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Judy Judy
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It’s typical on a diet that we tend to relax our otherwise stringent rules on the weekends. We are with family and friends and sometimes going to do errands that put us in the position to eat out. Don’t give in, don’t let your weekends become your “weak”ends.
I’ve mentioned before that you need to make room for a little treat here and there in measured portion so that you don’t feel deprived. Making a whole day or two as your treat is not a good idea unless you want to feel like you’ve just fallen on your face come weigh in time on Monday morning. Take this past weekend for me. After recovering from a rather excruciating shoulder injury on Thursday I still exercised Friday and was feeling pretty good about myself. Saturday I was home with DH and the kiddies and I didn’t feel like exercising. I snacked even though I did eat some veggies but nothing like I had during the week. Monday I weighed in and had gained 2 lbs. I almost fell over.
As far as exercise I didn’t do anything extraordinary Monday, but I did make sure to eat the majority of my calories from vegetables and fruit. This morning when I weighed in I was down 1.8 lbs. I felt good, but it would have been better to be 1.8 lbs down from where I was on Friday! Instead here I am playing catch up.
I need to remind myself to get up and move. Eat as much veggies in delicious ways as you can. Trade in your donut for a banana (or other fruit). Don’t drink the pop. Grab a glass(es) of water.
DON’T GIVE UP.
YOU CAN DO IT.
Time on current weight loss attempt: 8 days
Weight Change: .9 lbs lost
Total Weight Change: 2.8 lbs. lost
It is interesting to feel how cathartic writing about my weight loss attempts has been these past few days. Especially after joining the Noom 30 day challenge group and knowing others want to know what is going on with me has been encouraging. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, a I-can-do-it-on-my-own kind of person. After several failed attempts at losing weight and keeping it off I have come to realize that I can’t do this alone. Even if it’s just the idea that someone is out there reading this and gaining some comfort or help from my experience is a morale boost for me.
I didn’t do any 8 minutes in the morning exercises but I did do my 12 minutes on the Wii. Later the girls and I played scoop ball. I had to cut the top 6 inches off a gallon milk container keeping the handle intact. The object of the game was to throw and catch a small ball with the container. It’s supposed to help with hand eye coordination. The game was surprisingly harder than it seemed.
I ate A LOT of fruits and veggies today and save a headache later in the evening I felt pretty good. No severe hunger pangs and little cravings for chocolate, candy bars, cookies, popcorn or ice cream. Though it is rare that I keep that kind of stuff in the house (because I WILL eat it) I typically get a hankering for it later in the evening. I did have a glass of milk with a little Nesquick in it after supper to help quell a mild desire for chocolate and it seemed to do the trick to get me over it. Usually you’ll find me with a bowl of popcorn or corn chips with cheese after supper because I just wasn’t satisfied. Not today.
Supper was chock full of veggies and super easy. The idea was on a package of spinach. Supposedly the recipe is a ‘kid friendly’ way to hide spinach in an evening meal. I must say it did hide the rather chalky texture typical of cooked spinach which my DH hates.
I cooked a pound of regular Jimmy Dean roll sausage in a pan breaking it into small pieces until browned. Then I scooped it into a strainer and set it aside over a bowl allowing the fat to drain off. In the remaining browned bits in the pan I added a tablespoon of olive oil and a pound of the rinsed spinach and a little salt and pepper to taste. In the meantime I had set a pot of salted water to boil in order to cook some angel hair pasta. As soon as the spinach was wilted I brought the sausage back to the pan along with a jar of pasta sauce. This mixture was allowed to heat through on low while I cooked 12 oz. of angel hair pasta in the boiling water. After the pasta was cooked al dente it was drained and put in the pan with the sausage, spinach, sauce mixture. Mixed all together this became our supper. My three-year-old kept saying it was her favorite. No one complained about the spinach and everyone walked away satisfied – including me seeing that all the plates were left clean J.
Programs, books, helpers: Noom Coach for Android, Jorge Cruise 8-Minutes in the Morning, Wii Fit Plus, Power 90, Slim in 6, Flip the Switch Lose the Weight by Dr. Robert Cooper, Buddy Noom on Facebook ( if interested and using Noom, friend them on FB and they’ll add you to a support group), Online Stopwatch , SparkPeople.com, Everydayhealth.com
Time on current weight loss attempt: 7 days
Programs, books, helpers: Noom Coach for Android, Jorge Cruise 8-Minutes in the Morning, Wii Fit Plus, Power 90, Slim in 6, Flip the Switch Lose the Weight by Dr. Robert Cooper, Buddy Noom on Facebook ( if interested and using Noom, friend them on FB and they’ll add you to a support group), Online Stopwatch
Weight Change Total: 1.9 lbs. lost
Since Last Weigh In: .4 lbs. lost
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According to the scale this morning I lost .4 of a lb. I’m not complaining one bit especially since the trend has been down lately. That makes me happy. I’ve only been moderately hungry and slightly sore. No pulled muscles, injured shoulders or necks or broken diets yet. My diet, if that’s what you want to call it, consists mainly of eating way more veggies and fruit, less preprocessed stuff (if I can help it), less red meat and more lean chicken, pork or fish. It is interesting trying to figure out how to make the meat I have fit the vegetables I have available instead of the other way round. Trying to not fry my foods is another challenge but it’s well worth it. It takes longer to eat which I think is making me stop eating as many calories sooner – my jaw gets tired and my belly feels full faster. This morning I continued on my 8-Minutes-In-The-Morning kick. The exercises today were similar to the ones from Saturday, but I chose to do them standing up so I could engage more muscle groups in the endeavor. Since my cell phone was plugged in I used the stopwatch on the website http://online-stopwatch.com to time my exercises. For the first 4 minutes I would clear and reset the countdown timer, but then I decided to do the last four minutes without interruption so I set the timer to countdown from 4 minutes instead of just one.
This morning I did the following exercises:
The Glide Hold
Stand up straight with your arms raised out to the side at 90 degree angles to your head, palms down. Engage your abs and hold this position for up to 60 seconds. You can also do this from a seated position.
I chose to do this from standing so I was able to engage also my glutes by flexing, squeezing and tucking them under like you would at the top of a squat. Wow! Talk about full body engagement. You would think standing with your arms raised out to the side would not be so hard, but it really takes a great amount of effort to maintain your abs and glutes engaged while holding the arms in place. I like this exercise because it is working my chest, shoulders and back also without hurting my delicate shoulders (holding babies has wrecked them).
The Stir Hold
Stand straight up with your feet shoulder width apart and flex your abs. Make a fist with one hand and press it in a circular motion over your abs – like you are stirring a cake batter. This helps you to keep focus on your abs for the full minute. You can also do this from a seated position.
Ab exercise without having to do a crunch – need I say more.
NOOM Coach Advice for Today
NOOM coach offered a suggestion about how to curb your appetite that I had never thought of before – use the other hand. If you are left handed use your right hand to eat and vice versa. I tried this and kept forgetting and subconsciously picking up my utensils with my right hand instead of my left. I’ll keep trying though. The article said that using the non dominant hand will make eating take longer so you feel full sooner on less food and also it improves dexterity and improves neural function unlocking places in the brain that were previously unused. The fact that this act has multiple benefits makes me want to try it even more.
Time on current weight loss attempt: 5 days
Programs, books, helpers: Noom Coach for Android, Jorge Cruise 8-Minutes in the Morning, Wii Fit Plus, Power 90, Slim in 6, Flip the Switch Lose the Weight by Dr. Robert Cooper, Buddy Noom on Facebook ( if interested and using Noom, friend them on FB and they’ll add you to a support group)
Weight Change: 1.5 lbs. lost
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Technically I should be starting over again since it’s been 2 months since my last post in this series. Needless to say I had a setback – emotionally and a surprisingly painful menses. Haven’t had one like that in a long time. Since then I rediscovered my Noom weight loss coach program that I had on my smartphone before I had to reformat it and start over again. Thankfully, when I reinstalled it the program actually remembered me even though it’s format had drastically changed. I’ve read that many people are not enjoying the new format, but I think progress is good and it’s acting MORE like a coach now than it was before. Granted, to take advantage of all the bells and whistles you have to pay for the service ($4.99/month), but they are nice enough to give you the first 30 days free to try out if you like their program. So far so good.
I’ve been more conscientious about what I eat and how much. Trying to focus on eating foods that will keep me full longer with the least amount of calories since the coach said dieting is more effective than exercise in weight loss. This fact alone is probably why all my other weight loss attempts have failed. I HATE feeling hungry and deprived, I do tend to reward myself with food after a particularly strenuous workout and I have the bad habit of jumping headlong into a workout routine that is physically too strenuous for me leading to injury and setbacks.
Noom coach actually told me that my scheduled workout routine was too ambitious. That it would be better to promise to do 5 minutes, at least something, than try to commit to 30 minutes every day (which I have failed to do at least 2 times this week already) and that if I was able to to extra that would be great. The coach’s goal is just to make me more active than I was before; to make me commit to do SOMETHING even for just 5 minutes. Ever hear the saying, “Every little bit counts.”? Well I guess in this case I suppose that is the philosophy. So instead of sticking with the 30 minutes of aerobics – 6 days a week I lessened it to 12 minutes of yoga 5 times a week (that’s how long it takes to do my favorite Yoga poses on the Wii Fit Plus program). Since yesterday I didn’t have access to the TV and thus the Wii for most of the day I decided I needed to look for something else to guide me in my workout regimen. I remembered that I had written down some of the exercises from the Jorge Cruise 8 Minutes in the Morning book and that it had yielded results the first time I tried the routine for a 6 week period (don’t know what happened then; why did I stop?). People actually started commenting on how my look was changing and LITERALLY all I was doing was the simple exercises for 8 minutes in the morning. Now 30 lbs. heavier and trying to watch what I eat I am hoping that it will still have some positive weight loss results.
This morning before breakfast I found my notes and did 2 exercises that I thought would be super easy since I was sitting at my desk. The first one is called the Push Down Hold and the second one is the Lift Hold
Push Down Hold
Sit straight up in a sturdy chair (one without wheels), with your feet flat on the floor 2 feet away from a sturdy table (desk) and place your hands shoulder width apart pressing down on the table top. Hold this position, pressing firmly, for 60 seconds. Don’t forget to breathe. It’s hard not to engage your abs in this move – if you don’t feel it FOCUS.
Lift Hold
Sit straight up in a sturdy chair (one without wheels), with your feet flat on the floor 2 feet away from a sturdy table (desk) and place your hands shoulder width apart under the table top lifting up. Hold this position, lifting firmly, for 60 seconds. Don’t forget to breathe. Your abs still get a workout, but you do really have to focus harder.
Alternate these two exercises for 8 minutes; 4 reps each.
After I was done my arms and abs were burning! I think that is pretty awesome for only 8 minutes of work. If you notice I did this before breakfast and there is a reason for that. I checked the book Flip the Switch, Lose the Weight by Robert K. Cooper, PhD out from the library and started reading about how to harness the power of our metabolic thermostat. I wanted to find a recipe for breakfast and I came across a snippit of information about how people who commit to exercise first thing in the morning are more likely to stick with the plan compared to afternoon and evening exercisers also they burn MORE fat through the day. The morning exercise energizes you and kick starts your metabolism. Dr. Cooper said, before or after breakfast is fine, but the exercise needs to take place within an hour of rising – as does eating breakfast – to take the best advantage of our MetaStat. I’m still learning more about why.
Thank you for reading. If you have any comments of encouragement or admonishment please feel free to share. I didn’t take seriously how having support would help and I am starting to believe that is another reason why I’ve failed in the past. If no one knows what you are doing there is no one to be accountable to or to miss your updates. So here I am with Noom’s coaching divulging to the world my progress.
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