Weigh In Friday – Week #4 (after another start)

Back at the end of March I tried to get on track again, but it apparently didn’t work out so well for me.  When I look back at the last weight-in in April and compare it to what I weighed at the beginning of October, I saw that in six months I had gained right over 20 lbs.  That is all kinds of crazy!  I know it is time to do something about that.  If I don’t do it now, I will just keep gaining weight, and I really don’t want that for myself.

Starting weight: Oct 7 – 178.6

Oct 14 – 176.8 (-1.8 lbs)

Oct 21 – 174.4 (-2.4 lbs)

Oct 28 – 173.4 (-1 lb)

Pounds lost in Oct:  -5.2 lbs

From Oct 4^th through the 31^st I managed to make friends with the Exercise Bike and the Treadmill once again.  I totaled 130.5 miles, mostly on the bike, but they still mean calories burned.  All in all it wasn’t a bad month for me.

At the end of last week I ordered an AC adaptor for the Elliptical, named Hank.  I either packed his original cord away in the garage sale stuff (that is still in my storage building) or threw it out.  The new cord cost me $28, but it means that I can work out at home again (bike and treadmill are at my mom’s) so I really have no excuse at all for not doing it.  For some reason Hank is much harder for me to do than the other two pieces of exercise equipment.

And now, here it is the first Friday of November and time for another weigh in.

Last week’s weight:  173.4 lbs

This week’s weight:  175 lbs

Loss/Gain: +1.6

Right now I’m chalking this up to being a woman, not drinking enough water and craving salty.  We will see how I do next week.

I do keep track of the miles I do each day so I will go ahead and share the totals here as well.  Saturday’s was included in the October total but I will go ahead and track it in this week as well, since my “weeks” go from Friday to Thursday.

Exercise Bike:  12 miles

Treadmill:  3 miles

Elliptical:  3.5 miles

Total miles for the week:  18.5

Total miles since 10/4:  141.5

18.5 is better than last week’s small number of 13 miles, but still not as good as the week that I did a total of 59 miles.

While I am working on eating less, I am not doing strict calories counting at the moment.  I might go back to that, but I haven’t figured out how to make it work right now.  I have worked on eliminating fast food from my diet so that has helped.

This weekend I will make a meal plan, go to the store, and then do food prep for next week.  Now to figure out what I want to eat next week…

Weigh In Friday – Week #2

Starting weight:  156.8

Last week’s weight:  156.2

Current weight:  157

Pounds lost:  +.8

Yep, that’s right.  My weight is up.  I’m reluctant to say that it is an actual gain, because I’m about 95% sure it is mostly fluid.  I was already preparing myself last night for the step on the scale this morning.

I’m not totally into the losing weight thing yet though.  I’m doing little things, here and there that help, but I haven’t jumped into it with both feet yet.  I’m not sure why, other than I just haven’t made the solid effort.

I don’t want this to become a “Oh I’m not getting anywhere, I’ll try again some other time.” I just need to buckle down. 

I know I can do this, I just have to start making the real efforts to do what I need to do.

Weigh In Friday – Starting Weight

Starting weight:  156.8

1^st Goal weight:  127

Pounds to go:  29.80

I hope to lose about 1.5 lbs a week, which would be about 6 lbs a month.  This is a realistic weight loss for me based on past experience.

If I lose 1.5 lbs a week it will take me about 20 weeks (5 months) to reach my first goal weight of 127.  I’ve always said when I get to that point I will reevaluate and decided then how much more, if any I need to lose. 

My first goal weight of 127 simply comes from the BMI charts.  This is the weight that would put me at the top of the normal range, rather than the overweight or obese range.  I am not relying strictly on the BMI chart, because honestly I’m not sure I will ever be 100-110lbs, a weight it says someone at my height should be.

My weight loss goal has never been to be a skinny mini.  I just want to be healthy and at a healthy weight for me, my body type and height.  In the end it will be less about a number on the scale and more about how I feel about myself and my body.

Fast food, again, sigh!

Have you ever noticed how easily bad habits slip back into place and how long it seems to change bad habits into good ones?  Today, once again I’ve had that one step forward, two steps back felling.  Actually I’ve been feeling that since the beginning of the week. 

Even after I typed all that out last night I turned around today and had fast food for lunch, and this time I didn’t made a healthy choice like the salad yesterday.  My lunch today, when added up, was about a 3/4ths the amount of calories I should have eaten for the whole day!  I could have gotten just the slice turkey sandwich and had about 400 calories, but no I had the stupid extras.  Crap, crap, crap!

No matter how healthy I eat tonight I’ll be over my daily calorie allotment, period.  I’m seriously trying to do that pep talk thing right now.  But I’m just having trouble with the “It’s okay, you’ll do better next time” because I should have done better today.  I have to start doing better now and not next time, because next time won’t happen.

Maybe now that I’ve said all that and put it on paper I can push it out of my mind and just pick up and move on from here.  Even though I ate a crappy calorie packed lunch today, I am not going to let that give me permission to eat bad tonight.  I will eat a healthy dinner.

This weekend when I make my next menu plan I need to make sure I plan things for lunch that actually sound good and that I will eat.  I’ve had ham and cheese sandwich on there for weeks, but haven’t eaten one yet.  Maybe I should reconsider having it there.

Last year when I was eating healthy I had a lot of the frozen meals for lunch, but I got tired of them taking up freezer space as well as not really being enough calories.  I love that they have low cal meals out there, but I wish they would consider that most people need more than 260 calories for lunch.  I do realize that you can pair it with a salad, but I tend to like the higher calorie additions to my salads.

I can make my own ‘healthy’ lunches that I can heat up at work.  I just have to do a little prep work the night before.  It really wouldn’t be much different than what I do at dinner, except I’d have to precook some veggies and mix a few things together.

Let the planning and prepping begin, because honestly next week needs to be an opposite of this week.  Instead of one meal from home and four fast food ones it needs to be one fast food (if that) and the rest of the meals from home. 

Big Three Weight - Phase One

I’ve once again found myself sitting down and having to have that serious conversation with myself.  The one that starts off with a “Look you can do this!  You’ve done it before and it wasn’t *that* hard.  It just takes self control, motivation and keeping the big picture in mind.  It just takes passing up what ever fatty bad for you food that sounds good at the moment, for the idea of a smaller waist line.  And when you are down to pulling out the bigger sizes of clothes or wearing pants that stretch all the time, well you know you have to do something.  That is usually my breaking point, and I’m there.  I’ve actually been there since the beginning of the year.  I just have been stalling on the getting started part. 

The back story would be at the beginning of 2006 I weighed 183 lbs, which for some wouldn’t be to heavy, but I am only 5 foot.  I lost about 25 lbs at the beginning of that year and managed to keep most of it off for the next few years.  Gaining a little and losing a little, here and there.  I started the year 2010 at 153ish lbs.  And in March of last year I was at my lowest weight ever in my adult life (and really at any point in my life that I remembered).  I was happy because at 138.4 I was down 15lbs for the year and a total of 45 lbs since I first started my weight loss journey.  Now only that, but I was with in reach of my first goal weight which was 127. 

I don‘t have a good excuse.  I stopped counting calories, stopped weighing my food, stopped caring about portion sizes and now today, I am sitting around 157ish.  Totally frustrated, because have I gained back what I lost plus some.  I have no one to blame but myself, plain and simple!

I also know that no one can do this for me.  It is up to me.  And frankly I’m tired.  I’m tired of having a closet full of clothes that I can’t wear because they are for a 140lb body, not an almost 160lb body.  You can only squeeze 20 extra pounds into some things.  I’m also tired of avoiding the mirror, of not being happy with myself, or being pissed at myself for being stupid and gaining back the weight.  Oh how I can keep going, but I know that the negativity isn’t going to get me anywhere. 

I must refocus my attention back to that serious talk I mentioned earlier.  I have to be positive, rather than beat myself up for past mistakes.  They are in the past and I have to move forward.  This is me moving forward.

First thing I feel strongly about when it comes to weight loss is that I feel doing things healthy is the best way to do it.  I do not agree with fad diets that give you a list of odd items that are okay to eat, and suggest you stay away from other things like veggies and dairy.  I do not believe in taking pills, shots or restricting your calorie intake to an outrageously low number.

I do believe in the good ole food pyramid, as well as moderation and portion control.  I believe what I do today, this week and this month to lose weight is something that I need to be able to still do in six months or a year from now.  Even though my past ups and downs with the scale may not suggest that, that is mainly is because I got lazy and did what felt good at the moment, rather than looking at the big picture.

While I will say that losing weight isn’t as hard as we all make it out to be, it does take work.  It takes mental work.  It takes self control.  It takes saying no when you really want to say yes.  It also takes exercise.  It gets easier the more you do it.  You just have to keep it up and figure out what works best for you.

I sat down and wrote out some things I know I need to do to help me get back on this adventurous journey.  I believe in baby steps.  Meaning I believe in breaking things down to make them seem more manageable.  If I came up with a list of 20 things to do starting tomorrow, I wouldn’t make it through the day before I screwed up and decided to give in.

I’m going to call my first group of baby steps Phase One.  Phase Two may come along at some point, or it may be focused more on the maintaining the weight loss.  I’ll take that step when I get there.  But for now…

Phase One:

1.  Drink more water and tea and limit myself to one diet drink a day.

2.  Start writing in the food journal daily.

3.  Use up foods (that I cooked) in freezer that don’t have calories written on them.

4.  Start measuring and calorie counting everything I cook from this point forward and mark the calories on the package when I freeze.

5.  Continue to menu plan, but to also include calories and add snacks.

6.  Limit fast food for lunch and choose healthier options.

7.  Exercise.

8.  Weigh weekly.

I have learned that rather than be vague, like I was with exercise above, that you should list out how you are going to do things.  Just saying you are going to exercise doesn’t really help you and you aren’t really sitting yourself up with a productive plan.  You should say something like I will exercise for thirty minutes five times a week.  At this moment, I’m still figuring the exercise part.  I will have to dig my elliptical out from the jumble of my living room before I can even use it.  That is why it is low on the list, because I know that as long as I am doing the items above it, and weighing in, I am doing a lot more than I was doing. 

That’s a start, and a start is what Phase one is about to me. 

Let me just add…

If you have stumbled along and landed on this page out there in the blog world, let me tell you, the three things that helped me lose the first 25lbs were simple.  They were something anyone and everyone could realistically do, with out having to give their life an overhaul.  When peopled asked me how I lost the weight I simply said “I gave up cokes, walked, and watched what I ate.”

I lost 3lbs alone when I switched from cokes to water, and that was before I did anything else.  I walked on a treadmill, started off at a mile and was up to 3 miles a day.  And when I said I watched what I ate, it wasn’t anything extreme.  I didn’t cook special foods, didn’t give up everything in the world, I just tried to eat less and make better choices.  I decided I didn’t need so much butter and cheese on veggies.  I ate smaller portions of fried foods and so on.  Which if you cook for others, this is probably where I would start, so you don’t freak everyone out. 

I had gotten more strict with my food and calories in 2010, but that is because to be at the weight I want to be with my height it shouldn’t take a large number of calories to fuel my body.  If you are taller you get to weight more, meaning you get to eat more.  I’d be jealous of you taller people out there, but then I have to remember I never have to worry about having to find pants and skirts long enough for me.

Introducing my Big Three!

First a quick recap and the plan for tonight...

Monday Night’s To Do List was:

Work through my daily checklist.

  -- I did 5.5 of the 6 items on my daily list.  While not perfect, it is much better than the one item I was still doing actually daily.

Do my veggie prep on the stuff I bought Saturday.

 -- Veggies and fruits got prepped last night.

Do any additional food prep to help me stick to my menu plan.

 -- Prepped my lunch for today, as well as precooked veggies for Wednesday’s lunch.  I'll have some more to do later in the week, but this will get me started.

Give the rest of the dining room furniture a good cleaning.

  -- Didn’t do.

Along with the items above that I did do, I also folded two loads of towels.  Both were washed Sunday evening, though one load still needed to go through the drier when I went to bed that night.

How boring was that for others to read?  But I'm posting it anyway, because it helps me to see it in writing, what I did and what I didn't do.

Tonight’s To Do List is:

Really clean off the kitchen bar (which was that .5 item) as well as follow through with the other items on my daily checklist.

Do some of the things on the weekly check list, like empty all the little trash cans and sweep the floors.

Dust the dining room furniture, which is now in the room!

Wash dish towels and dust rags, if I get the washing machine leveled.

As always the list could keep going on and on, but I’m going to just stick with those things.  If one item doesn’t get done I will move it to another day.  If more than one item doesn’t get done then I didn't do what I needed to be doing.  If I do happen to get all four of them done, then I can always add to the list as needed.

And now, Introducing my Big Three, atleast the name for them that is, since I really introduced them yesterday. 

From this point forward I am going to start referring to the things that I mentioned before as my Big Three.  At this moment, daily/weekly (cleaning) routines, weight loss and saving/spending are the biggest things that I am focusing on.  Obviously there are many other things going on in my life, such as all the painting and redecorating, but that’s more cosmetic, and the Big Three are deeper issues I need to deal with.  I’m working on finding balance in my life, to get what I need done and to keep doing things that help me move forward. 

My current plan of action is to really work on doing my daily/weekly routines as I currently have them listed out for the rest of the week.  I will need to add to them, especially the weekly section, but first I need get into the habit of doing the main stuff every day.

While I am focusing on those I will work out how I want to attack the food/weight loss part of my Big Three so that by next Sunday I can start implementing those things.  It will just come down to telling my self no and making my self do the things I know I need to do.

By the following week I would like to have some idea how I will be tackling my spending/saving.  I know there will be an adjustment period, trying to figure it all out, but I can at least make postive moves towards getting started.

I’ve got to change things.  No, let me rephrase that, I am going to change things, starting now.