Today is day 41 of Power 11. That’s a day and a half beyond the halfway point of my homemade challenge.
I am crushing it.
I’ll eventually know how much weight I officially lost in the first half, but that isn’t the point. I’ve stuck to my checklist every day and every week, which means I’ve shown up for myself for the past 40 days. I’ve honored my half marathon training, which means adjusting the plan when I’ve had injuries or other disruptions to work around. I’ve avoided sugar, followed my meal plans with meal prep, and guzzled water like it’s going out of style. I’ve read to engage my mind and written to express it. And I’ve stuck with my weekly selfies, measurements, and weigh-ins. Keeping the weight checks limited to once per week has remained the biggest test for me, and I have not caved to the temptation of curiosity when it piques midweek.
Somewhat to mark this, but mostly to mark my reclamation, I got myself a double forward helix piercing today. I scheduled my appointment more than 2 weeks ago, when I knew I would have lost 100 lbs by now — and with an eye toward the recognition that my most recent highest weight was recorded on this date last year.
I am obsessed with my new piercings.
I love everything about them.
In the same session, I also had the piercing downsized that I got in the flat of my helix in my other ear during my last weight loss odyssey… 10 and a half years ago. There’s something extra satisfying about the historical rhyming of that… and I’ll leave it there.
Today was a good day. After a week where I sobbed at least once a day every day for 5 days straight, I needed it.
Months ago, I predicted that I would reach a point in my weight loss where the emotional dam would break, unleashing decades of emotions locked away behind body armor I’ve packed on as excess weight.
That time has come.
I have been going through it lately. I have cried every day since Saturday for one reason or another — or, more likely, for a nice big tangle of reasons knotted together by tenuous, anachronistic threads that barely make sense as part of the same weave.
Drastic weight loss? It’s… forgive me… heavy.
Seeing myself in the mirror feels like an elaborate prank. Sometimes I look so small, I can’t reconcile my reflection with the image of myself that lives in my mind. Other times, I still look so huge that the amount of work I have left to do seems nearly undoable.
Getting dressed is a gamble. If the pants fit my waist, will they be too tight in the calves and consequently spend the day being pulled down by the war between my limbs and my trunk? Will the underwear that sags in the ass still cling to my hips? If it clings to my hips, will my ass be too big for it? If the bra band is snug enough, are my boobs spilling out over the sides? If the neckline of my top looks right on the shoulders, will it still be too tight around my midsection when I sit down? If the dress hugs my curves, will it accentuate the bulge from my recently adjusted bra band and downsized tights squeezing my stomach? And don’t even get me started on the legs.
But the real mind fuck is the fucking mind.
I am approaching a size I have never been as an adult. The associations I have to that body are not positive. It was not a time when I felt safe, sure, or seen. I blame the grown people in my life for not helping me. I blame the people around me of all ages for not seeing what was going on. I blame society for normalizing the pressure on young girls such that the unhealthy ways they cope with it are easy to go undetected.
And I blame myself for letting things get so bad that it cost me.
It cost me my health. It cost me experiences. It cost me closeness. It cost me understanding of self-care and self-love. It cost me peace. It cost me good decisions. It cost me years of life I can’t change.
None of that resentment is productive. It might not even be entirely fair. But I feel it all the same. I feel it with the weight of decades and pounds of body fat that I did not put on consciously, but that I now am consciously taking off. It padded me, but did not protect me. It fucking hurts.
So I’m wandering around like an exposed nerve, hell bent on surrendering no ground on my half marathon training, because showing up matters to me. But today, after crying throughout therapy for the first time and wiping silent tears from my eyes for the rest of the afternoon in front of my work computer, I realized: this is not a knot I can untangle in an hour with a 7-mile run on the elliptical. Being low-key competitive with the people around me at the gym would not soothe this ache.
I needed to go outside.
It was nearly 60° today, and there was enough sunlight by late afternoon that it wound up being a great opportunity for my first trail walk of the year. It was treacherous; the foot+ of snow we got last month has not been cleared, leaving it to melt on its own. The freeze-thaw cycle and intermittent sun has created a soggy, muddy, slippery network of pathways that are clear in some places, frosted over in others, and wet everywhere else. The climb to the top of the trailhead was almost too much for my worn-in sneakers. With ankle concerns fresh on my mind, I nearly turned back; if the entire trail was going to be like this, it seemed imprudent to risk a fall.
But I thought, I’ll be careful.Maybe it’s not like this the whole way. Maybe it clears up later.
So I pressed on. I slid a little once or twice, but I was careful. It wasn’t like that the whole way. There were clear parts.
Then I got to this point.
And something about it struck me.
This was the thing:
Choose your metaphor.
The punctuation mark of this outdoor trek was at the very end. On my first venture to this part of the trail in the summer, I took a spill and did some damage to my knee — which also got infected. At that very same spot where I fell, there is now a 2.5′ x 4′ puddle of ankle-deep water from melted snow. The only way back to my car from there was either through that small lake, or all the way back up through the treacherous trail. I spent a fraction of a second verifying that there were no ways around the pool of melt, and then I trudged right through it. It was frigid and sloshy, but I didn’t care. A few minutes later, I was driving my soaked feet home to a warm shower, weighing the same amount yet unquantifiably lighter.
Emotional excavation is hard work. It requires a type of fortitude you don’t get by turning away from rough roads and uncomfortable obstacles on your path. It’s exhausting. It has no timeline. It fucking hurts. But if you keep going, carefully, it might not be like that the whole way. It might clear up later. You might even come out lighter.
I saw the scale dip below 200 lbs for the first time in 10 years. I did this mid-week weigh-in specifically because I had my August 11th – February 10th weigh-out to do, which is *the* exception to my Power 11 rule about only doing once weekly weight checks (on Sundays). I handily won that Transformer, going from 268.4 pounds in August to 202.8 pounds on February 11th1 — nearly 2.5 times more than what I needed to lose. Even better, it was the most I’ve ever raked in from a Transformer bet: $343.70! Conversely, it was the smallest group of people I’ve ever played with in a Transformer bet, and possibly any DB at all — so it was a VERY pleasant surprise to clean up like that! My theory is that people signed up for it in August and either lost track of it with the calendar busy-ness between start and end dates, or they fell victim to it: back to school, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all the functions, parties, events, and promotions that come along with all those occasions.
It’s always a great day to collect. And I felt pretty proud to review these 6 months of pretty fantastic effort and results.
But the good times ended there.
At the beginning of the week, I was contending with intense lower back pain that seemed to hit out of nowhere last Saturday when I woke up. It followed me into Sunday and Monday, and finally fucked off on Tuesday after some desperate interventions I made on Monday night that either paid off quickly or perfectly coincided with the natural ending of the pain. One of those was changing from sleeping on two pillows to sleeping on only one pillow. After losing 100 pounds, my shoulders are narrower, which means I don’t need a stack of pillows to properly support my neck as a side sleeper. I never thought about it until my back started complaining, but I made that adjustment and not only slept better, but woke up on Tuesday with no pain. I felt rejuvenated enough on Tuesday to hit a PBR on the elliptical in my workout that evening: 7.05 miles in one hour on the elliptical. Woohoo!
On Thursday, I had a bit of an emotional hangover from putting myself through some mental health processing work on Wednesday night. It was a positive development overall that came from that, but it did leave me wrung out on Thursday — which consequently felt like a VERY long day. Friday also kind of dragged, but it ended with dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since the end of June. Catching up with her was lovely and a much needed top-off of my social cup. (And yes, she was floored to see how different I look now!)
Yesterday was the roughest, though. I woke up with my period, which is a bit of a mixed-bag way to wake up. Now that my cycle has seemingly regulated itself, I feel this intense relief, joy, and gratitude when it shows up… and I also feel a bit of apprehension about it. Will it be debilitatingly heavy? Will the pain immobilize me? Then this spins out into feeling that I don’t even have the right to complain about any of the downsides, because I’m lucky to even be having a period now. (Yes, I have managed to emotionally complicate menstruation. Welcome to my mind.)
Anyway, I went for my haircut and lunch with a friend as planned, and everything was fine. Unfortunately, it all took a turn into death by a thousand cuts when I got to the gym for what was supposed to be my half-marathon training session where I’d be running 25 minutes straight for the first time, after multiple missed attempts at this since last week. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen again. I got on the treadmill to do the damn thing, and my ankle instantly started whining. I figured I’d try to run anyway; it’s about 50/50 whether the pain subsides or not when I give it a shot when this happens. In the final minute of my warm-up walk, someone decided that the machine beside mine was The One — out of all the unoccupied machines beside absolutely no one in the gym that afternoon — they needed to use. Um, no, ma’am. So I hopped off and changed to a different machine that was apparently not good enough for her. I started my run speed, and my ankle all but tea-kettle screamed at me. I tried a couple of minutes, a couple of foot placement changes, trying to see if it would loosen up… but it wouldn’t. So I had to stop.
I was pissed.
But I was at the gym, and the second half of my planned workout for the day was strength training. I was able to complete my circuit without event, but my earbuds did die two minutes into the first exercise. That’s annoying on its own, but I had JUST charged the suckers because this same nonsense happened earlier in the week. Between reps, I was rage-ordering a USB-C wired pair when I realized that not only was my ankle was still making its displeasure known, but my head had joined in. I suddenly felt the pain of a raging headache that was going precisely nowhere. I used to get headaches pretty regularly, but since I’ve started exercising every day, they’ve been a rare misery. When they hit, though… ugh. Right on cue, I moved to my next machine and felt violent cramps join the full-on assault my body was now waging against me.
This gym session was cursed.
That’s when I decided two things: 1) I was absolutely finishing this strength training, unless my limbs fell the entire fuck off; and 2) My evening plans were not happening.
I did finish the arm weights. With sincere apologies, I did cancel my dinner.
And then I went home, did the barest of minimums of prep work, ate what could passably be called dinner, dosed up on Excedrin PM, and promptly passed out on the couch with my ankle icing and propped up.
When I woke up some time later, my headache had not subsided at all. The recommended amount of time between doses had not passed, but I had no energy and no fucks left to give. I popped two more pills, crawled on top of the heating pad in my bed, and was asleep before 8 PM.
And there I stayed for the next 13 hours.
I woke up today feeling a million times better: no trace of a headache, an appeased ankle, and weaker cramps. I’ve been able to be as productive as I needed to be today to make up for the total unproductiveness of yesterday, and my whole list is now accomplished as of almost 6 PM: 2 loads of laundry, 3 meals prepped and snacks pre-portioned for the week, dishes cleaned and put away, and Power 11 Sunday tasks completed. I also went on a brief social call to atone for my last-minute jilt last night, got gas in my car, and transferred the contents of my work bag that broke this week (because of course!) into the replacement for it I ordered that arrived today.
After the weird week I’ve had, it’s no surprise that my total weight loss this week was 0.6 pounds. It’s frustrating, but not terribly; I am a walking skin sack of bloat, sleepiness, and emotional wear. I did the best I could at balancing my training against what my body told me it needed this week, and I can’t expect the scale to reflect that. And now, that week is over. I am letting this Sunday sunset with my yummy dinner, then taking my cramps to bed before they start biting again.
The most important thing I have learned over the past few months is that when my body talks, I need to listen. Feeling a little behind in my training is the price of admission for ensuring I don’t sideline myself for days or weeks because I was trying to prove the wrong point.
One positive thing I can say with full force is that even though this week tried my patience, disrupted my plans, and forced me into what feels like stalled progress, I have NOT fallen into past traps. I didn’t get angry and storm out of the gym, costing myself any amount of movement altogether. I didn’t push myself to keep plans — with myself or with others — that would have involved suffering for me. Most importantly, I never once reached for comfort in the form of sugar-coated sabotage.
I’ve said it before, and I repeat it for a reason: that’s how I know I’ve changed. Unhealthy food doesn’t solve my problems. It iswas my problems.
My body doesn’t want bad food that tastes good. My body wants care.
Some days go smoothly. Some days go roughly.
All I can do is keep going safely.
I trust myself now. Nothing feels better than that.
If you are reading this and noticing that 202.8 pounds is not below 200 lbs — yes. My below weigh-in at 198 was at 5:30 AM, after a pee, nothing new in my system, and buck-ass naked. This is not how I usually weigh in; my typical checks are between lunch and dinner, fully clothed. I have to submit photos for DietBet, so I follow their guidelines in my normal weigh-ins for consistency across my own records. Why the change, then? Because this milestone was important for me, and I wanted to do it this way. Enough said. ↩︎
Somehow in the past 2 days or so, I managed to tweak my back. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it did inform my decision to take a rest day yesterday, opting instead to spend it and most of today laid up on top of my heating pad. After taking it easy today to not only treat my back, but also to bank on a crowdless gym during the Super Bowl when I went to complete my half-marathon running session as planned, I hit a snag: I failed to remember that the Sunday gym hours are shorter than on weekdays. By the time I got there, as the employee at the check-in desk informed me, they were 18 minutes from closing.
There went my planned 45-minute treadmill session and strength training circuit.
For a split second, I considered taking a second rest day in a row. What was the point of a 15-minute workout?
Consistency. Showing up for myself. That was the point. That’s the entire point of all of this.
So I dutifully took my place on a treadmill in the nearly empty gym, making it my purpose to log a mile. My treadmill pace has been a modest 4.3 mph; in under 15 minutes, I was not going to be able to pull off the distance I wanted, even with a truncated 1-minute walking warm-up. So my pace tonight — and from this moment until the next increase — was 4.5.
I got 1.02 miles in 14 minutes.
Seahawks. Patriots. Whatever. After snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, I feel like the true champion of Super Bowl Sunday 😏
This coming week is going to be about some serious pushing of limits.
Six months ago, I was in the same vacation spot. But everything was different.
Then: heat of summer. Now: dead of winter.
Then: north side beach. Now: south side beach.
Then: could barely walk through the sand. Now: daily runs on the sand.
Then: 70 pounds heavier. Now: less than 70 pounds left to lose.
Those are just the easy-to-spot distinctions. It would take a lot more time to go into how very fragile, wobbly, unconfident, and ginger I was Then. Promising things were awaiting me at home after my summer trip, but I wasn’t feeling steady about them. I had lost trust in the universe, while slowly clawing my way out from under the pile of collapsed rubble that had been my worldview, and bargaining with myself to keep going.
I didn’t know why to keep going. I had taken the part of my brain that asks and tries to answer that question, offline. I just… did.
Running on the hardened sand at the very end of January was a much more meaningful experience than sunning on the gritty sand at the very beginning of August. It’s hard to compare two experiences that are so drastically different, but what makes it possible is me. I’m more different than any side-by-side pictures of the coast separated by seasonality. My seasonal changes are also visible, but it’s the ones only I can see that are the most pronounced, the most powerful, and the most profound. But the best part of all of that is the ownership I feel. I have rebuilt and reclaimed all of it, and used it to propel me forward.
That’s why in the Now, I had to frequently pause during my oceanside jogs. It wasn’t to catch my breath. It wasn’t to rest tired legs. It was to let the waves of months of emotion wash over me as I involuntarily recognized how far I’ve come.
I can’t wait to see what further developments come about by the next time I find myself on a beach.
It took more than 6 cumulative hours spread across 3 days this week to excavate my driveway. I cleared enough of a path that I can get my car in and out, which amounts to 1,000 cubic feet of snow. Now this tidbit that ChatGPT gave me when I asked for that calculation really blew my mind:
Fresh snow is roughly 7–20 lb per cubic foot depending on density. That puts your total somewhere between 7,000 and 20,000 pounds moved. That’s between 3.5 and 10 TONS of snow!
🤯🤯🤯
My arms, wrists, neck, traps, and shoulders were the casualties, with my shoulder blades aching up through and including today — and no wonder, given that information! Thank goodness for weekend getaways that magically include a friend of a friend who moonlights as a massage therapist and had no problem “practicing” on my destroyed muscles! Shout out to Advil PM, too. Oh, and heating pads. Multiple, high-heat, long-lasting heating pads.
I lightly complained about the aching, but to be completely honest, I loved it. I loved that it hurt. I loved that it made me tired. I loved that it was hard. I loved all of that because none of those things stopped me.
My body did it. My body can do this now. All alone, no help; just me and my determination. That’s months of physical and mental conditioning making a big ol’ flex. And hey, me and my determination? We know how to party.
I know it sounds strange to be genuinely excited about having to toil in single-digit (Fahrenheit) temperatures under dwindling sunlight to shovel snow. I’m not saying it’s my new favorite pastime or that I’m eager to repeat it. What I am saying is that it gives me another giant pile of evidence of how far I’ve come since last year. My body from February of 2025 would not have been up to this task. My body of February 2026 says bring it on.
This was a week of zero half-marathon training or even setting foot in the gym, which also included travel and broken sleep cycles because of my trip. What I got right was staying on track with my eating, even while surrounded by a smorgasbord of snacks and a gaggle of people partaking in them. (I mean, cake, cookies, alcohol, chips… you name it.) I also made sure I got quality movement, even on scheduled rest days that I strategically built in to account for this, so that I would meet my steps every day and not fall short on Power 11. Two mornings in a row, I went running on a frozen beach in 10-degree air, not only keeping myself moving, but deftly avoiding the patches of ice, the deceptively deep snow, and the slippery, iced-over seashells embedded in the congealed sand. My only real exercise other than that was hoofing it through airports and, of course, grueling rounds of digging up snow.
With that backdrop, I was not feeling confident that the scale would be kind at today’s weigh-in. I am driving hard towards my 100-pound milestone, which I want to hit by the 11th. I’m close, but it’s not a lock until it’s a lock — I needed this one to count, even if it’s true I’d be happy with any number that was smaller than last week’s.
Sure enough, the drop I posted was modest: 1.2 pounds. But a loss is a loss. And I’m 1.2 pounds closer to my goal.
I started a new job this week. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and has been living up to all my hopes and excitement from the interview process. As luck would have it, my body chose Sunday — the day before my first day and the actual first day of Power 11 — to come down with a head cold.
It chose today to start my period.
Last year, before June, I had exactly two periods. That’s it. For 5 months. They were long, heavy, painful, and obviously irregular. Starting in (and including) June, I had 7. The first 3 were still irregularly timed and chaotic, but I’ve had one every month since October now, with only one of them being debilitatingly heavy.
This is a very big deal.
I have never had naturally regular periods, even as a teen or young adult. In college, I was diagnosed with PCOS, which — cruelly — both exacerbates and is exacerbated by obesity. For unrelated medical reasons, I’ve been off the pill for several years and can never again take hormonal birth control, so my body and I have been trying to navigate my erratic cycle on our own since then.
It has not gone well. Until now…?
With my age (fertility-old), size (still big), and health (PCOS doesn’t magically go away), I never imagined that my periods would one day regulate themselves. I almost added the phrase “without intervention” to that sentence, but in fact, there has been an intervention: I broke up with sugar.
Sugar is a known hormone disruptor, and I’ve been poisoning myself with it for my entire life. Just 7 months into a drastic sugar reduction, and my grateful physiology was like “THANK YOU, I will now immediately repair decades of damage in a shockingly small fraction of that time!” I’m on a whole deep dive with this right now that I will spare anyone reading this from spiraling into with me, but suffice it to say this is a rich topic. The superstitious part of me hesitates to pronounce anything actually “healed” when it comes to my reproductive health, but something has been mended. Even if that’s not the case, all the symptoms of improvement are there, and the only thing that’s changed has been how I care for my physical health. Exercise has certainly been a positive factor contributing to this development, but I’m convinced it has a majority to do with nutrition.
Whether or not the return of my regular, naturally occurring periods is a fluke, I am happy and relieved about it. But I’d call 6+ months a pretty long probation. I hope my normal cycle still going strong by the time I’m no longer “new” in my job — and well beyond then.
Welcome back from probation, period. Most women won’t relate to this, but… I missed you.
Inspired by true events, I have developed a spin-off series for the next 11 weeks of my life: Power 11.
The idea for this type of project came from a need I’ve felt to reset after my end-of-year travel. It was a vacation not just from real life, but from responsibility, routine, and regulation. I didn’t go crazy by any means — in fact, I continued to exercise most days while visiting people overseas whom I haven’t seen in years, even setting a new PBR in walking speed (3.7 mph) and continuous treadmill running (20 minutes) before 2025 was out. However, I did allow myself to not obsess over nutrition, sleep cycles, or half-marathon training. I decided instead to trust myself to respect my body’s limits by simply remaining attuned to its signals, knowing that I would be able to resume my regimen when I returned home.
This sparked my realization that there are tons of parallels between this recent trip and the one I took in the summer. In both cases, I:
Made long-overdue reconnections with people I love in places I know for 2+ weeks
Was heading out with a job offer I’d be starting a few days after coming back
Felt the importance of needing to cement a structure for myself that would continue prioritizing my mental and physical health while allowing me to adjust to a new professional setting and schedule
I started 75 Hard on a lark with barely 24 hours’ lead time to prepare back in August. In spite of the suddenness of that decision, the challenge not only served me well structurally, but it was also an unqualified success overall. With that knowledge, I figured the time was right for another program — but this time, with modifications that make more sense for my purposes without letting me off the hook for what makes 75 Hard, hard.
Here’s what I came up with:
DAILY TASKS
TRAINING I will follow my half-marathon training plan to the letter every day. Each week includes 4 days of run training, 1 day of strength training, 1 day of cross-training, and 1 day of no training (rest). I tweak the plan at the start of each week and/or as needed in response to things like schedule changes, weather, injury, etc. There has to be reasonable flexibility because life be life-ing. The important thing is that I stay committed to building my endurance so that I will be ready come race day. Differences from 75 Hard: Only one workout per day. If I do another movement session because I feel like it, that’s fine, but it is NOT a requirement. It is likewise not a requirement for any additional daily workouts to be 3 hours apart from the other(s). There is no mandatory outdoor exercise stipulation as part of this plan, but my half-marathon training plan will start to include outdoor sessions as the race approaches.
MOVEMENT I will meet my daily steps goal, including on rest days (more on that below). Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
DIET Instead of observing a zero-tolerance policy on added sugar*, I will follow a refined — pun mostly intended — sugar restriction plan of no desserts, no sweetened drinks, and no simple carbs. In foods I prepare myself, there will be NO added sugar. In all other cases, I will consciously choose options with as little sugar as possible, to the best of my ability to ascertain it. (I would prefer to do no sugar at all, but it’s simply too restrictive to be practical.) “Sugar” includes sugar substitutes, which are just as bad, if not worse. Differences from 75 Hard: This component of 75 Hard is customizable, so different people create different rules.
WATER I will drink at least 1 gallon of water every day. Differences from 75 Hard: None.
ALCOHOL No alcohol consumption. This almost goes without saying since all alcohol contains sugar, but as I’m doing **restricted** sugar, I’m keeping it as its own rule. Differences from 75 Hard: None.
WEEKLY TASKS
REST In a total deviation from 75 Hard, my program requires one day off from exercise per week. Bodies need rest, especially bodies training for long-distance runs while aiming to avoid and prevent injuries. Recovery is just as important as getting after it. Differences from 75 Hard: 75 Hard allows zero rest days throughout the program, and any day off constitutes a failure of the challenge.
READING I never fully understood the reading component of 75 Hard, but I did come to appreciate the enforced quiet time to focus on something other than “toughness”. In addition to trying to incorporate more stillness into my life, and as a nod to the 2026 Book Bingo challenge I am participating in, I’ve included a reading task in my Power 11 challenge. Differences from 75 Hard: I am only requiring it once a week rather than every day. I must read, uninterrupted by phone checks or randomly getting up and wandering around, for at least 30 minutes at some point during the day. “Uninterrupted” also means “not while on an exercise machine” — the point is stillness, and that means dedicated time with undivided attention. I can read more than once a week, but the time commitment and focus rules are only required once a week. Finally, I can read any genre I want; it doesn’t have to be non-fiction or have a self-improvement bent.
WRITING I will make at least two blog posts per week. This gives me positive reinforcement for my mental health and fitness efforts while also providing an outlet for my always-buzzing brain. Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
PROGRESS PHOTOS I found the daily progress selfies to be the most annoying part of 75 Hard — and complete overkill. I do like the idea of being able to track the physical changes through photographic evidence, though, so I’m keeping it as a weekly action. I’m also explicitly stipulating both a head-on pic and a pic in profile each week. Differences from 75 Hard: Weekly instead of daily, and with two different views/angles rather than leaving this unspecified.
MEASUREMENTS I will record the circumferences of my ankle, calf, thigh, waist, hips, bust, neck, tricep, forearm, wrist, and ring finger. (Perhaps excessive, but what can I say? I like data.) Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
WEIGHT TRACKING I will weigh myself every Sunday and record that number as my official weight for the week. I will NOT weigh myself more often than that, unless I have a weigh-in or weigh-out for a DietBet that does not fall on a Sunday. Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
As with 75 Hard, any missed task for the day or week, for any reason, constitutes a failure and ends the challenge immediately. If I want to complete the challenge after a failure, I will have to start over at day one the next day. This is the same as 75 Hard.
You may be wondering: why the fixation on 11? Well, it wasn’t exactly intentional — but it also wasn’t exactly coincidental.
Something that bugged me about 75 Hard was that the first day post-challenge couldn’t mathematically fall on the same day of the week as the starting day. That means that the timeline for the full dataset of the final “week” of the challenge is 29% shorter than every other week. As I said, I like data, and this inconsistency is super annoying. In order for my program to comprise full weeks for a comparable duration, it would need to be 70 days or 77 days long. I went with 77, because why lower the bar? But I didn’t want to name it something based on the days; I wanted it to be based on the weeks. And that’s how it hit me that what I created is an eleven-week challenge.
I had also already planned to begin with day one as today: the 11th of January — because I want to start on a weigh-in day (which has always been Sunday for me), and have a weigh-in day also be my first post-challenge day when all the results would be locked. The number 11 has become significant in my autobiographical mythology this past year, so this seemed like a powerful connection. And that’s how Power 11 got its name.
From there, I noticed that my program had a list of 10 to-dos and 9 body measurements to track. Full disclosure: I did add one rule (no alcohol) and two measurements (hips and ring finger) to get to 11 of each. Hokey? Sure. Too hokey? Not for this girl.
And now that I’ve blogged (✅), it’s time for the official “before” measurements and selfies! See you back here again at least once more this week, like a good little rule follower.
I spent the first few months of the year navigating sudden change, loss, and pain. I had concurrent health setbacks, financial hardship, and broken confidence that were exacerbated by that situation. I was completely demoralized and in absolute misery. It took months of hard work to get back on my feet, both figuratively and literally.
It was ugly. It was painful. I struggled through it. But I did it.
Finally, in June, I had my turning point. I had put enough distance between myself and the traumatic events — as well as enough effort into recovering from them — that I was ready to take my power back. I embraced the idea of saying yes and dedicated the rest of the year to the things I wanted to reclaim: my story, my happiness, my strength, and my agency. The key to this was my mental health, and the key to that was my physical health. That’s how, just a little more than 7 short months ago, I found myself tentatively skulking back into the gym and telling myself I needed to make it through just 5 minutes on the elliptical. At the time, I could scarcely trek the distance from my parking space to the gym without getting winded, so that seemed like a tall order. And it was.
It was ugly. It was painful. I struggled through it. But I did it.
And I kept doing it. For the rest of the year.
That has enabled me to experience a normal quality of life again. In the past 3 weeks alone, I have traveled internationally (via airplane in an economy class seat whose seatbelt I easily buckled for the first time in over a year), run 20 continuous minutes while on vacation, and completed a hilly outdoor 5K (walking). To say these things would have been impossible at this time last year is so true that it feels like it could somehow be an understatement. But in the here and now? It was a breeze, and I didn’t have to think about it at all in real time.
I can’t imagine myself ever being grateful for what happened to me as a result of others’ decisions in early 2025. None of it was logical, fair, or deserved. Part of me is still in disbelief about it. But I am grateful for what I ultimately decided to do about it. And I fully intend to continue along that path in 2026.
If the theme of last year was Reclaim and Recover, this year is about integration. All of the lessons I’ve learned and strides I’ve made for my health have been important, but isolating that progress from the precipitating events is not sustainable. I have to make peace with the past in order to advance towards the future I want. The only way to do that is by accepting and processing it all — not just from last year, but from all the years that came before it that I’m still carrying in the remaining extra weight on my body.
It’s time to really heal.
It might be ugly. It might be painful. I might struggle through it. But I will do it.
It’s easy to notice certain behavioral changes during weight loss. At some point in the last 5 months, I started wearing dresses to accentuate curves instead of to disguise my whole body as an amorphous blob (and fooling nobody). I’ve become more comfortable putting my hair up in public and exposing the neck I suddenly have, which sometimes even sports a necklace. I now invite people to walk places with me in the absence of fear I’ll be panting for breath beside them the whole time, mortified. I no longer deflect positive remarks on my progress, and instead fully embraced my brother, along with his beaming exclamation when he saw me on Thanksgiving for the first time since early August. He’d had that look in his eye from the moment he saw me walk in that screamed I noticed!, and he couldn’t wait to tell me with full eye contact before he hugged me: “[Sister]! You’re so little!”
Other changes are harder to catch in action. Paradoxically, the biggest behavioral change I’ve made during my New Days is the one that completely failed to register until just a few hours ago: I’m no longer an emotional eater.
This is beyond monumental. It enters the realm of straining credulity.
Without going into a whole thing, I’ll state simply that the past month or so has been stressful, exciting, anxiety inducing, fun, sad, healing, deeply frustrating, and tiring. In short, it’s been taxing on the more-extreme ends of multiple points of my emotional range. I’ve felt it all. It’s shown up as tension in my arms and shoulders, a shorter fuse, and heightened restlessness, all exacerbated by insufficient sleep rooted in the intensity of how life is right now. How it has not shown up is in destructive behavior.
I cope by using my lunch break for a tour on the walking pad at my desk. I cope by venting my feelings in writing. I cope by commiserating with people in my support network. I cope by singing loudly while taking scalding-hot showers. I cope by running faster, or longer, or both.
I do not cope by consuming unhealthy things. (Anymore.) I don’t even have that impulse. (Anymore.)
When this realization struck me today, I froze in place. It had not occurred to me how much must have changed not only for that fundamental habit to have fallen out of my coping repertoire, but for me to have not even noticed that it had.
As if it’s not the biggest of deals. As if it’s always been this way. As if it was just that easy.
It is. It hasn’t. It was.
But here I am, reconstructed from the inside out. Because 168 days ago, I made a choice that created a chain reaction of subsequent choices that led to a change in me at the cellular level. In that tentative moment on that June day, without grasping the magnitude of what that one choice was setting in motion, I changed my life.
I am not the sad, broken, grayscale person I was for the first half of 2025. I am the centered, recovering, technicolor person on my way to becoming the happy, integrated, vibrant person I want to be.
Strength is a slow burn. You’re strong when you act on any choice you make, but it’s not until you one day realize how far you’ve come that you understand your strength now is only because of your strength then.
Anyone can make a choice: Stop eating the sugar. Train for the half marathon. Throw your hat in the ring for the opportunity. It’s every choice you make after that first one that will either honor that initial strength or not. That’s how you rebuild. That’s how you renew. That’s how you reclaim.
That’s how “never” becomes “maybe some day”, and “some day” becomes NOW.
Life Can't Weight 