Kim’s Journey to a Healthier Place

Yesterday was my usual weigh in day, but we didn’t have our WW meeting. The church where we meet was having a fall festival. I unofficially weighed in at home. I thought it would be safe since my scale always weighs heavier than WW’s scale.  I’m down 1.5 lbs this week according to my bathroom scale. Awesome!

This morning I went to the dentist for my routine 6 month cleaning. The first words out of the hygienist’s mouth were, “Have you lost weight? You look great!” This lady sees me every 6 months for crying out loud. I can’t believe she noticed!

Last night I went to an after-hours work dinner with Wonderful Husband. I see the people he works with about 2-3 times a year at various functions. I must say that last night I felt a bit ambushed. I wasn’t expecting anyone to notice my weight loss simply because I don’t see them often. I know that for me to notice someone’s weight loss it would have to be a lot if I only see them a couple times a year. Wonderful Husband actually had co-workers at the party asking who he brought with him. They thought maybe I was a new employee because they didn’t recognize me! Holy Cow! At least their first thoughts weren’t that he had a girlfriend on the side. (c: All night I had women asking how I did it, how much lost, how long, etc. In a lot of ways it felt great, and then I though it will be nice when it’s not a big deal. Ya know, when everyday I’m just a normal sized person, not the girl who is WAY smaller than she was the last time we saw her. Does that make sense? Really I should savor the compliments. I know maintenance is right around the corner and the compliments will stop once the pounds stop melting off.

I really didn’t have a game plan prepared before walking into the party because I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were all kinds of delectables sitting out before dinner and an amazing spread for dinner. I ate most of my points on the appetizers (which, to me, are usually better than entree stuff anyways) and just tasted items from the dinner spread. It was buffet-style, of course. I’m very happy with my selections and felt no anxiety with the evening. I have plenty of weekly allowance points to handle any extra points I may have consumed. Besides, who could feel anxious with all the compliments! I hope everyone reading this has an ambush moment. You all deserve recognition for all your hard work!

I’ve got the Recipes page up and running now. I added a few, but I need to sit down with my recipe collection and add my favorites. Three of them are for pumpkin fare (the Heavenly Pumpkin Cookies are to die for-I can’t stop eating them, and they’re so easy!), and an Anytime Frittata that I created last night. It was quite tasty, too. If you try any of them, let me know how you liked them. I’ll get more recipes up soon!

By the way, we had our second open house on Sunday, and I didn’t eat a single piece of candy. I did, however, chew sugar-free gum to avoid the temptation. I’ve really been diggin’ the Extra Polar Ice flavor. It hits the spot!

The Halloween party was great, and I didn’t blow it. I only had one beer and stayed away from the super fattening foods. Yesterday I may have gone over my daily points and used maybe 5 of my weekly allowance points. We were at the party for about 5 hours so I’d say I was very successful. Grated I chewed 3 peices  of sugar-free gum over the last 3 hours or so to keep me from munching on all the wonderful finger foods, but hey, I did it. I’m proud of myself. 

Our costumes were rockin’! We were by far the most elaborate. Several people commented on my weight loss in surprise, asking how much I’d lost. It felt great.

Tomorrow Wonderful Husband and I are going to a Halloween Costume Party. He’s going to be a pirate, and I, his wench. In a way this is bit of a “reveal” to friends of ours. We haven’t seen many of them in a couple months, and I’m sure I look much different! We’ll see if they notice! The costume is WAY more revealing than anything I would have attempted before.  Yay… for new found confidence! Pirate Wonderful Husband looks awesome! He tried his costume on last night and it was like he was a different person with the outfit, wig, and beard. Everyone’s gonna love his costume! I’m pretty sure this is my first costume party as an adult. It should be tons of fun!

Notes to self: Eat something before the party and only visit the food spread once. Taste only things that you don’t get to eat often. Three Mich Ultras max. That’s 5 points. (I don’t drink often so it doesn’t take much to make me tipsy.)

I’m not a nutritionist or professional in the area of diet or exercise. I don’t claim to do everything right, but I’m glad to share some of my experiences in losing these 40 pounds. I admit, it’s been super fast with huge weight losses. I’ve often wondered if I’m losing too fast. I guess being young and making some good choices have helped my body lose quickly. I DO eat all my daily points, and quite often, eat some if not all my extra weekly allowance points.

What are you eating? 

Notice my title is ”Kim’s Journey to a Healthier Place”, not “Kim’s Journey to a Skinnier Place”. This includes making wise food choices. One observation I’ve notice is the trap we fall into about our points. What we eat is just as important as how much we eat. A lot of people want to buy tons of 100 calorie packs and live off them. While they’re staying in their points range, they don’t lose much weight. Most 100 cal pks are still junk food, just smaller amounts. (Of course they’re fine on occasion.) Our bodies don’t work efficiently on that kind of stuff. I got in that rut too and didn’t feel as well or lose as much. I stopped buying 100 cal packs completely and replaced them with grapes, part-skim cheese sticks, bananas, whole grain crackers, carrot sticks, sugar-free pudding, yogurt, etc. These foods at least have some nutritional content whether it be fiber, vitamins, or calcium. Our bodies respond best to whole foods (i.e., minimally processed foods.) Changing these food choices made a big difference for me.

Avoid becoming ravenous 

One of my weaknesses is the bottomless pit syndrome (i.e., overeating). To combat this I started eating 3-4 small meals before dinner. My husband and I like to make dinner a heavier meal than lunch, so lunch for me is broken down into mini meals. I’ll eat breakfast before I get ready for work which usually consists of a high-fiber cereal (Fiber One Oat Clusters is my fav), with 1% milk, a Breakfast Lean Pocket, or a Smart Ones breakfast sandwich. My first snack at about 10:00 is something 1-2 points from the foods I listed above. I then eat lunch between 12:00-1:00 which is usually about 2 serving of soup (1-3 points), a frozen meal, or leftovers, and then a third snack shortly after lunch or about 3:00. Then for dinner I cook something more substantial. To manage my points I typically divide the number of points I have available in half (for example, if I have 22 points, 22/2 = 11.) I’ll eat half of my points in the morning/afternoon and save the other half for dinner. Of course there are days where is doesn’t balance out that way and I make adjustments.

Move! 

I try to work out between 2-4 days a week. I’m currently training for a 5K and doing a lot of cardio and stretching. I really need to start weights, but I just don’t like doing them. I’ll get there!

 The Ultimate Challenge

If you’re like us, you eat out quite a bit. At restaurants, I pretty much never eat everything on the plate. If you’ve ever seen how many points are packed into restaurant fare, you’d understand. Dotti has a great resource of restaurant menus and their point values. It’s SHOCKING! I always take some home or just leave some on my plate- even if I think it’s something healthy. Turns out, most of the time I’m not hungry anymore. I’ll even drape my dirty napkin over my plate so that I stop picking when I’ve reached the point I’m satisfied. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy hamburgers, wings, pizza, etc, just a lot less often. Maybe 1-2 times a month using my method of madness I just described. You’ve already paid for the food whether you eat all of it or not. It can go in the trash can or on your trunk. You decide! (I live by this motto when I eat out.)

Summary 

So to summarize, these are my daily notes to myself. Eat nutritious foods. Stay away from empty calories, even if they’re within your points, approach eating-out with caution, move, and drink water. That’s how I’ve gotten this far!

Cheesy hips… I don’t really mean like cottage cheese hips, ya know cellulite. Or am I?

Yesterday (also the day I officially lost 40 lbs) I had an older lady come into my office who was petite and chubby. I was making small talk about our first day of cooler weather and how chili sounded like a good idea for dinner. I then asked her if she’d ever tried spaghetti squash. I had fixed some up the night before (it’s one of my all time favorite dishes) and preceded to tell her how I prepare it (I’ll post recipe later). I was telling her some people put their chili over spaghetti squash (I read that on Roni’s site.) My recipe calls for mozzarella cheese and butter (no chili). The little lady remarked, “I could tell you love cheese by the looks of those hips!” OMG! If she ONLY knew how hard I’ve worked to get these hips this small. Then as she left her appointment, the last thing she said as she walked out the door was, “Don’t eat too much cheese. Your hips won’t be able to handle it!” OMG! I was shocked more than hurt by her comments. It has helped me to not get too comfortable with  the amount of weight I’ve lost. It would be real easy to say I’ve come so far, and if this is all I accomplish, I’m okay with that. I AM happy to be where I am, but I’m still striving to be healthier, and I mean according to body weight, exercise, and nutrition. So comments like hers are just a little kick in the butt to remind me that this journey continues on. There’s no stopping now.

 Side note: If anyone else is using this theme, how on earth do you edit the “About” on the sidebar? Thanks!

Tonight was WI night for me. I lost another 1.5 pounds for a total of 40 pounds! Right on! The whole time I was sitting at my WW meeting if felt like I could explode because I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Wonderful Husband. He’s been such a huge support. I know he’s worked very hard about not grumbling about the extra time it takes me to count points or the healthier foods I buy and fix.According to the WW chart, I can set my goal at a max of 160 lbs, which is only 7 lbs from where I am right now. Woo Hoo! My personal goal is actually 20 more lbs from where I am today. I was thinking that I’d have to make it to 150 lbs for my WW goal. Bonus…that’s 10 lbs less to lose before getting to lifetime! What an awesome day!

Does it? Last week I was a participant in a health fair at our local mall and bought candy for people to take as they walked through our tables of information. I had one old gentleman come by and grab 4 HUGE handfuls of the candy and stuff it into a bag he had from another table. He about emptied my basket, so I went next door to Target to buy some more candy. The Tootsie Roll mix is a weakness of mine. I didn’t buy it the first time on purpose. I had already been chewing gum all morning so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat the candy in the basket. Well, I mistakenly bought the Tootise mix at Target and took it back to my booth. I did well that day with my survival gum. Well, Wonderful Husband and I are trying to sell our house, and I took what was left over home so that I could leave out a bowl for visitors at our open house yesterday. Guess who ate more than the guests. Me, of course. As I sat at the computer I swear it was calling my name from the other room. “Kim…..Kim…. we’re your favorites! Come and get us!” To make matters worse, the tuna sandwich I had for lunch wasn’t very good, and I knew the candy was good. Last night the candy dish was emptied into a canister and placed in the cabinet. It won’t be calling my name anymore. Atleast not until next week’s open house.

My name is Kim, and I’m a 28 year old on a journey to a healthier place. All my life I’ve struggled with my weight. Even in grade school I can remember being larger than the other kids. My first memory of being overweight was my first day of kindergarten. I remember sitting in a circle on the floor with the other students while parents dropped of their kids. Looking around the room I felt like the big monster in comparison to the other kids- the “big monster!” It’s unbelievable to me how self-aware I was  at such a young age. I can’t believe that was the image I had of myself in kindergarten. In the third grade I remember a habit I had of putting my hands up under the bottom of my shirt and holding onto the bottom of it so that it wouldn’t cling to my stomach. I thought it would make me look smaller if people couldn’t see my belly roll. I did this for years. In middle school and high school I began yo-yo dieting. I stayed active in high school with after school activities and went to the gym pretty regularly, but I still never lost much. In college I joined Crew as a freshman and lost a few pounds from running laps in an orange orchard while inhaling gnats. Good times. I only stayed with if for one season because I saw there was a lot more to college than 4 hours of Crew, six days a week. It was fun while it lasted.

The spring semester of my sophomore year, I found out that I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). While it sounds like an issue of having cysts on the ovaries, that’s only a symptom. PCOS is really a hormone disorder that causes sporadic menstrual cycles, hair growth, weight gain, cysts on the ovaries, etc. Excess body weight makes the symptoms more pronounced. My biggest concerns were that PCOS is the number one cause of fertility issues (because of the cysts and bizarre menstrual cycles), and more than 50% of women with PCOS will have diabetes or pre-diabetes before age 40 (www.4women.gov). My family tree is riddled with cancer, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. For me, PCOS sounded like a guarantee that I would get diabetes some day or another. I was determined not to let it get me. I lost about 30 pounds through exercise and eating right. That’s when I met my wonderful husband.

That was about 7 years ago. Since that time I’ve lost and gained the same 40 pounds. I always ask myself when I’m healthier and leaner, “Why do I always gain back the weight I lose when I feel so much better, and I really don’t miss eating everything in sight?” I think I may have discovered why. I honestly feel that I have an eating disorder.  Roni recently posted about binge eating as an eating disorder and I know I have one! I would eat far beyond feeling full until I felt overstuffed or sick, and I would eat alone because I was embarrassed of the amount of food I would consume. I never knew what hunger was because I was eating as much as I could every single meal. I don’t know how I didn’t weigh more. I guess I stayed just active enough that I didn’t weigh as much as the house.

Since marrying my wonderful husband, I’ve graduated from grad school, started a new job and joined Weight Watchers. I’m very proud of how far I’ve come. Everyday I’m making new strides. One of the biggest is realizing that I really don’t some of the foods I binged on. I don’t like most french fries and tater tots after all. I always thought I did and ate them because they were “bad.” They’ve received negative attention due to their greasy reputation; therefore, I wanted more of them. Now I just don’t care for them. What an enlightening moment. I don’t miss them. It’s amazing what you find out when you really taste your food.

So here I go. Check out my Progress page to see how I’m doing. Feel free to send me a virtual “kick in the butt” or “high-five” for a job well done. I’m well on my way with my journey to a healthier place. Won’t you join me?