Plan what Plan

So this is the realization that I have come to people, at some point you have to stop saying you are actually back on plan and really get on plan. Possibly the fact that I am turning 28 on Friday brought this realization to me, or it could be that I ate entirely too much last Friday during the day and then skipped dinner (not a good method for compensating). Anyway, I know what my problem is in a single word "work". I snack at work on bad things and that must stop. Frankly, what I eat on the weekends is just fine but I am killing any weight loss durring the rest of the week. So here we go again, with a new date in mind, October 17, 2005. Why October 17, you ask, because I may be flying back to the U.S. then and I would like to be down a size or so for when I buy new clothing. Oh, and for the nice poster who asked if I was at goal weight yet, um no, as the above probably indicates, but I keep aiming for it. Oh and I don't expect to have lost all the weight I have to lose by August, frankly I am just aiming for 15-20 pounds which given my life recently seems reasonable.

The wonders of the DMV

Yesterday I spent two hours at that specialized circle of hell that we like to call the DMV. Well, to be precise it was more like an hour and a half because I had to drive to the Social Security office in order to prove to the DMV that my social security number is really my social security number. Now, mind you, I had three forms of ID, including a passport, a driver's license from my former state, and a local government id, two of which had my social security number on them. This however was not good enough so I went to the social security office to get a computer printout which said I really was not making up my social security number. Anyway, I eventually pried a new drivers license away from the DMV with a new photo. I looked at the photo and this was my precise thought pattern "Who is that? She's cute, well except for the extra chin". Seriously people, I looked like a normal person in the photo. Then I compared it to my id from law school and seriously I looked like my own sister. So, thank you DMV for putting somethings in perspective, but seriously people I am not going back there until dragged by my hair.

5.5 MPH

I am a little loopy today, that may be due to the fact it is only 8 am and I have already had a large cup of coffee and a diet pepsi which happens to be caffinated. I did discover this morning that running at 5.5 mph is not hard, which means I have been running too slowly for at least the last week. I am cutting myself slack on the running before that since I had to ease into it (or at least that is what I am telling myself). I am really focusing on my conditioning right now, rather than anything else, I want it to be about being healthy and not being a certain size. If I am a size 12 for the next year or rest of my life so be it, as long as I am a really fit and healthy size 12. Would I rather be a size 10 or 8 or 6, yes, but I won't get there by obsessing about it. So, I am working on the exercise this week and soon I will start working on the diet thing and we will just have to see what happens over the next few weeks and months.

It is all about the diet

One of the nice things about working out at 5 am is that the gym is pretty empty. Not today, it was completely packed because it was raining outside and one of the aerobics classes was cancelled. Ugh, it meant that I did an hour on the eliptical machine because there were no other free machines. It was still a decent workout and probably good for my body to work out on another machine. More and more, I am having to acknowledge that my workouts either need to become really intense or I need to once again adjust my eating habits. I will probably go with the later option with maybe one day a week where I cheat a little bit, but I have to tell you it is no fun to be getting back on the wagon in terms of eating. This weekend I am going to sit down and workup a meal plan for the next week and then starting on Monday I am going to stick to the eating plan religiously. I know what works for me, I just have to do it. So, here we go again for the 10th or 11th time.

Progress

So, progress is clearly something that happens to other people. Oddly, for the most part I am okay with that right now. I am still working out hard, I am increasing my running speed on the treadmill (my goal right now is to get up to 6 miles an hour as a speed) I did about four minutes at 5.5 mph as opposed to 5.2 mph. Tomorrow I am aiming for 10 minutes at 5.5 mph. I still have food issues, heck I am always going to have food issues, but I am trying to focus on generally being healthy and making small changes. As an example, I really like things like Mocha Coffees when I go to coffee shops (which I do sometimes before work) but I have switched over to just ordering regular coffee. I am eating more salads at home and after being forced to admit that we have horrible produce here and I am incredibly lazy in terms of food preparation, I am buying frozen peas and corn for meals (good for you and can just be thrown in a pot of boiling water). This is progress, and I am focusing more on healthy lifestyle and less on being a certain weight than I did in the past and that is a good thing. Everything else will come in time, for the first time I have faith in that fact.

Drowning

You should see me on the stair master, people, really you should. You would seriously laugh until you fell down and then laugh even harder. I look like a drowning person only without the water or fear of an immediate death. I grab on to the stair master rails, I breath heavily, my eyes roll around in their sockets and occasionally cross, and mentally I am counting the number of seconds until it gets easier. That is a lot of seconds let me tell you. Today, I .Almost.Died. on the stairmaster, no really (yes I am being a tad bit dramatic), then I staggered over to the treadmill and ran for 25 minutes. Now, I would like a nap but I sense that is not going to happen until after work. Plus, you probably do not get to take naps when you just showed up at work and have only been at your desk for an hour. This reminds me that I should now go do actual work rather than ramble on about the horror that is my early morning cardio workout. Oh and one more day and I will have run everyday this week, and that is a miracle given that I did not want to run this morning in any way (see above stair master discussion) but I did and at least it is a start to being back on track.

I woke up in the middle of the night to discover that I had two problems: a. A horrible backache and general feeling of ill health b. A small cat attacking my feet and head The first problem I solved with pain medication, unfortunately the second one did not get bored for a good 30 minutes. The result, I am remarkably sleepy today and in need of a good back massage. However, I still went to the gym and put in an obligatory hour of cardio. Actually, my run was really good, I managed to up it to 25 minutes mostly because it felt effortless. Now, that means that I will not have another good run for a long time because this is how my body works. My goal this week is pretty simple, I just want to run everyday for at least fifteen minutes. So far, I am managing to run for about 20 minutes everyday in addition to another 30 minutes on the stairmaster and 10 minutes warmup and cool down. My weight has not budged so I am refusing to pay any attention to the scale for a couple of weeks or I will make myself crazy. Anyway, I have to run and prepare for grand jury and walk the four blocks to court now.

In which I come up with ways to destroy the stair master

I may not entirely be on a roll with food but in terms of exercise, well the intensity is finally back people. I have discovered that if I spend thirty minutes on the stair master (which I loathe, oh let me count the ways that I hate it) it makes me really short of breath and I sweat like a pig. Both good things if you are trying to work out hard, then I take a five minute breather where I walk slowly on the treadmill and then begin to run or waddle (it looks pretty much the same) for about twenty minutes. Then I do a five minute cool down walk. Somedays, I am following this up with weight lifting for 10-20 minutes, somedays not, it sort of depends. I try to lift weights at least three days a week and I am also trying to use hand weights one day a week on the stair master, which yes, makes me hate it even more. However, I finally feel like I am really actually exercising again rather than just going through the motions. I am also doing better on food, just need to cut back on excess snacks and stick to the actual plan. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath on that one either, I am however working on it as best that I can each day. We will see what happens.

Noon is too early to think about dinner

Seriously, I just came up with 4 different ways to not eat dinner tonight. This seems odd when I have spinach for salad, salmon, a small number of croutons, and half of an avocado sitting in my refridgerator. In otherwords, dinner in under 10 minutes, and given the main reason I was not going to eat dinner was because of the length of time it takes to prepare food I think that we now have good evidence of my pending insanity. I do have to go to the store again today to buy cereal, soy milk, salad dressing, batteries (yes I know they are not edible), coffee and fruit. This makes me wonder what I spent all that money on at the store this weekend and the answer appears to be, soup for lunch, salmon, diet soda, and cat food. Oh, and I bought eggs so that I could make egg white omelets and hard boil eggs (although as we all know I really suck at hardboiling eggs). How I can cook and not be able to boil eggs in a pan with water I cannot explain. So, now that I have sorted out dinner, I just need to check my finances and see how much I can spend at the grocery store. I am poor what can I say, oh and I should probably do some work.

Tempted

So, my mom just sent me this invitation from my highschool. A reminder that my high school reunion is this November. Now, I hated high school, I hated everything about the entire experience. But I am tempted, because if I really worked my rear off and put in a lot of workouts like this morning (where I seriously wanted to pass out, no seriously) I could probably lose 20-30 pounds by then and blow some people away. Now, why I would want to blow the minds of people that I hated and who ignored me because I was one of the fat kids, I do not know. Still, I am oddly tempted by the whole thought. However, I probably will not go both due to the monetary expense of flying there and secondly because I really don't actually want to talk to anyone in my highschool class. Still, I think I have this persistant fantasy about the idea of showing up both really skinny and doing fabulously professionally. I kind of have the fabulous professional thing down, now I just need to work on the skinny thing.

Posting two days in a row, now there is a miracle for you. If you need to take a moment to adjust to the shock I would completely understand. In the spirit of new beginings, I should say that my food was horrible yesterday. I am trying again today to see if I can do better. I have my diet coke next to me and I am pretending that the snack area does not exist, we will see how it goes. I figure I burned about 500 calories at the gym this morning which I am attempting to not sabotage with large amounts of sugar. I have a pretty jam packed day at work ahead of me which you would think would make it more difficult to shove copious amounts of chocolate in my mouth, then again you might be wrong. I'm working tomorrow as well even though it is the weekend and that might actually be a good thing because when I work on the weekends I eat less (very strange phenomenon). Maybe I will actually manage to post tomorrow and let you know what happens with my will power today.

Today, tomorrow, and the next day

I'm really not good at the frequent posting thing right now. I think I am managing to post once a month, so I cannot imagine anyone is reading anymore, however this is more for my own edification than anything else so I shall now ramble on at length about nothing in particular (I am a lawyer after all it is what I do). I am still working out every morning during the week for between an hour and an hour and twenty minutes. I am working on increasing my intenstity level and that means much as I hate it, I am going to have to start running again everyday. Not today though because I am exhausted, I was paged at 2 am in the morning yesterday by the police department who had an urgent legal question and then I never really got back to sleep again. For the record, I am not certain I give out the best legal advice at 2 am in the morning but I tried my best. Of course, then I got up a little before five am and so I estimate I got maybe 5 hours of sleep at most last night. I do not enjoy working out on five hours of sleep, my body is too tired to really do anything useful or productive. On the plus side, I still worked out which several years ago I would never have done. Also, I have begun to notice an interesting phenomenon as I work out. I may not be losing very much weight right now but I am way better shape than I used to be in the past. Now, it is no big deal to work out for 30 minutes on the eliptical and then run for 20 minutes on the treadmill or use the stair master. I don't pant going up and down stairs anymore and I definatively have leg muscles which is strange for me. Am I struggling with the whole weightloss thing right now, oh yes, you bet your sweet bippy I am having problems with it. That however, does not mean that I stop trying to lose weight. Also, I am forced to admit other than indiscretions with food at work, my diet is pretty different. I only drink soy milk, diet soda (yeah we could have a discussion about asparatame and its problems but I grew up on diet coke and right now I need it in my diet for my own sanity), water, and coffee (mostly on weekends). I have soy milk in my bowl of cereal in the morning and I now eat breakfast everyday. Lunch is pretty much lean cuisine right now, because it is easy and low calorie. Dinner, well I have salads sometime or cereal if I am completely exhausted or some kind of dish with rice and protien in it. Oh yes, I only have brown rice in my house no more white rice. Only whole wheat pasta, minimal amounts of bread, and I realized the other day that I have not had cheese in my house in months. Perfection, no, better than in past years, yes. Admittedly, I still struggle with having a lot of my waking hours consumed with thoughts about food and eating but I am working on it. I read someone at one point, can't remember who, that said something like (don't you love my specificity) "I work every day and every year on eating better, I eat better now than I did last year and I will eat better today than I did yesterday." That I think is what I am aiming for here, that I eat healthier today than I did yesterday, that I work out harder and more effectively today than I did yesterday, and ultimately I am physically and emotionally healthier today, tomorrow, and in the future than I was last year, yesterday or the day before. In the end, everything else is just fluff.

Whence our heroine attempts to get back on track

Yeah, so things have not been going as swimmingly on the diet or exercise front as one might have hoped. Okay, let me rephrase, I am doing just fine on the exercise front (with the exception of needing to lift more weights) but not so good on the food front. Basically, I work in a high stress environment and I tend to overeat when stressed and I work with people who are always bringing good food into the office and feeding me. I think really they swing between feeding me and attempting to marry me off to any single men that they can find. Anyway, I am trying and so far today I am doing pretty well which is all that you can ask from any one day. Tomorrow may be an entirely different story but today I am doing okay. Oh, and I look rather cute which is never a bad thing. Anyway, back to work I go for a few more hours.

It's been a long time baby

I assume at this point I am pretty much writing to myself because I have been gone for so long. My office moved, I lost all access to e-mail/internet for the last two months and I am working 10 hour days plus another 8 or so hours every weekend from home. In good news, I have gone back to the gym on a full time basis which means I am getting in at least an hour of cardio five days a week and I am finally recovering from some old injuries. Now, going back to the gym means I have to get up at between 4 and 4:30 am every morning to get there and workout from about 5:15 am to 6:15 am. Then a mad leap in the shower and I get dressed so I can make it to work by 7 am and then I work straight from 7 am to 5 pm with little or no break. It is a good thing that I love what I do for a living most of the time or I would be going insane with stress (okay, actually I am pretty close on that one). I am working on the food thing, I have always been a stress eater and that has been manifesting itself recently. However, I keep moving and working out which is more than I have managed in the past. I'm hoping to get internet at home some point so I can really start posting more regularly but it may take a little while. Anyway, I actually have to get back to doing work for the office now but I will try to get a chance to post again tomorrow.

Generalized Chaos

I'm going to be gone for awhile. My entire office is moving on wednesday and right now there are moving boxes everywhere and people running around like mad. I am going to lose internet access starting on wednesday until we get settled into a new office and that may be awhile. So, I won't be posting but I will try and be good while I am gone. On another note, lets not discuss the weekend and move on with life. My friend set the jungle trail on Saturday which caused me to (a) get a mild concusion from jumping off a waterfall and hitting the bottom (there was no path other than jumping off the waterfall and frankly I am just lucky that my rear hit the ground first and my head second or it would have been bad), (b) I got yelled at when I informed her that the marks on her trail had disappeared which was why I got in after dark along with three other people, she basically claimed I was making it up and (c) I spent all sunday sleeping to recover from the pounding headache I woke up with although all I had drunk the night before was water and a soda when they ran out of water at the bonfire after the run. So, in other words, nothing got painted although I did run a line of caulk around my tub and bathroom sink. I did not even make it to the store to buy paint and that means it is one more project that I may or may not have time for this week. So, frankly I am a little annoyed right now which is not helped by the fact that I have to be in court in a few minutes.

Oh look, I'm at K-Mart again

I make a mean onion and garlic soup, I just have to tell you. Anyway, last night went well although I was still running around in the kitchen like a chicken with my head cut off when my friends arrived. However, they have met me before so I don't think that it was really a surprise that I was a little bit disorganized. Today, the rest of the chocolate cake came to work and I in a moment of complete insanity picked myself up a piece to eat with lunch. Three bites in and I remembered that cake was definately not on my diet so into the trash it went and out of my office as fast as humanly possible. At least tonight I am going running and climbing around with a bunch of my friends which should help burn off some calories. Oh, and I am going to paint my apartment which has to qualify as a workout on some level. I am think it will mostly end up being gold and green because that goes with the small amounts of furniture that I currently own. I am slowly working on organizing my life but I just wish it did not involve daily and repeated trips to K-Mart to pick up what I forgot to buy previously because after awhile wandering around K-Mart gets pretty old and you need to get a life.

I'll have my cake and avoid it to

One of my friends turns 27 on friday (yes N. that officially makes you old like me), so tonight I am having him over for dinner along with his girlfriend and another friend. He loves chocolate so I am making him a chocolate devils food cake (the cake is made, just has to be iced) and onion cream soup and pasta. It is not in other words, a diet friendly meal but my plan is to eat in moderation and avoid the cake completely. If it is not friendship to make someone a cake that you are not going to eat and keep it in your refridgerator for multiple hours when you really love chocolate, I don't know what is at this point. I have all sorts of things in my apartment right now that normally I would avoid like the plague, including sugar, chocolate, cream, and butter. Still, this is part of my plan, eat everything in moderation and balance out heavy days with light ones. If I have to live like this for the rest of my life, I need to make peace with all different types of food. However, everything I do not normally eat will be out of my house by tomorrow evening at the latest which is also a sneaky trick to avoid eating it after today. Anyway, back to work and then I have to run to the store and run home quickly after work so that I can start cooking everything.

Daily update

Last night, I lifted weights, did some core fitness exercises, and practiced falling down (which as far as I can determine is an important part of aikido). What my neighbors below me think that I am doing in my spare bedroom at 9:00 pm at night, I do not really want to know at this point. I was decent on food and I got a nice walk in because my car refused to start (it has a bad battery which is currently being replaced) and I had to walk home from the mall. I also had to walk to the mall this morning to jumpstart my car and drive it to the dealership. Extraneous exercise is never a bad thing in my book. Tonight is aikido practice baring unforseen problems preventing me from making it to class. Thursday night there is a hash run and hopefully by tomorrow, I will have my car and be able to start going to the gym on a more regular basis. Food has been decent and will get better the more that I get back on track. Now, I just have to work on furnishing my apartment which I think will also help my mental state and cleaning up my office.

Finding my groove again

In case you missed it, I have been in and out of here posting only infrequently. Now, I could totally blame this on work, which has been insane for quite awhile. However, in fairness, I must say that it is because I have not been eating or working out the way that I should work out. Oh, I am the queen of the maintainers, bouncing around between 160 and 158 for at least two solid months, but when you are 5'2" that is not a healthy weight to be maintaining at for any length of time. Still, I am finally back, the drive is finally back. Partially, because I have a car which is making me much more mobile (although not at this precise moment because the battery died this morning and I will be having that fixed tomorrow) and partially because it is time to get my behind in gear. I realized this on the weekend as I was hiking up a mountain on the hash run and having to stop because I was out of breath, not acceptable. I could pontificate and explain by saying that I was 45 minutes into an hour and a half run which was basically all uphill but no, I just felt out of shape. I have been slowly losing my endurance and strength over the last few months because I have been doing less exercise and making more excuses. This weekend I bought a stability ball, weights, and last night I turned my spare bedroom into a weight room for the nights I do not make it to the gym. Once my car troubles are sorted out, I am going back to my old plan where I get up at 6 am and go to the gym on my way to work. This coming month I am going to start picking up an extra night of aikido and going on tuesdays and thursdays. I am going back to a stricter diet but something I can live with, which means more salads and less eating out. Basically, I am going to kick my own rear into shape and it is about time. Oh, and I am going to post every day during the week to keep myself accountable. The really anal exercise and diet girl is back people, and this time the inner fat girl is getting a little bit nervous.

Working girl

Wow, I haven't posted for a really long time again. I have no real excuse other than the fact I only have internet at work and this is the first morning in forever that I have sat down at my computer for longer than ten seconds. I have been spending between six and eight hours everyday in court and then going home and falling asleep. Trust me, today will be very similar it is just that my court schedule is starting a little bit later that normal. I am exhausted and stressed but I was amused to discover the other day that my big food indulgence appears to be whole wheat pasta and 98% fat free cream of mushroom soup. In the old days it would have involved tons of cheese but lately I have been way more interested in putting tobasco into items. I go through food phases and now I seem to be into the spicy/salty food phase as opposed to the sweet food phase. Anyway, I am still maintaining and given the last couple of weeks that is a pretty big miracle right now. I have to get back to work but if I am lucky I will get a little time later to post (but if I disappear for a week again it will be due to the hectic nature of work right now).