I feel like I need to blog something but I really don’t have time right now.
I’m feeling better – not roughing it so much, but still not 100%. More like 65%, but I’m getting there.
Have completed Day 2 of Week 1 of C25k. Loved the run last night – felt good, but I still worry that I look like a squatty duck when I run. Maybe if I lengthen my stride I will look less duckish?
Tons of useless boring work to be done. And apparently I’m just the woman to do it. :(
I won’t lie. I’m having a rough time, y’all. For the last 6 nights my 4 yo has woken up in the middle of the night with a cough. The allergy-drainage cough that just won’t quit. Every night around 2 am, I end up awake for about an hour trying everything to soothe her cough, but last night my son also started coughing, and then lo and behold, to put the icing on the cake, Shawn decided to start snoring.
It was not a good night. And if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I do not do well on little sleep.
You know that scene in The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood where Ashley Judd’s character just can. not. take. it. another day and she drives to a motel and just s l e e p s. For days. Honestly, sometimes that’s what I want to do. Just run away and sleep until I cannot sleep anymore. I don’t want to leave my family, but having several days to just sleep would do my soul a world of good.
the part I’m referring to starts at around minute 6
I am slowly coming out of my pity-party, due to a few different (I believe) divinely inspired people. I have signed up for a 5k in May. Normally I wouldn’t have signed up without attempting some semblance of training first, but this is for a good cause. There is a 19 year old boy in my town who is fighting cancer, and some of his friends have organized a 5k race in which the proceeds will go directly to him to help with the medical bills, which are staggering as you can well imagine. My friend Lynn told me about the race and I decided to sign up and attempt to RUN. I’m going to start training this weekend with C25k. I hope that focusing on someone’s REAL pain will get me out of my own selfish world.
Another divine intervention came from Karly at First Ourselves.com. Karly is one of those women whose passion in life is teaching other women to value themselves. I started reading her blog a few years ago and now the blog has morphed into a whole website full of information about healing body image issues, overeating issues, and (ta-da) sugar addiction issues. I hadn’t talked to Karly in a while, but she was on my mind A LOT one day and so I went over to her website to poke around. Later that day, I check my inbox and whose email was waiting in my inbox? That’s right, Karly’s. I don’t know if she knew that I had been on the site, but to get an email from her was wonderful in a freaky kind of way ( I believe the term she used was “synchronicity”, a word that rolls off the tongue easily and also reminds me of The Police circa early 1980′s). She has an e-book about sugar addiction that I think I’m going to check out, and actually she has a whole program set up for overcoming sugar addiction if you want to check it out here. I think I need to seriously explore my relationship with sugar because something’s gotta give. Something in me is off-kilter and I need it fixed, and I have a sneaking suspicion that sugar is playing a big role in my off-kilter-ness.
And another run in with another blogger happened just this morning. Jenn left a comment on my last post and these words from her sparked a bit of an “aha” moment in me. She said
Every time in a place where things are rolling along so “even” I start to worry b/c I know the valley will inevitably come regardless if the mountain appears in the moment to never end. My hope is with time the valleys will be fewer and not as deep.
It was the last sentence that caught me. My all-or-nothing thinking has me believing that if I’m not UP and EVEN all the time, then I’m failing miserably. Leveling out the mountains and valleys I think is what I need to work on. I went over the Jenn’s blog and fell in love instantly. The name of her blog is Girl Heroes – how great is that?!?! Go over and check her out. I think she might be MY new hero (and I don’t mean that in a creepy stalkerish way, I just mean that I think I could learn something from her). :)
So that’s where I am right now. Not great, but working on it, and hopefully I’ll get out of this funk when I can sleep in this weekend. Thanks for putting up with me! :)
Oh it’s bad. So bad that I don’t even want to blog about it, but that’s why I have the blog right? To get it all out in the open and deal with it? Okay here goes.
*deep breath*
My head is so screwed up right now. The Crazy is taking over and she’s playing total games with me. I am sick of it. Sick. Of. It. The whole thing. The whole healthy-eating-working-out-weight-loss-thing. I cannot find the right balance and it’s driving me, well… crazy. I feel like I should be eating only healthy foods – nothing processed, nothing with HFCS, nothing with sugar, nothing nothing nothing fun and evil. I feel like I’m betraying everyone when I dig my hand into a bag of Cheetos, but you know what? I like the damn Cheetos!! I like brownies, I like ice cream, I like cookies. Yes, I also like carrots, red peppers, hummus, cottage cheese, and lots of other healthy good-for-you foods, but sometimes I just get so tired of trying. I get so tired of always trying to make the right decision. Sometimes I just want to take the easy way out and serve my family Hamburger Helper because planning planning and planning wears me the hell out.
For a long time I felt like I had a really good balance going, but lately that balance is totally out of whack. I spent all weekend long thinking about food – I hate thinking about food. That is one reason I did so well with the diet pills – I didn’t think about food except for when I was hungry.
I feel like I have SO MUCH to think about (husband, kids, job, laundry, housework, parents, etc etc etc) and I’m tired. I’m tired of …I don’t know …just tired. I know I don’t want to gain weight again, but I’m so sick of thinking about how NOT to gain weight that I find myself being driven right to the brownies and ice cream.
And here’s something else that drives me crazy: I’ll bet you a hundred thousand million bucks that in a few days, I’ll be totally fine. My head will clear and all will be well again. Until it isn’t, and I head right back down into the valley. Up and down, back and forth, side to side. When will I ever just go from Point A to Point B? I can’t deal with this roller coaster. It’s really starting to piss me off. And I don’t mean I stay at the top for weeks on end and then suddenly come crashing down, no…it’ll be a few days at the most, and then I’ll crash for a few days, and then decided I need to get my act together and climb back up to the top, only to have something else push me over the edge, whereupon I fall even deeper into the valley below. See? Pure Crazy.
I read Vickie’s blog every day, and she always talks about BEING EVEN. How important it is for her stay even – I have no earthly idea how to begin to get there. I feel like I’m almost to the point of needing professional help with this – not a nutritionist, a therapist. Someone who can help me deal with my head. I don’t know. I don’t know what I need.
I’m not looking for pity, I’m not looking for advice, I’m just hoping that by sending this out into the void I’ll get some of it out of my head.
So Jack wants to know why. Why did I gain 45 pounds in one year and have kept it on for nearly 13 years? Why didn’t I lose the weight the first time (and the second time and the third time)? Why do I think I’m going to lose it this time?
Why Did I Gain?
Well the easy answer is that I got pregnant. And when I got pregnant, I crowned myself the Pregnant Princess who ate whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. For the first time in my life I felt free to EAT, and eat I did. I didn’t just eat a slice of pie, I ate the whole pie and then wanted to know what else you could give me to go with it. I can remember finishing off a whole package of Oreo cookies in two days. No lie. I think that was also the month I gained 13 pounds – my OB never said a word. And being the young naïve woman that I was, I thought that once I had my baby (who surely would come out weighing at least 30 pounds) all the extra weight would just magically fall off a few weeks post-partum. Needless to say, my baby did not weight 30 pounds – he weighed 8 pounds, which left me with a lot to lose. And actually I did lose some – I was working retail full time and I really cut back on my food. I got within 15 pounds of my pre-preggers weight, and then I started dieting plans. One after another, I thought that I would lose 30 pounds in 12 weeks, and when I didn’t, I gained a few more pounds and moved on to another plan. With every new plan – failure (in my eyes), even though I was losing at a reasonable weight (about 3 pounds per month), but when you take one step forward and two steps back, you end up more miserable than you were before.
The more truthful and difficult answer to why I gained all that weight is because my world got turned upside down. In February of 1996, I was a new college graduate, I had no job, I was living with my parents, no boyfriend or prospects of meeting anyone, no responsibilities at all really. I was a young single girl, living in her own single world. Fast forward 12 months later and all of a sudden I had a husband, a brand new baby, a mortgage, a full time job, and no idea how to cope with any of it. So I did what I knew how to do – I ate. Don’t get me wrong, the husband, the baby, etc. are the best things that have ever happened to me, but I felt like JILL got lost in the whirlwind of it all. Suddenly I had a new last name; a new identity, and I didn’t really know who this new woman was supposed to be, and let me tell you, it took me a loooong time to figure it out. I was happy, but confused, and my self esteem plummeted over the next few years. The worse I felt, the more I ate and the more I ate, the worse I felt – you all know how it goes. When I got married, I weighed 135 pounds, which really was five pounds above the number I weighed all through college. The last time I did Weight Watchers, I weighed in at 186 pounds, my all time highest weight. I should mention that during that weigh in, I was wearing jeans and a sweater, so I probably really weighed somewhere around 180.
Why Did I Start To Lose Weight?
I lost 7 pounds with Weight Watchers before The Crazy finally caught up with me again and I decided that WW I could just not get along anymore, so I went to my doctor for help. He prescribed me some low dose appetite suppressants and I lost 30 pounds over about 5 months. That got me started, but I didn’t want to take diet pills for the rest of my life, so I weaned myself off of them slowly. I still have about 20 pounds to get back to that weight of 135, which for my 5’3” self is at the high end of what “they” say I should weigh. If I could get down to 140 though, I‘d be happy.
Why Do I think This Time I Will Lose It?
Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not 100% convinced I will lose it, honestly. I always seem to sabotage myself just when I get on a roll. I know intellectually what it takes to lose the weight, I just don’t know if I have the drive and mental fortitude to get it done. I’m sure some of you will say that I need to dig down deep and find the drive, but what if the drive isn’t there? What if I dig down deep and find…nothing? I guess this is the last part I need to work on… building my own self-efficacy (and actually I am working on it because there is a group on iChange that I’m a member of called Building Self Efficacy). I’m not sure what it’s going to take to push me to fight for those final 20 pounds lost.
So Jack, does that answer your question? Does my WHY make sense to anyone else but me?
I just noticed that not only do I have lipstick on my teeth but also a seed from the “strawberries” in Special K with Red Berries stuck in my teeth. Nice. And why do they call them Red Berries? Are they admitting that they aren’t real strawberries? Because I would have believed them if they had told me they were real strawberries. Now that I think of it, what are those things anyway???? And here’s another weird thing: I got much less sleep last night than the night before, yet I’m strangely wide awake today. What up wif dat?
Focus, Jill, FOCUS!!
Anyway, so I would like to lose another 20 pounds, but in order to do this, I think I need to really ramp up my exercise BIG TIME. A half hour on the elliptical a few days a week just doesn’t seem to be cutting it like it did a couple of years ago. I think I need to get my sweat on for at least an hour a few days per week, but I’m not sure what to do. The elliptical is so convenient, and the money for a gym membership is just not there right now, but I think I could swing one or two classes per week. There is a yoga class on Tuesday nights and a Zumba class on Thursday nights, but would that be enough to kick it up? I don’t know. Of course I’ve got The Shred on DVD, but really I’d like something a little more fun, not so soul-crushing. Any suggestions?
Also, I sit on my rear for 8 hours a day at work – I probably should incorporate some exercise into my day. Maybe get up once per hour and do 20 jumping jacks or something like that? I wonder how effective that would be. Anyone else a desk jockey? How do you fit in exercise throughout the day? Have you ever been caught doing something in your office that made others look at you funny? This is my big fear – I”ll be in full on Downward Dog and someone would walk into my office and see me NOT sitting in my chair. How to explain that?
What I need is for someone to PLAN a workout schedule for me. That’s what I need! Anyone ever had any experience with an online personal trainer? Or does anyone have a specific plan that you follow? Actually now that I think about it, I could just do the work out plan on my health insurance’s website again. That’s what I was doing before the Great Finger Smashing of 2009 when I totally lost all my mojo. I think I’ll check that out again, because it had a cardio plan as well as a strength training plan.
Man, am I all over the place today or what?!?
Okay, I’m off to find a work out plan! Wish me luck! 
Hello kids! How’s it going?
First of all let me get my curmudgeonly self out of the way: I hate DST. It screws up my rhythm and it takes me weeks to adjust. All because of one little measly hour. Patooie! I spit on you, DST!!
Oh, I’m not done. Next up on “why Jill is turning into a cranky old lady”, I don’t feel well today. Sarah (my 9yo) had a stomach virus Saturday night and most of the day Sunday, which meant very little sleep for me. She is feeling better today, but I’m feeling a wee bit nauseated. Yuck. I hate this feeling. 
And also, I still am not fond of my job. The End.
Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about the good things about today:
*crickets chirping*
Okay, so let’s recap: I’m an old woman who is tired, ill, and cranky…yep, that about sums it up!
Oh, before I forget… The Exercise for 10 Days Challenge is going well. I have worked out for 5 out of the last 6 days. The challenge ends on Thursday and I don’t see why I can’t work out for the next 4 days. It’s do-able. The No Sweets Challenge, well that’s another story. Saturday I had cake with the family, and then I had more cake yesterday afternoon. I had asked my mom to make me an angel food cake because I thought that would be less horrific than a bakery birthday cake. Well, I underestimated my mom. She’s an old-fashioned southern cook, so to dress up that drab Angel Food Cake she made frosting. The most delicious, sweet, heart-attack-on-a-plate frosting. She used powdered sugar, half and half creamer, and…are you ready for this?…I can’t even believe it myself…SHORTENING. Yes, lots of shortening. Like I said, it was some good tasty stuff, but not so much the healthier birthday cake I was hoping for! It all worked out okay, though. The cake was on the smallish side so the pieces weren’t very big and there was only enough for one left over piece which I devoured yesterday afternoon in a fit of “I”m tired, therefore I need sugar” (and yeah, we all know how well that works!). Other than that, I’ve been pretty good about staying away from the sweet stuff.
Okay, well back to work for me. Sorry this is the most boring blog post ever. I’ll try to channel my inner ray of sunshine and have a better post later. Although I can’t promise anything, cause I’m curmudgeonly that way.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes guys!! I really appreciate it.
So yesterday was awesome. Massage, manicure, pedicure, lunch at a tea room, shopping…what more could a girly-girl want?? I spent the whole day by myself doing the things that I wanted to do. It was bliss! A few years ago, it would not have occured to me to spend my day alone, but yesterday I didn’t really want anyone with me. I think what made this birthday so much fun is that for the probably the first time ever in my life, I wasn’t depending on someone else to make it a special day. I didn’t expect anything from anybody, so really there were no expectations of how I thought the day should go. And whaddya know, it was one of the best days I’ve ever had! I even went to the little tea room and had lunch alone (my spa day ran late, and Shawn had already had lunch by the time I was finished) but it was lovely anyway. I loved every minute of it!
Oh, and I stopped by Goodwill and picked up two very cute, very still-had-the-store-tags-on-them new summer dresses. They need to be altered and taken in a bit, but they are easy fixes that I can do myself this weekend. I can’t wait for warmer weather so I can show them off! I also bought myself (not at Goodwill, just various random stores) new flip flops, a stainless steele water bottle, and a toe ring. I know!! A toe ring!! I have always wanted one, and plus I needed something to draw attention to my lovely newly pedicured toes, so when I saw the rack of toe rings, I found one I liked and I bought it for a whole $5. It is sterling silver, so I don’t have to worry about it turning my toe green. It’s the little things in life that please me so!
I had a piece of cake, of course, but I didn’t go nuts with it or anything. Had my peice and I was done. Back to the no-sweets thing again today. I also didn’t get any formal exercise in yesteday, but with all the shopping I did, I think that counts right? So back to the workout challenge again today. I’m tired, but I’ll muster up the energy to get it done. Somehow. Between dinner, laundry, my iChange conference call, and more laundry, I’ll fit it in.
How’s the iChange thing going, you ask? Hey thanks for asking! I’ll tell you – my group is…how do I put this? Frankly it’s floundering. I had one group member and she hasn’t been on the site in about 6 days, so I’m afraid I have lost her. I think the other group leaders are having a hard time as well. We are going to talk tonight about some different things we can do, but I feel like the wind has been let out of my sails. Just FYI, anyone can join iChange for free and use the trackers – you don’t have to sign up for one of the groups. If you are the type that likes to do things on your own, you can totally do that too, or you can join my group (the funnest option, I think), or you can join one of the experts’ groups. There are a lot of ways to use the site, if you feel so inclined. Just thought I’d throw that out there in case you were wondering.
As far as my success with iChange, I had a little melt down and decided that I absolutely hate counting calories. I can’t see the forest for the trees when I’m counting things (calories, points, etc), and I get really obsessive about food. It brings out The Crazy, and it took me a long time to shut her down… I don’t want her making a reapperance. So I decided that I”m just going to focus on eating the best food I possibly can, not too much, but just enough and use the trackers without the calorie info. I breathed a sigh of relief and two days later, I lost 2 pounds. My head really can get in the way of my weight loss if I let it. I’ve been doing this whole weight loss thing long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. So all that, plus my no-sweets challenge, and my work out challenge hopefully will blast me through the 155 wall that I’ve been sitting at for awhile. 154 will be a sweet victory!
Speaking of sweets, Diane wrote about SugarStacks in her post today. It’s a website that uses sugar cubes to visually represent the amount of sugar in everyday foods. Very interesting, and very relevant for me. Oh, and there’s a blog too, cause we all love a blog, don’t we?! Go check it out!
Have a good day! 
Today I am spending the morning at a spa for a well deserved and much longed for massage and mani/pedi. After that, I’m going to have lunch with my husband at an eating establishment of my choosing, and then I’m going shopping for summer dresses and too-cute sandals. If I have time, I’ll stop by my favorite thrift and antique stores and spend some precious time browsing. In other words, I’m taking the day OFF.
Happy Birthday to ME!!
Hey gang! Did you all have a good weekend? Yesterday was gorgeous day here – we loaded up and headed to our local farm supply and bought seeds for this year’s garden. We are expanding the garden area-wise, and planting more and different veggies this year. I think we bought nearly $40 worth of seeds, and that was 40% off! We are some garden-planning maniacs!
I’m frustrated. I’m not losing weight like I thought I would. I’ve lost 4 pounds, and gained 2, and lost 1, and gained 3, and lost 1. *sigh* I’ve been doing this back and forth dance for 2 months and I’m tired of it. I really thought my sugar-free experiment would yield some results, but alas, I sit here the same weight I was when I started it. Of course I planned that little foray right smack dab in the middle of my Lady Time and all her accompanying symptoms, not to say that the experiment was a failure – my PMS symptoms were noticeably lessened and I felt good while I was doing it, so I’m going to modify my No Sweets policy a little bit, but I’m going to stick with it for awhile longer. (Was that like, the longest sentence EVER?)
In hopes of getting below 155 pounds, I’m going to begin a new challenge. For the next 10 days I’m going to exercise for at least 20 minutes per day. Somehow I am going to force myself to fit it in – I think this will be the key to busting out of the upper 150′s. So, that’s the goal for the next 10 days – Get. It. Done. I might buy a couple of new DVD’s, because there are days when I just don’t want to get on the elliptical, and plus I think it’s good to change things up. I need something to look forward to.
About expanding the No Sweets Policy, this week is going to be a little hard to work around. My birthday is Wednesday so I might treat myself to a little dark chocolate, or an angel food cake or something like that, and then Saturday is when I will celebrate with my parents and my sister and her family. Does anyone else do this? Have a birthday gathering to celebrate, even if you are almost 40? Birthdays are kind of a big deal in my family, we all try to get together and have a lunch or dinner and open presents and have cake and ice cream. Doesn’t matter the age, if you were born into my family, you will be having a birthday party! It’s still fun.
So anyway, there will be a few sugary foods consumed in the next 6 days. OH! And guess what else I’m doing on Wednesday? I’m taking the day off of work and treating myself to a massage and a mani/pedi. After my morning at the spa, I’m going to go shopping. I plan on spending the day by myself just doing the things I want to do. I rarely get time to do these things, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. I’m really excited!
Okay so, my focus this week is exercise and celebrating me! I’ll let you all know how it goes. What would you do with a day all to yourself?
My trifecta of weight loss success (water, food, exercise) is 2/3 perfect. I’m drinking about 8 glasses every day, my calories run about 1300-1400 of good, healthy (for the most part) food, but the exercise area is sorely lacking. I just can’t seem to get in the groove. I realized my all-or-nothing thinking is impeding my progress in this one area: if I can’t do 30-40 minutes, then I might as well do nothing. And that’s what usually happens – nothing. So I decided that instead of thinking of each day in terms of an Exercise Day or Not an Exercise Day, I would think in terms of Blocks. Will today be a 10 minute block of exercise, a 20 minute block, or a 30+ minute block? Which one can I fit in today? These are the questions I”ll be asking myself every day. Annie said something on her blog today that made my lightbulb go on:
I think the key change that happened for me was looking at this whole thing DAY TO DAY. Instead of trying to fit exercise in five days out of the week, I have to fit exercise in TODAY. And I have my calories for TODAY. It has helped a lot. Like whoa.
So that’s what I am going to do also, but I’m also going to think about how much exercise can I fit into my day today. I think that giving myself options will help me get over the slump of “I don’t wanna” and into “well, I dont’ feel like it, but I’ll do at least 10 minutes today”, and if I can extend that 10 minutes, great. If not, at least I know I did SOMETHING.
Any of you do this already? What mind games do you play to get yourself motivated to work out?
Speaking of exercise, Diana Young, RD, has invited me to be a contributor to her blog. So if you want to see a completely useless post from me (yeah I know you can do that here already!) go here to read it. Here at my own blog it’s pretty easy to come up with whatever drivel is swirling around in my brain and put it in print, but writing for someone else’s blog is tough! Let me know what you think.
Oh my gosh, I just remembered! Today is the last day of my NO SWEETS CHALLENGE! Woo hoo! I’ve made it for 10 days without eating any cookies, cakes, desserty type confections!! This is a big deal, y’all. And you know what? I’m not even really looking forward to eating anything sweet. I can’t think of anything that I just really want because I have a feeling if I do eat anything like that, it’s going to make me ill. I just feel it. I’m just going to play it by ear this weekend and see how it goes. I’m not going to search out the sweets to eat, but if say, someone makes me a birthday cake this weekend, I probably won’t pass up a piece. The bday party might not happen this weekend anyway, but if it does, I’ll deal with it. It’s all good.
I hope you all have a great weekend – it’s supposed to be a sunny 60degrees here today, so I may have to slip out of work early and go do something fun!
Hey there! Thanks for stopping by and please don't forget to tell yourself that you are FABULOUS!
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