New beginnings

It's been a very long time since I wrote a post. Believe me, it's not from a lack of will or material to compose. It's more of a "I've let this go in-updated for so long, how will I ever get everyone up to speed on what's been happening with me?!?!" situation.

So even though I've had all these amazing experiences and amazing ideas, I haven't blogged. I've put some skeletal ideas together but just haven't felt the urge to get it out there.

I'm restarting now. We will "talk" again soon.

Kitchen Fail

I'm going to preface this post by saying except for the next paragraph, this post has nothing to do with weight loss.

The preparing myself during the day for eating out at dinner has gone well, for the most part. Now it seems that my hubby is finally going to see the logic in not having our meals in restaurants so frequently! (Cross your fingers!)

Ok, now that that's out of the way, on to today's topic. My most recent kitchen failure.

After I got home from school, I was hankering for something sweet. I thought about making cupcakes but didn't really want to go to all that effort. Then it hit me, No Bake Chocolate Cookies! Mama used to make these for my sister and I as an after school snack for us to eat while watching Wishbone before we started our homework.

No Bake Cookies are SUPER easy. All you really need is some sugar, milk, butter, peanut butter, oatmeal, and vanilla. It seriously takes like 5 minutes. They turn out delicious. Go Ahead, visit the link and look at the yummy pic of delicious chocolateyness. I'll wait.

Anyway, typically, I'll assemble my ingredients before starting a recipe but I was all gung ho and started without fully taking an inventory of what I needed vs what I had on hand.

Because of this lady, my great grandmother, Lois Key or Granny as everyone called her:

I am well versed in the art of substitution. My husband has started to understand that sometimes my recipe substitution is a good thing and sometimes it's not. Just ask him to tell you about the chicken I made once in our old apartment, he's NEVER going to let me live that one down...

So, like the great granddaughter of the master substituter I am, I substituted my heiny off on this recipe.

Me: Oh, I don't have actual milk.... But I DO HAVE Almond milk. That's pretty much the same thing, I'll use that.
Me: Shoot! I'm out of oatmeal.... That's ok, I'll  use Special K in its place and make it more like corn flake cookies.
Me: I don't have enough peanut butter! Hmm. Maybe if I just add more sugar...

Turned out the only thing I did have on hand that was actually in the recipe was sugar, butter, and vanilla.

My husband would HATE how they turned out.  So let's keep it our little secret.

The Special K turned out kind of chewy and the extra sugar gave it kind of a "dirt" consistency. Overall, they have a pretty good flavor. But I wouldn't recommend doing these particular substitutions again. So, that's my latest kitchen fail, anyone else out there have substitutions go haywire?

Doctor's visit

I know it's not Sunday yet but I wanted to check in really quick. I had to go to the doctor as a sort of emergency visit today. I was having SEVERE pain. We still don't actually know what is causing the pain but at least I now have some pain medicine that's making it at least tolerable. However, I did have to get weighed. I was up 6 pounds from my last weigh in. So now I'm moderately depressed AND still in pain. It just reconfirms that I'm going to have to really get back to paying close attention to what I eat. I also expressed to the doctor my concern over the rapid increase in weight. She suggested a thyroid imbalance blood test and possibly further testing once I feel better. Just wanted to put this info out there so maybe I'll get better at monitoring myself.

How making the bed led to a weight loss epiphany

There's an old adage that goes, "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten."

I've always knew this to be true but never really thought about it, until now. This weekend, I would have a total of 6 days off from school and work. I had planned to maybe do a little organizing of our house and read two or three books. Basically, I wanted to be lazy for the sum total of those days. That didn't happen. The first day, I had breakfast with a dear friend and for some reason, it inspired me to not be dormant. I came home, changed the sheets, and made the bed.

That may not seem all that miraculous to you. But for me it's HUGE. Never in my life have I consistently had a made bed. I always brushed off the comments of people saying that making the bed just starts their day off right. Honestly, I'd tell myself, how could that make a difference at all? Wasn't it just hogwash? Now I know it's not.

Because I'd made the bed, it made me feel a little better about not being in our actual master bedroom, STILL after six months. I truly had gotten to the point that I was so dejected about our living situation that I really didn't care if it even looked halfway presentable. I'd gotten in the mindset of, because the house isn't done, my husband won't allow anyone to come over so what did it matter if the bed was made for just us? Let me tell you, it does. I really and truly feel better about the state of our home by completing that one little task.

It also made me think about what other barriers I might have created for myself that I didn't even realize. When I was single and doing so well on Weight Watchers, I only had meals in restaurants maybe once a week. So now that I can't fit any of the clothes in my closet and am getting frighteningly close to my start weight, one of the big things for me is; "I've gained so much weight because my husband wants to eat out all the time." Ok, let's examine this. First of all, I'm not blaming my husband, who I love, for my weight gain. Yes, ever since we started dating I have gained weight. And Yes, my husband wants to eat out almost every night, never mind that it isn't good for our pocket book OR our waist lines. But it's MY FAULT that I let it go to my waist. Eating in restaurants makes him happy. I don't really understand why, but it does. His happiness means so much to me and he gets so upset when I try to dissuade him, that I give in.Then I feel guilty about ever trying to change his mind. He works so hard and all he's asking is that I let someone else cook for and serve us, who am I to complain? So I give in, and what do I do when we go out? I eat what I WANT to eat, not what would help me stay on plan. Why? Because I don't want to go out to eat and not be satisfied. It really is a fear thing with me. I'm afraid that if I don't order the pasta or chicken strips or the potato soup and pretzels, that I'll be hungry later or I won't like the meal I ordered and it would have been a waste of money for me to have eaten something else in the first place.

Basically, I feel out of control in this area. After spending over two years of my life on plan, I know that if I were to have gone to a WW meeting and asked for help, I would have heard these suggestions:

1. Find something on plan at the restaurant to eat and/or choose a WW friendly restaurant.

2. If you've already eaten out X number of times, don't go with him.

3. Realize that the odds of you going to a restaurant when he gets home are good, and plan accordingly.

Option #1 When we go out, it's typically always my husband's choice in restaurant. That's not to say that he forces me to go to places I don't like, I DO like these places. But many times, these places are not at all WW friendly. For instance, there's a burger place that we LOVE to go to where literally everything is fried. So for our outings option #1 is almost always out.

Option #2 is not an option because my husband works often 7 days per week, 10-12 hours per day. I WANT to spend time with him. The argument could be made that if I stopped going, it would stop being pleasurable for him to go and we'd start eating at home more. But that brand of passive-aggressiveness is not for me.

Option #3: EPIPHANY ALERT: Failing to plan is planning to fail. One of my favorite leaders ALWAYS said that. I think what has been happening is that I've been just going with the flow and not taking responsibility for my eating in areas that I could control. The great thing about WW is its flexibility. If I were to start getting Activity Points during the day AND wisely use my Points for breakfast and lunch, eating out for dinner would become a non-issue. 

Effective immediately, this is my new strategy. I'll check in next Sunday and let you know how it works for me. 

It wasn't the end of the world, but it was...

The four horsemen didn't appear. Fire did not rain from the heavens. The world as we know it did not end. However it was the apocalypse of my re-fatting denial. It was this guy that made everything come crashing down: 

I had gone to the allergist in an effort to control my cat allergies so I could breathe for Christmas festivities. (No such luck, though I will be going back for treatments which have an 80% effective rate.) But I digress. 

In the nearly two years that I have been with my now husband, I have put on a whopping. 67 pounds. That's 268 sticks of butter, a little over 8 gallons of milk, a whole lotta weight. 

Talk about a wake up call. At the rate I'm going, it'll be no time before I completely gain back everything that I lost. It's time to get back to basics. First things first. Calculate points for what I'm eating. 

Starting with these little guys. Surprisingly, they weren't as bad as I thought at 5P+ each. Most of the Points come from the cream cheese icing. I'm hesitant to use reduced fat items in it because I think that it makes them incredibly tasty and satisfying, but my next post will detail any changes I do make to them. 

My next agenda item is to drink water like it's my job. Whenever I am doing my best, I drink about 80 ounces of water per day. To be brutally honest, I don't even remember when I last drank that much water. Starting today, I did.

Starting Wednesday, I will be attending one meeting per month at my old WW location in Bellville where I really feel a kinship with everyone and know they will help keep me on the straight and narrow. I'll attend meetings here in Sugar Land on the other weeks due to the financial strain multiple hour long trips would cause us. 

My husband and I have also committed to only eating out once per week. Over the past year or so, we've become increasingly dependent on eating in restaurants, sometimes several times per day and that HAS to stop. 

I'll also be posting here weekly, so feel free to stop by and chat. :)

The more things change, the more they stay the same

 Staying Up... In a Down World by Zig Ziggler was a total snooze. I couldn't get into it and ended up not even finishing it. I decided reading that particular motivational tome was not going to help me get back my mojo.

Left @ 210 pounds July 2012
Right @ 283 pounds January 2009

I started thinking about what helped in the past and came up with three ways to reclaim my lost enthusiasm.

1) The Weight Watcher's Message Boards! I remember when I was feeling my most revved about losing weight was when I visited these boards every day. Today I went there and within minutes I was feeling a little better about my journey. Turns out that I'm not the only one who has backslid after having made such strides at mass reduction.

2) Tracking. Earlier this year I had purchased a little notebook to use as a tracker. While I liked the journaling aspect of this particular style of tracking, I struggled with actually using it. I'd end up only doing it once a day which doesn't really do much good. I wanted the ease of tracking like I had with the Weight Watcher app but since I am following Momentum instead of PointsPlus, that tool is no longer available to me. So I ended up downloading a really cool app called MyNetDiary.  It has all of the spiffy things I liked about the WW app (integrated bar-code tracking, anyone?) and other things that I love like the ability to enter activity calories burned. AND a detailed daily nutrition readout:

 The only thing I haven't figured out is how I will make this go with Momentum points values which I find easier than the native calorie calculations. I just downloaded it today but so far I really think it's cool AND it was FREE!

3) Face to face meetings with like minded people. I used to attend WW meetings every week without fail. Since I am no longer doing PointsPlus and I needed to save money once I became a full time student, I haven't been to a meeting since March (I think...). I have not yet figured out a way to replicate this past motivator. I tried the weight loss buddy website but didn't get any replies. I was thinking of going to the message boards and seeing if anyone wanted to do meetings via Skype but just asking out of the clear blue seems kinda creepy to me. I guess I'll have to ponder on this a while longer. Any suggestions anyone?

Never give up

It's been a while since I wrote a blog post and for that I apologize.
Here lately, I have had a lot on my plate. Being a full time student and new home owner is tough business ESPECIALLY when you add two ruptured discs to the equation.
Today I decided to start reading some motivational books and see if that helps me get my weight loss mojo back. (It seems like nothing else has helped, so maybe this will do the trick.)
School starts back the last week in August, so my plan is to read one motivational book per week until then.

This week's book is: Staying Up... In a Down World by Zig Ziggler

I just downloaded it and I'll be ready to read in the morning.

What helps you when you need a little extra motivation?