most incredible thing. I also feel lighter, and that it is easier to move, and move fast, but I had already noticed that, the first week.
So are my eyes deceiving me? Is it all IP-style placebo effect? Measurements would tell, but that wasn't happening this week. The three-pound loss made me think I was cheating more than I knew at the trade show and caused me to make myself wrong in all sorts of ways. But at the same time I hadn't lost that much, I was noticeably more slender. How was that possible?
I was stymied, and telling myself nasty things about myself, until I remembered something that happened with Melissa in the beginning few weeks.
Her and Marv's coach is rather more technologically-advanced than mine. She has machines. All manner of gizmos, no doubt costing astronomical numbers of dollars, that measure all sorts of internal things, somehow. Including your muscle mass.
What happened with Melissa was: in the first week she lost both fat and muscle. But in the next week or two, she began to gain the muscle back, and in fact her muscle-mass began to exceed the baseline after that, due to the huge intake of protein.
Now if you know about dieting, or about how a fat person swims as opposed to a muscular person, you know that muscle weighs more than fat. Thus if you lose fat and gain muscle, you will lose weight, but more slowly, and you will gain svelte disproportionate to the small poundage you're shedding.
So I think that must be what happened to me this week. I can't think of any other explanation.
Another fantastic thing that has happened since I started the diet, and, I think, because of the diet, at least in part: every now and then I get hit with the most positive, happy, everything-is-going-wonderfully mood. I feel inspired, expansive, free, capable... amazing. I can't say I've never had this before, as I have in recent years, but now it is more intense and much, much more frequent. In fact this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, I was in a funk, thinking about how my Google Analytics are sucking and how I'll never get a readership and so on, when I whined via IM for a bit with a dear reader/friend, and suddenly I just flipped over into that incredible positive. It was like a switch. I've never felt anything like it in my life.
Again, not something I expected.
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