25 lbs and counting

This morning I weighed myself in at 188 lbs. This makes more than 25 lbs in total weight loss since I started doing the Weight Watchers Core Plan in January. I'm solidly in a 34 waist and eying the 33s in the closet. I've also gotten a number of comments on the loss from my office mates, so I guess something is working.

I'm trying to temper my enthusiasm for the diet since I've seen significant weight loss on most diets that I've tried. Body for Life? Check. South Beach? Check. However on each of these diets, once I stopped monitoring myself, the weight jumped back on. But so far so good. I don't feel terribly deprived. It's hard to feel deprived when you can eat an apple or an orange whenever you feel hungry. Sure, I don't eat as much bread or pasta or beer as I might like, but I've tried that diet and it really didn't work.

The next step for me is going to be to start exercising. I have all the excuses in the world as to why I haven't been exercising, but even I know that they are just that - excuses. I'll feel better once I start. I know it. I just haven't.

What to do

We're happy with our house. We have few major projects left to do. We like the neighborhood which is conveniently located near an elementary school, parks, and my office. There are a lot of young families with children near our children's ages. And so of course we are starting to think about moving.

I blame my neighbor. We were outside when Oliver was playing with her children. She started talking about how they were looking at moving. When I asked why, she said that the nearby elementary school was good. But after that, the middle school and the high school were downright scary. There were several weapons violations at the middle school. With her older children hitting middle school age, they were looking for a smaller house in a better school district.

I talked to my wife about the conversation and we started doing some research. The school district fared badly in the last several years of state assessment testing especially at the middle school and high school levels. The racial statistics would make our children a tiny minority at the middle school (19%) and high school (9%) levels. If we went with public schools, we would likely be looking to switch before middle school either to a private school or a new school district.

We have started doing some prelimiary looking at the housing market in different school districts. Assuming our financial situation remains the same, we could look at moving into a better school district. We've put enough equity into the house that we could afford the same size house in a better school district. We'd be paying a lot more in property taxes and would basically be paying our mortgage off longer, but we could enroll the kids in the public schools and feel confident in the education that they might receive.

But then again, this is St. Louis. So there are a ton of different private schools in which we could enroll the kids. In essence, we would more or less transfer the amount of money that we spend in day care and mortgage costs and put that towards education costs. We're still left with the quandary of how to pay for college, but that becomes a problem for another day.

At this point, I'm more inclined to look at moving. We have a good amount of equity built up in the house that would enable us to move laterally. That said, we don't have to make the decision soon. But that day is coming. And at some point, we will have to figure out what to do.