Weight-loss progress

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!