Friday Weigh In - On Monday!

So I completely forgot to post my weigh in on Friday, which is shocking, since I lost the most weight I've ever lost in a week - TWO POUNDS! Two pounds in ONE WEEK! I am still shocked.

Those two pounds makes the grand total weight loss for the month a whopping five pounds. Five pounds!!! And seven pounds total over the last 13 weeks. Wahoo!!!

AND, the two pound loss pushed me into the 170s (178.8 to be exact) which was another milestone.

I still can't believe it. Maybe that's why it's taken me a few days to blog about it.

In other news, school has temporarily taken over my life. I say "temporarily" in the hopes that it is a temporary hostile take over that will be over come this weekend when I resume my normal school schedule. I miss the ability to have a life. Not that I always take advantage of the ability to have a life, but I'd like the choice of whether or not to have a life back, please and thank you.

Until next time, keep on keeping on.

Third Weigh in of the Year...

Down .6 pounds! Ta-da!! So that's five pounds in 12 weeks. But I'm only going to say positive things because a loss is a loss and that's that. This week I'm going to try and get in some more exercise, I was only able to get in three days this past week ("only" being a relative term, considering how busy I am right now I should be more proud of my three workouts I think!)

But yeah, that's my goal, to get a few more workouts in. Even if it's just more walking, it's something.

I'm very much looking forward to this weekend. Tomorrow at 4pm I'll be done with my speech class and then Sunday is going to be a great day of football. For the first time since I've lived out east my Colts are playing someone New Yorkers actually care about - the New York Jets. All I have to say about that is...

Go Colts!!!!!!!

School has taken over...

Taken over everything it seems! See, in order to finish my MBA in a somewhat reasonable amount of time (like say, less than five years) I have to take these crazy intensive courses from time to time. Intensive course = a regular course crammed into a very small amount of time. You add that to my resolution to actually do all of the work for my classes and you have one slightly overwhelmed girl.

The good news is this will all be over two weeks from now. The bad news is I have to get through till then!

My third weigh in of the year is tomorrow and I'm not feeling very hopeful. I'm one of those every day weigher type people and lets just say, I'll be lucky to maintain. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't totally disappointed. I've stuck to my points, and while I haven't exercised a ton, I did get in three workouts this week, which considering my schedule is amazing! So a maintain would be pretty disheartening.

Hopefully I'll be happily surprised, but even if I'm not, I have to keep on keeping on, I mean, what else can I do? I don't have any other options. Although I will say I did make an appointment for a real physical next month, so if I continue to struggle this much to lose weight you can bet I'll be marching my butt in there with my food/exercise journal to try and figure out what the heck is going on!

Friday Weigh In

Happy Friday!

As of this morning I was done 1.6 pounds for the week, which is the biggest loss by far I've had on this weight loss journey of 11 weeks. So that makes my grand total of weight loss 4.4 pounds for an average of .4 pounds a week! Wahoo! I'm moving on up!! Can't wait to see what the future brings.

I'm trying hard not to make timed goals for myself since I seem to lose so slowly. I think it would just be more discouraging than anything. But it is so tempting to try and say I'd like to lose X pounds by my birthday or something. But for now I'm staying strong. My goal right now is to be on plan every day until my birthday and then give myself my birthday off to not count points (and only my birthday.) That would be 85 consecutive days of counting points. I think that's going to be my challenge to myself instead of a timed weight loss goal!

Today I'm planning on heading to pilates, and I'm writing it here so that I will force myself to go. I actually enjoy the class once I get there, but so often I find myself having a hard time mustering up the motivation to actually get out of my chair and out the door to the gym. Today is not going to be one of those days!

I'm really looking forward to the long weekend ahead (even if I do have class from 9-4 on Saturday.) I'm looking even more forward to the football games. Wahoo playoffs! The Colts play the Ravens at 8:15pm on Saturday night. I am sooo nervous. Lets hope my boys come out to play tomorrow night! Go Colts!!!

Resolution #1

So I won't say that I've never made New Year's Resolutions, because I most certainly have, but they've never been a really big deal to me. What has been kind of a big deal to me is that fantastic energetic feeling I get at the beginning of a new year. I feel like I have a clean slate. An opportunity to be a better version of myself. This year I'm trying to harness some of that good feeling and keep it with me throughout the year.

To that end, I'm not going to put a huge list of resolutions out there only to feel overwhelmed and well, sad when I don't meet them all. Instead I'm going to write individual posts about whatever goals (or resolutions if you will) I'm working on. (Granted, there is a huge list of "resolutions" in my journal, and I will use that as a reference point throughout the year.)

The first resolution I'm working on (besides my weight, which I've already talked about a lot) is being a better student. Or more specifically, I made a promise to myself that for my two winter intensive classes I would do everything that the syllabus says to do. I would attend every class, read all of the required reading and do all of the homework.

Now while this might not sound monumental to most, it is for me. I've always been kind of a slacker when it comes to school. Granted, I've always gotten by just fine and most people would probably have no idea, but my slacker ways are rampant when it comes to school. I can say I have yet to open a textbook and I'm over halfway done with my MBA. I have yet to go to every class session for any full length class (I did make it through one half length class without missing a session though!) I'm never prepared for discussions in class and I truly just do the minimum to get by.

I've always done this. Ever since I can remember this is how I have treated school, and I've always felt guilty about it. Sure, I make decent grades (even good I suppose) and that's the barometer for success in school, but what about my own personal fulfillment? What about learning for the sake of learning? What about trying to learn since each class I attend costs me roughly $500 PER CLASS SESSION?

So I'm trying an experiment. I'm committing to trying and completing my next two classes completely. After that I will re-evaluate. If I don't get any personal satisfaction out of my experiment then I can happily go back to my slacker ways, hopefully guilt free. And if by some chance I actually do feel better and learn more by keeping with my commitment, then I will consider keeping up with it for a longer period of time. Because at the end of the day, while grades don't really matter, my happiness does, and maybe this is one way to get a little more out of something that consumes a good deal of my free time right now.

Wish me luck!

Tuesday Ramblings

Well I survived my first night of business communications, wahoo! Granted, I didn't actually have to speak so it wasn't really hard for me to be there. And the professor actually seems pretty great, so maybe the whole class won't be as scary of an experience as I'm expecting. I think a lot of the time I make things a lot worse in my head than they actually are.

I'm having a hungry or rather a stress-hungry day. I find that I'm one of those people who relies heavily on food to get through stressful times. Its a big part of the reason I have gotten as heavy as I have. It's weird because even though I know I'm not actually hungry and that I just want to eat because I'm stressed, I still do it. It's amazing to me how hard that habit is to change. (I realize I just started three sentences in a row with the word Its, but I don't really feel like changing it)

One of the benefits to being gluten free now though is it seriously limits my snack food options, so even when I want to stress eat, I don't eat nearly as much as I used to because the food just isn't as good. Eating gluten free chocolate chip cookies is nothing like eating nestle cookie dough straight from the tube, or uh, eating fully cooked nestle tollhouse cookies.

I've been gluten free for a little over a month now. The whole thing started on a suggestion from my doctor as a possible cause for the migraines I'd been having (at their worst I was getting them 2 times a week, in fact, I took more sick days in 2009 than I did vacation days they were so out of control) We'd tried pretty much everything else and nothing was working, so I decided to try going gluten free. I'm about a month in and have only had one real migraine that I couldn't kick with medicine. For me, that is nothing short of a miracle.

So, for the foreseeable future, this girl will remain on a gluten free diet. It not only helps my health, but it has unexpected benefits of say not being able to stress eat on my favorite foods. I'd imagine this can only do good things for my goal of losing weight!

I'm contemplating going to the gym and am totally wavering. I just don't really enjoy the gym. But I'm not sure anyone really ENJOYS the gym, so sucking it up and going is probably my best option. Or if I don't do that, the least I can do is take a walk around the block. Or dance around my apartment when I get home. I pretty much will take activity anywhere I can get it!

Back to School

Well, it's been a lovely three weeks off from grad school. Really lovely in fact. So lovely that I can say I was a big agnsty last night just thinking about the idea that I have to go back to school today. I felt like you do when you're a kid and summer break is over, except I'm an adult and my three week break from school (not work!) is nothing compared to summer break! Although, it was quite nice, and really, nothing will probably ever compare to summer break as a child.

So anyway, yeah, grad school starts again tonight, with my all time least favorite topic, communications. Business Communications = me giving presentations = sweaty palms, swaying back and forth and saying "um" way too many time. Ugh. I'll be glad when it's over.

The world of weight loss this weekend went quite well if I do say so myself. I bumped my points down to 20 (which is less than weight watchers said I should have at this weight, but I wasn't losing much at all at the higher point totals) and that's been a bit of a challenge. 20 points of food equals roughly 1000 calories, which is not a lot. Now granted you get to eat more if you work out (which I did!) or if you want to use your flex points (which I did!), but still, even with those two things, it's not a lot of food.

But I would have to be insane to think that I could eat a lot of food and lose weight at the same time now wouldn't I?

I'm trying to be patient with myself and not obsess over how much I have to lose or how long it will take. I'm just trying to focus on my next small goal, which for this girl, is getting under 180 pounds (and then promising to never see that weight again, EVER.)