Sunday, January 30, 2011

I hate Sunday nights

Is there anything worse than that sinking feeling you get on Sunday evenings, knowing that the weekend is over and the new work week is ahead?  I mean, I like my job and I'm usually pretty refreshed from the massive amounts of sleep I got.  But I still start to get a little cranky thinking about the long week ahead.  I could go on about how much worse it feels when it's a Sunday night in January when you don't have any work holidays until Memorial Day, but really my whining is just getting tiresome, no?

I absolutely HAVE to rave about the recipe blog of a fellow WW 20s boardie, Emily (http://www.emilybites.com/).  I have tried 5 of her recipes in the past month or so, and they keep getting more and more awesome!  Tonight I made the Sausage and Pumpkin Pasta (http://www.emilybites.com/2011/01/sausage-and-pumpkin-pasta.html).  I was a little worried initially while I stirred the seemingly strange batch of ingredients together, but my concern was totally misplaced as this bad boy was friggen amazing!!  Seriously, check it out now, go get the ingredients, and make it- you will be well rewarded for your efforts!

This weekend was pretty vanilla.  On Friday evening I went out for sushi with Vanessa, another WW boardie who has become a good friend and gym buddy.  I love sushi and it seems like every time I eat it I'm immediately thinking about when I can next get some into my mouth.  Whatevs, I'm an addict.  On Saturday I hit up Body Sculpt class and then logged a half hour on the treadmill because I wasn't feeling Zumba.  I'll take any APs I can get from whatever source I can get them... any exercise I get that doesn't lead to major irritation and life-hating is a major win!  And today I donated a crapton of blood- the kind where they take double red blood cells and then dump the other stuff back into my veins.  Unfortunately this particular vein was being lame and wouldn't take the second dose of plasma and such, so I left feeling drained (literally) and a bit dizzy since they couldn't put some of my blood parts back in.  That's one way to lose some poundage!

Have a great week!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Truckin' along

I lost another pound this week!  What is up with that, seriously?  Doesn't the scale know that I ate my weight in guacamole this past weekend?  I'm starting to think maybe I have tapeworm or dysentery or something because the scale has been awfully friendly this month.  But, I will give myself credit in that I have been tracking diligently since Christmas, for better or worse.  I've been using all of my weekly points in that span (and one week all of my activity points plus a couple extra for good measure) which used to almost always spell a gain for me.  Whatever the reason, I will never argue with more eating and less gaining.

It snowed another foot and change last night which is becoming somewhat inconvenient, but I kind of love how pretty it looks once I'm inside my office and not trudging through it.  There were hardly any cars on the road this morning (the majority of people in New Jersey desperately need to grow a pair.. it's the northeast, we regularly get shitloads of snow and driving in it is nothing new) but at least it made the commute an easy one.  I don't care about sliding around on the roads when there's no one to hit!  I probably will, however, make a big sacrifice (translated: not at all a sacrifice) and forego the gym tonight.  I'm just totally broken up over that as you can well imagine.

I packed an army of healthy snacks and food options since I'll probably stay at the office for lunch (and the cafe downstairs closes at the first whiff of a snowflake).  I tend to be more motivated by good numbers and results than by gains, so I'm hoping I can snowball my recent progress (ha! snowball, get it?!) into more positive motivation and friendly WIs going forward.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

How much does hair weigh?

I finally got a MUCH needed haircut, and I'm feeling fantastic!  It's funny how getting your tresses chopped can totally put some pep in your step.  I got about 4 inches cut off and my hair feels so light and fluffy compared to the longass mop it was becoming.  I hate self-pics, but my vanity insists that I offer a shot of the new 'do:


On the WW front, I did 2 classes at the gym this morning after failing miserably at working out for the past 3 days.  I used a crapload of weeklies yesterday thanks in large part to scarfing down mega quantities of Chinese food for lunch, but I hadn't had it in awhile and it was quite tasty so I can't complain too much.  Actually just writing that is making my mouth water for General Tso's a little bit, but I think I've had my fill for a few weeks.  I'm going to try and be pretty conservative with my few remaining weeklies today because I'm going out for Mexican (translated: margaritas) for lunch tomorrow with a couple friends.  We'll see how this goes.

My next plan for the blog (since I seem to have already abandoned the weight loss rewards thing) is to post a few before & after shots.  I wish I had made a point to take more pics when I first started, but who really wants to jump in front of the camera when you're at your highest weight ever?  But I do have a few full body shots (yikes) from the year-ish before I re-committed to WW, so if I can figure out how to do the split-pic thing I'll get those up here with some current ones.  Or I might very well forget and move on to a new idea that will also never be completed.  Guess only time will tell!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Weigh-In Twosday? God I'm lame

Another WI day, and another 2 pounds bite it.  I'm very pleased to have lost 2 pounds, 2 straight weeks... my losses haven't been that big since my first months on WW.  I don't entirely know why I've been more successful lately.  My progress has been better since the advent of Points+, but I really haven't changed my eating that much since the new plan was rolled out.  And it's also been better since I stopped peeking at the scale on non-WI days, so maybe the scale is so grateful to not have me stomping on it 5 times a week that it's gratefully spitting me generous results.  Who knows the reason, but I have been more diligent with my eating and also with my tracking, and apparently it's paying off.

I'm going to Chicago in about a month for the wedding of two of my friends from law school, so that's definitely a motivation to get my ass in gear.  Frankly, I'm vain and I adore compliments, so any big event where I get to dress up and look foxy for people I haven't seen in awhile is fantastic for my willpower.  I don't like setting specific weight goals, but if I can get beyond the -75 mark by then I'd be ecstatic... 2.4 el-bees to go!

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Cheesecake Factory is a bitch

I'd imagine that it is technically possible to eat a healthy, reasonably-not-too-high in points meal at the Cheesecake Factory.  I'm sure one could order the "Weight Management Grilled Chicken", eat half, and contentedly suck on a lemon wedge while everyone else motorboats a mountain of cheesecake.  That, of course, is not my life.

I feel like Cheesecake Factory is one of those places that you either go to willing to drop some pointage, or you just stay home and eat a Lean Cuisine.  I totally get that restaurant food has a shit-ton of calories... I go out to eat at least twice a week and plan accordingly.  But CF is in a special sub-category of restaurants that still manages to blow my mind with its insane nutrition info.  So I just sucked it up, ordered something I didn't despise, and tracked the point values a bit liberally to make myself feel better.  (It's not like tracking my meal as 30 versus 40 or 50 really matters at that point.. suffice it to say I'll try not to use any more weeklies for the next two days.)  Even eating only half of an entree is still a ridonk amount of points - I guess the Red Velvet Cheesecake after dinner didn't help much either - but at least I enjoyed my meal and don't go there every week or anything.  So, I'm blogging about it and moving along.

I decided to possibly start implementing a reward system for weight milestones reached.  It's not because a reward is really going to add any motivation to lose weight that the cellulite on my ass and thighs doesn't.  But I generally love buying stuff, and having a justification for the financial splurge is even sweeter.  The problem is that I usually just buy something as soon as I want it, so I don't really have any reward ideas and don't know if I have the patience to wait that long if I think of something.  I got myself some new gym sneakers for -30 pounds but I need to come up with some less lame ideas.  Crap to use while exercising is fine and good but it's not reward-caliber.  So my next goal, aside from trying to keep losing more weight, is to think of some good reward ideas.

Quick weekend recap:  hit the gym for 2 classes yesterday morning; worked in the afternoon; ate my weight at the Cheesecake Factory; worked again this morning.  Now just lazying away my Sunday, avoiding watching football because I'm still mourning the Eagles loss, and trying not to eat just because I'm bored.   This coming week at work should be another crazy one, but I'm determined not to let that be an excuse to derail my progress.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Weigh-In Day... SEVENTY!

I lost 2 more pounds this week which puts me at a cool -70.6.  Of course the Debbie Downer in me had to go check my chart and point out to myself that I'm only down a net of 3.4 total in the past 9 weeks, because it would clearly be asking too much to just shut up and enjoy it.  But the scale has been pretty good to me since Thanksgiving, and bottomline is that I'm ecstatic to have crossed the 70 pound mark and still be trucking along after all this time.

A new "Biggest Loser" challenge just began on the WW boards so I'm hoping that can help translate into more progress.  I'm stupidly competitive and it takes very little to stroke my ego, so even an anonymous internet challenge where my fellow competitors may or may not be 50 year old dudes posing as 24 year old chicks on a mostly-girls message board still gets me amped up.  Yay Green Team!

Work is going to be a bitch and a half for the foreseeable future, so my workouts will no doubt take a hit.  I hit up kickboxing last night but Zumba went by the wayside this evening when I slogged out of the office just shy of 7.  Yes, I totally get that I could hit the treadmill at 7:30 or wake up at the asscrack of dawn tomorrow morning and do some pilates or something equally unappetizing, but that's just not me.  I like my TV and sleep, damnit!  But hopefully I can make it to Body Sculpt tomorrow night.  I'm also going to be working a good portion of this coming weekend (FML this week, for rillz) but now that the Eagles are eliminated and I'm pretending that pro football doesn't exist, I should hopefully be able to do something bordering on exercise this weekend.

Ah well.. in an effort to go out on a positive note here are a few positive affirmations about my life: I'm down to the weight I was junior year of college, I have a job that I love despite the fact that it's raping my weekends, and my arm fat has finally stopped making that horrific slapping noise when I throw a hook in kickboxing.  Things are, overall, very good.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

A nice little Saturday

Since I opted to forego the gym in favor of Italian food on Wednesday night, I decided to double up this morning.  I've started doing this quite a bit on Saturdays, and it always seems kind of shocking that I am doing back-to-back gym classes on a perfectly good Saturday morning when I could be laying around watching TV.  I'm lazy by nature, but also try to be efficient with my exercise.  If I'm already at the gym and I have nowhere else I absolutely must be at 11am, I might as well knock out another workout so I don't have to, god forbid, do anything remotely resembling exercise on a football Sunday.

Similarly, the only times I actually decide to run these days are when I'm so lazy that I can't handle spending an entire 30-40 minutes on the treadmill.  I figure if I toss a 10 minute jog into the middle of it I can burn my calories faster and get the eff out of the gym so I can go home and watch TV.  Yes that's right, I've found ways to use exercise to further encourage my laziness.  Either way, my system seems to work and I burn a nice chunk of activity points each week without feeling too much like I hate my life.

Anyway.. here I am, 2:21 on a Saturday afternoon, workouts out of the way until Monday night.  It's snowing like crazy outside which further encourages me to not do anything productive anytime in the near future.  My biggest challenge will be to not stuff my face just because there's nothing else to do.  I tend to be a grazer... I won't actually consume huge amounts of points at a time, but I eat mini-meals all day.  That's not a bad plan if my mini-meals were carrots or tofu, but more likely it turns into me draining through my daily points on cereal and pretzels and not even caring for much of what I ate.  So today will be a nice little willpower test.  I just saw a commercial for Golden Corral and started panting, so it could be a long day.

I'm hoping I can post another loss this week, but I kind of feel like the scale owes me a gain after getting such unexpectedly good results over the holidays.  It also depends on whether I find myself driving fiendishly around the northeast United States in search of a Golden Corral, but that's a whole other ballgame.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

First Weigh-in of 2011

3 weeks ago, I decided to something crazy and unprecedented for me and actually enforce my ongoing claim that I would stop weighing mid-week.  It's not that the scale makes me that psychotic, necessarily.  But in an attempt to keep WW from taking over my entire life, I figured avoiding my morning scale checks might restore some sanity and also make me concentrate more on tracking and sticking to the program.  An additional treat is that I now wake up on Tuesday mornings like a kid on Christmas morning.

So for the third straight week, I went into WI blind, and was pleasantly surprised to see a 1.6 pound loss.  Sure, I gained 1.2 last week, but a net loss of 0.4 pounds over Christmas and New Years?  You better believe I'll take that shit with bells on.  I ate roughly 2.4 million points over Christmas weekend so the "only" 1.2 pound gain the week before was Christmas present enough, but to lose it and them some after enjoying a New Years weekend involving beer, crab fries and Geno's (see my hot pic of cheesesteak consumption below) was pretty much orgasm-inducing.  I'm on the verge of -70 lost, and -75 is looking pretty awesome around the corner.

Time to get back to Biggest Loser.  Tonight is the premiere of season 442, give or take.  The first week is always the best because you get to point and laugh at people falling off treadmills and at least 3 people crying.  In truth, I love the show and find the transformations inspiring, and nothing gets my lazy ass off the couch like watcghing a 400 pound person do squat thrusts.  But it's a bit predictable, overly emotional, and a little depressingly unrealistic when that same 400 pound person passes me on the scale approximately 3 weeks from now.  Nevertheless, time to get back to watching as it looks like someone's about to face plant on the Stairmaster.  Here's to another great season!

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Welcome to 5 minutes of your life that you'll never get back

Welcome to my weight loss blog.  Or at least, my blog that isn't gathering dust over on freewebs.  I'm optimistic that I might actually stick with this one now that I'm using a blog website that doesn't appear to have been last updated in 1987.  Nevertheless, I caution you not to get your hopes up.

I've lost approximately 68 pounds on Weight Watchers since February 2009.  Truthfully, I think I'm more proud of the fact that I've stuck with this shit for almost 2 years than the amount I've lost in that time, but both feel pretty damn awesome.  I am eternally grateful to WW (and the WW message boards), my gym membership, and the fact that it's been a lot easier to resist alcohol in the second half of my 20s than it was in the first half.

I did WW for the first time when I was 16 and have logged about 47 re-joins, recommitments and do-overs in the years since then.  Despite the numerous bumps in the road and the weight lost and re-gained, I have always come back to WW.  Counting points is a pain in the ass sometimes, but it's what I need to do.  I'm also picky as shit (I really really hate vegetables... seriously, I'm not exaggerating here) so the freedom that WW gives me is the only way I can stay sane while losing weight.

Working out has also been tremendously helpful to me.  I'm an attorney and work long hours sometimes, but hitting the gym after work has helped keep me on track and increased my fitness level more than I can quantify over the past couple years.  It totally sucks ass at times, but it's more than worth it at the end of the day.  Stalking the hot guy that works at my gym has also been quite beneficial to my motivation.

So, that's a not-so-brief intro about me.  With the new year I figured I should channel some of my incessant chattiness into a positive outlet.  I hope this blog is enjoyable for me to write and keeps me accountable, but I also hope that anyone who happens to stumble across it doesn't want to blow their brains out after reading it either.  Thanks for reading!