Do over

It's incredibly frustrating to discover that this time a year ago I was 15 pounds lighter than I am now. 15 pounds away from square one.

I had a long talk with my husband about buying convenience food. He genuinely thinks that if he doesn't keep the house stocked with crap microwave stuff that I will starve. He complains that I buy produce and end up throwing it out. I throw it out because when faced with the dinner option of a can of Spaghetti-O's and a veggie stir fry, the Spaghetti-O's win out of sheer laziness. It's not his fault I can't make the choice to eat the healthy thing over the unhealthy thing, but I'd really rather not have a choice.

He agreed, reluctantly and I bought tons of produce for my dinners this week. Also, no more sweets that aren't fruit. There are apples, grapes and strawberries in the fridge and I can eat as many of those as I want.

I still have plantar fasciitis, so running or any kind of exercise on my feet is out. I have a bike, but my husband can only ride on the weekends and I'm afraid of riding alone (afraid of getting hurt, looking dumb, being lonely, etc.)

I'm gonna try to restart the hundred push ups and two hundred sit ups programs and figure out some kind of cardio that can be done without hurting my foot.

I think I want to have a baby and I want to be healthy (and okay, skinny) before I do.

Couch to 5K: Week 1, Workout 1

Today I started Couch to 5K. I was going to start on Monday because I'm very big on starting things on Monday, but since you're supposed to work out three times a week, that would put me at a Mon-Wed-Fri sort of schedule. I watch my youngest niece on Wednesdays, so I decided to go ahead and start today and work out on Tuesday, Thursday and whichever weekend day I find time for it. I've decided to use the treadmill for the whole thing and save outside running for after I've completed it. I'm hoping to do the nine week program in nine weeks, but it says if you can't progress that quickly to repeat weeks.

So here's my first Couch to 5K update!

Workout: Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

Weight: 175
Walking speed: 3 mph
Jogging speed: 5 mph
Distance: 1.5 miles
Calories burned (according to the treadmill): 154

Aside: I was going to jog in the afternoon, but couldn't find either of my sports bras. Got very frustrated and cranky and finally gave up. I bought a new running bra when we went to Target and when I went into the closet to pick a shirt to wear, there was my blue sports bra, hanging like it had been there the whole time. Then I went into the dryer to get some socks and there was my gray sports bra. It's like they planned it. Bastards.

Foot progress

I am thrilled. I finally figured out the secret to keeping my stupid plantar fasciitis boot on all night. Usually I can't get to sleep and end up kicking it off in the middle of the night. I looked at reviews and many of them said that the boots run large and that's what made them uncomfortable.

So Monday night I bulked it up by putting my fuzzy slipper on first. SUCCESS! Haha, I made it all night Monday night and last night I woke up about two hours before my alarm and went to the bathroom and didn't put it back on. But still, my foot didn't hurt this morning, which is so awesome. It still starts to hurt after a little while at work, but being able to sleep with this thing on will make a huge difference.

Awesome thing number two: Jason found my gate card which also gets me into the apartment gym. Even before my foot got really bad I didn't use it because Jason's card had fallen in the crack of his dashboard and apparently he has to take the entire car apart to get it and my card had fallen off the face of the earth. Which apparently leads to Jason's car. Huh. Anyway, Jason found it so as soon as my foot is better I'm doing Couch to 5K.

Triple threat awesomeness: When I'm ready to start Couch to 5K I want to have some really good shoes for it, 'cause my shoes now are old and crappy. And I was worried about how long it would take me to save up the money for them, but then I remembered that I will get a fat tax refund in February.

So that's the plan

• Fix foot


• Buy shoes


• Couch to 5K

I did it!

Yesterday was a good day. Not a great day, but I'll settle for good these days.

I only had one soda. When dinner rolled around there was nothing cold to drink except soda, tea (caffeinated) and water. I wanted a soda, badly, but I stuck to my guns and went with water.

I still had trouble falling asleep, but eventually I did and went all night with the plantar fasciitis boot on. Yay! My foot still hurts but not nearly as bad as it usually does in the mornings. I'm going to try to keep up with my other foot thingies - doing stretches before work and rolling it on a frozen bottle of water after work.

The bad news is I gained four pounds over the holidays and since I haven't lost a single pound since I started O:GHD I am up to 179. Boo! So now I have to work just to get back to square one.

y hallo thar new year

It's a new year, so let's forget all that 2008 suckiness and start fresh.

My exercise has been put on hold due to my plantar fasciitis. I bought a night splint for it but I'm having a really hard time keeping it on all night. I have a hard time falling asleep with it on, but then, I have a hard time falling asleep period. I've been tossing and turning all night for a couple of months. Then I have a hard time getting out of bed and I don't want to do anything all day. So the next steps in O:GHD! are getting better sleep and fixing my foot. To that end I need to give up the caffiene. I was at two or three sodas a day and even though my last one was about seven hours before I went to bed, I still had trouble sleeping. So I'm going to be drinking one soda with my first meal of the day and no more until I run out of soda (about six more days) and then... no more!

So starting now, PROJECT: Sleep Well and PROJECT: Fix That Foot.

Clothes Cow

or, I Have Nothing To Wear

I have a problem with clothes. I like to buy them, but I don't like to try them on. As long as they look good on the rack I can imagine they'll look good on me. And then I get them home and every so often I'll put them on when I'm in a pinch to wear something cute. And then I take them off when I realize they look horrible on me.

Mostly, they just take up space.

I also have way too many work shirts, to the point that if I wait until I'm out of clean shirts to do laundry (which I usually do) I end up spending an entire day on it.

That ends today. Here's what I started with.



Everything I own, laundered and hung. Then I tried everything on. Unless it was a t-shirt, everything got tried on and evaluated. Everything that didn't fit went into a tub. The tub has an expiration date of six months. Anything that doesn't fit in six months is going to Goodwill. I can do a freshness check in three months. A lot of the stuff just barely didn't fit, so if it does when I check again it can be re-added to the wardrobe. Probably seems like a long time, but most of the stuff is jeans and cute slogany t-shirts that I really like and want to be able to wear someday. So that cull gave me this.



Next I went through and culled work shirts. I had 25 work shirts and 18 of them were UPS branded. UPS buys from different t-shirt vendors, so some of the shirts didn't fit well and those went. Almost all of the light colored shirts had general UPS stains and what I call boob dirt, which is two obvious dirt circles on the front. Those went, too. I ended up keeping 10 work shirts, which isn't bad. Two weeks worth. The rest will either be restructured (I like the logos on some of them, just not the fit) or turned into rags. Here is after the work shirt cull.



And here's what I was left with after I removed all the leftover clothes hangers and organized the clothes by type.



Pretty huge difference, huh? Hopefully it will make finding something to wear easier because I won't be pointlessly trying on a bunch of too-small clothes and it'll make laundry day a lot easier. And every time I eyeball that tub full of cute-but-not-on-me-(yet) clothes, it'll remind me of what I'm trying to do here.

The Daily Weigh

One popular dieting tip is that you shouldn't weigh yourself every day. Because you're not going to drop pounds overnight and weighing yourself every day will just depress you. Instead you should weigh once a week.

This doesn't work for me for a lot of reasons, but I'll let Google 15 explain one of them. Google 15 is a Google app on my home page that I plug my weight into every day.

The Google 15 encourages you to get on the scale every day by calculating a moving average from your daily weight. We then plot this average alongside your daily scale weight and a goal weight that you set--this gives you a better idea of your weight trend by masking most of the day to day noise that variances in water weight introduce.

If you've ever tried to lose weight, you've undoubtedly experienced the excitement of getting on the scale to see that you "lost" two pounds since yesterday. Unfortunately, that tends to be followed by the depression that you "gained" three pounds the next day. It's impossible to "lose weight" every day according to your scale weight, so as a result, most people cultivate an irrational (but very real) fear of their scale and only climb on to get feedback on their weight loss efforts every week or two.

Your exact scale weight isn't really important as long as it's "ahead" of the trend you're aiming for. If you're trying to lose weight, you want your day-to-day scale weight to be below your moving average--concentrate on your moving average weight, not your scale weight! In the example on the right, note that on 4/10 it looks like the user "gained" three pounds according to the scale weight, but the moving average merely leveled out. But this is no reason to panic--the next day's weight continued the downward trend.

Of course, the big secret that you never hear is that the hardest part about losing weight is keeping the weight off once you've lost it. The Google 15 generally considers you to be on goal as long as your moving average weight stays within 2.5 pounds of your goal weight. So don't stop using it once you've made your goal weight--enter your weight every day and it will give you an early warning if you start to pack on the pounds!

As you can see, I weighed in at 172 today. I don't think that means I've lost three pounds. I don't consider it a pound lost until I've weighed in under my previous weight for at least a week. But if I only weighed myself once a week, that 172 might give me a little more false hope than if I was weighing every day. The good news is, if this trend continues, it does look like I can officially say I'm losing weight. Yay!