For someone who loves food so much, I didn't think starvation mode was ever an issue that I'd have to deal with. If anything, I was scared of overeating and that's why the scale wouldn't move. But, that fear of eating too much turned into eating too little on a daily basis, and this is why I have a lesson learned to share with everyone.

EAT!

Seriously. It's so important to get those 1200 calories a day. I wasn't under by a lot, it would be 50 less one day, and then 100 less another... but then it would become 200 less, or "I'm really not hungry so I'll just have 950 calories today". It's a TERRIBLE HABIT! I actually found myself putting in overestimate of portions of what I ate so that my calories wouldn't look so low. And I was convinced for a few weeks that this is how I have to lose weight. I'm smaller, I don't burn as many calories from a good workout as I used to, and my body needs less to lose weight. SOOOO WRONG!!!!

What I really was doing was increasing my muscles mass from doing Turbo Fire and Chalean Extreme dilligently, working out more in general, and then depriving my body of the calories it needed to function. No wonder the scale was stuck around 154 for a solid 4 weeks. What little calories I gave my body it held on to for dear life! So, Thanksgiving provided a good opportunity to eat more. The food wasn't horribly unhealthy, just plentiful. So I ate until I felt satisfied (which definitely took less food than it has in past years). I've been focusing on getting 1300 calories at least a day for over a week now (several days I went over that by a few hundred, but I was walking a lot and exercising). And guess what the result is...

I'm down to 151.6 lbs!

That's just ONE week of EATING MORE! I'm not using it as an excuse to have a cheeseburger and fries. But I'm just eating more healthy food, which I really think is the key. And it's a bit of a cushion for little indulgences like the frozen strawberry margarita I had with Randy last night on our date. I had been eating around this much in the past, but somehow the idea that I needed to starve myself got into my head for October/November. Well, I'm back to normal, so is the scale. Hopefully this lesson shows everyone that you really do need to eat enough, otherwise the scale will hate you and you'll just be sad and hungry... haha. 

Now I'm definitely not educated in all this stuff by anything more than what I read on here and pick up on my own. But I do know that I've seen much better success in the past week than I have in a month and the ONLY change I've made to my routine is adding a few hundred calories of healthy food back in. I've even worked out a bit less than usual, but still had my days of intense workouts for 30-60 minutes. I'm happy things are turning around, I'm excited to hit my goal of under 150 for Christmas. Since last year, I weighed 200 lbs on Christmas, a 50 lb loss since then (65 overall) would be an awesome Christmas gift.