Losing a part of me

Yesterday I did pretty well on the program… until the evening. It is amazing how badly emotional pain can affect me. I cheated… but not badly. My eating yesterday consisted of:

• Breakfast omelette
• Two meal replacement shakes
• One protein bar
• Two poached eggs at night.

Believe me, I wanted to cheat much worse than two poached eggs… but I did not.

I also managed 5km on the treadmill, and for the second day in a row I hit the steps-goal on my fitness watch. Yesterday’s goal was 9,930, and I took just short of 11,000 steps. Today’s steps-goal is 10,130. I will do my best to get onto the treadmill and hit that goal, but frankly my exam is this afternoon, and that is my number one priority. If I can get some studying in and then hit the treadmill, then I will be thrilled. If not, then I will try to get onto the treadmill after the exam. That, however, might be tight because of a few other things I have going on today.

There is a site called MapMyFitness.com which I have mentioned a couple of times over the past couple of years. I do not think I have mentioned it this year, but last year they had a challenge to walk/run 1023km in 2023. This year they extended that challenge to 1024km in 2024. This is not about the number of steps we take throughout the day, rather only in actual registered workouts. I hit the ground running early in the year, but then fell off a few times. I have start-stopped my walking so many times that it is hard to keep track of. Of course, on days when I do not do an actual workout, I often register my walks with Princess Sophie for the challenge, so even with nothing else, considering the average distance I walk with the doggo per day is 3km, without any other workouts I should still surpass 1024km handily by mid-December. However, since I do not always register our walks together, and since I spent a lot of time out of town (whether in Cuba or Dallas), I have not walked her about ten weeks this year. Yes, I do a lot of walking when I am in Cuba… but I do not register walking around as exercising. Anyways, I am happy that with yesterday’s treadmill walk I surpassed 1000km on the year, and I am now a scant 18km from reaching the goal. I thought there was a prize drawing for all of the people who completed the challenge, but sometime in the last few months it seems the site was sold by Under Armour to a company called Outside, and they do not seem to be offering any prizes other than the online badge. I am okay with that, since only 2-3 participants who finished the challenge would have been chosen at random for a prize package, and I have a better chance of getting hit by space debris than winning (186,000 participants, and I am in the top 12.51%, which means that a little over 23,200 people have either completed or are within 18km of completing the goal. I’m good with the online badge!

My sleep score was only 79 last night, but I felt much better rested than I usually do in the morning. That might have something to do with my having gotten up at 4:15am to pee and thinking as I lay there that I might as well get out of bed because I was not falling back a…. and then I was out again. My body battery only got up to a 56, and I really have no idea how to improve on that… other than losing all of the weight that I want to lose, and then figuring out how to get a good night’s sleep.

My weight dropped for the third day in a row, but only by half a pound. While I would love much bigger losses, I have to understand that going forward I will need to be happy with a 3-4 pound drop per week, and will not be experiencing those huge per-day losses as I did at the outset. I just don’t have that much excess weight to lose that would account for a 10 lbs. drop week after week. If I can lose 3.5 lbs. per week for the next ten weeks then I will still not be at my best weight ever… but I will fit comfortably into all of my custom tailored clothes… except for what might be too large on me.

I was speaking with my diet buddy yesterday and recognized a pattern in her that I brought up, and we had a good chat about it. Every time she talks about her progress or slipping, she spends fifteen minutes talking about how other people look and what they do and how they must look at her… and at the end she says, ‘and of course I am disappointed with myself.’ I told her that it seems that she equates her own value to how others are or how they look, but because everyone tells her that weight loss should be for ourselves she ends it with ‘oh and me.’ It is like someone going on and on about what is wrong with Jews, and then saying, ‘but of course I don’t have anything against Jews.’ It is obvious they do, but they know it is wrong, so they say that. I asked her if she has ever spoken to a professional about her weight issues. It seems to me that she will never be satisfied with her weight until she is happy with who she is as a person. I think I gave her a lot to think about, and she told me that she is going to try to find a therapist for that. I am always happy when I can help her… or anyone else for that matter.

…now if I could only get my own head in a good place, life would be grand.

Have a great day folks!