Category: health

Real smooooooth

In light of the fact that my surgery is 23 days away (woo hoo!), I want to try to eat as healthily as possible for the next few weeks. And I thought it might be a good time to try smoothies for breakfast. So I’m looking to you guys for ideas. I know I could look on Pinterest and find a million different recipes, but I’d love to hear from you.

Here are my stipulations:

– No celery (I don’t care what you say, I *can* taste it. And even if I can’t, I’ll know it’s there.)
– No protein powder
– No soy milk

I guess those are my only stipulations, actually. I thought I’d have more. I don’t have a hardcore fancy blender, just a normal cheapish one. Will that suffice?

What do I want in my smoothies? I don’t know, I just want to get my body as prepared for this surgery as possible.

So whatcha got?

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Random cute picture

Musings on Dukan, four months in

Today marks 4 months on the Dukan Diet. I’m down a total of 34 lbs as of today. (WHAT? You may ask. Weren’t you down 37.8 a few weeks ago??)

Yeah. At 3 months I was down 30.4 lbs. May was a tough month. (Though now that I look at my chart, I see I lost more in May than I did in April! So perhaps I should say April and May have been tough months.)

This ain’t pretty:

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I have plenty of excuses for May. Mother’s Day. George’s birthday. Barbecues. Birthday parties. But they’re just excuses. 34 lbs in four months sounds fine, but not as impressive at 27 lbs in 2 months sounded way back in March.

However, I need to not be so down on myself. I have lost 34 lbs! In four months! I’m down two sizes! And let me tell you, I did boot camp last August, and it’s a heck of a lot easier now with 30+ lbs less on my body.

That said…I still have 31 pounds to get to my goal. So I need to remember how well it works when it’s done right, and I need to do it! Grrr!

I found this picture from December. Blegh.
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And this was from a few weekends ago.
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While I’ve seen physical improvements in the last four months, I think the biggest change for me has been mentally. I’m not as nervous about meeting new people and worrying they’re going to judge me based on my weight. I’m more confident. So that’s nice.

Alright, people. Keep on keepin’ on. My goal for the end of June is 45 lbs down. Oh yes indeedy.

Hey, check that out >>

See my little ticker?

I’m halfway to my goal! 33 lbs down, 32.6 to go. And in less than 3 months! (The number 3 does seem to hold a lot of meaning in my life, doesn’t it?)

This morning, I was thinking, “man, I have to do all this again to get to my goal weight,” and then I remembered that “all this” wasn’t so bad at all!

Good stuff, Dr. Dukan. Well played.

Musings on Dukan (and our weekend)

Let me tell you about weekends on this diet. They’re not too bad, but I inevitably wake up on Monday morning to some kind of gain. As long as I know it’s going to be there, I’m okay about it. And know that I can get rid of it over the course of the week, plus some. Saturday I was down almost 28 lbs, but then today I was down only 26.2. (Hey! A marathon!) I gained 1.6 lbs over the weekend. Better than the weekend prior, when I gained 3 lbs. Yeesh.

See, with Dukan, you alternate Pure Protein (PP) days with Protein-Vegetable days. And for whatever reason (the prevailing wisdom is the water and fiber in the vegetables) your weight is almost always up a bit after a PV day. And to make life easier, I generally make weekends PV days and most weekdays PP days. So it makes sense that on Mondays, I’d be up a bit. But it doesn’t make it suck any less.

(Yes, I weigh myself every day. I do keep a graph with my daily weights, so the general downward trend makes me happy, if the small wiggles in the line don’t.)

(The yellow diagonal is the line I need to always stay below if I want to hit my goal weight this summer. Gulp. I’m a little close to it today!)

I should admit here that vegetables or not, I wasn’t perfect this weekend. I was darn good, though. Saturday was our annual Easter egg hunt with the triplet group. I was one of the hosts, and while I brought the drinks, everyone else brought food. I brought my own turkey pepperoni and ate some of the veggie tray. (Goood!) But while I successfully resisted the cupcakes, donut holes and noodle salad, the corn salad was too much to resist. So I had a little corn salad. That might or might not have had crushed up Fritos in it. (!!!)

And then on Sunday, while I managed to stay away from the pizza and cupcakes at a child’s birthday party, I may have later helped myself to just a few of the Hershey’s miniatures from the boys’ favor bags.

I know intellectually that a cup of corn salad and 4 tiny chocolates didn’t make me gain 1.6 lbs. It wouldn’t be possible, even if the corn salad was made with lard. (I hope it wasn’t.) I mean, my friend Steph and I walked five and a half miles in the disgusting heat Sunday morning. So I just have to make sure I don’t let these small fluctuations get me down. It’s so much easier for me to stay on track during the week, at work. So I just need to keep on keepin’ on.

Some pictures from the Easter egg hunt…

Some (not nearly all) of the kids lined up to find eggs…

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The boys discussing their haul with a friend:

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Candy!!!

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Our sad attempt at a family picture.

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So my goal (as I’ve probably mentioned) is to hit 30 lbs at least before I go to New York next week. Fingers crossed.

On a downward slide (in a good way)

For a while, after I ran some marathons but before I devoted my blogging to wedding-related stuff, I wrote a lot about my weight loss journey. My sister got married in October 2004, and I was determined to look good in the pictures. And then I got engaged a month later, and after that, my motivation revolved around my wedding. All told, I lost about 40 pounds, I think (not including the weight I lost while training for the marathons.) But then it all came back after the wedding, and then with my pregnancy, blah blah blah. Tried losing it many times, and could never get more than a few pounds off.

I was really starting to lose hope. Weight Watchers had worked for me in the past, but as I got older, it didn’t work as well, and frankly, I didn’t have the time to devote to journaling everything I ate, and going to meetings. I did Jenny Craig for a while last year, as I wrote about, and I actually liked it a lot more than I expected to. But I couldn’t afford to stay on that, so unfortunately, the weight came back.

I started to consider maybe I needed to try something new. And I remembered a few friends mentioning a diet they were having a lot of success with. It seemed pretty restrictive. No sugar. NO SUGAR! (Hardly any carbs at all, in fact, but NO SUGAR?!?!?) I am a sugar fiend. I figured any diet I ever did would have to allow me some sugar so I wouldn’t feel deprived.

But then I started reading about people having successes with fasting, maybe not for weight loss, but for breaking their sugar addiction. I’m telling you, quitting smoking was a piece of, uh, cake, compared to the idea of giving up my beloved sugar. But I kind of knew, that’s what I’d have to do. Not fast, necessarily, but give up sugar. I needed to make a drastic change. I needed restrictions.

Enter the Dukan Diet. That’s the diet my aforementioned friends had done and lost weight on. So I ordered the book. Read over the website. Found some blogs. Did some research. And decided to just go for it. (And sadly realized I would have to stop making the pumpkin steel-cut oats I’d been enjoying for breakfast. Sniff, sniff.) I think what really convinced me was all the success stories I found online. Not the ones on the Dukan website, but the ones from real people. And the fact that the diet has a lifetime phase. You very gradually work back in more foods, and by the time you’re at the maintenance phase, it should be second nature.

The Dukan Diet is basically a low-fat, low-carb, high-protein diet. Yeah, like Atkins or South Beach, I guess. And let me tell you, I finally found something that really works for me. It really works! I started on January 30, and have lost 26 pounds. That’s in less than two months! I will freely admit that I have had some sugar. I allowed myself a slice of king cake at Mardi Gras, a piece of chocolate on Valentine’s Day, a small slice of birthday cake here and there. But overall, I’ve stuck to the plan well. (It helps that sugar now gives me a massive headache.)

There’s also no drinking on Dukan, so the glass of wine I used to enjoy after the boys go to bed has fallen by the wayside. George was, at first, a bit upset that I wouldn’t be hanging out with him at the pub on the nights the boys were at Granny & Grandpa’s. But it’s just a temporary sacrifice until I hit my goal weight (which should be this summer sometime.) I consider it completely worth it, but yeah, I do miss my wine.


So that’s kind of a big thing that’s been going on with me lately, but I haven’t really wanted to blog about it until I had success with it.

Any questions?

TGIF

What a week….just glad it’s nearly over. I’ve been swamped at work, and the boys (ahem, LINUS) haven’t been sleeping great. Not that I’ll get a break this weekend, but I’d rather be swamped with cute little 17 month olds than a pile of paperwork. And we’re going to hang out with Anne and Bill and Whitman tomorrow. And there will be raw oysters for lunch. So much to look forward to!

I got a haircut earlier this week, too. And I started WW yesterday. So Operation De-Shlumpify Pam has begun! Just in time for my mom’s wedding in August.

The haircut:

In sad news, please keep my friend A’s husband in your thoughts and prayers, if you are so inclined. He is very, very ill. They have several children and another on the way, which just makes it all the more awful. I am sick just thinking about it. So please, send good thoughts their way. I just saw them together a few weeks ago, and I can’t imagine this big, vital, healthy man, weak and in the ICU. It’s just too awful. So please.