Diane

now I have to move!  I took your suggestion to find opportunities to exercise and followed it.  That costume was hard to come by and, being winter, I didn’t have a lawn mower, but still, my neighbors did NOT appreciate me out dancing around in a leather police outfit with hot pants picking up after my dog.  Probably should have made sure my police officer neighbors weren’t home first.    (See my booster notes for the full picture.)  Seriously, though, thank you to those who did respond to my blog.  The puppy situation has been weighing me down and guilt was getting the better of me.

This time when I called the SPCA to find out how long it would take to get my dog back, the lady was kind enough to look and see if she was still there.  She was adopted a few weeks ago.  She had a home for Christmas.  I know that bringing her back wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, but I do miss her and I did feel responsible that she was in a cage.  Now I can believe that she is in a good home with people who love her.  If you hear a hallelujah from the mid-west, it will be my husband when I tell him she already has a home.

Past few days I have been a bit down.  I really want my puppy back, especially now that I know my kids aren’t allergic to her.  I know it is insanity as she needs a lot of training, but I can’t stand the thought of her sitting in a cage all day.  When I got her, there was another person who wanted her and now I have put her in a cage.   I miss her even though she was a lot of stress.  And the shelter policies are that they won’t tell former owners any information about the animal.  It is taking all of my will power to not go to the shelter to see if she’s been adopted and if she hasn’t, bring her home.  Yesterday was particularly bad and I didn’t make the time to get in my exercise.  It was storming in the evening so I couldn’t walk my prissy beagle (she won’t even go outside if there’s a dense fog) and I used that as an excuse not to go walking.  Today I am going to try to get in a workout this afternoon and then take my dog for a walk in the evening.

I have two stress relievers - one makes me feel better about life in general and myself specifically; the other makes me feel guilty and depressed.  Yesterday I opted for the latter.  It’s easy to grab something to eat because I don’t have to find time to do it.  I don’t have to worry about the kids and I don’t have to even put on shoes.  I hate it, but I still do it.  The other is exercise, which, contrary to what one might think, I do actually enjoy.  It’s kind of like why I don’t eat more vegetables - it takes more effort to get going.  Once I get moving or try the veggie, the experience is so much more rewarding than the chips and salsa ever could be. 

So many things in my life have been easy.  Why is this one thing - weight control - so difficult?  I know what to do; I know what works and what doesn’t; I know why.  I’m just trying to figure out the how for long term.  Perhaps a good place to start is to get out of the house.

Have a good Wednesday. 

That’s how I’m going to deal with life from now on.  What is the point about complaining about the past?  Either learn from it and move on or fix it.  I have gone over on calories for the past two days.  No one made me do it so I will look at my food journal, figure out where I went wrong and fix it.  Can’t blame the food journal for having totals I didn’t like.

Complaining about not being able to go to the gym when I want to is also pointless, and rather repetitive.  So I can’t always go during childwatch hours because the kids have runny noses.  Well, they’re open at 5:30 a.m.  I have no right to complain when they are open at a time when I can go without kids.  And even if I don’t get to the gym I can always get in my cardio by walking the dog after they’re in bed if my husband is home, taking the kids for a walk during the day or using a Walk Away the Pounds DVD.  I can even figure out a strength training routine for at home if I’m so inclined.

Last night at dinner things got put into a little better focus.  I was eating a sandwich and choked on part of it.  I’ve almost drowned before, but that was more than 30 years ago so the memory is a bit hazy.  I’ve never been so scared for myself in my life and I’ve walked through Russian mafia controlled neightborhoods in Poland at night before.  Thankfully I was able to get it out with just a sore throat as a reminder.  I definitely don’t want to go out not having lived my life to the fullest! 

I tried two new, well sort of new, veggies yesterday.  I learned that dandilion greens need to be cooked to be edible and that summer squash really isn’t that bad.  I had my panini grill out for sandwiches and just tossed some slices on that then put on a little salt and pepper.  It was pretty good.  I haven’t eaten either of them since I had to pick them myself as a child.  So now I need to add at least one of them to the list of veggies I like.  Dandilion greens are still a toss up.

Hope everyone has a great day.

Okay, it’s not the whole day.  That would undo everything I’d done for the whole week, but I have decided that Sunday dinner will my free meal.  I was careful today so I had a decent amount of calories left for the day, but I’m pretty sure I went over. 

Sunday’s are my most difficult day to deal with food because I have to do my grocery shopping.  It’s always stressful because it involves more than one store and the kiddies lose any amount of patience they had about 3 minutes into the first store.  I have my list; I have my menu planned; I never go shopping hungry.  But after an hour of shopping with the kids, one of which is too big for the seat in the cart and the other trying to climb out it, trying to grab every “treat” item they can reach, I just want to pull my hair. 

I know I should do better, but I think that one meal on a day when I’m purposely cutting back earlier in the day isn’t the worst thing in the world.  I’m hoping that in time my Sunday dinner will follow the rest of the days of the week in being healthy without taking any thought. 

I’ve still made sure I get my fruits, veggies and water.  TOM slammed hard this afternoon so I’m taking it a little easy for the exercise today.  Did my aerobic breathing earlier, but walking isn’t in the cards today.  I’m planning on it being the only day I don’t walk for this month.

Have a pleasant evening.

Okay, so the weather’s not that bad here.  It was raining during my walk, but I didn’t melt. 

When I was a teenager I read a biography of a woman named Mindy who, at the age of 17, was diagnosed with TB.  It was back in the late 1800’s so very few people recovered, especially if they couldn’t get to the arrid southwest.  She lived in Vermont and her family was poor.  For two years she would walk every day for 2 hours.  It didn’t matter if it was a blizzard, raining, 20 below or hot, she would walk.  She beat TB and lived for another 70 years.

This week I have been thinking a lot about her story.  I have not wanted to exercise.  After just a few minutes my lungs are aching from the strain as I recover from bronchitis.  I’ve had daily asthma attacks because my lungs are weakened right now.  And today I had a migraine.  But I have gone walking and I feel better for it.  If this woman who was given a death sentance can fight and prove them wrong, I have no excuse for not exercising daily when I have access to home gym equipment and a gym if the weather is bad.

She could have easily sat in a chair or stayed in bed and waited for TB to take her life, but she didn’t.  I have been sitting in that chair far too often as I let obesity take my life.  I have not been given a death sentance and I am no longer going to silently write my own.  I will not put off until tomorrow what can be done today.  And I have a very orderly kitchen to prove that! lol

So, unless the heat during the summer is too much for my little beagle, I will be walking her 1.5 a day, working her up to 3 miles.  I am going back to the gym to do my strength training and a 30 - 45 minute cardio workout starting Monday even if it means going after the kids are in bed.

As far as today goes for being on point:
Water- Check
Fruit - check
Veggies - 1 short
Total calories - check
Exercise - check

Have a good evening everyone.  I’m off to load the dishwasher and do some laundry.  Man, I need to get a life!

Fruit and veggies - check
Water - check
Exercise - check
Calorie intake between 1200 and 1550 - not today

I know where I went wrong and I know what to do to fix it tomorrow.  Made black bean soup for dinner and it turned out really good.  Even my husband who’s not a big fan of it like it.  Maybe I’ll get this cooking thing down yet!

I got in 10 of my 16 glasses yesterday.  I always feel so much better when I drink a gallon of water a day.  However, when I haven’t been drinking that much I need to either get back to that amount over a few days or be really glad I’m a SAHM!  I got in all my fruits and veggies yesterday as well.  Even being vegetarian, that is a challenge for me.  Today I’ve already had some fruit and a healthy, veggie full lunch planned.

I was channelling Stuart Smalley earlier, but my daughter told me she needed the mirror to check her Pooh Girl outfit.

And now a pet peeve.  I checked out some cookbooks from the library and as I was flipping through one, I noticed that a page had been torn out.  I counted all the pages that had been torn out and there were 12 missing!  Is it really so difficult to make a photo copy or grab a pen and paper to copy a recipe down?! 

Hope everyone has a great day!

I was never the skinny girl.  Never felt like the pretty one, the cute one, the popular one.  I always felt like the fat one, the third wheel one, the one that they put up with.  My three best friends growing up were the skinny pretty one, the skinny cute one and the skinny popular one.  I was the Italian, Scottish heritage one who can still remember being 6 years old and having my mother, a high school beauty queen, tell me that she never expected her daughter to have a double chin at 6.  The thing is, I did and still do look exactly like my mother.

I knew there were times that my friends purposely left me out of things because I was a little overweight.  That in turn caused me to be depressed and the weight gain continued.  My senior year of high school I gained 30 pounds for no apparent reason, just before the class trip to Jamaica.  Even then I was only 150, but still considerably more than my 100 pound friends.  I could outlast any of them in walking, was the only person in my class who could lift a 100 pound bag of cement.  (My class trip was to build a dorm at a college, not just for play.)  I had friends, but when it came to dances where the girl has to ask the guy, they would come up with any excuse to not go with me.  From what I’ve been told in the past couple of years, it had nothing to do with my weight, but because they knew I was not going to sleep with them.  Whatever the reason, I thought of it as a weight issue.

My first year of college I lost enough to fit into a size 10 and the guy I had a crush on told someone else that he wasn’t interested because I was too fat.  He then had the nerve to ask why I was upset with him.  Quite a rude awakening to him that I understood Spanish.  I think the kicker for that period in my life was when a life long friend asked me to be in her wedding 2 weeks before the event after 3 other people had backed out and then was telling others in the party when she didn’t think that I could hear that I was a last resort because I was fat.

There were other times where I knew my weight was an issue and when I lost a lot of weight the attention I got was a little overwhelming and mostly unwanted.  Nothing like having to tell your friend’s fiancé that you have a face and to please stop looking lower.  Thankfully she didn’t understand English or end up marrying him.

I have always wanted people to accept me no matter what my weight is.  My husband does that.  He’s always letting me know how attractive he finds me, to the point of annoyance sometimes.  My children love me unconditionally.  My friends that have made the transition from childhood/college to adult friends don’t care what my weight is. 

So why am I still nearly 250 pounds?  The one person that needs to accept me no matter what I weight hasn’t figured out how to do that yet.  I just can’t get that person in the mirror to believe that there is a person worth fighting for standing there.  Instead of facing that, I try to force people to accept me this way.  Deep down I don’t really believe the lack of connections in the MOMS club have anything to do with my weight but it certainly is easier to think that.  That way the responsibility isn’t on me. 

Well, I am done hiding behind my weight.  If I don’t even like the person I am looking and feeling like this, why am I expecting others to?  Why am I trying to force others to like someone I don’t?  Kinda like making kids eat lima beans when I won’t touch them.    I know that I can be a very likable, funny, happy person when I choose to be.  As of this moment, I am choosing to be and I will continue to make that choice until it is me.

I will do the things that make me the person I want to be - strong, happy, energetic, a good wife and mother, a true friend.  It will mean a few things that aren’t quite as tasty as I’d like, a few sore muscles and putting myself out there so probably some hurt feelings as well.  It will be worth it, though, to be the person I know I can be instead of someone that I avoid making eye contact with in the mirror.

Well, I wish I really was.  There may not be a whole lot of stuff to do in Northern New England, but my daughter and I were never sick there.  It seems like since moving to Ohio, first Dayton and now Cincinnati, that the kids and I are always sick.  Since early November the kids have had croupe, sinus infections, ear infections, strepp, an extremely nasty respiritory virus and it just keeps going back and forth.  I went 3 years without so much as a sniffle before moving.  I just want to be healthy for more than a week and I’d love to go for a decent amount of time between hearing my kids sick.  It’s beyond insaneat this point.

In the wieghtloss department, my husband has not come right out and said he’s not going to do anything about himself, but actions certainly indicate such.  He doesn’t want to go back to exercising and he definitely couldn’t care less about what he eats.  I think in some ways it might make it easier for me to stick to my plan.  I won’t be as tempted to cheat if he’s not.  Even if he’s eating junk and not exercising, it’s not cheating for him so I won’t have that justification for my own actions.

I haven’t started anything yet this year, but I’ve still lost some weight.  I have gotten about 6 hours of sleep in the past 5 days, and that includes a nap yesterday.  I’m too tired to move and too tired to eat much.  I envy my sisters-in-law that live near my parents, but then, I wouldn’t send sick kids over there for her to watch anyway.