Update on Goals/Food Log

So, first of all, I want to thank everyone who responded to my post yesterday. All of your comments were wonderful and I just have to say that I feel so supported by everyone, and it is greatly, greatly appreciated. 🙂 You all are so fantastic. 😀

Now, since I am 110% committed to getting my butt back on track, I am back today with an update on my progress with the goals I set for myself yesterday. I am hitting this nonsense headfirst.

So, to recap, my plans for this week are:

Throw out all crappy food I bought (I’m looking at you, Salt and Vinegar potato chips).

The chips are in the trash, ladies and gents. Where they belong.

Go to store. Buy fruits and veggies, other healthy, ww-friendly foods I enjoy but don’t have in the house.

I went to Giant at 8:30 last night and stocked up – I bought apples, bananas, cherries, yogurt, morningstar farms chik patties, lowfat hot dogs, spankin’ new (to me at least) hot dog bun sandwich thins, regular sandwich thins, lettuce, strawberries, a spiffy-looking raspberry vinaigrette dressing, crumbled goat cheese, light tortillas, 2% milk shredded mexican cheese, light string cheese,  artichoke and spinach hummus, baby carrots, a few “fresh” WW meals for the days where I have shorter lunch breaks, and some club soda to have with my POM wonderful juice. There was a tense minute in the bakery when I saw some black and white cookies,  but, as my friend Kathy would say, I gave them the Heisman trophy arm and ran away, telling myself that my spinach and artichoke hummus would taste way better than a B&W cookie (snorts).

Run 3x/week; 1 day, 1 mile, 1 day, 2 miles, 1 day, 3 miles.

Start sit-up/crunch challenge.

Track everything, even if it’s not healthy food, I need to have it all written down. Actually, I’m going to track my food for a week on my blog, so I know other people will see what I’m eating. See Below.

BLOG MORE. Blogging helps me. Doin’ it now. 😀

Get back on the WW message boards. They are also helpful for me.

And, finally, my log of what I’ve eaten yesterday and today:

Wednesday

Breakfast – 1 egg, 1 slice of american cheese, sandwich thin.

2 cups cherries

Lunch – full English tea (best friend’s bridal shower). 4 tea sandwiches, 1 scone with clotted cream, taste of pineapple upside down cake, small brownie, macaroon, 3 cups of tea, 3 sugar cubes, 1 cupcake.

Blue Moon Beer (not at the tea shop…obv. 😀 )

Dinner – mama mary’s personal pizza crust, 1/4 c. mozzarella cheese, 1/4 cup pizza sauce.

1/2 container of POM wonderful juice with club soda.

1 cup cherries.

How I feel about yesterday: Obviously the tea lunch was a splurge, but I ate really well for breakfast and dinner, and avoided the temptation to call the day a wash and get McDonald’s for dinner. So, I say Wednesday was a win.

Thursday:

Breakfast – Wallaby Down Under Organic Yogurt, apple, sandwich thin with 1 tbsp. grape jelly.

Snack – archer farms wild berry fruit strip

Lunch – 2 tbsp hummus and 1 serving of baby carrots, 1.5 tbsp light mayo, 1/2 cup tuna fish, 1 cup cherries, 1 string cheese.

Snack – Fiber One Granola bar

Dinner – low-fat hot dog, hot dog bun sandwich thin, tbsp goat cheese with 1 serving wheat thins, 2 servings bagel chips with cheese

Post of Shame

This is the hardest post I think I’ve written in my short tenure as a blogger.

Since returning from England, I have been eating like a maniac. All sorts of things I would never have eaten earlier in my WW journey, and often, stuff I don’t even want. I just want to eat terrible food.

I don’t know what the difference is. Maybe it’s stress – I am currently in the process of applying for a student visa for my upcoming move to England. It’s majorly stressful as there are about a billion different forms, each with different information, and no one will answer your questions (Unless you pay 3.00/minute, that is). I’m trying to sell all of my worldly possessions, figure what to pack…Obviously, it would be stressful for anyone, and I tend to go way insane when I’m stressed.

Maybe, leading up to my trip, I was all gung-ho because I wanted to look and feel good during my time with DBF. Perhaps now that the trip is over and I had an amazing time with DBF,  I’m feeling less pressure to lose weight. We had a long conversation about my issues with food. He knew before – I’d mentioned it briefly – but I wanted him to know everything. All the dirty details. So, I laid it all out for him, explained my tendency to stress- and binge- eat, my yo-yoing weight, my fear that if I have children, I may never lose it for good. He was wonderful and understanding. He doesn’t want me to look like I’ve just fallen off of some magazine cover  – he told me he wanted me to be happy and healthy, which is great as that’s what I want for myself as well. I want to lead a long, happy, and active life with him. So I don’t know why I’m off track now.

I got on the scale Sunday and it showed that I was up 7 pounds. In a week. I honestly don’t think that’s accurate – I ran a lot and while I ate junk, I didn’t eat THAT much junk. I think a lot f it was water weight. However, seeing that number should have shocked me into being good. And it did, for a day.

Now, I’m back to old habits. I’m snacking all the time, and not on good foods. I’m not tracking. I’m still running, but with the humidity, it might be a mile a day instead of my normal 2 or 3.

For the first time since starting this WLJ, I feel completely out of control. It’s a very scary feeling. I’ve lost 60+ pounds and the scariest thing in the world is thinking that I may gain it all back. And then some. Because, let’s be honest, with me, I never just gain back what I lost.

I need a plan. Who knows if it will work, but at least I will have one laid out.

So, ladies and gentlemen…here is my plan and my little list of short-term goals.

Plan for this week:

Throw out all crappy food I bought (I’m looking at you, Salt and Vinegar potato chips).

Go to store. Buy fruits and veggies, other healthy, ww-friendly foods I enjoy but don’t have in the house.

Run 3x/week; 1 day, 1 mile, 1 day, 2 miles, 1 day, 3 miles.

Start sit-up/crunch challenge.

Track everything, even if it’s not healthy food, I need to have it all written down. Actually, I’m going to track my food for a week on my blog, so I know other people will see what I’m eating.

BLOG MORE. Blogging helps me.

Get back on the WW message boards. They are also helpful for me.

Short-term goals:

Get down to 199.9 (or less) before moving to England on Sept 10th. This is do-able, I think.

Run next 5K (in Dewey Beach, DE, Aug 21) in less time than my first 5K (47:42).

Track every day.

5 servings of fruits and veggies everyday. I’ll work on the rest of the GHGs later.

OK. So there is my plan for the week and my list of short-term goals.

If anyone has any words of wisdom, I could definitely use them. Have you stalled or lost motivation in your WLJ? How did you get back on track?

Just call me Farmer Kristen…

Reason number one why I love summer? Fresh from the garden tomatoes.

Tomatoes have always been one of my absolute favourite foods on the entire planet. Seriously, I’ll eat fresh tomatoes until my skin turns a lovely shade of red and I absolutely can’t eat another one.

For the last few years, my family has taken to planting our own veggies in the summer, and my favourite crop, of course, is the tomato.

Last week, I walked out to the back deck to see these beauties:

Three cherry tomato plants, sitting on the back deck, in hanging planters. I almost had a fit, I was so excited. Apparently my dad had gone to a sale at the local high school which has a pretty big agriculture/horticulture program, and they were selling tons of veggie plants and flowers they’d started growing in class. He got all three for under 10 dollars!!! Bargain!!!

Also, check out our little friend chilling in the middle picture: it’s a daddy long legs-looking thing, but I’m not 100% sure. Apparently DLLs (or at least the ones around here…if that is indeed what it is…) love tomato plants, because they’ve been hanging out on them every time I’ve gone out to pick the tomatoes.

On Saturday morning, on my way out to run errands, I grabbed a hand full for a snack. Oh. My. Gosh. They were amazing.

And here is a shot from the huge container I picked on Sunday night:

How amazing do they look??? And the good news is, they TASTE even better than they look. Aw yeah.

We also have some big tomato plants down in our garden, which has started sprouting green peppers already (the garden…not the tomato plant…)! Yay!!!

I can’t really take any credit, however. My dad is the one with the green thumb around here.  But I will be happy to reap the benefits :D.

One meal I am *so* excited about is fresh mozzarella, balsamic vinaigrette, and tomatoes. I haven’t yet figured out the points on the cheese but believe me, as soon as I do, and as soon as the big tomatoes start coming in, that will be a fairly regular dinner.

What is your favourite summer produce? Do you/can you grow it yourself?

I’m here! I’m alive! I’m off the wagon!

So I fell off the WW wagon, hard. And then it ran me over a few times.

I don’t know what is going on in my head. I was doing really, really well, then I wasn’t, then I got back on track, then last week…boom. Off.

So, again. Starting today. Tracking. Running. Taking better care of myself in general.

My First 5K!

Wow! There is so much to write about. I just wrote a post about my cousin’s graduation and I have another to do. Today was my first 5K, the Blue Hen 5K in Newark, Delaware. I had such an amazing time in Newark for the 19 hours I was there, so I will start at the beginning!

I stayed with one of my best friends, Kathy, who is a frequent poster on my blog. 🙂 (Hi Kathy!). When I arrived, Kathy was being all domestic and baking strawberry oatmeal scones:

She’s so domestic! They were very nummy. I ate half of one after dinner, which I’ll talk about later :).

The first thing we did was to go out and about on campus. I graduated from UD in 2005 and I miss it SO much! I am totally *that* girl who is ridiculously in love with her former university. I think I bleed blue and gold, seriously.

The first thing we did was to go see Memorial Hall, which is where I spent most of my time as an English Lit major:

My absolute favorite part of campus is near Memorial Hall, and they’re called The Kissing Arches. I heard the history of this campus spot early on in my UD career, and it’s stuck with me ever since. I am such a girly girl. I love it! There is a great description of the Kissing Arches on the UD virtual tour:

The archways on The Green, which link Memorial Hall with Brown Lab on its left and Hullihen Hall on its right, are known as the “kissing arches.” Between 1914 and 1945, The Green was actually home to two schools: Delaware College on the North Green and the Women’s College on the South Green. Memorial Library, built in 1924, was the only building shared by both schools, and the arches served as a meeting and departure point for students at the two colleges. Even after the two schools merged, the south campus continued to serve as the home for female students for many years, and the archways are still known as the “kissing arches” today.

All together now: awww.

True story: I totally want to get married under the kissing arches. Seriously. Love it.

We walked up to Main Street, just off campus, and had dinner at one of my favourite restaurants: Peace A Pizza. When I was at UD, I probably ate there once or twice a week. The pizza was amaaaaazing and cheap. It was close to campus, open late, and all -around awesome.

You know how sometimes you remember a food being amazing, and you get so excited about eating it again, but you’ve built it up in your head so much that when you finally do have it, it’s not as good as you remember? Yeah, I hate that. Luckily, that’s *not* what happened at Peace A Pizza, my friends. Not at all.

I got a slice of mozzarella, tomato, and basil and a slice of their white pizza. Both were oh-my-freaking-God good, and just as amazing as I remembered.

Then we went to the National 5&10 because they have every single UD item imaginable, and I wanted something fun to wear for the race! I really wanted this hat:

I decided against it, though, as I figured it might be a bit too warm. 😀 So I went with the feather hair clips. They were 1.49 each and worth every single penny. Love them!

We continued our walk around campus, visiting the new dorms that I am so sad I wasn’t able to live in, my old dorm (go Squire Hall!), and some other assorted places:

After we went back to her apartment, we watched Love Actually (best. movie. ever) and went to bed. The 5K started at 8:30 the next morning! We had to get a good night’s sleep. 🙂

The Blue Hen 5K

So, the 5K started at 8:30. We got there at 7:30 to register, get our stuff, and mill around. I was very sad that I couldn’t take my camera but I didn’t want to run with it, so I left it in the car. I did get some photos, though.

Here is the sign at the starting point:

And here’s me in my Blue Hen 5K attire the night before the race (I had to take the feathers for a little test drive…)

Yay for feathers! My t-shirt was homemade. I bought a yellow t-shirt and wrote my name in blue and glued some blue feathers around them. (UD’s mascot is a Blue Hen…hence all the feathers).

So basically, my thoughts on the race: I LOVED it. When we started, I was a bit disheartened because it seemed like everyone who was running was SO much faster than me, and I felt a little silly. But then it occurred to me that it doesn’t matter. No one else at that race mattered. I set a goal for myself (complete it in under 50 minutes) and I didn’t have to worry about anyone else. And, three months ago, I’d have never even considered running a 5K. So, I have a lot to be proud of.

The other thing I noticed was that the environment was so incredibly fun and positive. At my old gym, I remember feeling really intimidated and shy and like I was being watched and judged by the people who lived, ate, and slept the gym. It felt like a really judgy, competitive environment, and I didn’t feel that way at all at the 5K. There were people running and walking, new and experienced runners, people there to compete and people there for fun. It was so awesome!

The first mile and the last mile weren’t bad at all. The second mile was slightly torturous, and I was sweating like a fiend. The humidity was no joke.

My official finishing time was 47:42.

After the race, we got powerade, water, fresh fruit, and granola bars at the finish line. I plopped down in the grass to wait for Kathy and her friend Patoul, who walked the course and finished with a faboosh time of 55 minutes!

They gave us a pretty awesome shirt for participating. It’s not cotton, but really light, running-friendly fabric and it has a Blue Hen on it, so it’s a win-win, really. 😀 So the below photos: my number (99), the awesome shirt (post race) and me back at Kathy’s, still ridiculously sweaty and gross but uber proud of finishing my first 5k!

Quesadilla Success

So, after my quesadilla fail earlier this week, I decided to try it again.

There was mucho success.

Here was my lunch on Thursday (and dinner on Friday):

mmmmmm...

Yummy quesadilla goodness. I used black beans, salsa verde, and shredded 2% Mexican mix cheese. I cut up some grape tomatoes and some black olives to nom on with the quesadilla, and it was banging. And check out that pretty dollop of sour cream on the left. Mmm mmm nummy!

As an aside, aren’t black olives just the best? I ate the rest of the can for a snack last night, and I’d take them over a Snickers bar any ding dang day of the week.

Really, Sour Cream? Really?

I get really excited when I think of an awesomely awesome meal to prepare. I am trying to stay away form lean cuisines and smart ones because (1), they taste like yak feet, (not that I really know what yak feet taste like, but I have a very vivid imagination, so I just assume), and (2) they never really fill me up.

So, I didn’t eat breakfast (bad, bad Kristen) because I knew I wanted to run at 10 and if I ate, I might get all sickly like I did once before. So I was a little hungry when I went for my run, but I told myself if I went and did my run like the good little C25K-er I am, I’d come home and whip up something banging awesome.

So I did my run (finished week 7, YAHOO!) and I lurched in the house, sweaty, hot, and weak from hunger (picture moi, hand on forehead) and head into the kitchen. We have tortillas and 2% milk shredded Mexican cheese. Since I am never one to turn down Mexican food of any kind, I decided to make a quesadilla.

I grab the pan, the pam, and the ingredients. I throw 1/4 c. of cheese on the tortilla, fold it in half, and get a plate. Turning to the fridge, I dig through it to find the low fat sour cream. It took a minute, but I finally found it. I opened it. And…nooo!

Mold. On the side of the sour cream container. Harrumph. I check the date. It should be good till May 31! What the what??

Ok, no worries. We have regular. I’ll just use one tablespoon instead of two.

Mold. On the side of the regular cream. Which should have been good another week.

I was so sad. You have no idea. A quesadilla without sour cream is like…Bert without Ernie. Hall without Oates. Yin without Yang.

I improvised and used some salsa verde, but it just. Wasn’t. The. Same.

So, sour cream has been added to my shopping list.

And in the future, I will check for all quesadilla ingredients prior to throwing it in the pan.

I’m alive! I promise!

It has been an INSANE week. After weeks and weeks of sending out resumes and going on interviews for part-time and temporary jobs, I finally got not one but TWO offers! And the best part is, I can do them both as the hours don’t overlap.

The best part is, after two years of being self-employed and working from home, I get to get out of the house! I love the work I currently do, and it was fantastic while I was in school. It was also an escape, a way for me to hide away from the world, which was exactly what I wanted when I wasn’t eating right, exercising, or taking care of myself. I hated how I looked and just wanted to shut the world out. I did that, but now that I’ve lost almost 50 pounds (wow, I still can’t believe it), I have a lot more self-confidence and I just want to get out of the house!

I think that is an even better feeling than the physical stuff that’s come from weight loss and exercise. I love that I want to be out among people again. I am such a people person and although, like I said, I love the teaching I do from home, I can;t wait to start getting out and meeting and working with people.

So another exciting thing from last week…I went to my family reunion in North Carolina! It was an eight-hour drive down and back (ugh) but I had iPpy McSkinny and my mom and dad, so we kept ourselves amused. There are 20+ people in my family, so we rented this huge house on Lake Norman:

It had eight bedrooms, a huge game room, kayaks, a paddleboat, a FIRE PIT, a game room, a beach volleyball court….It was flippin’ amazing. I used my weekend away to partake in fun activities, such as paddleboating with my cousin Jennifer:

Hello there!

It was a good thigh workout, I’ll tell you that.

And this was the view of the lake from the house:

Not too shabby, huh?

I did attempt to do week 7 day 3 of C25K and I’m sad to say I failed miserably. The winding road leading to the house is a bit…hillier….than I’m used to, so I had to call it quits. I did however walk/jog for an hour, as well as do a little paddleboating and canoeing.

I did NOT, however, count points. This was the first time since being on Weight Watchers that I didn’t even make an attempt. However, I kept portions in mind and I never felt stuffed at any point, like I’d overeaten. And you know what? If I have a gain next week, I’ll get it off the week after. I had a fantastic time and I don’t regret one delicious morsel!!!

Finally, in  a few short hours, I will be getting my hair done.  I had to cancel last weeks appointment (sadness) because of training for one of my news jobs.

Can I just tell you how excited I am? Basically I’m going to tell her to do whatever she wants, as long as she keeps the general length. I want a bangin’ color, and I do not want subtlety. I want cars swerving on the road as I’m running my little tush off because they’re mesmerized by my hair. Seriously.

So, here is the “Before” photo, taken literally two minutes ago:

I’ll be back after my first day at my spiffy new job and I will show you all my (hopefully) bangin’ new haircut!!!!

Can’t?

I finished week 6 of C25K yesterday (yaaaay, me!) It was a five minute warm-up walk, twenty-five minute jog, and then a five minute cool-down walk.  Supposedly you were supposed to run 2.25 miles. I clocked mine in the car after the run and I actually ran 1.6 miles. I’m sloooooooow. That’s OK though. 🙂 I aim to finish C25k by May 15th. That then gives me 3 weeks to just work on running faster, and then the Blue Hen 5K is on June 5th.

As I was running, it occurred to me that I would have definitely said I couldn’t ever run a 5K prior to starting my WLJ and C25K.

When I was running today, about 5 minutes into it, I got that feeling. You know the one I’m talking about. It comes around with anything that’s difficult, whether it’s running the NY Marathon or not eating the third bag of Oreos. The feeling that it’s just too difficult, and then wondering if, in the end, it’s really worth it?

I thought, “Ugh. I don’t want to be doing this. I have a blister on my feet, my legs feel like lead, how in the world am I going to survive another 20 minutes of this nonsense?” I pushed forward, and around the ten minute mark I was feeling pretty good and running a bit faster. I kept going, waving at the nice people in the neighborhood, and thanked my lucky stars when iPpy McSkinny announced “You are halfway there.”

Then I thought, “Ugh, only halfway? This blows!” Again, I wanted to stop. I thought about how nice it would be to be home, soaking in a bath. Or at home, watching last night’s “Lost” on Hulu. Or doing anything, really, other than sweating up a storm.

At the twenty minute mark, I thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad.” When I did the twenty-minute run last week, the last few minutes were torture. It definitely wasn’t that bad this time.

So, I finished my 25 minutes/1.6 miles and walked about 10 minutes after it, to get home. As I walked, I realized that there is a big difference between “can’t” and “don’t want to,” although months ago, I didn’t know it. The two were one and the same in my head.  I certainly COULD have refused to eaten the 4th Cadbury Creme Egg in a row. I definitely didn’t want to. Therefore, in my head, I couldn’t put down the egg.

The same goes for the C25k training. Yes, when I was running today, I thought, “I can’t do this!” In reality, at the time, I just didn’t want to. I think part of it is a defense mechanism – if I say I can’t do something, it’s taking the responsibility away from me, thus limiting the failure that I’m sure is coming. Prior to starting this weight loss journey/exercise routine, the thought of failure was a complete nightmare. For a long time, I preferred doing nothing about it to trying to do it and failing. I suppose since I’ve crashed and burned in my weight loss before, I just didn’t think I could handle doing it again. Does that make sense?

Anyway, it was a good realization to have. A lot of the things I say I can’t do, really are just things I don’t want to do, because for me, they’re really hard and I’m afraid of failure.  When I said years ago that I can’t lose weight…well, really, I just didn’t want to try. It’s such a daunting task.  If losing weight and being fit and healthy and eating “normally” were easy, I (and everyone else around) would look like a Swedish bikini model and you’d be hard-pressed to get me to wear clothes. Ever.

Perhaps it’s best I not get *that* skinny. I’d never be able to leave the house again, because I’d just be naked all the time.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

I’ve mentioned the website ted.org on my reading page, and I was thrilled to find that my favourite English chef, Jamie Oliver, had won an award and given a talk.

I’ve watched his show, “Food Revolution,” on ABC since it premiered, (and honestly, my decision to watch it had nothing to do with his zexy accent…I swear…) and I was all about it instantly. I’d started WW a few months prior, so I was seated firmly in the “I’m all about getting healthy!” bandwagon. Shoot, I was driving the bandwagon.

For anyone not following this show, it chronicles Jamie’s attempt to help the town of  Huntington, W. VA become healthier. He works with families, schools, and local organizations by trying to educate people about food and attempting to change the school food program.

The program is pretty shocking, to be fair. Early on in the series, Jamie enters an elementary classroom with a table of fruits and vegetables. He holds up vegetables and the kids can’t tell him what they are. Obviously, being a reality TV show, one must realize that they probably edit it to make it look exactly how they want it to look (i.e. SHOCKING!), BUT if even half of what they showed were true, honest responses from the children, then it’s a sad commentary on the state of education, to say the least.

I may not have known how to add in 2nd grade but I sure as hell knew what a tomato was.

What else is shocking, and this is shown in the talk (linked above) is his visit to a woman’s house. He pulled out all the food that the family eats in a week and the table was a sea of fried, greasy brown food. There were no fresh fruits, vegetables, or meats in her fridge or freezer. Everything came from a box.

Now, obviously I’m not exactly one to talk as far as healthy eating, because we all know I’m not the patron saint of healthy food. If I was, I wouldn’t be the weight I am now and needing to lose it. I also might be able to pass a Cadbury Creme Egg without salivating.

However, what I can say is that I did this to myself. I mean, truly. When I was a child, my parents cooked what Jamie would call “real” food. Pasta and sauce for dinner, eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch…We didn’t eat a ton of processed food, and we barely ate fast food. It wasn’t until I got my drivers license that I started to eat a lot of junk.

When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to have any cereal that turned the milk a different color. I used to joke and say that if you ate the lucky charms fast enough, it didn’t have the chance to turn my milk pink. Mom was generally unamused and would then hand me the box of rice krispies.

We also weren’t allowed to have kool-aid, which killed my social life in 6th grade, let me tell you. My friends always wanted to go to the house of the girl whose mom let them have kool-aid. Boo and hiss.

Another difference was that my lunch was often packed for me. I didn’t start buying school lunches until later in middle school, and even then it was only occasionally. I really started buying it a lot in high school, once I had a job and could pay for them myself. The school chicken nuggets kicked the crap out of my nasty (in my eyes, anyway) tuna sandwich.

In all seriousness though, what I notice about a lot of the people on the show (and again, it might be the editing) is that many of these kids don’t have access to healthy food. Certainly, in the case of the family Jamie works with, this seems to be the case. They eat fried, processed food at home. They eat fried, processed food at school. When, exactly, are they supposed to eat “real” food?

I was very lucky in that I had access to that food, and now, in my WLJ, I know how to cook and how to plan meals. I know what I have to do. Sadly, I think a lot of the people on the show truly don’t.

Anyway I guess the point of this was to share Jamie’s talk on ted.org. So…yeah. Go watch it! If you’ve watched the show on ABC, it’s a lot of the same stuff but he’s amazing and charismatic and wonderful, so it doesn’t feel like you’ve heard it all before.