Ugh – Here We Go Again

How many times have I talked on this blog about losing weight? How many times have I started and then stopped?

Well, last time, I was doing the HCG diet and I did really well on it. I lost over 30 pounds on the 30 days I was on the program. As of this date, I actually gained back almost 20 of those pounds. Why? I think it was a variety of things. One is that I got back to regular eating. For those who don’t remember, the HCG diet involves a very low calorie diet of about 500 calories a day. I would actually adjust mine is needed but stayed within the 500-800 calorie range.

It was a good thing for me to do as it got me to thinking about how I needed to really do the whole mind-body-spirit thing. Everything must be in sync for a program to work. Period. Eating very little isn’t necessarily in sync with world view. Don’t get me wrong, I have enough fat to sustain me for the short haul but over the long term, it probably isn’t a very good thing.

This time, I think it will be different. Again, you may ask why when you look at my history. Well fuck history. No, I’m not talking about history the big picture but history the personal picture. I know that those who disregard history are destined to repeat it. And that’s just it. I’m not disregarding it at all I’m embracing it.

Yes, I’m fat right now. Get over it. Yes, I want to lose weight starting right now. Get on with it. Yes, I’m basically a healthy person. Get on with improving that aspect. I need to do, not talk. I need to embrace that diets don’t really work and work on what works for me. I am a unique individual with unique needs. I know me and my body best. I know what works for me.

And some thing miraculous happened. Recently, I went on a trip to Vienna, Austria with my husband. Vienna works on the premise that most people use public transportation or their feet to get around. So every day I was walking to all my destinations or to the public transportation. Also, every morning, I got up with my husband and went down to the gym to walk 30 minutes on the treadmill.

I ate differently in Europe. For breakfast, I would have scrambled eggs, bacon, a small bowl of cereal and tons of water and juice. For lunch, if I ate it would be soup or a sandwich. When we’d go out to dinner, we’d walk to a resturuant and walk back. The only thing I wanted and didn’t get would be salad. I didn’t get as much as I wanted at all. Otherwise, I ate just until full and no more. I also ate anything and everything I wanted. Desserts were special while I was there. Most of the time I couldn’t finish it at all because the sweet stuff would get to me. But I would also trudge back to the hotel room once we were done.

It was amazing. Because of the change in diet and the added exercise, I lost about ten pounds. Right now, you can’t really tell because a lot of that was transferred into lean muscle mass and my body didn’t shift in how it looks very much. But it feels a heck of a lot better.

So what I’m going to do with this blog daily is include what I ate, estimate how much it was, how much I exercise and when, and maybe a paragraph or two on how I felt. We’ll see as one of my major, and I mean major, problems happen to be is I get bored. I get bored with most things I do, which is why I need to do a lot of things. That way, I can shift from one thing to another.

If I survive a week doing this, I really will have a great chance this time. Here goes:

Monday, March 14, 2011

Breakfast: Bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, 1.5 c of milk, coffee

Lunch: Chips & Dip, Taco Burrito with sauce and sour cream

Snack: Garlic Salsa & 1 serving of tortilla chips

Dinner: 1/3 of a chicken salad, dressing on the side, with avocado, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and olives.

Exercise: Today I walked 46 minutes along the streets of the town I live in. It was brutal in the beginning as it was uphill. Once at the top the rest was flat or downhill until the last block that had a gentle rise. I put on my wrist weights and iPod and off I went. Yeah.

Thoughts: I’ve said all I’m going to say above.

Lynn

Starting Anew

Okay...I haven’t blogged for two weeks...I know, I know. But with the holidays...who has time?

And as expected, I back slid a little bit and I’m not happy about it. I’ve gained an inch on my abdomen and gained a pound and depending what part of the day I weigh, it can be more. Sigh.

Holidays are hard and while it’s not an excuse it is a reason. I could have done what I’ve done in the past and gain half of what I lost before the season but this time I didn’t. I can contribute the whole gain to me eating more salt, more cookies than I did all year and the worst of all, NO EXERCISE. If I would have just kept up my walks, I would have probably kept the weight off.

Then there is the fact that we ate out this last two weeks more than normal since I had the husband and teenager home. Eating out can be just as hazardous as the holidays.

So, what am I doing to combat this sudden upward trend?

Well, the first thing is I stepped on the scale today. Horrid as it may seem, I did it and was immediately depressed. My fault totally. Then yesterday, I started again with the food diary as it is the main thing that will get me back on track.

And I was immediately shocked when a restaurant meal came up to a whopping 1500 calories. Heavens! The only good thing is that I did almost two hours of walking yesterday, first in the mall and during shopping, then another forty minutes in the evening to start my trend back up. I also lifted weights and did my crunches. I hate crunches. Sigh. A necessary evil if I want to get that flat belly once again.

Still, all in all, the holiday season was wonderful. I received great gifts and had a great time off from life. Now it’s time to get back to it.

See ya next week!

Lynn

Baby Steps

Today, I didn’t know what to expect stepping on the scale. I had been not so good about writing it all down this week and know this can become a huge problem for me. To further complicate the issue, it has turned horrendously cold here and with today’s rain, it’s going to hamper my exercise routine. I might actually have to go to the gym to do my walking on a treadmill.

Not that I don’t have my own treadmill, I just don’t want to set it up in the back room where the expensive bamboo flooring is located. We’ve already seen what can happen when kids jump around in chairs on it...imagine what a large woman on a treadmill can do..oiy vey! Yeah, I say that a lot and I’m not even Jewish. LOL!

But seriously I have trepidation today as I go ready to step on the scale. The first time I stepped on, it showed a .4 pound gain. I was devestated then I remembered that normally weigh with just a t-shirt on. So despite the cold, my husband keeps it a cool 66 in the winter, I shucked everything except my t-shirt and underwear. And I was so glad I did so as the weight loss was 1.1 pounds. Yippee! I had managed to keep going down despite my backsliding.

Then I had to do my waist measurement. For those of you who don’t realize it, your waist measurement can be more important than your overall weight because it is a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease. Just to be sure you understand I’m not pulling your leg or anything, here are a few links to some articles on the subject:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/529324

http://www.righthealth.com/Health/Body%20Measurement-s?lid=goog-ads-sb-8536643334

http://health.msn.com/weight-loss/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100173487

http://www.cutthewaist.com/

Those articles are very useful when trying to figure out just where your waist needs to be in relation to your weight. In general, a woman’s waist needs to be less than 31.50 inches for you to be considered healthy. I’ve got about 15.5 inches to go which seems like a lot when you look at it but when you consider I have lost 4 inches in 5 weeks, it doesn’t seem an impossible task. Although, I will say from here on out, unless I put my nose to the grindstone, it will be harder to get weekly numbers.

As of today, I have also lost 5.9 pounds in the same amount of time. It’s certainly not the 25 I had wanted to lose my first five weeks, but a respectable pound a week. One of my friends told me I wouldn’t need to have any skin reduction surgery if I went slow and steady. She may be right but I sure wish it could be 2 pounds a week or more. How about 5 even, that would be fantasitc!

But it is the reason I titled this column baby steps. Sometimes it will take a large number of small, incremental changes to equal the big ones. If we don’t make those small changes and keep building on them, we will never move forward. And I've obviously got a good start since I'm still blogging, still thinking about it and still moving forward.

Yeah, I might not have kept my diet diary for a week but I can guarantee I thought about every bit of food which went into my mouth and realized I was starting to stray. What I did do weekly was take my weight and my waist measurement and record them in my diet diary. So first thing this morning, I pulled it out and wrote down my breakfast. Then I wrote down my lunch.

Yeah, Baby Steps.

See you all next week!


Lynn

A Great Monday

Okay, so I’m blogging on Tuesday. Shoot me already...LOL!

Yeah, I should have done it yesterday but after the writing binge and the fact we went away for the holiday, I just couldn’t sit in front of this machine any longer than I needed to do so. Once everything was done, I decided to just relax and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

Now, as far as weight loss, I had a wonderful weekend. Holidays are always so traumatic for most but this year I decided to temp it all with plenty of exercise. I also didn’t restrict myself from anything as we went to a posh buffet at my husband’s uncle’s golf club in San Francisco. When my daughter-in-law asked how much I though member ship was, I told her it was more than she wanted to think about. The look on her face was priceless as I don’t think until that moment she understood just how well off my husband’s family is. It took me many years to understand just which fork to use but eventually I got over it and started to enjoy myself.

And on that note, the food was fantastic. I loaded up on the greens and added a lot of veggies so I would be full before I went back for the main course. It works as I only had a little of the turkey, beef, small amount of the mash potatoes and more greens. I did save enough room for the tiniest sliver of pumpkin pie as for me it is a must at this holiday.

The way I compensated for this massive meal was I allowed, notice I say allowed, my husband and his family walk me to death before it happened. His parents walk 3-5 miles every day and I went with them on most of those walks this weekend. The only one I missed was the one in the pouring rain as it was a cool rain and I knew no shower would get the dampness out of my bones. Still, all those walks made up for eating more than normal, the drive through food eaten on the way up and back as well as the lack of exercise on travel days.

Was I rewarded for this diligent behavior this weekend? You bet I was! I lost 1.8 pounds and another .5 inches off my waist. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Hope you all have a great week! See you next one!

Lynn

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