Week 8 & 9 - Time Away

It's week 9...I can't believe that the competition is almost over!!  I've been slacking on the blog posting, and I'm sorry.  My Thanksgiving resolution (do they even have those?) is to blog more often!

I'm now down 29.8 lbs!!  I'm dying to get the last .2 off, so that I can say that I've lost 30.  I'm not stopping there, though...there are a bunch of weeks left in the competition.  I'm going to kick it up a few notches.  My initial goal (that Mcyveton set for me at the beginning) was a 30 lb weight loss.  I'm now cranking it into high-gear so that I can hit 40 lbs.  Wish me luck!!

I just returned from a few days of Christmas shopping in NYC with my Mom.  It was super-fun...but OH MAN, was it challenging!!  There's food everywhere in NYC.  There are roasted nuts, which are my all-time favorite, on every single corner!!  I tried to hold my breath, but I smelled them the whole 3 days.  It's bad enough to see restaurants on every corner...but it's an entirely different thing to be confronted with food smells while you're walking down the street.  That, my friends, was challenging.

The other big challenge?  Eating in restaurants.  My mother tried to be kind and let me pick the dining venues.  She was horrified to think that I would be in control of our food choices for the trip (and I secretly think that she thought that I would be critical of everything that she ate).  I ate oatmeal for breakfast, with some banana slices and peanut butter in it.  My mother said that it was disgusting...but I loved it.  I ate salad for lunch each day.  Salad in restaurants is a deadly thing for a diet.  There are very few salads that aren't loaded with horrifying amounts of non-vegetable items...and then smothered in fatty, triple-digit calorie dressing.  Luckily, I found multiple salads that were very healthy. 

Dinner last night was really hard, though.  We went to Bubba Gump's, in Times Square.  I don't know if it's a chain or not, but it has that chain-type restaurant feel.  I ordered grilled mahi mahi and shrimp, and I asked them to substitute steamed broccoli for the mashed potatoes.  This is where it all starts to go awry.  They bring my dinner out, and it's covered in some sort of sauce.  The sauce was most definitely cream-based.  The fish and shrimp is sitting atop a giant pile of mashed potatoes!!!  They bring me broccoli too, but it's covered in melted butter.

I could feel myself melting down.

I calmly asked them for no mashed potatoes, so they took my dinner away and fixed it.  By that point, I was feeling doubtful about the evening.  I started to tell myself that I was being irrational about my dinner, and that I should have just eaten it the way that it was.  I was in NYC, after all!  I was ON VACATION!!!  Didn't I deserve one night of whatever I wanted!?!?!?

That's when I decided to have dessert.

Ugh.  I didn't even want dessert.  There was nothing on the dessert menu that I was dying for.  But, I went right ahead and gave myself permission to eat the bread pudding.  My mother was thrilled!!  I was going to eat dessert...which I think made her happy, because she really wanted dessert.  I thought a lot about that bread pudding, and then I wasn't sure that I really wanted it.  I told my mother that I would only order it if it didn't have raisins.  I don't love raisins, and I sure as heck am not going to eat something that's unhealthy if it contains ingredients that I don't like.  When the waiter came back, I asked him if the bread pudding contains raisins.  When he said yes, I shouted, "It's a sign" to my mother.  We both said no to dessert.

The whole way back to the restaurant, I looked for a roasted nuts cart.  I told myself that, if I saw a roasted nuts cart, it would be a sign that I was supposed to eat roasted nuts.  At this point, as you can clearly see, I was temporarily insane.  We saw no roasted nuts carts...so I did not eat any roasted nuts.

I was still fighting with myself, for the entire walk, about what I would eat.  What I could eat.  I had myself in such a tizzy that I was willing to eat almost anything that was unhealthy.

In the end?  In the end, I ate nothing.  No bread pudding.  No roasted nuts.  I even walked right past the shake shop next to our hotel.

And you know what?  I was glad.

Week 7 - Out of my Head

Week 7 down.  I'm down 5 more pounds, which puts me at 25 lbs lost.  I'm 5 lbs away from a really big goal, so I'm hoping to hit that number in the next 2 weeks.

This week was another really hard week.  I'm fighting off sickness, and I missed my team workout this week.  That bums me out to no end.  We all need to be there for each other, as a team, and work hard together.  I saw Greg and Solange at the gym this morning, and I felt so proud of them for being there!

I had a really rough workout this morning.  I went from seeing the changes, and feeling the changes...to feeling like I haven't changed at all.  The gym was busy, which is always a huge mental battle for me.  I see myself there, working out, as a really overweight person.  I see all of the fit people around me and I feel like a big Fatty McFatterson.  It's all I can do to not run out crying.

I've done this to myself.  I can only work hard to fix it.

Sometimes the mantra doesn't work.  Sometimes that's not enough.  Some mornings, I can't get out of my own head.  I defeat myself before I've even started...standing there looking around in a panic at all of the people in the gym.

This morning was that kind of morning.

Thank you, Mcyveton, for sticking by me and making me do the workout.  Thank you for talking to me about reality when my brain was talking nonsense.

This is a fantastical, amazing journey.  Painful?  Yes.  Eye-opening?  Yes.  Seemingly impossible sometimes?  Yes.  But I will continue to work hard.  I will continue to reach each goal and fight through each day.

Week 6

It's been a long, tough week, folks.  Halloween was tough...and I had a weak moment.  Or two.

I ate some candy.

Ugh.

I'm using this as a lesson to myself.  Sometimes we eat things that are not good for us.  It's no longer an everyday occurrence for me.  I've had 6 weeks of eating really well.  So I ate some candy.  Big whoop.  It will not derail my progress.  My daughter's candy bowl has been sitting in my house since Halloween, and I haven't indulged since.

I'm now down exactly 20 lbs.  This was a huge milestone for me, and I'm really excited about it!!  I can't wait to see what the scale says each week as I watch the number go down...down...down...down!!!