back to basics

Slowly, my bloat is disappearing. I have been drinking a crazy amount of water over the past week (partly because we got a new fridge at home with a filtered water / crushed ice dispenser - yum!). Usually, once TOM starts, my bloat slowly fades away and by the time it's done, I'm back to normal. This month though, I'm guessing because of the move and all, the water never left me. I'm forcing it out though, all of this water has me running to the loo, a lot. My hands already feel MUCH better and my ankles are starting to look normal-ish again too. Boy, moving is hard on a body.

Our routine at home is slowly resuming. We had a great barbecue yesterday and I ate well under my allotted calories. My plan for now is to eat my usual breakfast and lunch (the same things I usually have when I'm working -- they are very filling, well-balanced and low fat meals) and then I'm not going to worry too much about dinner. As long as we're eating at home, things cannot get too far out of control. Last night, for example, we had a HUGE meal and when I counted everything up, I was still okay. That's the nice thing about pigging out on grilled veggies, isn't it?

Exercise wise, I'm not doing any other intentional exercise than unpacking and moving boxes around. Trust me, that's a workout in itself. Last night, I finally pulled my summer clothes out, packed the sweaters away and created (in the process) a massive pile of ironing for myself. I must have made 6 or 7 trips up and down the stairs, going back and forth from the laundry room (I still can't believe that I have a proper laundry room!!!) to our bedroom, within about 30 minutes. It didn't totally kill me so I mustn't be as bad off as I thought before.

I stepped on the scales again this morning and sure enough, I saw a downward progression. I know it's just water weight but that's okay. The number I saw yesterday was ridiculously high (up 23 pounds in 3 weeks!!) and I'm sure that I'll be showing a more reasonable gain from our pre-move-stress-related-eat-fest by the weekend. I mean, I figured I'd gained about 5 to 7 pounds but never 23!! That number has to be whacked. At least now, it's showing as 18 pounds up. To show a five pound loss over night, you know I'm losing a lot of fluid right now.

The long and the short of it is that I'm feeling better (still not as rested as I'd like but you can't have everything all at once) today. By the weekend I should be feeling like my old self again and I'll be able to face my bike again. Of course, I'll have to find it amongst the boxes in the basement but I have a good idea of where it is. For the moment, it's all good folks!

didja miss me?

Yikes.

What a week. I guess it was actually about 10 days. We're all moved now and are starting to get settled. I have posted a bunch of photos of the new place on my flickr account if you would like to take a look.

This was the biggest move either of us had ever made and we're still feeling pretty beaten up at the moment. It was very physically demanding and emotionally draining. I had no idea how stressed out I had been over the past 6 weeks until Friday night. After dinner on Friday, my body felt like it was shutting down. I could hardly walk, I was doubled over with some weird cramps (TOM arrived in the middle of the move but there were distinctly not TOM cramps -- it was strange) and was barely coherent. We had to get up sort of early on Saturday because some young men we had hired to clear out our crawl space arrived at around 8 a.m. I let my hunny deal with that and I stayed in bed. My legs still felt like jello but the cramps were pretty much gone. I think I'd been running on adrenaline for several days and, once we got back from the lawyers on Friday (after closing in the sale of our old house), my body just decided to stop functioning properly.

I spent the morning in bed, watching a movie and being a veg. Eventually, I found my bath robe and wandered out into the kitchen but I still felt very weak. I had never felt like this before and hope to never feel that way again. We've both decided that we don't ever want to move again and honestly, we're so head-over-heels in love with the new house that I can't imagine why we'd want to.

On the health and fitness front, I didn't track anything at all but I am fairly sure that I burned far more calories than I took in. I still feel pretty disgusted with myself though. Both of us gained a chunk of weight over the past 6 weeks. My face feels really round, my ankles and fingers are a little swollen (I know that this is partly due to stress -- it feels like my blood pressure has been up a bit over the past week, wonder why huh??) and I was convinced that I had re-gained all of the weight I had lost. On Saturday, when I did finally get out bed and bathe, I found a pair of capri pants in my closet that I got when I dropped the first 50 pounds. I was afraid to even try to wear them because I was certain that I would not get into them and I didn't want to face it. Fortunately, I bitch-slapped myself and pulled them on. They fit, thankfully. I hadn't done as much damage as I thought I had.

I know that now that I'm back to work and we return to our normal routine, I'll start to feel better. The bloat will disappear, the blood pressure will drop, healthy eating will resume (we grocery shopped on the weekend and filled our new fridge with lots of veggies and lean meats -- we have no gas for our new stove yet so we'll be bbq'ing for a few weeks), we will sleep again.

When I have some time this week, I'll write more about the actual move, probably over on my regular blog. I hope to be back into the swing of things over here. I plan to report on good eatin', lots of walks in our fabulous new tree-lined neighbourhood and other fun exercise news. I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted off of my shoulders, now, if I can just lift the enormous amount of weight I have on my ass and hips, I'll be a happy kid.

Have a good week folks!!

lower expectations

Posts are going to be increasingly sporadic over the next few days. We close on the new house tomorrow. We should have the keys by the time I leave work tomorrow.

Sadly, I don't have much good news to report about actual fitness and/or weight-loss. This morning, instead of working out, I packed five more boxes of kitchen (I almost typed "chicken") stuff. I plan to do the same thing tomorrow morning. Friday night, when we actually get into the house, I'm going to move the kitchen stuff myself. Hopefully, by the time the furniture and the rest of our stuff arrives at the new house on Wednesday, the kitchen will be fully functional, painted and cleaned. It may not work out like that but it might too.

I've been attempting to squash this nervous feeling by eating this week. Mostly I've been binging on toast. Something about toast is incredibly comforting for me and I can't stop it. In the mornings, instead of having my regular healthy breakfast (juice, fruit, cereal, organic soy milk), I've been having my juice with several pieces of bread and margarine. Not good.

This will change. Things will get better. We'll get moved and life will get back to normal. I can't wait for that. I keep trying to pull my head out of my ass and sort myself out but I can't seem to do it properly with everything else that is happening. I hate feeling like this, like I'm out of control. By this time next week, we will have moved and life will settle down a bit. I realize that I have used this move and all of the stress we've been experiencing as an excuse to just fall off of the wagon. I feel like a broken record but seriously, after the move is over...my head will get pulled out of my ass, regular workouts will return and all will be well.

day 20 - blah blah blah

Today has been a very blah day. I'm having a hard time concentrating at work or on my fitness program, I just want to move and get it over with.

The move will be here soon enough but I'm at that antsy stage where I'm anxious about it and want it to start. Soon.

I know I'm stressing about this more than even I realized because this morning when I woke up my back was "twinge-y." When I got out of bed, I was sort of bent over and felt really angry with myself. My back trouble is stress related and so far, I've done really well with this move. My back should have "gone out" once or twice at least since this whole moving process started but it hasn't. Anyway, I took an aleve and kept moving around. By the time I was finished my bike ride, I felt good. I know that the exercise healed me. I don't want another morning like that tomorrow. Last night, I had a bunch of strange dreams so I know that's stress too.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have more to report. Right now, I'm just happy that I have managed to do a small amount of intentional exercise, two days in a row and that it is seriously feeling good!!

day 19 - week 2

Happiness is a cancelled meeting. When I got in this morning, I discovered that a meeting I was supposed to go to this morning had been cancelled. Sometimes, suddenly getting back 90 minutes can make a huge difference in a day. After being away on Friday, I've got lots of stuff to get caught up on so I'm not too upset about this!

Thank you for all of the happy birthday wishes. My weekend was a lot of fun although I ate way too much food. Honestly, I knew that this would happen and I'm not upset about it, nor will I apologize. It was my birthday and there was a lot of celebrating going on, food was eaten, cocktails were consumed, it was fun and it's over.

This morning I woke up at my normal time, got my hunny off to work and, instead of going back to bed for an extra 30 minutes, I hauled my ass out of bed and got on my recumbent bike. It had been 2 weeks since I had done that. Over the weekend, in the midst of the celebration, I felt really fat. My body was sluggish and easily tired and I know that this is primarily due to a lack of intentional exercise. I missed it and my body missed it. I'd like to say that I had a gung ho, hour long workout this morning but it didn't happen that way. I did do about 15 minutes of stretching and then rode the bike for 15 minutes, a total of 3.47 miles. Tomorrow I plan to do 20 minutes and to do some more stretching as well as some arms and abs exercises. Whatever exercise I do this week will help me get through the painting and moving that will follow this weekend and next week. I am sorry that I let myself slide as far as the exercise component goes but it feels good to be back into it today.

Anyway, once again, its Monday so here is my latest weekly wrap-up:
summary - week 2

• Other than a small amount of walking and some packing (and moving some boxes around), did not get any intentional exercise in last week.
  
• I took my vitamins 7 out of 7 days this week
  
• exceeded daily water intake goal 7 out of 7 days
  
• I totally forgot to weigh-in over the weekend. By the time I remembered, it was later in the day and I'd already eaten something so I didn't bother. I'm sure that it would just have been upsetting anyway so I'm guessing I did not miss much. This week should be better.

happy birthday to me

I can't believe that yesterday flew by so quickly. I never had a chance to post, not that there was much to talk about but yanno, I'm a five-day-a-week poster on this blog, boring or not!

Today is my birthday and I've taken the day off from work. My hunny took today off too. Originally we had a whole bunch of moving related stuff planned but one of the big things we'd hoped to do (get to the lawyers) can't happen until next week. We will be seeing the bank and signing all of our mortgage papers. We've got a really good rate and we're doing a home equity line of credit mortgage so we'll be able to pay off some of our bills and have everything consolidated at the MUCH lower interest rate. I'm quite excited about this and pleased at how well everything has turned out.

This morning, my hunny installed a wireless router here at home so I'm actually posting from my bed right now (I have a bunch of work to do this weekend so I brought my laptop home from the office with me), how cool is that?? We knew that our old, regular router was wonky (our connection at home has been pretty shitty recently) but really, seriously, it was pooched.

Other than a few errands and an appointment this afternoon though, I don't have much to do. Today already, I slept in, watched a movie and am now getting ready to go out for lunch. The LOG is taking us out for dinner too. Except for the getting older part, Birthdays are great!!

day 14 - trying hard to care

Concentrating on anything this week has been tough. I'm distracted by the whole moving business. Every night after work, we're on the road running errands and getting stuff crossed off from our "to-do" lists. It's exhausting and I don't feel like either of us is getting enough sleep. I've kept up with my opting for an extra 30 minutes of sleep each morning instead of 30 minutes of exercise thing this week. Not good I know. I figure that the running around and other stuff we're doing is burning some calories, not enough I know but some. aarrgghhh...I'll be so glad when this is behind us and we've moved and I can feel like a normal person again.

day 13 - bye bye board

The other day, the fabulous Bev sent me an email which I am sure many of you also received. She wanted to let the members of the Weigh-Better board know that she was shutting it down. I completely understand why she's doing it and the other forum's she mentioned in her email are great, some of them I already belong to. For one reason or another though, the only one I ever stuck to was hers.

For those of you who never hung out on Bev's forum, it was a super accepting, supportive, nurturing place where anyone, regardless of their age, weight or fitness level, could feel comfortable spilling their guts about their personal weight-loss stories.

I want to take this opportunity to thank her publicly for giving all of us the board for as long as she did. This was something she did on her own time, out of her own pocket. It's a thankless job for sure. I know that without the forum, I probably would not have made it through the first few months of my own weight-loss journey. The support and encouragement I received from Bev, Trish and all the others on the board was amazing. I could get all soppy and stuff but I won't. I just wanted to say, for all the world to read, Thank you Bev. You're the best!!

day 12 - week 1

I sat myself down over the weekend had a good conversation. I gave myself a reality check about how the next couple of weeks are going to play out. Our lives have been chaotic for about the past 6 weeks. I expect that they will stay that way until after we get moved. We move on May 25. The weekend was not stellar as far as eating goes. As always, it could have been worse and, in the past, would have definitely been way worse, but it wasn't great. We ate out a couple of times, we snacked on crap a couple of others. Fortunately, we didn't go to Costco for bulk quantities of m&m/chocolate chip cookies or to the bulk barn for chocolate. Trust me, this is a huge deal.

The motivation for the reality check is that I don't want to get myself all into a state if I don't lose any weight over the next couple of weeks. Between my birthday and having no routine, I expect that we'll be eating a few more meals out. If I can maintain my weight until after the move, I'll be a very happy girl.

Over the weekend, we went out and bought new appliances for our kitchen. We purchased this stove, this fridge and a Bosch dishwasher, all in black. We spent way more than I thought we would but we got all of the features that we wanted. Primarily, my hunny, who is a chef and does the vast majority of our cooking, wanted a gas stove. The house we're moving into doesn't have gas currently so we'll have to have the city bring it to the house before we can hook it up. This means that for the first month or so that we're in the house we'll either be barbecuing or eating raw food. Given the time of year, I'm not too worried about it. We've made a decision that only good, healthy food will go into our new appliances. Clean start in a new house and all of that. It should be easy to stick to. Once all of this house nonsense is sorted, it'll be easier for us to stick with things.

I'm still resisting the temptation to go out and buy new summer-y clothes, even though the temperature is starting to rise. I just can't let myself do it until I'm down a size. I made that promise to myself and it's one I'm actually going to keep!!

Anyway, once again, its Monday so here is my latest weekly wrap-up:
summary - week 1

• I did "intentional" exercise 4 days last week. This isn't as fabulous as ut sounds (ie I worked out for shorter periods of time) but it's a huge improvement over the week before.
  
• I took my vitamins 7 out of 7 days this week
  
• exceeded daily water intake goal 7 out of 7 days
  
• forgot to weighed-in "officially" on Friday. I had a huge "weird" gain mid-week, which I discarded. I'm back to where I was the previous week so I either gained and lost 11 pounds or I maintained. Either way, right now, at the end of week 1, I'm at 13 pounds lost since January.

day 9 - t.g.i.f.

The week has gone by quickly but still, I'm happy to see the weekend arrive. I could use some more sleep. The cold symptoms keep rearing their ugly head and I'm tired of it. Both yesterday and today, I opted for an extra 30 minutes in bed over my workout. This morning when I got up with my hunny and sent him off to work, my head was completely stuffed and my throat was so sore that I had no voice. When he left, I crawled back under the comforter for 30 minutes and my voice was back when I woke up. The runny nose thing is driving me absolutely insane. If only my nose running would burn some calories, that would be great.

Cold symptoms aside, I'm feeling okay otherwise. A week of fairly virtuous eating has definitely helped. My big focus as far as eating go is that the good choices far outnumber the bad in a given week. This leaves me wiggle room for the odd "not so healthy" choice, so long as they are infrequent. For me, this helps me stay off the binge trail because I know that if I really crave some "forbidden fruit" (oh if only it were just fruit!?) I can let myself have it. Pure deprivation doesn't work for this girl.

Btw, on that note, I broke down and had a big, black coffee this morning (sooo good) and a warm blueberry muffin. I finally gave into that particular temptation and thoroughly enjoyed it (I also went for a little walk to make up for it, so it wasn't a total disaster). It was a really nice Friday morning treat.

day 8 - little victories

The past week has been full of tiny victories. Of course, at times, I slipped up but overall, it's been going well. This is not an official "wrap up" but I wanted to share some non-scale victories with you. These things have happened over the past couple of days:

- yesterday, I had a meeting in the building next door, where the cafeteria is located. On my way over I thought, "I'm going to have a coffee and a muffin -- I'm caffeine deprived and a little hungry, it'll be a great treat." When I actually got there, everything looked and smelled really good but my treat ended up being a Diet Coke with Lime.

- last night, the LOG wanted to go out for dinner. When we got to the restaurant, they were having an "all you can eat" rib night. They smelled terrific, looked really great on other people's tables but I didn't give in. I had a big salad and shared some fajitas with my hunny. I really loaded mine up with veggies, a much better choice, I think, than ribs!

- this morning, again, I was craving a coffee / muffin combo. I almost gave into it too. Afterall, I had been so "good" yesterday, didn't I "deserve" it?? I sat myself down, talked myself out it and had another cup of herbal tea. It didn't take long for the craving to pass.

Now, I should not even be having these kinds of conversations with myself, but the truth is, I do. Or I am. I hope to not be. I do know that I am consuming more calories the past few days than I normally would but I'm allowing myself more healthy snacks at work to help keep these bad cravings in check. It seems to be working and I'd rather have a handful of mini-rice cakes than a big chocolate bar.

This morning I stepped back onto the scale. After seeing that horrible, terrible, ridiculous number on the weekend, I was a little gun shy about looking again. Today's number was a much kinder, considerate number. I'm sure now that the inflated number I saw the other day was caused by some serious water retention. Hopefully, I'll be back into that elusive virgin fat territory sometime soon. With the weight I gained recently, I'm about 9 pounds away from that marker.

*fingers crossed* If I work the plan, the plan should work!!

day 7 - blueberry tea

My little cubby at work smells so good. Right now, some blueberry tea is steeping in my tiny tea pot, and it is heavenly!

Hump day, already. The week is going by rather quickly. I can't believe that it's Wednesday again. For the third morning in a row, I have exercised, intentionally. This morning, I even managed to clean the bathroom and exercise. I gotta tell you, now that I'm in a habit of over-zealous cleaning, I can't shake it. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, I like having a clean house, I just hate cleaning it. If I make myself do it more often though, as we all know, it's not as bad. Who'd a thunk it?

I don't think I mentioned this here (I know I wrote about it over at my other blog)but we sold our house on Monday. It's a huge relief and I was actually able to start doing stuff like booking movers, moving the cable and all those fun things. We'll be moving 3 weeks from today but we actually get possession on May 20. I'm very excited!

On the food side, that's going pretty well too. I've been really careful about what I'm eating the past few days and I'm not feeling too deprived. Yesterday, I had some bouts of crazy hunger but I kept myself really busy until they passed. It's funny how they only last about 20 minutes if you can ignore them.

Oh, my copy of Tales from the Scale arrived in the mail yesterday. I just skimmed through it quickly last night (hopefully I'll get some time this weekend to sit down with it for a bit). It looks terrific. I can totally see why Erin chose the writers she did. If you haven't picked it up or ordered a copy already, it looks terrific and it's new material by folks you already love and read on a regular basis anyway!!

day 6 - detoxing

Even though I'm not doing a cleanse or any kind of juice fast, I feel better. On the weekend, I felt kind of heavy, bloated and gassy. Gross huh?? I can tell that the amount of sodium in my system is decreasing because my rings are feeling looser. Forgive me if this is TMI but I peed a lot yesterday. I don't think I drank any more water than I normally do so I must have been retaining a lot of fluid. It was weird but as I mentioned earlier, I'm feeling better.

Today was day two of getting back to my morning exercise session. Again, I did a 20 minute ride (and rode exactly the same distance, strangely enough) but I added some upper body exercises to my stretching. My knees, which had been bothering me since I got my cold, have started to feel better. I'm sure it's not a coincidence.

So, back on track is feeling better. I'm not surprised, it always does.

day 5 - howdy

There will be no regular Monday update this week. As I restarted on Thursday, I don't have a whole week to report on. I can update you on the weekend though and today so far. Excited?? You should be!

The weekend did not go as well as I had hoped. Friday was a good food day but Saturday and Sunday were not terrific. Friday at work, we had our monthly birthday party thing. I usually organize them so this month, instead of cake, I picked up a fruit tray and some cookies (for the folks who think it's not a party without something baked!). That night, we had a terrific, home cooked meal at home. Such a treat! The rest of the weekend was kind of weird.

We slept in a bit on Saturday morning and I woke up craving (big time craving) a McDonald's BLT Bagel. It's disgusting, I know, but once in a while, I crave them. After I dropped my hunny off at work, I headed out to the west end to do some grocery shopping. As I drove, I kept thinking about that sandwich. On my way to the store, I zoomed by many golden arches but didn't stop. By the time I had finished shopping, they had stopped serving "breakfast" and I couldn't do anything about it. I was so relieved and pleased with myself. It was not an indulgence I needed to make on my first "back to basics" weekend.

I wish I could say that I "behaved" for the rest of the day but I ended up devouring an entire bag of baked doritos and a mars bar. Don't ask. For dinner that night, I made a big salad but we had it with hot dogs. Hey, baby steps, right?

So yesterday, we had to vacate the house between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. for an inspection. We decided to take LOG to breakfast. After breakfast, we'd drop him home "early" and then head to a movie. Breakfast turned into a huge mess. The restaurant was a place we used to go quite frequently but hadn't been in a while. LOG and I had gone there for lunch last weekend and enjoyed a really nice meal so my hunny wanted to check it out again. Sadly, the kitchen was in the shits because of a huge group that had come in before we did. When we sat down, I noticed that they were getting their food so I figured "no problem." It ended up being a huge problem, they were serving food to that big table for 45 minutes. By the time our food arrived (about 55 minutes after we had ordered), it was overcooked and cold. Hard to imagine how that could happen. Fortunately, LOG's was fine so he scarfed it down and we took him home (neither of us could eat what they gave us and we know enough about restaurants from our own experience to know that nothing edible was going to come our way). By this time, we had missed our movie. In addition to being hungry, we were now pissed off.

So, angry and hungry, we go to a Chinese buffet. Can you see where this is going?? Yeah, not pretty. It could have been much worse, I had a lot of veggies and tofu but still, it wasn't the meal I had planned for myself. When eventually we got to the movie, we had popcorn (luckily I spilled half of mine on the floor). At 8 p.m. last night, we ate dinner. It felt like all we did from 1 to 8 p.m. yesterday was eat. Gross huh??

Today is going much better. I even worked out, only 30 minutes instead of my normal 45 to 60 but it's a good start. Oh, I weighed myself on Saturday and was completely disgusted with the number. I'm not even going to mention how much I gained last week because I have a feeling that it's a bizarre water retention inflated number. I did record it though and it's in my head right now. It's not a number I ever want to see again but I've made my peace with it. This week will be so much better than last week was, there is no way that it can't be.

I promise that next week, the regular Monday update section will return.