Quick Update

Just a quick update on my week of travel.  In a nutshell, I have had some really great days and other days that were not so good.... so I guess its not that different than normal life. I have tried to drink water as much as possible, especially when in the car.  I have also tried to take walks when I can and stay active with the kids in order to prevent myself from sitting around and eating for no apparent reason.  Like I said, some days have been better than others.

Weekly weight in tomorrow, but don't be surprised if I do not get a chance to post until Monday.  The next couple days of our trip are going to be very busy and with limited internet access, so we'll see what happens. 

Well, that is all for now,  back to visiting with the family.  Just wanted to quickly update you and say THANK YOU for all of the good advice and ideas.  Tomorrow will be a very challenging day, eating wise, but I hope to drink lots of water and fill up on fresh veggies instead of cake or mayonnaise-loaded salads and fatty chips.   I will update again when I can. 

On the road again...

Ok, blog-readers, I need some encouragement and advice!  This week my husband, 2 kids, dog and I are doing some major traveling.  As you know, traveling is the hardest time to eat right.  Here is our week at a glance:

Sunday - Tuesday: Binghamton, NY to visit in-laws
Wednesday night: At a Bed and Breakfast in Bloomfield, NY to celebrate our 5th anniversary
Thursday - Friday: Coudersport, PA at my parent's cabin
Friday - Sunday: Johnstown, PA to celebrate my cousin's high school graduation

So far I have not done too well.  My mother in law is Italian, and like a good Italian mother she makes food... amazing food... and feeds us constantly.  Bread, pasta, pancakes, eggs, hamburgers, meatloaf, cookies... the list goes on.  Its so hard to resist eating.  I am trying to turn it around as we speak by drinking a bottle of cold water.  I am going to try to be done eating today. 

So what is your advice for eating right while on the road?  I am in need of some good ideas to make this week a success.  Thanks in advance for your valuable input! 

Not so weekly weigh in...

I am so sorry that it has been such a long time since my last post!  This week has been one crazy ride.  I've been feeling exceptionally moody, weepy, fat, and unable to say "NO" to food lately.  At first I thought I might be pregnant, but then it happened - I got my period back.  For those of you who do not know, I just had my second child in January of this year, and my monthly period had been absent since her birth... until yesterday, that is.  So once again my hormones are a whirlwind, trying to find harmony where there has only been chaos for the last 14 months.

It is for these reason that I am making an executive decision to skip the weekly weigh in.  I apologize to those of you who have been waiting at the edge of your seats for the weekly results from my bathroom scale.  I just think that whatever the scale reads today will be an inaccurate portrayal of the previous week.  I will say, however, that I weighed myself on Thursday morning and I was happy to be back down to 200 lbs.  However, on Friday I was up to 203.6, no doubt a result of water retention and bloating brought on by my "monthly visitor."  As I said before, my body seems entirely too unstable to post an official weight today.

In the mean time, here is a list of some things I did well this past week:

1. Went to a cycle class on Tuesday.
2. Took my MOM to a cycle class on Tuesday!
3. Drank lots of water and decaf iced tea.
4. Took a long walk with the kids and my sister on Thursday.
5. Resisted eating a second (and third and fourth) piece of wedding cake at a wedding reception I attended last night.

Some things I want to do better this week:

1. Embrace being hungry as a necessary step toward weight loss.
2. Take more walks.
3. Eat primarily when I am hungry.
4. SLEEP MORE.

I feel pretty good about the previous week, and although I am skipping my weigh in today I am 92.5% confident that you will see success from the scale next week.  SO stay tuned, friends, and thanks for walking along side me during my blog hiatus brought on by a fit raging hormones. I promise to write more this week.

Weekly Weigh In

So, after a week of working out, I am still stuck at 201.  This could be the result of a few different things:

• Although I worked out a lot, I still had trouble eating the right amount of food.  There may have been some over eating this week.  

• I am nursing, which makes it easy to lose the fat gained during pregnancy, but hard to lose additional fat that was packed on before baby.  

• I am just getting older, which means my metabolism is probably slowing down, making it harder to burn off that belly fat.  (And butt fat, and back fat, and...) 

• Even though I went to the gym every day I spend the first couple of days just getting a feel for the place, not really burning significant calories.  I plan to change that this coming week.

Honestly, I am disappointed, but not discouraged.   Am I feeling let down, fat, stuck in a rut?  YES.  Am I going to give up?  NO.  Do I want to give up?  SOMETIMES.  But I press on.  Now that I am in the gym groove I will try to go frequently this week and in addition, eat less, sleep more, and drink more fluids.

Please stay with me, and don't give up on me.  I feel embarrassed for not having lost weight AGAIN, and I'm afraid that another week of disappointing news at the scale will cause people to give up on me and stop following the blog.  Please prove me wrong.  Your support, encouragement, and faithfulness is what keeps me on this path, however winding it may be.  So I urge you to stick with me, and cheer me on as I try again to lose weight next week.  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...

Gym Week: Day 5

I have to confess that I did not go to the gym today.  It was not for lack of motivation, however, I assure you.  My schedule was JAM PACKED today and I literally did not have time.  To prove it to you, here is a brief run down of my day:

7:00am - Elizabeth up
7:30am - Noah up
8:30am - hung a load of laundry on clothes line outside
9:30am - @LifeSpring Community Church to pick up a form
10:00am - bank
10:15am - @Bible study
12:00pm - leave Bible study, drive to Waterloo Outlet Mall to get Nick Father's Day gift
12:35 - shop at outlet mall
12:45 - drive to Stefanie's house
1:15 - Arrive at Stefanie's, start planning for MOPS presentation for church
4:00 - leave Stefanie's, drive to Nick's end-of-the-yea band picnic at Onanda Park
4:45 - picnic
6:45 - leave picnic, head home
7:15 - Elizabeth in bath, PJ's, night time feeding, down to bed
8:15 - get Noah ready for bed, take clothes off the clothes line
8:45 - unload car from the day's travels

AND the gym closes at 9pm.  So I literally did not have enough time to go to the gym today.  However, I did so much running around that I barely remembered to eat, and I certainly burned a lot of calories loading the kids in and out of the car all day.  It may have been a little over ambitious of me to promise to go to the gym EVERY day withe the kids.  Oh well.  I am very content with how I spent my day.

Just a heads-up, I probably won't make it to the gym tomorrow, either, and I have another really good reason for that.  Tomorrow our church is doing a "walk for water" to raise money for a mission trip to South America.  We will be walking 3 miles to the lake, filling up buckets of water, and walking 3 miles back to the church... with the kids in the stroller, haha.  SO I think that is sufficient exercise for the day, don't you?

Weekly weigh in tomorrow... stay tuned to the fat diaries to see how I do!  

Gym Week Day 4

I was feeling pretty sore today as a result of working out yesterday without stretching, so I decided to take it easy and just walk.  It was good to have a light day.  During this time I really started to reflect on the nature of exercise.


I used to think that exercise was all about the parts of the body that you see - legs, belly, butt, thighs, biceps, etc.  However, I now understand that while it is sometimes about those parts of the body, it is REALLY about the parts that you do not see - heart, lungs, thyroid, etc.  I was watching a documentary last night about Parkinson's disease, and they talked about a lot of different treatments and research studies.  One that really caught my attention involved monkeys and exercise.

The scientists in this study basically took 2 groups of monkeys.  One group ran on the tread mill on a regular basis, while the other group merely watched the exercising monkeys.  Later in the monkeys' lives they were injected with something that basically caused them to get Parkinson's disease.  The monkeys who exercised were FAR less effected by the injection than those who did not exercise.  There is really no precise explanation as to why this is, but there is certainly no denying, how much we exercise REALLY does effect our overall, long term health.

The narrator of this documentary made the point that before cars and guns and grocery stores and other modern conveniences, we humans worked A LOT harder, physically speaking, that is.  Our bodies were intend to function best when we get regular and rigorous exercise.  It's a tall order in our modern society, but I do believe that it is perhaps the single most important thing we can do for our bodies, along with getting enough sleep and eating simple, unprocessed food.  Like I said, a pretty tall order for our culture today, but a worthy cause, for sure!!!

PBS Documentary on Parkinson's

So think about THAT next time you get bored on the tread mill. I know I will.

Gym Week: Day 3

I decided to do something different today and give the tread mill a try.  I am always really hesitant to go on the tread mill.  I had a fear as a young adult that I would fall off.  So one day in the Ithaca College gym I decided to face my fear and try the tread mill... and I fell off.  So its really hard for me to make myself get on that thing, even though I know it will give me a really good workout.  Despite my tread mill paranoia, I did go on today and had a GREAT workout.  

Thanks to everyone's great advice form my last post, I had some ideas on how to get my heart rate up and keep my feet feeling better in the process.  I did some interval training, and it was AWESOME.  I didn't really have a plan at first, I just thought I would alternate running and walking as it seemed appropriate.  I kept track of what I did and I even recorded my heart rate.  This is how it went down:

WALKED at 2.8 MPH for 5 minutes
RAN at 4.5 MPH for 15 minutes
WALKED at 3.5 MPH for 5 minutes
RAN at 5 MPH for 5 minutes
WALKED at 3.5 MPH for 5 minutes

It seemed that at the peak of my running my heart rate was around 165, if the machine was accurate that is, and when I was cooled down and walking it was about 128.  I really have no idea if that is healthy or not, but it made me feel good to see my heart rate increase and then stay elevated while running. 

 
I'm looking forward to trying to treadmill again tomorrow, but probably not as much as these guys. ;-)