Irritation

I'm getting irritated.

It's as if either everyone is way too polite or no one knows what "healthy" is anymore.

I've been on a diet...excuse me "life style change"

at one point a couple years ago (when I first moved to Phoenix) I was depressed, had a horrible living situation, and eating crap. I gained a ton of weight. I got a wii fit and lost ten pounds of that. Kept it off for awhile and then had to move all of my belongings up to a third floor of an apartment building when I moved out of horrible living situation. Lost another ten, kept it off for the most part. I was curvey but no one ever called me fat (technically obese/overweight according to BMI at the time).

Met Evan, current husband extraordinaire. Kept the weight off but became really sensitive of my size...especially since the man could wear MY PANTS.

We celebrated our one month together in style and I ended up gaining 8 lbs. Oy.

Adopted Evan's lifestyle of eating for allergies and working out with him. Lost 20 lbs.

Took a break, gained about 6 back. Still in overweight/obese land.

Got married lost those 6 and then some for my wedding. Yay. Gained the some back over the course of honeymoon. Boo.

Started a lifestyle of working out twice a day and only eating 1100 calories. No results...misery.

Decided to do something safe and drastic and now the weight is pouring off and someone hit my eating reset button.

I eat really healthy right now and everyone comments on it.

"Are you on a diet?"

Yeah

"Well, you don't need to be"

and I want to scream because yes I do. I'm still away from a normal BMI for my height. I am closer everyday, but everyone this whole time (besides Evan who knew what everything was and knew it was unhealthy) has told me I don't need to do anything. Now especially since I am super close to my goal. But I was not healthy before and everyone wanted me to eat like them and look like them and I refuse to do it. I know people think I am weird now.

I don't care. America has a warped perspective about the whole healthy eating and weight thing and I was a perfect example of this.

I'm almost there, I'm the skinniest I've been in I don't even know how long. I'm inching into middle school territory if I really think about it..I think.

But I am finally getting happy with how I look and feeling way healthy. I may even post the pics of my journey with my face blurred (even though there are already pics of my face) but they were me and I am proud of how it's looking now.

If not I'll just dig up photos from the past few years and scan them in to show that kind of difference.

I am happier now with myself but this crazy diet is almost over and then comes the maintenance for 3 weeks and then living the rest of my life. I'm kind of terrified about this.

But I believe in me!

Life Styles A-changin'

When my job started up again, I got into a huge funk.

I couldn't get anything done. My weight was going back up. I was super stressed. There was too much to do and no time to do it.

Last week I went to my Geek Girl Goal Setting (nearly late and rushed) and said I wanted a schedule, to catch up on things, and to calm down.

I am starting this goal this week. There has been lots of things going on around here and I wanted to address some of them.

Goal #1
Catching up on the house.
It's almost there. Evan and made more work for ourselves and bought a bunch of things from IKEA and we've been putting them together throughout the weekend. I now own a king sized bed, two nightstands, and two tall dressers from the MALIM collection of IKEA.
The Kitchen is clean. The living room is clean. The bathroom (thank god) is clean. We moved out office into the bigger extra bedroom, which still needs to be cleaned and the former office needs to be cleaned out along with the closet. Our bedroom is a work in progress from all of the new IKEA stuff and moving out my old set. Which now needs to be craigslisted.
The house is almost there, and that actually takes a lot of stress out. I can come home and relax a bit now.
Still need to clean that car though.

Goal #2 MI reception stuff
Invites are mailed. My ring issue is being resolved (via a new ring, that is almost like my other one just more expensive) as is Evan's ring issue. Surgical grade steel ring = no allergic reaction. I also have a nice shiny plain band too. I bought plane tickets as well. The only few things left are to do the photo books and print photos from the wedding and honey moon. I will also have to get my dress altered since I have lost enough weight where it is sagging a bit. I'm going to call an alteration place this week.

Goal #3 Art
oooh boy. I've been THINKING about art. Not much doing. I owe a friend a prize picture, still need to do my next creative grab bag, Evan wants some help with a game, and my friend Connie wants to talk to me about a webcomic. I am hoping to sketch out the prize pic this week along with the sketch for my grab bag. Evan will be next week and Connie whenever I talk to her.

Goal #4 A schedule.
It will be done this week. I am a cheer coach now and have to use time wisely after school and during. I want to schedule in art time, cleaning time, relaxing time, and evan time.

Goal #5 Dietary Changes
I'm on a pretty restrictive diet right now, but it's working. I'm being creative with cooking and spices and am not bored at all. I'm over the halfway mark (if I do it for the 30 days, I may go the full 45...currently on day 20) and have been working out how I'm going to do this when I'm allowed other foods. I have good ideas and need to start writing them down somewhere so I don't forget how to do this. Also: tea and stevia are my new best friends. I have finally fallen in love with tea and drink it ALL the time.

Lots of things to do, not enough time to do it...but I'm getting there and enjoying it finally. I've reached some sort of inner peace I guess.

I'll just keep going.

Weight Loss and Exercise

So I don't believe I've made it a secret that I've been on the quest to build myself a better body. I'm still doing that, it's been about a year since I started and I spent most of this school year maintaining what I lost over the summer.

Maintaining is just as hard as losing if not harder. I'm not even down all the way yet! I can't imagine what it will be like when I do lose everything.

So I've decided to step it up a notch this month, the last month of school, and try to kick-start the weight loss again. I lost about 2 lbs last month and I figured if I can lose even just 3 more I'll be rocking it out.

It's not even the weight I'm concerned about with anymore, but when lbs melt they show off the smexy muscles I've been building.

And they are there, oh yes, they are. I was putting on the pjs last night when I caught a glance at my stomach. My eyes bulged out of my head. I HAVE HIPBONES. There is not any padding whatsoever between my hip bones and skin except the normal things. From what I've read this is a precurser to ABS. I never even dreamed.

It's with good cause I never dreamed. I was on my way to sever obesity. Especially when I moved down to AZ. I was in a not good living situation having a very rough first teaching year. My solace was coldstone creamery and cheese. Plus whatever else I could scrounge up at school and there was always something.

I ballooned. I got a wii fit for christmas (not a hint, I wanted one) and I nearly choked when I got on it the first time. I worked with it and lost 10 lbs but I was still way over weight. Then I moved which actually caused me to lose more weight accidentally because I was carrying heavy boxes up 4 flights of stairs for a week making six or seven trips up and down them each day.

Then I met Evan and I make his allergies no secret that my new diet sped up my weight loss. That and he was a gym rat and part of our courtship involved going to the gym after work.

So fast forward to now. I did some math the other day because I have weight and measurments I have kept track of for years. From my heaviest I'm 28.6 lbs lighter. Then from when I lost my 10 lbs (I wouldn't even measure myself at my heaviest waaaay too depressing) If you take all my measurements (bust, waist, hips, glutes, thighs, arms) I have lost 21 inches off of my body. I am quite literally a smaller person. I take up 21 inches less of space!

But my quest is far from over. Slowly my weight is changing and my measurements are slightly moving around. In good ways. Things are reapportioning themselves around my body and I got about 10 more lbs to go until I hit my goal or 15 if I want to hit my uber goal. But I'm not too concerned with the uber goal because if I feel as happy as now in 10 lbs I think I'll just stay there.

Weight wise now though I am back to being a junior in high school. In 10 more lbs I'll be a freshman again. Which that's fun to think about in that way too.

I feel like I'm rambling now. I'm just way excited and I am going to lose my weight and I will be the best that I can be.

A Day in the Life

Why is chartreuse not red?

It's a blasted pukey green color and yet the word is so pretty it needs to be red.

Any ways, I've been doing a lot of reading and exercising lately. I've got a few books going on the should help with the teaching woes (woes of which there are many, but I do not feel like bitching about, this blog is not about bitching) and a few about weight loss and dieting.

This weight loss and dieting thing is really interesting to me. I bought one book on raising a child to not have self-image woes. (Not preggers, no worries) but I wanted to see what they said, what I could learn from it, and how to avoid perhaps doing to my future child or children what was done to me. I feel as if I have a better grasp on that. I also bought a book about a diet blogger, Dietgirl, she is a sassy Australian lass who was at one point 350 lbs. The whittled herself down to 175 by the end of the book. The whole thing was all the ups and downs (literally) she had in her battle of the bulge and she won. It took her six years but she really did it.

This speaks to me because I am on that path as well. I was never so big or even classified as obese, but I had been in the overweight category for a bit and was right sick of it. So with Evan supporting me I have kicked a lot of flabbiness to the curb. By no means am I done, but I have tried on all of my clothes again and had to put a bunch of clothes into the too big pile. t was quite ridiculous. I few more pants got freed from the bin (my stash of smaller clothes from yesteryear that I was too ashamed to throw out) and I actually went to Goodwill today and bought a couple pairs of shorts and a new pair of khakis. The khakis I had made me look huge because they were all baggy. From this shopping trip I believe I'm officially down a size, but women's sizes are all messed up and I tried on 5 different things all in the same size and a few were baggy, some were too tight, and others just right. But technically, I'm down two sizes. I never bought anything of the highest size (never wanted to admit it) but I was definitely two sizes bigger.

As happy as I am that I am getting healthy and looking, quite frankly, fantabulous, I have these spurts of awkwardness. I don't know how to look in a lot of these clothes. I feel somewhat uncomfortable in my new skin because I am not used to being healthy and fit. Evan's sister apparently called me tiny over the phone the other day. TINY. Folks, I would have never ever used this word to describe myself. EVER. If I am "tiny" now just think in the next ten more pounds I want to lose, and then the last ten after that? I might be invisible!

Also, never ever get sized at Victoria's Secret. That blood store had me wearing the wrong undergarments for the past few years. I highly suggest Soma as they have the comfiest stuff in the universe.

Evan and I went on a lovely hike on Saturday at the Tonto National Forest and I will hopefully put up just a few of my favorite pictures from that hike. One of them being the one that is currently my new desktop backround on my computer. Yes, I am a nerd. I don't care.

Toodles for now, anyone who is reading!

Rollerblading

So I started learning how to rollerblade lately. Evan had been wanting to go and awhile back I was at this used clothing store and I found a pink and black pair of really nice rollerblades in size 8's that came with wrist pads.

It was fate really.

So we practiced around the apartment a few times..the apartment is scary all the sidewalks are short and hilly. Not exactly the best for a noob.

So finlly I went and bought some knee and elbow pads because just the wrist pads were not going to cut it. Just practicing with only the wrist guards was like courting knee death.

So it is finally cooling down in this desert and we went to this long sidewalk area right by the expressway. It was perfect and I FINALLY started to get the hang of it.

We went again tonight but it was way more difficult because Evan made me skate all the way to the long sidewalk which included me crossing a street and several business driveways. The sidewalks in this state has these bumpy things where it meets the road so I basically had this obstacle course to go through to even get to my blessed skate area.

I made it there in one piece. Thank goodness.

Evan had me practice some more moves and I ended up crashing down. Thank goodness for those pads! I would have been torn to pieces.

Had to go back through the obstacle course again to even get back home and this was made more difficult because I kept getting toe cramps and had to sit and take my boot off for a bit. Evan ended up pushing me down the sidewalk for a bit so we could actually get home.

Then we capped the evening by playing some wii Resort Sports.

Good times.

Diet and Weight Loss

In my last blog, I wrote a lot about diet and exercise regimen...which I won't all the time with this one but I do feel the need to talk about since it is such an important part of my life right now.
When I moved across the the country I gained weight...now I had already been gaining weight but moving and the stress of being a first year teacher became a catalyst for some major gaining. I was FIFTY pounds over weight.

Fifty.

ugh.

My parents brought me a Wii Fit for Christmas which I did after they left pretty religiously and I dropped 10 pounds. But due to a housing situation which I like to block from my memory completely I had to stop.

Moving eventually, I actually dropped another 5 lbs because I was hauling things every day for a couple weeks up 3 flights of stairs over and over. It jumped started my weight loss program again. I was excited to lose another 5 lbs...I thought I had gained everything back but I hadn't.

Then I met Evan, who has CHANGED my life forever. He has been such a positive influence on my life, I don't even know how it happened and it all happened soooo quickly. But I have never been happier.

Evan is a very conscientious eater, he has to be. He has a lot of allergies to food that cause him discomfort. So I started making meals that the both of us could eat. Which, he is pretty much allergic to unhealthy things that this made me eat a lot better. We went on a trip to celebrate our one month anniversary and I ended up gaining a bunch of weight during that ridiculously fun weekend. But it also woke me up. I couldn't keep doing this to my body. I was dating a very attractive, skinny, active, healthy eating boyfriend. I didn't want to be this round ball standing next to him.

So I became active with him. I do love being active on my own and I had been hiking and running and whatnot off and on. But I started going to the gym with him, we went on walks, did yoga, the wii fit more, my apartment gym, swimming, volleyball, badminton, etc. Just doing SOMETHING.

I also started paying attention to my diet. After a few issues I found out that I am lactose intolerant. Most of the dairy things that I like are bad for me anyway so I don't eat them anymore. I know I could if I got lactaid or something, but I just avoid it. Soy is another problem. It affects my moods, scarily so. I think actually it helped put me into a more severe depression back when I was in college. So I avoid foods with any soy in them now as well.

Evan and I moved in together too, at my apartments. We push each other now when we feel lazy. With school starting I've been doing my exercise in the morning, but a few times I've done some in the evening with him as well. We are really watching what we eat too and how much. We were both chowing down on things just because they were healthy and we were eating too much.

So with all of this in mind I now only have a mere 20 lbs left. I am halfway to my goal. Every day I weigh myself on my Wii Fit and everyday it's been going down ever so slightly. Sometimes it's up but then it goes back down. And I know I am doing things right.

I have this bin of clothing that I've kept over the past few years. Pants, shorts, t-shirts, and some bathing suits that I couldn't fit in because I had gained weight and I swore to myself that some day I would get back into them so I kept them in this small bin in the back of my closet. I had freed just a few things from the bin and I tried on the rest of my clothes and got rid of things that were too big and binned anything else that was too small.

Last night I decided to try things on from the bin, because it's been over a month since I tried things on. I freed up a bunch of stuff last night!

Two pairs of dress pants
Two pairs of shorts
Three t-shirts

I still have a bunch of stuff left, but some of the stuff I only need to lose 5 more pounds to fit into. Some things I was actually able to pry up my legs and buckle (even thought I looked stuffed into them like a sausage) but the fact remains, I used to not even be able to get them up my thighs. I now can pull them up and buckle them.

Next month I am going to try on the contents of my closet again...there should be a few things that I shouldn't even bother wearing anymore because they'll be way too big. There are also a few things that I love and would be willing to get tailored to let me keep wearing them.

I have about a month and a half before my parents come to visit me. They haven't seen me in person since March and that was before I met Evan. I want to be 10-12 lbs less by the time they get here. I want them to see how healthy and active I've become and I want them to be proud of me.

Because I am proud of me.