Then God said Ha

Well, actually the court said hah. So, my trial just got pushed for probably 3-4 months at a minimum. The sad thing is, I have three or four more lined up in a row so it is more like whose next rather than anything else. I think it is going to take a good three or four days before the tension from the last two weeks really leaves my body. Now at least I can push some paperwork through that I have been putting off and finish getting organized. Well, sort of organized only not really. Oh, and seriously people I now need a nap. I'm just saying.

My body is weird

My body has gone insane, at least this is what I have decided. Yesterday, I stepped on the scale in the middle of the day in an attempt to grab my cat who was playing in my shoes (my scale is next to my closet so this is not as odd as it sounds) and I weighed in at 164. After eating breakfast and having a huge cup of coffee. I decided that this clearly could not be right and could be accounted for by the fact that I was simultaneously reaching for a small furry beast and thus all my weight was not on the scale. So, I tried it again once I had dealt with the cat and nope it was right the first time, 164. So, I think I am not eating enough, I don't have time to worry about it this week but this coming weekend I am really going to have to look at what I am eating and adjust my food choices. This is actually a good sign for me, because it means I am eating pretty clean in terms of food (i.e. minimal amounts of really processed food) and just need to adjust upward. If there is one thing I have learned over the last year and a half, when I am eating really healthy food it is hard for me to hit the correct calorie amount. I almost always end up below where I should be in terms of calories. I aim for 1,500 but have a bad tendency of ending up at 1,200 which is less than I should be eating given my activity level. However, this week is probably going to be pretty hellish, I do not know a single lawyer who doesn't lose weight from going to trial and the associated stress level and so I am not worrying about it until the weekend. I will reevaluate on Saturday when I go and do my weekly grocery shopping and come up with a plan when I have some brain space to spare. Oh and in a side note I do feel it is important to point out the following to my brother, "Dude, you are really old now, Happy Birthday!" (On the off chance I forget on July 12 which is the start date of my trial and his actual birthday).

I'm at work on Saturday. Yes, I reall am that anal and I have a felony trial next week. So, I am at work because it is easier to get things done here than at home and I have internet access. Clearly this is why I am typing on my blog rather than doing actual work. Thank you everyone for the lovely birthday wishes, in the end I went out for a few drinks with my coworkers and then went home to bed. It was pretty much how I wanted to spend my birthday, a few extra calories in the drinks and I had some peanuts and a little bit of bannana bread but overall no major overeating and no cake. Today, I am not working out and already my one leg feels better than yesterday. I am a big believer in rest days to let your body recover from working out and heal itself. It is part of my whole theory that if I am going to do this for the rest of my life I should not do something really detrimental that prevents that from being a possibility. Anyway, back to work I go now.

Happy B-day to me

So, today is my 28th birthday. I have sneakily managed to keep this fact quiet at work, which prevents all sorts of things such as cake, b-day lunch, and other dietary problems from happening to me. Of course, I ate my lunch at 11 am which may lead to afternoon snacking but I will try to prevent that from happening to me. I am going to trial next week which is the only reason that I am currently at work, otherwise I would have taken the day off. I might go buy myself a work shirt and shoes for my birthday tonight, especially since I am planning on coming into the office tomorrow to do prep work. I am still doing fine on my diet and decent on my exercise since I still have a sore left calf from last weekend. Tommorow is my day off from exercise and I will probably do something light on Sunday like just lifting weights. 166.5 today on the scale which means I am begining to equalize in terms of the initial week of weightloss on plan which is comforting in an odd way. I was going to write a more interesting post than this, but it will have to wait until I am not doing trial prep like mad.

Oh will you look at that

The amazing thing is, if you watch what you eat and work out, you will lose weight. The minute I started really watching my food intake at work, my weight dropped. Today, I hit 167 which is a little freaky (we could argue about how often you should weigh yourself, but weighing myself a lot has worked in the past so it is what I am going with again) but I assure you I had enough to eat yesterday. I had a small sandwhich at lunch and then I went out for a salad with a co-worker (did not know I was going out to eat at the time I had the sandwhich) and then a small dinner to make up for the large lunch. I know a lot of this initial drop is probably water weight and I expect everything to equalize in the next week. However, it is impressive the change that I can make by not stuffing my face at work. Yesterday, someone brought a cake in, which I managed to avoid and really the only deviation was the salad and a large latte with equal and cinnamon. The restriction on food has also been good for me because I did a lot of jumping jacks on monday and my legs have been sore ever since, thus workout have not been particularly hard at the gym. I have still been working out but not able to muster much enthusiasm for the process. I have managed to lift weights three days this week though and do a lot of sit ups which is an improvement. Once again, I am forced to acknowledge that when I can actually get everything on plan, I do much better than only being partially on plan. I may not be smart about it all the time, but I am learning.

Addiction

Yesterday was entirely on plan in terms of eating. Stuned? Yes, me too. However, I probably should have eaten a little more because I think I ended up at below 1200 calories, which is way less than the 1500 calories I should probably be eating. Then again, after the last few months a week of 1200 calorie days would not be a bad thing. That is what I am going for this week, a strict no cheats week of on plan food eating. When I am on plan, whatever the plan is, it takes at least a week for it to not be a struggle and a month for it to be easy. I have come to think of my relationship with food as a sort of addiction, I have been overweight probably since I was five years old. I spent about 22 years eating for all sorts of reasons: because it tasted good, because I was bored, because I was happy/sad/depressed, as a social activity, and probably just because I could do it. I still have problems determining when I am really hungry as opposed to wanting food for a different reason. Still, I am making progress and at 28 to be around 168.5 lbs (as of this morning) as opposed to 250 lbs is tremendous progress for me. Still, I have been struggling with food for awhile now and what I need to do for myself is make it easy, no excuses, and no deviations. I made it through yesterday and I can make it through today and right now that is all I am focusing on, a single day, hour, and minute at a time.

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.