5% Progress

The past few posts have been kinda sporadic. Sorry about that! I mentally try to tell myself to blog at least twice a week, but to be honest, I dont have a lot of time! I guess thats a good thing, but I have a hard time sitting down and finding time to write!

The past couple of posts have been picture-less and while not boring not really visually stimulating. So I have finally gotten some pictures to share which I'm very happy about. 

This is a book I made!

One of my friends, who is in the book making class, and she also works up at the school when I'm not working has a second job and she had Saturday night off, and because this rarely ever happens we made plans to go out for dinner and get some drinks. I knew going into this that I was going to gain some weight because of water retention, I knew that I just couldnt drink the margaritas that we were going to have a dinner, and I knew that it was going to be hard and that I didnt want to get drunk because I had to run on Sunday. 

I weighed on Saturday morning and it was at 247 (*squee!!*) my 5% goal weight. But I knew it was subject to change depending on how I handled that night. I was bound and determined to have it back down to 247 by Monday for my weight in. I did good at dinner, I had a beer with my chicken quesadilla and chips. Afterwards I had three more beers... yeah yeah, but they were spread out over a 4 hour period so maybe that makes it not as bad? I also drank a TON of water with my beer. For every beer I made sure to get some water to go with it. I peed a lot, but on Monday morning I was right at 249. But thankfully today I was back to 247. So really it only took me a few days to get back to normal.

That leads me to say that I have lost my first 5%!!! A week early! That gives me one extra week to lose the next 5%, which is 13 pounds. I'm so happy to be out of the 250s. You have no idea. When I was going balls to the wall in school my weight was up to 272, and every time I would try to get back into working out I could NEVER get past the 250s. So goodbye 250 pounds, we shall NEVER meet again! 

Yesterday was a Zumba day and I didnt have the late shift at school (4-9 haha) so I actually had time to do things at home. My mom is coming to visit this weekend (yayaya!) so I need to clean up. Now, I know she would tell me not to worry about it. But I have been living at my house with barely enough time to cook lunch or dinner and no motivation to do anything on the weekends but rest and workout. So I desperately needed to clean up, because it might be barely habitable for me and Axel, but not for a guest. I got home at 4, and proceeded to clean until 6:00 when I left for Zumba, I got back around 7:15 and cleaned till around 9:30-10. I got my kitchen, dinning room, living room all cleaned a vacuumed. A ton of clothes washed, I mopped, but didnt get to vacuum and mop the upstairs where the rooms and my bathroom are. I did get the dog washed too! And myself because I was disgusting after that.

5k baby!!

Sunday (yes, I know I'm skipping around) I did another 5k run, it only took me about 50 minutes. I toned down on how fast I'm going so I can go for longer times. Today I was SO sore because of all that cleaning. I'm too old for this I suppose! Not too old to clean, but too old for marathon cleaning sprees. I'm decently in shape, but apparently not in good cleaning shape. When I went to the gym my favorite treadmill was taken so I had to find another one. I got on and looked at the incline and it said 0, and I was like why does it feel like I'm going up a hill if this incline is at 0? So about 25 minutes into my workout I realize and remember that the other treadmill I used is a -300 incline so I move it down three degrees and it was like I could suddenly move again! I thought it was because I was tired and sore from cleaning, and I'm sure that was part of it, but the other part was that incline! Whew! It makes a difference. I was barely able to run for 5 minutes today, whereas Sunday I was able to run for three stretches of 10 minutes. Maybe Thursday will be better. 

I really badly want to take a nap, but I'm scared that I'll over sleep when I need to be at the school. I want to go in early to get some work done on my book. 

Dont look at the next picture if you dont like blood! I cut my finger with an Xacto knife on Friday and this is the bloody pic of it! I'm a martyr for my art!

Eww!

Run run run

I meant to post this yesterday, but honestly during the week I dont have much time to do anything. So! I'll just post it today! This past weekend I ended up switching how I was going to work out. Originally, my plan was to run Friday and swim on Saturday and Sunday. Friday, I went and swam for an hour doing laps. After that I got a call from a friend asking if I wanted to work out, I knew that if I said no, she probably wouldnt do it, so I said yes and went back to the gym. We did the stationary bike for about 55 minutes and then did weight lifting, concentrating on our arms. So Saturday rolls around and my arms were so damn sore they felt like they were going to fall off, because of this, I had a rest day on Saturday and then instead of running Friday I ran on Sunday and then went swimming.

I'm super excited to say that on Sunday I wasnt feeling it at all, I could barely get through a minute of straight running, but at the end of the workout, I had about 10 minutes left and I moved the pace down a lot and ran for 5 whole minutes!!!!! I felt so good about myself after that! So today was my next run day and I figured if I could run for five minutes once, I could do it again. I ran first for 5 minutes, walked for 1, ran for 6, walked 1, ran 7, walked 1 and ran 8, then I had like 10 minutes left so I walked 2 and ran 3 then finished my last 5 minutes with a cool down! I wish I could have done that all the way through without stopping, but I'll get there. Needless to say this is HUGE news and I'm beyond excited, because in May I could only run for 15 seconds at a time!

Something else that I did this weekend was 1. I stayed on track ALL weekend!!! 2. I went to the farmer's market. I dont have a three, but I think the reason I was able to do so well this weekend, was because I had all this awesome fresh produce to eat. I got okra, blueberries, watermelon, squash, bread and a ton of tomatoes. They sold me a giant bag of almost mushy tomatoes because they were going to go bad, and because its super easy for me to make a soup, freeze it and bring it for dinner when I work at the school, I had planned to use those tomatoes in my chicken tortilla soup, which has a tomato base to it.

I wasnt able to cook it on Sunday night, which had been my plan (I kept running into people during my day and getting side tracked from what I needed to do) so I did it last night on my night off. When I cook this dish, I cook the chicken separate from the soup because I have to grind up the veggies in the blender to make it a smooth soup. So I put the chicken in a pot with water to cook, and everything is going well, my soup smells good and is bubbling along nicely and my chicken looks to be finished cooking. I turn off the boiling water and grab a couple of forks so I can pull the chicken apart to make sure its done in the middle- I did it right over the pot of boiling water, and the chicken fell back into the pot and splashed my left hand with water. Oh how it hurt. I screamed and started running cold water over my hand. After a little while it still hurt insanely, my mom had said that I could put lavender oil on a burn and it would soothe it, so I do that, and nothing happens. So I pull the chicken out of the pot and put them on my cutting board and grab a bag of frozen veggies and a tea towel and sit on the couch to try to take the heat out of my hand.

Usually if I burn myself I would put aloe on it, and it wouldnt hurt at all, but I dont have an aloe plant, so I was SOL. After a while the pain was tolerable and so I go back into the kitchen to pull my chicken and to blend the soup. Its in a huge pot, and so I have to ladle it out into the blender and grind it up. Thats when the next horrible thing happens. I set the lid down to the blender and I'm looking and looking for it, and I'm getting super pissed because the last time someone used the blender lid, it wasnt me, and I thought that my friend had misplaced it. Because I cant find this lid, I get a flat cutting board and put it on top of the blender and turn it on...

yeah

You can imagine what happened next... my kitchen was splattered in tomato soup. By this point I just wanted to scream and eat some bread, but I was really hungry and I had all that chicken that I had just burned my hand to cook, so I found the lid, it was under a dish towel where I had put it and kept blending the soup. It was excellent by the way.

That's what I've been up to lately, tonight I have to work and when I get home I need to do the dishes from last night, I couldnt get my hand in the rubber glove last night because the burn was so bad. Eventually I had the bright idea to check for some sunburn aloe vera in my bathroom. Thank the Lord I had some because after 5 thick coats it finally stopped throbbing. I also took some aspirin :)

Sometimes Things Suck

Genrally I would have to say that I'm a pretty positive person. On a normal day I would call myself an optimist. No one is perfect and so there are some days that just suck no matter how positive or how much of an optimist you are. 

I havent been sleeping much, still trying to get body and head to want to go to bed before 12, I shoot for 11:30, but end up not being able to sleep until at least 12:10. That's late when I have to get up at 6:45. My day got all messed up because we had to have a book for my book making class complete, and because there is such a HIGH quality standard in this class, I feel like if I mess up even a little, I have to redo everything. Because trust me, my professor will point out even little things. But today I made a big mistake about halfway through the book, so I had to redo it, which made me stay longer than I would have wanted at school.

I was going to get out of class and go workout, and then eat lunch (its 2:55 and I still haven't eaten lunch yet...) but because I messed up my book, I had to stay late. 

So that's pretty much all background. Messing up the book didnt make the day suck, just threw my schedule off. What did make it suck was after I worked out. I had time to workout for about 45 minutes, and it was a run day, so I ran into the gym, changed clothes and got on a tread mill. Happily, I can say that I did intervals of 2 min. running 1 walking. Which is pretty darn good. Near the end I ran for about 4 minutes straight! Huzzah! 

I was walking out of the building and there is this long sidewalk you have to walk down to get to the parking lot, and as I stepped off the edge of the parking lot I fell, dunno how, call me grace, I just misstepped and all 255 pounds of me came crashing to the concrete. I wasnt hurt, didnt even skin my knees. But there were people around, and it was just incredibly embarrassing. Generally I dont give a flying fish what people think about me, but I hate to make a fool of myself. I dropped my water bottle and a nice girl picked it up for me and asked if I was fine. I said I was okay and got up, and the guy walking by asked the girl if I was okay.

I was perfectly fine, no a scratch, but as soon as I got in the car I just started sobbing in my 95 degree car. All I could think was that they must have thought "that poor fat girl cant even walk." It was just so embarrassing. I'm not saying that it wouldnt be embarrassing 100 pounds lighter, just that there would be less of me to make a spectacle of. Talk about feeling so down on myself, like total and utter shit. I dont normally feel like this, like I said, I'm a optimist (or at least I think I am) and I like to think positive. I just felt so disguising and fat and huge and icky and I just cried and cried. Finally I was able to stop enough to drive home. 

I dont know how I'm feeling now, mainly hungry. This is especially annoying because I did this earlier in the year too (on my birthday no less) and really hurt my ankle that time. I dont think losing weight will make me more graceful, I just wish that this didnt keep happening to me. Talk about a waste of a good workout high. 

Goals and Plans

So my weekends kinda got wonky because of the 4th of July and because I got sick the weekend before that. Needless to say things were kinda gross for a while there, and my stomach was really messing up. But I'm in my summer class now and even though its only been three days I seem to have a pretty decent plan for working out and having a good schedule for sleep, food, and class work.

My mom has totally inspired me to really think about the goals that I want to achieve. I have been looking at the weight watchers app the past month or so and while I only lost (and kept off) about 5 pounds I looked at the 5% goal that they want me to achieve and realized that there isnt a date cap on it. Its just- eventually we want you to lose 5% so you can move on toward a bigger goal.

I know chopping up goals is a good thing to do because its easy to look at the over all amount of weight you need to lose and think "I'll never get there" so I decided Monday to set a date goal for myself (also inspired by Extreme Weight Loss- Awesome TV show). I need to lose 8 more pounds, so I set a goal of 4 weeks. Two pounds a week is doable. I'm going to move my tracking day to Monday because I think it will help me keep myself accountable on the weekends. If I over eat- my weigh in will be baaad!

I started looking at small goals to set myself until the end of the year, because its not just going to stop with the first 5%. I want to keep this going, and to help keep me accountable I'll post my goals here. When I'm doing good I can lose about 10 pounds a month. These arent hard core- "if you dont lose THAT amount of weight by such and such date- you will die" kinda goals- they are just something to give myself to shoot for. Because I know I work better when I have a date and a goal to shoot for. 5 months isnt bad at all, and if I can lose 10 pounds a month (wow!) that would be awesome.

Starting weight 260

Lose 5% body weight: 247
Goal Date: 7-29-13

Lose 10% (from original weight): 234
Goal Date: 9-2-13

Lose 15% body weight: 221
Goal Date: 10-7-13

Lose 20% body weight: 208
Goal Date: 11-11-13

Lose 25% body weight: 195
Goal Date: 12-31-13

I realize that some of these are more than 2 pounds a week, which is more than 10 pounds a month. I'm going to try to see these first couple of months how this works, and if it needs to be revised... I'll do it!

I have to say that I dont seem to have a problem eating healthy and working out when I'm in Louisiana. Not really sure why. It just is easy here. Or at least it is right now. I think the hard thing will be when I get back full time into school. But you know, I really like what I'm doing now at the gym and I actually look forward to going. Especially on Zumba days. My plan is to do Zumba Monday and Wednesday, because those are the only days that I have off to be able to go, and on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I'll run. My plan for the weekends, are to do some weight lifting and yoga. The weekends will be DVDs, I really do enjoy doing them, and if I need to change up what I'm doing on the weekend, I can always go swim or just do stretches. I know that doesnt leave a day off, but on the weekends I dont think I'll get much of a workout.

I'm so determined to do this! I saw some pictures of myself from the 4th of July that a family member posted on Facebook, and I hate thinking "Dear Lord! That's me!?!" So its time to kick this fat's ass!!