TGIF!

This week seemed to drag on forever, and while it is only 9:30 am, I feel like Friday is going to drag as well. The kids have a half day - I wish I did! But I did take a half day earlier this week.

Monday was a great day - as well as Mondays can be, and Monday when TOM arrives. But I felt good, I felt like my eating was fantastic.

Tuesday - not so much. At all. TOM really took its toll. I ate like crap - I blamed TOM but really it was the anxious feeling of being home in the afternoon and having a ton of work to do, work I didn't want to do (I did all the work I liked on Monday!). So a bag of popcorn - gone :( And candy that was the house - gone (though I did throw some of the candy away).

Wednesday I felt like crud (overeating hangover I think, plus allergies) so I worked from home, but ended up taking a half sick day because I didn't work the whole day through - but I did get a lot of stuff done.

I've been doing pretty well otherwise - I will sit on my hands today if I have to! I am hoping for a pound loss tomorrow at my meeting - we shall see!

I won't be able to make my meeting next Saturday morning but I am planning on weighing in on Friday morning - which will help me eat normally on Thursday, even though the Patriots are on Thursday Night Football.

Weight Watchers DID happen/ Running did not

Weigh-in: 223.4 (this is my at-home weight, my WW weight was 224.4)

I had a pretty good week last week and was excited to get back to Weight Watchers on Saturday morning. I was surprised when they automatically had me start from scratch, while when I re-joined in January and hadn't been there in 18 months I had to fight to get my weight started from scratch.

So that means that while I am 7 pounds from my highest in January, my 5% of 11.2 starts now instead of being close to it, but I am okay with that. I wonder if they are doing this so they can track better how long it takes someone to lose weight.

We were and I was pretty busy all day Saturday but I made good food choices. I planned on running on Sunday so I made pasta, with roasted tomatoes from our garden, and baked zucchini from our garden as well, along with thin chicken pan fried.

I didn't get to bed as early as I would have liked because I got sucked into watched a Hallmark Fall chick-movie, so didn't go to sleep until 11:00. My alarm went off at 6:00 - it was going to be 90 on Sunday and I wanted to get an early start. I got up (and was happy to see the scale say 223.2) but pretty quickly decided to start home and get a ton accomplished from my To Do list (including slowly deleting 1 million, yes, million work emails). I am okay with my choice. I got a TON done yesterday (including shopping for winter/snow clothes for the kids) which makes this week earlier.

Eating Sunday was so-so - it could have been so much worse! I didn't eat anything while out doing errands. I had made pasta salad for dinner, but ended up having some for lunch and as my snack as well.

Dinner was steak tips, grilled asparagus, and pasta salad - an annual tradition we usually have for the first weekend of football because it was the first meal my husband made for me for the first football game he took me to. I probably didn't drink as much water as I could have and dinner was salty, so the scale said 224.2 this morning. Incentive to try harder today, but TOM is coming so it could be a little harder.

Weight Watchers Do Not Happen

It had nothing to do with me not wanting to face the scale, it had everything to do with this.

A little history: 5 years ago we go into a fender bender as we were moving - it wasn't our fault, but we didn't have the time or desire to deal with it - the damage appeared minimal and superficial. Over time we thought it may have been more, one of the symptoms being the tire would lose air and every couple of weeks I need to put more air in. One day I needed to put air in 2 days in a row -instead of dragging a 3 year old and 6 year old to the tire place (my husband was away) I went to my parents summer place as planned and woke up with a flat tire. My dad and I changed the flat and I drove into town and ended up with 4 expensive tires (my car was 5 years old at the time, so definitely due for new tires).

Then 3 years went by and the same tire started losing air again. So in my mind I have thought it was the rim - I've been putting air in the tire for 2 years now! Sometimes it is months, in the winter when I was parked outside when our basement was getting done, it could have been once a week. I put air in last Sunday, which was the first time since we came back from vacation. And Thursday the light came on. Friday I worked from home so didn't need to drive until me and the kids were in a hurry to do errands Friday night. I backed out of the garage and I knew it didn't feel right.

My husband had plans that evening but thankfully hadn't left work yet. I needed him to run to a store to get a mouthguard for my daughter and then come home so we could mold the mouthguard and make her field hockey game. We were also desperately in need of grocery shopping, so we went after her game, then ran to AC Moore at 8:30 pm because she needed items for a homework project.

Despite the fact that we are planning to buy me a new car this winter, I knew I needed 4 tires (a mechanic this summer had told me so) so I made an appointment for 8:30 the next morning. My husband had changed my tire but said the spare was flat, but he was able to pump it up with a bicycle tire. He looked at it every hour until 1 am when he went to bed and it was holding air.

I got up at 6:30 to go to WW and went to check on my car and the spare was flat. We had a ton of errands to run before noon because we were tapped out busy for the rest of the weekend. So my husband called AAA - luckily the tire place is just 4 miles from my house so no extra charge. And $600 later (that is with the cheapest tires) I have 4 new tires.

Through all of this I continued to eat well - Friday I was stressed as heck but thought I would make it to my meeting, so continued with my normal Friday WW eating. And Saturday was great. Sunday...Not so much. But that is a different post.

Twas the Day Before Weight Watchers

Ugh. Tomorrow is the day I am supposed to walk back into Weight Watchers and the scale said 228.0 this morning. I have watched the scale go up and up and up this week. I sware it is ovulation that does it to me. Yesterday was not a good day - I ate lunch downstairs after I swore I wouldn't (this required me to walk out to my car to get the few dollars in cash I had in the car) and I had to go to the grocery store on my way home because we had run out of cat food and milk and right inside the door was this Reeses Peanut Butter Chocolate Mousse Log thing - the 4 of us finished it off last night so at least there aren't any leftovers lurking around.

Today is my normal day to work from home and I am trying so good to be "good" - not that there is much around here to dive into, but I would find it - I've been known to eat bowls of Cheerios when I shouldn't.

My daughter bought Nutella earlier this week and I ended up throwing 1/2 the jar away because I was dipping into it.

This afternoon I need to go grocery shopping and really going to stick to the list, which will include some snacks because, well, I have kids! I can't have nothing in the house for them.

I hate that I am going to go in tomorrow and most likely it will say I am up 8-9 lbs since April 29, the last time I went in. But I am going to go in!!!!

3-Day Refresh Fail - sort of

As I wrote at 11:30 on Friday, my morning at the time was going slow and I wasn't able to eat/drink everything in as much of a timely fashion as I would have liked.

I was fine with the breakfast shake, because that is what I am used to. The "Digestive Sweep" you are supposed to drink fast and I didn't so I couldn't get it all down.

I was fine with my lunch shake (albeit late) and had carrots and hummus, and had more carrots and hummus as my afternoon snack.

When it came to having my dinner shake and then have a salad, I just couldn't do it. The dinner shake you aren't allowed any fruit it it. And when I opened the fridge, the leftover Asian peanut noodles/stir fry veggies and steak were calling my name. So I had a normal dinner. A small dinner because there weren't a ton of leftovers, but not the dinner I was supposed to.

Saturday was going to be crazy - I had the shake before soccer game #1, I drank the "Digestive Sweep" quickly in the late morning and that was okay. But we were going to be gone from 12:45 until 5:30. Leftover mac and cheese looked a whole lot better (with more carrots and hummus). And I was okay the rest of the afternoon. I drank lots of water during more sporting events. And then in the afternoon I also decided that I wasn't really following this thing, so I COULD go running in the morning (you aren't supposed to exercise during the 3 days because you really haven't had enough calories). So I had leftover spaghetti for dinner.

And Sunday, despite not having slept overly well, I got up at 6:30 and drove to my beautiful rail trail and ran 4 very, very slow miles (the nice thing about only running 4 miles is I didn't have to eat much first, so I didn't have to wait an hour before running). But I ran the whole thing without stopping. And it was glorious. Cool (around 51) and humidity around 75%.

I still ate pretty well the rest of the day - didn't go crazy. We were on a tight budget this week, so the catch-up grocery shopping I needed to do had to be less than $50 so that didn't allow for any extras! I didn't have a few WW cheese sticks about 15 minutes before dinner because I was getting famished and dinner wasn't ready as quickly as I would have liked.

So how did the weight do - Sunday morning I was at 224.8 - so excited to be under 225, but this morning was back up to 225.6.

But I am going to try really hard this week. I want to be at least 224 when I walk into Weight Watchers on Saturday. Back to Weight Watchers - a topic for another day!

Vacation Re-cap Part 1 - Colorado

We flew into Denver, Colorado on Saturday August 12. We flew from Boston with a layover in Dallas. The flight up from Dallas was really neat - I was so looking forward to seeing the Rockies again after 15 years that I looked out the window the whole time.

After a night in Denver and a large trip to Target to stock up on things like a cooler, folding chairs, all our liquids (shampoo, suntan lotion) and a few snacks, we headed off in our large Chevy Tahoe (oh I missed that SUV after the trip was over).

 

Our first stop was Red Rocks Amphitheatre. I knew abut it from watching Extreme Weight Loss. My husband knew about it from seeing shows there. I definitely wanted to check it out before leaving town. I do want to go back someday to run the stairs/seats (and maybe catch a show :) )

 

Then we headed to Breckenridge where my uncle (my dad's younger brother) lives. In hindsight it wasn't the smartest idea to head to 11,000 feet so soon after landing. We originally were going to see friends in Vail and it seemed like the easiest way to get to Moab instead of visiting him in Colorado Springs. But despite the headaches, it was beautiful country.

 

After a night we headed down to Gunnison to visit my cousin (my uncle's daughter)

And then the next day drove to Moab, with a spontaneous (the best kind!) side visit to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (our first of 5 on the trip)

It ended up being a longer drive to get to Moab because there was a lot of construction on the windy river, so 6 times we had to stop for one-way traffic. But finally we go to Utah.

3-Day Refresh Coming Up

My eating this week has been pretty good - and by that I mean the 3 days of work so far. I weighed myself every day, I ate the food I brought to work, I for the most part my snack I brought to work (but then brought home to eat because I went home to get my Middle Schooler off the bus). I purged the house like crazy, which resulted in wasting money, but as I tell everyone, money is no object when it comes to losing weight - that doesn't mean that i can spend $350-$700 a month on a weight loss/work out place that friends of mine can, but if that means my husband asking me to buy Smores stuff and then we don't end up having the firepit, so I throw it away. If that means that I throw away the ice cream that we bought for my son's teeth extraction.

Last night we had a nice meal because right now Thursday is our 1 free night - and we had a little dessert to celebrate the start of Football season (too bad our team choked, but I went to sleep before they choked because sleep is way important!)

Before I even left on vacation, I bought the 3-Day Refresh. Today is the day. My "starting weight" is 226.2.

It is 11:30 am and I am kind of failing - not because I have been eating other food, but so far I haven't had enough or drank enough water.  And now I am stuck in this 2 hour conference call - but I am home so I can make it.

This is the 3-Day Refresh Schedule:

Wake Up - Drink 8-12 oz water

Breakfast (within 1 week of waking) - Shakeology (I am using chocolate) with water and a fruit - I usually make mine with milk - I didn't have this until 10:00 am

Mid-Morning  Fiber Sweep Drink - this is the bad part of it - I drink it with my nose held - Need to have this now

Lunch - Vanilla Shake with a fruit - plus veggies and fat (for me this will be hummus)

Snack - Vegetable and Fat

Dinner - Vanilla Shake (without fruit)/ Veggie/Fat Meal

It is a weird feeling because I just want this weekend to be over so this be over. We have a pretty full weekend since it is the first weekend of fall sports. But it is also a good weekend to do this because we don't have the time (or $) to go out or do much.

So I will do this and jump start my healthy eating which will continue on Monday.

Back-to-school/ back on plan

My kids went back to school last week, but last week and this weekend was spent organizing - unpacking from vacation and getting into Fall mode, so today feels like the start of the year.

I will probably write another post full of the god awful pictures of me from our vacation, but those pictures are on my computer at home, and I wanted to get a post out there.

A lot of my plans for the fall I had prior to my vacation, but they were just re-iterated by seeing the pictures of me.

Back in the summer I cancelled my Weight Watchers account because I wasn't going, but I have decided to start going again on Saturday September 16.

I am not starting this weekend because I am doing a 3-day cleanse this weekend. I bought it when I got my latest bag of Shakeology, knowing that I would need it after vacation. Originally I was going to do it over Labor Day weekend because I can't make the shakes at work, but a friend suggested starting it this Friday (when I work from home).

I didn't want to get on the scale last week because TOM arrived, so today I decided I just needed to do it: 227.2. I had guessed 228 (though secretly worried I was back over 230). I am hoping to be back down to 223 when I re-join WW because I think that is where I was the last time I went.

I went running this weekend! I went with my BFF/BRF - We went 4 miles - The last time I ran was July 22nd, with her. She is doing a 1/2 in January and had run 8 miles before vacation (we met up with them for an evening on our vacation). We didn't run the 4 miles non-stop but I was happy it was her idea to walk. I will write more about my running/exercise plans for the fall in another post.

Below is the only picture of my from vacation that I have on my phone. I was horrified by it. Though in my defense I was standing very awkwardly because I was terrified of slipping and then falling off the cliff behind us! I will post more lovely pictures later :)

Hggg