Weigh In Wednesday

I've lost 25 lbs! Yay! I now weight 312. Hopefully sometime in October, I'll actually be under 300 -- can't wait for that.

So, my 5000 steps a day for at least 5 days last week, didn't quite work out. So I'm going to retry that this week. This is why I hate exercise goals, I always seem to do this. I can be so dedicated to sticking to the diet part of it, but the exercise part I can't always seem to make myself do, even though I know it's something I need to do, and even though in this case it's a totally reasonable goal that shouldn't be much of a stretch from my normal day.

Anyway, I have to get ready for work now.

Weigh In Wednesday

Weigh in day today -- I was a little nervous, because I worked really late last night, and had a Diet Dr Pepper(for the caffeine), and a bit of whipped cream on my Medifast brownie (that's not weird, right? whipped cream on the diet brownie? sadly, it wasn't even as good as it sounded like it would be.) But I digress -- I stepped on the scale this morning, and it said 314.6 lbs! Yay! That's a total of 22.5 lbs lost since June 19. This is what makes Medifast easy to stick to. (well, mostly. I'm moving those cans of Reddi Whip to another fridge at work today so they'll quit calling my name.) 

So, mostly I've had a good week. My air conditioner went out over the weekend, but it was an easy and relatively cheap fix, and now it's working great. I had a craft party on Saturday, there were about six of us. I fixed mostly on-plan food for snacks, lots of fresh veggies. I had some dip mix I'd won in a giveaway that I made up for everyone else, but I didn't have any. I did make some stuffed mushrooms and had one -- it was yummy, and while it's not something I could have every day, it was nice to make something that felt indulgent but that I could have without throwing my entire day out of whack, calorie- and carb-wise. Fortunately, there were none of those left at the end of the day, so I didn't have to worry about what to do with the extras.

Shortly after I started Medifast, I ordered myself an UP. It's a bracelet-style fancy pedometer thing -- it measures steps taken throughout the day, and sleep, and syncs with MyFitnessPal so if I do any exercise, it will show up in MFP. It's kind of cool. Unfortunately, I've mostly just been wearing it and looking at the numbers and going, yeah, that's nice. I haven't really been working on improving the numbers at all. So this week, my goal is to get over 5000 steps for at least five of the next seven days. This doesn't sound like much, but looking at the charts, I've been getting mostly 2300-4200 steps a day, only getting over 5000 a couple of times. So 5000 a day is an improvement, but it's not an overwhelming number. It should just mean walking around a little more throughout the day, parking a little further from the office, and maybe spending a few minutes on the treadmill to make up the difference. It's not a huge thing, but I believe the little things will add up, and past experience tells me if I set too big a goal, I will give up on it.

Anyway, that's my plan for the next week. 

Thanks for reading!

Hi!

Hi, my name is Shannon. All my life I've been overweight. By the time I was 28, I weighed around 300 lbs. (I'm 5'4" tall.) But about that time, I started a new job, got settled into a routine, and started going to Weight Watchers. I lost about 80 lbs and felt great. I felt more confident than I had felt in a long time, loved my job, I was happy. And then...I found out I had uterine cancer. So at the age of 31, I had a total hysterectomy, chemo, and radiation. I became depressed -- not suicidally depressed, just crying a lot, for no particular reason depressed. I ate, and ate, and ate, and, big surprise, within two years had gained back all of the 80 lbs I'd lost, and another 20 or so besides. Off and on over the next few years, I tried to lose weight, with varying amounts of success, but every pound I lost, I eventually regained, usually with a few extra for good measure. 

About a month ago, I started Medifast. I started at 337.1 lbs, and at my last weigh in this past Wednesday, I weighed 317.9 lbs, for a loss of 19.2 lbs. Obviously, I'm happy about losing this much so far, but I have a long way to go, not just to lose the weight, but to figure out what it means to me to be healthy and happy and how to achieve and then maintain that.

I have spent so much of my life overweight, and then obese, that I don't really know what a healthy, happy me looks like. Part of what I want to do is figure that out, to really begin to be able to picture my life as someone who isn't always tired, and isn't nervous going to new restaurants for fear they'll have chairs with arms on them and I won't fit. I've always wanted to travel, but the thought of trying to go anywhere on an airplane is mortifying -- I don't want to be singled out as that one person who doesn't fit in the airplane seat, or has to ask for the seatbelt extender, or even just the one that everyone looks at and thinks, oh, god, I hope she's not sitting next to me. 

So, anyway, that's a little about where I am now. Here's what I'm planning for the future:  My plan at this time involves staying on Medifast for a year or so, hopefully losing 100 lbs or a little more. I will be discussing with my doctor exactly how long I stay on the plan, and due to some concerns because of my history with cancer, I'm choosing mostly the Medifast foods that are not soy based. At some point, when I'm ready to start moving off of the Medifast plan, I will follow their transition and maintenance program, and then, I hope to do something akin to clean eating -- a lot of natural foods, not so many processed foods. I'm not sure on the details yet, part of what I'm going to spend the next year doing is looking into what seems most do-able for me, post-Medifast. I see Medifast as a good way for me to take my focus off of food for a while, learn that it's okay for me to actually experience unpleasant emotions without turning to food for comfort, to boost my confidence by helping me to achieve my weight loss goals, and to help me gain the energy that I need to be more active. After just one month, I'm already feeling better. Although I doubt that the weight loss is enough for anyone to notice yet, I can tell, and it makes me very happy when clothing that used to be skin tight is starting to be more comfortable. I'm also enjoying having more energy. It's probably hard for people to imagine how tiring everything is when you're hauling around over 100 extra pounds, but even the simplest things can leave me needing to sit and rest. 

I plan to post at least once a week, to check in when I weigh in every Wednesday. I hope to also post about weight-loss related reading that I'm doing (currently I'm working my way through Dr. A's Habits of Health and the associated workbook, Living a Longer Healthier Life, both by Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen), and because I firmly believe that health and happiness are related, and that both depend on a lot more than what you eat and how much you exercise, there will probably be posts relating to other matters as well. My goal is truly not just to lose the weight -- although I'd be lying if I said the thought of wearing cute clothes instead of tents didn't excite me -- but to also be healthy, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Thanks for reading!