Sometimes all you can do is try to hold on and not fall off the wagon

The last two weeks have been such a time for me. Lots of eating out. A tight packed schedule most days - and I need some time alone to replenish my energy, so too many plans stress me out. And, of course, when I'm stressed, that's when all my good intentions get out of dodge.

The low point was the day I ate brownies for every single meal (including breakfast!) - not my proudest moment. Luckily, the very next day was the opposite - I managed a whopping 1800 calorie deficit without even trying! I ate what I usually eat, but didn't stay off my feet the entire day. No strenuous exercise (except for my c25k run), just cleaning the house, taking a (slow moving, non sweaty) dance class and walking there and back. I was flabbergasted by how many calories you burn when you're not relaxing in front of the couch as I do way too often. I don't think such a large calorie deficit is good in the long run, but it really helped after the gazillion brownie calories from the previous day. :)

Despite the stress, I did manage to get in all my c25k runs, and I am very proud of that. I've made those runs a priority! Even though I sometimes had to run far later than I wanted (I get wired and can't sleep if I exercise too late in the evening), I did manage to squeeze them in. AND last night I ran 30 minutes for the first time! Woot woot!

Right now it sounds like I actually did pretty good these past weeks. I didn't, I just don't like to dwell on the negatives. I don't believe in beating yourself up after you've slipped, that only lead to self loathing and often makes it even harder to get back on track. But I DO believe in learning from your mistakes, so here is what I (re)learned (nothing new under the sun here).

• Stress, and having too many plans, no matter how fun they are, is a major trigger for me. I need to prioritize more 'free' days, and I need to find a way to lower my stress when I can't.
• It is much harder to avoid candy that is right in front of me, then to just not buy it. I have the latter down, but in order to not pig out when someone else brings candy, I'm trying out chromium in large doses to see if it helps.
• When I've mentally prepared to stay off a certain temptation (ie a special type of candy), and another type appears instead, my mental strength falters too often. Not sure what to do about this, maybe try to not focus so much on what kind of temptation I'm expecting?
• When I have a planned cheat, I way too often feel like that gives me a free pass to eat whatever I want the rest of the day/week. Challenges help with this, so maybe I'll try some half-day challenges as well.

Planning to fail?

Lately, I have started noticing how my mind is constantly trying to avoid failure, rather than working towards success. It became very evident when I first decided to do a 1 week 1 kg challenge. As I started to write the blog post announcing my challenge, I almost scared myself into quitting before I'd even begun. Thoughts like "what if I can't make it", "I will be publicly humiliated", "I'm not good enough" and "Now everyone will see what a failure you really are" raced through my mind. 

I noticed these fears, and decided to not let them stop me. But I also wondered how many times these fears have stopped me from doing something that I want to do. I am not always as aware of them, or if I am, I believe them and give up before I've even started. Frankly, I'm a little scared to think of all the things I've missed just because of my gut reaction of "you're not good enough".

I recently read You CAN be thin by Marissa Peer, and she talks (among other things) about this. Her advice is to tell yourself that you are enough, and repeat it until you believe it. I've started doing that, and I've also started being my own cheerleader instead of my own worst enemy. Well, I'm trying to anyways, my inner critic has been a part of me for years, so the habit takes a while to break. But at least I'm trying. :)

Of course, when I first started c25k, I was attacked by the self doubt monster. When I looked at the schedule ahead of me, I quickly decided that this was way too hard for me, impossible even. Yet, others who hated running had managed to come out alive and with a new-found passion for running, so I gave it a shot after all.

The first few weeks were okay, but as soon as the running time doubled from 1,5 minutes to 3 minutes, my doubts resurfaced. You may remember that I very nearly convinced myself I'd reached my limit. Luckily, I refused to give in, and managed it just fine. There and then I decided to stop believing that the next run would be too hard, and think positive instead.

For a long time, I actually managed to do so. I cheered myself on. At one point I even started feeling like I looked forward to a new challenge. Things were looking good. Then the dreaded week 5 of the c25k happened. From the very beginning I'd feared this week. Somehow I had managed to push it from my mind, thinking it was way in the future. Then, all of the sudden it was there, and there was no way I could quell my self doubts this time. Really, whomever thought that it was a good idea to go from running 8 minutes straight to 20 - TWENTY - minutes straight? They should be locked up, crazy people!

I was quite sure I'd never make it, my fear of failure was warning me against trying - no good could come out of this. Well, I'm very stubborn, and I hadn't come all this way just to quit. So I set out to prove myself wrong. I kept Jillian in my mind, and I envisioned the triumph of being able to blog about it afterwards. And I DID IT! Not only did I run 20 minutes straight, I went on to run really fast (for me - remember my definition of running at this point is 6 km an hour - babies could probably crawl faster) for a while afterwards, just to quiet my doubts once and for all. Take THAT, evil self doubt! Totally knocked-out there, inner critic!

Image by digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So now I'm more determined than ever to not let my fears stop me. I will not be planning to fail anymore, I am going to plan success instead. :)

I made it! :)

I managed to have a calorie deficit of 5000 cals, in fact I did even better - I ate 5630 calories less than I needed!

AND the weight went down, - 0,9 kg! NOT BAD! :)

Yet, when I see the stats on my Tanita scale, things don't look quite as good:

Weight: 77,1 kg - down 0,9 :)

Body fat percentage: 38,9% up 0.9% :(

Body fat in kg: 29,9919 kg up 0.2 :(

Muscle mass in kg: 11,2615 down 0,27 :(

Water weight in kg: 33,5385 down almost 1 kg :(

Seems like all I've lost is muscle and water, and gained fat. :( That seems kind of strange, though, when I've been so good. 

I guess I can't really trust Tanita blindly, either. It changes too much from day to day, and these last results sound impossible considering that I have such a high calorie deficit. Oh, well, I'll just have to look at the results in the long run instead. I have been working out, both running and shredding. I am getting fitter and I am losing weight. Hopefully the fat percentage and the muscle percentage will reflect that soon enough. Patience, my dear, patience. (this is quote from one of my favorite shows when I was a child - the musical Rock 'n' roll wolf - I still love it to this day! :) Just too bad I'm not the most patient type. ;)

New challenge

I wanted to do a new 1 week 1 kg challenge this week, as I didn't have any plans and it seemed quite doable. But then I was invited to a friend's birthday party, and I realized that such a goal would be totally unrealistic this week. My friend is originally from Azerbaijan, and his family was visiting and they were making traditional, Azerbaijani food for us. Now, how often do you have the opportunity to taste real, authentic traditional Azerbaijani food, made by Azerbaijanis who also happen to be excellent cooks? Not very often, and there was just no way I was missing out on this or trying to restrict my food for that particular day! 

The food tasted wonderfully, probably one of the best meals I have ever had (and I've even been to a 2 star Michelin restaurant!). I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was SO worth every single calorie, no question about it! Incidentally, I think the food was quite healthy, however there was a lot of it, lots of different dishes to try, each better than the previous.

So, no regrets there. What WASN'T worth it, though, was that I let myself lose on eating other things, too, just because I had let myself lose for that particular event. I had already let my guard down this weekend and binged on way too much candy, so I was heading down a dangerous path. I needed a new challenge to get back on track, and I decided that the rest of the week (Wednesday through Sunday), I'd lose 0,7 kg. The rules are the same as last time, I'll reach my goal if I manage a deficit of 5000 calories throughout the rest of the week. If the scale follows, that'll be great! :)

At first, my mind was stuck on the idea that a challenge had to last an entire week. I'm glad I got past that notion, though. There is nothing wrong with having a challenge for just a day, for that matter. I think this will make it easier for me to stay on track in the weeks where I have plans that make weight loss hard for a day or two. I don't see any problem with letting myself lose (within limits!) for a couple of days, the problem is getting back on track again. Hopefully this will help!

I'll be using my weight yesterday as a starting weight, because I am all bloated today, so it wouldn't be a good starting point.

Here are my starting values as reported by my Tanita scale yesterday morning:

Weight: 78,2 kg

Body fat percentage: 38%

Body fat in kg: 29,716 kg

Muscle mass in kg: 11,5356 kg

Water weight in kg: 34,5644 kg

Feeling your feelings

Lyn from Escape from obesity talks a lot about feeling your feelings. This has always been a struggle for me. When things got rough, I always put my feelings aside, ignored them and tried to live my life as if the bad stuff never happened. I am sure that's part of the reason why I am overweight - I've stuffed myself with junk food and candy to avoid taking a good hard look at all those feelings looming beneath the surface.

Dark feelings looming beneath the surface
Image by nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net



Lately, I have tried to do something about not just my weight, but my old-but-not-forgotten feelings as well. I have started going to Rosen therapy, which is a form of massage therapy that helps you get in touch with your feelings. I am also starting psychoterapy to work through some of the dysthymia (low grade depression) and anxiety that I've been batteling for far too long. My first day is tomorrow, and I'm scared to death - don't know quite what I'm scared about, though!



Anyways, when the twin terrors (as I've been told they are called in the rest of the world, in Norway, of course, we only call it the terror) hit, I woved to not let this experience add to the already overflowing collection of suppressed feelings. Instead of my initial reaction, which was to just stuff it all away, I decided to feel it all and work through it right there and then.



Healing
Image by m_bartosch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 



Consequently, I spent most of last weekend couped up in my living room, glued to the TV. I watched and listened to every single of the horrors that were told. I bawled my eyes out thinking of what those poor kids and their families had gone through. I even blogged about it. It feels like I was able to process at least most of the sorrow, and I'm hoping some of the shed tears were from old sorrows as well.



But there was more to this event than just sorrow. A lot of shock and fear, too, and those are not so easily dispelled by tears. Come Sunday, I was ready to let go of these feelings, too. I thought the best way to do that was through exercise. So I ran. First, I did the Cooper test at my old gym, to see how much I'd improved (I'll talk about that in another post). Later, I did a session of C25K.

It felt so GOOD! It was really what I needed to free some of the shock that had frozen my body and mind. Running, and I'm sure most kinds of exercise, can be the best form of healing. Often, we think of exercise as a means to reach our goal weight. But lately, I've started to value exercise for its own sake, for the good feeling it creates in me. I LOVE how strong I feel after a workout, how much more I appreciate my body, how it reduced my stress levels.

Even though I officially quit the challenge half way through, I DID succeed in losing 1 kg in 1 week. Half of that (the part prior to July 22) was due to hard work on my part. The other half - well, you just don't have the stomach to eat much when you're bombarded with heart gripping, real life horror stories like that.

Well, actually I'm sure it could have gone the other way, too. I could just as easily have turned to food for comfort. So it was just pure luck that my reaction led me away from food. Or was it? Could it have been that I didn't NEED comfort food because I was actually feeling my feelings instead of suppressing them? I hope it's the latter, because that would give me a new kind of power over binges. I'll never know for sure, but nonetheless I will continue to work through my feelings instead of hiding from them. I believe that will make me more equipped to reach my goal weight and stay there. Not to mention that I'll have a better life alltogether. Now, that is something worth fighting for! :)

One week challenge

 Image by scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This week I've decided to challenge myself. I have a relatively empty week ahead of me, and my boyfriend is out of town so it will be just me and the cats. A perfect time to put in some extra effort!

My challenge for this week is to lose 1 kg (2.2 pounds). It should be doable, and it is within what is recommended for safe weightloss. I know it's going to take a lot from me (I'm not sure I've gone down that much in a single week before, except perhaps at the beginning when the weight loss always happens faster), but I think it can be done.

I know that the scale is not the best way to measure progress, it just varies too much. So I've come up with an alternative way to see if I've accomplished my goal. If I manage to have a calorie deficiency of 7000 calories this week, that's a success even if the scale doesn't agree with me. (7000 calories is roughly equal to 1 kg lost). I'll use my BodyMedia fit to see how many calories I burn and a food journal to see how much I eat.

My plan is to do this without eating less (I like my food! And also, I don't think it's a good idea to go too far down on calories. Right now I'm on 1600 calories a day and that works pretty well hunger and craving wise). Instead, I'll be moving more, doing house chores instead of watching tv. I though about walking more, but since I'm running I don't want to tire my legs too much. They need some rest, too! I'll have to check my exercise dvds for good workout ideas that do not include too much legwork. This will be the perfect time to experiment with my new hoola hoop! And I've always loved the punching part of the shred, so I'll definitely incorporate those into my regime!

EDIT: I forgot to tell you my starting weight for this challenge. Today I weighed in at 78.9 kg.
Wish me luck! :)