I'm finally off my plateau after a month. I'm down to 243.8. I thought it was never going to move. I toyed with 244, 245, 246 for all of October. I'm glad things are moving in the right direction again.
The C25K is going fairly well. Saturday morning I went to the school and walked/ran for 55 minutes. It has been rainy here for about a week. There were TONS of worms on the track. I'm sure there are worm guts stuck in the cracks of my shoes. I'm not sure how many worm lives I ended on Saturday, but I'm feeling pretty darn good.

October 23, 2009

Watch this video. It's a great reminder of all we have & all we're capable of achieving. Tomorrow will come regardless of whether we're doing something to improve our lives or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ZuKF3dxCY

I know that I've wasted way too many years being lazy & abusing this body that God gave to me. Time to get busy doing the work that is needed to be the best me I can be.

October 20, 09

Yesterday morning I headed over to the high school to squeeze in my C25K run in the dark before the kids started arriving at school. It was 630 and v-e-r-y chilly outside. I only wore a thin hoodie over my t-shirt. I ran/walked almost the entire time with my hands pulled inside the sleeves.

I started out the walking segment completely freezing my butt off. The running interval came & I started to run. For some reason, it wasn't that hard today. I could have gone longer. How could my body do every running segment yesterday, yet on Friday I'm not even sure I completed a single segment. Friday was like running with the cinder blocks on my feet; yesterday I think I could have run an entire 5K. Totally weird. It it just my imagination or is running in the cold temperatures easier on the breathing than running in warmer weather?

I think it was all mental. While I was running, I was thinking about Jeannie & Chuck and Brent & me. I want to have a long relationship and be healthy so I just focused on that. The run seemed almost effortless. Yowzie!! I can't believe what seemed impossible on Friday was so different yesterday. Is this whole healthy lifestyle thing really mind over matter? The mind is a very powerful thing.

Tomorrow we shall see how it goes with week 4/day 3.

October 16, 2009

Today I got up early and went to the park in the dark & did my day 1 of week 4. I'm not going to lie; it was hard. I knew it would be. Just like my feeling of never having mastered week 1, but moved on to week 2, I felt the same way about week 3. I don't think I ever ran every second of each interval in week 3...ever. But here I am moving on anyway. I think it's the only way I'll be able to overcome my mental block of thinking that I can't do this. I think I only 100% completed one interval of running today.

It's hard, but I have to do this!

The scales have been stagnate for a couple of weeks. I need to get my fire back. I'm feeling blah and have been for a couple of weeks.

October 13, 2009

I'm back from my weekend in TN. We had a good time. For some reason though, I couldn't sleep the entire time I was there which made me miserable. I've never had that problem at my in-laws. The in-laws about had a heart attack because my FIL's 2 older sons from out west came in to surprise him. My FIL has been bitching to me about how these 2 sons treat him so badly and never come to see them, don't call to check on them, never email etc. They just showed up. Big WOW! I've been with Brent for 4 years & have never met or spoken to either of them.
So anyway, it was a nice turn out for the party. It was a combined birthday party & Oktoberfest...beer brats, hot German potato salad, German beers, sauerkraut balls. All the food was good. I stuck with water all weekend since I don't drink beer.

Almost every single time I've gone down there, I say that I'm going to work out, go for a walk or something. I NEVER do. EXCEPT, this time I did. I was awake waaaay too early on Saturday morning. I got dressed & headed outside to do my C25K run. I was proud of myself for actually doing it. Honestly, I figured that I would make some excuse up in my mind & just not do it. It was nice though. The air was cool & crisp so I barely got overly hot. Got to see some deer playing in a field; actually they scared the daylights out of me because I didn't see them until they started running.
But back to reality. I'm not sure where my head has been the past week. I think I've been mentally overwhelmed with everything that's going on in my life. I was too exhausted to exercise early last week. That day turned into the next and then the next. WTF??!!! Seriously, I'm so pissed at myself. I haven't logged my food either. I will say that the food thing is getting much easier though. I don't crave the junk food like I have in the past. Despite not exercising, I pretty much stayed on task with the food. I think it's almost become ingrained in me because I feel so much better by eating right. My guts used to just KILL; now I'm feeling good in that department. I haven't overeaten, but I have had a few things that I know I wouldn't have eaten if I was being strict with myself.

So that's my goal for the day. Get my head out of my ass & back on track. I need to get dressed & get to the track to do my run before the kids arrive at school & see a fat girl running. Eeks.
Have a good day everyone.

Hello GAG team, I'm leaving today to go out of state for my F-I-L's 70th birthday celebration. I'll catch up with you all Monday. They live in the sticks so I'm not even going to bother taking my computer since I can never get any sort of connection there. I know, I know. I'm already having separation anxiety.

Have a great weekend.

Oct 6, 09

So apparently my body didn't read the post where I wrote that the weight lifting weight can hang around until weigh-in day & then get lost. I gained 1.4 this week. Grrr! Seriously, I don't understand how this is physically possible, but it is what it is. Two days after the workout I was seeing a gain of 6 pounds. WTF is that all about?

Guess I need to just work harder & keep plugging away at it. Eventually it HAS to fall off.
Gotta go. Time to get ready for work and my cat is gnawing at my arm. I've put him on a diet too. Guess he's hungry too. He's nipping at the tender skin on the back of my arm behind my elbow...little turd.

October 4, 09







Here are some pictures from today. The first two are of my basement mini-gym. The next picture is of my October workout schedule. I put that one in the basement so I know what I'm doing every day and I also keep a paper version in my room. Since I'm combining 2 programs I decided it was best to write it all down. I'm totally a list-maker kind of person and if it's written down I'm more likely to do it. Last week I didn't miss any workouts.

And as the inquiring mind of Fat Free Me requested, the last picture is a weight belt update. The buckle actually touches now. Wooo Hooo. Just a few more inches and I should be able to wear it again.

As for my food, I'm eating between 1300-1600 calories/day. I don't think I'm going into starvation mode especially since I've changed up my eating plan. I'm now eating 5-6 small meals a day. This morning when I weighed myself the scale is on it's way down again. I think it was all the weight lifting thing.

Thanks everybody for checking in on me.

Oct 3, 2009

Thursday I did my BFL lower body weight lifting work out. I think I mentioned before that I have had delusional thoughts that under all this fat that my leg muscles are still strong. Yeah...not so much. In high school, I could squat 450 lbs on the stationary squat machine. Thursday I couldn't even complete 60 lunges with 10 lb weight in my hands. Like a complete bonehead I did the weights before my cardio...big mistake. The BFL program is only 20 minutes of interval cardio and I wanted to cry the last 5 minutes.
I can only recall being this sore one other time in my life. That time my brother killed me on the leg press machine at the gym. The day after that I had to scoot down the steps on my butt because my legs were too sore to support my weight to make the bending motion necessary to complete a step. It was very sad. I don't work out with my brother anymore.
I'm normally not sore on the day of working out, but Thursday I was and lucky me, I worked Thursday night. Oh what a joy to run up and down the hall to tend to the call lights that went off a bazillion times that night. I swear people in a hospitals NEVER sleep. Seriously, you really need a pack up Nutter Butter cookies at 3am?? Anyhoo, Friday was absolutely miserable in the leg pain department. I almost fell off the toilet at work when I tried to stand up to pull my pants up. That could have turned ugly in a second.
Today I'm feeling much better. I'm comfortably sore which is acceptable. Tonight is my C25K running night and upper body weights. It's already 9pm. I better get crack-a-lackin'.

Oh, and on the weight issue, my weight has gone up even more..5-6 pound gain since Thursday. I know this is physically impossible to be true because I haven't even eaten enough calories for this to be possible. It better be inflammation or water weight from lifting weights.
Has anyone experienced this issue when starting a weight lifting program? My quadriceps feel like rocks, but I KNOW I didn't gain muscle like that overnight. Input? Suggestions? Advice? Anybody? Anybody?

October 2. 2009

Thanks GAGer girls for checking in on me this week. I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I've just been working on revamping my fitness plan & such. Being as fat as I was/am, I expected to have lost more by now. I won't lie; I'm a bit disappointed.
With that being said, I took this week to amp up my exercise plan & readjust my food plan. Last week I didn't eat bad food or necessarily too much food. But I didn't log my food into the Bodybugg program. It really left me feeling out of control. Maybe some day I'll get to the point where I don't have to write down every morsel that crosses my lips, but I'm not there yet. Not by a long shot.
One of my personal drawbacks is working night shift. Even on my nights off, I often find myself staying up all night, wasting lots of valuable time. Do I work out at 3am? Hell no. I'm probably surfing the web for stupid or cute little pictures that will bring a smile to my face for 30 seconds, reading blogs, catching up on TV, doing Sudoku puzzles, or making lists of things I want to get done the next day, but never do because I've stayed up all night and then am too tired to get up before 2pm. Sometimes I really piss myself off.
I'm enjoying my C25K program. I'm taking that program super slow. I'm on week 3 & I'm going to start week 4 next week. In addition to that, I've recommitted myself to doing the Body For Life plan. I've had some success with that in the past. All the exercises are basically laid out for me so it's not like it takes a wizard to figure out what I need to be doing. Cardio & weight lifting...I can handle that. I do wish I had some hot guy to change the weights around for me between sets. That would be fun...for me at least. Sadly this is not the case; I'll have to do it myself.
This week I've done 2 days of C25K, 2 days of weight lifting, and 2- 20 minute cardio interval which is the standard cardio session for the BFL program. Right now I'm showing a 3 pound gain from yesterday. I'm not sure how that's possible when I burned over 3000 calories yesterday and ate 1500. Maybe the weight lifting/tearing the muscle thing has to do with holding onto fluid or something. As long as it's gone by Tuesday's weigh-in, it can hang around for a few days.
The other thing with the BFL program is eating 6 small meals a day. Six is hard for me, but I think I can squeeze 5 in on most days. I've noticed that I can't eat as much as I used to at one sitting. This of course is a good thing. So I've decided that the 5-6 meals might be a good thing. I'm going to focus on eating to take the edge off my hunger and not eating to "full" line. I usually overeat that way. I think my fuel gauge is broken in that respect. I've overeaten on a regular basis for so long that I don't know what is comfortably full compared to stuffed until it's too late. This is definitely something that I need to work on. I also thought that by eating like this 1) I won't overeat because there's never enough food on my plate to do that & 2) in 3-4 hours I can have something else yummy to eat.
Satisfaction without being STUFFED. That's what I'm working towards.
I think I've convinced myself to buy a captain's chair to do the hanging crunches on. I've used on in the past and it really works the abs and whittles the waistline. I'm all for getting rid of my big 'ol muffin top.

That's my week in a nutshell. Nothing earth shattering.

Hope all the GAGers and especially TEAM CUPID are having very productive weeks and meeting your mini-goals.