Just Keep Swimming

So I've just weighed-in and I lost 1.8 lbs this week.  That's awesome and very appropriate and great and wonderful but I'm still disappointed.  (Aside: Oh lovely, I've just realized Blogger hasn't been spellchecking automatically all this time, so the previous posts are probably full of typos.)  I only lost .7 lbs last week, and I tried REALLY hard this week.  I worked the Weight Watchers program perfectly, and I'd earned 33 activity points last week that I didn't even use (activity points can be traded for more food).  Usually when my loss has been small the week before and I work really hard I get a couple pounds loss PLUS extra for catching up from being "good" the previous week and not losing much.

I know I'm doing good though, and I know it's not about a number on the scale, and I know my damned pants are all falling down so I'm probably losing fat and gaining muscle.  I'm still worried though that at this rate I won't make 250 before Burning Man and I won't be able to go (even though my linear regression now says I should be 245 by then, weight loss isn't linear, so it's a rough estimate).

So basically I'm doing ok but I was hoping for better than average, so I'm disgruntled.  It's a lot more fun to work hard and do really well!  For now my philosophy will be to just keep swimming (metaphorically because I don't have access to a pool).

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

So I've been exercising a whole bunch more than usual, but it's really not a *whole* lot.  It's a 20 min walk every day, which is pretty minor, and 20 minutes of actual aerobic exercise 3 times a week.  Today Zumba started at work though, a full 60 minutes of jumping around.  I love Zumba, but I didn't know if I'd be able to make it the whole hour.  I suited up with trepidation and hoped for a dance sort of instructor rather than a drill instructor/super athlete type.

The instructor I got was in between, which is pretty much the best sort.  That way I don't feel too entirely graceless (like with the sensual dance guy), and I didn't have to feel like I had no hope of being able to follow the instructor (like miss I'm a competitive cheerleader in my spare time).  It was pretty quick dancing though!  For my first time in over a year of Zumba I think I did pretty good.  I did have to modify some moves.  I never jump off the ground because I am heavy and I value my knees.  Also, when doing moves that involve torquing around so that there would be sideways pressure on my knees I modify it so I step into the position rather than "twirl" there...if that makes sense.  The good thing is that I made it the whole 60 minutes!

I could tell as soon as I got home that I'm going to be sore tomorrow.  I think it'll be ok though.

Yeesh, so far this blog is like a diet blog.  I'm not trying to plan too much about Burning Man yet until I know I have a ticket.  Hopefully that will be February 13.  I'm nervous about possibly not getting tickets.

What a difference a week makes?

I have to admit I'm feeling exceptionally well.  I've moved a lot more in the last couple weeks than I previously did, and almost all the food I've been eating is healthy.  I've also been trying to get at least a couple cups a day of vegetables, with a focus on things that are dark green and leafy.

So last week I blogged that I hated exercise because it was moving for moving's sake.  Today when I got done driving for two hours to pick up Evy I turned on a dance video game (Just Dance 3 for Kinect) because I thought jumping around for a while would be fun.  It was fun.

Small Victories

Today was the first day I successfully didn't buy a diet soda.  I made soda water at home and put lime juice in it, and I bought pomegranate green tea.  Now I'm having some more soda water with lime juice.        

I was extra hungry for some reason all day today, but I stayed within my points.  Sheldon helped by making a yummy mushroom, onion, and bok choy stir fry for dinner.

Yesterday was weigh-in day and I only lost .7 lbs.  That's half of what I was guessing would be an average loss last week.  I'm not worried though, my weight can go up or down by up to 7 pounds weekly for no good reason at all.

So, all positive news in little bits.

I look funny right now, bleaching my hair.   I tried to get a pic but the light's not flattering and I have bags under my eyes so you don't get one.

Exercise is a Pain in the Ass

If this blog post were about muscle soreness that title would be awesome.  It's not though.  For me, finding TIME to exercise is a pain.  Then even when I make time it's hard to make myself do it because...well because I'd rather be doing fun stuff, or eating, or napping, or pretty much anything but making my body move for nothing but its own sake.  Now though, I promised myself I'd work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for at least 20 minutes and also walk 20-30 minutes at lunchtime on each weekday.

The lunchtime walking isn't that hard.  I don't usually take any more time for lunch than it takes to get food and bring it to my desk, so having to take more time out for lunch is kind of a pain.  I feel like it looks bad if I'm not at my desk for long periods of time, so I have to tell myself that it's ok to be gone for 30 minutes at lunchtime and that it is expected that a normal person do that.  So I grab my cup and purse and go off walking around the buildings at my place of employment.  I grab the cup and purse because I'm too lazy to go back to my desk after the walk and before I get lunch!  We have a nice path around the buildings to walk around.  It slopes very gradually down and then around the back there's a significant hill to walk up.  There are usually people to watch and I can listen to my music or audio book so it's pretty nice.  I'm not looking forward to doing it in summer though.  After that I feel pretty good and lively, and I get my lunch and go back to my desk to work and eat.  I think the walk is helping me to stay much more alert in the afternoon.

Then at 5, or 6, or whenever I'm done working on MWF I head to the bathroom to change into gym clothes and then I'm off to the little gym at work.  I'm finding this pretty hard to make myself do!   It's evening and I'm tired and hungry and I wanna go home and rest and see my family!  Just today I was trying to talk myself into skipping just this once because I REALLY didn't feel like exercising.  Then the "good voice" in my head sternly said, "No, this is what you do now."  I dragged myself over to the bathroom and changed, got a drink of water and headed to the gym.  I got onto the elliptical and thought, "Those other people are probably thinking I made a New Year's resolution and I'll be gone by March, but I'll show them." (Isn't it lovely when everyone is mean to you in your head?)  I started going and forking hated it for about 5 minutes, and then it wasn't so bad.  I listened to my book and watched Castle on the TV and ogled Nathan Fillion for the next 15 minutes and I was done.  I felt less tired afterwards too.  It's not so bad really, it's just the looking forward to it that's hard.

Diet Soda

One of my biggest struggles in trying to get healthy is trying to stop drinking diet cola.  There is more and more research that points to the fact that diet soda is REALLY bad for you, and I drink at least a half gallon a day.

Besides lovely things like kidney problems, it’s been found that diet soda actually contributes to obesity!  From what I understand, the sweetness of artificial sweeteners tricks your body into thinking it had sugar, and triggers an insulin response.  Because you didn’t eat any carbs/sugars though, the insulin doesn’t have any sugar to process, and you have a state called hyperinsulinemia.  Now your body thinks it needs food, because insulin is high and there are no sugars for it to process.  The result is you get hungry and want to eat, and you don’t feel energetic because your body thinks you may be starving and conserves as much as possible.   If at the same time you’re taking in more calories than you need (imagine a typical burger, fries, and a diet coke scenario), the extra insulin very efficiently helps store the extra as fat.  All this from diet soda!

Ok, so I know why it’s bad for me, but why can’t I stop?!  I’m actually down from a gallon a day a few years ago, so that’s a start, but right now I’m having two particular problems.  One is in the morning on my way to work.  That’s when I really feel like I NEED a soda, because I use it for my wake-me-up caffeine kick.  My solution here would be to drink iced tea instead, but iced tea takes 5 minutes I hate spending in the morning, plus a cup from home I have to cart around all day and then bring home and wash.  I know, first world problems, but seriously, diet soda is at McDonalds, and I go there anyway, and it’s only a dollar!  Ugh.  The second time is easier.  It’s at lunch.  I already have my soda cup from breakfast, and a refill is 50 cents ay the cafeteria.  I have a choice there though, I can get iced tea instead.  My current roadblock is that the iced tea is usually out when I get there, so I get…a diet soda.  Aaargh.

Corporate Wellness

I know corporate wellness programs are, at the bottom line, all about being good for the corporation.  I'm also aware of the worries about letting your company collect a bunch of health data about you, and that they may use the information against you, and so on.   In any case, I'm not sure why I'm starting this post out this way, because what I want to say is that I *love* my corporate wellness program.

First off, we have an awesome cafeteria full of healthy food.  It's possible to get a cheeseburger, or even a chicken and bacon quesadilla, but you have to ask for them special.  All of the everyday entrees and grill specials are about 12 weight watchers points, and they have a special "300 Calorie bowl" which is a small portion of the daily entree that has 6 or 7 weight watchers points.  It's not icky stuff either, it's yummy.  Tacos with rice and beans or turkey lasagna with garlic bread are a couple of the usual entrees, and they try not to have the same thing too often so it's hard to get bored.  All the food is cheap too.  The 300 Calorie bowl is $3.83, and when you refill your own cup with any drink it's only 50 cents.  They also have a salad bar with a TON of fresh, lightly steamed, and grilled veggies, and all the dressings are light.  Oh, and they have a tossed to order salad every day too, the cobb is divine.  It's like a healthy eater's dream restaurant, and it's 50 yards from my desk.

As if that weren't already a big help they have a bunch of programs to help everyone get/stay healthy, and almost all of them are free.  The Weight Watchers program I'm on is free, comes with free e-tools, and the meetings are right in the cafeteria.

We also have a walking program that's also free, and comes with a free pebble activity monitor. The pebble is basically a motion detecting device (not GPS!) that syncs with an automatic base station at work to upload my activity to a social-type website where everyone can kind of chat and encourage everyone.  It also tells me my step goal for the day.  So far I've made my step goals every weekday.

For the people who just need baby steps to fitness (and what I did all last year) we can do the Daily Challenge. Anyone can join that one and it's fun.  They email and/or text you something really tiny, yet healthy to do every day, and you can also develop a social network on the site and read about how people did their task and encourage people, and even form pacts with people that you will both complete the next five days worth of tasks.  Doing tasks gets you points, and your points grow trees, graphics of trees, um, that's not the most exciting bit of the site.

Then there's the on site gym with plenty of cardio machines, and last but not least we have free fitness classes right on site, so soon I'm be doing Zumba Mondays at 5:05.  I'm not sure how many people do the fitness classes, but its really odd that so few people use the gym.  I'm trying to go three times a week, and I go right after work and there are usually two or three people in there, and it's still January.  It should be packed, right?

Oh yeah, if we do some of the above free stuff, we get a discount on our health insurance and an extra day off.  It's not a cheesy discount either, it's like a hundreds of dollars kind of discount.  I could be all pessimistic and say if I don't act healthy they make me pay more for my health insurance, but for once I'll be an optimist.  It's like they're paying me to get healthy!

Weekends

Weekends are hardest for me as far as eating correctly.

On weekdays I typically grab an egg mcmuffin for breakfast (I know, it's not diet food, but it is the healthiest fast food breakfast sandwich at 300 Cal), then go to my work cafeteria for a healthy lunch, and then try to make or have something for dinner which fits within whatever Weight Watchers  points I have left for the day, and sometimes I have three or four points left for a small sweet or snack at night.

Weekends are all forked up.  I get up at odd times, scratch up whatever's in the house for breakfast, and then anything can happen.  We might go out or go to a friend's, or we may have friends over.  Alcohol flows, and alcohol is fattening!  Desserts happen, or restaurants.

I try hard to plan for the things that I know are happening.  If I know I'm going out for a meal I'll look up the restaurant online and see if I can find or estimate the nutritional values.  Then I look up the menu and decide what I'm having ahead of time, and budget the rest of the day's points around that.

Today I slept really late and so I just skipped a whole meal.  It turns out that it worked out really well as far as my Weight Watchers points.  It's been easy to stay within my allotted points because I got to add a whole half a meal worth of food to the other two meals.

Tomorrow's going to be trickier.  We're going to a small party that starts at 2pm, and it's a Happy Hour kind of theme, so there will be lots of snack food and plenty of alcohol.  We're going to bring ribs, but I secretly don't really like ribs much.  I think I may skip breakfast and have a filling healthy lunch before I go.  That way I'll be able to have a drink or two, and just have tastes of food.  Then later I'll try to estimate what I ate and drank and see if there are enough for dinner, or if I'll have to resort to greens with vinegar (zero Weight Watchers points).

Wish me luck!


Oh, I got a neat tip from a co-worker on Friday.  I don't like blueberries much because they're so bland, but she said to mix them into yogurt.  I just tried it with vanilla yogurt and it was awesome!

Statistics

So I mentioned before that I've been on Weight Watchers for a while, since August 22nd to be exact.  I decided to make a graph of my progress to see about what weight I could be by the time Buring Man rolls around.  I decided to use a simple linear regression.  I know weight loss isn't linear, but it's a quick and dirty graph.  So I graphed my weight since August 22 and projected out to the start of Burning Man, which is August 26.  The results were a bit disheartening:

Basically, if I keep going the way I am now without changing anything, I'd probably be around 275 lbs by Burning Man.  That's only 11 lbs less than I am now, and it would NOT get me off my apnea machine even if I work to get much more fit.  I'll need to work harder than this!

I decided to start from the first of the year instead.  If you see above though there's a weirdo spike right there.  I'm not sure what happened that week, The scale may have been wonky, or perhaps I was retaining a bunch of water.  I can gain up to seven pounds of water as a monthly cycle thing, so that spike may be consistent with that.  In any case, I threw that point out, not because it was so much higher, but because I was seven pounds less the next week, and it would make for a rediculous projection.  So I was left with only two data points for the year, a 1.4 lb loss.  That seems like a reasonable amount though.  If I'm very careful and stay on-plan all the time I think I can acheive a 1.4 lb loss per week fairly easily.

So here's the new graph which shows an average loss of 1.4 lbs a week:

I know, they're not such pretty graphs, as I said, quick and dirty.  So that puts me at about 242 pounds.  That should get me off the apnea machine before Burning Man. 

So now I know what I have to do.  All I have to do is do it!  Of course, that's the hard part.  So far this year I've tracked my points every day except my birthday and stayed within them.  I've also added exercise.  I'm trying to get to the gym at work three times a week and do at least 20 minutes of cardio.  I'm also trying to walk at lunch time for 20 minutes, but sometimes that's not possible, as work can get hectic.

Happy Friday!

An Introduction

Hi!  Welcome to the third blog I’ve started.  Hopefully I won’t abandon it as soon as I did the others!  This blog has a bit more purpose though.  I’ve wanted to go to the Burning Man festival for years, and I’ve picked this year to finally do it.  I have a few stumbling blocks though, and I want to keep my Burning Man goal in mind for the next eight months in hopes of overcoming my issues and actually a) make it to Burning Man, and b) have an enjoyable time being at Burning Man and participating in the community.

My biggest issue is my weight.  Right now I’m 286 lbs.  I’m only 5’3” tall, so I’m a BIG girl.  I don’t usually talk about my efforts to lose weight.  I’m not quite sure why, so I am now.  I’ve been on Weight Watchers since August, and when I work the program it works great.  Sometime around Thanksgiving though I stopped counting my points and gained back all but two pounds of the weight I lost.  Boo!  I’ve been back on the program for 3 weeks now (it wasn’t a resolution, it just worked out that way) and I’ve lost almost all of what I’ve gained over the holidays.

What does this have to do with Burning Man?  Well right now I have to sleep with an apnea machine.  If I don’t I stop breathing and wake myself up dozens of times a night.  I get up in the morning miserable and exhausted.  The machine is high wattage too, so it wouldn’t be feasible to take it into the desert with a deep cycle battery.  It would drain the battery in less than one night.  My apnea is because I have a big fat neck.  It goes away when I get below about 260.

In addition, I’m quite out of shape, so even if I didn’t have apnea I don’t think I could have much fun at Burning Man.  Right now just walking a mile makes my feet hurt, and standing for a long time makes my back hurt.  I can’t tolerate heat either.  I’m so well insulated my body doesn’t cool itself very efficiently and moving around in the heat makes me feel ill. 

My second biggest issue is that I have anxiety disorder along with a touch of PTSD sprinkled in.  For everyday activities I do really well.  I’m on a medication which takes the daily anxiety away without dulling my mind.  Big things like Burning Man are harder though.  Thinking about having to get tickets, gather everything we need for a week in the desert, and find ways to make myself useful to the community is overwhelming, and that doesn’t even count the anxiety I have about actually going and being there!  Hopefully I’ll be able to use this blog to help get me through it all.

I have a few other smaller stumbling blocks as well.  I have a 10 year old daughter with special needs and a full time job.  Between the two of those and sleeping, 90% of my time is already taken up.  My dear long-suffering husband gets some of the additional 10%, much less than he deserves, and I do have a fondness for sitting and chilling in front of the computer for a couple hours each night.  I’m an introvert, so sitting quietly really helps me relax and recharge.  As such, integrating the preparation for an event as big as Burning Man is going to be difficult at best.  I hope if you’re reading this that you’ll continue to read and cheer me on.  I’ll need all the help I can get.