Tuesday, February 28, 2012

How to not be good at Weight Watchers

After successfully avoiding hard alcohol for a week and drinking less in general, I can officially report that I…. gained a pound.  What a successful experiment!  No, honestly though, I ate poorly pretty much all week and went through my weeklies by Friday, so it’s exactly what I expected and had coming and I don’t think I ate more because of the lack of drinking.  I definitely didn’t think changing the liquor factor would be a cure-all for my weight loss woes, but I also hope this past week was more of an exception with how my eating is going to be.

On Wednesday my sister and I cooked dinner and then decided to do dessert a la McDonalds drive-thru, including a Shamrock Shake, Oreo McFlurry and a Cinnamon Melt (did you even know McDonalds made that?  AWESOME).  I swear we weren’t high, but that shit was delicious.  Things continued on that trend for the next several days, including two point-heavy birthday dinners for my roommate on Friday and Saturday.  Thursday was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had in my life at Morimoto in the form of something like 10 courses of orgasmic Asian cuisine and comped drinks so I don’t regret a single calorie consumed that night.  It just made for a calorie-laden week that didn’t do much in the way of helping my quasiLent-driven weight loss efforts.  Nevertheless, if I’m going to end up in the red and have a gain, I still think it was better to have overconsumed some good quality food than an onslaught of Red Headed Sluts shooters.

I’m really hesitating to do the whole “this week, I’m setting out to eating mindfully and healthily and not going over my points” etc. etc. etc.  What’s the point?  I know what I have to do, what I should do, and I just need to stick to that and not treat every meal like it’s my last opportunity to shove food in my mouth, ever.  I’ve been good with working out and am slowly trying to increase my speed and am thinking about doing another 5k in March.  I feel good and fit and healthy and so I’m not going to beat myself up for not being as on my game with the meal stuff as I could be.  However, at a bare minimum I will make it my goal to not binge on fast food ice cream products (no matter how motherfuckingawesome that shit is!) in the coming week.  That’s a goal I can live with.

Now because I'm bored, here is a brief pictorial look at the reasons I gained a pound this week.  None of these pictures were taken by me as I'll never waste 3 seconds taking pictures of my food when I could be eating it, but the food pics still make me salivate to look at.

Shamrock Shake... mmmmm.  Who neatly sets out their Sham Shake on a nice white plate with a folded green napkin underneath?  Obviously someone who doesn't love Sham Shakes because that shit would be sucked down my throat in the time it took to do this arrangement.


Carvel Ice Cream Cake... this baby speaks for itself


Guacamole.. I ate at least 15 avocados worth on Saturday


Morimoto.. go there, now. Trust me.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

And so it begins... Week 1 without hard liquor

I think Lent starts today but seeing as how I’m only half-Catholic aka not Catholic I’m not positive.  Considering I thought Mardi Gras was when the J-man died until I was set straight by some coworkers, I’m probably not the one to ask about anything relating to religion.  But anyway, as of last Sunday I stopped drinking hard liquor until April-ish and/or the end of Lent and/or the next time I have a big enough social event warranting me to end the drought.

So anyway, I felt it was appropriate to check in again- not to brag about not drinking liquor on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday because if that’s an accomplishment then I have bigger probskis than I thought.  But mainly because yesterday was WI and my first one of my liquorless era so it gives me a baseline to use in comparison with my weight at the end of this jamboree.  I was down 0.8 from last week, probably in part because my 2 pound gain the week before was a tad artificially high, but anyway that puts me back at -98.6 pounds lost (2 pounds above my lowest from a few weeks ago).  If I can lose those 2 pounds and even just 1-2 pounds beyond that over the next 40ish days then I will definitely feel like this whole shebang served some kind of purpose.  Of course, even if I don’t lose that, I can also feel good about giving my liver a bit of a rest for a few weeks.

Should be interesting to see how it goes.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Running and Boozing

I have started to write blog updates about 12 times in the past couple of weeks but, as you can see, none of them ever came to fruition, so might as well not spend any more time talking about how I “almost” updated this mofo.

To address the scale first, still up and down.  I was briefly down to some new territory a couple weeks ago when I got like 0.2 lower than my previous lowest, but have been bobbling around in my usual up/down dance since then.  Although I can definitely say I’m pretty happy with things right now in that neither my weight nor my appearance makes me unhappy and I feel very good physically, I also know that I could be a little happier and a little fitter, so I’m not settling where I’m at.  Since I agree with the notion that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten (or however that shit goes), I’ve done a little evaluating, of myself and my food tracker, and decided I need to make some smallish changes.  I’ll get into that in a bit.

On another note, I ran my first 5k since W’s first term in office last weekend and am very glad I did.  I ran the whole thing, albeit quite slowly, and I’m pleased with myself for at least sticking to running for a whole month prior to the race.  I’ve run a couple times since then so I plan to keep it up but it will definitely be mixed in with other exercise like kickboxing, Zumba and walking.  I briefly thought about upping my mileage and working towards a 10k or 10 miler but that doesn’t sound that appealing at the moment so I think I’ll stick to where I’m at and just try to increase my speed a little.  I ran the 5k in 32:40 which is about a 10:30 mile average and roughly 5 minutes slower than I’ve ever run a 5k before.  I really don’t care about time and I’m just happy I ran it all, but I figure it at least gives me something to work towards that doesn’t involve spending more time on the treadmill or streets.  I’d like to get back under 30 minutes again.  But I’m also going to do whatever type of exercise appeals to me on any given day so if I get sick of running and go back to my usual rotation, so be it.

Anyway, back to the subject of making changes, blah blah blah.  I need to drink less.  Wow, there’s no way to say that without feeling and sounding like a blatant alcoholic, but if only for my weight loss journey it would definitely do me some good.  I’m sure it wouldn’t be the worst thing for my liver, brain cells and Sunday productivity either, if we’re being honest.

Without going into an in-depth psychological self-eval, I’m pretty confident that I don’t have a drinking problem.  I’m not an emotional drinker, I don’t drink alone or unwind with wine or beer after work.  Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things, but I’m pretty purely a social drinker.  I don’t get drunk that often, but it’s amazing how much the points still add up even when you’re not going all out at the bar.  I looked back at my last few weeks and I used about 60 points on alcohol this past week, about 50 the week before.  The week before that was vacation and I didn’t track but I’m sure the alcohol points were triple digis.  As a specific example, this past Thursday I went out with friends and had 2 beers, 1 mixed drink, and 2 shots over a 3ish hour span.  I had a little buzz but nothing I consider major drinking, yet I used over 20 points on drinks alone that evening.  It’s also no surprise that in examining my past few months on WW, the weeks where I went out and had a decent amount of alcohol at least once were across-the-board worse on the scale and in the red than weeks where I laid low.

It’s not to say that the weight will just melt off if I stop/cut down on drinking, but I don’t find myself eating more to compensate on weeks I don’t go out, so I have to imagine that my weekly points usage will decrease which typically yields better results on the scale.  I spend time and energy carefully planning my meals for the week and, I’ve gotta say, I think I’m pretty good and generally healthy with my food and meals.  So why do I make an exception for alcohol?  It’s points just like anything else.

One of my roommates mentioned that she’s going to give up hard liquor for Lent.  I’m not Christian and am not trying to be spiritual about it, but I decided it was a perfect opportunity for me to do the same.  I can still have beer and wine but I’ll still try to exercise moderation with that as well.  No hard alcohol until Easter.  I’d like to do it partly to remind myself that I’m capable of setting a goal and actually using to willpower to stick to it, but I’d also like to see if it gets the scale moving again.  And that whole “helping my liver” thing probably isn’t so bad either.