The Brat Fights the Fat

Hi Alea,

Thank you so much for the comment on my last post! (On the off chance that someone other than Alea still has my blog in their bloglines... Alea made a lovely comment on my last post. It made me feel like posting again, without making me pressured or feel guilty for not posting in a long time.)

Where have I been...

In November last year, I got a new position at work. It's been taking up a lot more time than my previous position and it seems that I'm often working in the evenings. Life just seems to have gotten busier and more stressful. I'm not making excuses. I should really try to make my health and weight a priority, but I just haven't been. I've been avoiding the blog world, because I've been ashamed of how little I've done for the last year. And reluctant to make promises to post, that I'm not sure I can keep. Things are going to get crazier before they get calmer too. My son will start Kindergarten in a couple weeks and my daughter will start preschool. DS has also joined the soccer league and DH will be coaching the team (and I'm sure I'll get roped into some role).

So here's the plan...

• I will blog when I can, but will not promise more than that
• I will run or exercise because I want to and actually do enjoy it (somewhat), and not feel like I have to and therefore talk myself out of it
• I will make an effort to eat healthier, but not make it a major issue (trying to avoid the whole guilt followed by F-it attitude)
• I will try to focus on little steps in the right direction so as not to get discouraged by the big ugly picture.
• I will work hardest on regain control in my life.

I'm hoping that one of the good things that comes out of September is that I will be forced back into more of a routine. I do better with a routine. I'll have to make my kids' lunch/snacks, so I might as well make mine. I'm hoping that soccer will get me out and more active, running around the field with the kids (at practice). And I'm really hoping that work will settle down once everyone is back from holidays.

Thanks for listening! Hope to post again soon!

I had a blast on my girls day!! We had our nails done. It was my first time getting fake nails (aka porno nails) and it's taking a bit of getting used to. Suddenly there are new challenges... going to the bathroom safely.... doing up buttons (I'm hating the buttons)... typing (big problem, I'm supposed to be keying budgeting templates this week)... changing diapers (though that's definitely a positive 'cause I'm aiming to get out of that one as much as possible!!) and I'm sure many others I haven't yet discovered.

Did some shopping. Even found a couple of cute tops that look good on me (woohoo!! thank you surgery!!). Got some new makeup to liven me up a bit for summer! Loving the new eyeshadow that I would never had tried if my girls hadn't talked me into it. Thank you lovely ladies for making me step outside my safe, boring little box! Had really bad food (Red Robin Whiskey River BBQ burger - they won't even give you the nutritional info if you ask, so it can't be good) and a couple of margaritas (which made shopping even more fun!!) and then when we started to run out of energy, we hit Death by Chocolate where I had a Devil in Disguise. Very Very Very tasty!! Did a bit more shopping and called it a day. My legs hurt so bad last night I had trouble getting to sleep, but it was worth it!!

As for the goals portion of my title... here's what I'm hoping to have happen this week...
Monday - Water aerobics
Tuesday - Golf lessons (great for the upper body and back)
Wednesday - Water aerobics
Thursday - Running (okay, walking really with the occasional burst of slow jogging, but running sounds cooler).

I've decided that I need to start moving and exercising more, especially since that helps motivate me to eat better. So wish me luck this week and I'll keep you posted.

Well, now that I'm eating again, I regained back 2.5 of the 4.5 lbs I lost. Knew it was going to happen, but happy that I didn't gain all of it back. Haven't had any pop yet, but have had some junk. Oh well. I'm still making more of an effort than I have been recently. Small steps.


I'm really excited about Sunday! It's my friends birthday and we're going to have a girls day. We're heading the mall for some shopping, some lunch and getting our nails done. It's going to be a lot of fun. The whole girls day thing is still a bit of a novelty for me. I've always been more of a tomboy and have mainly had guy friends and non-girly girl friends.

My daughter is very much a girly-girl and we had our first girls day a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun we bought her some new shoes. When we went to get a makeup refill for me, the sales lady gave her a sample tube of lipgloss. OMG does she love her lip gloss. If you can't find her, chances are she's hiding under the table putting on more lipgloss. Well, since she had the lipgloss, we decided that she needed a purse to put it in. We found her a cute little purse and while we were there, she found a necklace that she had to have. So in one day, we hit... shoes, purses, makeup and jewelry.

Not bad for a three year old, eh?


It'll be even more fun to have a girls day with someone who I don't have to crouch down to talk to. :-)


P.S. the speech went well, thanks, for those of you that asked! Glad to have it done.

I've lost 4.5 lbs!! Woohoo!!

Unfortunately that's been in 3 days. Yup, I've been horribly, grotesquely sick. I won't go into details (I only to that to my husband and only 'cause it really freaks him out), but it has not been a fun couple of days. I think I'm finally coming out the other side of this nasty little bug (fingers crossed). My kids have already been through it and I'm glad; 'cause they didn't get it as bad and I don't think I'd have the energy to take care of them at the moment if they were sick.

Got in trouble from my boss and my best friend for coming into work today. I probably should have worked from home, but kinda had to come in. We're a big enough company that we have to have a Level 2 first aid attendant on site. We're down a bunch of attendants, so that pretty much left me as the only one this week. Which means that if I didn't come to work, they'd have to bring someone in. It worked out okay and the day is almost over. Besides, at least at work no one is jumping on me.

No all I have to do is figure out how to keep the loss once I start eating again, 'cause I don't think I'll last very long on crackers and water. Maybe I should look at this as a cleansing and try to avoid putting anything bad back into my system. Good time to cut out pop again and junk food. 'Course it's really easy to swear off those tasty treats when you're afraid to eat anything. I'm going to at least try, 'cause I really like the number I'm at right now. :-)

On another positive note, I dragged my husband and my stepmommy to a nutritional shopping tour at our grocery store. It was great (I would recommend checking if your local store offers them), tons of great information and the chance to ask a registered dietitian questions. She gave us some really good guidelines on things like cereal and cheese (e.g. your cereal should have 6g or less of sugar and a min of 3g of fibre). The best part was that my husband was really listening and paying attention. He's not known for his healthy eating (when she mentioned that he should be having 8 - 10 servings of fruits and vegetables, his response was "a month?" - thought I doubt he even gets that much), so any improvement would be great. Especially since he does the grocery shopping and it seems some magical elves or other such beings sneak into his basket and steal the fruits and vegetables that I've put on the list. ' Cause they never seem to make it home. It was also reassuring to know that my son is getting enough meat servings. She had some great meal and snack ideas too.

Now all I have to do is find the time to make a list and actually go shopping.

So tomorrow, I'm taking a big risk and doing my final Toastmaster speech (at work - it's a corporate club) about my weight loss journey. Wish me luck!

Here's the planned speech...

Inspiring Me
Good afternoon Toastmaster, fellow members and welcomed guests. The purpose of today’s speech is to inspire my audience. I’m going to twist it a little and instead try to inspire myself, and through inspiring myself, hopefully I’ll inspire you as well. Toastmasters is a journey, you start off unsure and hesitant and as you go along you learn and improve and with any luck at the end of the road you emerge a stronger, more confident speaker. What most of you are unaware of is that my Toastmaster journey was paralleled by another journey and that I brought you along on for the ride as well.

Most of us, at some point in our lives, will or have battled with weight issues. Whether it’s, “I wish I could lose 5 pounds” or struggling to lose 50; whether it’s noticing that time and gravity have changed your body or have danced with the dieting yo-yo for years. I’ve found that we all have different motivations, different approaches and different mirrors. Today I’m going to take you along the path of my other journey and show you how you were involved. I’ll start with my motivations, then I’ll talk about what I did and finally, I’m going to talk about my obstacles and how I have and will get past them.

I started my weight loss journey back in January of 2006 and those of you who’ve heard my ice breaker speech were introduced to my primary motivations... my kids: dirt boy and shoe girl. I wanted to lose weight so that I could keep up with them and so that I could be a healthy happy role model, especially for my daughter. When I look back at how I looked in high school and how I felt about myself. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself. But, since I can’t do that, I’d like to see if I can stop my daughter from experiencing it. I don’t want her to live her life on the dieting seesaw. In speech #7, I talked about another major motivator for me – diabetes. My dad has insulin dependent diabetes and both of my grandmothers have non-insulin dependent diabetes. That combined with a history of heart problems, makes being overweight is a ticking time bomb. I don’t want to die young, nor have my kids worry about me, as I worry about my father. I don’t want my quality of life as I get older to prevent me from doing the things I want to do, and I want to have the energy to want to do those things.

So, how am I going to achieve that? Well, each person is different, but I’ve found a couple of keys to my success. I discovered that I need some form of support and that I need to employ strategies that work for me. In my third speech, Blog It!, I gave a clue to one of my best sources of support. I discovered a wonderful supportive community of people on the internet trying to lose weight. Blogging is a way of chronicling my journey, a way of staying accountable, and sharing what I was going through with others. Seeing that I wasn’t the only one going through these challenges and struggles helped a great deal. We post comments on each other’s blogs offering suggestions, competitions and support; consoling and motivating each other, even though we’ve never met. As a techno geek, this was a great way for me to get the support I need. Though there are many others, including friends and family, support groups and weight loss programs, the important thing was finding what worked for me. This is true in terms of exercise too. Finding an exercise you enjoy can go a long way to increasing your chances of actually doing the exercise. In speech #5, I shared with you my discovery that I could actually run and even more shocking, that I enjoyed it (at least once the endorphins kick in). I’m not saying that it isn’t a challenge to find the time or the motivation to get off the couch and go, just that if you can find something you enjoy, you’re at least increasing your chances. I also discovered that when I exercise, my eating habits improve, whether it’s because I don’t want to undo the good I’ve done by exercising or if it’s that my body craves better food when I’m burning calories, I don’t know and I’m not going to question.

Now before you get to thinking I know what I’m talking about or that I have all the answers, let me tell you about my challenges. I did really well in the first six months of my journey, I lost 25 lbs. I felt better, bought some new clothes and got a little cocky. Then in July 2006, I had surgery. The surgery was successful, and I’m glad I had the procedure done, but it effectively stalled my journey. To tell you the truth, my journey came to a complete and utter standstill. You’ll notice too that the stall in my weight loss journey also matched my stall in my Toastmaster journey, interesting coincidence. Obviously right after my surgery, I couldn’t do much, but even after I was cleared to resume all my normal activities, I didn’t. I was afraid; afraid that if I started running again it would hurt and I was afraid to fail. And I used that excuse for a very long time. I slipped into a vicious cycle of excuses and guilt. I can’t work out because I’m too busy, I slept in. I’ll start my diet on Monday... oops, I forgot to pick up groceries, I guess its McPukes again. I could go on, but you get the idea. The biggest challenge I face is ME, but I’m also my biggest source of inspiration. Why? Because I haven’t given up; because while I have not lost much lately, I also haven’t gained; because my reasons for going on this journey remain the same. And most importantly because this is a journey, a long one, where the destination isn’t significant, it’s that I’m taking the journey, and what I’m learning along the way.

So regardless of what kind of journey you’re taking, Toastmasters, weight loss or life, you might want to keep what I’ve learned in mind. You need to know why you’re taking the journey, accept that everyone needs help along the way; that you need to find the best route for you, not for everyone else. Know that there will always be roadblocks along the way, but as long as you keep going, then you ARE succeeding. Good luck on your journeys.

I bet you thought I'd disappeared again. That I'd made the big post about coming back and then fizzled out. Well... HA! Not this time baby! It's been an absolutely crazy week.

At work for the last month and a half we've been dealing with a major issue. One of our systems changed to a different program and some numbers have gone awry. Given that I'm an accountant, numbers going awry is a major problem. We've been working like to dogs to try to figure out what happened and how to fix it. It's gonna probably take another month to sort through it all (I work for a fairly large corp). I won't go into any boring details 'cause, well, they're boring, but I gotta tell you, there's nothing like a major issue to show you just how little you know. In case that wasn't causing me enough stress... I have my performance review today. And for the first time in a long time, I don't think it's gonna be a good one. *sigh*

I have to give a speech at Toastmasters (our corporate club). It's my last one before getting my competant toastmaster pin. It's supposed to be inspirational. Originally, I was going to do the speech on my weight loss journey. Of course that was the plan, back when there was something inspiring about it. Since I've pretty much done nothing for almost a year, it's kinda hard to use that. But I can't think of anything else to inspire people with/about. *sigh*

It doesn't help that my biggest loser type competition has completely fallen off the map. One of the main drivers/motivators of that competition has had a personal issue that prevents her from being as involved. I don't blame her, she has to take care of that, but I miss her inspiration and heckling. I haven't officially weighed in in three weeks, and if I did right now, I'd be up again. *sigh*

Now that I've done pathetic to the Nth degree, on a positive note... I have taken tomorrow off and Monday is a holiday, so I have a four day weekend!!!

First, I have to say for the most part, my husband is incredibly supportive when it comes to my weight loss journal (with the exception of being a bit of an enable, not that I want him to stop bringing me Slurpees).

Last night I asked my DH to pick me up some Munch'ems, which are a relatively good snack and come in a good limiting snack size. Unfortunately, my DH misunderstood and bought me Munchies instead. Don't get me wrong, the Munchies were delicious, in fact half of the bag went down very well. Yup, ate over half the bag right away. They were very good. *sigh*

It wouldn't have been so bad, had McDonald's not already sucked me in with the McHappy Day. Went twice yesterday. Once for lunch with a friend and co-worker, once on the way home from swimming with the kids. *sigh* At least my continued obesity is helping to support charity this week.