I came, I saw, I conquered!

I got off to a false start this morning - thought I'd try to reach my trail from another angle but ended up going around in circles for about 30 minutes! - but I finally found the suspension bridge. :)

Was the bridge as wonderful as I had anticipated? No, but it was fun to jump on and make it sway. And it could have been worse - after all, about 500 feet from where I turned around last weekend I came to this rinky dinky bridge and I thought it was bridge I'd been searching for the last few weeks! But after continuing on for what felt like 5 or 6 miles, but was in reality only about 1/2 mile I came to the actual suspension bridge.

The rest of the trail was a killer! I swear it was straight up the whole way back except for one little section where it was straight down. I thought I was going to DIE. And have I mentioned the big fallen tree?? I was too tired to try to jump up on it to crawl over it so I took the low road and went under it. And I went under it with very little grace and dignity!!! This was of course during the little section where the trail went straight down. I ended up flat on my face, sliding under the tree and down the incline!! The good news was that I could "feel" that I was near the end so the fact that I was covered in dirt with sweat trails running down my dirty face and dead gnats in between my teeth (I was doing most of my breathing from my mouth because I was so out of breath) didn't bother me one bit.

Now I'm off to figure out how many calories gnats have so that I can log them into my fitday journal....

Woe Is Me

Since this blog is supposed to be about my weight loss journey, let me start by saying that due to my little journey off the beaten path last week I managed to gain 2.5 lbs. But the good news is that I got right back up, dusted myself off and jumped on the tracks again. So far I've lost 1-1/2 lbs and I'm hoping that by tomorrow I will at least be back where I was last week but I'm optimistic enough that I'm still hoping for a small loss.

Enough about weight loss! I hate getting old! Yesterday I went on my 4th journey up to the nature center a few miles from me. I've gone out there the last 4 Sundays to get in some walking. They have 7 or 8 trails ranging from .75 to 4 miles. The first week I just went on 3 of the smaller trails - by the time I had walked 2 I had worked in a total of 3 miles. Not bad considering we're talking hills! The second week I went out with the intention of finding the trail that had the 150' suspension bridge. I ended up walking about 5 miles, but never could find a trail that took me to the trail that the suspension bridge was on. The third week was more of the same. So yesterday I headed out early to beat the heat. And I finally found the right trail!!! (You had to go on this trail until you saw an unmarked path that took you to another unmarked path, which in turn took you to yet another unmarked path...and that path ended on the correct path!!). The problem was, I'm getting old! I drank 20 oz of water riding my stationary bike, I drank another 20 oz while I was getting ready (and doing laundry) and then I took another liter bottle with me on my hike. Need I say more??? Before I got half way to the bridge my kidneys were going "I gotta pee!". But I said, "You can hold it in a little longer". OK - no problem, except the trail is getting steeper and the trail isn't cleared as well as the baby trails were which meant that I was having to crawl over down trees and whack my way through vines. Each big movement like a jump over a tree truck or a trip over tree root made my kidneys scream a little louder. So...this is a trail in the forest. There are a lot of trees around. I had a Kleenex in my pocket. I haven't seen a soul since I started out. My thought was to make like a Girl Scout and find a big tree. :) Sounds like a good plan doesn't it? Only about that time a man popped out of the woods from another trail! So I kept walking. I got a little distance between me and the man and started scoping out for another nice big tree. ONLY to have yet another man WITH BINOCULARS! coming in the opposite direction!! Can I not have any privacy in the freaking woods???!!!!! After a few more minutes I consult with my map. It appeared that I still had about 15-20 minutes until I would reach the bridge. I'm sad to say, but I had to make an executive decision to go ahead and turn around at that point. I felt that I could hold it in another 45 minutes (that's how long I'd been walking at that point), but there was absolutely no way I could hold it in another hour plus!

Next weekend I'm going to find that bridge and I won't be drinking any water beforehand!!

Soooo bad!

I knew it would happen, I just didn't realize that when it happened it would be this bad! Seven months and one week...that's how long I've been on program. During that time I've had 3 "bad" days which consisted of going over my calorie limit by up to 100 calories (actually I think one of them was 200 calories - but still all in all not too bad!) This morning I left early because it was one of my co-workers birthday and I was going to stop and get her a doughnut. I even remembered to bring the candle, the treat bag to put it in and the ribbon to tie the bag with. One frigging doughnut, that's all I was going for.

The next thing I knew I was eating the doughnut!!!! And I don't even like doughnuts that much!!! And then the day really went downhill. I don't know if I'm even going to log it all in, but guessing I would say that I've consumed close to 3000 calories today. I'm physically sick. For the first time in months I've had to take Tums. I eaten more today than I would have in 2+ days!

I'm not mad at myself. I am however a little disappointed in myself. I've locked myself upstairs in my bedroom with no food to tempt me. But the overwhelming emotion I'm feeling right now is fear. It snowballed so fast today. I have confidence that I'll get back on track tomorrow but I can't help worrying about the next time.

Creative Cravings Cures

Remember the old Food Pyramid chart? Because of that chart I grew up believing that pizza was the perfect food.

• Bread - pizza crust
• Veggies - tomato sauce, green pepper, onions and mushrooms
• Dairy - cheese, lots of cheese!
• Meat - why pepperoni of course, with the occasional change to sausage and the even rarer pepperoni AND sausage.

But woe is me - the powers to be don't agree with me. Now to make it a "good" food, it would have to be a whole wheat pizza crust, no pepperoni and definitely no sausage and don't even think of adding cheese! Don't get me wrong - a tasty meal can be made with the whole wheat crust, tomatoes and veggies and fat free Parmesan cheese. It's just not PIZZA!

But I digress. Today I was on a quest to find a really good chocolate craving food. And this is what I came up with...

1 dark chocolate candy bar - 190 calories, 12 g fat, 2 g protein.
2 T Better N Peanut Butter - 100 calories, 3 g fat, 4 g protein.
1 cup Fiber One - 120 calories, 2 g fat, 4 g protein.

Melt the chocolate candy bar and the peanut butter in the microwave
Mix in the Fiber One cereal
Drop by Tablespoon onto wax paper.

This makes 6 mounds.
68 calories
2.8 g fat
1.6 g protein
5.2 g of fiber

What more could you ask for when you're craving chocolate but you don't want to blow everything? And if you're really craving chocolate you could even eat 1/2 the batch while keeping your calories below what the candy bar alone would have run without the added perks of the additional fiber and protein!

Now ask me if I'd rather have this than a big 'ol slice of cake with chocolate icing!! I wish I could say yes, but I don't like to lie. Now ask me if I would choose that piece of cake right now, right this minute. Nope - it ain't happening. (Of course to be honest, I don't have a piece of cake in front of me to prove it to you!)

Neglect

This is my #1 Neopet, Baabett - ain't she a doll??? I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I'm addicted to a website call Neopets. I've been playing on that site for over 6 years now and even though they recently upgraded the site so that now NONE of my hard written HTML and CSS coding work and ALL of my detailed graphics won't work correctly, I still love the site! Unfortunately this week they added a game called Roodoku which is based on the game Sudoku...just with Neopet flavor. I swear everytime I get near the computer my mouse just heads on over to the site for another round of Roodoku - (I'm getting better at it) and I'm basically negelecting everything else!

Now on to real news...

1) I'm .2 (I really do have a love/hate relationship with this number!) away from my 75 lb. loss goal.
2) I only lost 5 lbs for the month of April. :(
3) I had my appointment with the Endocrinologist today. Unfortunately, the Graves Disease is not in remission so I have to continue taking the meds. :( The good news is that my T4 (I get the T's confused so that may not be the right one and I'm too lazy to walk downstairs!) remained the same - so at least I'm not any worse than I was back in December.
4) My arms still hurt from where they tried to get my blood pressure readings! They use the automated machine - all they do is put the cuff on and then press the start button. My BP is normally on the low end - and the hypothyroid also helps lower BP sometimes. So we spent about 15 minutes while the machine kept trying to re-read my BP because it wasn't ready to accept it. The machine finally spit out my readings. (89/58 in case you're interested. :)
5) I had given up, and was mentally already in the drivers seat revving the engine for Sulkfest 2007 because Dr. Shenoy didn't notice that I had lost weight. BUT then as we were packing up he said "Melissa, don't think that I haven't noticed that you've lost A LOT of weight - I just wanted to get all the test results out of the way before I commented on it....followed by a lot more blah, blah, blah it can be harder blah, blah, blah, blah, doing a great job blah, blah, blah, blah and keep up the good work!

Ok - I'm tired and I need to go try to beat my Roodoku score one more time!


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