Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day is upon us. Ahhhhh....a day to show those whom you love that you care about them. And a day that I typically covered in chocolate....ahhhhh. I will admit, the chocolate is my favorite part of Valentine's Day. This year, however, I'm a bit torn because I love chocolate, I love getting it, giving it, and eating it, but I also am really thrilled with the progress that I have made over the last 6 weeks with my weight loss. In six short weeks I am down 14.2 pounds and I really am being careful to think twice about overindulging in chocolate so as to not have to back track.

This is where my opinion differs from that of my husbands, I am of the mindset that I like to be able to treat myself to something that I have been staying away from every once in a while so that I don't feel deprived of my favorite things and end up binging on them and eating an entire bag of mini Reese's peanut butter cups or something. He, on the other hand, feels like when he loses the taste for something, he needs to stay away from it completely because he feels like getting the taste back for it would make it harder to limit himself to a small portion. Some of you may be more like me, some of you may be more like him, and it's important to realize which you may be. I can honestly say, I will be treating myself to some special desserts over the next few days. I am planning to take my daughter for a special Valentine's tea party at my cousin's tea room and they have the most incredible desserts! I will probably have one when we go, and honestly, will do my best to try and eat only a small portion of it. I'll probably share it my daughter. Then to make up for those extra calories, I'll order something to eat that's a little lighter than I probably would. Even then, I may still go over my points a little. There is one awesome thing about the Weight Watchers program and that is the flex points part of the system. The flex points are a set amount of extra points that you have to use throughout the week if you go over your regular points. On a normal basis, I never dip into my flex points, it's just not even an option for me. For me, those flex points are there for special occasions and that's precisely how I use them. And considering that I'm down over 14 pounds, I'd say that what I'm doing is working just fine.

Something else really cool that we are doing this Valentine's Day that we have never done before is, as a couple, rather than focus on food and desserts and sweets and treating ourselves that way, we are going to have a more active Valentine's date! This was something we talked about last weekend when we were trying to decide what we wanted to do for our date night. My husband brought up the fact that he's having a hard time making plans because everything he could think of revolved around eating. So he asked me if I would like to do something more active instead of just indulging in sweets, and I thought that sounded great! Some of his suggestions were ice skating, bowling and rock climbing! We'll see which idea he ends up deciding on, I'm leaving that up to him. Then we totally felt on top of the game when we sat down to watch The Biggest Loser on Monday night and one of their segments was on having an active date for v-day...we both looked at each and high fived each other! Pretty pleased with ourselves that we were already thinking in that direction. We are still going out to dinner, he's taking me to one of my favorite places, and I will probably get a special dessert (which I already have been thinking out ahead of time and am planning on asking the server to bring me half and box up the other half so I don't eat it all at once, and take the rest home to my daughter) but then we're going to go out and have fun together doing something that is more than just sitting at a movie or sitting around eating chocolate (both of which do sound equally fun).

I hope you have a wonderful Valentine's Day and have a chance to show the people in your life that you care about, whether it's your spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, parents, grandparents, kids, or friends, that you love them and appreciate who they are and what they mean to you. Happy Valentine's Day!