Sloooowly

So I have been seeing a slow down since I started this blog. Correlation-unlikely but I seem to be only doing about .5 lbs on average each week for the last month. This is so frustrating yesterday I was 181.2.
I am pretty sure I should be lower than this but weighed in today at 181.6-I think it is because I caved in and had a huge coke zero last night-I almost never drink anything but water or coffee but it was just calling to me and was so yummy. My body didn't think so and it gave me hiccups for the whole eavening in response. Funny thing/cute sad thing is I have a chihuahua and she is afraid of my hiccups. She will literally tuck her tail in and stare at me and then run away when any other time she is like glued to my side.

Anyway it seems that I am always just a few steps from where I want to be. When I got my drivers license at 16 I put my weight at 180. Now I'm sure that I was probably being generous with myself and reducing my actual weight a bit but that is a huge milestone for me. If I can become smaller than my percieved weight when I was 16 that would be huge. I hate to give myself deadlines for weightloss as I never meet them even when I think I am creating easy goals so I just work one week at a time and see what that brings. I focus on what I do-food and activities. I know that if I do the rights things for long enough the scale will reflect that.

Yesterday I went to a water arobics class-it was actually water kickboxing! It was me and about 7 retired women but it was so fun. The water was so nice and the instructor was a bigger woman so it helped me feel better about walking around in a swim suit. Oh my swim suit is new BTW my old one was too big and provided absolutly no support in the bra area anymore. I got a cute green tankini top with black bottoms-I tried on like 10 before I picked this one. I just had no idea what they would look like on anymore. I did find that I am solidly a 12 now and 10s are in the near future but not wearable now. My goal is to be an 8 yeah single didgets-scarry!

Breakfast this moring if you are looking for yummy summer food-Dannon Light and Fit .5 cup, Fiber one 80 cal cereal 3/4 cup and any berries fruit you want to add! I did blue berries as that is what I had:)

Friendly Thaughts

Do you have a weakness for a certain type of food? Of course you do we all do. I was out with some girlfriends the other night and we started talking about ours. S's weakness is pop. She prefers Coke and will drink it all day every day if she had the funds. J's weakness is sweets. She is temporarily living with her parents her mom is retired and is home all day. J will hold up in her room all day and not eat and then will be starving for dinner and after and will eat dinner with her parents and then steal a bunch of cookies or whatever is available and take it back to her room to eat alone after dinner. K's weakness is take out. She was a single mom for a long time and got in the habit of picking up food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for herself and probably breakfast and dinner most days for her daughter.
Chatting with these friends I came to see at different points I had similar habits as each of them. I think my food habits have changed so much in these past few months and my awareness of calories is so heavy in my mind when I make food choices, even when I am intetionally making less than healthy choices.
Even with this new knowledge I know that if I let myself I could easily go back into my old ways and become that girl again. Tracking has been so important to me in this journey. Foods I eat have changed, excersize has changed alot, I don't know what matinence will look like yet. It is too far away to know but I'm sure that if not everyday I will definatly still be tracking my food to make sure I am in line periodically.

Update on my back: I am taking advil around the clock my aunt, a nurse said that I should continually take it a few days to build up in my system to see if it can reduce some swelling(pain) in the area that could be caused by the adjstments. Also, I am planning on getting a physical soon and will bring this up with my regular doctor. Mentally I am in a much better place today.

April Showers

I went to the Chiropractor and finally asked the question that has been on my mind for weeks: When will this start working and I stop hurting? His answer is it will just take time. TIME arghhh! I am tired of being patient. I am patient about weight loss. I am patiently working a job I don't love while patiently looking for a new one. I am patiently dealing with my back pain.

I was so upset when I left that instead of going into work early like I had planned I had to go to see my mom so she could calm me down. I am tearing up just writing about this. I am so mad at myself for allowing this to happen! If I could have fixed this weight problem years ago maybe whatever I did to my back would not have happened. I'm so mad that now that I have gotten my act together is when the pain comes not before. I don't tell anyone how bad it hurts because I am embarrassed and don't want to be seen as weak. It has hurt since Thanksgiving and I am only 25. Have I already ruined my life before it really got started? Sorry whiny. I'll get better and I'll keep working hard. Of the things I could be doing to help my back losing weight has got to help it right?

On another note eating has been great. I decided a few weeks back that I would stay on track throughout the weekends and I am only going off my normal eating if I eat out with someone. In that case, I still try and track what I am eating so I see the damage and encourage myself to make good choices. It does no good to eat 1300 cal each day sun-Thursday if I eat back the deficit over the weekend. I don't know what all of you do for planning meals but I am a planner. I grocery shop every Sunday and have a very specific list I make and stick to. I plan every meal and snack. I work late 2 days a week and eat lunch and dinner at work so I have to have 2 meals that can be made ahead of time or in the microwave those days plus my snacks. I pack it all before work to make it easy to make good choices for food at work-no vending machines for this girl!

Thanks for the encouragement on the Zumba class. It really was fun-much more enjoyable than the elliptical:) I'm afraid that it may have set me back on the back healing a bit but I can't just lay on the couch for 6 months but I may have to put of getting my Latin grove back for another week or so.

Zumba Love

So I went to my first Zumba class last night and loved it!
When I first started on this weight loss plan at 245 I was too embarressed to even go to a gym to work out so I would shut my blinds and do zumba tapes in my living room(as well as wii fit and a biggest loser dvd). I really liked them they were fun and went by fast and of course once you got the moves down they could be as challenging as you wanted because thats when you could add your own wiggles:)
When I got down to 200 I joined a gym. I liked it at first because it was a change in my routine and seemed more of a push that the videos were- I think mainly because I had done the same 2 for too long.
Now that I am near 180, (182 as of this morning)  I am more willing to get out there and try new things. Yes I thaught I would look silly doing my dance moves in front of others. Byt everyone was really into it and just doing their own thing. I did feel bad that since I was new I def did not get the dance moves right most of the time. This brought me pretty close to the girl on my left each time for some reason. Sorry if I was intruding your space I will be better next time and the time after that and so on.

I want to spice up my workouts with other things, variety seems to be the key for me. I think if I can do something that gets my heart going and breaks a sweat for at least 30 min 4 times a week I'll be happy. This summer I have rollerblading-def want to do at least once a week, gym work out -elliptical for 40 min with some rowning machine for arms would be good enough, then Zumba classes once a week seems like so much fun. I just need to either come up with one more thing or do the gym twice a week until I figure it out.

Gotta keep it fresh!

Side note last night for dinner I made chicken breast-pan some spray salt pepper vegetable seasoning and a dash of soy sause, and a sweet potato microwaved whole for 8 min sprayed with I can't belive its not butter. MMM it was so good. And it filled me up so much after Zumba that I was feeding bites of sweet potato and chicken to my doggie-I have a bad habit of giving her bites of food when we are home alone. But look at this sweet girl how can I resist!

Zooming

I am now a rollerblader!! I bought blades easter weekend. My brother and dad were around to hold me up as I skated back and forth in front of my parents house. It was alot like learnig to ride a bike but I was what 20 years older:)
The next weekend I went back over and my dad helped me again by the end I was able to go on my own and he just walked next to me. I did skin my knee with one fall but I was kinda happy about it. It has been a long time since I had been active enough to get a skinned knee!
This week I went out on my own one morning. I walked to the park put on my knee elbow and wrist guards and went rollerblading. It was so fun! I didn't go very long but just enough to not get too tired. I am concentrating alot on not falling at this point so I get tired fast from it and then I am less stable. I am excited to becoming more active as I get more compfortable with my body.
I am working on finding a new routine for being active. I'm thinking one gym day and then maybe some activity classes plus rollerblading will be great. Tonight I am going to go to a Zumba class if I don't chicken out :)
Have you done any fitness classes? How did it go were you compfortable? Did the time fly?

Visual Cheer!

I have a few things around my appartment for motivation. I have a nice little glass plate on it there are two candle holders one is labled lost and one is labled to go. I have little glass rocks that indicate pounds. Each is a haph a pound to fill up the candle holders. Its very pretty and I love that the lost is visibly more full now than the to go. Recently I have felt a bit crafty and wanted to make a chart as well that would go on my wall. I went to the teacher supply store that is open to the public here for ideas. I found the section where they have the boarders that teachers would decorate the chalk board or cork board with. There were alot of options I picked 2. One is a road this I marked off my 44 lbs to go where each lb is 2 inches. On this I am putting stickers of frogs each time I weigh in. I write on their bellies the date and my current weight. Its cute and takes up a whole wall. I kind of like it. The second is kindof in the red famly and is wavy with different colors I found an orange/red frog bookmark that I can place to hang at the current weight this is smaller with each inch being 2 lbs. What do/did you use to cheer yourself on? Visuals, treating yourself, etc? 

Starving for Skates

I have a weird work schedule where I will work like one or 2 saturdays a month when I do I get to have Friday off. I really love that. Its a day that I can vistit my friends who don't work-stay at home moms and students. Also, I can get stuff done like shopping when stores are much less busy than on the weekends. So I went to visit my friend yesterday(Friday). She lives about an hour away so we were going to spend the whole day together. I figured we were going out to lunch but I ate a good breakfast anyway. So I got to her place around 10:30 and she was going to Florida the next day so had some errends to run. We did that, it is always fun hanging out and talking no matter what we are doing, then went and saw Hunger Games-pretty good-book of course better but movie did what it could. Then, we went back to her place and changed to go to her gym(she can bring a guest for free so nice) and had to stop by the library on the way.
So my point is that I was starving by the time we got to the gym like at 3:30. We did 10min warm up on tredmill. 30 min of stations that go from weights then to cardio back and forth. Then I was going to do elliptical and she was going to do bike for 40 min. I got to 20 and was shaking I was so hungery I can usually go for an hour. So then we went to dinner. Moral of the story is that like grocery shopping you should never go to the gym hungry. Its hard when you are not at home to control everything. I should have spoke up to get something before we went or packed a healthy snack in my bag just in case. But each day is for learning and I will remember this in the future.
One of the errends that we did took us to her mall. While there I decided to make a big purchase that I have been excitedly planning for a while. I got a pair of Rollerblades yay! I also got a set of knee and elbow pads I know I will be falling:) I will be learning to rollerbalde in the coming weeks and hopfully we a blading machine come summer! I'm not super coordinated and a bit nervous that it will hurt my back recovery but I can't let those things stop me from enjoying my life. It looks like so much fun! I thought of bike riding but I have absolutly nowhere to store a bike I live on the second floor in an appartment and rollerbaldes can easily fit anywhere. So whish me luck in learning. From the learning to skate articles I have read, I plan to start on carpet then grass then sidewalk then pavement. What kinds of activities have you always wanted to try/learn/improve on?What do you think is holding you back from jumping in?

Backs and weigh ins

I had a pretty uneventful weekend. My weigh in on Friday was a wash I stayed the same that sucks I never stay the same only time since this started was for 2 weeks over christmas. That time a year I was just happy to stay the same as Christmas, New Years, and my birthday all come within 2 weeks of eachother.
My back has been hurting since November and I decided last week that I would try a chiropractor. So after going last week and geting x-rays done I went back yesterday for my results and first adjustment.
I don't know if my back was at the top of my mind or if the exam did something but since going last Tuesday it hurt worse than ever so this weekend I had a little pity party and did pretty much nothing but hang out with my doggie. Yesterday after leaving I had it in my mind that one adjustment would fix it and I would feel better. I took a 1/2 day at work to recover physicaly and mentaly and thaught I was feeling better. Thats when I took my dog to the park. I was just going to lay in the sun and let her play in the grass but she whined to walk around. I took her on the shortest path around a small lake and could hardly make it all the way around. Arghh I just wanna feel better!
I go back today and want to discuss when I should start feeling like a 25 year old instead of an 80 year old. I am in the best shape of my adult life, the smallest I have ever been since 16 and feel worse than I ever have. Its funny if you think about it when you lose weight people ask if you feel so much better. I would love to say I do. Hopefully soon. I need to feel better as soon as possible.
On a different note this weekend is Easter and my little brother will be in town from college. He is going to go with me to get a new pair of rollerblades and then I am going to learn to skate. It will be a funny thing seeing me on some rollerblades but I think it will be so much fun and a great way to burn some calories in an enjoyable way. Wish me luck at the chiropractor today!