Diet update and bangs for life

Lucy and me. And Lucy's gum, which she wanted to make sure showed in the picture.

For enquiring minds who want to know, here's where I stand on the ol' diet thing. The history of the issue:

On September 2, someone at church asked if I was pregnant. That marked the end of my 6-month "eat whatever I want" campaign, and I started dieting.

As of October 29, I'd lost 12.2 pounds. Unfortunately then came Halloween, and as everyone knows, Halloween = candy.

Here's what has transpired since that last update. I gained about 3 pounds after a 2-week candy binge, then lost about a pound after I began to eat more sensibly. So, for the math-impaired, my net loss is still around 10-10.5 pounds, and I'm holding steady. I'm not counting points, but I'm eating pretty well and allowing myself dessert on occasion without overdoing it. I can still fit into my skinny-ish jeans and all of my other pants that are that same size. Basically I'm at my average marriage weight. In January I may start counting points again because I would like to drop another 7-10 pounds, but I'm okay for now and I don't want to have to deprive myself of holiday goodies at Christmas! I plan to continue exercising occasionally, eating smaller-than-average portions, and maintaining my current weight through December.

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In other image-related news, yesterday when I was dropping my girls off at preschool and I saw a girl from my old ward dropping off her niece ("girl" means any female up to at least my age or a few years older, since I still consider myself a girl -- this particular girl is I'm guessing 28-30); I didn't know her very well because they had moved into the ward only a couple months before we moved out, but we were VT companions for a short time. Anyway, I have seen her a couple times from a distance since we moved two years ago, but hadn't had a conversation. Yesterday it was face-to-face (and thankfully I remembered her name!) so we did talk. Her greeting to me: "Wow! You look SO different! Look at you! You're so cute and trendy!!"


I took a look at myself and wondered what her shock was over. I'm virtually the exact same size; I was wearing my glasses, which I only do about 1/3 of the time; I have bangs now which I probably didn't the last time she saw me (I've had them my whole life except a few years ago in a failed experiment to grow them out. Well it didn't fail; I grew them out successfully, but I can't stand the pictures of myself from that time... anyone who has seen the size of my forehead knows why... I was meant to have bangs for life).

Are the bangs the big difference? Was it the fact that I was wearing my new shoes yesterday? Seriously folks, not much has changed. It's a mystery. The point of my telling you this story is not brag about a compliment; it just makes me wonder what her impression of me was when we were in the same ward. I guess the opposite of cute & trendy?

Homely and old-fashioned: the Sara of 2005.

I guess sometimes we need to be careful with our compliments: telling someone that their new haircut or that their weight loss looks great, without gushing to the point of giving the impression that they looked awful before the change. If this girl hadn't acted so surprised at my appearance and thrown in the SO different! part, I'm sure I would've just accepted it as a compliment and not given it this degree of analysis.

Or I could just attribute it to the shoes. Which I'm apparently obsessed with...