Still Chugging

It's been a tough week for exercise - even the short sessions that PACE requires are tough to get in when the baby is teething, and the big boy caught the cold, and you spend several days traveling. But the cool thing is that it's still working. I'm down another pound and a half. When I get rid of that pesky half pound I will have lost everything I gained on our trip to North Carolina. Not too shabby: it's been about two weeks since we got back. I'm noticing other stuff too: I can breathe better. Lots better. Enough to make a difference when I sing. I'm getting stronger. Moving is more fun. I like the way I feel. I sleep better. That could also be related to the baby suddenly sleeping longer in his own bed before he wakes up for his night-time snack. Night-weaning is a bear, and it's not going to be fun. I'm waiting for those teeth to settle down before we tackle that. The Hubs is also noticing some nice improvements. So far, this new PACE style workout is a smashing success.

PACE

Well, we went out east, attended a wedding, visited friends and then came back by way of the Kirtland temple. Brought back lots of pictures, a few souvenirs, and 5 extra pounds. But 3 are gone already. I'm crediting the new workouts Andy and I are doing. We're using a system called PACE, and I think that my favorite thing is that I'm seeing results, and my next most favorite thing is that the workouts, at no more than 12 minutes, are easy to slip into a busy day without feeling like I need to choose between sleep and exercise or choose between my kids and my health. And it seems to be working!

Checking in

10 days in and still feeling pretty motivated (though, there's still room for improvement with my eating habits).

That app on my phone has a cycle of 5 or 7 days, depending on the food plan I pick. Basically, it gives suggestions for meals and gives allotted times for eating (which is SUPER good for me now that I'm working from home). I picked a 5 day one. I think I did quite well sticking with it the whole time.. but I've only done it the first 5 days, I completely fell off the wagon with the second cycle.

I'm only going to weigh and measure myself once a month (that worked really well for me when I was losing weight for my wedding), so I haven't gotten back on the scale since Sept 20th, but already I feel small changes in my body (my clothes fit better so I know good things are happening).

I've gone back to using that workout plan that I used when I was losing weight for my wedding. It's only a 6 month plan, but my hope is that by that point I will have a routine that I'm in and that I'll have made good habits and be more likely to stick with it better this time 'round. With my wedding the goal was to get in shape for my wedding.. now, it's to be more healthy and to reach a healthy weight, increments at a time. So, by Dec 20th I hope to weigh 15lbs less than I did on Sept 20th.

To help me quantify how active I am, I got a pedometer. I read that a "healthy" person walks at least 10,000 steps a day. I wore it for a week to see what my normal number of steps were. Turns out, it was nowhere near that many. Even when I went for my walk/jog in the morning, the most I was walking was just over 7,000 steps. (though, this site says that a spectrum, but above 5,000 is ok)

However, my Hubby and I have been talking and he's feeling like he wants to step up his workout program too. He's super busy at work, but is really good at fitting in a visit to the gym 2-3 times a week. The downside is that, since he has to cram it into his lunch hour, he's only doing the aerobic workingout for 15-20mins at a time and he's feeling like it's not enough to fight the battle of the bulge. So we're going to work together to adjust our lifestyle.

Mon-Fri, after he comes home from work, we're going to go for a walk in the park up the street (twice around the walking path, just over 2 miles). Also, we're going to do the food plan together to motivate each other, and he's thinking that measurements on top of weighing-in, would be the way to go.

We started the walking today (I hit my 10,000 steps at 2pm.. woo!) and we'll start the food part tomorrow, after I go to the grocery store today. Wish us luck!

Wanting What Was

There's something extremely motivating about watching a slideshow with pictures of my younger, thinner self, that makes me determined to lose some of this excess I've gained in the years since.

This past weekend, I went to an old friend's wedding. It was a wonderful weekend.. good company, good times, great fun. But a million pictures. It's been a gradual thing, but I'm finding that I really don't like myself in pictures these days (not a good sign) and then, at one of the events, they played a slideshow of pictures of my friend, with several including me, from our college days.

Partly I was stuck by how YOUNG I looked (I know I was somewhere around 22, but I look like a little baby!) but, mainly, it was just how much thinner I was then. This realization has been a long time coming.. I know I've been gaining weight.. but I'd just pout and tell myself it was impossible to change this path.

I'm done whining about it. WeightWatchers didn't work for me. It's a good program, but I didn't stick with it. So, now I'm trying something new. I've downloaded an app on my phone that has menu planning and nutrition guidelines.. I'm also going to start keeping track of my measurements and weight again (I haven't weighed myself in ages), and also make a plan to be more consistent with my workouts.

My goal is to have lost 15 lbs by Christmas.

Here I go!!

Battle of the Bloat

Well, I'm up from last week, but I'm pretty sure that it's bloating. My numbers have been all.over.the.place this week, but I ended up being up just over a pound from last Wednesday. However, I'm still down some from my peak, so it's not as bad as it could be. And I'm pretty sure that my hormones have been doing things this week. Not that I could tell you what: still no cycles after the baby, probably because we still nurse a lot. Plus, getting enough water is a constant battle.

Turns out that Kris, of Eclipsed, is following a meme from a blog called Confessions of a Snowflake. So I'll be linking up there. This week, they're supporting each other with posting recipes. The recipe  made most recently was cupcakes with pudding in the middle... think I'll blog about that on the other blog, rather than here. Seems sort of out of place... but I will be browsing their recipes to see if any of them would please my family.

Sidebar Update

I've been updating our sidebar. This evening I re-did the blog links, including all the family blogs, plus Eclipsed, which hosts the weigh-in I'll be participating in. If anyone else has a blog they'd like to see on there, particularly a fitness or weight-loss blog, I'm happy to put it in. Can't remember what kind of permissions we did when we set this up. Anyway, I also re-did my "goal" thingy on the sidebar. Thought I'd mention it so that if you girls want to update your stuff you can.

Working Together

I am trying to lose weight also. I peaked about a month ago. I am down 5 now. Very slow. But constant and in the right direction. I am doing the same thing - trying to eat better - doing fruit for snacks and drinking more water. Writing down everything I eat to keep me focused. I also added walking - this last weeks heat sabotaged the walking a bit. I will get back to it on Monday.

Maybe we can work together on this and help each other out. :)

Setting Some Goals

I'm going to set some goals, and I found a new weigh-in meme that I'm going to use. She weighs-in on Wednesday,  and that works fine for me. My weight peaked again last week - this whole house thing has been rough on my husband and I in the weight department. And I've decided to do something about it. My body doesn't like to be this big, and when I eat halfway decent it drops down from where I'm currently at with very little further effort. But I've been so good at sabotaging myself that I still haven't gone anywhere.

This week, I decided that I'd had enough. I bought fruit, and that's what I ate when I had the munchies. I drank my water like I know I ought to. Well, not as much as I'd like, but more than I had been. And it made a great difference. I'm down 2.5 pounds for the week, and as long as I keep from over-doing it on the bread, I'm confident that I can keep it up for a while.

My goal? I want to be down 15 pounds from my peak by September 22. That's 2 months from now, and should be pretty do-able. 15 pounds isn't tons, but it's enough to make a very nice difference in how my clothes fit me. Not enough to make me need new clothes. But the next goal after that will  probably allow me to get out the things I have packed away right now because they're too small. And this time I'm going to get rid of the big stuff when it doesn't fit anymore. I'm not going to make it easy to come back to this place. I want to loose enough that even when I get pregnant next I don't come all the way back to where I am right now. The long-term goal is to loose 60-70 pounds. It's ambitious. I'll almost certainly find that I have body-image issues that I have to work through in the process. If I can keep the progress steady at 1-2 pounds a week, it can be done in a year, but I suspect that it'll take a little longer than that. And I'm OK with that. I'm just setting a small goal for right now. I'll be back for more after I get there.

Eye Rolling Moment

So, I've been doing this WeightWatchers thing for about 7wks. Several of my friends swear by it and I thought I'd give it a go. So I signed up and set up my online profile, etc etc. I've been being really good and following the plan, but so far I haven't lost any weight.. so, before I gave up on this completely and unsubscribed, I went into my profile to see if I could tweak the settings.

Initially, I had 36points a day to work with, which seemed reasonable and workable. After about a week or so it hopped up to 40. I thought that was kind of weird, but figured maybe since I'd been working out, it didn't want me to loose weight too quickly.. or something. Still, after another week or two, I wasn't loosing weight. So I worked out harder, and the next week the number hopped up to 42.

Finally, now being at 7wks and no change, I was feeling rather frustrated. Last night I went in to tweak the settings and I realized that (for some inexplicable reason) somewhere along the line, I had put the settings at "maintain" rather than "lose weight".

D'oh!

Mortification and eye rolling ensued. However, I'm working to see the up-side with this... I have gotten very good at following the plan.. and working out is becoming an established pattern to my week... I *am* feeling like my body is changing shapes (even if no weight is being lost), so at least my clothes are fitting better - and the hope is that'll be a precursor to actual weight loss, now that I've got the silly program back to the proper setting.

New Bathroom Scales

We bought a new bathroom scale, and I was pleased with what it said Sunday morning. Of course, Sunday afternoon I went to my first Superbowl party, and there was some good food. MMMMMM. Especially that chocolate thing... yeah, I indulged. But it's not an everyday thing, so it shouldn't be a huge setback. And, now I have the means to keep an eye on things!

Also, I set up my ticker again. I forgot my pin, so I had to make an entirely new one.

Good Workout Tonight

I'm feeling mighty good right now! A bit dead and ready for bed - which is a good thing considering the hour - but mighty good. I just got done at the gym and I rode the bike for an hour, went 30 miles, and burned 535 calories. Very satisfying.

Maybe that'll make up for having just a cupcake for breakfast! :)