Sweat & Sparkle

Every Day I’m Strugglin’…(Did You Sing That?)

This week has been a struggle! All I want to do is eat, eat, eat. Preferably high calorie, high fat, high sugar food, in the form of sweets and junk, everything that screams “diet fail”, washed down with buckets of soda.

I think the weekend threw me off. We had a long, exhausting day on Saturday, attending of the kids’ events, and got up crazy early to be there since a 4 hour drive was involved. Sunday I felt drained, and I didn’t work out. It’s like the weekend carried over into the week, and I don’t want to do much else besides pig out and sleep.

I almost caved on Tuesday. I asked my fiance if he wanted to go out to dinner. He was hesitant to commit, saying, “It’s up to you.” He knows eating out is a danger zone for me. We went out, and I was surprised when I couldn’t finish my meal. It’s a meal I’ve ordered before and have always been able to finish every bite, lick my plate clean, but this time, I took about half of it home for lunch the next day. So I could have done quite a bit of damage, but my body must be getting used to eating more normally and put the brakes on for me.

Almost forgot to report in on my weigh in. I weighed in on Saturday and lost one pound. A loss is good, of course, but I really expected more. When I am working out each day, logging everything I eat and drink, it just feels like I should get more in return for my efforts. I’m sure that is contributing to my “whatever” mood this week too.

My plan tonight is to do a workout DVD I haven’t done in a while. It’s a pretty intense Get Ripped workout, alternating weights with step routines. I’m sure I’ll have to modify some moves, but I feel the need to work up a good sweat and get back on track.

Over 200 Pounds for a Year

Playing around in MyFitnessPal today, I ran a report for my weight over the past year. I wasn’t surprised by the roller coaster, up and down, spikes and dips, mountain ridge profile of my weight graph. I already knew I’ve yo-yo’d like crazy.

What did stop me in my tracks, though, was realizing I haven’t weighed below 200 pounds for over a year.

Wow. I am only 5’3″, so weighing over 200 pounds is very noticeable on me, to say the least. And I have let that go for over a year? That was sobering. And mortifying. And sad.

I have had steady weight losses for the past month, at least. That’s a start. I need to focus on that. It was discouraging and depressing to see my weight chart today, and now I wish I hadn’t run it.

If I work out today and tomorrow, I will complete my goal of working out every day in March. A friend suggested taking a picture of my calendar covered in stars (I put a star on the calendar for each day that I work out), so I need to remember to take that picture!

Viking Challenge: DONE!

This past weekend, I weighed in for a 2.2 pound loss, AND I finally finished the Viking Challenge! Whew! Sixty-five point three miles DONE! I am so excited about that. I started the challenge back in October, slacked off, and had pretty much given up on ever finishing it. I am glad I decided to not give up and to take another shot at it.

I got an email today that my Viking Challenge reward t-shirt shipped. I can’t wait to get it!

Ever since starting over (again), I have now lost just over 10 pounds. I have a lot more to go, but I’m excited to hit the 10-pound mark. My fiance also had another loss this past week, and he was really happy about it. He was wearing a shirt that didn’t use to fit, and he was bragging about it to the kids, which was cute.

We had debated not giving the kids many details about our upcoming wedding, knowing everything will be repeated to Psycho, who will use every morsel as ammunition to try her damnedest to wreck our day in some way. In the end, we decided to share our excitement with them and talk with them about some of our plans. If Psycho is so jealous and shallow that she feels the need to be a petty, slithering snake, then so be it. Our lives will never revolve around her the way hers revolves around ours.

I may need to weigh in a day early this week, depending on our plans for this weekend. That means I need to stick to my meal plan like glue and up intensity of my workouts this week. I want to lose another two pounds this week!

Changing My Habits

Last night I got home from work with a to-do list as long as my arm. Our computer decided to be tricky (a/k/a, a little jerk), so I had to waste time messing with that, because it refused to play a workout DVD for me. By the time I got that rolling again, quite a bit of time had been chewed up, but I still finished my workout. I need to hit the ground running after work today, though, to make up for what didn’t get done yesterday.

One thing that didn’t get done last night was packing my lunch for today. That’s an all-expense paid trip to the drive-through, right? Normally it would be. Normally, come lunch time, if I hadn’t packed my lunch, I’d shrug my shoulders and figure, what choice do I have but grab a burger, fries, and huge soda?

Ugh. It’s embarrassing to admit that’s how my mind works. I looked up nutrition facts online and instantly ruled out the burger/fries/soda thing. Wow, that’s enough calories for the entire day! How many times have I consumed more than a full day’s worth of calories at one meal without thinking anything of it? Then tacked on dessert or sweet snacks later?

I ended up going through drive-through, yes, but I got a grilled chicken sandwich and a small chili and an unsweet tea at Wendy’s. (That was still almost $10. Is it just me, or is that a lot for a fast food joint?)

That meal may as well have been a glorious prime rib plate and expensive wine, I was so proud of myself while I ate it! It was amazing I could finish it with all that back-patting, ha ha. But it’s such a huge shift in habit for me, such a great improvement, that I can still barely believe I didn’t get fries or a soda.

Speaking of soda, I haven’t had any at all today! If you don’t know me, you may not know how significant that statement is. Let’s just say it’s not unusual for me to start the day with a soda with my breakfast, or to go all day drinking nothing but Coke. I caught myself slipping back into drinking a lot of soda earlier this week, and I wanted a few days of no soda at all to sort of detox and get that craving out of my taste buds. In fact, there’s a glass of water sitting on my desk as I type this. My body must be all kinds of confused right now, but it’s all good!

Proud

I thought last week was challenging! This week has been like pulling teeth, and I’m only halfway through. All I want is junk food and soda, and the last thing I want to do is exercise.

I weighed in Saturday morning to a loss of 2.8 pounds. I’m proud of that, because not so long ago, the board dinner, taking the kids back to Hickville, and other disruptions of my routine would have been a one-way ticket to disaster: overeating, skipping workouts, falling off the wagon and rolling helplessly into a gutter. But not this time. I planned ahead, and I stuck to it.

So far I have worked out every day in March, and I am determined to reach my goal of filling my calendar with stars. (I put a star on our calendar for each day that I work out). Yesterday was another challenge. I had a hair appointment after work, so I planned to exercise in the morning. Problem? Well, quite frankly, that whole “morning” thing. I am already getting up early for work, and that’s painful enough. An hour earlier for a workout seems inhumane. So the morning workout didn’t happen.

You know that feeling right after you leave the salon, when your hair is shiny, smells good from their fancy shampoo and conditioner, blown dry just right, and you don’t want to mess it up? That was me, flipping my hair as I left the salon, feeling good, but then remembering I hadn’t worked out yet that day. Dang it.

I got home, showed my fiance my hair, he gave me a thumbs up, and I took that fancy new hair and put it in a ponytail, changed clothes, and worked out! I hated to do it, but I hated wrecking my workout streak even more. Add one more star to the calendar!

I’m also still plugging away at my Viking Challenge. Fifty miles down, 15.3 to go!