Won't Derail Me

The spring/summer after Wyatt was born (2010) I started going for a half hour walk every evening. I walked back the lane through the potato fields behind our house. I started jogging a bit but was so out of shape that I couldn't do it for much more than a minute at a time. But I was losing a little bit of weight and my fitness was slowly improving. Then I got hurt. I tried to keep walking but it was too uncomfortable. I can't remember now if it was my hamstring or my Achilles, but it wasn't even an actual injury. Just a muscle strain or something from wearing old sneakers as trying to walk/run on rough surfaces. What should have been a temporary issue, stopped me permanently. I stopped walking every day and what weight I had lost all came back. 

Since January I've been waiting for something to come up and stop my progress. I had a few days early on that my knee was sore from moving the wrong way, but I babied it a bit and it was never a major issue. Still I’ve waited for what was going to derail me, because it didn't seem possible that I might actually not be obese all of my life. My ‘rest’ days away from the gym don’t feel like rest days....they feel like wasted days and are really hard for me to take.

During the end of May and for the most part of June I have kind of hit a weight loss plateau. I know that my body is still changing because my clothing fits differently but the scale has been stubborn. One week I gained (not much, 0.4 of a pound) and then the next I was down 5 pounds without really doing anything different. The week after that stayed about the same.

I had really hoped for a great start to June because I knew that the middle and end would be a test thanks to the wedding that I was in (the one in which I was wearing the bridesmaid dress that started this weight loss) and I wanted to really be able to enjoy myself. I’m still struggling with being okay with not being at the gym everyday, and while my diet is in no way shape or form perfect, I don’t do a whole lot of splurging in the calorie and junk department, and I thought that a few weeks of solid loss before all of the wedding festivities would let me relax a little. 

I didn’t have  great start to June though. Stagnant weight on the scale was followed by 3 days away from the gym because of mastitis. I was careful with my eating though and managed to maintain that week. Then the bachelorette party the weekend before the wedding was another hurdle. I’m not drinking alcohol since I’m still nursing and I didn’t really eat that badly, but the extra salt that my body isn’t used to put the scale up a few pounds, despite running my first road 5km race the morning of the bachelorette. I have gotten better recently at accepting that not every gain on the scale is an actual gain. I know that I didn’t consume enough extra calories to actually gain fat pounds back but the numbers sliding back up a little is still discouraging. 

The week between the bachelorette party and the wedding was another stagnant week on the scale and going into the wedding weekend I was pretty anxious. 

Not about the wedding, my two friends are perfect together and I am so happy for them. 

Not about my dress, the one that was too small in January had been taken in 3 times and couldn’t be taken in anymore. The size of the dress was 3 or 4 sizes too big....so my hard work paid off. 

I was anxious about having 4 days in a row of not getting to the gym. Anxious about eating pretty much exclusively in restaurants. And truthfully I was anxious that I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the weekend for fear of gaining a few pounds. As much as I haven’t felt deprived through this weight loss, I have been working hard and my diet and exercise are pretty much always on my mind. If I couldn’t relax and get through one long weekend, how was I ever going to be able to get through the rest of my life without turning into a gym/diet nazi?

I packed my gym bag and took it to the hotel just incase I had a few extra minutes to get to the gym, but the clothes stayed in the bag. I didn’t get there Friday after decorating and I knew that was my last opportunity, so I made myself be ok with that. Not going to the gym wasn’t going to transform me back into the 246 pound Darby over a weekend and that if I did gain a pound or two back, that I would just take it off again. Relax.

So, I did. No gym. An ok breakfast the morning of the wedding, a decent lunch before the wedding thanks to the bride’s mom, but the bag of chocolate covered jube-jubes that we snacked on all day probably didn’t do anyone any favors. They were so good though!

We walked around downtown Charlottetown for an hour or so (in heels....I don’t wear heels) for pictures after the ceremony, so that was a little exercise. The reception was buffet but I only had one reasonable plate. My parents and my boys were there and by the time I ate, both of the boys were looking for some Mommy time to we went up to our room. I did return in time for dessert however, and I had some of each of the three offered. Strawberry shortcake, cheesecake and apple crisp. Then at the dance I had wedding cake. So, 4 desserts. In one day. And they were all delicious!

I had plans to rush back home to get to class at the gym Sunday morning, but the late hours and running around of getting ready for the weekend took its toll and I was exhausted. I woke when I had originally wanted to be getting out of town and we still had to pack, drop of the shirt that my husband had forgotten to put in the bag with the rest of his tux, then drop my husband off at home before I headed to the gym. I dressed in my gym clothes, but my the time we got to the car I knew that there would be no gym that day. So we went to my parent’s cottage to get the boys and headed to the wedding gift opening and ate some more crap. Deli trays and more wedding cake. In for a pinch, in for a pound I guess. 

When I woke up Monday morning I was pretty leery of getting on the scale, but much to my surprise I managed to lose 2 pounds over the weekend. Ha! Maybe 4 desserts is the key!

I would have been happy to stay the same, but the loss was fantastic. And it was more of a victory than just the 2 pounds on the scale. It was proof to myself that I won’t spontaneously combust if I don’t get to the gym everyday. I can eat crap once in awhile and not balloon up to my old weight. Moderation.

I can relax.

As much as I know maintaining once I get to my goal weight won’t necessarily be easy, it will be manageable. I can survive small set backs and it won’t derail me completely.

The Difference 60+ Pounds Makes

Here are some things I have learned, noticed, or realized as I've lost 60 pounds. I borrowed this idea from Katie over at Runs for Cookies, and a lot of mine are similar to hers. You should check out her blog....she lost something like 125 pounds!!!

-I sink.
I love to swim (in a pool...little sea creatures and open ocean are not my friend) and before, I could stay afloat with pretty much no effort. I had a hard time diving for the weights in the pool because I would just float back up. I noticed today when I had the boys at the pool that now, I sink.

-H can nap on my chest.
I could never lay down flat with my boys on by chest when they were tiny because my belly was so much higher than my chest that it put them at a slant. I always needed to have myself propped up to keep then at the proper angle. We had an hour long nap yesterday with H on my chest and I didn't need to be propped up. 

-I don't have deep veins.
It had always been a challenge to start IV's on me. The students at the college hated practicing on me because you couldn't see my veins, only feel them. I would always say " my veins are good if you can find them, they are just deep" like it was just how I was made. Now I know that they were only deep because they were covered in FAT. 

-No more high blood pressure. 
I always hovered in that area just under actual hypertension. Not anymore. Last time I took my blood pressure it was 118/46. 

-My resting heart rate dropped from low-mid 90's down to the low-mid 50's. 

-I can use any towel.
We have two really big bath towels and they used to be the only ones I could get to completely cover me after a shower. Now, any of our towels cover me just fine. 

-There is no need for air conditioning in January.
At work it would be routine for my partner and me to have the AC on all the time. While I'm not back to work so don't actually know, I'm pretty sure I won't need it as much. 

-I don't know how people with no body fat survive without freezing to death. I am now cold all of the time!

-The regular size blood pressure cuff is lots big. 

-My bones don't weigh that much.
When I've thought about trying to lose weight in the past I never wanted to pick an ambitious (one that would actually put me at a healthy weight) goal because I never thought I would ever be not overweight. I used to rationalize not weighing a healthy weight by saying, "I'll never weight 168lbs....my bones alone weigh that much!"
They don't.

-I can enjoy a bath.
I can now have a bath and not feel cold all of the time because most of me is sticking out of the water. My torso can now be completely covered by water. 

-I can sit in chairs comfortably.
Those metal chairs with the arms that you find in banquet halls use to be uncomfortable and my legs would push against the arms. Now I fit without touching the sides. 

-I can cross my legs like a girl.
I could never sit with my legs crossed at the knee...I always had to cross them like a man with one ankle on the other knee. 

-I can buy any folding lawn chair and not be nervous of it collapsing.
I like having a fabric folding lawn chair for sitting outside at work but I was always heavier than the max weight. I still bought them but always felt nervous sitting down. 

-I wasn't only able to start wearing my wedding rings again, I also had to get them sized. Down from a size 9 to a 7.5. 

-I don't have to look for the biggest size. I could never buy many items of clothes that I really liked because the biggest size wasn't big enough. I still automatically look toward the back of the rack for the biggest size, but then realize I don't need it anymore. 

-I now weigh less than my husband.

-I don't mind my husband knowing how much I weigh.
Obviously my husband knew I was overweight (and loved me and found me attractive anyway) but I still didn't like him knowing the actual number. 

-I don't hide from cameras.
I have been looking for a good "before" picture but haven't really found a good one because I hated having my picture taken. My face.book profile picture hasn't been of me since W was born. I was much happier to share pictures of him, then him and H, than of myself. 

-I'm not too big to borrow my dad's warmer clothes if we stay into the evening at their cottage and I get cold. 

-I was having my last fitting in my bridesmaid dress the other day and the groom's mom, who is doing the alterations, handed me a robe to wear while she adjusted something.
She held it up and my brain automatically thought "that isn't going to fit and won't cover me" but then I remembered that I'm not the same size anymore. The robe fit with lots of room to spare. 

-I can eat foods without mayo, butter or sour cream.
Before, I had to have foods a certain way. Tuna salad had to have mayo (and lots of it), potatoes and veggies had to have butter or margarine, tacos had to have sour cream. My taste buds were used to the fat that makes these things so yummy, and food tasted like crap without them. But my tastebuds have adjusted. I rarely eat any of those things and my food does not taste like crap. It tastes like the food is supposed to!

-I like looking like a girl. Before, I was more comfortable hiding in baggy clothes and had no desire to wear anything 'cute'. Now I hate how baggy clothes look (still not comfortable in anything to skin tight though) and like the idea of looking girly. 

-My BMI has gone from obese to overweight and I'm now 16 lbs from healthy! I never thought I would ever see that category. 

-I look down at my thighs when I'm on the spin bikes at the gym and think "Those can't be my legs!" 

-I need to eat all day long. I was never a breakfast eater, but now it's my most satisfying meal of the day. I eat at least every 3 hours. 

-I can lay on the couch with W. We were rapidly running out of room.

-Jumping jacks aren’t sent from the Devil (but volleyball wall taps are!)
When we started going to classes, I hated jumping jacks. After about 5 of them I had to stop because I was exhausted. Now I can easily do a minute of jumping jacks at a time.

-When W gets tired and grumpy and wants a little extra Mommy attention and wants me to carry him and H, I can. W weighs 50 lbs and H weighs 20 lbs plus his infant car seat. So, 75-80 lbs of kids, with ease.

-Going to the gym is not a chore. Getting to the gym is my escape. I know once I go back to work this might change, but I love how I feel after I’ve gotten in a good work out and hope that will be enough to get my butt there, even after a long shift at work.


What are some things you have noticed if you've lost weight? What little day to day things are you looking forward to that you can't do now?

Sums It All Up

Goal Weight

When I started trying to lose weight in January I didn’t really pick a goal weight, for a couple of reasons.

First was that any weight that would put me into a healthy range based on my BMI seemed so far away that I would never get there, and I didn’t want to pick a goal weight that I would strive for forever but never reach. I think that a big reason why I was so unhappy tracking my food the last time was because I felt like I was working my butt off but not really getting anywhere. My goal didn’t seem to be getting any closer and that just made it seem that much more daunting. I should have broken it down into smaller goals working towards a larger one.

Second was that I had nothing to compare to. Some people have a weight that they want to get back to, what they weighed in university, or when they got married, for example. I don’t have that because I’ve never weighed a healthy, happy weight as an adult, or ever teenager for that matter. I don’t know what I weighed in high school because I knew it was too much and didn’t want to get on a scale, but I’m sure it was at least 200 lbs from junior high on. I was never comfortable in clothing and was always self conscious, so much so that I’m not sure why I didn’t do something about it then.

So, I didn’t start out with a concrete goal weight. I started off with wanting to reach Onderland (having my weight not be in the 200’s). As I started losing relatively quickly and I was content with how I was accomplishing it, not miserable, I knew that I needed to have something to aim for after that. With no other frame of reference to pick a final goal, I went with BMI. I have always thought that my “healthy” range for my height was a little low, between 125-168 lbs. It seemed really low when I was looking at it from my starting weight! But I wanted to get into the ‘healthy” category so I chose the top of the range as my goal, keeping it in my mind that I might change that as I got closer. I wanted to get to 168 and see how my body felt. If I was content and felt healthy there, then I would stop. If I felt like I could maybe go down a few more pounds, then I would adjust my goal and keep going a little lower. If I had to starve myself and be miserable to get to that weight then I would adjust in the other direction and raise my goal weight. I  know that I will definitely never see the bottom of the healthy BMI range and that realistically 125 lbs would not be a healthy weight for me. I would look like a skeleton!

I hit my first goal at the end of April. No more 200’s for this girl! 168 still looked awfully far away but it also felt manageable. I knew that I could get there. 

I’m now sitting just 17 lbs from that final goal weight and I’m still not sure if 168 will stay the goal or not. I have noticed way more changes in my body, and how clothes fit, in the last 20 lbs than I had seen up to that point. If that stays true, then I think I might be ok with stopping there, but I don’t know. I now feel that it is a weight that I can reach with starving myself and being miserable, even if the loss starts slowing down. I see more muscle and definition in my body almost daily and know that because I don’t have as much fat to lose that it will be harder to see the scale move, but I’m certain I can do 17 more pounds! I would love to reach my final weight before I head back to work this fall so that I can settle back into life as a working mom and just have to maintain my weight, not still trying to lose, and I’m confident that I can. I’ve found that success feeds on success and seeing the number on the scale get smaller and smaller makes me want it that much more. 

Starting in the Middle

I should have started this blog in January when I started back to the gym, but I honestly didn't think I would have as much success as I have had. And I certainly didn't think that the changes I was making were ones that I would feel so comfortable with. So I'll start this story in the middle. I've come a long way from the beginning, but I'm definitely not at the end.

I didn't start a diet in January, I started a new lifestyle, and it feels good. It's been hard work, but it hasn't been torture. I know that having success has probably made it easier to stay on track, and that the coming months are going to bring changes to life that will make it a little more challenging, but I have the confidence that I can maintain this life. I have to.

When I reached my all time highest weight at the end of 2011, I bought a gym membership and I went to the gym 5 days a week. I started watching what I ate, food journaled, and used Sparkpeople to give me helpful info and motivation. I started a fitness challenge at work with a group of co-workers and everyone had varying levels of success. I lost about 20ish pounds and got back to the weight I had been holding pretty steady at for most of my adult life. I was able to start wearing my wedding rings again after not being able to for months, because they were too tight.

But I wasn't doing it right. Or at least not right in the sense that it was going to be something that I could do forever. I hated it. I didn't look forward to going to the gym, I hated food journalling and I felt deprived. I also felt extremely daunted by the number of pounds that I had to lose.

I wasn't doing the exercise part of it right either. I went to the gym 5 days a week, sometimes 6, but all I did was cardio. I would sweat my butt off on the elliptical for an hour at a time. Cardio is hard, and it makes sense to people just starting a health and fitness change, like I was, that if its hard and makes you sweat, that it is the best way to lose weight. The weight machines were intimidating and I didn't want to look like an idiot, so I stayed on my elliptical. My gym had great staff and I could have had help but I figured that cardio was the way to go. Hindsight is 20/20 though, and I know now that I could have run on that elliptical from now until eternity and never lost the weight that I wanted to lose.

In February of 2012 I found out that I was pregnant again. I have terrible all day morning sickness during the first half of my pregnancies and I felt miserable. Going to the gym was the last thing I wanted to do, especially after/before work when I had been going to the gym. So I stopped going all together. I did feel bad about quitting the exercise, but I felt utter joy when I tossed away my food notebook. No more dieting for this Mamma! I was so relieved to not feel like I had to monitor and account for every morsel that went into my mouth.

Cut to the fall of 2012. Baby #2, H, was born at the end of September. I'm one of the lucky ladies that doesn't gain much weight while pregnant (maybe the only upside to puking multiple times a day for months) and by 6 weeks after he was born I was at pretty much the lowest weight I had ever been as an adult. I went and got measured for a bridesmaid dress for the wedding of two of my best friends, and ordered the dress to those measurements. I was close to the next size down and the man that owned the bridal store suggested I order that smaller size...his logic was that I had just had a baby and would probably lose some more weight. I told him that I was a light as I was probably going to get and that I didn't want to have the stress of fitting into a smaller dress. I also knew that I probably wasn't only not going to lose weight but that I would likely gain some and didn't want to end up with a dress that really didn't fit.

And gain I did. Between mid November and mid January I gained about 13 lbs. I was adapting to having 2 children to take care of, so I was busy, but I was also bored and I am definitely a bored eater. I was nursing, so I rationalized it in my brain that I needed extra calories to produce enough to feed H. The general theory was correct. A nursing mother should eat a few more calories. But a mother that is obese probably doesn't really need that many more, and they should probably come in the form of extra fruit and grains and protein. Not in the form of cookies and other junk food that I was getting them in.

In mid January I measured my waist, the most fitted part of the bridesmaid dress that I needed to wear, and my waist was 4 inches bigger than when I had been measured for said dress. Uh oh. I had eaten myself into a dress that was too small and needed to lose weight before the wedding.

So I got a gym membership again. Same gym, now in a new location. (My gym is awesome. 24/7 swipe card access. Staffed hours are pretty good too, but the fact that I can go any time I want is a big plus, especially when I go back to work this fall. And the staff and other members rock too!) I only got a 3 month membership because I wasn't sure how often I was actually going to get there. It was fairly convenient when I was working because I would be in that city anyway, but we live 20 minutes out of the city and I wasn't sure if it was going to fit with life to actually get there. I went on my own for awhile, doing the same thing I had done before, sweating on the elliptical. My next door neighbour and her husband both had memberships that they really weren't making full use of, so she started going with me, which was great because it was that little bit of extra motivation to get me there. It's harder to cancel plans on someone else than is it to just lazy out on yourself!

Neighbour J and I also braved some of the classes offered at the gym. I had seen one of the trainers (Trainer Awesome) doing parts of her classes at the gym when I had gone before I got pregnant, and to be honest, she kind of scared me! That seems so silly to say now, because she is one of the most friendly, motivating and supportive people I've ever met, and an awesome trainer. Her classes got me off of the elliptical and are currently kicking my butt 6 days a week! But at the time we first started, both Neighbour J and I were scared! But we did it. We walked in to a packed room of people who ALL looked like they were in better shape than me, and also looked like they knew what they were doing, and we didn't have a clue. But it only took one class for me to be hooked!

The classes were tough (and still are) but in a good way. My body rebelled at first and for days after a class I could barely make my muscles do anything I wanted them to without agony. We used to see some of the regulars (and Trainer Awesome has lots of regulars) come to classes almost every day of the week, sometimes more than one a day, or doing a class friday evening then another one Saturday morning, and wonder how on God's green earth they could do that?!? I didn't think my body would ever be able to do that! Slowly but surely though, we started to be able to get to more classes each week, not needing days and days to recover.

And now? My body can totally do that! I go to class at least 5 days a week, and usually get there on my own at least one more, if not 2 more....so 6-7 days a week. And I LOVE it! The gym has become my addiction. And I am reaping the benefits.

One of the best benefits to date....I bought workout shorts today that are a size medium. All of my life I've had to buy 2xl, if they were even big enough. Medium feels awesome!