Weight Watcher's Diaries Fourteen
By Carol Daelemans

2468 Plateau Lane, Plateauville

Welcome to Plateauville. I have been languishing in the land of the plateau for a total of 6 weeks. I could get used to it here. It is really easy to maintain my weight. In fact all I seem able to do is maintain my weight. I am sure not losing any. I can see convincing myself that this is my body's natural weight. The place I am meant to stay.

Not really though. The thing is I don't want to stay here. I have been working my butt off, literally, for months and this was not my goal. I have only lost the equivalent of a very small toddler. I have not even lost as much as my small toddler. If I am going to continue carrying her around it would be nice if I lost as much as she weighs. Then it wouldn't be any more difficult to carry her the whole way back from our evening walk then it was to go on that same evening walk by myself so many pounds ago. Well, that's my theory anyway and I am sticking with it.

There is one point on the scale that I have been fighting to get past for nearly two months. This is not my actual goal. It's barely the half way point of my ultimate goal. I am starting to feel like my ultimate goal is a dream. This feeling is what I really have to get past not the point on the scale.

I have a girl friend who weighs about as much as I did at the start of this journey. She is also at least as short as me if not a little bit shorter. She and I have "strong builds." Her husband has a "short, strong build." Her children are lean little machines as most children under the age of 12 are and should be. She decided to start working out. She was doing really well. People started to notice and say something.

Then she decided to do a huge project to reinforce her goal of fitness and weight loss. She signed up for the Breast Cancer 3-day walk. She would need to walk 20 miles a day for three days. The part I thought was particularly torturous was that she had to sleep in a tent and shower in a trailer set up after such a grueling day. I would never have done these things. I wouldn't sleep in a tent if it didn't have air conditioning and I would never rough it after a long day of strenuous exercise. If they want to get more people to sign up for these things they should promise a suite at the Four Seasons.

I talked to her a few weeks after the walk. She was proud of her accomplishments although when she came home you couldn't get her to sign up to walk across the kitchen for a glass of water even if it cured cancer. The bad thing was she was tired of losing weight. She really felt at that moment that she could not do any better than she had already done. She had lost 30 pounds before the walk and gained nearly 10 of it back by the time the walk was over. She felt a lot of this was thigh muscles. You know, the ones that were complaining during the walk. But now she was feeling "done."

I completely understand this feeling. There will come a day when I am done too. I just hope that I am really done. In fact, I think there will be several times when I feel done. Each and every one of those times I am going to have to talk myself out of it. I am going to have to get mad and say, "For crying out loud! Michelle walked 60 miles in 3 days. I have lost all this weight up until now. I cannot stop now." I need to look at this weight loss like she looked at the walk. There is a beginning, middle and an end. There is a finish line. It is a killer getting to it and every day gets a little harder until the finish line is in sight. I like to believe that when I can see the finish line the journey will get easier. Until then I will continue to talk myself into walking on.