Overwhelm

Oh boy.  Still being very blessed. FINALLY talked to my sister last night, and she agreed to move out of her (and mine and Lisa's and the grandkids house) this summer. That right there is a major miracle. So I know the Lord is helping me with this but--oh wow, the sheer amount of work (think the show hoarders) coupled with the poor health/inertia/unrealistic ideas of my sister, makes me want to run to the other side of the world. What I did was to lick the bowl of our chocolate melting cakes much more than I should (Silver Star for yesterday). I'm greatly relieved that this phone call is over, but will be even more relieved when all of this is over.

Conference

Feeling blessed in every way. A whole week and still going strong. :)  Yes, I would love more food. No, this isn't exactly easy, but I can feel the Lord's help in this. Actually, Lord's help isn't quite right. It's abundantly clear that I can't do this at all even with divine help. What the Lord is doing, is pretty much lifting this problem from me. My job is to not get in His way and let Him recreate my body and my life. So in a way, I'm "helping" Him--not the other way around. And my help is about as helpful as a two year "helping" to make dinner.  But that's ok. It's how the two year old learns. Eventually, I'll learn too.

Dave made a different kind of pancake this morning. Usually, I have no problem just eating one, but today that was tough. Realized, it's probably going to be more difficult in the future too, because I'm coming into breakfast hungrier.  No matter, one was enough.  Really delicious lunch of homemade bread with spinach dip, and I cleaned up my recipe collection yesterday and rediscovered the weight watcher truffles. YUM! Made a batch of those. They're tiny, but only 45 calories of dense chocolate yumminess.

I had meant to walk up to campus because I had to return a wii game to the library. But it was wet and cold and I was still a little tired from Friday's effort. So decided to call today a true day of rest. Feels like a smart decision, not just a cop out.  I love that in this life I can keep trying and trying again.  I love the saying that the road might be long, but it is always directly beneath our feet.

UP

So far, so good. Last night I discovered that all it takes to make me happy is about 1500 calories per meal . I had a wonderful pizza dinner--pepperoni lovers pizza, breadsticks, wings, salad. I could have eaten more, but I'd "only" earned 600 extra calories. It really felt good. For wellness time, I walked and did the rowing machine. Then I did another 15 minutes of walking to be sure I did the full hour. Then the weather was nice after work and I went on my hike. Holy tamales, it went straight up hill! I huffed 45 straight up, and then minced straight down for another 45. This brought me back to my office. I picked up my stuff and walked another half hour home. I was good and tired and I thoroughly enjoyed my big pizza dinner. Later, I finished off the night with a couple of girl scout cookies and a mini hershey bar. Perfect.

Today is 1700. Hard for me, but although my choices probably weren't the wisest, I liked them. At the moment I'm at 1500 because I want dessert. I had two orange rolls and some sausage for breakfast. A random lunch of snacky stuff---spinach crab dip, homemade chips, tomato soup, an apple and some brie. No much of any of that. And for dinner I had ONE count it, ONE piece of pizza. It might be the first time in my life I've ever eaten just one slice. ONE slice pizza, one buffalo wing and a cabbage salad with three olives. I could have easily eaten 4 times as much, but really, I'm ok.  And now, we finally filed our taxes, and I'm going to have one of Catherine's pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and some hot chocolate with whipped cream (diet, naturally).  

Exercise-wise, I was still a little stiff and tired, so I did a gentle 45 min of wii with a lot of yoga and 15 min of gentle bike. I'll give myself 100 extra cal for that. One thing I always forget, is how well I sleep when I exercise. I slept like a rock last night.

A little bit down

YAY!!! 3 pounds down so far and I don't think it's all water weight either. When I weighed last week at 204 I'm not at all sure my body was finished packing on the pounds from the previous two week orgy so I'm quite pleased with 201 (or as pleased as anyone can be with such a weight).  the working out is really helping.

Glad ice-cream diet day is over. Actually, I did pretty well, but I gave myself a silver star--there was just a bit too much nibbling I think. I didn't get to eat the ice-cream early as planned darn it. I was derailed in this and also my harp practicing, by a free magic show at the library.  I love magic, so I saw that, went to harp and didn't get my ice-cream till after 9:00.  Someday, when I really learn how to eat within reason, life will be so much nicer.  At the library they had crackers and cheese. I'll take crackers and cheese over ice-cream any day. Even last night I realized that I could have had those instead of the ice-cream, but I'd been thinking ice-cream all week and by that time I was determined.

Today is 1800 cal. Plus earning calories for pizza tonight. :) It will be interesting to see if I think the pizza will be worth the work.  I walked to work (doesn't count), Did 1/2 hour of rowing (that's for weight loss) and walked 15 min. Later, I'll walk another 15 min (that's 1/2 for extra calories). After work, rather than walking home, I'm going to walk up the hill to the 36th street trail head and continue walking until 45 min have passed, then I'll turn around and walk back to the office (for another 1 1/2 hours of earned calories) and walk home (doesn't count).  That gets me home at 6:30 with TWO hours of earned calories. That's 600 extra calories to use on pizza.

Lastly, I love this image from Fitness Nerd



He says, and I can't agree more, that weight loss is less like a straight journey, even one with bumps and hills, and much more like a labryinth. YES!! Lot's of dead ends and things that don't work.

Brain Games

Wow---an actual original idea about weight loss. Thanks again 300poundsdown!  There's an article from Psychology today http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/choke/201107/training-the-brain-avoid-temptation that talks about how stronger executive function in the brain (like memory) helps with impulse control. OKAY! I need to take luminosity more seriously. My memory is getting weaker by the minute--might be time to actually do something about it.

In the meantime---today is ice-cream diet day. Happily, it's one of those days where it feels as though I have plenty of calories (I don't, only 1200). But I was careful about dinner. Both dinner and breakfast have very few calories so I have a reasonably hefty lunch AND amazingly two snacks.  Good snacks too. Popcorn and then blueberries and brie cheese. One thing that will be helpful about today is the timing of the bowl of butter pecan ice-cream. Normally, I like to have desserts--well, food in general, at the end of the day. It signals that the work of the day is over and that I'm relaxing. But today, I have harp lesson unusually late at 8:30. It would be better if I ate the ice-cream earlier. If I do that then the ice-cream will be just what it is--ice-cream. Yummy, but that's all. That's an emotion that I need to practice.

The other emotion I need to practice is patience. My brain is fine with the fact that my sweater is still too tight. My emotions on the other hand are complaining loud and clear--after all, I've been good for what? FIVE whole days now! I feel great and have lost that bloated feeling. But my clothes are still tight! What's the problem???  Sometimes it would be so nice to be a vulcan.

Still doing well

Hope makes all the difference. I'm a little hungry today, but it's okay, because I COULD, if I wanted to, eat anything I wanted---I have the calories saved up. But I don't want to. I want to eat in the wildcat room on Monday, and I want to eat Pizza on Friday and I really feel as though I CAN and it will be all right.  I'll be able to easily save up 1,000 for Monday even though I can't work out extra tonight because I have to go to SLC. I had wellness time at work so I at least earned 150. Tomorrow and Saturday I'll be able to get what I need for the 1000. Then for Friday, whatever I earn on Friday will be used that day for PIZZA!!  YAY!  I spoken many times about "exceptions" I swear, they happen almost daily---but I finally feel as though I have an effective way to deal with them.

Best of all, even if I don't lose weight, I still feel as though I'm doing my body good. After all, all this effort is at least preventing me from gaining weight very fast. But I think I am and will lose weight this way. Feeling a bit hungry usually means that I'm losing weight.  Today I've had fun food---somehow those delicious enchiladas that Catherine made just don't sound all that great--I think it's the tortilla---maybe I'll throw out the tortilla and have them with fresh homemade corn chips tomorrow instead. That sounds much better.

Today, I had a Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich, a banana and milk. Then for lunch I had--31 gorgonzola crackers from Trader Joe's, 6 olives, 2 string cheeses, 6 slices of ham, a cup of soup and best of all, one of those reeses peanut butter eggs.

Dinner will be great too. I only earned $5.25 in March. I gave Catherine the cash and told her to buy me a treat. She did great! Fancy bread and brie.  That will be dinner tonight!!

Tomorrow is ice-cream diet day. Classic quack diet stupidity. No way I'd want to do this for more than a day, but I'm looking forward to it tomorrow, because the butter-pecan ice-cream has been in the fridge since Saturday.  SO---1200 cal, then a big dish of ice-cream. I'm thinking of an egg-white omelete and some light toast for breakfast--that's going to be under 200, then I've already planned for stuffed portobello's for dinner--I think I can add either some spaghetti squash, or cabbage salad or both for practically nothing. That will leave me quite a bit to have a satisfying lunch. I'm thinking it will be ok to have a light dinner because the ice-cream will shortly follow and that will fill me up both in body and spirit. You simply can't fool the body. All these websites that talk about how much brocolli you can have for almost nothing? True. But if you tried to fool yourself by eating 6 cups of brocolli for lunch and nothing else, your body would know that it hadn't had enough calories and would complain. At least mine would.

Anyway, then it's Friday with hopefully good weather so I can go hiking, then a nice pizza dinner.

This is tough. But it's a tough I can tolerate. I've decided that finding a plan to deal with obesity is the same as finding any other medication to help any other disease. You simply have to figure out what the patient can tolerate.

A better day

What a difference a day can make! Dave brought me flowers, but the day continued to be annoying. One annoying thing that worked out much to my benefit was trying to turn in that grant application. I couldn't find where to turn it in, so I went to the place where the department was housed--the Miller building at the bottom of campus, next door to my building. Nope. I had to turn it in to the committee chair who works in...drum roll....FACILITIES MANAGEMENT! Are you kidding??? FM is is at the extreme opposite end of campus well above the stadium!! Weber State is built on a mountainside--it gives real meaning to the phrase, "it's up there."  There was nothing for it but to take a deep breath and dash up the mountain as fast as I could.  I made it in time, but without the letter from my supervisor, I had to hope that she'd get it to me and that they'd let me add it to the packet. This was all definitely the 1/2 hour of exercise I had missed on wellness time.

Bless her heart--she gave it to me first thing this morning. I made the mandatory 17 copies (not kidding, don't ask), and went charging back up the hill. I made it---my stuff was still in his in-box, so I slipped in the letters. Phew, in every sense of the word.

Meanwhile, food was pretty good yesterday--pecan day is one of the better flavor point days. I really liked the chicken.  Today is 1700 and I'm struggling a bit--but I had a poptart for breakfast and that atones for a lot. The problem today is the actual counting--I guesstimated that my lunch (enchilada and corn) was about 500 cal. Okay. Well, it's gradfest and they gave us all $5 lunch vouchers and it's taco tuesday. People have been raving about the street tacos for ages. I got two and some beans and I'm guessing it's about 600 cal? Not impressed with the tacos.  They were plentiful enough and with the beans they should have been filling, but I'm not really full today. I still have 1/2 a muffin and some celery to nibble on, but I'm at work till 6 and am going straight to a meeting after that. Dinner is also a little hard to estimate--himmel and erde--potatoes, turkey sausage, apples and onions. Very healthy and filling, but difficult to dish out exactly 1/5 of the pan or whatever. Oh well, my best will have to do. I'm proud of myself for saying no to all the goodies that are all around me today. I'm also hoping to put in another 40 min of exercise. I need to collect calories---our book club will be meeting soon, and there's going to be office treats (not a full blown pot luck thank goodness), for the April birthdays and Catherine's graduation, all of which are going to involve food that I don't want to say no to. Not to mention Friday night pizza nights. I'm going to need to work hard!