Has it really been a week?

It would seem that when I feel I'm not making progress at the gym, I feel I have nothing to post.

The sadness over not being able to run has been overwhelming. I made do with a few visits to the bike at the gym, logging nearly sixty miles, each mile feeling more desperate than the one before. Pedaling away the hours, yearning to reach that wonderful endorphin rush that I've come to know so well.

I don't know if a "biker's high" exists. If it does, I sure didn't find it.

To compensate for the days off I was going to take last week, I changed up my diet. I knew I needed to get serious about it if I were to keep my weight down while not hitting the treadmill every day.

Enter: The Salad.

I hate salads. I really, really hate them. I don't really like vegetables, I certainly don't like vinaigrettes, and if it doesn't have melted cheese, what's the point?

You're seeing now why I gained this weight in the first place, aren't you. It's okay. You can nod.

Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was browsing the organic section of the local grocery store and I saw this bottle of dressing sitting on an endcap of clearance items. Even the word "garlic" makes my taste buds start to samba. So I bought it, figuring that I might one day decide to eat a salad.

You never know.

Last weekend, with this idea in my head of buckling down on my diet while I rested my foot, I decided to buy some lettuce. Only when I got to the produce department, I remembered that, oh yeah, lettuce is boring and dumb. So I picked up a bag of greens consisting of mixed spring greens and baby spinach, and I found some marinated butter herb chicken breasts that were just begging to be bought.

A bowl of greens with two tablespoons of dressing and a chicken breast for lunch, every day. (Okay, not Friday. I had cookies for lunch. I was under a lot of stress.) Some days, I had it for dinner, too. It was... edible. Maybe not great, but by the end of the week, I could say that it was actually good. I even started looking forward to it.

And when I stepped on the scale on Saturday morning, I had lost two pounds.

200 pounds. Right there, on the scale. I stared at it, dumbfounded. I didn't understand.

I'm struggling to resist the urge to stop at the gym every morning before work, just to check. I weighed myself before and after training today, just in case.

Every pound is a milestone, but this pound, this one little pound... it means something even more.

It's almost here.