Change of Plans

I decided not to report my "Losses" for January, as I usually do each month.  I did lose inches, and I netted a 1 pound scale loss, and about 1.5 % body fat; I'm pleased with all of that! BUT, for now I've decided to enter maintenance, and for my own mental health I need to take a step back from focusing on losses, losing, getting smaller, smaller pants, smaller shirts, smaller everything.  I have gotten into a bad head space with it all.  I decided to see someone to try and work out some of my issues, and I met with her for the first time yesterday.  I think it will do me a lot of good.

So, switching focus.  This is hard, I won't try and pretend this has ever been easy, and I won't lie and say it's a relief to enter maintenance because it isn't really so much a relief as it is a necessity, and I have a lot of anxiety about eating so much.  I started as of Monday.  My weight has stabilized downward.  It does take time to figure out your maintenance calories and I decided to use the New Rules of Lifting for Women formula which puts me at 2000 calories on a regular no workout day, 2250 on a regular workout day, 2500 on a high intensity workout day.  I want to give it around 4 weeks and see what happens weight-wise and body-fat-wise.  I've planned to do weight training 3 days per week and have Jason train me at home, we have plenty of equipment, plus my in-laws live one street away and have an Olympic bar, squat rack, and more weight for everything than I could ever lift!  I plan to do 2 to 3 days of cardio, never on weight training days, a max of 30  minutes with the intention of having it be intense intervals.  Obviously I'm just 5 days in, but it's been working well so far, I feel really good.  Since I've worked out every day so far, either weights or cardio, I've been at 2250 calories, which has seemed like SO MUCH food!!!  I fully expected the scale to go UP, but in fact it's gone down.  I had gained a couple pounds last week and gotten up to 141.4 and have been down in the 138.x range for 2 days now.  Crazy!  It honestly seems to go against nature, HA!

Goals you ask?  Body composition focus and not scale focus.  Strength and muscle gain!  I want to start doing power lifting!!!  I'm actually very excited about that.  I hadn't been eating enough to fuel any sort of intense kind of workouts so now I can actually do it!  I've switched to doing higher weight, low reps, more sets, than I have ever done, which is why I'm having Jason train me.  It's out of my comfort zone!  But I haven't been comfortable in a while so it's the perfect time to do something new.  I've become too numbers focused even though, rationally, I know the scale number doesn't matter, especially now that I'm a normal weight.

Habits, beliefs, and thought patters, are all hard to change even if you know they're off, or wrong.  I've known for a while I've needed to change some things, but I guess I'm just now ready to do it.