Day 54: Knock, Knock...

I am scared for my weigh-in tomorrow.  This is why:

Back in late January:

Door:  Knock, knock.

Me:  Who’s there?

Girl Scout:  The sweet Girl Scout from down the street!  Would you like to buy some cookies?

Me:  Yes!  Of course I do!  I love the Girl Scouts! [Read, I love COOKIES!]

             Girl Scout:  How many would you like?

             Me:  4 Boxes, thanks!

[2 Days Later]

Door: Knock, knock.

Me: Who’s there?

Girl Scout:  The sweet Girl Scout from across the street!  Would you like to buy

some cookies?

Me:  Yes!  Of course I do!  I love the Girl Scouts! [Read, I love even more COOKIES!]

            Girl Scout:  How many would you like?

Me:  4 Boxes, thanks!

Girl Scout Cookies! Yummm

This is what happens when you miss out on Girl Scout cookies one year.  Last year we did not get ANY GS cookies!  Can you believe that?!!  I think that was the first year something like this has ever happened.  So when the little girl from a few houses down the street came by peddling her sweet cookie goodies, I had to partake!  This girl was NOT missing out on her GS cookies this year!  Even if they come in the middle of my plan to get back to pre-baby weight.  Weeeeelllll, then my sweet neighbor Kathryn came by with her cutie little girl Olivia.  I couldn’t help it!  I had to get more!  I want to support these sweet girls and their organization….Ok, that’s only partly the reason.  I wanted to make sure I would have enough cookies!  [Wow, I sound like a pig!]

Now I am realizing, too many GS cookies is NOT a good thing.  I can’t resist them!  They are sitting out on our counter calling my name.  When I should be reaching in the fridge for a delicious 80 calorie Greek yogurt, the dang Samoas are saying, “Psssst, hey lady.  Wouldn’t you rather have one or two of me than that diet yogurt stuff?”  Well, yeah of course I would!  But that’s 160 calories for two of those tiny Samoas.  I should have eaten the yogurt.  I already put one box of thin mints in the freezer.  Maybe I should put the rest of the Samoas and Tag-a-longs in there too.  Or maybe I should have just donated money instead of buying 8 boxes this year!  Bad Leah!

I wonder if Matt would kill me if I brought the rest in to the office to get rid of?  They are seriously what is making my daily calories go over my goal.  Not Good!  If it’s not in the house, I don’t eat it and don’t even think about eating it usually.  This is a good lesson learned.  Don’t keep junk in your house if you are trying to be healthy and lose weight!  You are just playing with fire…or in this case Girl Scout cookies!

 

 

 

Day 52: I Love/Hate Exercise

Thin Mints...Yum!

Monday morning, the Marimba ring tone floats softly into my dream about folding laundry sitting in a church pew during a Sunday morning church service.  I look around wondering where the melody is coming from.  Then, I open my eyes and I’m lying in bed.  It’s my iphone that is singing the Marimba ring tone to remind me to get up and go work out.  I don’t particularly like dreaming about folding laundry in church, but I’d rather do that in my warm cozy bed than get up!  So I look at my phone and turn off the alarm.  Then I feel a scratchy feeling in my throat.  SCORE!  Sore throat.  Can’t go to the gym with a sore throat, right?!  No way.  If I do that then it will get worse and turn into a full blown cold [given to me by my sweet little girl who likes giving kisses…a lot, even when she has a runny nose…cute but still yuck].  So, I reset my alarm for 6:45 and got an extra hour of sleep.  I got up then, drank an Emergen-C, and the sore throat eventually went away…and no cold!  Was it worth it?  Yes and no.

Yes:  I got another hour of sleep and thwarted the powerful efforts of a cold! 

No:  I had only 1200 calories for the day.  Yikes!  No exercise calories to pull up the slack!  AND I’ve been craving chocolate like a maniac [like most women do at least once a month].  Double Yikes!

Needless to say, the handful of M&M’s and the 3 thin mint cookies put me over my calories for the day by about 150.  THIS IS WHY I NEED TO EXERCISE!  Not only does it make me happy that I can have those few pieces of chocolate, but it also just makes my brain happy too!  I feel like I have done something great for myself.  I get a little self esteem boost too.  That could even let me be able to say no the 5^th or 6^th thin mint.  Woohoo! [Thank goodness a serving of Thin Mints is 4 cookies].

Tuesday morning, the Marimba ring tone comes into my deep dreamy state with a shock.  Time to get up!  No sore throat and I’m ready to throw down on the treadmill. 

Let’s do this!

[Insert Eye of the Tiger]

I may have had two thin mints this morning...but I earned it this time!

Day 48: 6 Weeks Results

It’s been a month and a half and I am somewhat on track.  Woohoo!  I was actually kinda worried because I was out of town this weekend till Monday [sorry for the lack of posts!].  We were up at my parent’s lakehouse.  We had a great relaxing time…and of course we had to go to El Cancun one night.  El Cancun has the best food around for the price.  In other words, it’s cheap greasy Mexican food!  Yum!  I think you can get a full dinner for $3.99!  That’s craziness!  I ended up getting chicken fajitas…and yes, I did count out 12 tortilla chips to eat.  I know that sounds ridiculously dorky!  You gotta understand, if I don’t count them out, I eat way over one serving [probably more like 2 or 3].  But hey, I got to eat chips and salsa and fajitas!  Yum! 

Jim N Nick's Devil Muffins...Recipe courtesy of Tastebook

I was also not feeling so great this weekend and some of this week.  That meant that I didn’t work out.  I had to stay at 1200 calories with no wiggle room.  That is hard!  It’s especially hard if you go eat Mexican food, and don’t feel like cooking.  Eating out is just a huge calorie splurge usually.  Like yesterday, I had sales guys in town and we went to lunch at Jim N Nick’s BBQ.  If you have never been to a Jim N Nick’s, it’s a really tasty BBQ restaurant with these addictive cheddar corn muffins.  They are seriously like crack.  So I’m sitting there with my phone opened up to the My Fitness Pal app [www.myfitnesspal.com] trying to figure out what I could eat.  Weeeeeelllllll, really the only thing I could afford calorie wise was a salad [shocker].  As you can imagine, I eat a lot of salads when I go out for lunch or dinner.  So I had my salad with smoked chicken on top [YUMMMM], half the portion of house vinaigrette, and yes…I had ONE cheddar corn muffin.  Those suckers are 182 calories each!!!  They are like half the size of your computer mouse.  Tiny.  Just enough muffin to make you mad that you can’t eat another.  But, I did not give in.  Even when the server came out with yet ANOTHER basket of these little devils, I still did not waver.  YAY ME!  Lunch turned out to be under 500 calories, which is a pretty good accomplishment at a restaurant.

So you can imagine that I REALLY didn’t want to get on the scale.  As luck would have it, I actually lost another 2 pounds!  That’s a total of 12.4 pounds!  I am now one pound under where I got stuck in my previous efforts to lose weight while nursing last summer.  YAY!  Big accomplishment for me!  Now let’s see if I hit another plateau right around this weight for if I can blast through it.  I’m hoping for the later. 

I CAN DO IT!

YOU CAN DO IT TOO! 

 

Day 40: Valentine's Day [Eat Lots of Chocolate Day]

Yummm!  From Here

Don’t get me wrong, I am a hopeless romantic, and I love Valentine’s Day.  I also love, love, love chocolate.  Milk, Dark, White…I do not discriminate; I have love in my heart for all chocolate.  Saint Valentine’s Day is a day to appreciate a Roman third century priest who married a bunch of young men and women, illegally of course, and actually got killed for doing it [that’s the short story at least, look for more here].   When commercial America gets a hold of Valentine’s Day it turns into: show your significant other how much you love them by spending a lot of money on overpriced jewelry and flowers.   Oh, and don’t forget to throw in a pound or two of chocolates.  And, you can’t forget a big delicious dinner at an overpriced restaurant.  And, why not go ahead and have a bunch of cocktails and a few bottles of wine.  Why not! 

The next day you won’t remember the steak, the flowers will be starting to wilt, and you will have a headache from all the wine.  Then, you will remember the copious quantities of chocolate that you ate, and the scale will too!  I don’t lose the chocolate…it seems to settle right in my hips…or butt…or belly.  There are many hiding spots for chocolate.  I am trying to find them out, and melt them away!!!

Like I said before, I am a hopeless romantic, and a Valentine’s Day without chocolate and flowers would be sad.  Luckily I have an awesome husband who brought me beautiful red roses and chocolate along with a really sweet card this morning.  I love this man! 

 

If you are not blessed with a significant other, do it for yourself!  Who says you can’t have an “I Love ME” day?  Get yourself some pretty flowers, and treat yourself to a little sinful bliss…chocolate. 

If that isn’t enough reason to indulge in a little chocolate, how about these from the Huffington Post:

1.       Chocolate can decreased risk of stroke in women by 20%

2.       Chocolate can lower blood pressure, lower bad LDL cholesterol, and lower risk of heart disease

3.       Dark chocolate can help fill you up, so you eat less

4.       Chocolate can also increase insulin sensitivity which can decrease the risk of diabetes

5.       Dark chocolates are rich in antioxidants  called flavonoids

6.       Theobromine in chocolate can help to stop coughs

7.       Chocolate boosts your mood

8.       Chocolate has anti-clotting, blood thinning properties and can improve circulation

9.       By improving blood flow to the brain, chocolate can also improve vision

10.   Also, the improved blood flow to the brain, chocolate can make you feel more alert and awake

Awesome, right!!!???

My goal for Valentine’s Day:

 Don’t eat all the chocolate in one day!

That’s it.  That’s the only goal I have today [other than get in a work out to burn off the chocolate so it won’t find that hiding place in my left thigh!].

I hope your day is filled with wistful thoughts of knights in shining armor, and lots of empty calories…I mean, chocolate J

XOXOXO

Day 39: The Good, the Bad, and the Sick

At Dinner with Dave and Hollis in Steamboat, CO

The Good:

I am so excited to say that my hubs and some other friends of ours [Mariah and John] are now using My Fitness Pal!  It is fun to be friends on it with them, and we can all keep each other accountable.  It is so awesome to have friends with similar goals in mind.  It also makes hanging out and having fun easier on the figure if everyone has like goals.  We can have just as much fun with grilled fish and corn on the cob as we can with fried pickles and chicken wings [yes it’s possible].  Thanks y’all!

The Bad:

So I’m back from skiing and trying to get back into the swing of watching what I eat and working out.  It is so difficult to make yourself get out of bed to go to the gym [at the butt crack of dawn] when you haven’t done it in a week.   It is SOOOO easy to break a habit!  You know what “they” say, it takes 21 days to create a habit.  [Who the heck are “they” anyways?]  Welllllll, I’ve got 20 more to go because this is the first day I have gone back to my early morning workouts.  Once I roll out of bed I’m good, but it’s the rolling that is difficult!  I just have to keep thinking…YOU ARE A THIRD OF THE WAY TO YOUR FIRST GOAL [lose 30 lbs]!  YOU GOTTA DO IT!

Ellis' Carseat

The Sick:

I hate it when I’m sick.  I really hate it when my hubs is sick.  It’s a whole other story when Ellis is sick!  Especially when she has tummy troubles.  On Sunday she had a little [TMI Alert] diarrhea issue, but I didn’t think much of it.  That is, until we were on our way to see my bro Adam’s newly designed apartment to deliver cupcakes.  Yep, got about 10 minutes down the road and…BARF.  Not me, but my sweet little Ellie-Belly.  Poor thing puked all over herself and the car seat…and had to sit in it until we got back home [thankfully only 10 minutes].  This is my first major baby puking experience, so I was a bit horrified.  Matt ended up taking the cupcakes for me, and Ellis and I hung out a little and she went to bed early.    That left me to clean the car seat.  I want to strangle whoever decided it was a great idea to make a car seat so complicated with all these stupid crevices and cracks that puke likes to find and get stuck in.  Not only was I trying to clean this thing out at night outside, but it was also raining!  I just wanted to hose the thing off, but no, couldn’t do that in the rain.  So I got to hand wash the entire car seat [fabric parts removed and put in the washer of course].   I hadn’t worked out that day, so I used that 30 minutes of “strenuous cleaning” for my cardio in MFP [My Fitness Pal].  Score!  Hopefully this nasty bought of sickness will not spread to us and go away quickly!

So actually the bad and the sick were not so bad after all.  I got calorie expenditure from both, and I’m well on my way to starting a good habit!

What good habit are you starting today?  The Time is Now!

 

Day 34: It's been a Month Already!

Imagine that...ha

1 Month Check up

Total Weight Loss: 8.2 lbs          

Total Inches Lost: 12 inches (bust, hips, stomach, arms, thighs)

That’s pretty good for my first serious month of weight loss.  Thank you for everyone in my life who has been so supportive and helpful J  You make this easier for me!  Also, thank you to my friends Mariah and Kimberly who help me stay motivated on MFP [My Fitness Pal].   We can do it!!!

Not only was I blessed this week with an awesome trip to Colorado where I skied and got to hang out with family and good friends, but I also got a wonderful [sarcasm] take home gift…sore knees and sore calves.  The knee soreness is pretty predictable, but the calf soreness is just stupid!  I was hobbling up stairs at the house in Colorado.  That was really cute... Thank goodness there are no stairs in our house!  Because of my soreness, I decided to take yesterday and today off for the gym.  That reduces my normal calorie intake to close to 1,200.  That’s not much.  Yesterday I ended up right around 1,200, but I’m a little worried about tonight!  I am going to have some drinks and watch a movie with my honey.  Therefore, I’ve got to figure something else out about exercise.  Maybe I will go for a walk around the mall near my work.  Then maybe we will take Ellis and Chobee on a walk when I get home from work.  That would work out to be maybe 2 drinks?  I hope so!

Day 33: Skiing = Major Calorie Burn!

Back to reality.  Vacation is always a great time until the night before you have to go back to the real world, back to work, back to chores, back to going to the gym at 5:45…and back to the dreaded scale!!!  Yikes!!!!  I stepped on the scale this morning, feeling my half a cheese burger I had on Monday night [I was proud of myself for only eating half, but I did eat most of the fries].  I was thinking about all the skiing I did, and the stairs I climbed.  Who knew one house could have so many stairs!  I was also thinking about the food I ate for lunches while skiing…chilli [chicken, not beef at least], baked potato, cheese, tomato soup, grilled cheese [ok, only half]…  I felt like my clothes were fitting a tiny bit less snug, but I couldn’t tell for sure.  I stepped on and, I lost 2 pounds!!  Woohoo!  I don’t think I have EVER lost weight on a vacation before.  It’s usually the opposite!  I am soooo relieved.

Here is how I lost weight.  SKIING!  Like I said in the previous post [Day 27: I’m a Ski Bunny!] , skiing burns a ton of calories.  Where I looked it up, it said that in 3 hours, I would burn 1,800 calories.  Well, I actually wore my heart rate monitor for 2 of my 3 days skiing.  This is what I found.

Yes, you read that right, 3,091 total calories burned!  I turned on the heart rate monitor at about 9:00 am and took this photo on my way down the gondola at around 2:00 pm.  That includes sitting on lifts, skiing, and about an hour long lunch.  AMAZING, RIGHT??!!  No wonder you don’t see any obese people skiing!  I would LOVE to live near the slopes.  Too bad all the ski hills near us are covered in ice for most of the season….oh, well. 

When I was out in Colorado, I didn’t track my food intake in MFP [My Fitness Pal], but I was mindful of how much I was eating.  The first day when we were eating lunch, I was starving, so I got a chicken chili, topped it with cheese and sour cream.  Then I got an apple, and half a brownie.  Oh, yeah, and shared fries with Matt.  Not good.  The entire rest of the day I was soo full, and had a hard time skiing.  I probably burned off all that food, but I really didn’t need it [and it made me feel like crap].  I improved some the next day, and I finally did ok on the third day with half a grilled cheese and tomato soup…and some soft pretzel. 

I got to enjoy the foods I don’t normally eat because I was on the type of vacation that included lots of physical activity.  I think in the future, my family will try to build our family vacations around something active.  Maybe we will go kayaking at the beach, or swimming and water skiing at the lake.  This way I can enjoy some my vacation foods that I don’t usually eat on a regular basis.

We had a great time skiing, and I can’t wait to go back! 

 

Day 27: I’m a Ski Bunny!

Gotta Love the 80's!
http://www.svguide.com/w05/w05_skifashion.htm

 

That’s right folks, I’m going out to snowy Colorado and turning into a fluffy, bedazzled, fur wearing, après ski drinking snow bunny!  Ok, not really.  When we go skiing [once a year usually], we are serious about getting all the skiing in that we can.  There is no time for bedazzling ski parkas, and fluffing my hair just right to fit with my furry ear muffs.  No, we get up early, and are waiting to jump on when the ski lifts open at 9 am.  We ski all morning, and then take a break for lunch.  THEN, we get back to it and ski until the lifts start closing down around 4:30.  We are seriously serious.  Although, I do like to have an après skiing drink.  Ok, let’s just call it a beer for the hot tub!  None of this après fanciness! 

The real ski bunnies!  Me and my friend Hollis!  I can't wait to see her and her hubs!!

 

This week hasn’t been the greatest for me.  I have maintained my weight, but haven’t really lost any yet this week.  [It may be the cheese burger I ate at a friend’s bday party on Saturday].  I’m really hoping that on this ski trip, I can do good on my diet with the extra available calories from skiing. 

I had NO idea how many calories you burn when you are skiing until I looked it up.  I will burn about 600 per hour!  And since we are super serious non-fancy skier people, I’ll be skiing for around 6 hours!  Now let’s say about half of that is down time on lifts and figuring out the runs we want to do.  That means about 3 hours, 180 minutes.  That means that I will burn about 1800 calories a day!!!  That is like having another full day’s serving of calories!  Awesome!  So if I just limit my caloric intake to 2,000 [instead of my regular 1,200] , I will still be burning an extra 1,000.

I really hope that’s true!!  I am going to wear my heart rate monitor to see how many I actually burn, and I will report back what I find.

So what are some activities that you enjoy that could be major calorie burners?

·         Dancing – About 400 per hour

·         Hiking – About 500 per hour

·         Yoga – About 350 per hour

·         Swimming – About 400 per hour

·         Gardening – About 300 per hour

·         Playing Ping Pong – About 350 per hour

·         Walking the Dog (brisk) – About 400 per hour

Get out there and do some of these to burn some calories while doing something you enjoy!