Apparently I never learn.

I’ve had a dark cloud over my head all week, both figuratively and literally, and I am not entirely sure why. I apologize if anyone has grown tired of me whining. For some reason I’m just not my bright and cheery self, and I’m hoping that turns around quickly.

I suspect my mood might change when my much-needed break from work begins. I found out that I have more vacation time than I thought I did, and so my two-week vacation starts as of tomorrow afternoon! Hurray! I love my job, but I also love vacations. Starting this weekend I’ll be at my parents’ house spending time with family and doing Christmas-y things, so odds are that will get me out of my winter-blahs funk.

Remember that holiday challenge I signed up for at work? The one where my coworker and I have been weighing in weekly and having a woman write down our weight in order to motivate us to not gain holiday weight? My first reaction upon finding out that I would be taking next Monday off as well was, “Sweet! I’ll miss the weigh in!” It turns out that I am not a fan of weekly public weigh ins, and that is something I definitely should have known by now. Instead of thinking to myself that it is okay if I gained a pound or two or varied from week to week, as the challenge went on I found myself stressing out on Sunday evenings. I would eat a light dinner and work out more than usual that evening, and then take Monday evening off and eat more than I normally would. I was “cheating” after the weigh in.

It took me until yesterday to realize that this challenge was making me sort of crazy. Having someone weigh me each week and see if I gained or lost was stressful for some reason, and it shouldn’t have been. The woman who weighed us is super sweet and not at all judgmental, and furthermore she had nothing to judge. I’ve been playing with the same two pounds almost the entire time! December is the first month in a long time that I haven’t seen a pretty significant loss on the scale over the course of a month, and I think that my excessive attention to the scale is to blame. I know that using the scale regularly works for some people, and it just turns out that I am not one of those people. I have no idea why it is that weighing myself in the privacy of my bathroom and seeing that I gained a pound is so different to me than publicly seeing that I gained a pound, but it is. For some silly reason I’ve let something that should have been a positive experience become a negative experience.

That’s lame. I should know better than this by now. The battle with the scale has led to me engaging in all kinds of negative behaviors that I thought I’d already beaten. All of a sudden I’m seeing photos of myself that someone added to Facebook and thinking that I look fat, or seeing myself in the mirror and being unhappy with certain areas. Hello, poor body image, and holy relapse into unhealthy thoughts. I plan to do away with those immediately. Mainly because, let’s face it, I am awesome. Seriously, this is not okay—I am wearing the exact same size now that I was wearing at the beginning of November, and I felt all kinds of hot and empowered then! Let’s get back to that, shall we?

And hey, the point of the challenge was to maintain my weight during the holiday season, and I have done precisely that. So really, I win! Now I’m going on vacation and my scale isn’t invited.