Well, last week’s weigh-in post was a bit of a downer, wasn’t it? It was cathartic to write a post like that, though it wasn’t entirely easy to read. But it felt good to get my feelings down and sort through some of the emotions I have regarding losing weight and eating healthier. Because this ish is hard. It’s really, really hard. I didn’t grow up in a household that encouraged healthy living and exercise. I grew up on processed foods, sugary drinks, nightly desserts, and many a fast food visit. The only time I exercised was for P.E. or gym class, and I don’t think I ever really started exercising regularly until college.

It’s difficult to switch your mindset, but I know it’s possible. And sometimes, things will go well and sometimes, things will be really, really hard. But that’s the whole point of change: living in the uncomfortable until it starts becoming comfortable.

There’s a great quote that I love that says, “If you’re tired of starting over, stop giving up.” And how true is that? I’ve been at this “beginning” of my healthy living journey for years because I keep stopping and starting, over and over again. It’s not that I don’t want to live healthily or that it’s not the “right time,” or anything like that. It’s just that living in the uncomfortable is weird and difficult and annoying. And it’s hard to sit in that uncomfortableness all the time.

So I spent a lot of time thinking this past week about what I want my healthy living journey to look like. What do I need to do to help me succeed? I was writing an article for work on habits and came across this amazing article from Zen Habits called “The Four Habits that Form Habits.” It talks about the four habits we need to put into place in order to actually form habits. There was one sentence that stuck out to me and it said, actually doing the habit is much more important than how you do it.

He suggests we start as small as possible. For example, if you want to get into a regular habit of exercise, simply exercise for two minutes a day. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? You’re not going to get any results from that! But the point is not results, the point is building a habit. And building a habit means building a foundation. And because exercising for two minutes a day is so laughably easy, we can do it without any issues. Then, you gradually work your way up as the weeks progress to where 30 minutes of exercise a day is a natural habit in your life.

Another important point the article brought up was to enjoy forming your habit. Have fun with it! “Your new habit isn’t some sort of sacrifice, some sort of chore you need to get through to get to a better life. Your new habit is your better life.”

Powerful.

In this vein, I decided that I needed to stop worrying so much about the scale and getting things perfect and losing x amount of weight in x amount of time. Instead, I need to focus on building healthy habits. Sure, it might mean it takes me muuuuch longer to lose weight, but it’s not like the way I’ve been doing currently is helping me see results. There’s no time limit on my goal. I want to take small steps to build healthy habits, starting small and savoring the journey.

So I made a decision on three habits I want to incorporate into my life. Sure, this isn’t starting as small as the article states but I do have a base for my healthy living and fitness, and this feels right for me. My goals are to exercise for 30 minutes five days a week, to drink at least 32 oz of water a day, and to only have dessert once a day.

I started implementing these habits this week and I didn’t do as awesome as I hoped, but I’m not kicking myself for failing. Every day is a new day to get it right. I did manage to drink 32 oz of water every day, which I’m very happy about because drinking more water has been a goal I’ve been trying to achieve for a long time. It may not seem like much, but it’s enough that it feels a bit challenging but still doable. (The real achievement came from doing this on the weekends since I rarely even drink an ounce of water on the weekends!)

I only managed three days of exercise, but I do have a good excuse for that. On Friday, I actually twisted my ankle (the same ankle I’ve broken twice before) and I spent Friday and Saturday resting, icing, and elevating my ankle. Luckily, it’s healing fine and I was able to work out on Sunday without any pain.

As for dessert, weeeellll. That’s been a bit of an issue so far. I know the easiest thing would be to not buy anything dessert-like when I buy my groceries, which was something I was doing. But then I started buying a bag of Dove chocolates and bringing a handful to work, then having a handful after dinner, and it just hasn’t been great. This is a major work in progress.

I’ve also decided to change from weighing myself once a week to weighing myself once a month. This will be a challenge, but I think it will be good for me. It allows me to simply focus on building healthy habits without worrying about how it affects my weight. I want to do this for the overall health and wellness aspect, not on my results on the scale. (Well, I am also doing it to lose weight, of course, but I don’t want that to be my sole reason for building healthy habits.)

This means I’m also not sure what to do about these weigh-in posts, though I do like the accountability of them. And I like talking about health and fitness. I think I am going to continue to do them, as long as I have things to write about. We’ll see how it goes.

In any event, I am feeling much better about this new plan and more motivated to succeed because I’m doing it for me, to build stronger habits, and to find my healthy living happy place.

Are you working on any healthy living goals currently?

Here’s the week when I regret starting this series because oh, my goodness, I am not doing well with healthy living lately. I don’t have much to say for myself, other than laziness, falling back on old habits, and eating healthy just doesn’t seem all that interesting to me right now.

This week was not a great week for me. I mean, in all other aspects of my life, it was. Work was fine. Personal life, fine. I slept well. But I just didn’t feel like eating healthy. Or exercising. Or any of that. I guess I’m just having a really hard time getting back on track after being on vacation.

I’m participating in a DietBet challenge currently but it is NOT going well. I am nowhere close to making my goal, and I’m going to have to be super restrictive over the next two weeks to win back my money. Which makes me feel crappy. I want to start another DietBet right after this one, but if I lose that one, too, that means I’ve spent $83 over the past three months to see barely any results. And that doesn’t sit well with me.

I know I need to take a different focus on this. I feel frantic about losing weight, sometimes. As if the reason I don’t have a boyfriend or a more active social life or more friends is due to the fact that I’m overweight. And if I keep gaining weight, nobody will ever love me and I’ll never succeed at anything I do and life will be terrible and wah wah wah wah wah. Which is so untrue and I don’t know why I keep shoveling these thoughts into my mind. I don’t know why I let them fester, instead of silencing them the minute I think them.

I engage in negative self-talk. I fat shame myself. I fat shame others, which is horrible and makes me feel terrible and I hate admitting it but there it is. I’m not a very good friend to myself. I don’t give myself time to appreciate who I am and what I’m doing now, because I’m so focused on who I wish I was and what I want to be doing in the future.

There has to be a balance. A balance between appreciating myself, loving who I am, in this body, with this life, right now, and striving to make better choices that feel good. Eating unhealthy doesn’t feel good, not exercising doesn’t feel good. I think once I gain that understanding, that who I am right now is okay, but that I want to be a healthier individual all-around, my entire mindset will shift. And instead of being this frantic battle to lose weight so PEOPLE WILL LIKE ME! and IT WILL MAKE ME THE HAPPIEST!, it’ll simply be a change I’m making because it feels good and is the right thing to do.

I need to think of healthy living as something I’m going to be doing for my whole life. This isn’t something I’m doing just to lose 50 lbs, and then I can go back to eating what I want. It’s a lifestyle, and it’s hard to think of it as a lifestyle when it’s something that makes you uncomfortable and annoyed. Something that feels so hard and unnatural.

So maybe instead of making grandiose goals and starting crazy challenges and any other alliteration I can think of, I should take the babiest of baby steps. Start as small as possible, and then once that becomes second nature, add on another goal. And so on and so forth.

This is such a rambling post. It has no point, other than to be a stream of consciousness for how I feel about my healthy living attempts lately. Since this is a weigh-in post, my weigh-in result this week was that I gained 2.2 lbs. Yay. (I can blame my period for some of this, right? Riiiiight.) Hopefully, this upcoming week is better and I’ll see a better result on the scale.

How do you snap out of a healthy living funk?

It’s been a while since I’ve done a weekly weigh-in post and I have missed them. These posts really help me stay on track with eating well and exercising regularly, and both have been suffering for a few weeks now.

My first DietBet ended right before I left on my cruise. It actually ended the Monday I was on my cruise, and I was able to get a code to weigh in early, but I actually fell short of winning. I needed to lose 1 lb, and I only lost .4. But honestly? I am not upset about not winning! I am really, really proud of myself, for losing 6.4 lbs in 4 weeks and for being super serious about healthy living.

I also took my measurements and found out I also lost 8.5 inches around my body. !!! That’s a whole lotta inches. I knew I had to be losing inches because my clothes were fitting me so well. I was feeling good.

Then the cruise happened and I didn’t eat well, as typically happens when you’re on vacation. I was active most days, either through walking, using the stairs on the ship, or doing a workout (okay, I only got in an actual workout once, ha!). But my body is really awesome at gaining weight easily so I wasn’t surprised to get on the scale after my cruise and find out I had gained weight. As in, most of the weight I lost in the weeks prior hopped right back on!

It happens. I don’t regret my vacation or eating as I did. I only go on a cruise once a year and if that means I gain 4-5 lbs during them, then that’s what happens.

So here’s how my weight loss and gains have worked out over the past few weeks:

Right before leaving on my cruise: -.4 lbs
After my cruise: +4.2 lbs
This week: -1.1 lbs

I am really happy to see a weight loss this past week because I haven’t been great at eating well and exercising. I won’t even write down my exercise for this past week because it was pathetic. I’m getting over a head cold (and I don’t exercise when I’m sick, even though I know you technically can with a head cold, but nope, not my thing!), so that was part of the reason, and it’s also interesting how easy you can fall out of the habit of something! I am hoping that knowing I’m going to have to write these posts, detailing my exercise and eating habits will get me back on track.

So! Let’s talk about goals for this upcoming week, okay?

1. Get back to tracking. I’ve totally fallen out of the habit of tracking because it can be so tedious and annoying. But I know it helps and keeps me mindful of what I’m eating, so back to MFP I go!
2. Exercise 6 days. I feel so much better about myself when I’m exercising regularly. I only managed to exercise a few days last week, so I need to get back to my usual six-days-a-week routine.
3. Drink no more than 3 Dr. Peppers. Oh, soda. My favorite substance! I don’t want to go cold turkey off soda, but I do need to severely limit how much of it I drink. Three seems doable!

Do you have a hard time getting back on track with healthy living after a vacation?

This was a hard week for me. If last week was about carrying momentum throughout the week, this week was about resisting temptations and trying not to completely fall apart. (I’m slightly dramatic, yes?)

Eating healthy just doesn’t feel natural. And it’s not like I expect it to, but I had so many feelings of overwhelm come over me throughout the week. From telling myself that I didn’t need to pick up take-out for dinner, to waking up early to work out, to choosing water over soda. I had a rough start to my week, as it seemed to slip my mind that stores would be closed on Easter and, since Sunday is my grocery shop + meal prep day, it meant I had to shift that over to Monday/Tuesday. (And I do not do well with changes in my schedule. It usually makes me want to “cheat” and give up and say I’ll try better the next week.)

But I made it through the week. I didn’t give into temptation, stayed away from soda and most sweets (I think I’m realizing I don’t need sweets and even having healthy ones on hand is a trigger for me), and got in another six days of solid workouts. (You guys. I still can’t believe I am working out six days a week! I know it’s only for 30 minutes most days, while others work out for an hour+, but this is monstrous for me!)

My workouts for the week were more of the same:

Monday: Couch to 5K (30 minutes)
Tuesday: Stationary bike (30 minutes) and this killer circuit training workout (30 minutes)
Wednesday: Elliptical (30 minutes)
Thursday: Stationary bike (30 minutes)
Friday: Elliptical (30 minutes – used this workout), strength training (15 minutes)
Saturday: Couch to 5K that devolved into a walk (30 minutes), Ripped in 30 (30 minutes)
Sunday: Rest day

I’m quite pleased with my working out, though I’m still not sure how many calories I’m burning. I’m using the sensors on the workout machines but I don’t think those are very accurate. For strength workouts, I typically divide what MFP tells me the calorie burn is in half. I need a heart rate monitor, ASAP! I’m still working through week one of Couch to 5K and I’m trying to take it slowly this time around, not moving on the next week until I feel comfortable. I’m still not sure if I like running, but I wanted to add something different to my workouts. I’m going to keep it up for 2-3 more weeks, and then evaluate. I never look forward to my runs like I look forward to my gym workouts or strength workouts, though.

All in all, a great week for me! I was very nervous about getting on the scale because I weighed myself on Thursday and I was up 1.5 lbs from Saturday and that seriously bummed me out for two whole days. It’s so interesting how every ounce of work and effort and time you’ve put into weight loss comes down to those 5 seconds of waiting to see what the scale says.

What I’m trying to remind myself is that the scale won’t always reflect my work. Some weeks, I’ll lose an incredible amount for little effort, while others I’ll lose nothing, or very little, or even gain weight when I thought I put in the work. The most important thing is that I try hard. That I do my best because the ultimate goal is feeling better and being healthy. As long as I do that, as long as I eat healthy and exercise, the weight will come off. Maybe not as quickly as I want it to, but it will eventually come off.

So what happened on the scale this week? I am happy to report it was a successful week – I lost 1.4 lbs! This puts me at 6 lbs lost over the last three weeks (8.2 lbs since the start of the year), and I just need to lose 1 lb next week to win my DietBet. Hooray! I am so pleased with that number. I did a little fist bump in the air when I stepped on the scale and saw that. (And stepped on the scale again… and stepped on the scale again… and stepped on the scale again. I wanted to be 100% certain it was accurate!)

Last week, my goals were:

• Stay under 1,500 calories a day and under the limits MFP gives me for fat/sugar. PASS. I easily stayed under 1,500 calories, stayed well under my recommended sugar grams, and most days, under my fat grams (one day, I went over by one gram, the other day by five grams).
• Drink 40 ounces of water a day. FAIL. I think I managed this one day. Ugh.
• Take a multivitamin and iron supplement daily. FAIL. I managed this one day, too. This is an important part of healthy living (especially iron, as I have an iron deficiency), so I’m going to try to do better.

My goals for this upcoming week are:

• Make one meatless meal.
• Drink 40 ounces of water a day.
• Take a multivitamin and iron supplement daily.

The last week of the DietBet commences today, and I want to win my $25 back! That’s my motivator – winning some moolah! Here we go!