Four Down 361 More to Go

I have been on the weight loss train for six months now and I am half way to my goal weight. Yesterday I decided to get my butt back on track after two weeks of nonsense eating so that I can make my goal by the one year anniversary on July 4. Not as easy to do as you might think. It seems it only takes two weeks to un-train your body and send it careening back into craving everything you hadn't been giving it. Thank God I didn't slack off on the exercise during the two weeks!

I am back to monitoring my daily calories in and out on a calorie counting website. I found it was extremely helpful when I started and since I am starting again after the two week binge I don't see why it won't work this time around too. Of course I find I am not being completely honest on it but estimating a bit here and there. It seems no one has told them they need to program in Leonie's chourice and peppers or her homemade pumpkin pie. They are also unaware of Confreda's strawberry rhubarb or Boston cream pie or the multitude of flavors Ghiradelli chocolate squares come in. To my knowledge there is nothing to be done but to make a guess at the homemade items and work off the ten calories it takes to type in the information on the back of the chocolates. Of course now that I am over forty I have to put on my reading glasses to do that, there's another ten calories burned because I have to go get them from their hiding place in my room down the hall where the kids won't see me acting my age.

I thought I would be inspired by watching The Biggest Loser tonight. Well I'm not sure what I am after watching it. If I lost 41 pounds in a week like this one guy did I'd be below my goal weight. I can't even imagine 15 lbs in a week but these people are ticking them off. Then another man was upset that he lost 7 pounds in a week and all I can think is; "Damn! That's fantastic!" But the guerilla mentality on this show makes that a shame. No wonder people have body image issues and number issues. I'm shocked that it really is more about the end game. I guess it wouldn't be as big a draw if all of the teams got the help they needed and succeeded and stuck around for the full ten or twelve week run of the show. Who'd tune in to see that? I guess I would.

The disgust with the brutality of it being a reality show aside I have to say it is the most revealing thing to watch other people step up on a scale on national television in clothes I wouldn't even wear around my own pool and I'm a few hundred pounds smaller than they are. Talk about eye opening. So yes I was inspired. I was inspired to not get that way but I haven't changed my outlook on me.

I like me no matter what size I was or will be in the future. I will not hide pictures of me when I am at my heaviest and I will not make excuses for how I got there or why I stayed there. Make no mistake I'm not planning on going back there but I'm not whiling away the hours giving myself a complex about the whole thing or worrying about the numbers. Even at 210 I was doing front flips off the diving board without much effort. I was by no means healthy but I wasn't a physical disaster either. I could tread water for an hour and make a half hour on the treadmill without too much trouble.

Three months after we started I could tread water for two hours without batting an eye. Six months after I started I can walk five miles around the neighborhood which takes an hour and twenty minutes. I can blast off an hour on the tread mill on an 8 incline at 3.2 miles per hour and I roll the elliptical for an hour, churning off over 600 calories per jaunt. Even better than all that is how much more impressive my flexibility is in this thinner body. Okay so the balance is still off but there are those extenuating circumstances involving nerve damage, metal plates, and screws that weigh in on that part of the equation. (HA! Balancing equations! I kill me! I got a C in Chemistry because I couldn't master that.)

I don't run, I don't want to run, I don't like it. I don't do weights except once in awhile because I don't like them either. I'm all about the effectiveness of each movement and not the speed or number of repetitions. I don't subscribe to the mentality that I have to be dripping sweat and practically passing out at the end of a workout for it to be worth it. I refuse to kill myself in an effort to prolong my life. Sorry it just doesn't make any sense to me to do that. I also have to thank Sansa for making my MP3 player because the right sound track makes all the difference. Nothing says walk a little faster like The GoodLife by Three Days Grace, Bang Go The Bells by Babylon AD, Juggernaut by Baptized By Fire, and Da Do Ron Ron by Shawn Cassidy. Yeah, you go ahead and laugh. It's working for me and that's all I care about.

So there you have it, four days into the new year is four days into the renewed diet and exercise pledge. Four days toward being a healthier me but still realizing I am the best I can be at any given moment and accepting all that is or isn't.

Be safe.