A-Ha!

On Friday of this past week, I decided to start tracking my Weight Watcher points again.  I'm not really sure what made me think to start doing it, but I did.  I have been having a hard time keeping those few pounds above off *the two to three above my goal*, even with drinking my water faithfully.  It was getting frustrating.  I logged everything into MFP at the same time I was counting my points.  Now, I know there are some people out there that do GREAT with MFP.  Counting calories is totally their thing and they have lost big.

The beginning of my day looked like this:

For my purposes, my day was going great.  My middle kiddo had soccer practice and I came home to make pancakes *with fresh milled flour*.  Uh. Yum!  When I entered them into MFP, I still had calories to spare.  I was doing great until I figured out how many points those bad boys were.  Yikes!  Let's just say I was over by a lot and while I counted every morsel, it was an eye opening moment.  All of this time I have been under my calorie goal, but was I within my points allowance each day?  I'm not really sure.

I have continued to count my points the last few days and it's almost been a bit more freeing.  I have a WW calculator that I'm using that I can also change days on as well as track my points for each day.  I am writing it all down like you see above.  And really?  It's okay.  It doesn't take me much time to do it and keeps things real for me.

After taking last week off from exercise, I got up at *cough* 5:15 to go for my walk this morning.  Of course, because I didn't lay everything out last night before getting up, I had difficulty finding everything I needed to get out the door.  I took my 'short' walk.  I say 'short' because people laugh at me when I say my 'short' walk is 3.25 miles.  That's not short for them.  Eh, it works for me.

As I'm typing this, I'm wondering how many activity points I got for this morning's walk.  I found this neat website.  Not only does it have an AP calculator, but if you look in the left-hand 'tool bar', they also have restaurant points, a food points calculator, and a points plus allowance calculator.  A-mazing!  I wonder if WW is allowing them to have these things on their site?  At this point, who knows?  But, it is benefiting me at this point in my life.

This post isn't to say that one can't lose by counting calories, because it is completely doable.  I'm just saying that something just wasn't working for me.  Today is my 5th day of being back to counting my points and I feel great!  Yay!

Keep plugging away friends!  The journey is never over, it just keeps improving!