Positive Small Changes

I am sitting here today wondering why I feel so horrible about what I did last week as far as my journey. I succeed in cutting another 50 calories a day off my totals as well as increase my daily steps. I also cut off another inch from my belly which is a big Yippee! for me.

Yet, the scale didn’t budge. Or at least, I don’t think it did. I just replaced the batteries in my old Weight Watcher one and decided to give it a try. And I hated the numbers. Hated it more than the fact I was allowing myself a handful of smarties a day because if I didn’t, the whole bag would be in my stomach by now. And that would do no one any good.

I need to revel in what I did do right, not wallow in the one thing that didn’t happen.

I did record all my food this week.

I did exercise every day except one.

I lifted weights three times this week.

I did reduce my waist by another inch.

I did reduce my average calorie intake by another 50 calories.

I did write this blog again even though I felt like I didn’t accomplish one thing.

When I list them all out like this, it makes me realize how silly it is for me being worried that the scale didn’t move this week. I’ll have lots of weeks where the scales won’t move and lots of weeks where I’m going to have to remind myself of all the positive things I have done.

It might be hard but I have to do this for myself. Forget about everything else, remember to do it for me.

Until next week.

Lynn

A Bad Case of Body Image

Okay, I’ve been fighting this battle of the bulge all my life and wondered just what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t lose weight. I had tried all sorts of methods, everything in the world to just get rid of enough of my excess weight to get to a point where I felt healthy, where I knew I wouldn’t keel over dead.

Now the keeling over dead can actually happen to you no matter how healthy you are, so I had to quickly knock that one off my list. See, I have a friend who is the healthiest person ever according to her lifestyle. She jogs two to three times a week, takes daily walks, swims, bikes, you name it in the area of exercise. And she eats right, always has by watching it and writing it down. It was her who reminded me the only time I had ever really lost weight was when I wrote it all down and exercised every day.

Then about four years ago, she had chest pain and went to the ER to find herself in a full blown heart attack. The next day she had open heart surgery and now she is almost back to where she was before the surgery. See, unbeknownst to her, her ancestors had heart disease so when her parents lived a healthy lifestyle and died in the eighties, she never thought it could hit her. But hit her it did with a sledgehammer.

So, I started looking at pictures and wondered just what type of body I really wanted. I thought if I could just some positive pictures in my mind of how I wanted to look, it would help me along this journey. It didn’t take me long to realize that I wanted a body similar to this:

Or this:

Why? Because in my mind, both these pictures represent what I thought was a positive body image. Both look healthy and trim and just a little bit sexy in my mind. In my books, I’m mainly thinking about women who look something like these pictures because I think they look good. And good is great where heroine are concerned.

Then just last week, I started looking at some old pictures of me that my husband had scanned in for my fiftieth birthday and my amazement of what I saw blindsided me. All my life I had thought I was a chubby fat girl even though I would tell everyone I was thin and I wore a size eleven. But the problem was even though I said these things, I didn’t believe them one little bit.

Now pictures don’t lie and as I flipped through the photos, I realized the body under the wedding dress looked just like the person’s body in picture number one. I saw that my legs and arms were just as skinny and firm as those I sought to use as my uplifting image. For more than a minute, I realized I had the body I wanted but like the old saying goes, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. See for yourself:

Why do we beat ourselves up on how we look, only to realize years later if we could just get back there, things would be better? I don’t know but it is something I’m going to work on in the coming weeks as I go from overweight to healthy. Yeah, the old terms, even though they may be the truth, don’t motivate me in the least.

And this week. I am definitely motivated. So how well on my goals did I do you many as? Well, I did very well and this is good. I managed to lose another 3/4 inch off my waist, walk at least 30 minutes a day and reduce my calore intake by 100 calories this week. The only place I didn’t do so well on was on my total step count. I was down a lot of steps even though I increased my walking time. I think the problem is the fact I got a new pedometer and it’s not quite as attuned to me as it should be. Sometimes the sensitivity isn’t set correctly and I do believe this is the problem. After all...how many people actually reduce the number of steps while increasing their walking time? LOL! Not very many I’m sure.

See you all next week!

Lynn

Wiggly-Jiggly

Okay, the first day of writing down what I ate was more horrible than I could imagine for a variety of reasons. First, I had my first hormonal day in about six weeks. Now, I don’t know about you on those type of days but usually I get my butt kicked because I don’t eat like I normally eat. I tend to eat more and foods that aren’t so good for me. Things like candy and Taco Bell get into my diet on these days more than usual. And what started out as a wonderful day with a delightful breakfast of under two hundred and fifty (250) calories, turned out to be a battle from hell.

Second, I normally walk at least twenty minutes and because I was on hyper-speed from the sugar, I only got thirteen crappy minutes because I was practically jogging. Unheard of for me! LOL! But no, that wasn’t what got me this day at all. I can forgive myself one day as things happen our of our control and hormones are in that category. But this…this is almost unforgiveable…sigh.

Many times people asked me what I missed being thin and on this day, I was reminded of this more than any other part of my thin days. For whatever reason my wiggly-jiggly upper arms had my full attention on that first day of me writing down what I ate. Now, don’t ask me how I noticed this first because I can’t even tell you. All I know is I held up my arm and I noticed that the flesh around my elbow didn’t seem as tight as it had in the past. Holding up my arm a little higher, I noticed that I could get it to wiggle to and fro with very little effort. It reminded me of the song, ‘Do your boobs hang low, do they wobble to and fro.” God, the wiggly-jiggly time of my life had arrived.

I wanted to scream, I wanted to jump up and down. I wanted to have surgery to cut the offending flesh away and I wanted twenty years back when my arms were nice and firm and – and – mine. These things I don’t even know where they came from but they shouldn’t be anywhere near my body much less on it. Ugh…this did not make me feel well but only strengthened my reserve to stick with what I planned to do this time.

Add to this the fact I wanted to start everything right this time and this meant I needed to get a waist measurement as well as use my handy-dandy BMI and body fat machine to get an idea of where I stood. Now I won’t tell you those yet but maybe sometime in the future when it is far behind me but let’s suffice it to say that the machine told me my body fat was too high for it to measure. This is soooo not good. Sigh.

So…I had a horrible first day…how about the rest you ask?

Well, for such an auspicious start, surprisingly good. I actually walked everyday, lifted weights for my upper arms and recorded the good, the bad and the ugly in my food and exercise journal. And with all my faux pas, I managed to average just 1675 calories a day, walked at least 4273 steps per day, lost a couple of pounds and 1.25 inches in my waist.

Yeah, I’m on my way and feel great about it! LOL!

So the goals for next week are just an extension of this week and I’m not going to add anything new. What I would like to try and do is to subtract another 100-200 calories off my daily total while I increase my daily steps to at least 5000 steps. This will decrease my daily caloric average as well as increase my daily step average. My father-in-law the surgeon told me once I could lose weight as long as I ate three squares and walked my butt off. And he’s right. It is all a numbers game.

And this week I seemed to kick ass.

Until next week…


Lynn

Sticking To Just One

Alright, I told you all about my just one campaign, how I needed to change just one thing to get on my road to permanent weight loss? Well, I succeeded this week with my just one item which was walking every night. Notice I didn’t put a time on how much I had to walk, just that I had to do it.

Now, I’m lucky because my puppy forces me to go. So every night between 9 and 9:30, I get the DH and the puppy to walk around the block with me getting at least 15 minutes exercise which makes me feel invigorated. And I already can feel the pants being a little less tighter as well as other small incentives to keep going.

Next week, since this is almost a habit, I’m going to add another block which should add another 5 minutes to the routine. Also, I started to lift weights to help my arms during me sitting and watching TV. What better way to get my flabby arms tones? I get to feel the burn and watch my favorite shows! LOL!

Now, it’s time to choose my next item I want to change. And here I find myself tossing up two ideas at once. Do I want to write down all I eat? Or do I want to change how I look at breakfast? Well, I knew that one of my biggest problems was I had given up breakfast again up until about three weeks ago. Realizing this was one of my biggest errors in the weight lost regime, I had already started to add breakfast back into my life.

If I truly want to lose weight, I know I need to go back to the breakfast shake my naturopath had me on almost a year ago. The first couple of months, I had been on the weight loss kick when we realized that my allergy issue was overwhelming everything. So for about nine months, we concentrated on putting my allergies in a more manageable position. It worked as I haven’t had any real severe attacks for quite a while now.

So, in my eyes, we’re back to the weight loss track and I’m looking back on what seemed to work so well in that beginning. And one of those things was a breakfast shake made of skim milk, protein powder, flax seed and fresh fruit. Later I modified it to make it even better by adding orange juice instead of fresh fruit and ice making it more of a frappe than a shake. But the taste was more palatable and I looked forward to it daily.

The other item I did then was to journal everything I ate, not to point out what I had done wrong but to point out how to improve my weight loss chances. I found that journaling about life and what I ate made me very, very honest because I never knew who would pick up that journal to take a peek. I wrote down every bite and every drink. And no foods were really taboo except those we were trying to eliminate from the allergy mix. It ends up that I am not very allergic to any food but outside things, like cleaning chemicals.

So given these two choices for the one thing I wanted to change, I was in a quandary. Both were equally important to my overall goal but the real question was which one did I think I would stick to better this week. And this gave me pause to think for a few hours. But after much thought and consideration, I’ve decided to start writing down what I eat.

Now this can be very good for me as I see one of my issues is portion control. I eat all the right foods but sometimes I eat too much. And eating too much is what got me here in the first place. LOL!

See you next week when I give you a report on how well I’m doing with this aspect of my journey.

Until then…

Lynn

Updating My Story

I have a weight loss motivation problem right now and thought if I shared my story from the very beginning and what I'm doing to improve my lot, I would get the zing back.

When the phen-fen thing was going on, I found out I have a true imbalance of some kind as I was in their clinical trials of when the pharmaceutical companies put them together. With little effort, except 40 minutes of exercise daily, I lost 80 lbs in 6 months. They did weekly blood test and the meds actually changed my blood chemistry. They were going to do some more with some special testing, basically testing my brains uptake inhibitors and various other brain things to see why it worked for me, when everything was pulled from the market by FDA. I was one who never had a problem but the meds apparently fixed the chemical imbalance problem I was having. I still remember reading the doctor's book regarding it all and seeing myself in it on almost every page. As with any medication, I was able to keep that weight off for a period of almost two years when everything became very unbalanced again and I started to see my weight slowly go up. My regular GP tried to control things will anti-depressants which bombed miserably because it wasn't the right stuff and she has tried to tell me to this day it's all because of depression. I wish it were that easy. At that point, I mentally gave up and started eating what I wanted again and no exercise. When my youngest son turned diabetic I gained another 50-60 pounds due to stress. I had never gained weight in stressful situations and was shocked. When I realized just what I really weighted, as I'm at my highest weight ever, I knew things had to change. So I'm trying to change them just one thing at a time.

Food has never been my problem and frankly, I wish it had been. See, I eat all the good things just my portion control is out of whack sometimes and even with larger portions, I tend not to overeat. My problem has always been exercise. I hate and will do anything to avoid it if I can. Basically, I have just pared my calories back to about 1200, I watch the portions and carbs. And I only eat when I'm hungry again which has been a huge thing this past couple of years as trying to learn to live with a diabetic is interesting. In September, I got a puppy because our older dog, which was my DH's anyway, died and I knew if I had to walk the dog, I would get out and up. And bless his heart, the dog is relentless as he won't let me do anything without walking him at least once a day, most times two as well as actually playing with him and just moving around in general. This is very good.

I started to go to a naturopath to see what she could do for my menopause which was causing sleep issues. Then there was the part that there were some days I knew I was going crazy...LOL! Once we got those under control, she is helping me tackle the rest like allergies and weight loss. I finally seem to be on a regime with the allergies that is making life better all around. When allergy season starts, it used to be I would swell up like someone having an allergy attack. It would take months to get rid of the extra fluid and drive me nuts. Now it's only for a week max in spring and fall. Next we're going to tackle just why the phen-fen balanced all the brain chemistry and to see if anything will work naturally like the pharmaceuticals did. And overall, I think we're making a lot of progress.

And to be frank, my only problem with how things are going, is just how very slow it's all happening. So far, since September 6 when we got the puppy, I've probably lost around six pounds maybe a little more. I've got to start charting it to make sure. This is a decent weight lost but much too slow in my mind. When on the phen-fen regime, I lost a whooping 14 pounds a month without trying much at all in my opinion. So right now, my biggest issue is keeping motivated. I'm reading all I can regarding weight loss and motivation as well as talking to people like you to stay on top of it. Still, there are days I really want to chuck it all because my waist is too big, my arms are flabby and 17 yo diabetic son makes all the wrong comments in his quest to achieve this goal. And bless his heart, he's had to change everything about how he operates with the diabetes knowing that if he eats what he wants, he has to exercise his butt off with at least 1.5 hours of hard exercise for every fast food meal he has. Which he does but he doesn't get that saying to me various things just makes me sad and want to give up. He's so typically a young, unknowing male I frequently have to tell him to zip it.

Which is why I plan to stop here weekly and vent in a positive way. I know there are many authors, readers and just general people who struggle with weight daily. I'm hoping if we all support each other, we can get it off and keep it off!

Lynn