GOAL PARTAAAAYYY!!!

This shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s... okay, no.

This morning I'm 134.6 pounds (2.2 down from last week) and 25.6% body fat. So I've hit my goal right on the dot, and my lean mass is still in triple digits. I now get to see what my ticker does when you hit goal, which turns out to be: nothing interesting. It just says 0 lb to go. And 50 pounds lost. Which is pretty awesome - 50 pounds lost. Annika Q and the whole 50 pounds... that she got rid of. Not to mention 3 compounds of 10% of my body weight. I tripled what they usually get in those obesity-and-dieting studies. Woohoo!

I took my measurements as well: waist 26 3/4, hips 37 1/4, thigh 21 1/2, arm 11. My waist hasn't changed a ton lately and my arm measure has been totally stalled for a while, but my hip and thigh measures have dropped a lot since I last measured. That helps to explain why my pants are getting baggy. However, considering it's currently subfreezing outside, it's actually rather useful to be able to wear an extra pair of yoga pants under my jeans.

I'll do a more thorough debriefing and where-do-we-go-from-here reflection on my birthday, when phase 3 is officially over. However, for now what I'll say is - I'm happy with my weight, and I wouldn't mind if this was the end, but I don't think it has to be, and I think my ideal weight/fat content is still lower. I haven't met my <25% body fat goal yet. I think in the future, my ceiling weight should be around 145. That's when I really began to feel like I looked good and felt good, and it's within normal BMI. At the moment, I'll keep exercising and calorie counting, but think less about weight, more about body fat %, and most of all about fitness. I'll probably go for a bit less calorie deficit than I have been, inching toward a more maintenance-oriented version of this lifestyle. For example, I have my aerobics class certain days and I might choose to do yoga on the alternate days, rather than doing them the same day and then other hi-cal workouts the other days. I would try to get back into running, but I think I'll wait for the weather to get above, oh, fifty Fahrenheit. It just sucks futzing with layers and the air freezes your throat and if your ears aren't warm enough you get a terrible headache and so on...

Oh, and one last thing - I'm dropping sugar and refined flour from my pseudo-Lent restrictions because I feel like it is a) not really a big issue for me in the first place, b) hard to enforce, and thereby c) being a pain in the ass in a way that is not useful. Just a few examples to justify my choice: I can't eat the honey roasted peanuts my boyfriend bought because they have regular sugar in them too, but I can make cookies with honey. If I want to go get a yogurt for a snack, most of the time I'm out of luck because I don't want to eat plain yogurt or yogurt sweetened with Splenda, but all other yogurt is sweetened with sugar except maybe those awesome Fage cups. I ate a salad the other day from the salad bar and used this orange ginger dressing, and it didn't even occur to me to think salad dressing might have sugar, but when I got to the bottom of the bowl I realized it was really sweet. Anyway, so I'm still excluding milk, cheese, butter, and intoxicants, but I think the whole thing might have started out too broad.