Dieting is not a competitive sport

I was skimming through a book about emotional eating and this chapter title jumped out at me. It can be hard to remember that losing weight and getting healthy is not a competition with others around you. Especially when you feel like you are trying harder than you ever have and you watch other people losing quicker....

I struggle with this a lot at my WeightWatchers meetings. When it comes time in the meeting to celebrate losses and milestones I keep hearing people lose 2, 3 or 4 pounds in a week on a regular basis and a lot of times it feels like a punch to the gut. This past Saturday at weigh in I made sure to try and be one of the first few people to raise their hand, because I was happy with my loss and wanted my bookmark and 5pound sticker. But my 1.8 pound loss in two weeks still didn't seem like much when the person who went after me said they lost 4 pounds.

Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of myself. I know I'm making progress, and even the little losses add up to a bigger number eventually, but I almost feel the way I tried to avoid making my classmates feel back in grade school when I know they studied their butts off and got an 80 on a test and were so proud of themselves and I didn't study much at all and got a 98. I didn't want my higher grade make them feel bad about themselves, because their 80 meant a lot more to them as an accomplishment than my 98 did to me.
I feel like I work so hard and am lucky if I see a 1 pound loss in a week and to consistently hear these amazing losses week after week hurts on some level, especially when I know I have more weight to lose than those who are having these losses, and so, theoretically, I should be losing larger amounts.
I know I should be making better food choices, because better quality food will be better for my body, but when I try to plan out meals based on those better choices, I'd have to eat twice the volume of food than I'm currently eating to reach my daily points. This would be wonderful if I was feeling hungry all the time and needed to find ways to eat a larger volume of food, but I'm not hungry all the time, and I don't feel the need to continually snack. The exception being during my TOM.

I am slowly weeding certain foods out of my normal eating, either realizing that I don't really like them as much as I thought I did, eating them in smaller portions and/or limiting the frequency of having them. I'm not going to try and overhaul my food all at once because I know from the past that this tends to lead to me eating the same thing day in and day out, which leads to boredom, and then giving up. Also, because of financial restrictions I need to work on eating what I already have on hand (which at some point will result in a venison heavy few weeks. [1/3 of chest freezer is full of venison]).

Well, that's all for now on this topic and its associated random thoughts.