I shouted this to my husband this morning and he didn’t know what I was referring to at first. Oh. You reached your goal weight. Good.

I’ll admit it was a bit anticlimactic because I’ve been hovering close to 145.8 for two months and actually reached it several times but never on Weigh-in Saturday until today.

My reward on Weight Watchers online was a star that was larger than other milestone stars and it bounced. I was offered the option of setting a new goal and reminded that my healthy weight was 109 to 137. Yes I know but I’m not going there yet, if ever.

So I chose the option of maintaining the current weight and then checked my food tracker and saw that I was now allotted 32 points for the day instead of 26—a 23 percent increase. I spent three extra points on a slice of rice millet toast with coconut butter and honey, along with my usual small bowl of cereal and fruit. (I have been craving sweet recently and ate several spoonfuls of that Trader Joe’s organic honey from India yesterday.) I am now feeling quite full.

I think I would gain weight on 32 points a day to say nothing of the 49 extra allotted each week for indulgences, which I seldom dip into very far. So basically I have to keep doing what I have been doing recently. Pretty boring.

Slow weight loss is good but 8 months to take off 22 pounds is ridiculous. However, I was already eating healthily and exercising quite a lot when I started so it took extra discipline. Plus I am 68 and I really do think it is harder to lose weight as you get older.

I was within a pound of goal at the 6-month mark, when I bought all my new clothes. It just took me two months to take off the last pound.

I don’t think buying the new clothes prematurely is why the last pound took so long to come off. My body and spirit were just needing to let up a little on the discipline. When you start eating maple syrup by the spoonful and heading straight to the olive bar at Whole Foods, you know you need something you haven’t been getting.

(We now have a Whole Foods in the nether reaches of Michiana though not yet a Trader Joe’s. When TJ arrives we will have at last joined the United States of Couth. Plenty of uncouthness here to go around still—every brand of all-you-can-eat excess fried fast cheap gloppy yummy to-go supersize self-destruction available, by car no sidewalks.)

Last September I wrote that I would be ecstatic to get back to what I weighed 7 years ago when I was feeling fat in Japan. And I am! Who-hoo! But this morning I am also thinking there are a few things I don’t like about weight loss. (Discipline isn’t one of them. I enjoy being disciplined. It brings its own rewards.)

1. It comes off where you don’t need it to. Like my face and hands. One friend who hadn’t seen me for months said she missed my round cheeks. I do too. They made me look like my sweet mother. Now I look more like my thin-chinned Aunt Irene.

Thus losing weight does not solve all my appearance problems. I must keep working on my posture. I am still an older woman and look like one though truly I feel much younger than I did a year ago.

2. I become judgmental. I feel superior to and sorry for all the obese people who are walking around the track and huffing and puffing on the machines at the Y. I am smug about having nipped my weight problem in the bud before it got that bad. And I feel a tinge of scorn for the other obese people who are sitting around watching their kids swim or do gymnastics rather than moving themselves.

Reminder: Even 22 extra pounds sapped my energy and made it really hard for me get my butt moving. Those who are working out are heroes. Those who are sitting represent what I felt like doing 8 months ago.

3. It can make you want to give advice to others. Everybody who loses weight wants to do this and I am no exception, though I try to rein myself in and talk only about my own experience. During this personal campaign I came to the stunning realization that I am responsible only for myself. I am not responsible for the way other people eat except those who eat at my table.

In fact, the more I talk about it the more I may turn people off. I may inspire guilt rather than courage. But writing about my effort has been good. It has helped to keep me focused and accountable just a bit beyond myself.

So thank you for reading and cheering me on.