Clean eating or thin eating?

I have never had a healthy relationship with food. As a child I was heavy and there was a lot of family pressure to be the pretty, skinny little girl every parent wants, but kids don't understand how food relates to appearance. In the end these pressures just lead to a lot of shame and self-hate. As a teen I was pretty obsessive and for a while I was too thin. Sometimes I worry that I really fucked up my pancreas during those years by starving my body of the sugars and complex carbs it needed to function. For roughly the past 10 years I've fluctuated between being healthy, slightly chubby, decidedly overweight, and now back to slightly chubby. Losing weight is not easy for me. For some reason my body holds onto extra fat more than what's typical (see previous comment re: pancreas).

I divulge this brief history to explain my recent slight obsession with healthy eating and weight loss (though fear not, it's nothing like my teenage obsession). While living in France I went from a size 10ish to a size 6ish. I didn't even have to try. It was amazing. Leigh had an even more dramatic transformation. We felt great. Since coming home I've gained a bit and now I'm completely fed up with being held hostage by the Gods of Chubbiness. I'm trying to take control once and for all. Enter the Eat-Clean Diet (e.g. sticking to whole foods and eating small portions regularly to keep the metabolism pumping).

Unfortunately, any weight loss from this lifestyle change has been painfully slow. Leigh and I weighed ourselves this morning. It wasn't a happy occasion. What's most frustrating for me is that my body fat percentage hasn't budged in 2 weeks. That's two weeks of lifting weights and doing cardio 2-3 times per week. Not a perfect record, I'll admit, but an effort worthy of some results. So frustrating...

Maybe it's weight gain from cheating two weeks ago.

Maybe it's water weight.

Maybe it's just a plateau week and we'll see results soon.

Maybe we just need to be patient.

But then I remind myself that we're both so much healthier today than we were 2 years ago. Our time in France did wonders for us by allowing us a drastic lifestyle change. Sure, we ate rich foods, but we were so poor that our portions were smaller. We walked everywhere. Even buying groceries was a major workout (walk 0.9 miles to bus, take bus near store, walk around store, pack groceries in rolling bags, walk to bus, bus to home, walk uphill 0.9 miles to home, climb 3 flights of stairs with rolling bags filled with 2 weeks of groceries, put in fridge, realize 3+ hours have passed since leaving for grocery store, collapse), going to work involved over 1 mile of walking, my frequent travels involved hauling my bags everywhere, taking public transit and walking for hours everyday.

Anyway, our lives caused us to lose weight without trying. It was nice, but now we're grownups. Now we go to work, sit on our asses all day, try to resist eating convenient American garbage all day then muster the energy to exercise before coming home, shoveling supper into our mouths and going to sleep. Then repeat till the weekend. Depressing, eh?

But now we're eating clean, and even though we're not dropping weight quickly we're feeling better. I'm more comfortable in my own skin these days just because I never feel ashamed of what I'm eating. It's all healthy and half the time I've made it from scratch over the weekend. I take some pride in doing these things for myself. We also have more energy and my skin looks better than ever. So even though I still weigh a ton for someone my height (granted, I'm not huge and wear an average size, but it's still pretty shocking that most women my height weigh as much as 20 lbs less than me) and I'd love to slim down faster, I know whatever I lose will stay off and I can maintain this diet long term because it's not ridiculous.

So in spite of our disappointment this morning, we're still trudging on. We're also going to try to not cheat AT ALL until my birthday, which we've set aside for a fair amount of cheating. In the meantime, we're doing more activities, hitting the gym more, etc. Today we even tried out cross-country skiing for the first time. We're hardly naturals, but it was really fun. I think we'll buy our own sets next weekend to keep it up. This evening I'm utterly exhausted and certain I'll be sore tomorrow, which is a great feeling. What's more, according to my fitness app on my phone, one hour of slow and steady X-C skiing burns over 600 calories! That beats the hell out of cardio machines at the gym, plus I get to enjoy the sunshine!