I feel so much better today!  I’m eating real food!  My brain is functioning correctly!  It’s a wonderful day. 

Plus, hey!  It’s already Tuesday!  I’m going to see my parents over the weekend and I am So! Excited! to see them it’s hard to say.  And then we’re going to make a second attempt at going to the Ren Faire and I’ve been looking forward to that for several months.  I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to get my henna tatoo this year.  I get one every time we go.  Last time (in 2008) I got a rather large fairy on my shoulders.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do this year, but I’d like it to be in a place where I can actually see it without a mirror.

In other news, my pants are too big.  The pants I wore yesterday were too big, too.  But I thought these fit!  I’m going to have to wash them “wrong” and see if I can get them to shrink a little bit because this is getting silly.  It’s easier when shirts don’t fit quite right.  When pants don’t fit, they have a tendancy to try to fall off!!

Such a bother. 

I’m going to go outside and see if it’s as nice out as I think it is!  Cheers!

Before -- Christmas 2009

Current -- April 2010

Okay, so anyone who doesn’t want to hear about diet stuff can skip this post and go back to admiring our work on the lawn. 

As you can hopefully tell from the pictures, I’ve lost about 20 pounds.  This is crazy amazing to me because I’ve only been seriously working at this since the beginning of March.  To lose 20 pounds in a month is insane!  I’ve slowed down to about 2 or 3 pounds a week now, but those first couple weeks were crazy!

What I’ve been doing is logging every single thing that I eat through MyFoodDiary.com, which I resisted for a long time because of the time commitment involved.  It’s frustrating, sometimes, having to keep track of every little thing and write it down and figure out how big of a serving it was and how many calories were involved and blah, blah, blah.  But ho-ly cow.  There’s no denying the cold, hard truth of nutritional information when it’s all written down and telling you that you just put more than 2000 calories in your body today.  And half of that was sugar.  And you didn’t exercise.

I’ve had to make some adjustments to what I eat and how often and all of that, and it’s been interesting to notice how my appetite has started to change.  If I eat healthy foods, which look more and more appetizing, then I don’t get hungry as often, and I can eat less.  I have more energy to get up and exercise when I’m not so weighed down by a full stomach and it’s easier to sleep when my stomach isn’t bloated with food.

I set a goal for myself to log my food for 30 days straight.  The reward for achieving that was to get an hour-long massage.  I met that goal last week and my massage is scheduled for Sunday afternoon!  I’m on my way to 60 days, now.

Exercise-wise, I’ve been hitting Zumba classes on Monday and Wednesday evening and yoga class on Saturday morning.  Besides that, I try to exercise for about an hour on my own enough times so I maintain a consistent 5 out of 7 days where I’ve exercised.  Not that any day in particular is a “non-exercising” day.  Every day is a day when I should exercise, but some days are too busy and I don’t beat myself up if I can’t get in a workout between work and band practice.

Other than that, I haven’t done anything in particular to work on this.  I try to drink my 64 oz of water or more each day.  If I REALLY need a cookie, and if I can afford the calories, I’ll have a cookie.  But not a handful of cookies followed by a handful of chocolate and ice cream with syrup on top.  If we’re going to a restaurant for dinner, I try to get a hold of the menu online before hand so I can look at the options and find something healthy – like grilled fish instead of breaded and fried fish.  And that’s pretty much the whole story – eating foods that are healthy, in appropriate amounts, and logging it all, while exercising for an hour, 5 days a week, doing something that I really enjoy.

I’m very pleased with my progress so far.  I have a long way to go – I figure I’m just under a quarter of the way to where I’d like to be.  I figure, at my current rate of weight-loss, I should be in the 100s by late May.  And I should be down about 40 pounds by the 4th of July.  My goal when I started was to be down by 50 pounds by the time I went back to my doctor appointment in early September.  I’m hoping to blow her socks off when I get there.

Even better, by Christmas of this year I hope to be almost to my goal weight.  And that makes me a very happy girl!

Yesterday at church, a reporter from the local newspaper came to the service and took photos so he could write an article about the “Shoes for Soles” project that we did.  It was “Barefoot Sunday” and everyone was encouraged to bring a pair of shoes to donate and go barefoot for the rest of the service.  The church collected over a thousand shoes to send out to people in Haiti and Rowanda.

The front of the newspaper today is 2/3 covered in a picture of the piano player’s foot.  And I’m standing in the background—blurry, but still vaguely recognizable as me.  The article that’s supposed to be on page 10 – 11 isn’t actually anywhere to be found in the paper, but maybe it’ll be out tomorrow.   I really don’t know what’s going on there.  But hey!  I’m on the cover of the newspaper!

I was invited to the 9:00 meeting that the director of my department holds on Mondays.  I was invited to this meeting once before and it turned out well, but it’s always a little scary being invited to a meeting with the “big dogs.”  This meeting turned out well for me again – I was given an award for my hard work on my projects lately.   There are three levels of awards:  bronze, silver, and gold.  Bronze awards come with a set of free tickets to a movie theatre in Savannah.  (Not terribly useful to us since it’s about an hour away from home.  I have four of those tickets in my purse right now.)  Silver awards come with a $50 voucher to the Wal-Mart close to the company grounds.  (And it really only works at that specific Wal-Mart.)  And Gold awards come with a $300 bonus check.

I was awarded a Silver award at the meeting.  $50 to spend at Wal-Mart!  It’s pretty exciting.

As a side-note, I received a Bronze award in January and again in February.  I was thinking I’d work on a trend and see if I could get one every month of the year.  (Who deserves a promotion?  I do!)    I didn’t get on in March, but I figure getting a Silver award makes up for both March and April.  Don’cha think?

On my way back to my desk from the meeting, I passed my lead.  (Or co-lead?  I’m not totally sure where he fits on the current chain-of-command, actually.)  He took a double-take and said, “Kylene, you’re shrinking!  Is that from Zumba?  I almost didn’t recognize you!”  It made me laugh, especially because he had to back-track and explain that he meant it in a good way and not at all badly . . . he’s very concerned about being proper to women in the workplace.  I have no idea what I’m doing differently from Friday when he saw me last, but made me feel really nice.

By the way, the scale on Saturday said I weighed 213.5 pounds, with shoes on.  That’s down 3 pounds from last week and about 19 pounds from my starting weight.  And I’m on day 29 of logging my food in a row!  If I can make it all the way through today and tomorrow (and really, why wouldn’t I?) then I can call and schedule my massage.  How awesome is that?!

But I’ve run up to the end of my lunch hour so I’ve got to go ahead and post this.  I hope you’re all having a fantastic Easter Monday!

So I went home and asked Justin to rub my leg.  And he did and it was wonderful.  It hurt, but it felt better.  And then he covered me in blankets and let me sleep until about 9:30, when he offered me food left over from our anniversary dinner (baby back ribs, mashed potatoes, and cheese biscuits).  I ate delicious food, poked at my computer a few minutes (gotta log my food so I can get my massage), and curled back up for sleep again.

When Justin came to bed, I asked him to massage my leg again, and he’s a wonderful man because he rubbed my leg again.  And then I was out for the night.

When my alarm rang this morning at 6:00, I wouldn’t have minded sleeping for a few more hours, but I have multiple projects on the table right now, so I had to get moving.  And when I got out of bed and stood on my leg, it didn’t hurt at all.  AT ALL!  It’s completely better.  I have some bruising, but that’s probably related to all the scratches on my legs from the yard work over the weekend.

I’m hearing again and again that what I should do the next time I get a cramp is to stand on the leg or pull my toes up toward my knees.  Both options sound terrible, but apparently they’re wonderful once the pain stops, and that the pain will stop more quickly and result in less residual pain.  So I guess if it happens again, I’ll either have Justin push on my toes or I’ll have to figure out how to get myself out of bed so I can stand up.  But I’m telling you right now I hope it never happens again.  Ever.

To that end, I’m trying to figure out why it happened at all.  There are so many options, but the primary reasons apparently are dehydration or a lack of potassium, magnesium, or calcium.  I thought I had calcium supplements in my multivitamin but turns out that I don’t.  So I have to either increase my dairy intake or start with a supplement.  And I might just do the supplement anyway because this girl doesn’t want osteoporosis.  And I have to figure out what all has potassium in it other than bananas.  And keep on drinking my 64 oz plus of water.

Anyway, since my leg is feeling so much better and since I got a lot of sleep last night and I’m much more rested, I’m having a much better day than yesterday.  I’m actually getting work accomplished and catching up on projects, and with any luck, I won’t have to work on Friday afternoon again.  It depends on how this document goes this afternoon, though.  I was supposed to finish it today, not start it . . . .

But we’re keeping positive!  And I’m going to go step outside for a little while and see what the weather is like.  It’s supposed to be lovely.  The only thing that could make today better would be if I could take the afternoon off and go finish my yard work.

While setting up the table for our dinner last night (while Justin ran to the restaurant to pick it up), I scratched the back of my hand on some unidentifiable sharp object, leaving a two-inch long mark on the back of my hand.  I also stepped on the metal mechanism for the folding stairs that lead into the attic and scratched the side of my un-bruised foot.

And all of that would be fine.  They match the scratches that cover the lower part of my legs from yard work we did over the weekend.  (Pictures of the yard work coming soon-ish.)  Scratches and bruises are familiar; I get those all the time.

What caught me by surprise was the 3 AM leg cramp.  This is my second leg cramp in less than a week, and my second ever that I can remember in my adult life.  I don’t get leg cramps.  Justin gets them every now and then, though, and they looked really painful.

THEY ARE.

The first one I got was early Wednesday morning.  I’ve been trying to remember which leg it was in.  While I wrote down that I got one, I didn’t think to write down which leg it was in.  Last night, I thought my first cramp was in my left leg, but now I’m more and more convinced it was in my right leg.

Either way, the first one wasn’t too terrible.  I mean, it hurt.  It woke me up and I said “Ow.” and I put my foot up in the air to try to stretch it out so it would stop hurting.  And then it hurt for several hours.  It wasn’t pleasant.  But it wasn’t so bad that I woke up Justin and once the muscle relaxed, I went back to sleep.

Last night, I woke up shouting in pain.  My right leg calf muscle was spasming and I couldn’t get it to straighten out.  Justin woke up when I shouted and asked what was wrong and how he could help.  I asked him to go get me some ice, and he ran downstairs to get some, and then came back upstairs, gently lifted my leg onto his lap and massaged it.  That helped, but the muscle kept cramping.  It would relax for a while, and then tighten up, I would cry out in pain, Justin would massage the muscles in my leg, and it would relax again.

I don’t know how long it went on, but it felt like forever.  I think I can handle a lot of pain, but I lay there crying as my muscle clenched up.  When it finally finished, I was terrified to move my leg because of the fear that moving the muscles would make it start all over again.  Justin helped me get situated and put the ice pack under my leg and we both went back to sleep.

Needless to say, my leg still hurts this morning.  I couldn’t get it to extend all the way when I got up.  It warms up after a while and I’m able to almost walk normally on it, but if I sit still for any length of time, or have to keep my foot flexed to drive my car, it tightens up again and I have to work it loose.  I’ve got a heat pack on it and I’ll be reheating that again and again today to help ease the pain there.  I’ve got my leg propped up on my trash can so the leg can relax.  I’ll be taking off my shoe here in a little bit so the bruise on my foot isn’t so aggravated.

I feel like I’m just falling apart here!

Anyway, this post is going to be about my weight loss progress, so anybody who finds that really boring, feel free to leave right now, skip to the next post on the page, and leave wonderfully complimentary comments about my photography skills.  Because a girl likes to be complimented.

Okay, so I’m on day 10 of logging my food in a row.  This may be the most number of days I’ve tracked my calories EVER.  I usually fail on weekends, but I’m finding that this goal of getting a massage if I can do 30 days in a row to be EXTREMELY motivating.  I want that massage!  So when we went out of town, I took my notebook that I use to write down my calories until I can get online to track them with MyFoodDiary (or MFD).  And I was very purposeful about my food choices.  Green beans instead of French fries.  Salad instead of hamburger.

I’ve seen my food choices and how I approach food change drastically, just in the last week and a half.  I’ve stopped snacking nearly as often and chosen better snacking options when I do.  And I’m less hungry than I used to be.  I was genuinely more excited about that seared salmon on Saturday than about almost anything else on that menu (the crab cakes would have been delicious!).

I’m feeling very good about what I’m doing.  I feel like I’m lighter, like I can start the day better because I’m not so pulled down by gravity.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would be so, but it’s how it feels.  Maybe I just have more energy because I’m making better food choices.  Either way, it feels wonderful.

I think I can already see a difference in my body shape.  My chin is smaller.  My face feels more narrow when I wash it.  My ankles look more slender—more like ankles than cankles.  I’ve worn a couple of tops where it seemed like they fit better than they have in months, like they might actually button up and not pop buttons off under the strain.  The pants I wore on Monday seemed to fit worse, as if there was all this extra fabric hanging out in the front.  I didn’t measure myself, so it could all just be in my head.  Or it could be that I’ve held onto a lot of water weight that feel of quickly once I started to do this right.

My scale at home isn’t terribly reliable, so I was planning to weigh myself on the scale at the gym.  I haven’t had the opportunity to do that, though, so last night I weighed myself on the antique-looking scale at the chiropractor’s office.  It’s probably not entirely reliable, but it’s better than the one I have at home.  At my doctor’s appointment on the 4th, I weighed in at 232 pounds.  At home, yesterday morning, my scale said I was 218 pounds.  Obviously, that can’t be right.  This morning it said I was 216.5 pounds.  The thing is crazy.  But the scale at the chiropractor’s office said I was 221 pounds.  So either I just lost 11 pounds in 13 days or these scales are lying.

I’m tempted to drive over to my doctor’s office on Friday and use her scale, just to see what’s going on.  Is it possible I’ve been carrying that much easy-to-lose weight around for this long?  The whole thing is wacky.

But the exact numbers aren’t all that important to me right now, just as long as they’re smaller than they were before.  As long as they’re not higher than 232 and not lower than 135 and they’re moving more toward the 135 than the 232, I’m great!  I have such a long way to go that it doesn’t matter yet exactly what they are.  Just as long as I’m making progress.

And I am!  9 days of logging down.  It’s amazing how having a set goal and reward is so motivating.  I’m all about chasing that carrot on the stick, except I’m not terribly fond of carrots, so let’s make it a sweet potato.  Since the massage reward is working out so well, I’ve been trying to think of other rewards I can use after more logging-goals are met.  And I’m trying to keep well away from food rewards because I don’t find them as motivating.  But things like a new food scale after two months of logging sounds really good—my current scale is a little frustrating.  An umbrella for the back porch after three (or four?) months of logging is exciting because I’ve wanted one of those for ages.  Our back porch is nearly uninhabitable during the summer because there’s absolutely no shade.  Maybe I’ll go back for a second massage.  And if you have any other recommendations on rewards, I’d really love to hear them!

So that’s where things are at right now.  I’m feeling *really* good about how it’s going and how I’m feeling and how I’m looking (even if it’s just in my head).

Cheers!

So, in my last post, I mentioned my doctor appointment and that I’ve got a follow-up in six months to check on my weight-loss progress.  I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about how I’m going to approach this problem.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.  I have an account at MyFoodDiary.com and I know that if I actually go on there and track what I’m doing, I will lose weight.  I lost weight this way before—exercising and tracking my calories through this program.  So I’m doing that again.  Now, it only works if I actually go on there and enter in what I’m doing and I really don’t like doing that.  It’s a pain in the butt.  So my incentive to do this is that if I can log my food for 30 days in a row, I’m going to get a massage.  I love massages, but it’s been over a year since I last got one.  So!  Goal = 30 days straight of logging my food = Reward = MASSAGE.

I have a set of cards on the wall of my desk at work under my clock that count up to 30 (0-3 on one set and 0-9 on the other) and I have a tick mark on my mirror at home and I’m going to keep track.  I’ll also keep track through MFD, but I’m learning about visual management at work and the affectivity of it.

On my mirror, I’ve also written “Log your food!  Be nice to Justin – you asked for his help.”  Because he’s wonderful and gives me gentle prodding about logging and exercising and what I should and shouldn’t eat, and I get cranky at him.  So I’m going to try very hard to not do that anymore.  I appreciate his help. And I did ask him to help me.  So it’s not at all fair for me to get grumpy at him.

And that goes for the rest of you, too.  If you want to prod me about how things are going, I’m going to try very hard not to get grumpy about it.  So, please!  Go ahead and prod.  Send me emails and call and ask how I’m doing and if I’ve logged my food and if I’ve exercised today and if I’ve had enough water to drink and give me recommendations on different things I should try.  Because I have a wonderful bunch of family and friends and if I can’t accept help from all of you, then I’m in trouble.

I’m also putting in a request to get a nurse to help me.  My employer is starting up a program to help us improve our health and one of the issues that they’ll help with is being overweight.  I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that, exactly, but at this point, I’m willing to take any help I can get.

Okay, so that covers my calorie counting and accepting help from everybody possible.

Currently, this is my exercise program:  Monday and Wednesday night, I go to Zumba class.  Saturday morning, I go to yoga class.  That leaves Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday on my own.  What I’ve been trying to do is to practice Zumba or yoga on my own or do an exercise video.  Now that the weather is going to get nicer, I’ll be adding more outdoor activities.  Got to catch the weather between when it’s too chilly for rollerblading and too hot!  It’s not a long window.  In the summer months, I’ll get back into swimming again. 

What I’m missing is weight training.  I think it’s something I’ll want to be doing, I’m just not sure exactly when.  Yoga has a lot of muscle work in it that works with body weight, but I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be hitting the weights at the gym, too.  I’m still trying to figure that one out.

My overall goal is to lose 50 pounds in the next six months.  It’s a strong goal and I know that.  I’m going to have to work very hard to try to make that goal.  But I think that setting a goal that’s fairly difficult but not completely unattainable is a good idea.  That’s a loss of 2 pounds a week, which is healthy for my current weight and it’s going to be healthy for a long while.  Once I get past this first 50, it’s going to slow down, but for this first half, it’s attainable.

I need to lose nearly 100 pounds.  I’m sitting at 232 pounds right now.  I want to get down to 140-ish.  By my doctor appointment in six months, I want to be at 180.

And that’s that!  More information than you probably wanted to hear about my weight-loss situation. 

I’m on day 2 of logging my food.  Only 28 more to go before I earn my massage!

At that time, my triglycerides were up and my cholesterol wasn’t where it should be and my blood sugar was higher than it should be and it just wasn’t good blood-work all the way around.  I had three months to do something about it.

At my appointment yesterday, my triglycerides were much lower than they had been (by about half), my cholesterol was much better, and my blood sugar was much better.  My weight is still bad.  And a few of those numbers could handle going a little further toward the “good” side of things.  But it’s doing better.  I’ve been taking fish oil pills with my multivitamin every day, and I think that’s had a lot to do with it, plus regular exercise.

So now I just have to work on logging my food better and actually work on getting my weight down.

One of the other things I talked with her about was my asthma.  Do you remember that terrible cold I got back before Christmas?  (I’ve been sleeping.)  It’s was a bad cold and it settled into my chest and did unpleasant things.  Since then, I’ve had to take an inhaler almost every time I exercise.  And sometimes just because it’s cold out and I’m feeling short of breath.  It hasn’t been fun and I don’t like this relapse of my asthma symptoms. 

My current doctor hasn’t actually had me as a patient with asthma symptoms – they recessed back around 2005-ish.  So at my appointment, she’s explaining to me the differences between emergency inhalers and maintenance inhalers and all these other things that I know SO WELL by now, let me tell you.  It was kind of funny.  Seriously, I’ve dealt with asthma for well over half of my lifetime.  I understand how it works.

Anyway, she gave me a prescription for Symbicort as a maintenance inhaler and a refill on the emergency inhaler and we’re going to try and see if the maintenance inhaler can fix whatever problem has been happening down in these lungs of mine and see if I can’t get the symptoms to go away again.  I think I damaged them a little bit with the cold and they haven’t been able to properly heal – if that’s even an idea that works medically.  I don’t know.  But I think that taking the meds for a little while will help heal my lungs enough that I can go back to being asymptomatic again, and non-medicated again, which would be lovely.

I have a return appointment in 6 months to check on my progress with getting my numbers even better – my cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, and, most significantly, my weight.  We’ll check on the status of my asthma, too.  But for the most part, I’m in better health than I was the last time I went in to see her and that makes me feel good.

Today is awful.  Today is the first day back at work and if there was anywhere I wanted to be today, work isn’t that place.  It’s never a good sign when I’m tempted to resort to violence toward my coworkers.

I should get a plant.  Plants are calming, right?

Plus, I bet they’re great and heavy for throwing.

Today I didn’t get up to go to the gym because I didn’t fall asleep until after 12:30 this morning.  4:45 is too early to get out of bed on a Monday on the first day back after vacation after only four hours of sleep.  No way was I getting out of bed.

Tonight I will go to Zumba and remember why I wasn’t supposed to have all that sugar when I was on vacation and why I was supposed to exercise every single day and I will sincerely regret the choices that I made.

Tonight I will sit and try to find pictures to put at my desk at work and try not to cry over how much I miss my family and how fat I look in pictures.

Today I will go to a meeting and try not to get too frustrated at the lack of progress that we’ve made over the last several meetings.  And I’ll brainstorm ideas how I plan to do it differently once I pry my way into control of that committee.

Today I will submit work that I’m not comfortable submitting just so management can maintain their precious schedule.

This afternoon I will sit and listen to music while trying to remind myself the importance of the work that I do and why I find it enjoyable on days that are not the first day back from a wonderful vacation.

Tonight I will go to sleep praying that tomorrow will be a much better day than today.

It really feels like I’ve been doing this for longer than I have. I can’t put my finger on why that’s the case, but it really feels like I’ve been doing this for ages. It’s still not fun getting out of bed at that time of day. I’m still struggling with being super tired later in the day.

But getting that done right away makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something really difficult. It helps me know how much I can eat for the day because I’ve already done my exercising. I have the option of just going home and slouching around the whole evening without feeling too guilty because I’ve already done what I would usually be avoiding on those evenings. And I’ve been falling asleep more quickly in the evening.

It has its pros and cons, but I’m definitely enjoying the pros much more than the cons are bothering me. I really hope to be able to sustain this for the long run.

Which is good because I had a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday and my cholesterol levels and my triglycerides are up. (Dad, those triglycerides are probably partially your fault! ) So I’ve got an appointment set up for 3 months to see if what I’m doing is making a difference to those things. I’m adding fish oil pills to my diet, and I’m going to make sure I get the milled flaxseed put back in there, too. With those two things, the exercise I’m doing, and the changes I’m making to my diet, I should be able to make some progress on that.

I’m still having trouble figuring out a “heart-healthy” diet. From my research, this is what I should be doing:

Fat should make up 25-35% of my daily diet.
Of that, less than 7% should be saturated fats
And less than 1% should be trans fat

I should have less than 200 mg of cholesterol a day

I should have 25-30g of fiber a day, in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes

Sodium should be less than 1,500 mg a day.

And I should eat fish twice a week.

I have a really long way to go.