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Lets Think About This Shall We?

For the month of January I made it my goal to eat healthier. This meant cutting out processed foods, fried foods, sugar, and cutting back on meat. As far as meeting my goals, lets just say I tried.


Actually I did pretty well for the couple of weeks that I journaled for my doctor. But I can't afford a $20 copay every two weeks so she can tell me I need to eat better. That's what weight watchers was supposed to be for. I even told my meeting leader that I was going to give her my tracker every week so she could keep me accountable. Except she forgot and never asked me for it.


I didn't completely bomb, but the last few days have been a free-for-all in terms of eating. To some extent I blame hormones. Even though I'm 7 1/2 months post partum things are still off kilter at times and it's the only way I can explain why I'm completely ravenous sometimes.


So now that January is over I feel like I need to stop and reevaluate my goals. First I shall review what they were:


  1. Walk 20 minutes EVERY DAY.
  2. Cut out all sugar (including fake sugar) for the month of January and July.
I had a goal about Dragon Boating too, but I'm going to revisit that later on when my team starts paddling more regularly again. 


Now that I've reviewed my resolutions, I need to think about what worked and what didn't. Let's star with walking.


Walking didn't work at all. Initially I tried and made it out the door maybe two or three times a week maximum. Then I just stopped trying altogether and most days I didn't even think about it. I think the reason it doesn't work for me is because I think of it as something that other people do, but not something that I do. It also doesn't help that we're living in suburban sprawl where the only level places to walk either don't have sidewalks or are on super busy streets. This isn't really a very good excuse, but it's an excuse nonetheless. I don't like walking the mall either because then I just end up going shopping. 
In the past the best time for me to get exercise is first thing in the morning before I do anything else. If I wake up and put my tennis shoes on, I get out and get active. This is incredibly difficult with a baby because my night of sleep varies every night, and then I have to do all sorts of things in the morning to get her happy enough to go anywhere. It could easily take me two hours to get out the door. By the time I get her fed, changed, clothed, fed again, bundled, packed and ready to go, I'm ready for a nap and so is she! This doesn't even include feeding, bathing and clothing myself. Walking may just have to be out for awhile. 
Instead I think I'm going to join the gym. I still can't go first thing in the morning, but I can go in the evening when everyone else is home to watch the baby. I could really use a couple hours a few days a week to just go be by myself and get the endorphines going. 


There's just one problem. I can't afford to join the gym without quitting weight watchers. And this brings me to the second goal of cutting out sugar. I really didn't do to badly at keeping my sugar down, but I did have a few snags. I think I'm going to continue to try to keep sugar out of my diet altogether. I feel like I am better without it and I really enjoy naturally sweet foods more. 
My last post I said I was going to quit weight watchers. I've been frustrated because I was doing so well in keeping my diet pretty strict and I kept gaining. Right after I wrote my last post I weighed in and was down 2.5 pounds, got my 5% goal and hit my 10lb loss. Was it because of weight watchers? Nope. But I can't help but feel like I could do better with the program. I'm still fairly convinced that my hormones are going to make losing weight through diet more difficult than normal, so maybe what I need to do is exercise until I stop nursing and try it again. I don't need meetings to eat well, and honestly I haven't tracked since September anyway. 


As far as my diet geared toward lowering my cholesterol I've completely derailed. It's really difficult to eat a certain way when you live in a house that you don't have control of the meals. I don't really want to have control of all the meals while we live here either, and I don't feel like it's reasonable for me to have to make my own food when there's food already made. So, until I have my own kitchen again, I'm going to control what I eat when I'm out by staying vegetarian, whole grain, and not eating anything that's deep fried, and I'll do the best I can with meals at home. I think this is a reasonable approach, but probably not good enough as far as my doctors concerned. 


I guess I'll wrap this up with my new goals.


  1. Join a gym and work out at least 2 nights a week. I'm going to do this by writing my workouts in my calendar so I know I have time.
  2. Continue to be sugar free.
  3. Eat more vegetarian meals than non-vegetarian ones and no fried food. 

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