Down 14.2 pounds!

Okay, This week you are really going to laugh at me. My husband left to study for and take his prelim exams at U of I. I was having a pity party for myself. I wasn't eating right and didn't exercise. I was quite certain that this Wednesday, weigh in day, would be my Waterloo. In order to make a long story short, I'll just tell you that I lost another pound. I didn't do anything to deserve a loss this week. My husband had bought me two bottles of Missouri Winery wine. I had a glass of wine each night and really enjoyed myself. My sons had ball games and I had purchased frozen pizzas for them to eat because I get home from school at six p.m. They have to be on the field at 6:30. We were really pushed. I ate frozen pizza and made other poor choices. I am finished with summer school as of six p.m. today. I intend to get back to making the right choices so that this fall my success will continue.

No loss this week

Well...I don't have anything good to say for myself other than that I only gained 4/10 of a pound. I have to shop for groceries to keep stocked with healthy food. I ended up getting really busy with classes and did not buy. I ate things that were not healthy enough. My Nintendo Wii is broken and I really did enjoy working out with Wii fit. It has been carefully bundled and sent to Nintendo. They have agreed to fix it in ten days. Oh! the agony!

I'm grocery shopping tomorrow and I'm excited to start anew. I did lose inches, one inch to be exact. This week was not a total loss.

13.2 pounds, 11 inches, 3.1 body fat percentage points lost this week. Did I do something special? No. I was actually bad one day. I ate pizza. It makes me wish that I had been good all week long because I could have possibly done better. The reason for my recent binges is the final exam from my math class. I made the mistake of taking a 4 week math class during the summer to make my schedule livable for fall. I still don't know if I passed it. I had a B going into the final exam but the final exam was weighted heavily and I was unable to finish in the time allotted or to check my work. I've been kind of a wreck thinking about it all. I've started another class now that I expect to be a ton of work. The subject interests me. The home-school connection. I want to effectively communicate with parents.

I should probably clue you in that I've been eating less cheese and probably more fat. I'm going toward a more Atkins like model. So far, so good. I don't know why Atkins got such a bad name. With each study, he is vindicated. It is the only diet I know of that has changed the lives of people I know, long term. They never went back to their normal patterns, they are skinny, healthy and have great cholesterol numbers. Check it out.

First ten pounds

That's right. I've finally lost 10 lbs. It's taken six weeks to do it. I've lost 9 inches. My body fat percentage is down 4.1%. I'm eating when I'm hungry and I'm doing it all while going to college. College has been extremely stressful and I've gained twenty pounds since entering three years ago. I have ten more to go until I've undone my college damage. Then I can begin to attack my kid stress weight.

social duty

I want to share with you the largest major hurdle to this struggle for me, social duty. Social duty bound eating describes the situation where people present you food and not wanting to be rude, we accept and eat that food. I've been in this situation three times in two days and it's absolutely ruining my hopes for having another weight loss this week. I'll begin my story with what happened yesterday. I had spent the entire day in a panic, trying to prepare myself for an algebra midterm. I rushed from tutoring, home to meet my kids. My parents asked me to come eat with them and I accepted. Why did I do this? I had made a prior commitment to a friend, who had agreed to study with me during the evening. She made tacos for us. Well, I ate a salad with my parents. When the salad arrived, it had breaded chicken on it. That's a diet no-no. I ate it out of duty. When I got to my friend's house, I was not hungry. I had made the commitment to eat at her house and was not willing to tell her that I couldn't eat after she had gone to all of the trouble she had. I ate two dinners last night. Before that, I had been making great choices.

Thank goodness that was over. Today It happened again! My son is taking cooking as a project in 4h and has a real interest in it. He made a smoothie for himself and wanted someone else to have one. His older brother won't eat his food (or behave kindly toward him in anyway.) I volunteered to drink the smoothie to make sure that my son knew that I support him. It wouldn't have been a horrible cheat. It was composed of milk, apples and blueberries. I wish that I knew of a way to decline in a way that saves face. Ideas????

Diet With Me

I've been doing The South Beach Diet. You can call it a diet. I call it my lifestyle. I've really only just started. I've been dieting for three weeks. Since, I'm 41 and have two kids who have birthdays and things, I do have days that I eat sugar. I've had two in three weeks. I push my weigh in and measurement day to Tuesdays because it gives me a few days to recover from what I consider to be those expected situations that arise. I have lost fairly steadily and I use the Wii Fit to exercise.

Now for the surprising and shocking numbers. I Started this diet, three weeks ago. I weighed a shocking 190 lbs. My goal is to weigh 125 lbs. (My wedding weight.) It's a healthy goal weight and not too skinny to be out of the question. I've lost 7.19 lbs so far. My body fat scale says that I've lost 3.1% body fat. I've lost 4.5 inches so far. My inches lost is kind of muddied because my kids got Guitar Hero Metallica last week and I haven't been able to log any wii fit time. I'm getting in there again today. I logged 50 minutes on wii fit. 30 minutes of aerobics, 10 minutes of yoga and 10 minutes of strength training.

How did this happen to me?

The answer to that question is sort of simple. I am really short (five feet two inches tall) and I'm one of the unfortunate people who have battled their weight for a lifetime. My mom swears that I was not chunky as a kid but she's remembering it differently than it was. I was heavy in fourth grade, slimmed down from fifth through grade eight and began my battle with weight from there for the rest of my life.

In high school, I was ahead of the game most of the time but I made very unhealthy choices that have cost me greatly as an adult. I used to starve myself for extended periods of time to lose weight. I used to go many whole days without eating. Quite a few people called me spacy or dizz. These names were fitting at the time because I was likely in some blood sugar crisis. I also battled acne and spent all of my teen years taking oral antibiotics. I believe based upon reading Dr. Atkin's book that I probably became insulin resistant as a result of this combination of things.

More later.