Nerves!

Friday was awesome as far as working out. I was in the gym for 2.5 hours!
Saturday, all day I prepped for a sleepover for four very excitable and energetic 5 year old girls :-)
Saturday night I survived a sleepover for four very excitable and energetic 5 year old girls (who didn't go to sleep until 11:30 and woke by 7am!) :-)
Today, I rested.

However, none of the weekend is helping me towards my

FIRST WEIGH IN ON MONDAY! 

Oops. :( 

I'm quite nervous for tomorrow. I've been trying to get my water in - I didn't get my full 80 oz yesterday but I've gotten it every other day this week! I hit my 10,000 steps everyday except Saturday or Sunday. I did realize that I never set my stride length! So that is on my to-do list this week. 

In addition, I need to meal plan myself back to clean eating.   I realized that, even though I'm only 6-9 lbs heavier than I was in February, my clothes fit TERRIBLY now.  And it's because clean eating seriously reduces the bloat! Soooooo this week - running and clean eating are the first order of business! 

Here's hoping I at least MAINTAIN this week. This puts me at my highest level of uncomfortable - I am answering to a TEAM. If I don't lose, it could change my team's standings! Forget me, this is about them now. 

I'll check in tomorrow briefly. My plan is to wake up, weigh in, combat whatever happens with a good run around the lake! I will have to push a jogging stroller, so I'm not looking to break any speed records but just getting OUT will be awesome enough!

Is this moderation??

So the 4th of July is a big deal around here. It's "E's parade" - she even calls it "my parade."  We just so happen to live ON a parade route, so we roll out of bed, have friends come over for breakfast and sit on the lawn and watch.  As I mentioned last year, this parade is better than Halloween for my kids - the candy comes TO THEM.  Lots of candy!

I am a sucker for Tootsie rolls and banana Laffy Taffy.  So those were my big weakness yesterday. I signed up to follow a training plan through RunKeeper for a sub-55 min 10K and yesterday I was supposed to run "2 slow miles."  Well, that obviously wasn't happening as I had two HYPER kiddos and it was about 88 degrees by 1pm.   So around 1:30 I told the kids we were going for a walk.  We walked to a local park and I had a brief epiphany!  My kids are 2.5 and 5 now, hardly young enough for me to need to stand behind them and watch them play.  So while they played, I ran laps around the playground! It was only approximately .15 miles around the circle, I could see them every part of it. Also, I wasn't wearing running shoes or clothes - Keen sandals and cargo shorts. But I did it! And I went 2.48 miles, with the walking and running portions added in. The walk was about .5 miles there and .5 miles back, so I did a decent bit of a run.

photo of the day for my challenge - flex a muscle.

This morning, A woke up brutally early for a little boy who stayed up until 10 for fireworks. I was awake so I left the kiddos with my hubby (who rocks, by the way, if I haven't mentioned that lately) so that I could hit the gym for a few of my favorite classes. I always miss them because I work on Fridays now, but it was a lovely time.  I went to an 8:30 cardio drills class (I walked in with 800 steps and left with 7000!) where we do all kinds of plyo moves, run outside and use a big tall step!  Then I stayed for her full body toning class. I thought I would be done there because I felt something snap in my knee during a crunch with a yoga ball, but thankfully, the pain didn't persist. So I went to my circuit class for 45 minutes. 

But I hit 10,000 steps before 11am! 

I did well with lunch (a HUGE romaine salad with 4.5 oz of grilled pork tenderloin & 1oz of smoked white cheddar cheese) and dinner was fantastic (thanks to my awesome hubby - burgers (no bun) with curried cauliflower, grilled asparagus and corn on the cob!). 

My princess has her birthday party tomorrow night (our first sleepover!) and I made mini cupcakes tonight. I didn't' taste a cupcake, but I did taste the batter - delish. I had two Tootsie Rolls earlier and I'm having wine now. But I'm still within my calories for the day!

I did have another awesome moment of "right" choices yesterday for lunch. My family had Annie's shells'n'cheese and turkey hot dogs. Instead of indulging in that, I made myself a bowl of tuna, celery, onion and a TINY bit of mayo to bind it (I WISH I had an avocado, that would have been fabulous!)  I ate it mostly out of the bowl, but did have a few crackers with it. So yummy! I highly recommend it for lunch!

So in short, while I've been making some awesome choices, I also haven't been completely "clean."  I can feel it, though, in my gut mostly.  I have a weigh in on Monday and I'm just hoping to make a little progress by then so that I don't let my team down!

Any awesome lunches I MUST HAVE this week? 

I am working 4 days next week and at this point, I think I'm having the same salad I had today. Not a BAD thing, but also not much variety! 

Better than last year....

Today my little girl turned 5. FIVE, people. I have a FIVE year old!  It amazes me the road I've taken since she was born. 

• I am entirely unaware of what I weighed before I got pregnant. I was using fertility medications and had just plain old given up. 
• I was 210 lbs the night before she was born. 
• I lost weight, down to 160, and hit 160 the DAY I got my first positive pregnancy test with my son (my daughter was just shy of two years old)
• I went up to 210 lbs with that pregnancy -  And was STILL 199 when I came home from the hospital! 
• I weighed into my challenge this week at 159. 

Sometimes I just need to see those numbers are a reminder. So for the last year, I have bounced between around 150-162. I need to remember that even though I fluctuate, I haven't gone up, I haven't gone back to where I came from! My happy place seems to be around 152-154. I am hoping to get back there. We'll see if I can get lower if I start running faster and further!

I have a partner within the weight loss challenge that I am doing. It seems like the perfect match - her introduction was all about moderation.  PERFECT.  I (obviously) have a history with my "all or nothing" mentality! 

Today was one of the most hot/cold days I've had yet on my journey. If you recall, last year my daughter's birthday was an edible tragedy! Today, we started off with homemade poptarts (pie crust + cinnamon sugar or no sugar added preserves!).  

We headed out to Grant's Farm for the morning.  If you are unaware, Grant's Farm was the home of Ulysses S. Grant and (if I paid attention I would know how) but somehow it was acquired (married into the family maybe?) by the Anheuser Busch family.  They have spent 100 years accumulating animals on their 80 acre land and it is open to the public. It's a fun morning, the kids fed baby goats bottles of milk and threw corn to ducks. We saw an elephant show and our tram almost got charged by a bull.  The downside - all the food is crappy.  And they give you free beer "samples," which are truly cups of beer, probably 4-6 oz at a time.  So I had three of those over the course of our time there. I didn't want to eat the food, I couldn't bring myself to do it, so we shared a soft pretzel (2 for the 4 of us) and headed out of the park for lunch.

We went to one of our favorite local places, The Wolf Public House, for lunch. The food is amazing and the whole place is like Caribou Coffee and Panera had a baby.  Very rustic, very hip and awesome. This is from their website: . We support sustainable local family farmers raising animals kindly without the use of antibiotics or added hormones. We respect our environment and compost or recycle 95% of our waste.

So it makes me feel good about our choices to eat there.   Today I went out on a limb and tried a salmon BLT. It was ahhhhhmazing.  Absolutely amazing! And instead of potato chips, I got the veggie special of the day - a cold salad of zucchini, kalamata olives, feta in a vinaigrette. Delish! 

So, -2 for the beer, but +2 for my lunch choices, I think. Especially since I ordered an iced coffee with half and half instead of my usual Vietnamese coffee (coffee + sweetened condensed milk). 

We came home and I started making E's requested birthday dinner - Pizza. Now, I had the benefit of knowing what her birthday dessert was (which she didn't) so I wanted to balance my calories out. Instead of indulging in pizza (I make a whole wheat/corn flour pizza crust, so it's clean, but it's still carb-y and loaded with calories!) I made myself baby portobello mushroom caps with a tsp of pizza sauce, some mozzarella cheese and turkey pepperoni. BOY were they delicious! I tasted the pizza but I was quite happy with my dinner! +8 for me (the number of mushroom caps I ate! YUM!) 

What was dessert, you ask? 

Individual DQ cakes! 

I didn't finish mine. Which is another small victory. As recent as a month ago, you would have had to pry it from my clenched fist. Today, I ate half and was completely satisfied. So we put them back in the freezer to save as a treat for another day! 

All in all, even though I made some "bad" choices today, I feel like I did ok. I didn't get in a formal workout, but we did walk a lot at Grant's Farm and I did hit my 10,000 step goal, along with my 10 flights of stairs. 

So onto tomorrow. Just hoping to show SOME loss on the scale at my first weigh in on Monday, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess!

Challenge Day 1

So I'm not even officially sure all the things I need to do for this challenge, but boy am I ready! 

This morning my alarm went off at 4:30. I sat up, ready for a run, until - I realized it's DARK at 4:30am. And I 'm a wuss - no running in the dark for me! So I went back to sleep and didn't wake up until too late to run. 

BUT I did have a solution. I worked today (weird because I don't' work on Mondays!) but after work I headed straight to the gym and my favorite kickboxing class! Booya 700 calories! 

I drank my required water too, 5x15 oz glasses at work, a bottle at kickboxing and a glass of water with dinner! 

So far I'm kicking butt. Here's hoping I can get up and run tomorrow! Jen and I are eating at a restaurant called CHEESEOLOGY tomorrow, which is probably as fattening as it sounds :-) So hopefully I can get a good run in the morning to justify some of those yummy calories. 

My official first weigh in weight: 159.
Goals: Hoping to get back to comfy weight of 153 by mid-July and maybe even 150 by August 1. 

July Challenge

I started following a new page on Facebook and they have been talking about a July challenge. I figured, I'm in the market for something new so why not? 

My first weigh in is tomorrow morning and here's hoping I can uphold my part of the team!  The group seems like a great accountability tool and one of the requirements is drinking half of your body weight in water a day! (As in, if you weigh 200 lbs, you have to drink 100oz of water).  That's a huge challenge, but I'm ready for it!

Bring it, July!! 

Majority says...

Find something new. 

Thanks for all of the responses, support and advice after my last post. The resounding majority of you said it's time to find something new, it's obvious I'm not happy.

So now I just need to brainstorm what I can do that will fit into that 4:30am time slot and will make me happy.  I'm toying with the idea of running (although my neighborhood is NOT good for running - running the whole thing only gets me about a mile, a mile and a half TOPS, before I start doing circles.)  I also have a few games on the Wii that I could do - Zumba, Biggest Loser, Pilates. 

So this week I am going to get back to getting up early (although I am off the majority of the week because my baby girl turns FIVE on Wednesday!) and trying out different things. I definitely plan on hitting the gym a few times, hopefully for some of my very favorite classes like kickboxing and cardio circuit. 

I need to get my eating in line again.  I log everything in MFP  but most days I'm over the allotted calories. After this week, I am going to sit down and start meal planning again.  I stopped at the store and bought massive amounts of veggies this week. My goal is to stop keeping such strict track of everything and to try moderation. I'm NOT good at moderation, if you haven't noticed. I need goals, number like goals, or else I just lose track of what I am supposed to be doing.    I am going to continue to track on MFP, I will start working out, but I'm no longer going to keep track of the other things I was tracking (sleep, water, drinks, etc).  It was just too much to keep up with. It's one thing to be accountable to someone, it's another to be so bureaucratic about it. 

I did register for the Halloween 10K the other day. My awesome friend C is going to come in and run it with me! Our tentative plan is to dress up as Super Moms. Our costumes will rock. My goal is sub 60. But since I haven't run since the Run in Color run in Evansville - who knows if that's realistic. I had an opportunity to run this morning when the kids were playing at the playground and it was REALLY not appealing to do it! I guess we'll see this week. :-) 

I went with Jen to try on my bridesmaid dress. You know, the one we ordered in February, before I started working, when I was at the gym 4 days a week, 2 hours a day...  Needless to say, it fit a BIT differently than it would have.  I can zip it (thankfully) but I certainly can't breathe when it's zipped. And I don't like the way it bunches around my waist/hips. So that is my motivation for the next 63 days. I even told my boss I was going to have the photo printed and put it in her candy drawer! Gentle reminders! :-) 

This picture is from last spring, but same bikes!

We did go on a lovely family bike ride today.  My husband took my son in the trailer and I had my daughter on the trail-along bike. It's not a bad workout, especially when she's "helping" ;-)  We went about 3 miles then stopped at the park and let the kids play. Then we headed back the same way but passed the car for an additional 1.5 miles. All told, our ride was 9 miles in about 55 minutes. Not speedy but we were out.  Hubby did make the observation that the calorie burn compared between running and biking is NOT comparable at all - it was about 260 calories for a 55 min ride.  NOT super athletic but I'm glad we got to go out as a family!

Gosh she looks so little here!

Push Through or Find Something New?

Well there's a lot of orange on my chart this week. As in failure.  But there's enough green that I'm going to keep trying. 

I woke up Tuesday and did Insanity. Then my hubby and I went on a date (yay!) but were out until 12:30. So when 4:30 rolled around Wednesday morning, my alarm went off and I actually DID wake up, I thought to myself "This is insane. I have to work all day and will be toooo crabby without sleep!" and went back to bed. 

So then Thursday I took the kids to the children's museum for the day and was completely exhausted by the end! I can't believe how wiped out I get at things like that! 

Friday I woke up again at 4:30. I had to work Friday and we were leaving to go camping for the weekend right after work. So when I woke up I had the conscious thought "I will be a COMPLETE crab tonight at camping if I don't sleep in."   I know, I know, I suck.  So I went back to sleep.

Saturday we were camping and went on a nice hike. As you can see, I walked over 20,000 steps that day! I ate like crap because I was camping, duh. :-) 

Sunday we packed up camp and headed home. We had some nasty storms here so we took the kiddos to see Monsters University (CUTE CUTE movie!). 

Today we took the kids to the zoo. We got there around 10 and left at 5! SUPER long day but a wonderful awesome family day. I am thankful to be able to have days like this with my family. 

So obviously from this week, we have learned that I am still not able to "eat clean" when I'm out and about. It's a hard choice for me to make still! Which is funny, since we've been doing it for almost 6 months. But it's a work in progress! 

I am planning to get up tomorrow morning to work out. I have the same issue tomorrow that I had last Tuesday - I have tickets to see a show (Shrek with my daughter) and will be out until easily 11pm. But I'm going to go with it, eat smart tomorrow and drink lots of coffee to get me through it all!

Again, going to refocus this week. 

Aiming for 6 days working out, 2-3 days allowed drinking, good eating all of them and steps over 10,000. 

The thing that kills me, and maybe the point of this whole post, is that I woke up on my scheduled days last week, looked at my phone, went to the bathroom - and went back to bed. I want to get to a place where I am EXCITED to work out. Maybe I need to find a new workout?  

Maybe Insanity isn't for everyone. 

I am just having such a hard time getting excited about it! I get excited about kickboxing, I love my classes at the Y.... I just haven't gotten fully on board with Insanity yet.  Here's hoping I can start sticking to it. 

I refuse to weigh in again officially until next week. With all the salt, sugar and junk I consumed, it will just depress me further.   How often do you weigh yourself? I get stuck in a vicious cycle of weighing myself everyday, noting even the smallest fluctuation.... it's borderline obsessive, which I KNOW isn't good. Jen has reminded me for years not to weigh in that often, but I just can't stop doing it! 

I remember loving weigh ins. I would weigh in every day just to see the number change (go down!) when I was working out regularly. And sometimes it was ok with me if the scale went up just a bit, because I was lifting and had a pretty fabulous routine that I knew would "bulk" me up some. I miss that. I'm terrified to have my body fat percentage taken again because it cannot have done anything but skyrocket!

So I will probably weigh myself every day this week, but I won't do an "official" weight check until next Monday.  Hopefully we'll see a change. 

Have you ever tried a workout that just doesn't "work" for you?  How did you handle it - push through or find something new?