We didn't go to the gym this evening, but knew we needed to exercise. I was starting to slide deeply into "I do not want to exercise" mode when Josh suggested a walk outside. That peaked my interest as I really didn't want to move the coffee table for a DVD or in the mood to do the wii fit and frankly there wasn't much that appealed to me. That is not a surprise though.

We put on our shoes and headed up our rocky driveway and I started huffing and puffing. Why am I breathing so hard? My body started to heat up and I felt the familiar pressure of my body exerting itself and willing against my weight to keep moving. I kept wondering, why is this so hard? I make it through an hour on the elliptical without much problem.

We kept going, slight inclines and I break a sweat. I'm pushing myself up and down the hills as we walk. It feels nice, the wind is blowing the air is cool and warm. I feel like I weigh 5,000lbs. and then it accures to me that when I exercise at the gym a machine is holding my body up and I am moving. It burns calories, it get my heart rate up and it is exercise, however, walking and dare I say jogging is really hard for me. I felt how out of shape I really am on the road with just my body to move my body.

I power walked pumping my arms vigorously in the air, gasping for air and dripping for sweat. I. am. out. of. shape. Obviously.

I'm home now, the sweat is drying and my legs are tingling. I'm ready to keep going. Tomorrow I'll be back on the road.

okay, I'm back. Wow, I should not write posts that say "I will post later" and then never do. I spent the entire weekend outside which was so nice. I can't seem to get enough of it. I've declared this the spring/summer of doing things in nature. Which explains why we are making our outside living area as nice as possible for just that reason.

I spent two summers in Brooklyn and we did not have any outside living space. I remember (fondly) one summer night that we pulled up two chairs in front of the fire escape, turned on wilco, turned on the outdoor lanterns and drank some sort of lemonaide/vodka concoction and it was heaven. I think I soaked my feet in a bucket of cold water. Our apartment would get so hot that we actually considered buying a kiddie pool and putting it in the livingroom. I wish I were kidding. I never took a hot or even warm shower.

So now, we have a small outside area and we plan to get one of those easy set-up blue pools (16x3.9) to float around in. A grill, and some outside furniture. I'm really excited! Josh has been working hard on the other side of the house, clearing weeds and building an area for blueberry bushes and marigolds. He is also thinking about making a place for koi fish.

I've been doing good with my challenge! Friday we went to the gym and did 60 minutes of cardio on the elliptical. Saturday and Sunday I spent all day working outside making this:

(before)

(after)

(strawberries, gerber daisies, and italian parsley)

(chickens and hens)

I had my first challenge weigh-in on saturday:

I'm pretty excited to see the 270's again. I've missed them. Around the lower 270's I can comfortably fit into size 22 jeans. I've been fluctuating a lot this week and aiming for 276 by this coming Saturday.

Wedding! I finally got the invites sent out on Friday! I still have a handful left to get out, but I am so happy to have those finished and hearing that people are starting to get them. I put a lot of thought/time/effort into them and so happy with the outcome.

I also just got off the phone with Paula my dress lady and she has completed it! We are working on a sash Thursday, but after that all we will have left before the wedding is a final fitting.

Food. My eating has been considerably better though I feel like I haven't been eating at home a lot lately. My calories have been around 1,500-1,800.

This is where I'm at today, I didn't exercise yesterday which is unfortunate. When I got home at 5 I felt like a zombie and had no energy to do anything. What is it about sitting at a desk all day staring at a computer that makes me so tired? Oh well. Today, going to the gym for strength training and cardio.

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I am taking a little break from my gardening to blog that i will blog a big post tonight. that's kinda silly. Anywho, I got some really nice flowers today so laying brick for a little planting area in front of the house. Wish me luck, it's hot outside!

Sorry I've been MIA lately, I've been pushing myself to get the wedding invitations designed, printed, assembled and mailed out. I can now say "they're in the mail!" woo!

So, a couple of days ago Krissie (questions for dessert) left me a comment suggesting the Jillian Michaels podcasts and how informative and motivational they are. It took me awhile to find them as they are kind of hidden on itunes, but once I did I downloaded all of them (for free!) and have been listening to the lasted ones working me way through them.

I love them!! I love her advice and how real she is with her advice. I love that she doesn't sugar coat things or be all willy nilly with her weight loss advice. I get so frustrated with the conflicting advice out there about what to eat, when to eat, how fast you should lose weight etc. She doesn't hold back from telling anyone, even the 154 lb. caller who wanted to lose weight for her wedding in 4 weeks that she could easily drop 20 lbs. without crash dieting.

How? 5 hours of intense cardio a week, and a diet strictly of vegetables, lean meat/protein, one of two small servings of good carbs (brown rice, whole grain bread) and one or two servings of vegetables. Stay low on the fats, and sugars. So simple and obvious. I loved it, and I loved that it gave me a new sense of hope for dropping some weight before having to squeeze my thighs into the airplane seats.

At this point, my concern has nothing to do with my wedding dress. It fits perfectly, it was made to fit my body. But, every time I think about going to Europe at my current size, I get anxiety. I also get anxiety about asking Paula (my dress maker) to alter the dress in a few weeks, but I can't worry about those things. I want to be healthier and for some reason listening to Jillian the past couple of days while making invitations has made me more confident about living a healthier life.

I am very sensitive to what people think of me. I worry that people will tink I'm shallow for wanting to slim down only 6 weeks away from my wedding, or think I am unrealistic or that I can't be pleased with myself the way I am. I get comments about "being pretty at any weight" from all around me. I don't find myself unattractive, but my weight bothers me. All the time.

I don't want to feel bad about what people might or might not think about my weight loss efforts. I know I've gone about this the wrong way this whole time and haven't really been serious about it. I want to find my place now as a healthier person and not worry if my friends won't think I'm fun anymore because I don't want to eat badly all the time.

I want to live for a long time, and wear any outfit I want and not worry if my body will take me where I want to do. I have to start believing in myself and stop worrying about what people will think of me and my healthier habits.

I went did a two hour session at the gym on Tuesday and did strength training B something I hadn't done since february 28th! And I felt so weak and it was hard. Too much time had passed. Something else I learned from Jillian in her podcasts is her advice to burn fat with intense cardio and diet so that muscle can be visible.

I like that she doesn't apologize for caring about her health and wanting to have a body she is proud of. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a healthy person. She talks about her weaknesses, "today I eat two packs of newman's peanut butter cups" and while things like that bother her, she tries to figure out why she ate too much. And concludes that she wasn't take care of herself and her needs.

That really hit home for me. I don't take care of myself a lot of the time and fill myself up with the things that make me joyful. I'm working on that.

So anyway, though I've been doing relatively good this week with losing weight I am officially starting a 6 week Jillian inspired challenge. She told the 154lb lady that she could safely lose 20 lbs in four weeks, so I am aiming for at least 25lbs in 6 weeks. That is not with crash dieting.

I need rules with my eating and so I am following her food advice to eat whole foods, organic when possible, lean protein, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. No processed foods, and staying away from butter and oils. I am also doing one hour of intense cardio a day (one day off a week to do leisurely exercise), the 30 day shred, and weight training twice a week. I will weigh-in every Saturday, starting this Saturday.

I am not going to give up this time. I will do this.

I figure the best way to take myself seriously again is to have consistent action that I don't make a big deal about. I always feel about two weeks, a month of losing weight that I've figured it all out. I get cocky and then sabotage myself. I need to rebuild my own trust and see the bigger picture. See past a month, see past 10 lbs, and see where I want to be and how continued actions will get me there.

I hold water like a crazy person. I try not to weigh daily and won't weigh again until the end of the week, but yesterday: 285.5, today: 282.5. And that doesn't even matter. What matters is exercise and being kind to myself. To not race to the finish line, to stop eating too much the day before "I get back on track" and to stop beating myself up for having (lord forbid) a sugar craving. Because everyone has them.

So in that yesterday, eating when I was hungry (ie: less) caused major pee action (tmi). I pee'd about 10 times yesterday. I had a protein shake for breakfast, protein bar for a snack, chicken alfredo for lunch, string cheese, chicken fajitas for dinner and a clif bar. About 1,550 calories.

Exercise did not happen for no good reason. I talked myself out of it in the morning. Came home (tired) and made dinner and then basically fell asleep on josh on the couch. Went to bed at 10pm which is pathetic. I really want to explore my inner dialog with exercise and really get out of my comfort zone with it. When I tell myself "you should exercise" I immediatly recoil. Sure, I've exercised and loved it. I've gotten int he habit of doing it on a regular basis making it easier to keep going, but as soon as I take a couple of days off, it gets really hard to get going again. So hard that the couple of days turns into two weeks.

I have to go to the court house this morning to get finger printed (heh) and we are taking our gym stuff with us to go right after.

What I'm did yesterday was something, but there is a bigger picture and a longer road.

Hello Monday morning. Its nice to see you. Did you have a nice weekend?

I can't complain about mine. It was busy and I felt like I didn't get enough sleep until Sunday and then we gardened. I planted  peas, zucchini, and watermelon. The tomatoes aren't ready for planting yet, and so excited to see the bell peppers (finally) sprouting up.

Gardening is nice to do with your significant other, its fun to watch this thing happen that you did together. Like having a baby. Or not

I did not do anything productive this weekend (aside from gardening and doing good deeds) to help bring me closer to my weight loss goals. It would be really embarassing for me to write (yet) another post about my decisions and any epiphanies I've had about (still) being fat. It's just silly. I can write a good lot about my procrastination, my inability to follow through, or my lack of consistency and it would be a good read, but where does that get me?

At this point, I can only write about actions and about what I am doing. Not what I plan to do or what I want to do or what I should do. Because writing in a blog about weight loss, and re-losing the same 10 lbs. is kind of fruitless for me and when I feel that other people don't take me seriously, I don't take myself seriously. And we all know where that leads.

Facts: I'm getting married in less than 7 weeks. I weigh 285 today. I am blogging instead of exercising. I have a protein shake chilling in the freezer for breakfast. I washed the dishes (something I hate doing) this morning instead of exercising. I am scared of myself, but know I have control. I always get to decide what happens to me, yet I sabotage myself every single day. When I saw the scale at 280, I ate.

Okay, I have a lot to talk about today, but I have a to-do list that is growing and growing. I wanted to talk about health insurance today and my lack of it and my not qualifying for it because I'm...obese and had a heart condition when I was THREE. And trying not to get frustrated by the "teabagging" folks. Where the hell were these people in the past eight years? I'll tell you: yelling back at me when I (we) protested the unjust war and the debt that is crushing us all , but yet our current president spends money to help the USA (talk about patriotic) and now they are angry.

I'm angry too. I want health insurance.

I had a few comments lately regarding getting married and how calm I am. I am calm, I will remain calm, but it somehow just occurred to me that we're getting married in 7 (seevvveen) weeks. I thought it was 9 weeks a couple of days ago? People are starting to get belligerent with me about not having the invites send out.

We are having friends over for an Indian dinner tomorrow evening and I'm cleaning and preparing for that, redesigning the invites (printing those out myself), working on my new etsy shop, catching up with my (very) neglected inbox(es), planting a garden, volunteering this weekend, dress fitting saturday and design work friday and oh! I am weighing in tomorrow and really (really) need to get on a regular exercise schedule asap because. I'M GOING TO BE A BRIDE AND THEN RIDING IN SCARY AIRPLANES AND THESE THIGHS NEED TO BE SMALLER.

woah, not freaking out. nope, not me I will be back tomorrow, or tonight. Or when I realize that procrastination has gotten me nowhere in life.

I got an email from Rachel at Brown University asking if I would blog to promote her survey. This is what it reads:

I'm working on my master's degree in Public Health (at Brown Univ. in Rhode Island) with an emphasis in behavioral nutrition. Long story short, I created an online survey about how work environment affects women's eating habits, and I was wondering if you might be willing to post my survey on your blog? This is a project for one of my classes, and it's completely anonymous. The kinds of questions I'm asking are things like:

- During a normal social conversation with people at work, how often do you talk about what, when, or how much to eat?

- How often do you think that the kinds of food you eat at work are different than the kinds you eat at home?

- On a normal day, is there food available in a common area at work?

It's not a test-- no judgment attached to any of the questions. I just want to feel out the blogging community since blogs tend to create a great community for motivation.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY

I don't currently work in an office environment (except 7 hours a week), but I remember how it was. We had some of the best sub sandwiched ever literally next door to our office, the best bagels, the best everything within reach every day. Some weeks I would go through phases where eating healthfully at work was much easier than it was at home, and then I would get in the habit of my daily enormous sandwich or my very skinny co-worker would convince me to go in with him for the 2 for 1 sundae's at baskin robbins.

Some weeks I would do really well, I would bring my lunch to work, or order sushi, but the delicious food from around the corner always called out to me. And then it was an office birthday.

Does your job environment affect your health?

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check it out! I have sproutlings! When I discovered this last night, you would have thought I won the lottery. I was jumping around and yelling like a crazy lady. I have been so nervous about this resolution I made in January. To eat vegetables out of my own garden.

I am not garden material, I have a black thumb, I kill plants. So to see sprouts from seeds I planted just a week ago is a big deal to me and I will probably bore the socks off of anyone I encounter to tell about this. Now that I know I can germinate seeds, I don't want to kill them. I've been researching and reading everything I can about organic gardening. Composts, sigh. I'm not there yet.

This has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss directly, but I feel that everything is related and interconnected. How will this garden help me to be healthier?

* Physical labor. Gardening is hard work. Josh has been cutting down weeds over the weekend and next I will be helping him remove said weeks plus shoveling up potential garden land. Not to mention all of the weeding, planting, watering etc. that is involved.

* Eating better. Maybe I've watched too much or read too much about chemicals in food, but it really bothers me. It bothers me that food that is supposed to be good for us has had the DNA messed with to look prettier in the store, has had chemicals sprayed on them to kill bugs. Nothing really compares to garden vegetables, they are totally unequal and far superior in taste to something grown many many miles away. This is a whole other post, but did you know one of the monster food corps (Monsanto) is trying to pass a law  prohibiting home gardening? This happens to be the same corporation that went through a milk lawsuit a few years back for their hormone usage and unethical treatment of cows. Sigh.

* Focus on something besides myself, my eating issues, and being fat. Have you had those days when your soul is filled up, you've done something good and you feel good about it? For me, those days are spent being creative, helping others, reading a good book, listening to music or spending time with people I enjoy and those are the times that I don't think or obsess over food. Finding ways to fill voids that don't involve food can be really beneficial to losing weight. I know that I overeat to keep myself from being happy, but when I do things that make me feel good I don't want to overeat. The more of these things I do, the less important overeating becomes. Does that makes sense? I feel like I rambled that point out, but doing this makes me feel good, it gives me confidence and makes me feel like I can make things happen.

I'm forcing myself to do this every week, well, forcing myself to remember and stick with it. I lack commitment, and tend to "forget" to stick with things especially when the scale reads higher than the week before.

This week its easy to post, because the scale went down, but I want to post no matter what. I chose Thursdays randomly a couple of weeks ago to post and when I saw the scale this week (not at all a new number for me) I ran and got the camera.

So, camera weigh-ins every Thursday. I need to keep track of this because I could be 290 and call 286 a loss, but I've been 286. Its not a real loss if I'm just re-losing the same weight.

My goal was to lose 5 lbs this week, which is a lot, but I did it:

hm that scale is dirty! Its been through a lot and I rarely clean it. I will clean it before the next weigh-in though, thats just gross. This is the same scale I've used since the birth of this blog. It has seen 308+, 290, 280, 270, and 265. In the past two and a half years.

I met my goal this week and I'll admit two things: one I didn't do much of the second part of the weight loss battle which is exercise. I don't have any real reason or excuse. I followed my rules, eating when I'm hungry, stopping when I'm full which I've talked about this week and a lot about since reading Geneen Roth's emotional eating book, but for the most part I just mentally kept track of my eating. Occasionally I would write down what I ate, but I know how I feel on days when I eat enough. How it feels to have a day that leads to weight loss.

So there it is: 280.5. Next week, I'm aiming for 276.5 ish.  And yes, not only am I trying to lose weight for better health, but I want to look damn good at the wedding. Eight weeks left!

So this week I did good with eating, and this coming week I will do good with eating and exercise.