Picture Day

Thursday was good.

I controlled myself at the restaurant (it was tapas, which was helpful!). Afterward, despite really wanting to go home because it was frigid outside, I went to the gym for a great 45 mins strength / 25 mins cardio workout. I would have stayed longer but it was getting late and I had to get up early this morning! When I came home I made myself a delicious pumpkin yogurt – plain low fat yogurt, a dab of canned pumpkin, brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and 1/4 cup of Kashi Crunch. Mmmm, so yummy! So yummy, in fact, that I made it again for breakfast :)

Today there are two challenges: eating out for lunch (that rescheduled meeting from Wednesday), and the wedding this evening. I know I can do it, though. For lunch, I'll order a garden salad with feta, olives and grilled chicken – I'll go light on the feta and won't bother with dressing. Total points: maybe 6ish, fewer if I can. Easy peasy!

The meal tonight is a bit more of an unknown, but I'm hoping that since it's a wedding it will boil down to soup / salad / meat / veggies / starch / dessert. I can handle that. I'll just lay off the bread, and (trying to drill this into my head) not finish everything. That many courses is far more than any normal person needs! So I don't need to finish the whole soup, all of the meat, all of the starch. I'll load up on the healthy salad toppings, avoid most of the unhealthy ones (who knows what there'll be – cheese, nuts, etc.), and load up on the veggies that come with the main. Dessert we'll see about. Perhaps I have the control to only eat half of it. I will try very hard!

As a fun aside, here's a pic of us on Valentine’s Day (we took it a couple of days after, but close enough – we got dressed up just for the pic actually!):

My hair was a little psycho but I'm still in love with the dress! :)

Deep Breath

Weigh-in results: 156.4 lbs

Translation: Just squeaked in under 157, but I'm at least going in the right direction.

Thanks to Jen, Marie and Sara for the encouraging (and butt-kicking) words yesterday. I don't know why I let myself get so overwhelmed with everything, but I eventually snapped out of it.

Another bump in the road last night though... I am embarrassed to tell everyone, especially after my butt-kicking, but I am DETERMINED to not let it affect me, so I might as well just document it and move on.

I ate a healthy supper, then went to Noah's (health food store) to pick up some things. I found dried mango, a 2 pt licorice that I planned on making my treat that night, and a couple other things. I opened the mango package, decided to have a quarter of it (70 cals)... and during the course of a car-ride to Scarborough ended up eating the whole thing. (SCREW UP #1.)

The car-ride led us to a friend's house, where she is laid up with a broken leg. While we were there her mom fed us samosas, dried peas, crackers, pineapple and OJ (this was completely unexpected!). I felt so awkward that I ate a lot of this out of politeness. (SCREW UP #2.)

Next scene: At home, J has dropped me off while he goes and returns the AutoShare car. I am feeling supremely shitty and stressed about having wasted SO many of my flex points on my friend's mom's snacks. In my despair, I end up eating two licorice sticks, a 2 pt Cadbury Thin, and a crap-load of cookies. (SCREW UP #3.)

I think things escalated precisely because it was Wednesday. Wednesday is the absolute WORST day for me to screw up because it's the day my points reset. Screwing up on Wednesday means that I have no flex points left for the rest of the week. This is an especially bad thing THIS week because I have a wedding to attend.

So. This is my CONSTANT pattern. It happens all the time: Meredi screws up Wednesday, and ends up blowing the WHOLE week. It does too much psychological damage for me to face the rest of my week without my flex points. It means that I blow them all really quickly, because I'm bummed about not having enough, and even after I've blown through all 35, I don't stop.

Instead, this week, I'm going to pretend that last night never happened. And pretending like it didn't happen doesn't mean pretending to pretend it didn't happen, but still having the flex points evidence in the back of my mind, weighing me down, at all times. I am starting today ABSOLUTELY fresh, as if last night didn't exist -- I still have 35 flex points this week. I am on track for today -- healthy breakfast, healthy lunch, carefully portioned restaurant dinner, workout afterward (no matter how tired I am).

And tomorrow, I'm going to go meal by meal too. Healthy breakfast, healthy lunch, carefully portioned meal at the wedding. I will let myself eat a bit of dessert, but just because it's there doesn't mean I need to indulge in the whole thing!

If resetting my flex artificially means that I gain weight this week, then so be it. In the end I think it's better than me feeling out of control for the rest of the week (which, knowing me, could lead into a downward spiral over the next few weeks.)

I'm starting to think that this lifetime membership stuff is too much pressure. It makes me feel like I don't have time to experiment; that the world will end if I'm 157.1 lbs. I feel constantly tied to the calendar. On the other hand, I find my free meetings very motivational. I don't know what to do about that. Will have to ponder a bit more...

On The Edge

I am blogging from work, which is bad, but I feel like getting this off my chest will be the only way for me to work productively today, so here I am.

This week has been a push to get down under 157 so that I don't have to pay $16 at my weigh-in today. (For any newcomers, I am a lifetime member, which means that I have to weigh in once per calendar month, and must be no more than 2 lbs above my goal weight of 155 lbs.)

I did really well this week. I worked out Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday with a mixture of cardio and weight training (yes, weight training! I actually did it!). Partway through the week I was invited to go to Magic Oven (a local organic pizza/pasta shop) with friends on a night I had planned to work out. I went, ordered a very small pizza (on spelt crust, with minimal cheese), ate half, and then went to work out after. I must say, I totally rocked and was very proud of my good decisions.

My work seemed to be paying off. Yesterday morning I took a sneak peak and weighed in at 152.6! Oh the thrill. This morning, however, the scale wasn't so friendly -- 154.4. I always weigh more in the afternoon than in the morning, so my weigh-in will be significantly heavier. Whether it will be below 157 remains to be seen. :(

Even worse is that J and I spent time making a delicious WW chili recipe last night. I portioned out two servings to bring for lunch this week, but I left them at home this morning because I knew I was scheduled to have a lunch meeting at Fusaro's (another Italian place) today. I wasn't thrilled about the timing of the lunch, on my weigh-in day, but I had resigned myself to it and planned to get a chicken garden salad. NOW it turns out the meeting is canceled, and I have nothing healthy at work to eat except high-sodium soups I keep in the pantry. :( In other words, I got my chance to eat healthily after all, but I am ill-prepared. I'll have to go out and buy something -- which means a wasted $10 AND eating out for lunch twice this week instead of just the unavoidable once. :(

I worry that my obsession with healthy eating is edging me toward some kind of mini-depression. Everything that goes wrong just feels like such a huge deal now. I mean, I'm stressing about having to eat lunch out twice in one week, whereas way back when I would have eaten out 3, 4 or 5 times a week! I get all bummed about small things that I can't change and it's all I can do not to blow the whole thing. (Hence me writing here to get some negative energy out and talk myself down from the metaphorical eating ledge.)

I have been considering trying to find some sort of nutritional / emotional counseling but it's so hard to know where to begin -- Google searches never turn up that much and I worry that I'll have ideological clashes with whomever I do find. WW seems to be enough for everyone else, but I feel like perhaps I still haven't dealt with some fundamental issues. What those are, I'm not exactly sure, but it feels like maybe there's something sleeping there below the surface.

<Meredith waves to the people who know her in real (non-WW) life and secretly still read this blog, and now know that she feels she might need counselling. Rock on, life is great.>

Eating Larger, Healthier Meals

I spoke with J about some of my eating issues this afternoon. I mentioned that I was thinking of trying Core for a while to try to avoid having to count points all the time, and to transition to a system where I don't have to THINK so much about this -- where I'm eating healthy food instead of processed stuff, and where I listen to my body instead of thinking "ooo, I have 3 points left, what shall I do with them?" (even when I'm not hungry).

J is freaked out by core, and I'm a little scared of it too, for two main reasons:

• We still eat out a fair amount. Not a ton, but enough so that I'd be worried about having enough Flex points to meet my needs during the week.
• He is fiber-phobic. He doesn't like whole-wheat bread/pasta/anything else, brown rice, etc. This means that even more than we do now, we'd have to make separate meals. It's doable, but not really pleasant.

I think I'll still keep Core in my back pocket for a while. I would like to try it at some point, just for the experience, even if it doesn't become my permanent plan. In the meantime, I think what I'm going to do is take 25 or 30 of my 35 flex points and divide them up evenly across the week. This means:

• When I'm in loss mode, I'll have 24 or 25 points a day instead of 21.
• When I'm in maintenance mode, I'll have either 27 or 28 points per day instead of 24.
• I will have either 5 or 10 "flex" points left over for true splurges.

My hope is that I will end up having larger, healthier, more well-rounded meals instead of saving my flex for snacky junk. I think it will also get my body used to eating a more consistent amount each day. (I find after I eat a lot one day, my body gets used to it and I want to eat the same amount the next day, and the next!) Plus, since I'm going to reserve 5 or 10 points, I will still have a little room to play if I do want to go out and have some wine, or share a dessert.

It's a little exciting. Instead of a 3.5 point breakfast I could go for 5 or 6 points (oatmeal, mmm!). Instead of a 3.5 point lunch, I could go for a 6 point lunch. I might actually have enough points to fit in all the food groups! Just imagine! (</sarcasm>)

I'm curious to know if any of you gals have divided your flex up like this before? Did it help at all? I just want to avoid spending 35 points on crap every week! I know this won't be a magic bullet, but I'm ready to experiment a bit and see how this goes.

Food Obsession

Does anyone ever worry that this program has made them worry TOO much about their food choices?

J commented the other day that it seems like I spend all of my time thinking about what I last ate, or what I'm going to eat next.

At first I thought he was exaggerating, but then I thought he was probably right. I spend WAY more time thinking about food now than I ever did before I started this thing. It worries me. I worry that I can't keep this up my whole life. Can I really count from here to eternity? I almost went up to ask my leader last Wednesday, but I was worried I would start crying in front of him if I did.

Aside from that, this week is going well so far. I feel in control. I'd better be in control, because it's my last chance to lose a couple pounds before my LAST February weigh-in opportunity, on Wednesday. I just have to hang in until Wednesday. Then I have to hang in until the next Wednesday. And so on, and so on. I have to hang in forever! No more of this up-up-up-scramble-to-get-down-before-deadline crap.

Domesticity At Its Best

So the boy and I got all domestic last night. First came dinner, which he planned. Both of the recipes were out of Martha Stewart's Great Food Fast book, which is very nicely organized into seasonal recipes. Both of these are, very fittingly, from the 'winter' section!

Here are the fruits of our labour:

Roasted chicken breasts with carrots, onions, garlic and prunes; orange and fennel salad (missing black olives because the boy thought olives from a CAN would do! aaaagh!); mushroom couscous (from a package).

The boy also had a craving for empire cookies (two shortbread cookies with raspberry jam between them, slathered with icing and topped off with a cherry). He saw them at St. Lawrence Market a week ago (a big daily market in Toronto) but wasn't willing to pay $1 per cookie for them, so he decided he would make them himself.

It turned into a bit of a fiasco. As sweet as J is, he doesn't have very much baking experience, so we had to have a bit of a rolling dough / using a wine glass as a cookie cutter / extracting the cut cookies demonstration, followed by a "how to make icing that isn't runny" demonstration, etc. It was pretty fun, but we didn't finish until 11:30pm and the kitchen was a disaster area!

Here are some pics of the process:

J demonstrating his amazing jam application skills!

Close-up!

All finished, on my grandma's crystal pedestal!

I have to tell you, they're pretty darned heavenly. I don't know how I'm going to stay away from them this week! I am craving one even as I write this...

Okay, Maybe I Can Do This

I still feel like I'm a moment away from falling into a deep chasm. I fell into a mini-chasm tonight, but I don't think I did too much damage. It all depends how many points that carrot cake cost me :P Oh well, I planned for it, and Winterlicious only comes once a year!

I've been having this weird taste in my mouth all week. I thought it was maybe the result of too much vitamin D (I started taking it to try to ward off s.a.d.!) but even now that I've stopped the pills the taste is persisting. I started to fear that it might be one of my fillings -- eek, mercury! I booked a dental appointment for after my spinning class tomorrow, and as much as I don't want to deal with a filling replacement right now, I really hope that's the problem, so that I can just FIX it. It's making me want something in my mouth all the time to overpower the icky taste, which is not good for my goal this week: LOSING!

I forgot to mention that I finally got to meet Sarah and Marie this week! They are two lovely, highly intelligent gals. It's a shame that there are so many rocking ladies here in Toronto and I have missed out on them up to now! It's always hard to meet someone in person for the first time though. I think it had been about 7 years since I last did this kind of thing, crazy! Hard to believe I met my first boyfriend online :) It's funny, I don't think it gets any easier with experience! Anyway, ladies, it was a pleasure to meet you and I hope we can do it again soon!