Happy St. Patrick’s Day everybody!  I know it’s not a big deal in a lot of places, but Savannah goes all out for this holiday—schools are closed, half of my department is out of the office, mobs of people have descended on downtown.  I’m at work, wearing the most kelly green turtle neck that I own and a pair of white and green stripped socks over my black tights.  And these kickin’ maroon shoes with enormous buckles.  I look AWESOME.  Or at least I make people smile.  The only thing I’m really missing is a great hat.  Maybe I’ll get one before next year.

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!

Yesterday afternoon I had my follow-up check-up for the appointment I had three months ago. (Operation Crazy Owl continues.)

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.