Celebrating Oktoberfest

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One of the hardest parts of changing my lifestyle is monitoring and limiting my intake of good craft beer.  This is especially hard because my husband is an award winning home brewer.  Some people are like, well gees, who cares?  If you've had really good craft beer, you would.  Some people have coffee or a snack that they absolutely have to have but for me it's a nice glass of beer.

After we got married everyone kept telling us that they had so much fun at our wedding reception.  When people keep telling you this, how can you not think about having another party?  Maybe not as big and maybe without such formal clothes but we wanted to get together with those we loved most and have a good time.  This lead us to the decision that we'd combine our desire for a party with Dan's ability to brew good beer.

This also brings us to the major challenge of the week.  On Sunday we celebrated our fourth annual McTews Oktoberfest.  We had seven different home brewed beers on tap, food catered from Der Rathskeller in Rockford and soft pretzels from Austrian Bakery & Deli in Chicago.  The day was awesome.  We had about 30 people here and we ate and drank like fools.  Ok, maybe the eating and drinking like a fool was just me.  I planned in advance that it would essentially be a bad weekend.  I wanted to enjoy myself and not really worry about food.

When I got my plate I thought I was very conservative.  I only took a small amount of sausage, about a half cup of sauerkraut, a half cup of lyonaise potatoes and some fresh vegetables and dip.  The beer is kind of where the wheels came off the bus.  First off, I didn't realize that plastic cups came in 18 oz. size.  Secondly, I don't remember how many beers I had.  So, journaling my food/drink for Saturday became much more difficult than I had hoped.

Things only got a little bit worse on Sunday because we had left overs.  And the food was really good.  I guess maybe my lifestyle change hasn't quite settled in enough to get me through the soft pretzels and Sunday left overs.

I know that tomorrow is another day and that I didn't put the weight on in one weekend so I can't expect it to come off in one weekend.  So, now we get back on the bus and start again.

The one good thing that came out of the weekend was the time I got to spend with one of my besties, Krissy.  We talked about WW, my journey and she asked me why I wasn't blogging about this because others may find comfort or inspiration in the things I've learned and humor in the stupid things I've done.  So, on Sunday night I started this blog.  I went back through my journal and wrote posts for all the weeks since I started and now we're really in present time so... let's enjoy the ride I guess!  I'll blog about my weight management goals, achievements and failures but I'll probably also throw in some other fun stuff too.  I hope you enjoy this and I hope that you'll participate through the comments section to let me know what you think.

I was kind of dreading weigh-in this week both because of the party as well as the pre-party party that we had on Friday night with our besties Jeremy & Krissy.  I was tremendously surprised, and there are witnesses who will attest to my surprise, when the scale said I lost 3.6 pounds.  The woman who was doing the weigh in said, 3.6 that's great.  My response?

3.6??
Pounds? 
Really?

Yep - and I've got the sticker in my weigh-in journal to prove it.