12 September 2011
Today, I start a 15-day fruit and vegetable cleanse called Reboot Your Life. This will be my second go at it. My first go at it, I made it 12 days and then was craving chicken so badly that I couldn’t get it out of my mind to the point I ended up caving and went and got some fried chicken. I had planned to go back on the cleanse the next day and finish up my last 3 days on it. However, that is not what happened. What happened was that I binged on fast food for the next 5 days.
In the 12 days that I remained faithful to the cleanse guidelines, I was able to lose 9 pounds. My unchecked binge of fast food caused me to regain all of those pounds that i had lost.
This go-around will last for 9 days. Why only 9 days? Well, because on the 10th day I will be going camping with a friend and it will be impossible to continue the cleanse while camping, so I will be putting it on hold while I’m camping and then picking it back up when I return home for the last 6 days of the month. I’m hoping that during the next 9 days that I will lose about 5 pounds. And I’m hoping that in the days after I get back from camping I will just lose whatever I may gain while camping and eating camp food.
I hope to come out at the end of the month at about 185 pounds. If I manage to come out at less than that, I will be very happy. I will have lost the majority of the weight I needed to lose in a natural way, by just changing what I eat and the way I eat it and by adding exercise.
At the beginning of next month, I’m going to start taking a supplement called HCG. It is a hormone produced by pregnant women. It causes your body to burn fat at a faster rate and it also helps control your appetite. It’s a little extreme in that you can only eat 500-1000 calories a day while taking it; but I know a few people that have used it to lose weight successfully and they told me that they didn’t have a problem with feeling hungry, even eating so few calories.
On the HCG, I should be able to lose the remainder of the weight I need to lose to reach my goal weight of 170. And, I should lose it by the end of October! Then, I will start the process of just maintaining that weight loss. I will have to make sure that I continue to eat healthy and sensibly.
I love to cook, so hopefully I can get myself in the habit of cooking just about everything I eat and making things fresh as much as possible. Sure, I’ll still eat out occasionally, but it won’t be any more frequent than once a week. But, like I said, I love to cook. I love the act of creating something. I don’t know what it is about cooking, but it just brings me so much pleasure to do it. It’s relaxing and calming. It focuses me like just about nothing else does. I just really enjoy it.
I’ve never had the desire to cook my way through some cookbook, like the lady that wrote Julie and Julia did. That’s just craziness. But I do love to try new recipes. And, speaking of trying new recipes, Sparkpeople.com is releasing a cookbook next month that I really want to buy. It will have loads of healthy recipes in it and that will help me stay on track with my plan to continue to eat healthy and sensibly after I’ve finished losing the weight. I need to look for other cookbooks that are for the more health conscious person. If I have plenty of variety in what I’m eating, I won’t be tempted to eat what I shouldn’t be eating and end up gaining weight again.
What I allowed to happen to myself last year where I gained 60 pounds in only 7 months, I will not allow to happen ever again. That was an extreme low point in my life and I hope to never repeat it again. It has caused long lasting problems for me that have been nothing but a continued struggle for the last 10 months trying to get rid of the weight I gained last year. I was not emotionally fit last year and, therefore, I turned to food to comfort me and make me happy. Food never let me down until it did. Until I realized just what the food had done to me and by then, it was too late to stop what I had started. It had snowballed into a weight gain that was rapid enough to give me new stretch marks on my hips and lower stomach. That was when I realized that I had to do something. Something had to give, had to change. I had to act and I had to act fast.
Last year, I weighed more than I have ever weighed before in my life. That changed something about me. It changed my ability to actually lose the weight. In the past, I’ve gotten a little chubby and was able to lose the weight in a somewhat decent time frame. This time, it has taken me almost a year to lose just 45 pounds! That’s insane that it’s taking this amount of time and effort to lose it. I think it also changed something about my hormones because I am getting more facial breakouts than I have ever gotten before and they now resemble actual acne with huge, painful pimples and not just sporadic little zits like I’ve gotten in the past.
When I reach my goal weight, it will be quite the accomplishment for me. It will definitely be cause to celebrate and I hope to get a couple friends together and do just that. Not sure what we’ll do, but I would like to celebrate me reaching my goal. This has been an almost insurmountable undertaking for me. I will never again let myself go like I did to get myself in this position in the first place. It will be a day of triumph and victory the day I step on the scale and it reads 170…or less.