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!