I'm doing it.

I'm winning this battle. It's still too early to declare a winner on the war, but between you and me, I've got that one bagged, too. As I mentioned previously, I've got a lot of emotional issues to sort through before I can even begin to effectively work on the physical issues. I've spent the past few months working a little at a time to change this habit or that reaction and it's paying off.

It's paying off, people.

I'm not losing weight. The number on the scale still fluxuates between 159 and 161, but my legs look hot. HAWT! My upper body is just a little smaller, but my ribs are visible again (not pokin' out, just seen enough to validate that I am NOT stuffed full of marshmallows.) and my stomach is back to a decent bulge. BUT, this is still not the pay off.

The pay off is that my little baby-steppin' changes have culminated in a lot of bigger changes. And it's not just as far as my diet and exercise go, it's also showing itself in my financial decisions, the way I manage my time, my sleep schedule, my motivation, my goals and my dedication to myself. Things are coming together. I'm getting closer to the person I want to be and seeing less of the person I was.

The beauty is that it's still me. Just a better me. Because I'm victorious.

Letters To Myself

Dear Wednesday Morning Nicole,

Hi, it's me, Tuesday Night Nicole. I want you to listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you because it's important. You can roll your eyes and grunt all you want to, but this is a big deal. If you fail at this, Wednesday Night Nicole is going to be writing you really nasty blogs at a quarter till 10. I know this from experience. I'd like to give Tuesday Morning Nicole a swift kick in the duff.

So listen. You want to get up tomorrow morning. Don't argue. Just do it. Get up at 6:30 tomorrow morning and have a cup of ice cold milk to get your body awake. Rub your eyes. Stretch your back. Then wake your kids up at 6:45. Feed them breakfast. Tell them you love them. Be gentle when you brush their hair. Kiss and hug them before they get on the bus. Then as you wave to them, walk briskly home and then... pay attention... stay awake. No, no no. This is not negotiable. Stay awake. Even further-- GET A SHOWER! Wash your hair. Use the scrubby face wash. Shave your armpits. Take your time. Get out of the shower and-- trust me-- stay awake. Don't try to make the bed. You'll just want to get back in it. Get a cute outfit on, style your hair. Put on some make up, maybe. Just stay awake. Go downstairs, have a snack. Drink a cup of tea instead of coffee.

It's probably going to be close to 9 when you get all of that done, but here's the thing. You've got to fight off those sleepies that are coming at 10 so get busy. Get a move on your to-do list. Clean the bathrooms. Clean the laundry area of the basement. You know those won't take you more than an hour, total. Don't procrastinate. Get your housework done. Then, around 11:30, have lunch. Walk around outside for a while and take a gander at your plants. The daffodils will be fully bloomed and you know how much that will boost your spirits.

At 12:30, you may lay down for a nap. Don't lay down on the couch. Go upstairs, climb into bed and really allow yourself to rest. You've earned it. DH will wake you up when he gets home at 2:30 and then it'll be Wednesday Afternoon Nicole's shift. As long as you've done these things I've listed to you, her job will be a lot easier. You just have to stay awake. You cannot sleep the day away just because you'll be the only one home. Love yourself better than that.

You can do it,
Tuesday Night Nicole

So here's the new plan

De. Railed. With a capital F.

I was doing really well for a while there. I got hit hard in the gut, figuratively, the day I turned 30. Any chance of recovery was gone by January 4th. I can say, honestly, that aside from one major exception, this has been The Worst year of my life. That major exception is that I just got home from Seattle, Washington, effectively crossing an item off of my Bucket List. I've wanted to go to Seattle since I was a teenager and it was more than I had ever hoped it would be. I didn't want to leave. It broke my heart to get on that plane to head home.

Aside from that one major ray of sunlight, it's been a crappy year. I just can't seem to get back on my feet after being knocked down. I'm tired of my happiness and peace relying on someone else. I'm tired of having someone else dictate for me what goes into my mouth, directly or indirectly. This has got to stop.

I'm back up to roughly 160. I'm hesitant to start tracking again now as Aunt Flo is a few weeks out and I'm due to start packing on water weight in the next week. I don't want to get discouraged.

Still, I need to have goals. Reasonable ones. Goals with room for error or allowances for me to take a break from myself to deal with the issues here at home. Not dealing with them with food, though. With time and patience. So my goals are this:

One pound a week for the next fifteen weeks, gone. That would put me well below the overweight BMI, and put me at a healthy goal weight of 145 by June 22nd, the first day of Summer. I would feel comfortable in my bikini at that weight. In the event that I lose more, that's good too. Two pounds a week would put me at 130 by Summer, but it's not necessary to get that low. I just want to get better food in my body because I'm definitely feeling the effects of chemical after chemical, here. I feel gross. Inside and outside.

My second goal is to train for a 5k. It's something I've always wanted to do but I am just not a runner. I can go for half an hour/3 miles easily on an elliptical but once my feet hit pavement, I feel like the bones in my legs are shattering. I'm going to give the Couch to 5K program a shot again, but not until it warms up a bit more and I can plan out my run a little better without hurdling piles of snow.

My last goal is to start weight training. I've held off because I don't want the effect of being bulky, as I really feel this will cause me to backslide, but I need to get my metabolism kicked into gear. I'm not getting any younger and I'm only getting fatter.

This is all great in theory but I will be swimming upstream for all of this. My real support system is nil and the issues I have going on at home are weights around my shoulders. I'm pulling a whole lot more than 160 pounds.

Recipish: Mozmatach pasta salad

A few days ago, I whipped up a quick pasta salad that, quite honestly, turned out to be a whole lot better than I expected. It's simply gemelli pasta, halved grape tomatoes, mozzerella pearls and chopped fresh spinach. I tossed it with a bit of Parmesan Asiago Light Balsamic Vinaigrette by Kraft and voila. An incredibly tasty lunch. I even had another cup of it for dinner. And breakfast the next day. I didn't track the calories or carbs or whatever, but I kept my serving size confined to that cup you see sitting there. It's about the size of a standard coffee mug. 8 oz?

Either way, it was very good. I even managed to get the family to eat some, too. I didn't think they'd ever willingly eat spinach.

Recipish- n. It's like a recipe, but doesn't involve any measurements or health information. In fact, it's essentially a list of ingredients, which is how we roll around here. I leave it to you, the chef, to figure out how much of what is good for you and your tastebuds.

An interesting thing happened to me yesterday. On a whim, I weighed myself. I wasn't due for a weigh in until today, but I thought "Hey, I'm naked. I haven't eaten yet. I've been to the bathroom. Let's check some numbers." I was fully prepared for a small raise, possibly even a small loss. I was not, however, prepared for what I saw on the scale.

I was down 3.2 pounds.

I know, right? Crazy! Considering that was a 2 day loss, I've got two explanations.

1) There was more water weight than I had expected following my Monthlies and, once finished, the rest of the water made its exit. This would mean that during the time I was happy just maintaining, I actually lost weight and couldn't tell for all of the bloating. Love being a girl. Love it. Love. It.

2) The batteries on my scale are going.

So, that's where I'm at. While I know I should be weighing myself today, I think I'm going to just take the numbers from yesterday and use them as unexpected motivation to keep up the good work until the officially official weigh in on Wednesday.

Inertia

I've read several blogs in the past few days that have me really thinking about something. Some of them only relate slightly, but part of the point of reading blogs is to share in other people's experiences and see how their mistakes or triumphs can help me along the way.

The hot topic of the moment in the weight-loss blog-o-sphere is quality v. quantity. I, personally am of the quantity camp. Weight-loss is about calories in and calories out. Period. Bottom line. Can you eat 1500 calories of Reese's cup, exercise three times a week and still lose weight? You betcha. Are you wrecking your body? You betcha. But ultimately-- YOU'LL STILL LOSE WEIGHT!

As with anything, there are a lot of people around pushing their opinions on others as the "right" ones and see any flirting with thinking for yourself as preparations for burning in the Lake of Fire (Love you, Nirvana.) For instance, the Breast V. Bottle debate. Heh... that is one hot topic among mommy forums. I don't even go near it. It seems like, by writing about what you ingest on a blog, you're painting a target on your forehead for people to judge you by what you're eating. "You eat processed foods?! Off with your head!" "That canned food has sodium! SOOOOOODIUM!!!! *dies*" "Fuh-fuh-fuh-frozen... meals?? I hope you've made out your will because you're going to get three kinds of cancer!!! Everyone knows they're chock full of aspartame and turpentine!" Ludicrous nonsense.

The way I see it, what I'm putting into my mouth and my body is my business. As long as the number on the scale is going down at this point, I'm doing just fine. I'm a big girl (really.) and I can make my own decisions. I am looking to be healthier, as is everyone, but I can't just wake up one morning, throw all of my food into the trash and start over following someone else's guide book for what's good and what isn't. What I'm doing is known in the medical world as "too much too fast" (It's Latin.) and I know what happens when I jump through a gigantic hoop before I'm ready. Inertia, because I've got a whole lot of forward momentum going and when it happens that I snag my shoe lace on a rusty piece of emotion, I'm not going to be near anything familiar to help me cope. I won't have any sort of familiarity to help me get back up. Baby steps! Now there may be the people out there who can just throw everything off of the table in one big dramatic cloth-pulling event, but I'm not one of them. And I don't expect everyone else to be, either. We are all unique. We all need different things to get us through in this weight-loss journey and if it's a mother-flippin' 100 calorie pack of Goldfish crackers that gets me over the salt craving then kindly "STFU" and let me have my Goldfish! If, at this stage of my journey, I still need crutches, why on earth would someone take that away from me? There are low calorie alternatives to the high calorie foods I'm familiar with that will carry me through a tough emotional time. Why not be happy that I had enough wherewithall to go for the healthier (-er, that's important) choice than the old fall-back? As long as I don't eat the entire box in one sitting, I'd say that I've done a great job. Who cares that it's not whole wheat, unbleached, free range flour soy-cheddar flavored cracker types, baked for two hours in my own oven? I don't care. Why would someone else? Why is someone else wasting their energy projecting their own preferences onto other people?

While I understand there are healthier choices than some that I might make, there are a whole lot worse choices, as well. I choose not to survive on 100 calorie packages of anything. I also choose, however, not to deny myself anything, which I know will eventually end up in a binge during a weak moment. If I choose to work a caramel mocha into my weekly calorie "budget", but eat healthy for every other ingested morsel, why get down on me? I've had enough discipline and motivation to stay on target and the promise of that one mocha just might be the motivation that got me through the week. One mocha doesn't mean that I'm falling off of the wagon. It might just mean that I've brought a pillow to make the wagon less bumpy on my tushy.

There are different levels of what people consider healthy eating. We're all at different places and I think it should be respected that having slightly less healthy diets than the one you might be on doesn't make anyone else less serious or less motivated. It just means that some people are at a different place, going slow, working on the small steps they can manage right then.

Disclaimer: This is, of course, my opinion on the matter. "You" does not mean I'm speaking to any specific "you", but refers to the general "you" of people to whom these points might apply. All conversation has been strictly hypothetical, as no one has said a darn thing about what I, personally, choose to eat. This post is based off of voyeristically watching other people's conversations on their blogs and contemplating how I would feel in certain situations, not as a rebuttal to any one post. In the event of a water landing, your seat may be used as a flotation device. Thank you for flying Air Nicole.

Gack.

I've been up for nearly two hours and the nausea is just now beginning to subside so that I can eat something. Unfortunately, all we have for breakfast is Apple Cinnamon Cheerios or eggs and toast. While I could just scramble an egg quickly and have it on a slice of toast, the eggs are from the neighbor's incredibly free range chickens (and by that, I mean they're usually in my yard, just wandering around and munching on whatever seeds I planted) and I'm not comfortable yet eating something that didn't come from a farmer. K, however, had no problems adding them into the pancakes he and the girls ate a few mornings ago. The Cheerios don't sound very appealing either, so I think I'm going to have a piece of toast with pumpkin butter and a glass of OJ. It's times like this when having those Slim-Fast shakes on hand is beneficial. I know I should eat. I know I have to get my energy kick started so that I can make it through the day without being a lump but just walking into the kitchen turns my stomach.

Maybe I'll just grab an apple and make a break for my office.