I was talking about that Geocaching thing a few posts back and I found one right by my work. Well, I mean I haven't FOUND it yet - but I know where it is. I work in the back lot of Universal Studios Florida (not for them - we rent space) and when I was looking up new locations I noticed that there were a few hidden inside the parks! One of them is somewhere around the ET ride. I thought that was really funny. I'll have to find one of the guys here at work who has GPS so I can go find that sucker! :)
I'm back at work for a full week for the first time in a while. It's hard to get back on track after the holidays! Not just eating, but just getting back into a normal schedule too. I had to get up for work this morning at about 5:30 and I didn't actually get out of bed till 6:00! Thank goodness I was being an over-acheiever last night and got Harpers bag all packed and laid my clothes out before bed.
Eating good so far today - just gotta keep it on track. I think tonight Terry and I will move things around in the garage so the eliptical machine is free and clear to use. He just built some new shelves in there and it's kind of a mess. :) We'll see if that sucker makes it out tonight....
Busy Sunday! (Well, I guess it wasn't THAT busy. I did get a nap in after all!) But I personally like to keep my Sundays down to a schedule of absolutely nothing. :)
We did a bunch of laundry today and cleaned (because we have been so busy that it was just a pit in here - yuk!). We had to take down the tree and put away all the Christmas stuff. And we finally let Doodle out of her cage!
Doodle is the nickname we have for my daughter Harper. She's 9 months and she just started cruising. Up till now we have had a modified living room where we basically trapped her into a 10 foot area with the couches and all her toys and stuff so she couldn't get herself into too much trouble, yet feel open enough to roam a little.
But we went to some friends house the other day and they have a 11 month old. The two of them we crawling around the house like little speed demons and having a good ol time. So we decided that it was time to let her have free range at home too. It's not too hard actually - we just moved into a new house recently and since we were in a tenny tiny apartment before, we don't have much clutter and not much she can get into. The real trick is keeping it that way....
We found a new way to get out of the house and get a little exercise today - it's called Geocaching (www.geocaching.com). It's this web site where people go all over the world and hide treasures for other people to find. You log into the web page and type in your address and it lets you know how many people have hidden stuff around you. We put in ours and found over 2000 within 10 miles of our house!!!! Holy moley!
So we drove all over town this morning trying to hunt down these little thingies. Out of the 5 we tried to find - we actually got two of them! One was a big one, a coffee can covered in camo tape out on a nature trail, and the other was hidden in a fence behind a local resturant. The with the big one you take a prize out (we took a little doll) and leave something in return (a keychain). Then at both places you sign a little log book so the person who hid it knows that you were there. The first one only had about 10 signatures, but the second one had like 50.
It was funny - when we were at the resturant, the owner was taking out the trash and he yelled over to us, "Hey! Is that thingie still back there?" I stopped to talk to him for a while and he said there are people back there looking for it all the time. He didn't put it there, but I'm sure he loves it because I bet a lot of people to stop there to eat! :)
Give it a try! I bet you anything that there is one hidden less than 2 miles from your house. Look it up!
Ok - pretty much any average woman eats 1500 to 2000 calories when trying to maintain a healthy weight, right?
So if you divide that into 3 meals a day - that's what? 500 to 670 calories per meal? So why, WHY, is my Lean Cuisine lunch (that's actually pretty tasty) only 200 to 300 calories? Isn't the whole point of a frozen meal for me to have a easy way to grab a healthy meal? If I have to like make a salad to go with it - then what is the point!?
I'm telling you, if that frozen meal would have been twice its size I would be fine right now and not trying to figure out what I can get at our fatty fatty cafeteria that's only a little bit of calories. BECAUSE I'M STARVING! Groan....
*I just wanted to add a note before I start todays post - I'm not blaming my husband, Terry, for yesterday's stuff! :)
We both have food issues and we both love, love, love (and are addicted) to food. The whole cheese steak episode could have very easily happened the other way around. In some ways I think its harder when both people are struggling because you are not just each others support - but a lot of times you are both each others downfall too. When you have two people sitting watching a movie on a saturday, and a commercial for Pizza Hut comes on and you both give each other that look (you know the one!) it's harder to talk TWO people out of a cheesy warm tasty pizza then it is for one!! :)
Anyway - as I posted earlier, we have recently moved into a new house and have a long commute that sucks up a lot of gas money. So while we are okay with money - we still need to stick to a pretty tight budget when it comes to food shopping. (Besides - we have to buy food for THREE people now - believe me, feeding a baby is not cheap at all!) So we try to make a repeatable menu for the week that is not only cheap and easy - but healthy too. And while it's fairly easy to get 2, getting all three, seven days a week is a lot harder.
We have a good handful of days that are already pretty healthy and cheap - we just need to work on portion control. Like cooking a half a box of noodles for spaghetti and half a jar of sauce, rather then making the whole thing. Or on nights that we have chicken and veggie stirfry to only have one cup of brown rice - not like 3 cups and then seconds. It's finding a few more things that are a '30 min meal' that we don't mind having once a week and we can afford will be something I need to figure out this weekend.
I've finally realized that is truly what food is to me. It has some kind of mental control over me and I literally can't trust myself with it.
I was doing really good up till about 7:00 last night and was planning a healthy dinner when my husband calls and says he is really in the mood to make cheese steak sandwiches for dinner. What do I do? Do I tell him no? Do I tell him we should stick to our planned dinner? No. I tell him to get some chips to go with them. :(
Then once he was starting to make our crazy high cal dinner, I'm literally standing there dipping cold chocolate fudge leftover from Christmas into a jar of peanut butter telling him ABOUT HOW I NEED TO GO IN FOR A 3 HOUR GLUCOSE TEST. What in the hell is wrong with me!!?? Plus I am feeing my daughter a healthy meal of lean turkey, whole wheat bread and some cheese cubes. I would never dream of giving her what we were eating because I knew how bad it would be for her, yet it's somehow okay to do this to my own body when I already know that my sugar levels are high, but somehow in the moment I rationalize that I don't ACTUALLY have diabetes yet so in some weird way I can still eat what I want?
Is that what it's going to take for me? Having the possiblity of death in front of me before I can put down a piece of fudge or pass on two giant Philly Cheesesteaks? It has to threaten to kill me first? I mean, how is that not just like cocaine or heroin?
This has stopped being about looking good and the someday-a-million-years-from-now-heart-attack, it's now. It's Harper, it's Terry, it's once you get diagnosed with diabetes there is no getting rid of it. Even if you have your levels under control you have to deal with it for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. How is this not enough to get me to stop doing this to myself?
I guess all of this stuff came to me today after last night thinking about all this stuff and thinking last nights dinner was yet another "treat". Then I was walking back to my office with a big plate of chinese food and an egg roll (when I was planning on getting a salad for lunch) because "Oh! Chicken chow mein! They hardly ever have that! I should get it!". There will ALWAYS BE A "TREAT" AROUND!!! There will always be a cookie that looks good, always a fatty side dish thats not always there, always some tasty thing that we can make for dinner. It stops being "treating yourself" when you do it at every freaking meal.
Maybe thinking of this as truly what it is - a real chemically dependant addiction - is the only thing that might help me deal with it.
I wonder just how many people sign up on here today...
So, of course, with the holidays and all, I have been a total slacker and not done one single good thing for myself. I'm down to like 247 - but I think I was bloated anyway on the day I weighed 250, so I'm not patting myself on the back too much.
So today, so far, I've had a cup of instant oatmeal with a big mug of tea, and for lunch a Lean Cuisine and a mini bag of popcorn. That's about 650 calories so far today. My goal is to get around 1500 to 1800 calories per day. I'll probably have some sort of snack from the caf later today - like an apple or something. Or a plate of hot salty french fries....oh wait...no! Bad Rachel! ;)
My doc says that my weight has probabaly skyrocketed over the last few months because of stress of the baby/new house, and a lot of it on the fact that I had been using Depo shots for birth control. Apparently it makes your body think that it's the week before your period all the time! Yeah, you know - that week when you are psycho and crave salt and sugar like crazy? Before I couldn't figure out why I was buying all this chocolate and chips over the last few months when I never really had a problem with them before. Lovely. At least I can stop the cravings - but it's not like it's all water weight and will now melt off. No, no - it's fat and I have to take it off the old fashioned way. Ugh....
I am so tired. We just got back from a vacation last week at my parents house. It was one of those trips where you end up more exhausted from going on vacation then you would have been staying at work.
My sister and her husband are transitioning into moving back to their hometown and are staying with my parents. We went out to see them because we have babies that are only 2 weeks apart and neither of us had been able to see them yet. But after a week in a tiny three bedroom house with 6 adults, two babies, and a 2 year old - we were really ready to get home.
Unfortunately, I caught strep and a cold while on vacation and Harper started teething again. She's pretty miserable. We are used to her sleeping through the night, and over the last week and a half she has been so off her schedule that she hasn't. But with me being sick and all - it's just making for a miserable week.
This morning I was so tired that I felt like pulling over and taking a nap on the side of the highway. I knew that the instant oatmeal and cup of tea I had packed for breakfast was NOT going to cut it. I went through the McD's drive through and got a HUGE diet coke for the caffine and some egg mcmuffins. I knew from last time I lost weight, that they were the best thing on the menu and that I was having a lean cusine for lunch - so I got two. I'm actually beating myself up more over the $8 I spent than the calories. ;)
But anyway, I need to work through lunch today beacuse I have a doc apt tomorrow. I did eat my frozen dinner though. And yes, I do know that a sandwich or something with fresh fruit would be better for me, but unless you are planning on coming over to make it for me so I can get some sleep, then let it be. ;)
I can remeber back 5 years ago - right after I lost about 75 pounds and looked great, and felt great. I thought "Man, this is wonderful! I will never let myself see the other side of 200 pounds again! It will be so easy because this is so nice!"
Well, then I moved down to Florida, got a boyfriend, moved in, got engaged, got married, got prego, became a mom, and bought a house.
Hello, 250.
And no, it wasn't baby weight.
When my hubby and I started dating we both realized that we LOVED to eat and try new foods. Most of our dates centered around new resturants and going out to eat. We both gained about 40 pounds the first year we were together - but hey, who cares!? We were in love, right?
Then I found out that I had pre-diabetes about 2 years ago. It was right before the wedding, I was losing weight to fit into my dress anyway, so about 2 months and -20 pounds later my levels were pretty good and things were fine - good right? Well...
About 2 months after the wedding we got pregnant! That was fine - but I knew that I needed to tell my doc right away about my high sugar levels. I was still about 30 pounds overweight when I got prego and I ended up being diagnosed with gestational diabetes at 18 weeks. I spent the rest of my pregnancy watching what I ate and eventually taking insulin. I actually consider myself a little lucky to know what it's like to end up on insulin for a short amount of time and what a pain in the ass it is! I don't want to do that again. (I HATE needles!)
Although I did a really good job during my preganacy (I only gained 8 pounds) and my beautiful little girl Harper is healthy and spunky - will all the stress of a new baby and moving to a new home, I gained another 50 pounds in 6 months. Ugh. I'm sure my levels are right back up there and I really need to lose the weight.
We've been so busy with the house and living quite a way out of town with a long commute, that we have been kind of ignoring what's staring us right in the face. But I've been getting a lot of what I call 'signs' lately and I think it's time to get serious. The biggest one was actually a fortune cookie while eating a very bad for me lunch. It says "Anything you do, do it well. The last thing you want is to be sorry for what you didn't do." And as if that wasn't to the point enough, on the back it says "Learn Chinese: Daughter = Nu-er". That thing actually freaked me out a little.
I work for Fox Sports in the backlot of Universal Studios FL, so when I go walking at lunch I walk around the amusement parks. It's great! Lots of bathrooms, interesting things to look at, music everywhere! And I also see a large cross section of America out there. WE ARE FAT!! You wouldn't believe how many at least 40 pound overweight 8 to 12 year olds I see BEING PUSHED AROUND IN STROLLERS!! No wonder this country is getting fatter and fatter every year! I don't want that for Harper and I don't want to get sick and have the reason be because "Mommy couldn't stop eating junk."
So I need to lose some weight before I end up with full blown Type 2. Lucky for me I'm really tall and can eat more calories than most people, but to get to my healthy weight I need to get to at least 175. My goal is 165. Right now I'm at about 250 - so I need to lose about 85 pounds.
The sucky thing - yes, it's true - it's really easy to gain all the weight back. The good thing - I've done it before so I know just how hard I have to work and what works and what doesn't.
