52 Weeks (or What Can I Do in a Year?)

One year from tomorrow will be my brother’s wedding in Kauai.

I’m excited for their wedding. I really like my brother’s fiancé, Krystle. She’s very nice, and she invited me to come up to San Francisco in April for her dress fitting. I’m excited to have her as my sister next year.

Since the wedding is in Kauai, clearly there will be some activities in the water at some point. Water activities involve swimsuits. The last time I wore a swimsuit was in 2006 and I looked like this:

I was about 100 pounds smaller than I am now. I wish I could go back to this time. I thought I was still so heavy, but looking back now, I know better.

So with the wedding one year away, that’s 52 weeks. And people say that a sensible weight loss is about 2 pounds a week. Therefore, it should be possible for me to lose 100 pounds by the wedding.

I’m not saying that this will definitely happen. I’ve tried to do this a million and a half times. I’ve failed most of those times. And the few times I’ve done it, it hasn’t been a sustainable way.

So I’m not trying to focus on losing 100 pounds. That’s too scary and too big. I’m going to try very hard to focus on losing 2 pounds a week.

That’s a very frustrating thing to do. I partially blame that on the crazy diets I’ve done in the past where having a 10 or 15 pound loss in the first week or two isn’t unreasonable. And most weeks I would lose at least 5 pounds a week. I also blame it on shows like “Biggest Loser” where when contestants lose less than 10 pounds a week, they feel like failures.

2 pounds a week doesn’t seem like enough in my head, even though when you add it up over 52 weeks it will be amazing. But I’ve always had trouble focusing on the small victories instead of the big picture.

The one thing I do have going for me right now to jump-start this is the fact that I’m on a soft food diet due to my temporary crown. So I’m living on a lot of yogurt, cooked veggies, and bananas right now. I know that this weight loss won’t be the norm, but at least it might get me motivated.

I don’t want to make this blog a focus on me losing 100 pounds before the wedding, so I probably won’t do a ton of updates of where my progress is. But I just wanted to share this with all of you. Even if I don’t lose 100 pounds, I’d love to have the confidence in a year to wear a swimsuit. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be having a lot of fun at the beach.