The plateau has been conquered!

So my recent post about plateaus keeping me down?  Not so much anymore.  I busted through that bad boy finally... right at Thanksgiving, which is so random!  And, I'm steadily losing weight again.  About 1-2 pounds a week, without much on the exercise front.  Again I wonder to myself how much weight I would have lost had I been pumpin' iron, running around the neighborhood or hittin' an eliptical machine!

Sinterklaas

The Dutch have a Sinterklaas tradition that mirrors the American folklore of the breaded man in a red suit with his magical helpers and flying stabled animal friends.  I spent a few minutes really thinking about their traditions, and I don't think its gonna fly as a mainstream thing over on this side of the pond. They are SO un-PC that to even mention some of these things in passing makes me lookout for possible retaliation!  Yet, it is based on this holiday that our own Santa Claus tradition was born.  I can see why we changed things up a bit!  I'll break it down for you:

Plateaus and Periods

Gosh, diet plateaus sure stink. (Content was edited... I really feel much stronger about that opinion!) 

Periods are no picnic either.  (Again, I could write a novel on that topic too!)

Put them both together and this is a recipe for diet disaster which includes a trifecta of depression, brownies, and lethargy.   Makes me kinda want to pull my hair out.

Motivation... or lack thereof

Why can I not get motivated to exercise?  Seriously!  It's like every time I go to the gym and have a great work out, and look forward to going tomorrow... that when it is finally tomorrow, I totally lack the motivation to have a repeat performance.  Why?  Let me tell you!

Cuteness!

Beautiful.  Adorable.  Happy.  Loving.  Cheeky.

All words to describe my kids during a photo shoot we took as a family a few weeks ago.   I couldn't even wait until tomorrow (a typical Wordless Wednesday, which I've never even done before.... so why start now, right?) to post these photos for the world to see.  

Are you ready for supreme cuteness?

And supreme silly loving cuteness...

And sassy goofy party time!

I love my girls!!!!!

Photo Credit:  Tracey Meyer Photography  (http://www.traceymeyerphotography.com/)  714-985-1914

Ugh.

I started tracking my diet and exercise with an online site (http://www.myfitnessplan.com/).  Wow, epic fail on my part!!!  Well, not that it's a fail that I use the site, but a fail that I have totally blown out my goals!  But maybe its because I never really established goals to begin with.  All my life, I have avoided goals because I really don't want to be reminded when I come in at 80% of them.  Anything short of 100% is failure, right?
 
Anyway, new goals are:
Food = 1,600 calories
Exercise = 30 minutes walking daily (I really need a dog!) and 30 minutes resistance training on the gym machines 4x week. 

 

I want to start doing sit-ups/crunches too.  However, each time I try, I end up throwing out my back within a few days.  Must start slow... 5 of them, then increase by 5 every three days or something like that.  I just get bored and forget to follow up by a week into a new routine!

 
I chose 1,600 calories a day because that's about the bottom level of the food I've consumed in the past week. 
 

11-9............... 1,640 calories, 2 hours of walking (yay for Disneyland!!!)

 

11-10............. 2,311 calories

 

11-11............. 1,927calories
 
11-12............. 1,441 calories

 

11-13............. 1,817 calories
 
11-14............. 1,622 calories
 
Of the most highly caloric food I've eaten, the homemade macadamia nut white chocolate chip cookies I *had* to buy from my kids' preschool (which thankfully are gone as of tonight) and tortilla chips and salsa are my evil evil evil snacks.  They represent 400-600 calories I don't need.  How rad would it be if I could keep my intake at 1,000 calories and actually exrcise every now and then!
 
So while I may have failed all over the place and back this week, at least I have idenitied the culprits that I didn't think mattered much in the grand scheme of things.  But, yeah, they do.
 
Gym tomorrow AM for SURE!  Then Disneyland for my 2 hours of walking.
 
Is there any way to hide this post??  Really, I sound pathetic.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photo credit:   Google Images

Accountability

Webster’s defines accountability as: the quality or state of being accountable; especially : an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions .

When you “diet,” do you tell everyone that you are on a diet? Does it bother you when people constantly ask how you are doing and if you are losing weight, especially when you are not? And does it bother you when people say things like, “Well, you shouldn’t have that on your diet, right?!” or “shouldn’t you go to the gym more than twice a month?”

Or do you diet silently, not telling anyone, in hopes that if you fail, no one will give you any grief about it. So that no one bothers you about the fact that you’ve been paying for a gym membership for over 4 months without actually having gone inside?

I used to be a quiet dieter, keeping it to myself so no one will be let in on my latest failed venture. I was never accountable to anyone. What did my cat care if I lost 10 pounds or gained 15?

Now. Now I am accountable to my family. I am putting them first this time, because I need to get into a zone on the obesity scale that isn’t screaming red. For them. Because I want to be here on this earth, able to participate, now and in the future.

I am accountable to myself. I didn’t realize how little I thought of myself, before. I didn’t really care if I succeeded. What difference did it make? Once you weigh this much, what’s 20 pounds either way, right? Now, I jumped into this diet, this lifestyle change, with both feet and I cannot look back.

I am accountable to everyone I let in on the secret. I told people that I am going to lose a lot of weight. Whether it takes me 9 months or 2 years, I will lose a significant amount of weight.

I am accountable to everyone who reads this blog. So accountable in fact, that I put a weight ticker on the right hand column of my blog! I am aiming to update the weight loss ticker once a week for sure, or twice a week if I am super successful!

I am accountable to about 5 million people, by my last count. I put my story on my blog, on the website of a company where I work, and on the air-waves at a radio station!! Who does that?! I told millions of listeners that I was losing weight and they can too.

So now I am accountable to everyone else’s weight loss plan, too! OK, not really. But I am accountable to those who did what I did, at the place I used – the oBand Surgery Center. And I want to be! I want to be there to support anyone following my lead. Because we’re in this together.

I’ve already been responsible for gaining an extra 200 pounds. I’d like to be responsible for losing it too. And losing YOUR extra 60 pounds. And HIS extra 120 pounds. And HER 80 pounds.

How can I support YOUR weight loss plans? I’m finally ready.

 

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountability


Photo credit:

Week 8 thru 12 - Life as a Post-Op Bariatric Patient

Read me first, if you are new to my weight loss blog!
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5-7

Week 8 - 12
So as many of you know, October at my house is non-stop activity.  I had maybe 4 days where I could get to the gym if I wanted to... but had NO energy or nmotivation to do so.  I know, I know... some of you might be thinking "girlfriend has time to go to Disneyland 5 times that month, she couldn't bust her butt to work out a bit?  Gym's open til 10 ya know..."  Well, that's where "being human" comes into play.  Being human, I am prone to mistakes.  Mistakes such as "well, I suppose 1 piece 10 pieces of candy won't hurt" or "finally, a day of rest... I think I will!"  Mistakes like getting OUT of the habit of going to the gym frequently.  Mistakes like thinking that I should test my boundaries and eat as much as I can knowing the LapBand will stop me when I am full.  FAIL.   The LapBand is a tool, like Weight Watchers, let's say.  Weight Watchers gives you guidelines and rules and tools to use to help you lose weight.  But it's up to you to actually do the program correctly.  Same with the Lap Band.  You CAN fail if you put your mind to it.  You can overeat and stretch out the top of your stomach like you willingly did to the bottom of your stomach.  You can eat ice cream and consider that a liquid, like water, therefore you are still hungry for real food.  You can not exercise and watch your weight loss go from 20 pounds lost per month to maybe 5 pounds per month.

So, imagine my whole month - 5 weeks of not going to the gym, eating chocolate and halloween candy, and going to how many birthday parties with cake, and even throwing one of my own, complete with ME cooking a cake, cupcakes, cream cheese dips, artichoke dips, chips and dips... oh my!  What did that do to me?  Especially since I did NOT get a band tightening during week 10 like I probably should have.  The doc was on the fence... he would have tightened it if I asked, but I was having a problem keeping foods down (turns out it was my chewing issue, not necessarily what I was eating because it was all good healthy stuff) so I elected to go without the tightening.  Besides, I knew that I was having a party in 48 hours and the first 48 hours after a tightening is rather restricting .... liquids only!

So after almost a month of not seeing the inside of the gym, I went yesterday for a weigh-in.  Well the great news is that I hit my post-partum weight low from Fall of 2006.  I'm actually rather excited about it because my friends all commented that I looked great after the baby weight fell off because I had essentially dropped 105 pounds (60 of me, 45 of baby even though I gained those 45 during losing the 60... it's weird math, sorry)!  Anyway, now at the end of 12 weeks post-op, it's a total of 35 pounds lost but since my last blog post in mid-september, meaning I lost those 7 pounds in September after my tighening, then stayed flat for October.  I'm excited because even after all the crap I ate, I didn't gain anything!  Averaging the 35 pounds over the 12 weeks, that's 3 pounds a week, which is pretty awesome for a diet and/or lifestyle change, right?!

I'm still so happy my "tool" (aka LapBand from the oBand Surgery Center) is still working for me regardless of whether or not I help it work or follow the rules.  I'm going to "work it" in November and lose 10 pounds.  Really!  I'm going to, darn it!  I'm also going to start blogging my diet.  It will hold me accountable for my food consumption.  I don't want to have to admit eating a bag of chips and cheese dip!!  But I'll start tomorrow. 


photo credit:  google images

You got all this candy… Now What?

Let’s face it: Halloween candy is totally unnecessary for the human body to consume.

Humans do not need the massive quantities of refined sugar, fat, preservatives, and questionable filler that make up most of the candy passed out on Halloween by your neighbors, shopkeepers, and friendly strangers whom you encounter. Does anyone really need 20 Snickers, 14 Milky Ways, 55 tootsie rolls and pops, stale bubble gum and other impossibly sticky things that make Dentists both cringe and get excited for the overwhelming number of November 1st phone calls at the same time?! No, we don’t.

Does that mean I’ve never touched a delicious King Size Butterfinger bar or dug into a Milky Way Dark Mini before? That would be no… I’ve had my fair share as a child, as a teenager, and now as an adult, because we have to give it out to total strangers who knock on our door on the 31st, right??! It would be downright criminal to turn off the lights and hide in a back room somewhere because we didn’t want to answer the many calls of social pressure that occur between dusk and the late evening on Pumpkin Day!

Besides, do we really need to send our children out into the night, dressed up in all things from princesses to superheroes to creepy crawly things or undead monsters we don’t want to run into in a dark alley somewhere, all the while begging total strangers for treats with the unspoken promise that they won’t in turn smash their pumpkins, egg their front door, or cause other illegal forms of mischief and mayhem?? Again, no. But it sure is fun!!

So now that the night is over, and your kids have gone trick or treating on no fewer than 3 different days at 5 different venues, they have amassed a gianormous fortune in hard candy and chocolate. What do you do with it all? What will keep you from having to put 2 pieces of poison in your kids’ lunches every day until next Halloween?

My October

October is always a super busy month for me.  Like, really busy.  So busy, in fact, that I've had a heck of a time trying to get to the gym this month and most likely won't go more than a handful of times the entire calendar month!  I really want to... but it's just not gonna happen.  Blogging?  I haven't even averaged once a week this month. Here's why: