The Very Hard Difficult Journey of Losing Weight and Gaining Self-Discipline

Loving the beautiful fall color's!

So losing weight is not proving as easy as I thought it would be.  I really thought that hardest part was saying "no" to food I wanted to eat and dealing with some hunger.  This has not been the case.  The hardest part has been my plateau!  Very quickly into my weight loss journey, the weight loss stopped.  So I had lost 12lbs, and then....nothing.  For 4 weeks, even though I was counting my calories and exercising...nothing.  Well, actually that's not completely acccurate. I actually began to gain weight while doing about 1300 - 1400 calories and exercising several hours weekly. So I searched the world via google for answers and I found lots of different advice.  One of the pieces of advice was go off my diet for an entire week and then start back. I decided to try that, and sure enough I began to feel hungry again.  So I thought, Aha!  I have found the problem and fixed it.

Not so.  After I went back on my diet, I have lost what I had gained during the other plateau and 1 additional pound, but so far the weight loss is just not happening.

I know that bodily exercise profits me very little, spiritually speaking.  But I made a commitment to keep on doing the self-discipline of exercise and counting calories, even if I don't lose weight, solely for the purpose of learning self-discipline.  At this point I'm counting calories anywhere from 4 to 7 days per week.  I'm exercising hard from 180 minutes to 240 minutes. 

To be honest, I'm discouraged.  It's hard to keep doing stuff like this when I'm not seeing the results that I want to see.  I'm having to find motivation totally not related to the scale.

So I'm relying on this verse right now (next week it may be a completely different verse or goal that motivates me):

"I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified." ~ I Corinthians 9:27

I don't want to be disqualified from serving my God because I lack the discipline to bring my body into subjection.  I don't want to be a hypocrite before my children or others when I tell them that we should live in obedience to God.   So I keep doing what I'm supposed to do with my body.  Hopefully, it will eventually show on the scale and in my pants size.