Finally Getting Fit

I was raised with the belief that cravings are an okay thing. Obey them because if you are craving something, that meant there is something in the food you’re craving that your body needs. However, when I got older and people talked about craving foods that were less than ideal for them, I began to think that cravings were a little more than what I’d been told.

I decided to do a little research because I have not been able to get enough yogurt lately. However, I’ve also been feeling sick to my stomach off and on, which may or may not be caused by being lactose intolerant. So, in theory, if cravings truly are what I was raised to believe, I should be able to replace the yogurt with something else that will give me what my body needs…

According to WebMD, “Surveys estimate that almost 100% of young women and nearly 70% of young men had food cravings during the past year. That covers most of us, doesn’t it?”

Well it’s certainly good to know that I’m not alone! But what does that mean exactly?

According to this article, food cravings pretty much are mostly in your head. Take away the pregnancy cravings side of things, and you’re most likely craving things because you want to calm down, comfort yourself, or are addicted to what you’re craving.

If you’re struggling with food cravings, read the article. It has seven facts about cravings and well as ideas on how to deal with them

As for me, I’m not too worried about yogurt cravings but will be taking a break from it nonetheless so I can see if I’m lactose intolerant.

And you shouldn’t be worried if you’re craving healthy foods. Just take things in moderation.

One of the big reasons I am trying to lose weight is because I want to have as healthy of a pregnancy as I can. While having a baby isn’t in my close financial future, that just means I have more time to work with when it comes to losing weight.

I haven’t gotten on the scale for a couple weeks now, and I’m a bit nervous about the possible ‘damage’ I may have done by not weighing in. Despite that, the worry I feel about that is nothing compared to the stress and depression I was dealing with before, so I’m still glad that I went off the scale for right now.

Towards the end of next month, I have an appointment to see a doctor. I’m both excited and nervous about this appointment because it could mean changes in a lot of ways. I’m hoping to find out why I have such a hard time losing weight. I’m hoping that she’ll make changes to my diet that will help me get even healthier. I’m also hoping that the appointment will be a turning point.

I want to be a mother so badly, but I am afraid that whatever is going on with my body is going to prevent that dream from coming true. I know a lot of women with PCOS (I’m not 100% sure I have PCOS, by the way) just have to lose a little weight and then they get pregnant, but therein lies the problem.

So I guess you can consider me on a bit of a hiatus (though I’ll still be posting) until I go to that appointment and find out what’s going on.

Wish me lots of luck and patience.

I received an email today that linked to a page (it was just a question, so no link) that asked:

“What does overeating and being overweight giving you?”

I was a bit puzzled about the question at first until I realized it was the basic question of why overeat. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it all morning.

When I first started my weight loss journey, it was easy to figure out why I overate. I was abused as a child and shut down a lot of myself and my personality. I used to eat as much food as I could get my hands on until I would ache with being full. It was my way of feeling something without the fear of having something bad happen because of my feelings. I could eat until I hurt and no one would know it but me.

I’m in a much better place now with much better circumstances. Those reasons no longer apply, so it was a bit harder to think of what I was getting from being fat.

These days, I think food being a comfort thing plays a big part in things. I was betrayed and hurt by people I trusted with my life from an early age, so it’s very hard for me to trust people. Food has never betrayed my trust and has never failed to be there.

So that’s the food side of it, but what about the being overweight?

For right now, you’re guess is pretty much as good as mine. I think part of me thinks that fat equals unattractive equals safe as far as men goes, but I feel like I’m still missing a key element that will answer the question better.

So, what does overeating and being overweight give you?

Or is it round three? I can’t quite remember.

I was roaming the weight loss part of the blogsphere yesterday and read on Irish Mom’s blog that one of her goals for this week is to keep a food diary. “If I bite it, I’ll write it,” as she says. (I love that little saying.) It got me thinking that maybe it’s time I get back into keeping a food diary.

When I first started on the ‘I’m in Australia now’ leg of my weight loss journey, it was a big kick in the head. I couldn’t believe how much food I would shove in my mouth (or rather, would have shoved in my mouth without the food diary) on any random day. Keeping the food diary made me think about what I was eating.

But I sort of grew out of it. I was more aware, more careful and all the better for it. I could easily recall everything I had eaten in a given day and I thought before I ate.

Now, as I skip the scale, it will be all too easy for me to fall back in to bad habits. Having a food diary would help me out at least a little in that area because it would at least keep me aware and away from ‘mindless munching’. Mindless munching is a bad, bad habit for me that I definitely don’t want to get back into.

So I’m thinking about taking it up again.

Do you use a food diary? Do you find it useful?

After a heart to heart with my husband yesterday, I feel the need to clarify a few things about my decision yesterday.

I have decided not to weigh in on the scale. That’s it. I’m not quitting exercising, not quitting eating right, and certainly am not heading out to have a big binge of my naughty little food addictions. All I’m doing is just not stepping on the scale for a month so I can clear out my head space.

I am currently trying to get myself in a better place mentally and emotionally. I believe that accepting and loving myself as I am will help inspire me to want to make myself healthier. While I am doing that a lot, I could still stand to improve. At this time, though, I feel like I’m being hindered by stepping on the scale – not helped.

I need to be doing this for me. I can keep going doing it for other people, and that’s okay, but if I’m not doing it for myself, I’m not in the right place mentally. Gains hurt too much and plateaus are too frustrating when I have this subconscious need to be making someone else happy.

So no scale for June! But keeping on with diet and exercise.

Having said that, I am already feeling better without the scale and numbers hanging over my head. (Not literally. I keep the scale on the floor in the bedroom.) Of course, now I’m curious to see how much I weigh, but I think that just comes with no longer being required to weigh in.

It feels great! I’m doing my healthy thang and feeling good.

And that’s all it should really be about in the end.

It’s a long holiday weekend here in Oz, so I slept in and had the pleasure of doing so next to my husband. Not having to deal with the alarm and having the husband home, it wasn’t until after I took a shower that I realized it is Monday. I dried myself with the towel and though, “Oh, Monday. That means weigh in.”

But as I got dressed and prepared to start work for the day (someday I’ll take a real holiday), I thought about how I have been feeling about losing weight lately. I thought about how I have been closer to just giving up completely, for good, than I have ever been. Yes, I’ve fallen off the wagon before, but never have I wanted to purposely just stop.

I also thought about an email I received over the weekend from my lovely friend Jenera. In the email, she said:

“I’ve taken breaks in weight loss (and life) before and it really helps. You might just need to take the next month to focus on YOU-not your body, just you. I know it helps me quite a bit. I think if you keep up with the exercise, still eat healthy, and have the hubby hide the scale, you might be able to refocus a bit and not be too hard on yourself. The fact that you’ve been sticking with the positive changes is a huge accomplishment!”

And she’s right. I have been so focused on numbers, pounds, losing weight, that I have lost focus on me, JM, the person inside. I have been slowly turning myself into someone who judges myself based on my looks instead of based on the beautiful person I know I am.

So for the entire month of June, I’m hiding the scale. Whether it turns out to be a bad or good thing in terms of pounds, I don’t care. I need to focus on me, take care of me, and remember why I started getting fit in the first place.

I’ll be honest with you all here because it feels like that’s all I have left to talk about here right now.

Lately I have been frustrated. More than a year (two years in October) of a dramatically better lifestyle including fresh foods, exercise, and diet restrictions have seen me with almost no weight lost. Yes, I have bounced around and lost up to twelve pounds, but it bounces right back. Up, down, up down.

Perhaps if my weight was in the 230s, I wouldn’t be here now mentally. Emotionally. But I’m not. I have been losing and gaining about the same ten pounds for many months now despite the vast improvements I have made to my health, diet and fitness.

I want to cry and complain about the state of it all, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s more just letting you know that I’m tired. And my being tired is probably starting to show through in my posts, if it hasn’t already. For that, I apologize.

I went into this with such high hopes and yet I find myself stuck in a place I never wanted to be: Tired of trying for a healthier lifestyle.

I can’t well and truly quit. Not yet. I still have one more step of having a bunch of blood tests done to see if they can reveal why it’s so hard for me to lose weight. So until that’s done, I’ll keep on.

It’ll just be hard. And I apologize to you now for my enthusiasm not being what it should.

When I started this journey a year ago, I wrote this on my 100 Pounds to Go blog:

I’m Spunk, and I’m 100 pounds (about 45 kilos) from my ideal weight. I got married May 5th, 2007.The honeymoon is over.

If you’d like to join me on my quest for health, please feel free. People like to know they aren’t alone when they take on challenges.

When I wrote that, I was ready and rearing to go, not worried about anything going wrong or stumbling on my path. All I knew was that I wanted to get healthy in a hurry.

While the hurry part hasn’t really happened, a year on I am in no doubt that I am many times healthier. I feel better than ever, have more energy than ever, and I even go to a local gym on a regular basis.

I can definitely tell you I didn’t see that happening a year ago.

All in all, I may not be down in the pounds like I would like, but I’m still very happy with my progress mentally and emotionally so far. I’m in a much better place.

How about you?

On May 14th 2007, I wasn’t long married and I decided it was time to get my health straight. I started at 256 pounds and set out to lose 100 pounds. I wanted to be healthy and happy. And, as the year wore on, it became important to me to be healthy so I could have healthy babies.

My starting statistics looked like this:

Starting Stats: Started: May 14th ‘07

Weight: 256 lbs ~ 116.1 kilos
Waist: 45 inches ~ 114.3 centimeters
Hips: 51 inches ~ 129.5 centimeters
Upper Left Arm: 14.5 inches
Upper Right Arm: 15.5 inches
Left Thigh: 27 inches
Right Thigh: 27 inches

BMI: 41.4

GOAL: 156 lbs ~ 70.76 kilos

I felt ashamed of my body and ate whatever I liked. I knew little about PCOS, insulin resistance and didn’t pay much attention to what dietary changes I should make because I deal with those things.

Now a year has gone by and I look at how far I have come.

Stats: May 14th, 2008

Weight: 248 pounds
Waist: 44 inches
Hips: 50 inches
Upper Left Arm: 13.5 inches
Upper Right Arm: 14.5 inches
Left Thigh: 26.5 inches
Right Thigh: 26.5 inches

BMI: 40

I’m not that much changed in terms of weight or inches, but I am completely changed in mentality. I am no longer ashamed of my body. It’s my body. I like it, but I know it can be better.

Food is no longer my enemy. I have adjusted my diet to one that is better for someone with blood sugar problems. I don’t eat as much and neither do I feel the need to eat more. I eat things that satisfy my hunger longer and have even discovered foods I love that are also good for me.

The numbers simply cannot show how much I have changed in just one year.

As I mentioned on Monday, I decided to ‘take a break’ from the diet so I could well and truly enjoy my anniversary.

While I didn’t automatically go out and eat all the pasta, bread, and death by chocolate cake I could get my hands on, I did enjoy little indulgences. My husband surprised me with a little cake that we both shared and on a different night, we both enjoyed dessert. (I’d never actually had a proper chocolate sundae.)

The whole weekend was a lot of fun and I don’t regret a bit of it. (Ask me again next Monday. Haha.) I stayed away from a lot of the bad things out of habit and didn’t go crazy on other bad things.

Still, as I get back into the diet (back to phase one for a while!), I am reminded how much easier it is to just eat all the stuff I’m not supposed to eat. Funny how it took only a weekend to forget the difficulties in cutting bread out of your diet.

Bread is everywhere! Burgers, sandwiches of all kinds, dinner rolls… I don’t consider all bread evil by any means, but try getting something other than white bread and rolls when you go out…

I don’t mind it too much because I know it’s all worth it in the end, but it is a bit annoying. I think I was sticking closely to the diet so long that the break made me want to rush back in all my bad habits. It makes me wonder if I should have taken a break at all…

What do you think? Do you ever take breaks? Have you ever had a break backfire?

I think that coming up with a rewards list is one of the things people have the hardest time with (besides the actual losing weight). While everyone is different, I have pretty consistently heard people who want to lose weight talk about how hard it is to make a rewards list.

I think the reason for this comes in two parts: One, most of us don’t feel like we deserve rewards – especially the people who are trying to lose a lot of weight and don’t have a lot of confidence. Two, many people are so concerned about doing it ‘right’ that they end up not doing it at all.

First off, there’s no wrong way to make your rewards list. I promise!

Secondly, of course you’re worth it. Of course you are. You are someone who is trying to make your body healthier. You deserve a lot of credit beyond rewards.

Rewards can be as often as you want and whatever you want them to be. If you have an extremely hard time with motivation, then make it every five pounds you get a treat. I knew a woman who got a $5 iTunes card every time she lost five pounds.

If bigger rewards are what will work for you, then make it every twenty or twenty-five pounds and then get yourself a manicure/pedicure. Go out for a massage. Treat yourself with a road trip or a new purse/book/pen set/whatever.

Think of things you really want and then set them as rewards. Don’t feel guilty about spending money on yourself because that will just take the whole point out of it.

Work hard and then reward yourself. You deserve it.

You’ve looked at yourself in the mirror. You’ve twisted and turned. You’ve thought about what you’re eating and how you can change it. You’ve even thought about joining the local gym.

You are one of the millions of people changing their lives to get healthier.

Having decided to do this, you would think it would be easy to get your friends and family to support your decision. You would think they would be more than happy to help you on your way to becoming a healthier person.

Not always.

Believe it or not, once you have decided to start on your weight loss journey, you might find your spouse complaining about how you won’t be cuddly anymore or your friends saying that, “You don’t need to do that. You look fine.”

When it comes to getting fit, you can’t be in denial about your weight. You shouldn’t let anyone else be in denial about it either.

What can you do when the people whose support you need the most aren’t exactly supportive of your journey to become healthy?

You might need to sit some down and let them know what their lack of support is doing to you. Tell them why you want to lose weight, what prompted you to start, and what your goals are.

You can also find support elsewhere. Start talking to other people about your weight loss plans and maybe those people will start talking to the people who aren’t supporting you.

If all else fails, just don’t talk to them about it. Don’t share meal times with them if you can avoid it and don’t talk about getting healthier. Some people just don’t like people they know losing weight because it’s a threat to them on some level.

That’s their problem to deal with. You have to focus on you and your health.

Having the option of coffee (caffeine), chai (caffeine), or tea (wholesome goodness of grossness) to drink this afternoon while working my arse off to cover blog posts while my husband and I are away on vacation, I immediately disregarded coffee. I have yet to figure out how to operate our new coffee maker.

Between chai and tea, my choice would usually be chai. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself reaching for the sample of tea I received in the mail last week. I paused to consider a chai once more, but I yawned and figured that tea of any kind would probably be better for me.

Now that’s what I call living the lifestyle.

I didn’t think about how the caffeine/sugar in chai would probably be bad for me and my diet and how I would have to watch what I ate for sugar content for the rest of the day. No, I just figured tea would be better for me.

Too often I, and many others, forget that weight loss – true weight loss – isn’t about the temporary fix. It’s not all about doing whatever it takes to get to that ideal weight regardless of the consequences. Those sorts of diets and actions will get you nowhere but gaining back all your weight and then some after the goal is achieved.

That is, if it is achieved at all.

Given that this is something you will ideally be doing for the rest of your life, it’s good to celebrate the small changes you make. The automatic habits you develop when it comes to your health.

Celebrate because you’re doing one of the hardest things out there – changing your life.

No, I’m not talking about weight loss success stories, unfortunately. However, I have found a video you might have a good chuckle at because it sounds oh so familiar even for how it’s taken to extreme levels.

Okay, so maybe I’m a bit of a hypocrite for posting this given I am taking weight loss supplements, but I figured that if I can get a laugh out of this video, other people can as well.

Haven’t we all heard it thousands of times? Try this! You’ll lose weight instantly. The pounds will melt off. It’s the latest and greatest diet out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something I read today really resounded to me because it makes so much sense. As we all know, 99 percent of these things plain don’t work. Or they don’t work in the long term if you are one of the lucky few to see some kind of result.

Why? To keep us spending money!

Just like any other companies, they’re all out to make a dollar. So why give people something that works when you can make a lot more money by keeping people coming back?

This is more of a ramble than a rant, but I am a bit peeved at all this. These companies know exactly what they are doing because it has worked for so many companies before. People are so addicted to the quick fix that the psychology of obesity simply doesn’t come into play.

Now that’s a thought – if a company started a psychological program, maybe more of us would get real help.

What do you think? Are you sick of all the ads or don’t you mind them? Do you wish there was more focus on the psychology of obesity?

As per usual, easier said than done.

It’s easy enough to say that you should lose weight for you. To live longer, to look better, to feel better about yourself. But more often than not, it’s difficult to start a diet with ‘for me’ in mind.

Why? Because many overweight people just don’t care that much about themselves.

Unlike what a lot of the skinnier population seems to think, being overweight is not always just a matter of “I’m a glutton”. There are mental, emotional, and psychological components all adding up to a lack of not caring about the value of one’s own life.

There are many reasons for ‘do it for you’ not being quite enough to get you busting to go to the gym.

So what can you do if ‘do it for you’ just doesn’t cut it?

Try making a list of the people closest to you. (Even if they don’t exist. My future daughter, not even conceived yet, has been a big motivator for me in the past.) You can use that as a list of motivators.

Not really close to many people? I know how you feel. The next step is to make a list of reasons you want to lose the weight. Even things like the little black dress/suit of your dreams.

It’s entirely possible that you’ll find you have lists of things that aren’t quite the ‘bottom line’ to get you to start changing your life. However, if you wait for motivation, it’s possible that you’ll never lose weight.

Sometimes it’s a matter of doing it and the motivation will come.