It's Coming On Christmas, They're Cutting Down Trees

(This was actually written with good old pencil and paper while at school November 25th.)

My poor neglected blog. My poor neglected goals. But fortunately not my poor neglected weight; my 60 day challenge has me down to 169.0 lbs. And I’m really liking that. 

As for the neglect, I’ve been insanely busy and fairly stressed over the last few weeks (months?). Training with Natasha kept me busy until a few weeks ago, but then add in organizing a float for the Santa Claus parade for the first time, hosting a book club meeting/Christmas party, and all the other Christmas events I like to do, and life has been purely chaotic. I am anxiously awaiting December 5^th, because it will all be over, including the 5km Santa Shuffle I signed up for, which falls on the morning of the parade. I know the stress is all self-induced, because other than the father-imposed float, I do it all of my own choice. But what’s life if you’re not busy? But after thinking about the last year and how crazy it’s been, I am truly looking forward to my two weeks off to do nothing but relax and be stress free, no plans, no commitments. It will be much needed. I won’t know what to do with myself. Although I’m planning on lots of cooking, reading and exercising. Here’s a recap of my crazy year:

Jan – plenty of supply at my fave high school

Feb – start extended supply at said high school; lasts until June

Jul – two weeks of summer school at same high school, two weeks at a local school

Aug – trip out east, several camping trips

Sept – start extended supply again at same school

Nov – extended supply (finally) becomes an official LTO

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all been good stuff that has kept me busy. But maybe it will be nice to have some time without prepping math classes from scratch and adding all my crazy weekend adventures to the mix. I’ll let you know.

As for my 60 day challenge, it apparently was just the thing I needed, despite my initial hesitation. I was having a hard time sticking to my weight loss plan for an extended period of time; I would do well for a week or two, lose some weight, then abandon the healthy eating for a few days and basically undo all the hard work I had done. I followed that pattern for a year; the end of last November I was at 169.0 at WW. I gained 10 lbs over Christmas and spent the majority of this year trying to get rid of those 10 lbs. So here I am, at the end of November again, and just where I was 365 days ago. I was getting frustrated at paying WW and a gym membership, for working so hard 75% of the time and yet not really progressing. The 75% effort wasn’t working well enough (probably because the not-so-good 25% was really bad). So I decided to enlist myself in a 60 day challenge. 

The rules are fairly simple; follow WW points strictly, measuring and tracking everything. If I go over in points (including my weekly points) I have one week to ‘earn’ those points back with exercise. If I didn’t, I had to give up completing one of my goals. That is a pretty intense consequence; I have no intention of leaving a single goal incomplete, and if I had to purposely not do one (or more!) I would be furious with myself. Nick was nervous too; one uncorrected week and I would have failed the challenge AND failed my goal list, and I would be a very big depressed mess that he would be cleaning up. I won’t lie, I wasn’t sure I could do it either, especially over Christmas. But it’s Day 21 and it’s going well. I’ve yet to use all my weekly points (and I aim to keep it that way) and I finally broke back into the 160’s (my visit to 169 after the cabbage soup diet was incredibly brief). 

Even though the worst of the holiday food is yet to come, I have confidence that I can make it work, and if I can make this work during the most food-obsessed month of the year, then I can easily make it work forever. I can easily see that for a regular week, it would be easy to eat well; it’s the weeks with more than one ‘event’ that become a challenge. This weekend will be tough; a baby shower, followed by a friend’s birthday dinner at The Keg, followed by Nick’s and my now-annual Christmas picnic. That’s a lot of difficult food choices. I’ve already perused The Keg’s  nutritional info online, and it was very difficult finding a reasonable meal choice. If it was the only food ‘event’ of the week, I could splurge a bit, but being only 1 of 3, I’m trying to be conservative. Which I think is smart and how people ‘normally’ eat; not like my old eating habits where every occasion was ‘special’ and meant a full out splurge no matter how many events came up.