On the wrong side of the river

I had believed I'd never come back here, standing on the wrong side of BMI 30. And then life happened, with my workload exploding, and diverse stressors in the private sector I won't delve into here.
And I stopped being watchful, for just one month. I should have known better. One month of eating ready-bought foodstuffs and not logging what I ate. One month of fighting exhaustion with the help of a bag of nuts. One month of avoiding the scales.
And there goes all the progress I made at the beginning of the year. Yes, I am back to the weight I had before my b- day in March, and back into morbid obesity.
By less than two pounds, yet those two pounds bring me back to this place I had so hoped to have left forever.
And the holidays are drawing nearer. One week of celebratory meals I cannot opt out of. In the past, that meant about four to six pounds up.
I have a choice of either resigning myself to entering yet another year morbidly obese, or fighting to get out of this upward spiral.
Fighting will mean being selective about what I eat.
As I am the one who does the holiday cooking, that should be easy, shouldn't it?
Except for the fact that we will be spending part of the holidays with DMIL. She's old and frail, and tends to eat way too little when we're not there to encourage her.
So every visit with her means trying to make her eat more and refeeding her. My problem in that context is that she will invariably stop eating as soon as anybody else at the table does, or decide early during the meal that she is full and then proceed to divide the remains of her meal between DH and myself. Either way, I end up eating more than I intended.

My defense plan, this year, goes like this:
I must not eat bread or potatoes during the holidays. Of lebkuchen and stollen no more than one piece. Hands off the chocolate. And halve the portions I serve myself. I will have to explain to her why I do this, and hope for the best, because she keeps insisting that I do not need to lose any more weight.
Which is wrong. I am still 32 pounds above what is for me the limit of a normal weight, so, only two thirds of the way down from my highest weight. The fact that I do not look obese any more won't change that. And I am still determined to be normal-weighted before the big five-oh in 2014.
Even if I effed up like that in 2012.
It may well take me all the determination I have at my command.
I sometimes wish I had as much of it as Norma.



Julia