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Countdown to Christmas Challenge

By on December 2, 2010 in challenge, consistency/commitment, holiday, R2P4, working out

First off, if you haven’t had a chance to read my post on self-discipline and you have a moment, check it out.  The comments and some conversations I’ve been having with myself (yes, in my head, you gotta problem with that?) are making me think a lot more about that topic.  So there will be more to come on that in the near future!

Countdown to Christmas Challenge

Moving right along, it’s time to recap my week last two weeks for the Countdown to Christmas challenge hosted by Scale Warfare and Bella!

You may remember the rules:

1. Choose a specific, realistic goal that you can achieve by December 31st.
2. Post weekly updates (you choose the day) about your progress.
3. Add the challenge button to your blog post/sidebar.
4. Decide on a gift (reward) that you’ll give yourself when you meet your goal.

The first week of the challenge, I set my goal, which as a refresher is:

  • My goal: commit to and follow-through on four structured workouts/week from now until the end of the year.  I have some travel time coming up, along with the normal scheduling challenges that we all face during the holidays!  So my goal is to make at least four structured workouts (and by structured, I mean “official” and not just a walk – trainer, weight lifting, running, gym, something) a priority in my schedule no matter what.
  • I will post updates about my progress on the challenge on Thursdays each week.

Week before last, I added a couple more goals:

  • Be in bed by 10pm Sunday through Thursday nights.
  • Get up no later than 6:30 Monday through Friday mornings.
  • No snacking on the couch – the only eating allowed is a planned, pre-plated meal.
  • Shut my pie hole by 8:30 p.m. every night – no more eating!

As you all know (unless you are both living in a cave and have your head stuck in a hole), last week was Thanksgiving.  What you may not know is that two other circumstances combined to throw me for a loop – I got sick and Seattle got hit with a snowstorm of epic proportions (okay so it was 4 inches, bite me), making driving anywhere difficult.  Not because of the roads, but because Seattle drivers don’t know how to drive in snow so they create more of a hazard than the snow in the first place!  (Sorry I’m not sorry…you know it’s true!)

So the last two weeks I completed a sum total of…drumroll please…4 workouts.  Yep, you read that right – my weekly goal is 4 workouts, but I only fit in 4 workouts over the last two weeks.  So not what I had hoped to report!  But I am not beating myself up over it; instead I am working on getting back into my workout groove.  I’m confident that next week I’ll report a minimum of 4 workouts completed from today until next Wednesday.

The holiday, time off work, and being sick also threw my sleeping schedule off completely.  So I’m back to struggling to get up at 6 or 6:30 a.m.  Today Kim even gave me an awesome early morning wake up call…and I promptly rolled over and went back to sleep until 7:40 a.m.  This all ties back to the self-discipline post from yesterday, and what I’m trying to figure out is if getting up early is an important goal for me right now.  I think it is, but I am going to be doing some thinking and writing over the next few days so I can be sure I’m doing it because I want this to be my goal, instead of because I’m trying to jump on a bandwagon that’s not really important for me to be on.  So, as I said, more to come later.

And since I am all about the silver lining, I will share that despite my crazy sleep schedule, being sick, a holiday, an unexpected week off work, and being off my game workout-wise…and despite not having my scale to weigh myself in the mornings (something I generally do, it works for me) – I made mostly healthy choices and maintained my weight over the last two weeks.  I count that as a win!

How was your Thanksgiving?  How are you doing with your workout goals this week?

Comments { 4 }

Checking In

By on November 20, 2010 in family, food, holiday, plan, R2P3, working out

Hey y’all, happy Saturday!  I don’t usually post on the weekends but I am usually too busy!  Today I am taking the morning for some me time – I slept in (ahhh) after a late night out, made a great pot of coffee, and am settled in with my laptop catching up on blogs, e-mail, and Facebook.  I didn’t post yesterday so I thought I’d catch you up on what’s going on with me.  Then, as per usual, it will be your turn to catch me up on what’s going on with you!

Yesterday my cousin and his girlfriend flew in from Detroit for their annual tradition of spending Thanksgiving with my family.  But I should rewind to Wednesday night, when my sister called me up to say that she couldn’t pick them up from the airport.  No big – my job is fantastically flexible and my boss neverendingly (technical term) understanding, so it was easy for me to stand in for her and pick them up.  As she went on to tell my why, though, my heart leapt up into my chest.

Apparently that evening, my 8 month old nephew had what his doctor almost casually referred to as an LTI – Life Threatening Incident.  When my sister said those words, I swear my heart stopped for a moment.  (Sidebar: things like that? Terrify me in terms of having kids.)  She had him in a warm bath when his lips started to turn blue.  She handed him to her husband, threw on her robe, and in that short time, my nephew got paler and paler and became unresponsive, his eyes glazing over, etc.  When she described it to me, I thought it sounded like a seizure, with all my lawyerly expertise, you know?  In any case, it lasted for about 5 minutes (!!) and just when she was ready to call 9-1-1, he started to get better.  He eventually took a full bottle, played with his older siblings, and returned fully to normal.

Sis talked to an on-call pediatrician that night who said that babies have incidents like this rather frequently (who knew?!), and that she should keep an eye on him through the night and bring him in Friday morning for a checkup just in case.  This all freaked my sister out beyond belief, as you can imagine – she set her alarm to go off every 45 minutes through the night to check on him.  Took him to the doctor, where he was given a clean bill of health aside from a very mild ear infection.  The doctor says they may never know what caused it (it wasn’t a febrile seizure as he did not have a fever), but that it may have had to do with temperature regulation since he was in the bath.

Anyhow, so color me all shades of thankful and grateful that the youngest apple-of-my-eye is healthy.  So I skipped out of work for a few hours yesterday to go pick up my cousin and his girlfriend (F & J for the rest of this post).  We picked up some food and headed back to my sister’s house, hung out for a while, had lunch, and then I headed back to work.  All the while I’m wearing workout clothes because Thursday I missed my workout (for two days in a row of no workout), so I really wanted to fit one in.  I figured if I walked around in gym clothes all day long, eventually my conscience would force me to the gym!  (See details about wonderfully flexible and also casual employer above!)

I worked until 6 and hit up the gym for 30 minutes of running intervals on the treadmill and 5 minutes of core work.  I’ve been fitting in more and more of these “short” workouts lately and they have been my saving grace!  When life is busy, often our workout is the first thing to go – we think, “I don’t have time to drive to the gym, work out for an hour, shower, and then drive back – that’s 2 hours out of my day!”  Thanks to a gym that’s 5 blocks from my office and the realization that short workouts are still good workouts, I fit in a sweat session and was on my way to my sister’s house (sweaty and unshowered, but still!) in under 45 minutes.

Showered up over there and headed out to my brother’s pub for the evening, where fun was had by all!  And then on the way home?  Hubs said, “Want to go out to eat??”  It was 1am.  But I didn’t have the heart to say no, since he so rarely expresses a strong wish to do something!  So we found an all-night grill for a wee-hours-of-the-morn meal.  I stuck to my healthy-eats-only plan and ordered a veggie omelet with fresh fruit; I ate all the fruit and about 5 bites of the omelet, but I’m just not a middle-of-the-night eater!  So I brought the rest home.  In bed by 2am (ish?), fast-forward to the aforementioned sleeping in, and here I am.

Did I mention I’m wearing my workout clothes again?  J loves to work out so we are going to make time to slip away for a workout sometime today before the poker extravaganza begins tonight.  And if that means I’m all sweat-tastic and gross for the game?  Who cares – it’s all family and close friends and you all?  Don’t judge.  :)

So that’s me – family in town, a slow build-up to the holiday which for me will begin Wednesday morning since I’m taking that day off.  Heading home to my parents’ place where we are hosting a “small” Thanksgiving meal for 45 or so of our closest friends-who-have-become-family.  My plans are to keep getting my workouts in; enjoy the time with the people I love; and enjoy a little bit of the foods I don’t have easy access to the rest of the year.  I am feeling really confident in my ability to make healthy choices.

So…your turn!  What’s up with you?  What’s been going on in your world?  Any fun plans for Thanksgiving?  Or are you grinching it up this year and doing something non-holiday-ish?  Do tell.

Comments { 8 }

Pounds and Inches Update

By on November 5, 2010 in beauty/beautiful, body, eating, emotional stuff, hcg, hope/inspiration, R2P2, self-image, weight

I started to add this update to yesterday’s post, and then realized it really deserved its own separate post.  Big changes are happening around here, which you’ll understand as you keep reading.

Today is my last day of injecting on my second round of the HCG Protocol.  I am thankful to report that the weight I had gained during my little “interruption” of this round is long gone, along with a few extra pounds.  Today I weigh 189.5 pounds. People, that is momentous!  I honestly don’t remember the last time I was under 190, but I do know it was at least as far back as my junior year in high school.  I feel fantastic and am so excited to start my maintenance phase and keep focusing on my running, strength training, and overall health and wellness.

For those of you who are interested in an outside perspective/opinion on the Protocol, here’s an article on HCG by a thyroid patient advocate – a friend of mine shared this with me.  Let me know what you think!  I’ll be sharing some more in-depth thoughts with you in the near future about this Protocol and how it’s different – but in some ways exactly the same – as any other method of losing weight.

I’ve been promising to share measurements with you for a while, so here is the chart I’ve been using since I started.  It’s hard to see but if you click on the image it gets bigger!

I’ve lost a total of 32.5 inches off all the parts of my body that I’m tracking!  (Note: I only measure one side of my body, so right thigh, right bicep, etc.)  And with today’s weight of 189.5, I’m up to a total of 63 pounds lost on HCG, and a grand total of 109.1 pounds lost since my highest recorded weight in 2006.  Holy sheesh – that seems crazy to me – does it seem crazy to you?

For any new readers who may have stumbled on my blog recently, I want you to know that you can do it.  For years – decades, even – I felt hopeless.  I never gave up, but I never really believed I could do this, you know?  There was always a small big-ass kernel of doubt in my mind that made me wonder – can I ever really do this?  I had failed at reaching a healthy weight for so long, I didn’t know how to be anything but a fat girl who failed at weight loss.  And I’m not saying that to garner pity or admiration or for any other reason than to say, to those of you who may be feeling the same way, that I know how it feels.  And there is hope.  And you can succeed in your desire to achieve a healthy weight, a healthy body.  So please, never never never never never give up.  And as important as that: love yourself.  Know that you are enough and lovable and good and worthy just as you are.

So there you have it, folks.  My pounds and inches update.  A transition, after today, off the injections.  And Tuesday, I start phasing back in higher amounts of protein, fruits, and veggies.  I can also eat dairy, but I will be talking with my N.D. about how and when to add certain foods back in, since I might as well do this deliberately and test out whether I have any food sensitivities or allergies, right?  Anyhow, I’m excited.  So excited for what the next couple months hold.

How about you?  What are you looking forward to in the coming months?  And, if you could share one piece of advice with someone who is struggling right now, what would you say?

Comments { 18 }

My Perfectly Imperfect Run

By on June 1, 2010 in running, training

Or should that be imperfectly perfect run?!  Not sure…

Yep, it’s that time again – time for a running update!  But first, don’t forget that tomorrow is National Running Day!  Tara and I are each hosting a giveaway to celebrate NRD.  Enter mine here, and enter Tara’s here.  Well, what are you still doing here?!?

Now, on to the running update.  Mondays are my long run day, because Sundays are just too hard with family things and all the other “stuff” that gets crammed into the I-only-have-two-days-to-live-it-up-and-oh-yeah-do-laundry weekends.  You might remember this training schedule I put together for May – looks like I need to fill one out for June now, too!

45 minutes had been my longest “long” run in May, but yesterday I knew I wanted to take it up a notch.  I decided my goal would be to run for 60 minutes or so, depending on how my body felt.  I’d start with a warmup walk of about 8 minutes and do 5/1 run/walk intervals since it was a longer run than I’d done in a while.  Since I was starting with a walking warmup, I intended to turn around somewhere around the 35 minute mark, thinking that’d put me back at my starting point at 60 minutes.

Backing up a bit, last week I tweaked my left calf and I’m not sure how.  Thursday I got to the gym 30 minutes before my Zumba class and took the opportunity to run my fastest mile yet (11:40-ish – I stopped the treadmill at 11:41 but the distance had just clicked over to 1.01, so I think this is a fair estimate) and jog/walk a bit more before Zumba.  It was great, and then I went on to my class.  I knew my calves would be talking to me since they do when I run and they do when I Zumba, and I was combining the two back-to-back.  So I took some time to stretch out my calves between the two.

I don’t know how and I’m not sure when, but my left calf did, indeed, start chattering at me at some point during Zumba.  By the end of the class, it was done talking and had graduated to yelling at me – it felt like I had a HUGE knot in my leg!  You know the feeling you have AFTER a really bad charlie horse?  Well that’s how it felt, and that’s part of what precipitated my massage on Friday evening (after a kick-ass strength training session during which my calf did a little more talking to me, including some choice words I won’t repeat here…).

My massage therapist told me that my body has many of the “classic” signs of a runner (I know this is not a good thing, she’s talking about tight muscles and poor stretching habits, but can I just say that I was excited about this for a sec?!?), including very tight calves.  She worked out the knot which felt good horrible amazing excruciating healthy in a “hurt so good” kind of way.  I took Saturday as a rest day to give my body a chance to heal, and by Sunday the soreness was gone and I was feeling good.

Fast-forward to Monday’s run, and the minute I went from warmup walk to jog, my calf started to tighten up and get sore again.  I did plenty of stretching before and even during my run, and decided that I would run as long as I was only feeling soreness; if I felt any pain, I would walk back to the car and try again another day.  I didn’t want to give up my run, but I also don’t want to do any longer-term damage, you know?  Anyhow, I started off, and even including an 8-minute walking warmup, I finished 4 miles in 60 minutes!  I ended up going a total of 4.25 miles including warmup and cooldown.  I was/am super excited, because I ran 2/3 of the distance of my upcoming 10K in about 2/3 of the time I will have for that event!  With 3 more months to train and LOSE SOME FREAKING WEIGHT, I should be on track to finish the 10K in 90 minutes without too much trouble.

So, the perfectly imperfectly perfect part?  I did it!  I ran the longest distance I’ve run in about 2 years.  I powered through some really tough thoughts as I got tired, I worked around a sore muscle, I adjusted my socks when I got a blister, and I maintained my slow 5K pace for 4.25 miles.  Good, bad, and ugly, and I did it anyways.  I really wanted to run, to me that feeling is a miracle every single time.

Making it through this run at nearly 250 pounds is another miracle.  The infrastructure of my body isn’t meant to carry this much weight, and yet it does, and I’m so grateful to my body – my legs, my feet, my heart, my lungs, all of it – for soldiering on and enabling me to run.  I also know that the best gift I could give my body in return is to really get serious about taking some of this weight off so that it is easier to run and do the things I want to do.  So as I shared yesterday, I am reaffirming my commitment out loud in black in white here.

This blog is about running but it’s also about losing weight and getting healthy.  These things all go hand-in-hand, and I will not continue “coasting” and maintaining in one area while trying to excel and progress in the others.  ‘Nuf said.

Comments { 6 }

May Goals Update

By on May 12, 2010 in Uncategorized

You may remember that earlier this month, I decided to start setting monthly goals for myself.  For May, my goals were:

  • Complete at least 5 out of 6 weekly planned workouts.
  • Track everything I eat 6 out of 7 days.
  • Eat 5 servings of veggies and fruits each day.

In the spirit of challenging myself but also creating a foundation of success to build on, I chose simple goals, some of which might be easier for me to achieve (workouts) and others which would stretch me beyond what I was doing before I started (tracking my eats).

A week later, here’s my report:

  • After getting off to an amazing start early in May, my workouts faltered a bit last week but are back on track this week.  So far in May, I’ve missed 3 workouts.
  • I’ve eased back in to tracking my food every day, but weekends continue to be a challenge.  The progress I’ve made is that I’m paying attention to what I eat and making better choices on the weekends with my calorie target in mind.  This coming weekend I will track both days as an exercise in discipline.  Not because I have to; because I choose to.
  • I’m knocking the veggie-eating ball out of the park!  I’ve been on a streak lately with a great scramble I eat for breakfast OR dinner!  It’s super easy – spray a heavy bottomed, non-stick pan with olive oil spray and add one tablespoon of olive oil.  Chop up a bunch of veggies (lately I’ve been using green onions, zucchini, bell peppers, and mushrooms) and lightly sautee – just until they’re hot and starting to cook, not until they’re soggy.  Add a bunch of egg whites and one or two whole eggs and scramble away!  At the very end, you can sprinkle in 1/4 C of low fat mozzarella cheese.  Et voila – moderate in calories, contains healthy fat, protein, and fiber.  It’s the perfect meal!  Anyhow, this and my other veggie munching habits (sweet peas and carrots, mostly), and frequent salads with dinner have got me sitting pretty with this goal.

I’m checking in on these goals because I didn’t want to just set them and forget them.  I really want to make a concerted effort to reach these goals, which means taking the pulse every now and then and adjusting course if I’m falling short on them.  I think the workouts are going to be okay; last week’s shortfall on that was a blip and I’ve got my workouts actually scheduled for the rest of the month.  As for tracking, I am just adjusting my mindset to make that non-negotiable again.

For example, last night, I switched my dinner at the last minute, which I knew was within my calorie target.  I really, really wanted to go to bed after watching the Biggest Loser!  Instead, I stayed up an extra 15 minutes, tracked my food for the day, planned, tracked, and packed my food for today, and then I went to bed.  I’m putting that in my memory/success book, folks, because that is the kind of commitment that will keep me on track for the long haul.

Photographic Evidence

I reported yesterday that I ran a mile in 11:56 and took a photo of the treadmill display to prove it.  Here it is!  Want to know how dorky and excited I was/am?!  I took FOUR photos of the display!  lol  I’m excited to keep timing myself to see how fast I can run a mile.

How are you doing on your goals for yourself?  What are you working on/towards this week?

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