Remind me why it's better to lose weight slowly. Frustrated.

It's annoying but try not to worry about it too much. Keep doing what you're doing and in the end it'll pay off. You've lost a lot of weight for just a month. My mom makes snide comments like that too lol She doesn't have a filter.

Comparing you to your husband is a bad idea. In fact, comparing yourself to anyone is a bad idea. There are so many factors that go into weight loss that it is impossible for 2 people to be the same. From differences in lean muscle, starting weight, metabolism, hormones, and just plain old genetics.. everything plays a factor. I get that people noticing him and not you at this stage of the game is frustrating, but you have to put it out of your head. Stay focused, keep doing what you are doing (which at 9lbs lost so far.. is definitely working), and it will all pay off in the end.

A few things to bear in mind:

1) Your husband presumably had water weight to lose from your vacation, too, likely more than you did.

2) Your husband started out weighing more than you did. Twenty pounds is only 9.1% of his starting weight of 220 lbs, while 9 pounds is a full 4.7% of your starting weight of 190. So you're further ahead than you may have thought.

3) Your husband is a guy. Between their higher metabolisms and their more weight-loss friendly hormones, the weight-loss version of the battle of the sexes takes place on a steeply-sloped playing field.

4) Your husband is being a dork. By New Year's, chances are that you'll be the one who's lost 15 to 20 lbs, and he'll be back up around 220 or more. "I told you so's", like revenge, are a calorie-free dish that is most delicious when served cold.

5) Your mother. Yikes. I've thought of a hundred snappy answers you could have given her (from "We both got tapeworm on our vacation, but I guess he needs another round of the meds," to "Didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?! - ...Oh.") , but they're really just beside the point. With my mother, at least, it seems like whenever she sees her own inadequacies expressed in me, she addresses them by being as abrasive and belittling as possible.* My choices for responding to this seem to be either matricide or trying to remember that it is much more about her than it is about me. I've always chosen the second one, at least so far.

(*My mom is actually a wonderful woman who is caring and delightful the vast majority of the time. While that does mean that I've usually let my guard down by the time she's ready to slip the knife between my ribs again, any violence in our relationship is purely metaphorical.)