I lost 30 pounds and….

I have plateaued. What a shame… I was starting to enjoy the constant weight loss every week. I even won $100 out of it. But I have hit a slow stop. I am not gaining but I am not losing from what I can see. I take full responsibility because I am feeling quite content and losing sight of my ultimate goal. I have been feeling pretty good ad looking good if I might add. Loosing 30 really showed and I love it. I feel that maybe I am liking the plateau a little too much. I bought some new clothes because my other clothes we re really falling off of me (yay). So now, I need to motivate myself some more. I am halfway there and I need to keep pushing. If not harder. Because the first part of the road was good but now the challenge is how much do you really want it. Do you really want to reach the goal you set for yourself or is halfway is good enough.

I don’t see it but I can feel it

I‘ve been obsessed with the scale lately and it’s getting on my nerves. So I decided to give it a break for a couple of weeks. You see, I have been doing my best with my food intake and I have been looking at the numbers slowly but surely go down on the scale. It’s exciting to know that what I am doing is working but… I just don’t see it. I look at my face and I don’t see the slimming. I look in the mirror, same body. I put on my clothes, same size. ok. Maybe not as tight but same size. I’m not saying that I’m not happy about it but I just can’t see if when I look in the mirror. I totally understand why people get discouraged when you think you’re working and one of you factors is not matching up to the other (scale+clothes+belly+…)
Even after all of this, I’m ok with it because the way I feel. I feel simply fantastic. I feel lighter. I don’t see it but my knees feel it. They don’t hurt when I stand for too long. My walks to the train station has shortened (by a whole min! – and yes I time myself). I just feel lighter and just better. I like this feeling. I still have my rolls but that’s not the only thing I see when I am looking at myself in the mirror. In some aspects, I have already reached one of my goals which was to just feel better. I’m petite by technical standards (5’3″) and I have size 6 feet. I felt like to keep going the way I was would just not work out for me. And I was longing for a day where a 15 mins walk was no longer a big deal and if I ran to catch the train, I wouldn’t feel like I was dying. I have achieved that goal and I’m excited. For that reason, I’m giving my scale up for a month so that I can enjoy that awesome feeling I have of actually enjoying my present body, enjoying feeling lighter on my feet. Here’s to victories!

I’ve had some success so far….

I‘ve decided to track everything I ate since I started to take my journey seriously. I’ve read and heard all the advice and the first step is usually “write down what you eat”. So that’s what I did. I started tracking everything. My goal was simple to track. Whatever it is I was eating. I bought a journal, and an app. But since my phone is attached to my hip, I basically ditched the journal (it was hard, I love pretty journals) and just kept up with my app. My goal initially was to just be honest with myself, just honest. No depriving, not controlling, just “seeing” what goes in my body. I use a handy dandy little app called Lose It! and have been a dedicated user. I don’t believe it’s the best out there in terms of database honestly, because sometimes I would to go google for some food and the other competitor sites would the items but not this one. But since I already had it on my phone, I just supplemented. I mean when you are in a relationship, you have your partner that is not without fault. You look around and other people might have qualities that you like and you think they’re missing. You don’t just dump or leave them, you do your best to encourage or add some of the missing ingredients, I mean, qualities. You leave the core as it is since that’s what attracted you in the first place. And you of course appreciate the good stuff. One of the features I love about this app are the Challenges. I totally get a kick out of finishing some of them and earning badges. So cool! Fake rewards? Yes!
And like “they” predicted, the more I started to track, the more I saw what I was eating, the more I started to cut back, started to substitute. According to the picture, I think I might be on the right track. Not bad Dee, not bad at all…

I have not been exercising

 You read right. I’m not lifting, not running, not cycling, the only walking I’m doing is walking casually from the train station to my job and like a maniac back to catch my ride back to my car. And when I get home, I’m so tired all I want to do is take a nap. But since I’m a mommy, I actually have to do some work when I get home.
Now if you’re reading this and thinking well then, she is not serious about that weight loss! No way. Diet and exercise are the key ingredients to a succesful weight loss! I know I know. And I am very well aware of this but here is my tale.
Last year was a crazy start. I was working out three times a week at least. Picking up Minnie Me, dropping her off at the wonderful babysitting and heading off to zumba, kick boxing, the occasional spinning and my favorite body pump. Loved it every time and saw absolutely no results. I look the same, felt the same and my scale showed the exact same number. No matter what I did and how I motivated myself, I was still looking in the mirror and seeing the same image. I didn’t get it. So when our budget got tight, what was the first thing to go? The gym. My pocket got somewhat alleviated but what my weight….skyrocked. And here I am now. What happened there?
I figured it out. I was eating like crap. Not like crap but basically anything I wanted. I mean I work out almost every day so I can eat anything I want. I mean there’s a balance there right? Wrong! See, the type of food you ingest really do affect how you feel and how your body processes. I read that all the time, seen it everywhere but really could care less because I figured I’m putting the gym time in then my success is inevitable. So this time around, I decided to do something else. I decided to attack from the other end of the spectrum. I decided to take care of what I eat. I’m not depriving myself by any means because I know I will fall back into crazy habits and ridiculous eating binges when I’ve starved myself for days. No. I am remastering my palette. I am making some conscious decisions, making some substitutions here and there. Instead of rice, maybe some veggies. Instead of bread with the soup, maybe just soup. That sort of thing. And when I want pizza, damn it I have pizza. I just don’t have four slices of pizza, with seven wings, fries and wash things down with a soda. I think I might call this new lifestyle “restraint”.

What’s important to you?

I found this little nugget on tumblr and saved it to my phone so that I could talk to myself from time to time. I give great pepe talks! Absolutely, ask any of my friends. But when it comes to myself, sometimes I wonder if I just like the sound of my own voice. Not in everything thank God. Just on things that I feel that I have gotten comfortable in without realizing. It’s one thing to see your weight go up on the scale, to see your size changing (say it with me, waist expansion) and brush it off. It’s another to talk about doing the work and just come home ans lay down. So I decided to do a personal inspection and see exactly what’s going on with me.
What exactly is important to me? Honestly, my health is very important to me. Really my health. I work in a hospital and even if it’s in the IT department, you can’t help seeing what’s happening around. As a matter of fact, just building the software for the hostpital, you are introduced to terminlaogy that you never knew existed. Frankly it’s pretty scary and sometimes keeps me up at night. I figure if I’m not at my best, I can take care of anything else. I have money problems. If I can’t go to work I can’t fix that. I have a daughter with too much energy for tired little me. If I can’t jump up and down or run around after her, she’ll slowly become a slob and that’s all on me. Therefore, if it’s important to me, let me take care of it. If I can make sure my daughter has a ready lunch box every day when she goes to school. I can take the time and do the same for me and ensure I have some good stuff in there. Why not start there? I have to work, I have to eat. Instead of spending $10 for lunch (Boston is no joke), I can work on carving out a little time to make sure I get some good stuff in my body.
Lunchbox prep is the word here. Let’s do it.

Hello again world

If I count how many times I said I’m on a diet in this blog, I would crawl under my covers and cry some fat tears. I came back to the blog and read the last post and I felt really inspired. I should really start following my own advice. This I talked about two years ago. I did not make it happen. Matter of fact, I am heavier now than I ever was before. I am pregnancy weight without a baby. Isn’t that a shame? But my determination for that dream has become stronger than ever. Because I want to be healthy, I want to walk up stairs without having to catch my breath for thirty minutes, I want to wear my heels without feeling knee pains later on, I want to look at my body in the mirror and not feel like a failure (I really don’t like the rolls on my back – I’m not kidding). So here’s to me on this beautiful journey. Let’s pick up where I left off. This blog will probably have some new stories in there because my mind has been very active and I really feel like writing. Here’s to me. This blog is going to be just about me. The very busy Dee…