Diane

Just got a call from my Mom for the prayer chain at my church.  One of the members is being rushed to the largest hospital in Maine by ambulance right now.  She was scheduled for an MRI this morning to find out why her brain is misinterpreting almost every signal it is getting.  Things took a turn for the worse and the ambulance became necessary.  She is recently divorced and has custody of her 5 year old son.  Things are not looking good. 

So what have I learned in the past 24 hours?  Two 35 minute interval workouts AND swimming is too much for me right now.  Every muscle in my body hurts.  Hubby wasn’t feeling well so we didn’t get up at 5.  This week will be MWF for exercising together.  I am going to try to get in a WATP DVD at some point today.

So, even though it’s not as I had planned, I will keep going.  If one workout a day is what I need to do this week, so be it.  At least I can do that.  Had I been consistant over the past few months, my orginal plan wouldn’t have been a problem, but I didn’t.  Now I must deal with the consequences. 

Now I will get back to my day.  Hope everyone has a great Tuesday!

Today is my final D-Day.  I’ve had it with being fat, obese.  I don’t want to see another doctor write on my chart in red letters “MORBIDLY OBESE”.   I’m done soul searching for the reason I’m hindering myself from being healthy.  I really don’t care anymore why.  20 years of trying to answer that question as only left me heavier than ever.  Well, not quite, I have kept off 25 pounds from my heaviest.  I have theories, ideas, insights as to why I’ve allowed this fat to hang around and multiply.  It doesn’t matter.  Action is what is needed now, not more introspection.

Perhaps someday down the road I will need to revisit the why of it all, but for now, I am focusing on the how of getting rid of it.  Exercise, healthy foods and a change of attitude.  I will not make anymore rationalizations for not getting up in the morning to exercise with my husband.  Do I want to get up at 5 a.m.?  Uh, NOOO!  But I will.  I need to for me, I need to for him, we need to for us and we need to for the kids. 

Fifteen years ago I weighted 200 pounds.  I left in late August, 1993 for a village outside of Warsaw, Poland to teach for a year.  When I returned to the US in July of  1994, I weighed 150.  Aside from 2 or 3 times, I didn’t purposely exercise.  It was a part of daily life - walk to the train station: 1/2 mile each way; get off train and walk to Old Town: at least a mile each way; to get food: 1/4 - 1/2 mile each way.   Getting food was generally a daily thing as we only had a small fridge that 5 people were sharing.  As the days grew longer, I would go for long walks in the forest, most often alone.  My diet was bread, cheese, tomatoes, apples, candy covered peanuts, pastries, ice cream and Pizza Hut.  I ate when I was hungry.  I drank 3-4 litres of water a day.   Some days I barely ate.  Other days it seemed like all I did was eat.   I was up at 5 every morning and thought nothing of getting up then.

Somedays I would like nothing more than to go back to those days when exercise wasn’t an issue and my diet was just food.  But life is different now.  I have a family - husband, kids, dog.  And I’m not 21 anymore!  Exercise is something I must make time for.  Food must be planned and prepared.  I have finally accepted that if I want to be content with the reflection in the mirror, I must work at it.  I do not live a lifestyle that allows the weight to just drop off as it did that year and I haven’t for a very long time now. 

So, today is the beginning of the end.  The end of my obesity, the end of my procrastination, then end of being inactive while I try to figure out the irrelevant WHY, the end of token efforts, the end of being unhealthy, the end of blogging about starting over.

Whether the effort will show for myself and the Diamonds this week, I do not know.  What I do know is that it will in the long run, just as so many others have and are proving.

Been trying to get more of each lately.  Not always a good mix, but if I can get the water in earlier in the day, it’s not bad.  Getting sleep is actually the more difficult part.  It’s gotten easier than it used to be.  The kids haven’t been getting up at night for a while and my meds help with not getting up several times a night.  I do have trouble getting to sleep even thought the room is completely dark.  I can’t get my mind to shut down.  What would be nice, though, is if I could always understand what I’m thinking!  The closer I get to sleep, the more the words are not in English.  Guess it’s true that once you’ve learned something it’s always there, but the recall might not be that great.

Water is easier.  I actually like water.  I always have.  To make sure I get it all in each day I’ve started drinking it with meals, if I drink anything.  Before it was always milk with a meal.  Milk has kinda been grossing me out lately so I’ve barely been drinking it.  Trying to get in about 1.5 gallons a day. 

The best thing to happen this year was finding out I was deficient in Vit. D.  Some of you are probably sick of hearing me talk about it but I just can’t say enough about it.  Six months ago I was still exercising, but it would take me 30 - 60 minutes just to get up and moving without extreme pain.  That was the day after not exercising.  The morning after exercising, double that time.  I wasn’t sleeping well.  I was in near constant pain and my migraines were getting really bad again.   I was diagnosed with PCOS and put on Metformin.  I was warned about some pretty uncomfortable side effects.

Fast forward to now - never had the side effects of the meds unless I didn’t take it properly.  I take 2,600 IU of Vit. D daily (and now calcium since I’m not drinking much milk) and I am pretty much pain free.  I still have muscle pain if I over stress them, just normal stuff.   I can go walking, swimming, do gardening, have started First Day to 5 K and can keep up with it.  (Now if I just would, but that is a different blog topic!)  It’s amazing to me the difference.  I don’t have to worry if I’m going to be able to keep up with the kids the following day if we go to the zoo. 

Interestingly enough, I’ve discovered that there is a family history of Vit. D deficiency.  My mother had a brother that died in infancy of Rickets, my mother was recently tested and has NO Vit. D in her system, NONE!  I’m trying to convince my older brother to get tested as he is in constant pain and they can’t figure out why.  Every symptom that led my doctor to believe that might be a problem in me, my brother has worse. 

Okay, I’ll get off my soap box now.  I just felt like writing and getting everything I was thinking out today.  I really need some people to talk to face to face!

I took the kids to Jungle Jim’s to get some fresh fruit and veggies today.  Okay, some candy too, but that wasn’t the main purpose of the trip.

We’d already picked out the apples, plums, grapes, strawberries, bananas and yellow water melon, but still needed to get my celery.  I’d picked out the two bunches I wanted and was starting to push the cart away when my son grabbed a bunch of celery off the display and licked the entire length of it.  Yes, I bought it.  His reason was that he didn’t want all dark green celery.  I almost put his candy back, but thought it might be a tad counter productive to punish a kid for picking out a veggie he wanted.

Now I must go make a fruit salad for dinner.

with Leslie Sansone!  Every morning at 5:20 he is in front of the TV doing part of the 2 mile workout from the Walk Slim series.  And she is being pretty rough on him.  Notice I said part of the workout.  This poor man can only make it through 25 of the 35 minutes.  All these months he has been thinking I’m not really exercising when I “walk” in the den.  I think he was in shock that he couldn’t even finish the workout.  Then when he asked if I could get through it, a new respect was born when I told him I generally do at least the 3, if not the 4, mile workouts.

I will be doing it with him Sun, Tue, and Thursdays.   Not sure if that will be good for our marriage, but it might give him the support to keep going beyond the 30 days for a competition at work.  He’s only been doing it for 3 days, but he’s snoring much less so I’m getting more sleep.  Monday, Wednesday and Fridays I am doing the First Day (Couch) to 5K workouts.  I’m on week two and am amazed that I can actually do it.   Sandy suggested Podrunner.com and for anyone thinking of doing the 5K program, it is great.  The music is techno, not exactly my favorite, but to have the pace set and not have to watch a timer to know when to change is well worth a half hour of techno.