Welcome!! A little background . . . I have struggled with my weight for 14 years now and I don't want to do it anymore. I have gained and lost 75 pounds twice and I'd like to lose it one more time and never gain it again. I'm trying a blog to help me stay on track with my goals, accountability, and my life along the way.
I was down 0.8 pounds yesterday. It's a miracle. As of Friday, I was going to be up 2+. I was freaking out. Enter my friend Lindsay (thank you Lindsay). She emailed me on Friday and said she often goes for a bike ride after she puts her kids to bed and she rides right by my place. She said she would text me when she was leaving her house and if I could come great, if not, no biggie. Sounds good to me. Friday night I was sitting on the sofa just before 8 pm thinking "i wonder what time Lindsay puts her kids to bed", "what am I going to wear if she texts me?" and once I couldn't think of anything, "what can I say so that I don't have to go?". Less than a minute after that thought, I got a text that said "i'm leaving in two minutes, be there in five". Gulp. I said okay and then around like crazy throwing something on and grabbing a bottle of water and dragging my bike out of the storage room. By 9:15, I was home again after cycling 9 km. All sweaty and happy. It woke me up. I ate fruits, veggies and egg whites all weekend to keep all the points low and under control just hoping that I could manage to salvage the awful week I wrote about. I was really just hoping for no gain so to see a loss of 0.8 is really amazing and I'm so thankful for it. The bike ride also motivated me to FINALLY put the basket and fenders on my bike. They've been sitting here for months. The fenders were pretty finicky and for the front one, I almost took it to the bike shop but I took a little breather and looked at it again and figured it out. I hate paying people to put stuff together!! My tires were low too and the convenience store next door JUST put a coin box on their air compressor so I bought a fantastic pump for home. It's also small enough to put in a pack.
Napoleon Dynamite would love it.
I was so relieved for Monday to come as well just so that it was a new week. Fresh weekly points, I haven't ruined the yet, I'm not in the hole, I"m still tracking everything.
So for this week, I have to get some walking in. I swear I will probably have burning legs just walking around on my trip to San Francisco. Incidentally, 10 MORE SLEEPS!! There is also a baby shower that I am NOT going to and as per my last post, I'm buying soft fluffy towels that match as soon as I see them on sale. :)
ps. I so appreciate the comments and email support I got from you ladies. Makes me feel like less of a freak knowing many feel the same way about the wedding/baby shower circuit!
PMS + an upcoming trip + a summer cold struggling to emerge + a heat wave + everyone around me is pregnant = THE PERFECT STORM
So the PMS is the real devil here. It makes every single one of the above struggles 10x bigger and more painful. Do any of you have raging, crazy pms? If so, have you tried anything that's worked to alleviate it? My doctor once told me he suspected I had PMDD. I wouldn't be surprised but really, other than medicating yourself for 30 days a month to treat one week a month, I don't see an answer. Honestly, even though I know what it is and I know that I am a crazy, irrational person who hates the world and everyone in it at that time, it doesn't make it any less of a difficult few days knowing that there is a reason behind it and the intensity of emotion will pass soon. I also know that the basis for the emotions are true and are there all the time but oh the intensity of that one time a month. INTENSE.
I have been eating like a crazy person. I've tracked everything and blown through my daily points and as of tonight my extra weekly points are gone. If I want/need to go over my daily points for the next four days, I'll need to get some activity in there. I am fighting thissummer cold tooth and nail and it comes & goes. At least the trip is a fun thing to be planning. My sister and I are pretty much planning it via text message and pretty much taking turns booking things and making reservations and it's really coming together so it's just a little stressful at times. I leave in two weeks and I just want to make sure everything at work is up to speed and my condo & cats are looked after etc.
Which brings me to the pregnant thing. Let me just preface this by saying, yes, I'm bitter. I'm not bitter all the time, just a little of the time and at the moment, all these pregnant people are overwhelming me. I'm not kidding, it seems that EVERYONE is pregnant. Friends, my little sister (she's 24, I don't have words to explain how much this one hurts at times), and girls I used to babysit. Yes, it's happy, I'm happy for them. But at the same time, it breaks my heart, truly. At nearly 38 years old, single & childless, it has been pretty f*cking hard to watch everyone around me get married and have babies. They step out their front door and meet someone. Believe me I've tried. Blind dates, online dating, etc. I've even tried "not trying" because apparently it "happens when you least expect it". Um, no, no it doesn't. I've struggled with this for about 10 years now, wondering why not me. I've pretty much let go of the baby idea. It's far too painful to keep hanging onto a hope or a dream that in reality has a very low probability of happening especially given the fact that I have endometriosis and one ovary left.
So now where my pain lies is showers, wedding showers, baby showers etc. Just shoot me. In the midst of my pms rage, I found out (via facebook naturally, I so want to delete facebook) that a girl I babysat is pregnant. Actually two of them, one is due any day now. I burst into tears, go through the whole thing, eat some crap, feel like shit and start to recover. While I'm distracting myself with online scrabble, an email pops up and it's an e-vite to a baby shower for my friend's daughter who just had a baby. More tears. Again, she's 10 years younger than me. I've decided something. I'm done with showers. DONE. I'm not attending any more. Effectively immediately. From now on, I will politely decline. I've been shelling out cash for years celebrating other people's happiness and choices and I'm done. It kills me to be there and I don't ever want to hear "it's your turn next". Really?? If this was a "waiting till it's your turn" situation, I'm pretty sure my turn should have come before all the girls I babysat and changed diapers for. I feel sad the whole time and then usually come home and cry and I'm done. I know some may be disappointed, or think that I'm being a bitch, think I don't care about them. Yes, yes I do care about you. But then I think, can you please care about me? With all the people that will be there, the fact that I'm not, will go unnoticed. And if it hurts my heart to be there then do you really want me to do that??
I'm going to make myself a little registry list of things that I need and every time I'm invited to a shower, I'm going to decline and then I"m going to buy myself something off that list if I can afford it. Number one is towels. :) I've never had nice matching soft towels. Spoken like a true crazy woman.
So I will leave you with this clip from one of my favorite Sex & the City episodes. I loved Sex & the City. I so can not relate to the active sex lives but there were so many episodes that just made me feel okay about being single that sometimes I pop in the dvd's of my favorites when I'm feeling shitty about it. In a nutshell in this episode, Carries goes to a baby shower and her shoes get stolen and the woman who the shower is for makes her feel like crap for spending so much money on shoes and doesn't want to pay her for them. LANGUAGE WARNING if you have little ears around.
And then Carrie says she is marrying herself and registers for the shoes. Love this.
Don't worry, it's entirely likely I'll be back to my "normal" self in a couple of days, until then, no person or food item is safe.
Yesterday I weighed in and I was down 1.6 pounds. Not gonna lie. I was disappointed. I've since changed my tune so don't jump on me. But yesterday, my first thought was "I did 30 Day Shred 6 days in a row as well as some zumba and yoga and I only lost 1.6 pounds??? BULL$HIT!!". Now that I've slept on it, I'm happy with 1.6 pounds. It's down. It was more than 1. It's in the healthy range for successful weight loss. And when doing the math, if I do this 25 more times, I will be within my lifetime membership range again at WW. So last week 25 more times!!! Here we go!
30 Day Shred . . . ah f*ck it. :) Seriously, I can't watch Jillian every day for 30 days. Yes, it's an excuse but really I can't. I started off doing it, by day two I'd muted it and by day 6, I couldn't watch her anymore. Her silent enunciation started driving me nuts and now that I've mentioned it, it's going to drive you nuts too, I apologize. So my new plan is just activity for 30 days straight. I have a multitude of dvd's and Wii workouts that I don't have to get sick of any one in particular. Tomorrow I'm starting with Bob's Pure Burn Super Strength. I've done it before and really liked it because it was very close to a class a I fell in love with at the gym called Barbell Blast.
20 -- I got to change my HYC badge to 20 lbs lost!
30 consecutive days tracking. Today is day 30 and I've tracked every bite, lick, taste, sip. Everything! It works. It keeps me in check. I'm so excited to be just a week away from my previous record of 37 days. Today has been a rough day. I've been feeling a little woeful and bogged down by life stuff and in turn, that makes me feel hungry. Emotionally hungry. And I want to cure it with a mountain of bad food. I actually need to go grocery shopping right now but I don't want to go because I know that I will come home with some crap to ingest tonight. I know I'm not physically hungry so I'm really trying not to go nuts and I'm tracking everything. It's 7:29 pm and the only thing I'm having more today is a glass of wine. Come to mama!!!
. . . But not anymore!!!! I will back up. I have always let my weight stop me from doing things and going places. If it's going out to do something where I think there is the potential for me to look ridiculous, I try to find a way to not do it or I just don't go. And for going places like traveling, I think of trip pictures. I don't want fat trip pictures. It's stupid, I know it is, I'm not really living. I thought about it a lot before my trip to BC in May and it really turned out fine. I mean, duh, I just don't post the pictures where I look much larger than everyone else or I'm sporting extra chins!!
Back to the present, my Vancouver sister messaged me on Sunday night talking about how she was going on a yoga/spa trip with some friends in California and she was going to spend a couple days in San Francisco by herself and she was nervous because she'd never done that before. Then she joked that I should meet her in San Francisco. We laughed, wishing we were the type of people who just did that and had the money to just do that. I kept thinking about it and then went online to check flights out of curiosity because I really had no idea how much that flight would normally cost. Seat sale. Oh my. Opportunity. I tell my sister and we get excited for a minute and then I say that I really can't afford it. She understands and we say one day, we'll take a trip together. I lay awake all night thinking about it and what i realized was that the weight was stopping me more than my bank account. I have zero objections to charging a trip and paying it off over the next few months because trip opportunities and travel buddies rarely come up. This is a great opportunity so when I realized it was actually my weight and my own self-conscious feelings that was stopping me, I got really angry at myself. Missed opportunity after missed opportunity. I got to work the next morning exhausted and I looked up the flight again. Next to it, it said "one seat remaining at this price". The night before it said four. I booked it. I BOOKED IT!! I'M GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO!!! WITH MY SISTER!!! While I am still self-conscious and I am still thinking about it and I am busting my ass to at least lose 10 pounds before I go (September 9th), I refuse to let my weight stop me from doing things anymore and I'm so pissed off that I did this for so long. And so the countdown begins . . .
30 Day Shred Update
Day 5 . . . damn you Jillian . . . doable, I'm getting in more push-ups than when I started and taking less breathing breaks.
Day 6 . . . damn you Jillian . . . I'm starting to get sick of watching her. I have it muted and listen to music but I'm starting to notice how much she enunciates, I think I'm a lip reader now!
Day 7 . . . FAIL. I shouldn't call it failure. Working out six days in a row and tracking all of my food and staying on plan isn't failure and I need to change my attitude. After not sleeping Sunday night because of the above story, I just kept getting more and more tired. I got home from work today and put on my sports bra and my shorts and sat down on the couch with the dvd remote. Put my head back and fell asleep for an hour, sitting up. Tomorrow is a new day. Actually, tomorrow is the day I take my measurements to see if any inches have been lost since I started Shred.
Almost forgot, another very cool thing about my trip to San Fran is that I fly home through Vancouver and I'm going to stay there for a few days and I'll get to see my family again! So excited!!!
Anyone been to San Francisco? Any tips on must see's and must do's?
The week has started off well with a 2 pound loss, woohoo! Really? Tracking works? Really? Yes, yes it does. Today marks 23 days of tracking and I'm determined to get past my previous record of 37 days. While I am encouraged that the scale has gone down three weeks in a row, I'm so irritated that this is where I was in March. Losing weight that I've lost already is so infuriating. I just hope I"m mad enough this time around to keep it off.
What's working . . . salad. I've never been a salad fan unless it's made by someone else. I hate the washing, chopping and preparing. By the time I'm done all that, I don't even want to eat it. I've been eating two different salads that are easy to prepare with minimal chopping. Caesar salad (I use the PC Yogurt Caesar dressing) and the romaine/spinach with strawberries, feta, pecans, and raspberry vinaigrette. I've had a giant salad every day for the last week +. I have it as soon as I'm done the workout after work and then I start making supper. It keeps me from being too hungry and overeating at dinner. I'd like to add another salad choice to the mix though, preferably something with blue cheese dressing, I love blue cheese dressing. Anyone have a simple salad or favorite blue cheese dressing that is point friendly??
I mentioned in my last post that I was going to do the 30 Day Shred for 30 days. I didn't start for the first couple days. I needed to work up to it. I started on Saturday, August 6th and I've done it every day since including today, that's 4 days. I've muted her now and I just play my iPod. My experience so far:
Day One . . . damn you Jillian . . . I did the whole thing but took about a 5 second rest at the end of each segment.
Day Two . . . damn you Jillian . . . same as above. I did a bit of yoga this night as well and I think that helped with the muscle stiffness.
Day Three . . . damn you Jillian . . . I did more push-ups in the time allotted this time, I took less breaks.
Day Four . . . damn you Jillian . . . same as above and I discovered Two Door Cinema on my iPod, must listen to them more. Today I also did 10 minutes of Zumba after just for some more cardio.
The cover of the video says "lose up to 20 pounds in 30 days". I'm not going to get there because I think it's lofty but I'm going to take a run at it. The morning I started Shred, I took "before" pictures which likely won't see the light of day, and I took lots of measurements. I'm going to keep that up weekly. I want results!!!
Sweaty after Shred and then even sweatier after the added Zumba, my hair was stuck to my neck. EW.
Next up . . . Yoga. Any yogi's out there? I'd really like to get into yoga. Especially since I did just 10 minutes on Sunday and I think it saved me from the major muscle pain that starts about two days after I start doing some work outs. I have Rodney Yee's Power Yoga but I knew after the first ten minutes that it was more of an intermediate DVD as opposed to beginner. I need a good beginner DVD. Any recommendations? I've looked into the beginner DVD with pose instruction by Rodney Yee but can't find it anywhere so I'd have to order it. Does anyone have it and like it? Or have a different beginner DVD that they love? Thanks!!
So this past Monday was a stat holiday here in Canada so we didn't have a WW meeting and I just weighed in at home. Down 2 pounds! Yes I'm pleased. Getting closer to Onederland again and can't wait to get there. And once there, I want to stay there . . . FOREVER.
This will be random, I apologize. I can't ever think of anything to write about and what I've come up with as being the problem is that I'm boring. So here are my random thoughts and tidbits for the week:
I was thinking I would do the 30 Day Shred for 30 days. The most I've ever made is 10 days. Anyone want to do it with me?
I normally take the bus to work and today I took my car. I was thinking I should come up with a list of errands to run on my way home to make the car at work more worthwhile. The only things I could come up with were that I needed cat food and a box of red wine. Those two stores are side by side so then my dilemma was, is it more pathetic to take a bag of cat food into the liquor store or a box of wine into the grocery store to get cat food?? I chose to walk back to the car and put the booze in and then get the cat food. I decided both options looked equally as sad. hahaha!
I got an iPhone!! I love love love it. I downloaded the WW eTools app and it is so awesome to be able to just enter everything I eat right then. Makes keeping up with my consecutive days tracking much more convenient (notice the 18!). I love the iPhone for so many other reasons too. The only flaw I've discovered with the iPhone is that it can't take a picture of itself so I can post it. :) Anybody have some favorite apps that I can't live without?
Well, I think that's all the random I have for now. See? Boring!!
