Sugar, sugar

Let me tell you, nothing makes you more conscious of what you buy at the grocery store than not owning a car. When I go to the grocery store, whether I take the bus or I walk, I have to carry what I buy. When my sister was living with me, we'd usually fill our backpacks and then use reusable grocery bags if there was anything else. Now that it's just me, I try to keep it to just my backpack.

Have you ever based your shopping purchases on how much they weighed or wondering if it would fit in a backpack? It makes decision-making a lot easier. Milk is usually a half-gallon or less (I'm not a big milk drinker, I really only buy it if I need it for a recipe or when I want cereal). If I want watermelon, I've got to sacrifice elsewhere. I have to make sure there's room for what I absolutely need, and more often than not, that leaves no room for sweets or other junk foods.

The other day, I went to the store to get yogurts since I was almost out and I've been eating one every day for breakfast. And I got to thinking about visualizing my weightloss. When I buy things like flour or sugar, I usually buy the five-pound bags. At my highest weight, this was what I wanted to lose long-term, represented by five-pound bags of sugar:



Forty-two bags of sugar. That's not even my weight - that's the weight I had to lose! I'm not sure that would even fit in a shopping cart, yet I carried it every day on my 5'6" frame.

Out of those forty-two bags of sugar, this is approximately what I have lost so far (as of last Friday's weigh-in):



I'm not great at math, so I'll leave the fractions to someone more ambitious. But in my mind, I'm picturing taking nearly three of those bags of sugar and dumping them in the trash. And personally, I'm thrilled.