Monday Weigh-In/Weekend Confession: Hampton's Restaurant Week Edition

Happy Monday! Just to quickly explain the title of my post...

Hampton's Restaurant Week is a promotion they run in early April every year. The local restaurants offer an inexpensive price-fix menu - and it's usually restaurants that have pretty expensive prices. So you can get a nice meal out on the cheap! The price-fix menu includes a choice of appetizer, entree and dessert. But more on that in my weekend confession...

OK, let's get to this!

Last week: 132.5
This week: 131.3
Difference: -1.2
Maintenance: Success!

Well, better than success I'd say! Down a pound! Whoo-hoo!

So my takeaway this week is this: You can't trust the scale. It has a mind of it's own. Seriously. Some weeks, you do every thing right. Follow the program to the letter. Track every single bite. Workout six days of the week. And the scale goes up. And other times, you can do everything wrong and the scale goes down. So the focus truly has to be "beyond the scale" as Weight Watchers says. You just need to focus on being healthy because in the long run it doesn't matter if the scale says 131 or 132, it matters what you are doing to your body.

And speaking of doing everything wrong...

Bless me Jean Nidetch for I have gone off program!

It all started Monday, the day after my supermarket pop tart incident, where I found that last lonely pack of pop tarts in my car from the day before and scarfed them down on the way to work. But, I tracked all 17 points worth of them and moved on. To dinner. For my hubby's birthday. He wanted to keep it simple - bread, butter, Hawaiian sea salt (seriously if you've never tried this you MUST it's soooooooo good), cheese to eat. Wine to drink. Cupcakes for dessert. And since my daughter didn't want to finish her cupcake I ate hers too. That's right. Two cupcakes for 24 points. After having had the 17 point pop tarts as my morning snack. With that plus the wine, bread, cheese... I finished Monday (which is my first day of the week) with no weekly points, no activity points, and a negative number. But it was allllllllll tracked - all 77 points worth. A non-scale victory in itself!

Tuesday was better - usual breakfast and lunch. Made tacos for dinner. Got a work out in... Still negative for the week, but that negative number was smaller thanks to the exercise!

Wednesday was not so good again. Breakfast was more than usual (stopped for breakfast on the go and did the best I could), lunch was the usual and dinner was ok. I made a variation of a grilled chicken puttanesca sauce I found in last month's WW magazine. I was already a little higher in my points than usual, but on the way home I found some easter candy in my daughter's back pack and had a little snack. Tracked everything again (yay for another NSV) and finished my day with 51 points. Ouch. Still in the red for the week.

Thursday was another off day. According to WW Connect it was National Beer Day! And being Irish I can't miss that! So I had 11 points worth of Mike's Lemonade (that was the only thing resembling beer I had in the house - but I looked at the label closely and it said "flavored beer" so I figured why not?), plus my higher than usual breakfast (on the go again) plus tacos for dinner (which weren't bad points wise because I make them at home but I like guacamole!). Finished out the day at 53 points again.

Friday was a much more reasonable day. Only over my daily points by 1. And with all my activity I was actually pretty much breaking even in points by the time Saturday rolled around.

Saturday I tracked all day up until Dinner. If you recall, I said last week that we were going out with friends and that I was planning on not tracking or worrying about points. And that's exactly what I did. As I said earlier the price-fix menu includes appetizer, entree and dessert. So hubby and I both chose the dishes we both kind of wanted then half way through we switched plates! So for appetizer we had butternut squash soup and mushroom polenta (both excellent), for entree we had house-made rigatoni with lamb ragu and grilled salmon (the rigatoni dish was better!), and for dessert we had flour-less chocolate cake and some butterscotch pudding thing (the butterscotch thing was excellent and the cake - average). Oh, and lots of wine! Actually when I got home I thought about tracking the points but gave up when I found it pretty hard to estimate amounts and guess ingredients/preparations. And besides, I had already decided to have a night out and not worry about it. So I let it go.

Sunday I went right back to tracking and used exactly my daily points - no more, no less.

And as you can even with a really off week - the scale was nice to me today :)

That's why you can't listen to that little number. I'm convinced the scale just goes up and down at random to mess with our heads. Focus on behavior. Focus on health. Focus on YOU. Really, go beyond the scale because in the long run those are the things that are going to make a difference. Have a great week!