I am working out for an hour 6 days a week, eating an average of 1100 calories per day, and have spent the past two weeks doing a dance around 173 pounds. I don’t know if it is officially a plateau or just some joke being played by the scale gods, but it has me down. I refuse to let a little plateau put me off track, though.

I had to do a bunch of mental games to get my butt to the gym for my workout (36/200) yesterday. I felt awful the whole time – and ended up cutting my cardio from an hour to 45 minutes simply because I didn’t feel like doing any more. That is completely unlike me. I typically feel great all the way through the end. I just didn’t have any legs left.

So, I am thinking about several approaches. I could bump up my calories to 1200 in case my body thinks we are starving. I could be overtraining (thus my lack of enthusiasm and wobbly legs) and might need to cut back on the cardio a bit. I might need to alter my gym routine so that I am getting a better variety, though I am not bored. I might need to just stick with what I am doing and ride out the rough patch.

Since this is about my health – physical and emotional – I am going to try to honor my mood and my body. It may be the added focus of looking at what I eat has turned this from a positive challenge to workout 200 times into a stressful forced over-haul when I am not ready to look so closely at everything I eat and why. I haven’t come to any conclusions, yet. Just laying it all out.