Steely (Dan) Determination

This is week three of my 3 Week Exercise Challenge. Can you believe I have really loved it? It’s such a stress reliever for me in the evening; I get on the elliptical machine and when I’m done I feel so good about myself that I feel ready to go back to whatever pressing tasks need to be done. My job is ending this week (I work in a grant-funded position for a non-profit agency and my position’s term is up.) So I have been scrambling to find another position while at the same time trying to wrap up everything at this job and trying to make it through a hectic summer school schedule and continuing practicum. Usually I would use this schedule as an excuse to not exercise and instead to eat ice cream. Yet somehow working out at a set time everyday is what’s keeping me sane. I had to write about this just in case there ever comes a time in the future where I doubt my abilities to do this whole weight loss caper. If I ever whine or complain, “I can’t do it!” in the future, I want to be able to go back to this post and prove to myself that yes, I can do it. If I ever find myself blowing off exercise I want to remember that I do this because it’s good for me and because I want to do it, not because it’s a chore or a task.

Weigh To Go! Part 5

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 157.0 Today’s Weigh-In: 152.8 Yay! This month I lost 4.2 pounds; meaning that I have lost a total of 26.1 pounds since starting this blog! I can’t believe that I’ve lost that much. The most amazing thing though is that I’m roughly halfway to my goal. I never set a specific number; I just have been aiming for somewhere around 125 pounds. (That’s right in the middle of my recommended weight from the doctor’s office as well as near the number that Weight Watchers had set for me when I did that diet a couple of years ago.) I know that as I get closer to that weight I’ll have a more official number but until then I’m going to celebrate this weigh-in as having reached my halfway point! My birthday is next Saturday and I think I’ll make an exception to my once a month weigh-in rule. I’d like to see myself in the 140’s and with another week of daily exercise and good eating to go I think I can do it. I can’t even remember the last time I saw 140’s on the scale, I think it was just a blur on the way up!

Not So Frustrated Anymore

Everything is back to normal now. My pants are fitting like they did before last week (super snug but at least wearable) so I guess that was just a fluke. It's probably what you guys all commented about; my body was totally freaking out from all that good eating and exercise! I have been so sore from working out everyday and my body isn't quite sure what hit it. But I feel great, this week has been insanely stressful and the workouts are so great for burning off anxiety and getting my mind off of things. Well, I better get back to work. I'm up against some crazy deadlines and that's why I haven't been in to post more this week. I did want to make sure I stopped by today to say hi in case you were worried that my lack of posting was a sign that I had gone off the deep end and was now permanently parked in front of the fridge!

Frustrated!

I didn’t realize it until Saturday night but I’ve worn dress clothes everyday last week. Also as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been exercising everyday last week. So I was excited to try on the only pair of jeans that fit me lately but are extremely snug, thinking that they must fit a little looser after a whole week of exercise and good eating. Oh it was so depressing to realize that they don’t even fit at all now. The pants didn’t fit over my thighs, hips or ass and are now just too tight to wear. Can you build that much muscle in one week? Enough to make you go up almost a whole pants size? That doesn’t seem possible but that’s the only explanation I can come up with. I fully intend to stick to this plan; it’s just that I got a little freaked out by this. I know that in the past I always showed a two or three pound gain on the scale when starting an exercise program but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a physical difference that was well, negative, for lack of a better word. Has anybody else had this happen to them before? Have you “gained” significant weight/inches from exercising? If so, how long does it last before it goes away and you start to see some results?

Now It's In Writing

I’m always so hesitant to commit out loud to something. Sometimes I feel safer secretly forming a plan in my mind and then that way if I fail miserably, I’m the only one who knows. But I know that’s silly. I know that often times the best way to reach a goal is to state it verbally, commit to it in front of others who can support you and to make it an acknowledged priority in your life. So that’s what I’m doing right now: I want to go three weeks with working out every single day. That’s it, just a small little exercise goal but big for me. As you probably all know by now, I am bad at exercise. My relationship with exercise could be described as sporadic at best. To do three weeks, that’s twenty-one days, of workouts is actually a huge commitment for me. Right now is the perfect time to do it. My summer school sessions are everyday and allow me to get home around 8:30 pm for the next three weeks. Already everyday this week I have exercised for at least thirty minutes immediately after arriving home. It helps me to know that there is a designated time penciled in for me to work out. Also, last semester I regularly arrived home around 10, which was effective at helping me not to spend the evening eating (I tend to be a late night eater so this is a constant battle). Now that I get home so much earlier I have the urge to graze in the kitchen. Exercising not only suppresses my appetite for a while but it also gives me something to do other than sitting in front of my fridge. Finally, at the completion of this three week mini-challenge is my birthday and it’s near my weigh-in day. It’ll be nice to see some results and feel better about my body on my birthday (I can tell myself “yes, I’m growing older but better!”) I do have a lot of things going on in my life like work, school, practicum and family but it doesn’t mean that I can’t take at least a half an hour out of my day to do something nice for my body. I mean come on, I wouldn’t skip brushing my teeth just because things got a little hectic so why is exercising the first thing I scrap on my to do list whenever things get a little busy for me? I think it will feel really good to be able to celebrate a mini-goal like this and to prove to myself that I’m worth the daily effort.

Where Is The Love?

I was tagged by the goddess Marla for a meme. All I have to do is: List the top five people you would absolutely have passionate sex with, without a second's hesitation, if you ever got the opportunity and name two people you would want to have wild monkey love with, but are kind of embarrassed to admit it. This was really hard for me to do and I have to wonder, do I now have absolutely no lust drive? Has it been burned up by daily exercise, starved by restricted calories and washed away by gallons of daily water requirements? I know for a fact that a romp with Johnny Depp would do a body good but beyond that no one else popped into mind immediately. Maybe my mind got stuck on him and then really had no inclination to move beyond him because that man alone is completely satisfying! Can I just have Johnny Depp five passionate times and two wild monkey times and call it a day?

Internal Dialogue

Yesterday during our break in class a few of the girls and I walked over to another building to raid the vending machine. Well, they went to raid the machine; I was actually interested in just getting up and going for the walk. After they had made their purchases one of the girls, who I haven’t seen since last summer, said, “You always manage to maintain your weight. It’s probably because you never eat junk like this.” She said it in a complimentary, good for you sort of way because as far as she knows I have been the same weight since she saw me last year. In typical me fashion I never know what to say to this. First I wanted to say no, “I’ve lost over twenty pounds since Christmas” because I’ve been working hard and I’m proud of how much I’ve lost. Then I didn’t want to say that because I hate discussing my weight loss attempts with other people. (I’m really only comfortable with this topic with you guys!) I didn’t want to tell this group of girls that I’ve been losing weight and then have to answer questions about what I’m doing and how much I want to lose; I don’t feel like drawing that kind of attention to myself. Plus it makes me feel weird to admit that since she last saw me I had managed to put on those twenty-something pounds and was only now back to my starting point. I feel the same way about telling people that at one time I had lost seventy pounds. I never mention it but some little piece of me feels like saying “Hey, I have willpower! I’ve been successful before and I can do it again!” But you can’t be proud of something that you turned around and completely undid. People will just think, “My goodness, you had that much to lose in the first place? Then you turned around and gained almost all of it back?” I think I struggle with what to say because there is some part of me that wants to be like, “Yes, I know I’m fat but I’m trying to do something about it.” Why in the world I want people to know this, I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s not that I feel like my friends will criticize me, it’s that I feel like they can’t understand. There are just some things that people can’t know about, can’t understand if they haven’t lived through it themselves.

Hungry Days

Yesterday was what I refer to as a hungry day. Have you ever had one of these? You wake up in the morning starving and for some reason no matter what you eat you still feel ravenous. The problem with me is that my ability to interpret hungry, full, bored or stressed is still blurred and so I can’t tell when my body is asking for extra fuel for energy and when it’s just reacting to the craziness of the day and in need of some calorific comfort. I have the feeling though that yesterday in particular was just stress talking; work is crazy and yesterday was the first day of school summer session. Also, my cravings mainly centered around things like french fries and ranch dressing. If it had been my body in actual need of food would it be asking for something with no nutritional value? No, I think that was just a call for comfort food. I’m happy though to say that I made it through the day yesterday. I try to eat fresh and healthy but sometimes things with a lot of fat and protein help me through days like that. I had a huge mixed greens salad with buttermilk dressing and two strips of bacon chopped up in it. It totally hit the spot for me. Best of all, I still managed to keep sight of portion size. I had two strips of bacon (instead of six like I used to gravitate towards) and two strips only cost me eighty calories. I’m glad I didn’t go food crazy yesterday because today my appetite is back to normal. I’m going to go and have a cup of grapes now. It’s not bacon but they still sound pretty good!

Unseen Victories

You know what’s great? When you see changes in your body, changes that are only visible to you, and you feel so proud and happy with yourself. That’s great. It’s great because it’s not about me looking for other people to validate me. It’s not about me thinking that I only deserve to be proud of myself if I’ve hit some large milestone. It’s just about doing something everyday for myself and taking pleasure in doing it. So do you want to know what made me so proud of myself? Don’t laugh! I noticed yesterday when I put my pants on that there was just a little less back fat bulging out. I lost maybe a millimeter or two of fat, something that is absolutely unseen by anybody but oh so noticeable to me. I’ve done so much negative self-talk about flaws on my body that nobody else can see, so it’s nice to praise and enjoy improvements that are visible only to me.

In It For The Long Haul

Yesterday my husband and I went grocery shopping. I swear, sometimes you have to prepare yourself for seeing all the amazingly “yummy but not good for you” food that is out there! On our stroll down the frozen food aisle for a bag of frozen corn, I found myself looking at Salisbury steaks, beef pot pies, tater tots and a whole bunch of other frozen foods that taste good but are full of nothing but calories, fats and sugars. For one split second I thought to myself, “Ooh, I used to love to eat all of these kinds of food when I was young. I wish I could eat some of these things now just to remember what they taste like. Maybe…” and that’s where I stopped myself but I knew what the next words in my thoughts were going to be. I was going to finish with “when I get down to a normal weight I could start to eat some of this stuff.” And it wasn’t the sort of “maybe once a week as a special treat” kind of urge, instead it was a mental image of a huge plate piled high with tater tots smothered in ketchup, fried chicken nuggets and a steaming beef pot pie as a side dish. I actually was starting to think that I had conquered that sort of thinking. It’s been awhile now that I’ve found myself thinking about losing weight and changing my eating habits as a lifestyle and not as a short-term means to an end but obviously there’s a little part of me that still needs some work. The good thing though is that I caught and identified those sorts of thoughts before just going along with them. In all my previous weight loss adventures I openly thought to myself that this is a short term thing, that after I lose the weight I’ll be able to eat whatever I want. I can see the progress that I’ve made but I can see how much more work I have to go.

Clothing, Clothing Everywhere And Not A Stitch That Fits

I’m having trouble finding stuff to wear. Despite losing over twenty pounds and having a ton of clothes in my closet, I’ve been noticing that putting an outfit together is starting to become a pain in the ass. The reason why is because as I’ve written before, I hate to buy clothes as it seems that I’m always trying to lose weight and don’t want to waste the money on things that I won’t be able to wear in a month. Therefore, even though I have a lot of clothes, they’re pretty much grouped in sizes representative of landmarks in my weight loss efforts. I’m ok on jeans, I have a pair in pretty much every size imaginable and that’s because I live in jeans and they’re the one item that I’m willing to go out and buy. In other types of clothing I’m not so lucky. Does that make sense? Here, let me explain the problem: When I need a casual jeans and t-shirt type outfit for wearing to the grocery store or to school: The jeans that I’m wearing are still pretty snug but they’re the only ones that fit right now. The t-shirts that I have are either in extra large from my heaviest days or in a size small from when I had originally reached my 120 pound goal which was celebrated with a shopping spree. There’s no in-between. I either look like I’m wearing a maternity shirt or a child’s tee that highlights every fat ripple and roll being pushed up by my tight jeans. Neither are a flattering look. When I need a dressed up professional look for practicum: The dress pants, trousers and tops I own were all purchased when I began working at an evil company that had a business wear dress code. I have since left said evil company so my dress wear is limited to that initial purchase in which I happened to weigh 168 at the time. If I had to guess, I probably weigh somewhere near 155 right now. As you can see, that means that all my dress clothing is just swimming on me. I also have a very extreme hourglass figure which means that my pants are totally sagging away from my shrinking waist but because my hips and thighs are rather large still, the fabric gathers and rests on the widest part of my lower body. Now I’m pretty sure that sagging is not appropriate in the business world but that’s the look that I’ve been rocking lately. Not a flattering look. I think that these big baggy clothes not only make me look heavier than I am but they also make me feel frumpy. Also, let’s all admit that sometimes when all your clothing is too tight, you suddenly get really motivated to lose weight. At least this type of motivation works for me and I find that wearing these baggy clothes doesn’t give me that same do or die attitude that they were giving me a few months ago when they were too tight. I tried pairing the dress pants with some of the cute little tops that I had bought from my skinny days hoping that this would make me look less all-around heavy but that really didn’t work. Instead I just look unbalanced; yes my waist looks smaller but my boobs and arms are too tight in the shirt and then my bottom half looks so much bigger and out of proportion with the top half of my body. You can't really wear a small top with a large bottom, it just looks weird. Again, not a flattering look. I don’t know how to fix this problem (without going out and buying more clothes) and I’m not quite sure how it’s going to play out as I lose even more weight. My best solution right now is to wear everything as long as I can and then at some point break down and have everything tailored. Not only will that be cheaper than buying a whole new wardrobe but another benefit of having things tailored is that there will be no going back at that point. There will be no fat pants to gradually move back up to wearing if I slip and let myself gain weight. I figure the fear of having nothing to wear and having to go naked if I get fat again is enough to keep me from gaining the weight back!

Cup of Salt

Last week when we went grocery shopping my husband bought a whole bunch of cup of noodle soups. They were super cheap, like two for a buck and he just couldn’t pass them up. We bought them for him but I have ended up being the one eating them. They don’t fit my rule of lower carbs or fresh ingredients but they do fit my rule of a low calorie meal; only 290 calories for a soup that takes me thirty minutes to eat and leaves me feeling full for a good couple of hours afterwards. At least this is how I have justified eating this dehydrated food product in a Styrofoam cup for up to two meals a day. Well now I realize that as much as I love them, I just need to back off the cup of noodles for a while (even though they are so yummy!) Those suckers have like 1300 mg of sodium per serving and my body has been reminding me of this fact. My fingers are so swollen that I can barely get my wedding rings on and off. Even with drinking somewhere between eight to ten bottles of water a day, it’s that bad. I don’t remember ever having such a reaction to salt previously. Since beginning this newest weight loss journey I have inadvertently changed how much sodium there is in my diet. I usually don’t eat foods high in sodium and I never add salt to any of my foods. Is it possible that as you transition out the crap foods from your eating habits you develop intolerance to those foods that at one time were a main staple?

Busy But Good

Wow, it’s been madness this week! I have been so busy and stressed out and running around crazy. I’m pretty tired and have pulled some very late nights and very early mornings. You know it’s bad when you got to sleep at 3 in the morning and then wake up at 7 in the morning, take off and are gone for the day. Last time I checked, aren’t you supposed to go to sleep at night and then wake up the next day? Doesn’t this technically mean that I’m napping a few hours every morning and completely lacking a night of sleep by definition? Anyways, I have had work deadlines and school deadlines and I’m giving it my all in class and practicum and there are no signs of stopping; in fact it’s far from over. Next week is finals week and in addition to my exams I have a ginormous presentation to give and yet another work deadline looming. Then after next week summer school begins, Monday through Friday three hours every night. And so it goes! Ok, I’m done bitching. Thanks for listening to me whine. I do have to report that all is well on the food front surprisingly! In all this madness I have managed to be so good! I think what’s been helping me with this is that my husband and I have been taking walks a few times a week to help me relieve stress and get my mind off of things. I’m so proud of me for just getting outdoors and moving around that it inspires me to stay on task with the food. I guess it’s an upward spiral instead of the usual downward!

Size Matters / Matters Of Size

I have a friend who is super teeny tiny; she can’t be more than 5’2” and if I had to guess, I’d say she wears a size zero and doesn’t weigh more than 100 pounds. We always sit next to each other in class and I have to admit I secretly really find her size fascinating. I just always wonder what it’s like to be on the opposite side of the spectrum that I rest on now; what’s it like to be undersized compared to everyone else around you? I definitely am familiar with being the largest sized girl in the room, what’s it like to be the smallest? During class last night I noticed that she hardly takes up any space on her chair. She’s one of those girls who can sit in a desk chair and bring her knees up to her body with enough room for her feet to rest on the chair seat. (Is that confusing? That was the best way I could describe it, basically she can hug her knees and all of her body including her feet are on the chair seat) I just find that amazing. My ass doesn’t really even fit on the chair so forget trying to pull my feet up on there too! I know that throughout class I’m always trying to suck my tummy in, adjust my shirt to make sure no fat rolls are showing, and worrying about my thighs hanging over the edge of the chair. Downplaying your fatness can be a full time job. Basically my goal whenever in public is just trying to make sure that there isn’t fat spilling out all over the place. So I find myself fascinated by how the other half lives and therefore I often spend time observing. I notice that people often comment on her size, from giving her a good natured hard time about it amongst all us friends to matter of fact remarks about how small she is. Which makes me think, yes I may be fat but at least nobody is constantly telling me things about it. I just wonder if comments like that can be annoying for her or if because being very petite isn’t a "bad" thing to be by society standards, she doesn’t really think too much about everyone’s constant notice of it. I don’t really have a point with this post, I’m just going over some of the random thoughts that pop into my head when I start to get bored after a few hours of class!

Love!

Yesterday was wonderful! We had such a romantic day, just hanging out with each other and talking and laughing. Then we went to a nice romantic dinner at a fancy dancy restaurant where we drank wine by candlelight and held hands at the table and just had a splendid time. It was very cute, a couple dining a few tables away from us were celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary. The waiter mentioned to them that it was our first and the husband came over to wish us congratulations and tell us that the secret to making it work is that no matter how long you’ve been married you have to also keep dating each other. Then they walked out arm in arm, laughing and looking into each other’s eyes. Aahh, I think we’ll be that lucky too! So I don’t know how many calories or carbs I ate yesterday. It’s not like nutritional knowledge would have changed anything about the way I ate but I’m always curious to know what the damage is from a free day! I know it was a lot and I’m really, really bad at estimating. Seriously, I know some people have this talent but it totally escapes me. So I’m just going to say that it was somewhere near 1 million, give or take a few hundred!