Wednesday Weigh-In #4

Not good news. Up 2 pounds. Not at all surprising.

I'm struggling mentally right now though. Some times when I have a bad weigh in I can see it as a fresh start and get myself right back on track (even if that only lasts for one day). However today I'm not having that feeling. It's July 2nd and with the holiday coming up I feel like I don't want to have to think about it. I feel like I want to just do whatever I want for the next few days and get back on track after the weekend.

Then I think about how stupid that is and try to convince myself that there is no reason to not track this week. That I can easily choose one day to not track, but still track all the other days. That frankly, if I focus on using only my daily points all days but one, I could probably even lose weight this coming week.

But then I can't decide what I want to do. No matter what I choose it will be my choice. I will own it and move on. I definitely need to get my butt in gear and I need to get on the band wagon for losing this weight. However, when I'm struggling mentally I tend to do better when I just make the decision to give myself a break and then start again soon after. Sometimes if I continue to try to fight through this mental block, I end up taking that much longer to get back on track.

I am contemplating changing my weigh in day. I was thinking Wednesday was going to be a good day because it would give me 2 days after the weekend to recover from any over eating that happens on the weekend (even eating within my points range). However, what has been happening is that I don't get back on track until my week starts again on Wednesday. So now I'm thinking about making my weigh in day Sunday mornings.

The good news is that I continue to do well with the 5k training. I have gotten on the treadmill to run every other day since deciding last Wednesday to start my 5k training. I have completed 4 runs. The first 3 were half mile intervals. I completed the 5k in 50 minutes (or a little over a 5k if you go by the mileage on my vivofit). Then yesterday I changed the intervals a little and did .4/.6 mile intervals. So, I walked for .4 miles and then ran for .6 miles until the treadmill said 3.1. This took 2 minutes off my time and I finished in 48 minutes. The vivofit was actually consistent with the last run and indicated that I actually completed a distance of 3.51 miles. Like I said before, I don't know which device is more accurate, but I will continue to run until the treadmill says 3.1 because I'd rather be doing too much than not enough! I'm happy about this. No matter what happens over the next few days, I will continue to focus on my 5k training. I ran yesterday so my schedule will be to run tomorrow and Saturday. My plan is to do the same intervals I did yesterday.

Glitch

I have good news and some not so good news to report. Let's start on a positive note!

I have successfully finished 3 training runs since I started my 5k training last Wednesday. Yay me! I am currently doing the training on the treadmill for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is I'm back to feeling pretty self conscious about how I look running. Another reason is I find it easier to just go down to my basement and knock out 3.1 miles while watching a show on my kindle than going out in the heat to run. Anyway, so those are 2 of my main reasons for choosing the treadmill right now. I already talked about the runs on Wednesday and Friday, so Sunday was time for me to get on the treadmill again. I was going to get on the treadmill in the morning, but I just couldn't muster up the motivation to get it done. I then was getting some yardwork done (cleaning the patio and such) and decided since I was already sweating that would be a good time to get my run done.

So pretty and clean! 

Of course, I was also having a battle with myself about whether or not I had to run. I mean, I was already getting a workout in cleaning the yard and I could still just focus on getting my steps in, etc. I eventually convinced myself that the 5k training is something I need to do above and beyond "working out". That it's not just about burning calories or getting my steps in, but about getting back on the running bandwagon! I finished my 3.1 miles in 50 minutes again. The workout was the same as the other 2 runs. Walk at 3.0 to half mile, run at 5.0 to mile 1 and continue that cycle until finished with 3.1 miles. The treadmill says 3.1 miles at 50 minutes, but my garmin Vivofit varies from 3.49 to 3.51 miles in those 50 minutes. I don't know which one is more accurate, but I'm happy with my progress regardless.

So that's the good news.

The not so good news is that my food is not going so great again. Sigh......same old, same old. I made it through about 3 days this week with tracking and staying within my points. I hit Saturday and decided I didn't really care. It was only going to be one day. Well, I haven't gotten back on track with tracking yet. I'm not going totally overboard and I'm earning more activity points this week than I have every other week, but still. I would have NO problem taking 1 day to not track and just eat what I want, IF the other days I track my food and don't use my weekly or activity points. That way, I'm probably not going over my points at all if I have one bad day. But, what I've been doing is using my weekly points for the days that I am tracking and I start to get frustrated because I don't have enough points to eat what I want on the weekends. So basically I'm eating too much and I need to get it under control (as usual). The good news though? I'm really keeping it close to in check considering I'm still on prednisone. As of getting on the scale this morning I'm up less than a pound from my weigh in last Wednesday.

I'm a work in progress though. I am really getting back on the wagon regarding my activity. My daily step goal had reached its' way past 10, 000 steps per day so today I decided to override the automatic step goal and just set it at 10,000 steps per day. I think for now that's plenty to shoot for. Oh, and I'm still going strong with my streak of hitting my step goal every day. I was awfully annoyed yesterday though when I synced my vivofit to the Garmin Connect website because there was some sort of glitch and it did not record ANY steps for Saturday. I have no idea what happened. The only thing I can think is that I didn't set my wristband to "sleep" until right around midnight (so technically Sunday morning). I don't know, but now the website tells me that my longest streak is 15 days and I'm starting a new streak as of Sunday! Grrrr....that's not true! My streak is now at 18 days because I hit my 10, 000 steps today!

5k Training

I feel like I can say that it has officially started. On Wednesday I decided to say in my blog post that I was going to start training for a 5k at the end of August. So, on Wednesday I got on my treadmill and I started to train. I decided to do my training a little differently this time. Although I haven't been running at all in the last almost 1.5 years, I feel like starting with something like the Couch to 5k program is too slow for me. I've actually tried that before and usually get bored with it. I think I get frustrated because in 2012 I was finishing a marathon and now I'm trying to get back to running (or even run/walking) a 5k.

No pictures that relate to this post so instead
enjoy this picture of a deer!

When I was training for the marathon, I had gotten to the point where I was running 3 miles without walk breaks on the treadmill. I decided that this time around I am going to train to run this 5k without walk breaks. This is not to say I won't take walk breaks during the actual race because my plan is to do it with the kids and I will let them dictate the pace and any walk breaks. However, if I am training with the thought of no walk breaks then I'll be ready to do my own 5k with no walk breaks.

So on Wednesday I got on the treadmill and started with walking. I walked until the treadmill read a half mile and then I upped the speed and ran until the treadmill read 1 mile (so I ran for a half mile). At first I was just going to do this and then walk to 3.1 miles. While I was walking again I decided that I was recovering pretty well so I would try it again. I walked to 1.5 miles and then set the treadmill to 5.0 (12 min/mile) and ran to 2 miles. I was feeling really good and the running was feeling so great. I decided to do it again. Walked to 2.5 miles and then ran to 3 miles. I then walked the .1 and was done. I did the 3.1 miles in 50 minutes, but I did it. I ran 1.5 miles of the 3.1 in my first attempt. I am happy with those intervals and it felt really good.

I continued my step streak yesterday with a nice walk in the park with the kids. Today the kids and I went on a very nice 8.4 mile bike ride. It was slightly challenging because there were some hills but we all did awesome. I was contemplating whether or not I wanted to run since I already got activity in with the bike ride, but I eventually decided that I wanted to run every other day to get back on track with running. So after getting home from our bike ride I got on the treadmill and did the same workout I did on Wednesday. It felt pretty amazing.

I am a little nervous that I'm pushing myself too much, but I feel good so I'm going with it. As of right now my plan is to stick with the .5 mile run intervals and eventually decrease the distance of the walk intervals until I am running the entire thing. My plan is to run every other day and to stick with one interval set for 3 days. I have not yet printed out a workout schedule for myself, but I just may be doing that soon! :)

Wednesday Weigh-In #3

Big sigh of relief!

Today's weigh-in = Maintain!! 0 pounds lost or gained. Whew!

I can't even express the sigh of relief and shock that I had when I got on the scale this morning. As I said before, I ate too much Sunday and Monday this week. Sunday I had decided to still track my food and I was something like 58 points in the red for the week. I didn't even track Monday or yesterday so I'm sure that I added several points to those points as well. I did continue to earn activity points because I am trying to continue my streak of getting all my steps in each day (today's goal is 9165).

So today starts a new week. I need to take this maintain and run with it so I can actually lose this week. I know I can do this.

I also would like to start focusing on getting back into running. That will inevitably help me easily reach my steps for the days that I do run. There is a run here locally at the end of August that is a 5k "Glow Run" so it's done at night with glow sticks and black lights and stuff like that. I've never done any of these kind of "fun" 5k's before and think this might be a fun one to do with the kids. The race is a little over 9 weeks away from today. I haven't run or run/walked more than maybe a mile or two in over a year so I really need to get my butt in gear starting to get ready for that race if I want to do it! So I think I'll make the statement now that starting this week I'll start my 5k training!

And with that I'll leave you with a nice short and sweet post today!

Streaking!

I'm going to start with the positive for this post. I currently have a streak of sorts happening and I almost let it go last night, but decided that would be really dumb.

So, as I've mentioned before, I bought a Garmin Vivofit back in March to help track my activity. I decided on the Vivofit for a number of reasons, but one of the things I really liked about it is that it gives you a new goal each morning depending on what you did the day before. I believe when I first got the band my step goal each day was somewhere around 5000 steps. If I made that goal one day the next day it would increase, but only by a few steps. Even if I had a day where I hit 10,000 steps, it would only increase my goal by a couple hundred steps.

I've had this on my wrist since I bought it back in March, but I haven't really been using it to its' full capacity. I would see what my steps were for the day, but didn't really care if I wasn't hitting my goals. A few days ago I realized that I've been paying more attention to hitting my goal each day. I had noticed one day online that my longest streak of meeting my step goal was 5 days. I also happened to be at a current streak of 5 days. At that moment I decided I'm going to try to meet my step goal (the one that the Vivofit gives me) every day and see how long I can keep the streak going.

Lots of green lines! 

As you can see from the green lines above, my current streak is 11 days. Last night I almost ended my streak. It was 10 PM and I still had to walk over 2800 steps to hit my goal for the day. I haven't been doing great with my food so I almost just threw in the towel. Around 10:15 I decided that would be really stupid and it actually doesn't take me that long to get in a couple thousand steps. I went downstairs on the treadmill and walked for about 25 minutes to get the rest of my steps in for the day! 

Because I have hit my step goal for 11 days, my goal has been steadily increasing each day. My goal for today is 9,108. With my goal so close to 10,000 steps it is getting a little more difficult to get those steps in every day. I have to make more of a conscious effort to get off my butt more and get those steps in! 

And the not so great news - my food has not been good. I did OK until about Sunday. I tracked everything and was within my points through Saturday night. Sunday was terrible and I ate lots of extra points. I did better yesterday, but then again ate too much yesterday evening. My official weigh in isn't until tomorrow, but I will be up this week - hopefully just a little bit. I'm OK with this. It happens. I do, however, need to stop doing this one good week, one bad week thing. At this point I'd even take 3 good weeks and one bad week out of a month! It's a process and I'm going to get there. 

Last but not least, the Crohn's update. The prednisone is definitely working, but I step down the dosage this morning and I'm a little worried that it isn't going to stay at bay. I'm still having some issues, but nothing like it was a week ago. I'm going to stay positive and know that if I get my eating back under control as well that can only help the issue. We'll see where we go from here. 

Running Out of Points!

This week isn't going quite as well as last week was at this time. I'm still tracking and I'm fighting to stay on track. This is starting to feel more like week 1 though where I had to fight every day leading up to the weekend and then I just stopped tracking for the remainder of the week and started to just refocus again on Wednesday (since that's when my WW weeks start).

I don't want to do that again so I'm going to continue to fight the battle and hopefully win before I run out of points! I suppose it'll just mean that I need to exercise more to earn more activity points! I don't EVER like to see my food tracker go in to the negative though, knowing that I'll have to earn activity points to get out of the red and then when I do earn those points I can't even use them because I already did! I have switched the way that I track my weekly and activity points though so we'll see if that makes any difference at all. I used to track my activity points first; that way I would try to only go over my points for the day based on how many activity points I earned. But it was driving me crazy last week because I would earn maybe 5 points, but use 8 - so I'd use the 5 of my activity points and 3 of my weekly points, but then the next day I'd earn 5 activity points and maybe use none so then it would switch and put some points back to my weekly and take them from my activity. Seemed silly to me. So, now I'm swapping my weekly points first. If I go over the (now) 34 points a day I can have, it'll be subtracted from my weekly points. When those go away, I'll be using the activity points that I've earned throughout the week.

I always try to have at least some points leftover at the end of the week (even though they say you can eat all of them) because I figure this way it accounts for any human error of tracking. If I maybe tracked too many activity points or didn't track enough for some food I estimated, I figure it's covered if I end the week with some leftover points. But I think for this week I'll consider it a win if my tracker tells me 0 points left on Tuesday night and not -100 points or anything!

I did walk with my mom yesterday so I ended my day around 13,000+ steps so that was good for like 9 activity points so that's good at least. I need to do some more walking today to even hit my goal. Mary is supposed to have a pitching clinic tonight and I'm really hoping it doesn't get canceled due to the light rain that's happening because I was planning to walk the track while she has practice. That should help me get the 4600+ steps I still need today to hit my goal.

Last week I earned 32 activity points on the week so my goal will be to earn more than that this week - so at least 33! :)

In other news, I have now been on prednisone for 4 days and I also did my Humira injection today so that's good. There is definite improvement so I continue to feel hopeful that this quick round of steroids will calm things back down and I'll be good to go. If the steroids help it to get under control in only 3 weeks and keep it under control for even several months I can deal with that. Being on steroids for months at a time just stinks though so.......

Wednesday Weigh-In #2

Needless to say it's been a rough week. I have now taken 2 doses of prednisone though and I am already seeing improvements so that's good. I'm staying positive and this is GOING to work. I have never caught a flare this early so I'm hopeful that I'll be able to stop it faster than ever as well.

Source

But moving on to what we all want to know, right?? Weigh-in Wednesday!! I am VERY proud of how I handled my week regardless of what the scale said this morning. I tracked every day last week. If I wasn't sure of the points for something, I estimated as best I could with what WW had in their database. I tracked my steps every day with my Vivofit and made a conscious effort to hit my step goal every day (and the Vivofit gives me a new goal every day based on how well I'm doing with meeting my goals - so the more I meet & exceed them, the more steps I have to do the next day).

Despite starting to flare, I did not succumb to emotional eating. I did have wine this week, but it was one time and I didn't gorge myself in the process. I also counted every ounce of what I drank! And the results of my hard work this week were excellent!

Weight lost this week = 4.2 pounds
Total lost since re-starting WW on June 4 = 5.4 pounds
Total weight lost since starting the Whole30 on April 22 = 17.4 pounds

The key this week will be once again to track everything and stay within my points range. Last week I used all my daily points every day (well, except last night - I ended the day with 3 points left); all my 49 weekly points and 22 of my 32 earned activity points. I was a little nervous about counting all those activity points because I'm not really doing "activity" perse, but I'm tracking my steps over the day and there is an option to enter your steps in from "all-day" to get activity points. My average steps per day right now are 8109. I plan to work up to 10,000 steps per day so I'm happy with 8000 now.