Good Days

How do you make change happen? Change is hard. Change takes time. I think the longer it takes to make the change the better chance you have of that change sticking. Yesterday I had a good day. I ate healthy. I worked out. I didn't drink. I didn't feel sick. I took all my medications. It was a good day. Change is more days like that.

Deep Breaths

I guess I feel a little frustrated today. I didn't lose any weight this week. In fact I gained a half pound. I'm not going to cry over a half pound, but it sure would have been nice to lose some weight. So far I have lost 15 pounds and 1 pant size. I am very happy about this, but I have a goal and that is to lose 1 lb per week and over the past month or two my weight loss has been very scattered. I keep reminding myself that I don't have a normal body. I have PCOS and that means it is much harder for me to lose weight because I have a genuine endocrin disease. But, I can't blame everything on that. I also have to take personal responsibility for what I am not doing and what I could do. I could work out more. I could and should stop drinking. I could spread my meals out into more small meals through out the day. So I guess the question is -- how do I make myself do these things? If this were easy we would all be our ideal weight with no bad habits. Obviously this is not easy. Life can be so stressfull. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. All I can do is take a few deep breaths  and keep on trucking. No matter what the final result is, I am doing this for a full year. I have commited myself to making this a lifestyle change and not a diet.

Motivational Chart

I think an important part of staying motivated is to picture in your mind your goal. I made this chart for myself. Basically it coorelates between what weight I am and what size I wear.


231          size 18
215          16
199          14
183          12
167          10
151          8
140          6
130          4



My goal for this year is to lose 52 lbs that would put me at 179 lbs and right around a size 12. Right now I am at 216 lbs and a size 16. Hopefully I can look at each benchmark and use that to motivate myself to keep losing weight. I think this is a great tool for anyone trying to lose weight.

Healthy Snacks

Sometimes it is hard to make yourself eat through out the day. Every book or atricle or nutrionist I have spoken to says that it is best to eat 5-6 smalls meals through out the day. I am guilty of eating a small lunch and a huge dinner and no breakfast many a time. Sean is even worse about it than me. Sometimes he won't eat all day and just eat dinner. It is easy to tell yourself "ok I am going to eat more through out the day" but half of the time I end up stating at the reridgerator feeling like there is nothing to eat. So I did some online research and came up with a few good snack ideas.

peanut butter and celery

peaches and cottage cheese
apple sauce and toast
granola and yogurt
1 egg in toast
rice cake with peanut butter
handfull of nuts and low fat yogurt
trail mix
a small bowl of soup
a bowl of ceareal
hummas and pit chips
baby carrots and cucumber slices \
a fresh fruit smoothie


These are just a few ideas. So when I went to the grocery store today I made sure and load up on all of these things, and hopefully this week  I will snack smart.

A Lesson In Forgiveness

Sometimes saying you are sorry can be really scary. I have never been one for confrontation. In fact I usually avoid confrontation at all cost. I've always seen confrontation as a bad thing, but sometimes confrontation can be a good thing. It can feel really good to say to a person that you are sorry. To admit that you did something wrong, and that you hurt a person, takes a lot. For me it is the fear of the unknown. What will they say? What will I say? What if they say something hurtfull to me? What if they don't accept my apology? I wonder how many friends over my life I have walked away from because of my own cowardice. And lets be real -- that is really what it is -- cowardice. At the same time, it is also a great feeling to stand up for yourself when you feel that you have been wronged. You can't change what happened, but if feels good to free the air.

Well now that I got that off my chest.

Good news we have weight loss!!! I am down to 216. That is 15 lbs total. I have lost 5lbs since starting CalorieKing 2 weeks ago. I am so glad tracking my calories has started to work. Yay! Next week I hope to start exercising (I feel like I say that every week) but hopefully I can start working out and make it a habit.

Slow

Well I can say that my frequency of posts have definitaley slowed down. Hopefully that isn't refelcted in my weight loss. I have been diligently recording my calories every day in CalorieKing. Lately I have struggled with being hungry in the mornings and afternoons, and then I find myself trying to eat a days worth of food after work. Not good. I have to eat 1650 calories a day according my my weight and activity level. When I work out I have to eat even more. It is hard to eat when taking Metformin. Never thought I would be complaining about it being hard to eat. I think that what went wrong in September is that I didn't eat enough in July or August and my metabolism crashed. Then in September when I started feeling better and adjusting tot he medications I was eating more and not losing weight. Also one of the drugs I am on Spironolactone is a diuretic -- that is how is gets rid of the testostorone in my system. I missed about a weeks worth of that medication so very likely I gained water weight from that. So I have switched my weigh in's to Mondays and I am hoping I will have good news to report on Monday.

268 days to go // 97 down

It has been almost a week since I started the calorieking web site. So far I have learned a couple things. I often don't eat enough, I eat too many carbs and I still drink too much wine. Now good news. I went back up from 217 to 221 in September (how I still really don't know), but I have gotten back down to 218. so that is still 13 lbs lost in 97 days. I know that isn't an amazing amount of weight, but I keep telling myself if I keep trucking along it will add up in the end. If I stayed on the exact pace I have been on for the past 97 days after 1 year I will have lost 49 lbs. My ultimate goal for the year is 52. I am 25% to my goal.  I think keeping a food journal, like calorie king, is such an important thing to do. It keeps you accountable, and it prevents you from eating too much or too little. I am hoping that in the next couple of weeks I can have some happy results to post.

CalorieKing

Well sadly I must admit that September was not a good month. Seems I have managed to put back on 3 of the pounds that I lost. I honestly don't know how, but I am determined to find out. So what I have done is joined the web site CalorieKing.com. I had used it before, and I think it is a great web site. It has a database that allows you to track what you eat and it keeps records and charts etc. for you. Now in the past I had minimal success because I had not been able to lose weight. Now I know that was because I had an underlying untreated medical condition: PCOS. So now that I am being properly medicated and treated I am going to give it another go. Tracking your food is very important for many different reasons. It is not just important to make sure you don't eat too much, but also that you eat enough. If you don't eat enough your body can go into starvation mode and slow your metabolism to a crawl. You also want to make sure you are getting the righ spread of carbohydrates, protien and fat. My hope is that by tracking more closely my food and exercise, I can figure out how to get the weight loss train rolling again. You know that old saying "the only person in the way of your dreams is yourself" Well I believe that. I am not going to give up even if I have to try a million times or a million different things. If I have to start over each month each week each day - I will. I am not going to give up or give in. I am going to make this happen.