Day Thirty-Eight: The Fifth Weigh-In and Week In Review

Wow, I've really dropped the blogging ball the past two weeks. Let's just say life's been crazy, work's been crazy, I've been crazy. Literally, just the other day my boss and I were sending each other emails with size 48 font and lots of emoticons. We'd gone crazy. And crazy is no mood to be in when you're trying to write down deep, thoughtful...thoughts. Apparently I am still not completely coherent, but we'll move on anyway.

You wouldn't know it, because I didn't tell you, but last week I lost 3.1 pounds. I was seriously having some trouble eating all the calories SparkPeople was telling me to eat, so I adjusted my account so that it wasn't adding calories in based on my workouts. My calorie range is now 1200-1550, which feels a lot more reasonable to me. With what I'm eating now, I don't need more calories to feel full. And I haven't had any negative side effects from "not eating enough." Before I was eating JUST TO EAT because I didn't want to eat too little, but I feel like that's a slippery slope to Red Vines. "Welp, I have to eat 300 more calories today, may as well eat the demon candy." So for now, a few less calories it is. Don't worry, as soon as I start feeling any adverse effects or hunger of any kind, I will be all over those extra calories, but for now I don't think I need them.

Moving oh, here is a look at this past week.

Food
Honestly, as I sit here and write this, I don't remember much about what I ate this week. Which probably means that none of it was worth writing about. I stayed in my calories, even though I ate an obscene amount of lemon snaps this week. I also had Red Vines for lunch today. Damn it!

Fitness
A few weeks ago I was a yoga machine. Now I am a walk-jogging machine. Each week I add thirty seconds to my jogging intervals, and take away thirty seconds of walking. This week I had even intervals of two minutes, thirty seconds each. It was tough, but I stuck with it. Because I've been working late all week, I didn't get any yoga done until today. But I still feel proud that I stuck with my 5K training.

Weigh-In
Drum roll, please. This week I am down another 1.7 pounds to 227 pounds even. That is a total loss of 24.7 pounds in about 2 months. I couldn't be prouder of myself. Not just because I've lost weight, but because I've persevered through the rough bits and always come out on top. Losing weight is NOT easy, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. But if I can do it, I think anyone can, as long as they're in the right mindset.

Day Twenty-Nine: This Week's Plan (or Not)

There was a plan for this week, I swear. It's just that sometimes plans don't work out and you end up at McDonald's for dinner. But the important thing is that, no matter how much your plans are derailed, no matter what goes wrong or what you eat, you have to be honest with yourself about what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent it from happening again.

This week's plan was driven off course by a lot of factors. I forgot my dad was coming to town. I didn't check the weather forecast. I had to go to a late meeting and didn't finish in time to exercise OR make dinner that night. Snit happens, as my mom would say. It is always going to happen, and it's important that we don't use it as an excuse for throwing our good intentions and hard work out the window. There's no reason to feel bad about yourself, feel like a failure, or sabotage yourself just because something didn't go right. That's an important thing to learn, and it's something I've finally grasped.

The scones I baked for breakfast this week were terrible. The thought of exercising or cooking after my late meeting was terrible. The 90 degree weather on the day of one of my training runs was terrible. These things were all terrible, but I took the problems, worked with them, accepted what happened, and moved on. There is no blame to be placed, no shame to be felt for not having a perfect life. I think a lot of us forget that when we're trying to lose weight and get healthy. We want so badly to reach this skinny nirvana, and we don't know what to do when something goes wrong on that journey (did I just use the word journey? Hashtag kill me now). And so we go to this dark place of shame and pity, and Coca Cola and Kit Kat bars, and then give up altogether because we can't do it.

That's absolutely not true. We CAN do it. I can do it, you can do it, anyone can do it. We just have to want it enough, work at it enough, and be willing to face the tough times with some dignity, self-respect, and HONESTY. Be honest with yourself about the choices you make. Did I have to go to McDonald's instead of going home and throwing a salad together? No. Did I? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? No, because things happen. Life's not perfect, and we're going to make mistakes. The important thing is to ACKNOWLEDGE the mistake as just that - a mistake. Not some life-ruining moment that is worth throwing away everything you've worked for. Acknowledge it, contemplate it, track it, come up with ways to prevent it from happening again. But never, ever, EVER let a mistake get in the way of what you want.

And because I'm talking about honesty here, I'm just going to add that McDonald's chicken nuggets and French fries really don't taste that great once you've gone without them for almost 2 months. Okay, the French fries were good. But the nuggets? I can live without them.

Day Twenty-Five: The Third Weigh-In and Week in Review

Oh hey there, Saturday. Nice to see you. Really, really, really nice. Seriously, I've been waiting for this Saturday to arrive since about 8pm last Sunday. As soon as I think, "I have to go to work tomorrow," my next thought is, "When is Saturday?" I know they say Do what you love and all that, but that doesn't always pay the rent, so I am stuck having a day job until I become a superstar blogger, not that that will ever happen.

But even though this week felt longer than most, and I was stressed and upset through most of it, I still stuck (mostly) to my plan for the week. I think the stress even helped me get more exercise in, because I used yoga as a way to calm myself down after work. I was a yoga rock star this week. I'm still terrible at it, but I tried and that's what counts, okay?

Here's this week in review:

Food
You know how sometimes your brain just isn't functioning correctly? Especially when you're having a crappy day/week? That happened to me this Wednesday, when I had two brain farts that ultimately lead to me having to make some adjustments to my nutrition. First, I failed to read the recipe I was making closely, and added 1.5 pounds of ground beef to my meal instead of just half a pound. Oops. So first I had to adjust all that extra ground beef into Spark People and see how badly I had messed up. Turns out it wasn't so bad, because it's an all-around healthy dish anyway, so I actually needed the additional calories.

Then I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer to thaw in the fridge for Friday's dinner. So as I drive home on Friday, I'm thinking of fried chicken, and then realizing there is no chicken, and then contemplating Skittles for dinner. I ultimately went with oatmeal, but it has really messed up my meals today, when I was supposed to eat the leftovers. And since basically all I had left in my fridge was bacon and hot dogs, I had a very fatty day today. Oops again. But learn from it and move on, I say. And yet I still haven't learned that I need to keep emergency dinner ideas around. Sigh.

Fitness
Did I mention I am a yoga rock star? Also a 5K Training rock star? Because I am. My 5K training this week was damn hard: 2 miles Sunday at 1 min jog, 4 min walk intervals; 1.5 miles Tuesday and Thursday at 1 min, 30 secs jog, 3 min 30 secs walk. Tuesday and Thursday were hard. I think a minute and thirty seconds is the longest I've ever run in my adult life, I kid you not. And I had to do it 4 times in less than 25 minutes? It was rough, but I did it, and I'm feeling super proud of myself for that. Of course, next week I'm up to 2 minutes jogging, so we'll see how that goes.

Now yoga. Yoga all-star right here, y'all. I get an A+ for this. I set a goal to do yoga 2 days this week, and I did it twice as many times. Thirty minutes on Monday, 20 minutes on Tuesday, 20 minutes on Wednesday, and 40 minutes today. That's 4 times!! For a total of 110 minutes, when my goal was only 40-70 minutes. Seriously, I win right now.

Weigh-In
After Ground Beef-Gate (which I supposed is still better than Red-Vine Gate...or is it?), I was again worried about my weight. I feel like even though I'm eating mostly healthy foods, and I'm staying within my calorie goal range on Spark People (and most of my other nutrients too), I'm still eating too much. And I think part of that is that I'm never hungry anymore. I used to always be hungry because I only ate once a day, and pigged out as much as I could at that one meal. I'm not used to always being full/satisfied, and I feel like I should be starving, because that's what weight loss was like in the past when I was trying to lose weight and still eat all junk. But for now, being full all the time is working, because I am down another pound to 231.9. I so badly want to see 229 next week, but I'm not going to push it. I just have to do the best I can, and let my body do the best it can.