Healthy You Challenge — Update 1

*drumroll please*

258.3lbs – 254.0lbs = -4.3lbs

4.3lbs in a week is a *huge* loss for me. 2lbs a week, *if* I do what I’m supposed to all week, is usually the most I can hope for and is what I’ve come to “shoot” for as a result. Anything else is gratis.

I guess getting “back on track” after a few weeks of only half-heartedly doing this has made a difference. Plus, and I’m sure you’ll agree… marking a loss is always a great motivator. For me, seeing a loss on the scale is *always* so much more motivating than seeing a gain. I read some bloggers who say that they need the occasional “kick in the ass” of a gain to get them back in the game… but not me. A gain only serves to make me feel more defeated. I find that, for me, one loss begets another loss and so on. That said, I hope this marks the beginning of a roll.

It was a lovely weekend here, and we took full advantage of the good weather by moving our exercising outdoors. On Saturday, I did a 3 mile walk around an area that the locals call “the loop.” I live right across the bridge from a set of barrier islands that are nestled between the mainland and the Atlantic ocean. “The loop” is a public footpath that starts on one side of the islands, travels across one bridge and over the intracoastal waterway, runs parallel to the ocean, then back across another bridge and then back around. It’s really quite lovely, and although I was really more focused on my walk then the view, I did snap this picture along the way, so I’d have something to show you guys. At this point, I was just about to cross one bridge, and if you click on the picture to make it larger, you’ll see the *other* bridge that would bring me back around, far off in the distance.

Then, on Sunday, my husband and I took a walk through a park that’s right in our neighborhood, but that we’d never been to. It was beautiful, overlooks a marshy area and then a different part of the intracoastal waterway that I got to traverse the day before. In the end, we surely marked that spot as a good “picnic place” when the weather is really nice, but it wasn’t much of a “walk” so we decided to walk the same “nature trail” that we did last week. By the time we reached the last mile of the trail, I’d walked *at least* 6 miles in two days, and I have to admit I was feeling it. I wasn’t *nearly* as out of breath as my two dogs though who, in the main, seemed to be as glad to be outside as I was.

Anyway, it felt so good to be outside and I couldn’t help but feel that all this walking was doing more for me than the exercise I’ve been able to do while cooped up in the house all winter. My husband and I are “talking about” buying tennis rackets and then trying our hand at that once the weather really settles into spring and then summer… but we’ll see. Neither one of us is particularly “sporty” so I imagine such an effort would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.

One last thing. I’m really having trouble keeping up with my food and exercise journals. I’m still, absolutely, counting calories and sticking within my limits (as evidenced by my loss last week) I just haven’t had time to record them. For some reason, I feel racked with guilt over this. Part of me feels like I’m “cheating” by not writing all this stuff down — while another part of me feels like that’s ridiculous because, prior to starting this blog, I *never* kept a food or exercise journal. The thing is, I don’t want to get so bogged down in the administrative details of this that the pressure of having to write everything down knocks me off course. On the other hand, I don’t want to start slacking and sliding *because* I haven’t held myself to account by writing everything down.

It makes me wonder, because I read a lot of weight loss/health related blogs and I don’t really see *that* many food/exercise journals. Do you guys find them necessary or even helpful?

Anyway… I’m off to face Monday.
Happy new week everybody!

Good Things Come in Sets of Three.

Poking about online, recently, I’ve seen some really good advice that has caused me to a) think more about how and why I’m doing this b) evaluate whether my strategies are as effective as they should/could be and c) get my ass back in gear during a period when it’s been *really* hard to stay motivated.

Firstly, John over at John Is Fit wrote a great post with his 9 tips for “Kick-Starting Your Dormant Weight Loss Blog.” This post is *so* good and I’ve seen *so* many “dormant” weight loss blogs lately that I’ve seriously considered just sprinkling this link all over cyberspace — like a little motivational fairy. :) I have to confess, though, I still haven’t done #5 yet, but I *have* done the others and it’s helped me pick up where I left off a month ago. Even if you’re not in a weight loss/blogging slump right now, I’d recommend bookmarking this link — just in case.

In this post, Alice responds to a television program called I Can Make You Thin that claims that weight loss can be achieved by eating what you want, when you want and whenever you’re hungry. Yeah good one. Alice responds in the perfect way by outlining her own steps for success, which as you might imagine, fall in complete contrast to those of the show. I find this kind of self reflection to be so healthy. After all, when we share our own methods for success, who knows, we might even help someone else in the process. That said, I loved Alice’s suggestion #5. I’ve been thinking about it all day and plan to put it into practice the moment I finish this post! :)

And finally, there was this article from MSN that outlined 10 common “Diet flubs” along with suggestions to fix them. Number 10 made me want to write this post. It is as follows:

Diet flub #10: You slim down solo.
It’s tempting to keep your 10-pound goal a secret (and wow everybody later with your results), but coming clean about your diet to pals increases your odds of success, according to an analysis of 46 studies by researchers at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. People with social support lost 6 percent more weight than those who dropped pounds on their own.

Gosh. That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? People with social support lose more weight than those without it.

Of course, I didn’t need the health experts over at MSN to tell me that I owe a great deal of my success to having a network of brilliant and compassionate people to lean on during all of this. But still, having them say it does provide just a smidge of validation. What’s more it also makes me all the more motivated to keep all this writing and reading, posting and clicking up, even on those nights/weeks when I just don’t feel up to it.

So… there go.
Go do some clicking now.
Really.
Go on. :)

To Find What I Already Have…

Good day.

The weather is starting to warm up here, so earlier in the afternoon my husband suggested that we walk a nearby “nature trail” that we’d only recently discovered. It’s funny because the entrance to the trail is within walking distance from our house, but neither one of us even knew it was there until a few weeks ago when, driving by, my husband spotted a small sign tucked behind some shrubbery, that marks its entry. Since then, we’ve been saying that we should go, but it’s still been fairly chilly and what with the recent bout of flu that’s plagued our house, exploring the “nature trail” has taken a bit of a backseat. But today, with the sun up and our health restored, we decided to hitch up the dogs and make our way towards the sea.

Although lovely in spots, it’s difficult for me to call the path we walked a true nature trail with a straight face. In truth, we saw a lot more development than we did nature. Here’s just one example:

Nonetheless, it was a perfectly lovely jaunt… about 1/2 a mile from our door to the entrance to the trail, which had mile markers along the way, letting us know that we’d traveled exactly 1.5 miles from start to finish and then another mile and a half back… that plus the half mile home, made for a nice little walk. The weather was perfect and even though I was a bit disappointed by the lack of actual nature, all in all, I felt lucky to live in such a beautiful spot.

When we got home, my husband said, “we should plan some kind of physical activity to do together every weekend.” Usually he and I do our own things when it comes to exercise. Partly this is because I have so much weight to lose and he, well… he doesn’t. And partly this is because, in the past, it’s been very difficult for me to keep up with him. I’ve been so out of shape for so long, while he’s maintained a pretty healthy weight, that any attempts we’ve made to “exercise” together have turned out to be pretty frustrating for both of us. Frustrating for him because he constantly has to slow down in order to wait for me, and frustrating for me for lots and lots of reasons.

It wasn’t always like this, though. When I first moved back here to be with him (way back in 1990) we’d walk the loop around a park (that was nestled right behind the house where I rented a room for the 4 years while I was in college) every single night. Those walks were a joy… we’d walk and talk for hours — working through a million different issues that, seen through our youthful eyes, often seemed insurmountable and always seemed absolutely essential. Of course, at the time, I took those walks for granted. It wasn’t until years later, when I was so out of shape that just walking from my car to the house would would wind me, that I longed for the ability to just go for a walk with my husband again.

Today, as we rounded the corner towards the last leg of our walk, my husband took my hand and said, “you’ve no idea how long I’ve waited for this.” I just smiled, but I *do* know how long he’s waited… because I’ve been waiting too.

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PS: I joined the Healthy You Challenge because a) it was time b) I need the support and c) I really, really wanted a big pink button that said I’d lost 60lbs. :)