WW and Biggest Loser Tuesday...

I am so happy that Biggest Loser is back on, although none of the contestants have so far grabbed my heartstrings the way Abby did or played the game to annoy like Tracey did. They lost mad weight last week though!

On my own weight loss (and I promise, I am faithfully documenting in pictures every week, I'm just not at a point where I'd like to show them yet), things are still going ok, just slowing down a bit. Which is totally normal for this point. Christmas was harder than I thought it was going be and I broke down more than I wanted to and being sick helped in the weight loss efforts but not in the "right" way. I know I was losing lots of muscle weight instead of fat weight. I got totally rocked at my Tuesday class at the gym today :(

Weekends are tough when it comes to sticking to "the plan" but I do really well on most weekday by making and packing lunches and cooking point friendly dinners. I thought I had found an illusive 1 Point oatmeal and today I re-did the math and found out that each packet is actually 3 Points, which really made me sad since I bought two boxes last week. Blast! So even though the eating continues to be a big battle for me, I know I'm making progress and making better choices at restaurants. Most of all, I am feeling better about myself every time I get dressed and clothing fits!

I went to a yoga class yesterday and I seriously cannot recommend it enough. I'm usually so exhausted on Wednesdays but I am bound and determined to go to class tomorrow evening just because it was so relaxing. My upper body is sore and there were a couple of things that I wasn't able to do as well as I wanted but overall, the class felt so good and was an hour well spent. I hadn't been to yoga in years and I don't remember it being as great as yesterday. So, I think I'll be a yogi for the time being, at least until the weather is nice enough for outdoor activities. If you go to a gym that offers it, consider going.

Grabbag!

• Upon venturing out yesterday, I discovered that our friendly neighborhood train station has nearly been completed. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it but they are doing an overhaul of the Brown Line and making it totally handicapped accessible. It's been a complete cluster of an operation and they spent years closing down the smaller stations to completely overhaul them. Since our local station also serves the Red Line and is a main transfer point, they couldn't feasibly close it down and the construction has been dragging on FOREVER. I'm sure they are still working on it (like the elevators) but all I needed to see was that the side of the station on my side of the street and nearest to the car that I want to be in was DONE and OPEN!! I was about to be that scary random person and do a jump for joy on the street. It's probably going to shave about 5 minutes from my day both in the morning and afternoon. It's the little things in life that really get me jazzed!


• I had a good weigh in at WW, which is hilarious considering I probably gained 3-6 lbs during Christmas week. Being so sick had one benefit! On the bad side, I tried to do 30 Day Shred yesterday and it was a huge FAIL. I made it a little more than half way through. Why does being sick take away all your strength? I was feeling so strong before. It's sad because I probably only lost muscle weight for my weigh in. Grrr. But I'm down 11 lbs so far so I think that is something to be excited about. I'm enjoying the way that my clothes are starting to actually fit me.


• Today I can finally wear my contacts again, no more eyedrops and no more glasses! I'm heading down to the MAC store later to begin the process of getting new eye makeup. I only have a few more days of the strep antibiotics and then I'll be back to being medicine free. For awhile there, I was thinking I needed one of those pill holders to remind me what I was supposed to take and when. My meds were confusing!


• We signed up for our first 2010 run yesterday. It's the 8K Shamrock Shuffle at the end of March. We missed it last year for a wedding so I am pretty excited. The past couple of years, the weather has been awful, snowy awful so I will be keeping my fingers crossed between now and then that it ends up being a nice day. Now, to get back in fighting shape for the run!


• We are hosting two students from my alma mater, Texas A&M, over the weekend. The Student Center sponsors a really awesome trip for students that are interested in local grad schools. I'm a really bad member of the local Aggie group so hopefully this will kickstart me into being more involved. And it'll be a fun experiment having two extra females in our teeny condo for the weekend. Hopefully they will enjoy our fine city and our fresh and new neighborhood train station :)

A successful weigh in

I had my weekly WW meeting last night and it went well. I tortured myself all day because I weighed in on the Wii Fit in the morning and it didn't read what I wanted it to. Then I remembered the so-called curse of Week 2 on the Biggest Losers and started to freak out that I'd suffer the same fate and have a gain. At my real weigh in, things were right where they needed to be. In fact, I got in trouble with WW Online when I came home and put my weigh in results on the tracker. It says that I'm losing too fast but the computer can't take things into account like the fact that the first week my Thanksgiving weight literally fell off. My loss this past week was much more to standards and it's more like what I'll be expecting on a regular basis.

Part of this is hard because the people that sit in meetings that I "look up to", meaning the ones that are in control of their weight, are often lifetime members that have hit their goal and just come each week to maintain. I realize that for me, this may not be a thing to do for a few months, and more like something I will have to do at least part-time forever. I am not blessed with a high metabolism. If anything, my genes work against me. I also think that a lot of the foods that we put in our bodies now have been processed to make them more inexpensive in monetary cost but they are extremely expensive in cost of the weight they put on our bodies. I am lucky that I have an literal obsession with tracking my points on the computer everyday. I think if I can keep that up to a certain degree over time, that I'll be ultimately successful enough to not put the weight back on. I never want to feel the way I did when I went to my first weigh in and saw that awful number on the screen. For someone at my height, it was not a good number.

I am a little worried about handling everything when we go home to Texas but I set a goal for myself to not have any bean and cheese tacos while I'm there. For those of you who know me, you know that I usually set the exact opposite goal to see how many bean and cheese tacos I can have while I'm home. It's going to be a tough one but those buggers are worth almost 1/3 of my daily points value for just ONE TACO! My mom is going to take me to a meeting on Monday so I can have my regular weigh in while I'm there and I know I can stay on track if I work at it. Since I'll be missing my regular Tuesday butt-kicking at the gym, I'm thinking about bringing the 30 Day Shred home with me.

(just FYI, I am still only on Level 1 because I refuse to move on until I can do the whole thing just like the advanced girl and I still suck at the pushups)

And the high for Thursday is 16...

That's what the world looked like outside my front window yesterday morning. Cute, no? Yesterday's snow was not so bad. In fact, it was almost enjoyable (except for the time that I got a Zipcar that couldn't drive in it, I had no idea how awesome my AWD SUV was until I was driving a Mazda 3 that was skidding all over the place). But most of it melted during the day off of the sidewalks and there was just a cute little dusting around.

I woke up this morning and had a bad feeling based on the fact that it was extremely dark in the bedroom. I pulled open a shade in the living room to find more snow and non-shoveled sidewalks. Blast! The weather man just said that we should think of today as a "marathon, not a sprint", meaning snow all day long with the heaviest stuff to come overnight and into tomorrow. Craptastic. We'll do the same thing I did last year and keep a tally of how many times I slip and fall on ice. So far, we're at:

Winter, 0

Jen, 0

Last year, I never figured out how to tally points for myself but I think that I will give myself a point for every time that I start to slip and manage to hold on. We'll see what the score ends up in May when we can safely assume that the snow and ice is done. Yes, I said May, the winter never ends up here.

When I moved here in Summer '08, we had a get together with some close friends and my two roomies where we discussed things we were looking forward to about our move to Chicago. My big thing was the winter: surviving it and becoming a true Chicagoan. I'd lived in St Louis and Northern VA for winters before but this would be my true initiation into a "real" winter. That was before we had the worst winter in 39 years.

This year, I'm so over it and it hasn't even started. I just want to fast forward to the end of winter and be done with it. I'm considering registering for the half marathon in Austin in January just so I have another excuse to go home to TX. I will never understand how people can be natives of this place (well, until next summer rolls around and then my love affair with Chicago can pick up where it left off).

I'll try not to be so cranky about winter but I can't promise anything. I have a slight problem with my extremeties. Adam likes to call my hands and feet "ice talons" during the winter because they get so cold and I like to grab him on the neck to warm them. But I think I just might have the worst internal temperature regulation of any human being because I also sweat buckets when it's about 80 degrees. I just need to shut up and embrace the fact that I am a freak.

This picture is from the train station nearest our house, I'm not sure if you can see it but whomever decided that it would be cute to decorate the streetlights with SNOWFLAKES should be punched. Dude, rub it in much? Were they out of cute bells or wreaths or Christmas trees? Snowflakes would be far more appropriate in a place like San Antonio, where they don't actually have to deal with feet of snow every year.

Now, that I've sufficiently wasted a ton of your time with my winter rants, on to more postive things. I had my first big WW weigh in last night. I pretended that I was on Biggest Loser (finale tonight, go Amanda!) and went to the gym and made myself do a "last chance workout". Good times! I won't go into specifics about my loss but we can say that I lost all I gained during Thanksgiving weekend and a little bit more! WOO HOO! I have a long way to go to get to my personal goal, but when I get there I'll be in a place I never thought I could go.

I know that not every week will be as big as this first one, but not every week includes birthday cookie cake. I'm sure just cutting my alcohol portions made a huge difference. My love for drinking pints of wheat beer is not a good thing for weight loss and I'm learning to treat those types of things as treats and not daily life. Plus, the portion control issue is where I was having the most trouble. Every bar/restaurant here serves delicious tater tots and they usually serve you a portion that looks like 3 Super Sonic Sized portions and I usually eat quite a big amount of them. So, re-learning how to go out to eat has and will be my biggest battle. I'm encouraged and ready. I'm pretty sure that at my weight right now, I wouldn't be able to fit in my wedding dress and my mom would maybe kill me for that, not to mention how embarrassed I'd be. SO... gotta keep working!!

Day 2 of being on "The Plan"

Yesterday, I went to the grocery store and pretty much filled my basket with goodies from the produce section. I can't stand trying to navigate the place with the rolling cart so I always go the hand-held route and I have to tell you, my basket was HEAVY!

I regret jumping the gun a little bit because I went to my first WW meeting last night and the topic was all the different products that everyone has found at the grocery store that are good for snacking and low in points. If that's how every meeting goes, I like it so far! It was kind of elementary on the encouragement level with the stickers and what not but I can roll with it. It was almost exactly how I thought it would be, lots of people with different reasons to be there.

One thing I forgot was about how all the leaders are actually following the plan themselves. I stayed after the regular meeting for a getting started session and she showed us her before picture. During the meeting, I was staring at this (pardon my french) skinny bitch and thinking, "what does she know about battling weight?". Um, open mouth, insert foot.

So, I just finished figuring out what I'm going to eat today to earn my points. I went a little bit over, but I figure I need a bigger breakfast than normal because I have my mega-hard gym class today and I don't want to pass out. I feel like if I make the healthy choices that I know I should have been making all along that I can have some success with this.

I'm glad I'm making the choice to start now but OHMYGOODNESS is Christmas ever gonna be HARD HARD HARD!!! Thank goodness we are having Italian food as our main meal at my Grandmother's house on Christmas Day because I can just make a huge gigantic salad with all sorts of point free goodies and fill my plate with that and eat the pastas as sides. UG UG UG! But people, I just want you to know that right now there is an almost entire Oreo Cheesecake, 2 chocolate donuts, ample Oreo balls and other chocolate dipped goodies and an almost entire pack of Double Stuffed Oreos in my fridge and pantry. It's taking all the willpower that I have to not tear into the leftovers from Thanksgiving. But neverfear, I have all the willpower I need just by pulling up that mental picture of my muffin top from the weekend. Obviously, I remember it as being about 10 times worse than it is, so I ain't going near the junk food this week. I have to save all my extra points because I have cookie cake coming this way on Saturday!!!

Muffin Top

I had one of those horrifying lightbulb moments this weekend. And by one of those moments, I mean several. Starting with eating that second plate of almost exclusively carbs on Thanksgiving and ending with buying jeans in what is an unholy size yesterday. The new jeans were primarily because I looked in the mirror on Saturday night while putting on makeup and since I wasn't doing the "traditional full-length mirror pose" of sucking in to look good, I saw it. I had/have a HUGE MUFFIN TOP! and I was in jeans that I thought fit me pretty well when I was in one of my fatter phases about 2 years ago. As much as I'd like to attempt to justify this, I don't really believe that jeans slowly shrink over time of washing and drying them. I think, in fact, that I have actually been expanding over time. OH and I broke the belt loop on another pair of jeans on Friday when I was yanking them over my slightly larger bum (maybe because of all those muscles?) and the new muffin top. I'm having some wardrobe malfunctions that are just not acceptable, ok?

Generally, I try to eat healthy but I know my portion sizes need work. Well, portion sizes and the fact that I routinely eat a couple (or few) meals a week at bars. And while bar food may be the most wonderful food taste-wise, it's generally fried and has little to no nutritional value. Ug. Luckily, I like a few vegtables and currently have a mega-obsession with Subway's veggie delite. I know that if I make a few swaps, I can work on this muffin top problem. The problem is that I feel like I am constantly fighting this battle with myself of about 15 flex pounds that are constantly creeping back on. My biggest problem is that the easiest way for me to lose weight is to never work out and just not eat very much which is an unhealthy and not very successful for the long term way to lose weight. SO... I blogged about it weeks ago and after seeing myself in that mirror I realize that I must take action and that action is going to be Weight Watchers.

It sucks but I feel like I need a way to better control my weight. I enjoy going to the gym and working out, I just don't enjoy the way that I constantly feel starvation when I do. And it's unhealthy to yo-yo about with 15 lbs. I would like to lose them and begin to believe that they are gone forever. So, here's your chance to hold me to it. I want to do this and I want to feel like I gave it a good effort and really enjoy looking back at the upcoming onslaught of wedding year photos. And I got a new digital camera as an early birthday present so I'd like to feel really good about the way I look in the new pictures.