October Results

October 31, 2007
Today's Weight: 278.0 lbs

I began this journey on October 1st...31 days ago. Since then I have gone up and down a bit on the scale, seen big losses and big nothings. Overall, I have lost 12 pounds over this past month. That's not too bad, I guess. That averages out to about 3 lbs per week.

The frustrating thing for me has been seeing a fabulous 10 pound loss over the first 2 weeks, and next to nothing over the last 2 weeks. I'm not sure why that is. It's possible that I'm still going through the post induction stall. I've heard that can sometimes last a while. I had thought perhaps it was a hormonal thing, since I do remember years back that I had a hard time dropping weight in the 2 weeks post ovulation and pre-menstruation. It's possible that I'm just eating too many carbs, too many calories, or not being active enough. I do know that I'm having a difficult time getting into ketosis for some reason. One thing that has occured to me is that I am far more sedentary this time around than I was the last time I did Atkins. Back in 2002, I did not have children, but I DID have 2 jobs (both of which were on my feet all day), and I did work out in the gym everyday.

So while I am pleased with my 12 lb loss, I am eager to lose more, of course. I will continue to work hard in November, and I hope I can see some good results.

31 cheat free days so far!! This is hard, but it's worth it.

Still living in the stall....

October 21, 2007
Today's Weight: 280.0 lbs

I'm still plugging along. I haven't been posting because frankly, nothing new is going on. I did have an AMAZING burst of energy last night. It was wonderful. I danced, I cleaned, I felt euphoric and energetic. I had thought perhaps this might signal a change on the scale today, but alas, it did not.

So I don't know what is going on. I do know that it is typical to experience a post-induction stall and I believe I mentioned this in my previous post. Perhaps my body is going on past experience and truly believes I will go back to my high carb-sugar loving days anyday now. Perhaps it wants to take a "wait and see" approach before letting go of a few more pounds. I can understand that. It's like a battle of wills with my body...to see who will cave first. Will it make adjustments and give up the flab, or will the scale taunt me enough to make me cry "uncle!" and dive head first into the Krispy Kremes.

Well I'm telling you this now, my dear body: I am not giving up. This is a lifestyle change for me. Even if I don't shed a single pound from now until Christmas, I WILL NOT GIVE UP. Because this way of eating makes me feel happy, energetic, satiated, and in-control.

So there.

Still Pluggin Along...

October 16, 2007
Today's Weight: 280.0 lbs

I thought I would check in since it's been a few days since I posted. I'm now on day 16 of my journey and so far I'm down 10 pounds!! It definitely is not easy, but I am taking it one day at a time.

The weight is not coming off as fast this week, but I think it's normal for things to slow down in the second and third week. I am hopeful that things will pick up in the next couple of weeks, as long as I keep working hard.

Since my son is officially done nursing, I have started taking my supplements. I am taking Vitamin E wth fish oil for a healthy heart, Alpha Linolic acid to help convert glucose, chromium picolinate to aid metabolism, B Complex for energy, a bone reinforcer with Vitamin D and Calcium, and just yesterday I started Ginkgo Biloba for metal clarity (boy I hope that works!). So far my body is reacting well to the supplements. I am feeling good and I have lots of energy.

Let me just say...I'm now like a kid in a candy store at Vitamin World! I may have traded one obsession for another!

Dreary Day

October 12, 2007
Today's Weight: 279.5

Today is a cold rainy day. I love it! The only downside is I would never want to venture out in this weather alone with two kids. Luckily I don't really have any place to go today. So we are having a nice lazy day inside. BTW can I just say I love dark days like this because I can ALMOST convince my kid that it's not morning yet! He believed me but he couldn't go back to sleep. Luckily he was happy to watch Noggin for an hour while I got a few more zzzz's.

I didn't post my weight yesterday because I really wasn't sure what it was. Stupid scale. I stepped on it two times. The first time it said 285 and the second time was 280. So either I had gained 2.5 pounds or lost 2.5. Whatever with that, right?

Today I just stepped on it once and got a good answer. 279.5.....WHOOOT! The weight is melting off and my shirt and pajama bottoms feel roomy today (yes, I'm still in pjs....did you not read where I said today was LAZY day?!?)

I'm feeling pretty good. I'm incredibly thirsty because of ketosis. I'm currently sucking down my 2nd 52 ounce cup of water. It's lunchtime and I'm trying to decide if I'm hungry or not.

Survey Says....

October 10, 2007
Today's Weight: 282.5

Well, sigh of relief, I saw another loss today! This is exciting to actually see my scale going down every day. It has been a LONG time since I have had this pleasure! To celebrate, I downloaded some new fun songs off iTunes and I did 10 minutes on the elliptical trainer. Not much, I know, but baby steps! I know before I know it I'll be back up to an hour a day like I was in 2001.

Today I'm listening to :
Daughter by Loudon Wainwright
Believe by Suzie McNeil (featured in the show Biggest Loser)
Little Less Conversation by Elvis
Apologize by Timbaland

I've also been doing great drinking water today. YAY ME!
I'ts amazing how a success can further motivate you. The challege is keeping your chin up on bad days. Luckily today is one of the good ones though.

Overwhelming Hunger

October 9, 2007
Today's Weight: 284

The thing about low carb diets is that they usually work wonders on curbing your appetite. This is one of the reasons why I am usually successful on a diet such as this (as long as I stick to it and don't cheat, of course!). Eating low fat/high carb diets just feed my insulin resistance and my cravings. I am always miserable on them. However, in my past experiences with low carb, I've experienced wonderful appetite suppression as well as astounding energy. It's like the carbs gum up my system, so to speak. Once I get rid of them, my body responds with a sigh of relief and becomes a fat burning machine!

This time around has really been no different. It's confirming my belief that I really need to eat like this the rest of my life. Now the thing is, I haven't been doing strict induction this time around. I'm eating low carb but not counting carbs. I'm eating all the protein, veggies, cheese and nuts that I want. As a result, I've had a tiny bit more hunger than I normally would have. But here's the key...it's manageable! I'm able to still make good choices when hunger hits, and not even really be tempted to cheat!

Well fast forward to today. I woke up this morning, and while my energy wasn't the amphetamine-like frenzy that I've experienced in the past....it was still very good! I set out on a daunting task this morning that I would not normally have the energy for. I sat down in Alex's room with the floor full of toys, and I completely reorganized them. I made a huge box of toys to get rid of (um....my kids have WAY too many toys!). Then I walked over to Jakes' room, which was equally trashed, and I did the same thing there. Next, I went downstairs (toys seem to find a way of walking down the stairs to annoy mommy!) and I reorganized all of those, and sent half of them packing back to their respective owner's rooms. So yes, I am proud of myself for working extra hard this morning. I did all this in addition to the normal taking care of the children stuff. (The women who read this blog will assume that, but I wanted to point that out to my husband in case he ever finds this blog!)

After Alex woke up from his nap, we went out to Wal Mart to get some essentials. When we came back around 4:30......well this is where I stop rambling and actually get to the point I'm trying to make today! I sat down at the computer to check my email and I was hit with just a ravenous hunger. I felt like a wild animal that just needed to FEED! I ate some nuts. Nothing. I ate some beef jerky. Nothing. Two sticks of strings cheese. Well, I felt a little less animal like. Now I was just plain hungry. I finally decided to make my dinner early around 6:30, and it was then that I finally felt satisfied.

Soooooo. We will see how this affects my weight tomorrow. Will I have a loss after all that work? Or will I have a gain after my feeding frenzy tonight? I can't wait to see. Regardless of what happens, I'm still proud of myself for hanging tough and not cheating.

Here's to Breakfast!

October 8, 2007
Today's Weight: 284

Today the high number in the magic scale game show was 284! That's pretty good, I think! I was tempted to post the lower amount as usual but I know not to rush these things.

This morning was a challenge for me. It's so hard to try to train yourself to eat a whole new way. After 33 years, I've established so many habits, and they are very hard to break. Before now, I would wake up and grab a pop tart, bagel, waffles, etc for breakfast. Of course I can't eat any of those now. Perhaps later on I can try high fiber cereal, but it's too early in the game for that, unfortunately. I still have about 150 pounds to go....yikes, huh?

The problem is that I'm too tired and lazy in the morning to prepare a proper breakfast. Today I grabbed some string cheese and an ounce of nuts. That kept me satisfied for only an hour, unfortunately. Then hunger set in again. So I tried some dried beef jerky. That did nothing for me. Finally, I broke down and made some scrambled eggs. I finally feel satisfied! Thank goodness. The good news is that once I make it through breakfast, I can generally go the rest of the day. Breakfast truly IS the most important meal of the day, because for me it fills me up and helps me stay on plan and resist temptation the rest of the day. I figure I got off to the right start, I need to keep going and not mess it up!

I know I'm going to have to work hard at this and not only come up with new breakfast recipes, but also the energy to make them. But one day at a time, right?

Now I'm off to drink my water!

How did I get here? Pt. 2

October 5, 2007
Today's Weight: 285 lbs.

Well it looks like my scale has redeemed itself! I guess the threat of sending it to sleep with the fishes worked! Funny thing though...I can step on it 3 times in a row and it will give me 3 separate weights. Sometimes drastically different too. Like it's playing with me and I'm a contestant on some insanely cruel, yet funny weight loss show. I usually take the weight in the middle or the highest one. Call it the realist in me. No need to believe the lowest number and then set my self up for disappointment tomorrow, right? So I figure if I go with the higher number maybe I can have a loss tomorrow too. At any rate, I've lost about 5 pounds in the last few days. Though it may all be water weight, it still feels wonderful to see the scale going DOWN instead of up.

Well back to my story for those of you who care. When I left off the other day, I was talking about my weight history and how obesity has been a demon I have struggled with for almost my entire life.

After high school graduation, I went off to college to study education and become a teacher. Like I said before, I was probably a size 16 or so after high school, but that soon changed after I went to college. I decided to live in the dorms my first year, even though my parents lived only 5 miles away. I know, funny huh? But I got a great experience living on campus. First of all, the mess hall was FABULOUS. I got up every morning and just had a huge breakfast before class: eggs, bacon, sausages, potatoes....you get the idea. That combined with the pizzas, fast food and sedentary study life really caused me to pack on the pounds. Before I knew it, I was a size 18....and then a 20. Definitely a disappointment.

My next turn around came right around my sophmore year of college. I got over the whole novelty of living on campus and moved back home to save cash. Mooching off your parents is much easier when you live at home! Around that time, my mom encouraged me to join her at Weight Watchers. I was ready to take control of my weight again, so I did. Let me tell you, Weight Watchers is HARD! My personal kudos to anyone who can stay on it and succeed. I've since tried it again post-children and I just could NOT do it. I was starving most of the time I was on WW. I'm a carb addict and the tiny amount of carbs WW allows just sabotage me, because I eat them and then get insane cravings for more. Now back then it was before they started doing the points thing. You had to measure all your food and then check off boxes for each serving you ate. After all your boxes were checked, you better hope you weren't hungry anymore because you were DONE. I think I had about 7-8 boxes for breads. Oh how I treasured those sweet little squares on my chart. I'm still amazed I managed to lose about 60 pounds. I was VERY determined. By the time I quit WW, I was a size 12 and I felt just insanely beautiful. I mean, even then I wasn't at my goal weight, but it didn't matter so much that I wasn't a size 6 again. I was content and happy with my success and I felt great.

It was right around this time that I met my ex-husband. I know...yikes. If I'd only known then what I know now. You know, it pisses me off that once you lose weight, you get far more attention from men. It happend in high school, and it happen this time too. Once you lose weight, men who previously barely gave you a glance are now suddenly VERY interested. Losting weight truly does tell you who loves you for you, and who just loves your ass. Which makes me love my dh even more, because I'm 90 pounds fatter now than when I met him (and trust me....I wasn't all that skinny then either!). Yet he says he still loves me and finds me attractive. Well that's what he says anyway. Hmph.

With Anger Comes Determination

October 3, 2007
Today's weight: 294

Men suck. So do scales.

I'm back at home now. I spent the weekend in Arizona at my mom's house. Apparently her scale likes me better than mine does.

Today I hit the diet hard. It was a rough day, made even harder by the fact that I'm thoroughly pissed at my husband. I'm not even going to get into details on that one.

So starting a new diet sucks ass. I'm starving all day. But I was successful. I didn't really eat all that much during the day because honestly I was too pissed off and depressed to eat. For dinner I made a great choice and I'm proud of myself--I bought McDonald's for the family and for once I chose the grilled chicken salad. GO ME!

One thing I've discovered over time is that my mood really affects my willpower and my appetite. When I'm tired, happy, bored or stressed out, I want to eat. I'm a champion comfort eater.

When I'm depressed and sad, I don't have the desire to eat. Which leads me to wonder if all this is really worth it. Do I want to be happy or do I want to be thin? Can I find the way to be both?

Another mystery of the universe.

Let's hope my scale loves me better tomorrow, or I'm shipping it to my mom for an attitude adjustment.

How did I get here?

October 1, 2007
This morning's weight: 288 lbs

For the most part, I have struggled with my weight ALL of my life. Don't get me wrong...I wasn't a fat kid. I look back on my childhood and honestly, I was pretty normal for most of it. I ate what I wanted when I got hungry and perhaps I was a little pudgy at times, but certainly not fat enough that kids would tease me or anything. I remember being pretty active and happy. I didn't really start to verge into the overweight side of life until 5th or 6th grade. Around that time I noticed I was a size or two higher than the other girls. But that was that...it didn't really start to affect me negatively until junior high. By the time I was in 8th grade, it was definitely obvious. I was a size 14 and my peers were much, much smaller. By the time I went shopping for my 8th grade graduation dress (not a pleasant task by the way), I was definitely sporting much more pudge than I needed and completely miserable about it.

My first venture into weight loss came during the summer between 8th grade and high school. I think looking back at the pictures of my graduation, it just really hit me that I wanted to be someone other than who I was. I wanted to go to high school as the beautiful smart girl...not the smart, fat girl with a pretty face.

So that summer I dieted pretty hard. I don't remember too many specifics about my diet...just that it was pretty restrictive. Despite the fact that it was my first time dieting...or perhaps because of it? I had AMAZING willpower. I remember putting food on my plate and that was IT. I knew I would eat that and only that. And that's what I did. No candy, no snacks. It's odd how determined and possessed I really was. Obsessive maybe? I know that the exersize I did during that time was certainly obsessive. I would put on my walkman and ride my bike for 1.5 hours every day. I would weave in and around all the streets around my house...so that I could go miles and miles in that 1.5 hours without actually leaving the 1 mile radius of my house.

By the time I started school in the fall, I believe I had dropped at least 25 pounds or so. I remember all my peers doing a double take when they saw me. I got an unbelieveable amount of attention. So of course this encouraged me and I continued to diet through the new school year.

With classes and activities, I now had less time to devote to my bike riding. Although I still did it, I had considerably less time to do it. So to compensate, I remember that I started eating even less. I would basically go hungry during different times of the day. Anorexic much? Towards the end of this phase, I know my mother was about to give me the "I think you're anorexic" talk. She told me this much later of course. I was 130 pounds and a size 6. You could see my collar bones and the bones sticking out of my shoulders. I LOVED it.

Of course, most of us know that you can't maintain an extreme diet or lifestyle forever. So eventually the pendulum had to swing the other way. Sometime around my sophmore year, the pounds started to creep back up as I started to eat more and more and get busier with school. By the time I graduated high school, I was back up to a size 14/16. Grossly fat, NO, but overweight, YES. A far cry from the self-confident and happy size 6 freshman four years before. It was discouraging.

This, of course, would be the first major upset of many over the course of my life. As will become evident in this and later blogs, I am a champion yo-yo dieter. Although the problem is that as I have aged, I've become less of a champion and more of a has-been.

I'm going to stop at this point and say TO BE CONTINUED.......

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about that freshman 15....err, 30 pounds that found me in college. Oh that should be fun! I love a good story...don't you?

Here I Am

October 1, 2007

Here I am: 34 years old and 290 pounds of me. I have no idea how I got here. Well, actually I do know. But I chose to look the other way, I suppose. For most of my life, I've found that if you don't glance in the mirror as you walk by, you can maintain the fantasy that you are not fat.

You know how you are going along nicely, living your life with the illusion that you aren't THAT fat? You look in the mirror everyday and you generally like what you see. Your clothes that used to fit that are now tight...well they must have shrunk in the dryer, right? And then one day...BOOM... you are hit with a picture of yourself where someone caught you off guard and you couldn't suck in your gut and lift your head to hide your double chin, and you think...WTF...who the hell is THAT?? When in the world did I get FAT??? The proof is undeniable. Because the proof is forever memorialized on Kodak's finest....and Kodak doesn't lie.

Well I'm past that point. Now when I look in the mirror, I actually DO see a fat person looking back at me. And that is truly sad. But I suppose it's a good thing, because now perhaps I can truly take the blinders off and see things how they really are. I am fat, and I need to do something about it. I need to make a drastic change if I want to live. I want to see my precious boys grow up and become men. I don't want to keel over at the age of 40 and leave my little guys without their mommy. How selfish would that be?

And speaking of selfish...I'm tired of walking around, living my life and trying to pretend that people aren't revolted when they look at me. If you are fat, you know what I'm talking about. The look people give you when they look down on you. Because you are fat, so obviously you are a gluttonous pig with no self control.

I want to be beautiful again, like I used to be. I want people to look at me and say, "wow, she's gorgeous." I want to look at myself in the mirror and love who I am. To be proud of who I am. I want people to look at me and see ME. The person I am inside, and not the huge, almost 300 pound lard ass that I am.

That's not to much to ask, right?

I have no idea how I'm going to do this.