A small loss.

Hmm, I didn't realize I hadn't posted in a few days. I've just been busy. I only lost .5 pounds this week but I'm ok with that. I blame the absolute awesome Outback Steakhouse dinner I had two nights ago. lol. Do you realize how incredibly difficult it is to find a "good for you" meal at outback! lol. I am proud of myself though. My absolute favorite appetizer is their bloomin' onion. I LOVE IT. I've only ever had Outback twice before this weekend and both times we got the onion and I could easily eat half to 3/4 on my own. We also got the cheese fries as well.

I managed to eat 5 of the little petals from the onion and 2 of the fries, for the taste really. I also ordered a 6 oz sirloin rather than a huge 14 oz ribeye or some other insanely large piece of meat. I got the green beans thinking they would be pretty nutritious but they slather them in some sort of butter sauce. I also got the garlic mashed potatoes. I ate all the potatoes, about half of the greenbeans and the 6 oz steak. They also asked if we wanted any dessert, and I got their chocolate brownie thing, but I asked for a small portion, and they gave me about half of a normal piece, and of that piece I ate about half of that. It was very good, I savored every little bite :)

It was a very good dinner. I did not feel overly stuffed when I left. I was pleasently satisfied and it was a really really nice treat. But I know it was just FULL of salt, so that's probably why yesterday and a little today I'm still feeling bloated. I just keep chugging my water :) So I'm not going to sweat the small loss, I know WHY I didn't lose as much as normal, and I don't feel bad about it. It was a nice night out with two really good friends (one of which is expecting her second child any day now), their first kid and my friend's mom. I had an absolute blast!

So today it's back to the grindstone. I have nothing really to eat at the house, so I'm going to have to go to the store before I go home tonight if I expect to eat dinner. lol. So for lunch I plan on getting a good for me subway sandwich, and then get something for dinner. I would love to have porkchops tonight but D's home tonight, so that's not going to happen. Perhaps I will get some Chicken breasts and george forman grill them. I wish we lived in a house or a duplex where we could have an outdoor grill. I really love grilled anything really. lol.

Anyway I need to get some work done here at work, in anticipation of going home tonight and doing nothing but working on my homework assignment. Oh...joy...

Anyway, so toodaloo! Enjoy your day!

Amber

Hmph!

Why can't I seem to get my fat ass to go out and exercise? I mean seriously! Yes I know part of it is being afraid of my asthma, ok, well, fine. But at the same time I seem to always be so excited and pumped up for the weekends to go for walks and then the weekends come and I sit in my house or something. I'm getting irritated with myself. I find reasons to not go for a walk, I feel silly just walking down the block and back, and our block is so large, to walk around it is like a 3 mile walk (I kid you not!) and a good half of it is I swear at a 45 degree angle. lol. Last time I walked to the YMCA for a meeting, my legs hurt so bad for the next week I didn't want to do anything. That's half my problem too, I get to where my muscles hurt and I don't want to exercise anymore.

/le sigh.

Well, this weekend I had all this awesome exercise planned out and I realized it would probably be dashed to pieces. I forgot that Saturday I promised a friend I'd come over to his house (in Rio Rancho, about 2 hours from here), so I'll be there all day Saturday. Friday I have to work at least half a day, possibly longer. Horray for overtime but ugh I want my 3 days off in a row! I'm so spoiled lol. I also have to do laundry, grocery shopping and clean my house on Friday. So two out of the three days I had plans for exercising is kind of out the window... >.>

This whole trying to exercise around my hectic life schedule sucks.

Amber

20 pounds down.

So today was another weigh in day. I'm officially down 20 pounds.

TWENTY POUNDS!

I am 8.5 pounds away from my 10%.

I officially stopped weight watchers...I still have access to the site and forums and such but I no longer have to pay for it, and have no access to the tracker, points etc etc. Why? There's things about it I don't really care for and I wasn't using it like I should so why pay for something I'm not using. What I'm doing is working for me so far so I'm going to stick with what I'm doing. :) What's that? Counting calories, making sure I'm eating healthy and exercising. I still have the same freedom that I have with Weight Watchers. I can eat whatever I want, I just have to keep in mind that having pizza for lunch may mean I might have to eat a smaller dinner, or I may be more hungry or something. Not that I generally DO eat pizza for lunch or whatever, but I refuse to live a secluded "I'm on a diet" life. No, I will not say "I cannot have that". Rather I say "I can have that if I eat a small portion" or "I can have something similar such as a cookie dough sunday made by weight watchers made with low fat ice cream rather than a small thing of ben and jerry's cookie dough ice cream.

It's all choices, right? I choose what I eat, when I eat it and exercise and the pounds come off. Simple. Yet so many diets make things so complicated. I've done the low carb/no carb diet in the past, hated it. My personal trainer tells me to stay away from potatoes as a main veggie and I do. I used to eat meat potatoes and maybe greenbeans or corn or peas just about every night. Now it's more meat cooked with veggies. Or meat and a baked potato with green beans. Or like two nights ago, we had a small steak, mashed potatoes with gravy (I limited my gravy to 2 tbsp) and peas. I also had a small salad with it.

The challenge I have in my life is my boyfriend does not need to lose weight, and I do. I'm sure many out there have the same problem. Yes he will generally eat whatever I put in front of him, but there are times when he wants "real" food as he puts it. Last night is a prime example. He loves taco bell, so do I. I used to be able to eat a 7 layer burrito, 2 tacos, a thing of nachos and slam down a baja blast dew with it all. I don't even want to know how many calories that is. Last night he got a burrito, taco and mountain dew. I got 2 soft shell tacos with tomato and a small sprite. I ate it, I was full, life was good. I savored every bite. I hadn't had tacos from taco bell in forever! So each bite was like...immensly good to me. Before I'd scarf it, and I'd be hungry after because I ate too fast. Now I ate slowly, and enjoyed it, and was full.

I've come a long way since Jan 9th when I started. I know some people may say "OMG YOU HAD TACO BELL FOR DINNER!" and do the "shame on you" finger wagging. But I say back why not?! In small amounts, infrequently, there is NO SHAME in having "fast food". What's important is what I do after I've had such food. Do I crave the fast food and go back for more and more until I'm back to eating the way I used to eat, or do I go back to eating healthy, cooking at home, and such? Considering I always go back to eating healthy there is nothing wrong with a small deviation of living life!

My 20 pound loss I think speaks for itself.

On the computer front, it's still not working correctly. /le sigh. We had to go back to Best Buy and get a different hard drive because the one we got wasn't working correctly with Windows XP. Oh joy. So we got it back home and hooked up and got XP on it and it works...but the network card I have for that computer is on board....and I don't know where my cd's went. >.< So we got onto D's computer and found the drivers I needed but...we're both plugged into the modem, and XP don't allow that, we need a hub. /grumble.

Basically I can't get on the internet, so I can't update most of my shit, and I am extremly frustrated. I plan on going to Radio Shack today and see if I can pick up a hub and a new network card so I can stop using all this "on board" bullshit and actually get this working. SO FRUSTRATING! >.> I hate computers sometimes.

I also have my homework assignment due tonight. I worked on it over the weekend but life kept getting in the way. It was so nice out this weekend I went for a couple of walks. Then on Saturday we went to his mom and dad's house to get his brakes worked on, and have our visit with his daughter and I did my laundry. We were there most of the day. Sunday was the whole work on the computer thing, and so I didn't get shit done other than about 500 to 600 words out of the 1400 word paper. Shouldn't take me long tonight to get it done though, one would hope.

So that's been my weekend. Not a whole lot to talk about. Life is good, weight comes off, I still need new pants. I'm about to call my mom and have her ship pants from IL to me if I can't find any here! lol.

Amber

Hazzah!

I got my computer parts! We actually ended up going Wednesday evening, just D and I. It was nice to get out of the house. It can be hard to get him moving sometimes to get going, part of his problem. But he was in a great mood, I was in a great mood, and Santa Fe is lovely at night. So we hit up Best Buy around 7pm after filling one of my tires with air (I still haven't replaced them, stupid Santa Fe Walmart doesn't have a tire center!). We got my new hard drive (500gig for 100 bucks! not too shabby really), and a dvd burner WITHOUT lightscribe technology, and a new decent sound card so I won't have to use my on board card thus eliminating the whole scratchy voice over vent problem I've been having. Also picked up a new video game just cuz, all in all I spent 250 bucks. When we get all this stuff in the only thing I won't have replaced is Ram and/or Motherboard lol. Ahh well, that'll be next year probably...

So I had an off day on Wednesday eating wise. Though I'm pretty proud of myself none the less. Wednesday afternoon I had this nice little lunch planned, chicken salad with green onion, and black olives a splash of dressing and a tiny bit of cheese. I had the salad already in a bowl waiting for me at home and when I got to work...SURPRISE! We're going out for lunch at the chinese buffet because a co-worker had a birthday and we need to do her birthday lunch...oh...joy...

So I managed to go through the buffet with ONLY getting 1 cup of beef and brocolli and one cup of rice and 2 small pieces of the chicken used for sweet and sour chicken. That's it! ALL I HAD! >.< I wasn't hungry so I had no real desire to go back for anything except I did go back for probably close to a cup of fresh red grapes. HOLY SHIT! I MADE IT THROUGH A BUFFET ON ONE PLATE THAT WASNT EVEN FULL! Can you believe it? I sure as hell couldn't.

Anyway, so I was really excited, I got home and asked D if he wanted to go to Santa Fe, was shocked he said ok on a work night. We went and got the stuff and it was getting late, both of us were starving. So he started to head off to taco bell but I diverted him to Wendy's. I couldn't think of much that Taco Bell had on their menu that would be even close to being a "good choice". At Wendy's I got a large chili a 5 piece nugget and a small fry. I had about 3/4 of the chili, 4 of the nuggets and not even half of the small fry I got. Probably not the best choice ever for food, but I rarely get to eat Wendy's but you can't go to Wendy's without having a couple of chicken nuggets! I should've just stole a couple of D's fry's instead of ordering a fry, but a new idea floated into my head.

I do not have to eat all that I order!

New idea! WOW! I don't have to eat everything I order if I get full before I've ate it all! WHAT A CONCEPT! I got full and still had 2 nuggets and a good half of my fries and I looked at it and was like...why do I feel like I HAVE to eat this food? There's no reason to eat it if I'm full, so...I grabbed one more nugget (they're so good!), picked up my try and pitched it. D kind of gave me that cock-eyed dog heard something look and when I asked what he said it was the first time since I moved here that he'd ever seen me throw away food off my plate. Ever. I've been here almost a year. He asked if I was feeling ok and I said yeah I just was full.

Quite interesting this is. Learn something new every day. I may even try this at home! lol. I've also started putting dinner away into the fridge as SOON as we get our plates. I'm less tempted to get more if I walk near an empty stove than if there's still food out waiting to be eaten I've noticed.

So that's been my week, how's yours been? Oh, and for the record, despite my eating on Wednesday, I'm still down to what weight I was when I was at the end of being sick, so I've still lost so far this week. :) And I haven't even exercised yet, that comes today and Sunday XD

Toodaloo!

Amber

Computer Woes

Well, peeps, my computer hates me. Feeling is mutual at this point. I went home for lunch yesterday, had a quick bite as normal and sat down to do a little mid day wow-ing for the rest of my lunch hour. After my wow-ing was over, I shut the program off and went to brush my teeth before returning to work and when I came back around the corner, my computer had reset itself. Odd, I thought. So I told it to restart windows normally and...it wouldn't load windows! Stupid computer...

So I frantically called D and told him at work, and he said he'd take a look when he got home. He did, and came to the conclusion my hard drive is dying. Booo...While we got it up and running again, he doubts it'll last long, and I have to spend the next few days backing up all of my information and such. I am just hoping it'll hold out until Friday. I am off Friday and can go get the parts, and D said he'd put them in on Saturday for me since by the time I'd get the parts on Friday he'd be at work already and wouldn't get home until late.

Oh the joys of computers....

For now, eating is on track. My back and legs are still hurting something fierce from Sunday so I've been nursing them, hopefully I'll get to do some exercising later this week.

Amber

Weigh in day again!

So being sick really messed with my weight loss. I lost 2.9, which is awesome, but not, by any means, in the way I would've liked to. 3 solid days of not being able to eat hardly anything had me down almost 6 pounds, some of which came back when I started eating and hydrating again, and I'm fine with that.

So I guess I hit my 5% mark last week and didn't notice. I had to get under 270 to hit it and I did. lol. Shows you how much I look at numbers eh? Only reason I knew I did was because I joined WW at 281, 4 pounds under my initial starting weight of 285. I put my weight in today and it flagged it as having lost 5%, which perked my curiosity to see when I actually hit it since I started this journey a little before I started WW.

I got to thinking yesterday about reasons I started all this, beyond just the "Oh I need to lose weight for my health" thing. I think it all started when I realized that yet again my clothes were getting too tight, and uncomfortable. I was going to walmart looking for clothes and 4x clothes were either too tight, or didn't seem to fall quite right, too short, or whatever, and I was depressed. I could barely get my seatbelt on without it feeling like a struggle. I was having to take my winter coat off before getting into my car in order to be able to wear my seatbelt. No more! I told myself. Yesterday I noticed that the shirt I was wearing was no longer showing my "stomach, it was just hanging off my shoulders. I noticed that I got into my car and buckled my seatbelt with my lighter spring jacket on instead of automatically taking it off. Life is good!

I went to Walmart yesterday needing to buy pants. Have you ever gone out, as someone losing weight to find clothes, knowing you've probably dropped a pant size or two but still stick to that "oh I wear a such and such size" mentality? Yeah that was so me yesterday.

I wandered around Walmart, and everything I picked up I kept saying oh that's cute, it's a 4x it'll fit. I had about 5 things in my car and I hit the fitting room. First thing I did was try on these cute black pants with dark red thin pinstripes going down....they almost fell off me they were so big. Which actually sucks bad, I liked those pants and there was none in my size. Since I'd grabbed another pair at the same size of the same type only straight black, I didn't bother trying them on, they would be too big as well (I never did find any pants, Walmart's selection sucked, and I need new pants badly, the ones I have for work are so baggy I feel like a thug wearing them or something). Next I hit the 3 shirts I picked out. Two of the three were too big. The two that were too big were 4x as well, a 26/28 shirt. The other was a 3x that actually fit and the only reason I'd grabbed 3x was because there wasn't a 4x and the material was stretchy so I figured it might fit. The 3x is slightly uncomfortable, mostly because it's that type of material that hugs you and so I feel like I constantly need to be adjusting it. But I bought it anyway, knowing that soon it'll fit perfectly. I'm wearing it today actually, at work. It's not easy finding clothing that fits, even with being down a size. Not because there's not much selection (which is true anyway but still) but because things don't seem to fit my body correctly. I tried on this one shirt, and at a 4x it was large around the stomach and such, but the way it went across my chest made it really tight and I didn't feel comfortable at all, so much so it took two seconds of it being on to say "Mmmm NO!" lol.

My legs hurt....and not just a little. I had an appointment at the Y yesterday with my trainer to go over nutrition and such and I had the bright idea of getting my cardio in for the day by walking... Right. So I walked, 1.3 miles to get to the Y but failed to realize how damn steep the hill is to get there. It took me 31 minutes to walk the 1.3 miles and by the time I got there my legs were on fire. I sat around a little waiting for her (I got there early) and then talking with her and you'd think on the way back home it'd be cake because it's all downhill, no my legs hurt sooo bad! It's like right at the hip joint! lol. D kept saying I looked like a duck trying to walk last night. I threw his new game cd holder at him roflmao.

Anyway so that's been my weekend. Eating right, exercising and just chillin'. Hope ya'll have a great day!

Amber

Ho boy here we go again...

So....I got smacked upside the head with the "guess what!" hammer this morning. D found a new job....in Albuquerque, about 2 hours from here. He starts on the 30th. So of course my first OMG reaction was like ZOMG WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?! my stress level I think went through the roof, and then some.

After he got me to calm down (I was asking 5 billion questions I guess), he explained that this new job is going to make him 38,000 a year, as much as both of us currently make combined with him working part time at the Lab and me full time at the dental office. We're also NOT going to move right away, he's going to have training for a couple of weeks in Albuquerque and then he's going to be a system administrator and some of the stuff I guess the company he is going to work for is all over this area too, so he MAY not have to move.

I'm torn. In a way I would LOVE to move to Albequerque. I don't really care for it up here on the mountain, I would like to get away from the cold weather, and my asthma does better at lower elevations. But....

I would have to quit my job. <----That right there is scary.

Why? I had a hell of a time FINDING a job when I first moved here, granted it was probably because we lived on the mountain where there's next to no job market....but STILL! What if's started running through my head. What if I can't find a job, how will I pay my bills (I'm very independent, I hate others paying for me). What if I DO find a job and it sucks and it starts messing with my ability to finish my master's degree. What if he loses his job, what if what if what if UGH!. I hate it!

I really hope this works out, and that I can manage to squeeze in all of my dental work before we have to move (if we need to). See, right now, my dental work is free, Dr. M does it. I had one hell of a lot of cavities to fill, and a tooth that was crowned and another that's broken that either may need a crown or may just get extracted (fine with me either way honestly). I'm deathly afraid of dentists when it comes to being in the chair, so I hadn't gone to a dentist since I was 18 probably. So with all the work that's been done, if I'd have to pay for it myself you're talking thousands of dollars, and I still have probably close to 1500 to 2k left to be done. So if I can squeeze the remaining like....5 small cavities and that one big ? tooth....life would be much better.

I don't know, so many scenarios going through my head. Albequerque isn't near as expensive as it is up here, so finding a place to live would be easier and cheaper and probably bigger with more ammenities than here. Could even find an affordable place with a washer and dryer in apartment! lol. That would so make my day.

Anyway, I'm going to go, it's lunch time and I'm starving. Cross your fingers for me.

Toodaloo.

Amber