TGIM!

Monday again!

This morning I got out of bed, spent a few minutes on my computer, waking up and becoming human, then we all got dressed and went to the gym.  My favorite machine was takenm which was kind of a bummer.  It’s one of the gym’s older ellipticals, and I like it much better than the new ones they got in about 6 months ago.  The new ones have built in fans and their own TV’s and everything, but their stride is kinda mushy and I have trouble making them go as fast as I want to.  They also don’t have an interval program.  I just like the old ones better.

In my gym, there are 2 old machines in the first row of ellipticals and the rest are in the very back row – far away from their wifi router.  If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time at all, you know I like to watch netflix while I work out…and the wifi signal isn’t great in the back of the room.  It’s about as far away from the front desk where the router is as you can get, and there are some walls in the way.  The old machine in the first row is optimal for my workouts.  Both of them were taken.  I had to mush along on the new ones, but I didn’t like it so I wasn’t inspired to work hard at all.  It was just kinda…blah.  I’m planning on going back tonight though, so hopefully I can make up for it.

I’m feeling snacky today, trying to keep the snack monster at arms length.  Remember the snack monster?

I feel like he’s after me today.  Nom nom nom!  Trying to figure out what to have for dinner.  I feel actual, physical hunger today so I figure it better be something with a lot of nutrition in it to keep me going with my two aday workout I have planned for tonight!

It’s monday again?

This week has flown by!

I have been to the gym every single day this week, and it feels really good.  Instead of being tired in the evening after a long day, I actually feel like going again!  I know, it’s nuts!

Sadly, the summer program my older two kids have been attending is over, so now if I want to go right away in the morning, I have to pay for extra child care.  Today is Kid#1’s birthday, and he is turning 8, so I am off the hook for paying for childcare for him.  8 year olds are allowed to play in the game room and stuff without an adult.  If that wasn’t the case, I would have to stop going in the mornings because I can’t afford to pay for childcare for 3 kids every single day…that would be more than my membership costs.  2 I can deal with.

My eating has been under control.  There have been higher calorie days, but not outright, full on, out of control days where I just said “screw it” and did what I wanted.

Today is one of those days.  As I said, it’s my son’s birthday.  This means it’s a different day foodwise.  For breakfast, I made biscuits and gravy.  I only had about half of what I would have eaten before.  It is tradition that the birthday person gets to pick a meal on their birthday.  Often this translates to going out to eat…unless it’s hubster’s birthday.  He prefers to eat in and save money ;).  Kid#1 wanted to go to the chinese buffet for lunch.  Knowing that hamburgers are on the menu for dinner (homemade ones, that is, including homemade buns), I didn’t really want to, but I settled for eating only a small amount of my favorite things and keeping the rice to a minimum.  I spent all the time I wasn’t eating after I finished my smallish portion guiding my kids in how to behave at a restaurant.  I don’t know how many times I repeated “Sit on your bottom facing the table with your legs hanging down and USE YOUR NAPKIN.”  The 4 year old was the least wiggly.

As I made the buns for tonight’s hamburgers, I made one less than we have burgers.  My plan is to eat mine without the bun.  I am not into any extreme diets or anything, but when I need to cut corners, the carbs are the first to go.  It’s more important for my body to get protein, I think, so i’m eating the burger, not the bun.

As for the cake….I’ll have a sliver of cake, no ice cream.  I’m not even sure if we’ll have ice cream because all the kids had some at lunch, and we don’t have any in the house so I would have to have Hubster pick it up on the way home from work…maybe we’ll just skip it. 

And that’s it.  Yes, it’s a higher than average calorie day for me, but not out of control.  I have had several <1200 calorie days this week, so there is room in my budget for a couple of bites of cake on my son’s birthday.  Don’t worry, no leftover cake for me.  It’s not even tasty on the second day anyway.

So…why all the gym time lately?  Because I’m going this!

http://warriordash.com/

I’m not going to win, but I would like to not be too embarrassed 😉

 

A better job

Hubster was summoned out of town last night for work.  As per our deal, this meant that I was allowed to duck out of cooking.  Usually we order pizza.  It is the only time we ever do that.  Hubster HATES eating out, so when he is here, we rarely order pizza.  It happens maybe every 4 months or so.  Seriously.  So we usually do it when he’s gone.

Last night I thought very carefully about what to do.  Remember what happened last time I ordered pizza?  I do too.  I wondered if I should.  I knew it would be okay to order pizza as long as I could refrain from eating so much I get sick.  Could I beat it this time?  Would it beat me, then I would have to post about it and you people would be able to say “WE TOLD YOU SO!”

The first step I took toward not going crazy with the pizza was I only ordered one thing.  Normally when get pizza we do only get one pizza.  One pizza feeds all 5 of us without leaving any leftovers, so it’s just perfect.  At this particular place, though, they have this fantastic deal where if you order pizza and breadsticks, it is much cheaper per bite of food – even though you have twice as many bites.  These breadsticks are not just breadsticks.  Here is a picture:

You get twice as many as that.  I won’t even go into how fabulous they are.  Everyone here likes them better than the actual pizza.  One time I ordered just those and no pizza.  Hubster was mad!  He said it was a waste of money, I should have spent a couple more dollars and gotten a whole pizza too, so we would have leftovers.  I saw the flawed logic, but I didn’t argue, and the next time I did what he said.  And you all read about what happened next.  After that debacle, I told Hubs that I would never again order both just because it’s cheaper.  He does not agree with me, so I am forced to decide between making him happy and doing what’s best for me.

Last night I ordered just the breadsticks.

You will also remember that another aspect of the problem last time was that I ate too many breadsticks at dinner, ate a couple more after the kids went to bed, and then ate some MORE the next day for breakfast.  I pledged not to do this.  I would eat some for dinner, and no more after that.  0% of the leftovers would go into my belly.

So last night at dinner, I probably ate about 1 more stick than I should have.  Still, I didn’t eat any more after that, so that’s not too bad.  I drank 64 oz of water to go with it to help wash away the sodium onslaught.  This morning when I was contemplating breakfast options…I did not reach for the leftovers.  I actually had leftovers from yesterday’s breakfast instead.

Yesterday Hubs and I made this breakfast of eggs, peppers, onions, sausage, and chopped potatoes.  You know, kind of a breakfast skillet thing.  There were about 2 servings left and I dumped it all on my plate and warmed it up.  I ate until I started to feel full and pushed my plate away from me…and was very pleased to see there was still 1 serving left.  I didn’t overeat just because it was there.  I know you’re thinking “but why even put 2 servings on your plate?  Why tempt yourself so?”  The reason I did that was because I knew it wasn’t going to get eaten after today so whatever I didn’t eat was going in the trash.  I put it all on my plate so I would pick out the parts I wanted, mostly the eggs and peppers and some of the sausage, while leaving behind the potatoes…so having it all on my plate made it so I could exchange the potatoes for other things in the dish if that makes sense.  I didn’t eat ALL of those things either.  There is still plenty of sausage and eggs left on the plate with pretty much all the potatoes.  The only thing I ate pretty much all of was the peppers.

Last time I ordered pizza, after breakfast the next day I felt bloated and like my belly was full of concrete.  Today I feel fine.  What a difference!

The one where I struggle

Wow.

First I want to say that I am owning my responsibility in all of this.  I’m no complaining about it, or saying that this happened “to” me.  I realize that I am the one that did it.  It was my choice.  So this isn’t a “woe is me” type post.  I do write those sometimes, but they’re usually about situations in my life that I have a little less control over.  I am merely writing about this situation here to record it for posterity, and to keep my blog honest.  When I started this blog, I set out to document my journey, and leaving out the bad parts wouldn’t be fair.  Besides, when I am at my goal weight, reading back over my posts of everything it took to get me there, I want to read about the bad times as well as the good. 

I committed the biggest….I don’t even know what to call it… screw-up?  That’s not the phrase I want to use, but this is a family blog here…so I try to keep it nice.  Anyway, it was a disaster.

Hubster was out of town.  This is stressful for me, and I am a stress eater.  I was on plan the entire time he was gone except for one evening – and that was enough.  It is stressful to me when I have to run my entire household single-handed.   Hubster and I usually use a divide and conquer strategy when dealing with the kids, so when I am alone, things are very different.  I will admit that I have it easy most of the time.  Really easy.  Hubs is very involved with just about every aspect of our family life.  He does at least  half, which is a lot considering he is here half as much as I am.  As I type this, he is doing the dishes (while I play on my computer).

Anyway, he was gone and I was on plan the whole time until wednesday night.  It’s traditional for us to order pizza one night when he goes out of town.  It gives me a break from cooking, and I usually do okay with it.

Not this time.

To make a long story short, I ate more pizza than I should have.  It was more than I have eaten in months.  My meals have gotten fairly small over the last 3 months.  This meal was not as small.  My stomach felt awful.  I was stuffed, and I have not felt that feeling in a long time.  I’m sure it takes less to make me feel that way now (which is good!) but still.  It was really uncomfortable.

To make matters worse, this pizza was somehow particularly high in sodium.  Everyone was really thirsty after eating it, including me.  That usually doesn’t happen to me.  I’ve heard of people getting thirsty after eating a lot of sodium, but it’s never happened to me.  Well this time it did.  I was CRAZY thirsty.

Can it get worse?  Yes, it can.  I had more pizza for breakfast the next day (yesterday).   I didn’t eat too much, I just one piece, but that was enough.  My stomach complained.  My insides felt like they were full of sludge.  My intestines were in a state of riot.  My system was in distress.

To give my poor stomach a rest, I did not eat again until dinner, not even a snack.  At dinner, I had a small bowl of chili.  I figured the fiber would do me some good and the sodium wasn’t too awful because it’s homemade so I know exactly what went into it.

Part 2 of my plan to exorcise the pizza demon was to drink water like there was no tomorrow.  I set a timer for 10 minutes and every 10 minutes, I drank 16 oz of water.   My whole afternoon went like this:

Drink water, fill brita pitcher, do laundry (or some other cleaning task), drink water, fill pitcher, cleaning task, drink water……and on and on.  I don’t know how much I drank.  I just kept going.  I normally try to drink a lot of water, 100 oz plus, but this was more than that, I’m sure.

Later, when I ran up the stairs for something, I felt something strange.  My legs were swollen with fluid.  I don’t know if you’re experienced that…but when I was pregnant it happened to me a lot.  My legs feel weird when they have a lot of edema going on…almost like the skin on them is tight or something.  I could feel it as I went up the stairs. 

I checked the scale.  Amazing.  I was 10ish lbs heavier than I had been the day before.  And I could tell it was all in my legs.

I kept drinking, but I slowed down a little.

Today I stepped on the scale again.  I am nearly down to my wednesday weigh in weight.  So, I’m thankful for that.

You don’t need to tell me not to panic.  I’m not.  I will be fine.  As far as calories go, I knew I was having pizza on wednesday, so I did leave some room in my weekly calories for it and yesterday I didn’t eat much at all.  Today is going to be just like any other day, on plan and fine.  It’s going to be fine, I just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t put it out there.

So there it is.

Going to take the dog for a walk now!

Weigh in Wednesday

Wow.  I am humbled by all the folks who came out of the woodwork and commented on yesterday’s post.  Thank you all so much. 

Just to be clear.  I don’t think this girl is a Mean Girl.  You know the reference I was making, right?  The movie about horrible teenage girls?  At least that is what I assume it was about from the title, I never saw it.  I think she is more a Mean Girl in the making.  I see the potential for her to be a real problem when she gets to be about 13 or so.  We all knew girls like that growing up…the ones who were merciless.  If you weren’t in their little circle of friends, your best bet was to just stay out of the way.  Even if you were in their circle…that didn’t mean you were 100% safe.  Anyway, I can see her growing up to be a real…well…bitch. 

I may be wrong.  She may be the sweetest girl ever.  I don’t know if she actually teased my kid or if she just said the thing that popped into her head, like one commenter said.  I know that little kids sometimes do that, and that’s why I said in my post that it might have been something she said almost in passing, but my kid definitely remembers it.  It’s possible it stuck in her mind because it shocked her.  She may have only thought of me as her mother, and not really noticed so much that I am fat…who knows.  I won’t pretend to understand 5 year olds.  The whole situation is just sad and I will leave it there. 

Okay, so on to bigger and better things.  My weigh in this morning was good.  I have no idea why, I don’t feel like I deserved it…but whatever.  I’ll take it.  Oh, the number.  It makes me shudder, really.  WOW, great job, Twiggy…you’ve lose 34 lbs!  286 is your magic number today.  Wow…286?  Gag me.  In what universe is 286 something to be happy about?  I guess the 320 universe I came from.  34 lbs in and I am still well above where many of you started.  Humbug.

I just got a reminder that I have a lunch meeting today at Cheesecake He@ven.  Lovely.  I’m going to go, this is a once a month meeting that I hate to miss, I just wish they were not eating at a food place.  One that specializes in cheesecake, no less.  Today I am feeling strong and able to stay focused, though.  I will find something on the menu that I can eat.  I have never been there, but I’m checking out the menu now so I can decide what to get ahead of time, while I have my head on straight.  While I have been having snack attacks lately, today I feel really impartial about food…so it’s a shame today had to be the day we have to go to that place.  Next time they ask if we should go out to lunch, I am going to vote no.  I didn’t vote this time at all…but I don’t need this.

Okay, last item of bizniz and I will let you all go.  Progress pics.  I had Hubster take them last night so after I am done writing this post I’ll go to work on that.  I don’t know how many times I will be interrupted by kid#3 while I put them up, so if they’re not up when you check, check again.  They will be up today, I promise.

Today is better

I have spent the morning dealing with the things that are stressing me out…mainly, delegating responsibilities to other people, and realizing that I need to calm down about certain things.  Without getting into a ton of detail, I am the leader of my daughter’s girl scout troop, and my son’s cub scout den.  I love them both, but right now they are both a nightmare with scheduling, and we have some HUGE deadlines coming up.  That’s what is getting to me.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I have parents going after me from both groups…I can’t believe how people like to COMPLAIN about scout leaders.  These people are volunteers, taking time out of their schedules so YOUR kid can have some fun.  Instead of bitching, how about offering to help?  No, you’d rather just complain, huh?  I guess I just take it to heart a little bit too much.  And I get stressed by deadlines.

I decided to step on the scale today.  I wasn’t going to after my case of the munchies yesterday.  I don’t think I was clear…the few chips that I mentioned turned into a LOT of chips.  I logged it all, and while I was over my planned calories for the day, I was not even over the maintenance calories for my goal weight, so it wasn’t as bad as I thought…but I still don’t like when I indulge like that.  Anyway, like I said I stepped on the scale and was surprised to find myself at a loss even though I have not been drinking much water, and have had some snacking problems the last few days.  It really raised my morale a lot to see that.

Tonight is going to be a bummer.  I have date night with my 7 year old son, and usually this wouldn’t be a problem…but after my little chip mess yesterday, chinese on Wednesday, and pizza on tuesday…I don’t feel like I have the wiggle room I would normally have for something like this.  He wants to go to @pplebees.  I’m going to have to look at their menu and see if there is even anything I can eat on there.  I wish I had wiggle room today…but I’ve used it all up for this week.

Whoops

The title of the post before the last one (the one about the food tv) brought me some….unsavory visitors.  Oopsie!  Needless to say, I fixed the problem and hopefully I don’t get any more spam.  This is why new commenters have to be approved…I saved you all from some very…well…interesting material. 

Yesterday was a really hard day.  I don’t know what it was.  Tom?  Hormones?  Something.  I was extra, extra munchy.  It started with a bowl of cereal.  I typically don’t even buy cereal.  It’s not good nutrition and I don’t like the way I feel after eating it, so I don’t give it to my kids to eat.  I normally make them a good breakfast that I hope will keep them full, sharp, and focused through their morning at school.  As a treat, I had bought some cereal and I gave it to them for breakfast yesterday.  It was a kind that I really like too though and I figured that since I hadn’t had any in….gosh….6 months or so….that I could have some, too.

So I had some, but as usual, it left me hungry a little while later.  So I made the worst mistake I could have made and stopped at the drive thru for my favorite breakfast treat which I also have not had in 6 weeks or so.  I knew it wasn’t worth it, I knew it would be a mistake….but I figured it would be okay.

Normally after eating that, I’m not hungry at lunch time and calorie wise, it all evens out.  Normally my calories for the day are between 500 and 600 after I am done with lunch, so it works out the same (even though I know it’s not the same, the drive thru food is bad bad bad and my usual break fast and lunch are faaaar more healthy).  So as usual, I wasn’t hungry at lunch time so I skipped lunch. 

But then in the afternoon, I had the horrible munchies.  You know the kind, where you find yourself constantly looking into the fridge or the pantry and then walking away empty handed, but coming back every few minutes?  I don’t know what my problem was, but I just wanted to EAT all day long!

And that is pretty much what I ended up doing.  Hubs offered me half of his bagel and I took it.  Not satisfied, I ate a dried fruit bar (figuring at least I would be getting some fruit in).  A little while later, it was string cheese.  A while after that, I shared a pouch of those itty bitty muffins with Kid3.  A while later I NEEDED another piece of string cheese.  Then when my kids came home from school around 4, I had a taste of their snack.

Then I started to panic.  I was freaking out.  I had a conversation with a friend online about it and I was in full panic mode.  I admitted to her that I was *this* close to giving in to “I’ve blown it” syndrome and ordering a pizza and chowing down.  I brought up my outlook calendar and was horrified to see how close my final weigh in for my contest is.  I felt like throwing up.  I was scared to put all this into my daily plate log, but I did, and found that the damage was not as bad as I thought.  Aside from being more carbs than I normally eat, and the extremely poor use of calories, it wasn’t THAT bad.  I was over the number of calories I normally eat by a teeny bit, but it wasn’t the extreme overage that I had pictured in my head.

Dinner was squash soup, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I ate some of it because it is pretty low calorie and packed with veggies.  I felt very yucky afterward, though.  My stomach is just not used to having something in it all day.  I realize a lot of people eat this way and like it…small amounts frequently…but my tummy likes to have 3 meals.  Grazing is not for me.

After things settled down, I went to the gym and did some jogging.  I did the same thing I did the other night, I walked .25 miles, then jogged .75, then walked again.  I intended to jog the last .25 to make it a full mile, but for some reason my chest was all tight and I couldn’t breathe.  I don’t know what is up with that, I’ve never had asthma but that’s what it was like.  I started to jog the last .25 but between that and the little tinge of pain I felt in my knee, I let it go.  I need to respect my knees, after all I am still very fat.  If I want them to be good to me and allow me to jog, I need to be good to them and listen when they say it’s time to quit.  I’m not nearly as sore as I was after my first run, so that is a huge positive!  I walked the rest of the time I was there, and I’m not beating myself up over it.

So no jogging today.  As soon as I am done here, I’m going to load up a workout video from netflix.  If you have netflix, you should try it.  I stream them to my tv and work out 🙂  Then I think I’ll do a little yoga.

Even after yesterday’s freakout, the scale was gentle to me today.  According to it, I am officially down 30 lbs today.  I put my workout clothes on and shoes so I could simulate a weigh in at the Y, and it added 2 lbs.  If that number were my official Y weigh in number, I would have lost 15 lbs for the contest, or about 5%.  Their scale has weighed me lighter than mine in the past though, so I’m thinking that according to their scale it will be more like 6-7%…hopefully they use the same, super nice scale.  That’s a lot of weight to lose over the holidays!  Even if I don’t win, I think that is awesome.

Why I like food shows

There is this show on the travel channel called M@n vs Food.  Have you seen it?  It’s a show where a guy goes around to eating establishments around the country to check out their speacialties.  Sometimes, it’s things I would like to eat, and sometimes not (like when it’s seafood, I hate seafood). 

Anyway, they show all this food at all these different places, and then at the end of every episode, he does a challenge of some sort.  The places he’s visiting have these in-house challenges and usually there is a wall of fame, where there are pictures of the few people who have completed the challenge…and a wall of shame, with lots of pictures of people who couldn’t do it.  One day he had to eat several gallons of ice cream.  Once it was 4 hamburgers that were 1 pound each.  Sandwiches a foot tall with a pound of fries on the side…crazy stuff.

This show, and others like it, really help me to objectify food.  When I watch this, it helps me see food as something that I can control.  It’s just a thing.  It doesn’t have magic healing powers to calm my frustrations or ease my stress.  I won’t have a cleaner house by going down to the diner and eating a huge plate of pulled pork.  I don’t know how it works…but it helps me see food as just a “thing” that interests me less and less.  I hope I am explaining that right.

That particular show has an added bonus for me.  You’ve all heard the stories of parents who catch their kids smoking a cigarette, so they make them smoke until they get sick…or catch them drinking and make them drink til they puke, right?  This show is a little bit like that for me.  Watching this man overeat in such an exaggerated fashion makes me want to overeat less and less, I swear.  It makes me see that, although I might like a certain food, eating more of it just to eat it doesn’t make sense.  If this guy eating a platter the size of a table of oysters isn’t advisable, how is that any different from me eating 4 pieces of pizza when 1 would have been fine? 

This all might sound backwards…but I feel like watching food shows helps me feel more confident about MY power over food instead of its power over me, especially when the food looks really good.  I can tell myself “That looks like something I would like, but I don’t need to eat it.”

Weird, I know.

Do you watch food shows?  What effect do they have on you?

Tempation strikes (and Twiggy sways in the wind)

I think I am PMSing…I usually have crazy cravings the week or so before she hits, and although I expected her last week, things don’t always add up thanks to what I suspect might be PCOS.  I don’t have a regular cycle by any means, so it’s not a shock at all.

Last night was rough for me.  I was faced with the prospect of going out in the cold, dark night to go grocery shopping.  We were down to soup in the pantry.  No milk, no eggs, no bread, not much of anything.  I didn’t feel like going.

Then a little light went on above my head.  I was stressed.  I was tired.  I didn’t want to leave the house.  Why not make it a little more bearable with a little trip to my favorite drive thru? 

I quickly dismissed the idea as quite crazy.  No.  I can’t.  I haven’t done that in months and I’m not about to start now.  No.  Then the little voice came back…

“Come on.  Just this once.  It’ll be okay.”

“No.”

But even as I was dismissing the idea, I started to taste the food.  I daydreamed (while I was supposed to be writing my list) about what I would order.  I could picture myself sitting in the dark car, eating it. 

“See?” purred the voice.  “It’ll make you feel better.”

My thoughts strayed.  I have had several really good days in a row, yet my weight has stayed stuck at +1 or so from last week.  If I’m going to be up anyway….and I thought about the menu…which items I would most like…

Then I shook off the thought again…but my resolve was weakening.  It was getting harder and harder to tell myself I wouldn’t do it.

“No.  I’ll hate myself tomorrow if I do.”

The voice crooned “But you’ll love yourself tonight if you do.”

And that’s when I managed to pull the sword out of the hat.  Right as hope was quickly vanishing and I was practically fishing around in my pocket to see if I had the extra cash to do it.  The death of this little battle came unexpectedly with that one line.  The part of me that wanted to indulge became the engineer of its own demise.

No….I won’t.  I won’t love myself tonight if I do.  I might like the taste of the food, but I’ll feel guilty as I sit there and it won’t change anything else.  I’ll still be going out in the cold for groceries, only I’ll have a bloated, over-full belly to lug around the store.  It won’t take away the stress of my day, and it won’t make me feel good at all.  It’s only food.  Just food.  And I’m not even hungry. 

I straightened up, finished my list, went to the store and bought lots of healthy food, and didn’t spare another thought for the drive thru.  Not one.  It almost had me…but then I remembered the truth.  It’s only food and it can’t make me feel better. 

I can tell you, that realization made me feel a lot better than a hamburger and fries has ever made me feel.

*I don’t really hear voices, okay?   Oh, and I wanted to use a picture of a real snake, but I thought maybe I might have readers who don’t like snakes so I tried to pick a really mean looking cartoon one. 

Yowza.

It is 1 pm and I have had about 100 oz of water already today and you know how I can tell I have a LOT of sodium floating around in my body?  I have not gone pee once.  Yikes.

I’m  working on digging out from under the Christmas induced mess  in my house.  I threw out several gingerbread men that we made (I took pictures of them, but then left my camera at my in-laws’) and what was left of a bag of cookies that my mother in law gave us to take home saturday.  Honestly, we’ve all eaten all the cookies we really need and I know we have more cookies coming.  Maybe I will put those in the freezer and put them in the kids’ lunches once school starts up again.  It feels kind of liberating, throwing cookies away…never tried it before ;).