Weekly Weigh In & Recap

 

This week, I did even better than I did last week.  Granted, I had Chinese buffet for lunch and pizza for dinner on Saturday, but other than that, I stuck with my eating plans and stayed within my calories for each day.  So, I’m very proud of myself for that.  I found that I do NOT like whole wheat couscous…I also do not recommend it unless, of course, you like eating cat and dog food because that’s what it looked like, smelled like and possibly tasted like too.  So, I threw that stuff out and will be having quinoa with my Moroccan Beef Stew in the future instead.

I like to switch up my snacks that I eat every day.  For instance, I usually eat 1 or 2 low-fat/low-cal healthy yogurts for one of my snacks, but this week, when I was grocery shopping at Randall’s (also known as Safeway and Tom Thumb, depending on what part of the country you live in), I came across their prepackaged salads that range from 210 to 280 calories per salad.  So I grabbed 8 of those and decided that those would be my snacks in lieu of yogurt for this week.  Not something I’ll do every week because while the yogurts run me around $1 - $2.50 per day depending on the brand I buy, the salads are $3.50 - $4 each.  So yea, while a good little change from the norm, not a cost effective one.  Next week, it’ll be back to the yogurts.

Let’s kick this off with a picture of my scale from this morning

That's 2.4 lbs down from last week's weigh-in and 4.8 lbs down since the challenge started on Dec 15th.

Now, let’s move onto this week in exercise:

• Saturday: nothing.  I had signed up for overtime Sunday night at work, so I needed to do my grocery shopping AND all my cooking on Saturday because I wouldn’t have time to do it on Sunday.  Also, I was still recovering from my sinus and ear infections and seriously wasn’t up to working out.

• Sunday: busted out 15 miles after 4 days of not running due to working overtime and being infected from the neck up.  I ran at an 11:31 pace.  Nice.

• Monday: nothing.  As mentioned, I worked overtime Sunday night so I was sleeping Monday morning before having to be back to work Monday afternoon.

• Tuesday: had a great 7 mile run.  While still a little sore in the quad department from Sunday’s 15-miler after 4 days off, my legs were definitely feeling much better.  I ran at a good pace, 10:30 with my first mile at 11:00 minutes and my final mile at 9:50!!!  Super proud of that final mile.  Except for mile 2, this was a completely progressive run.

• Wednesday: nothing, I worked overtime on the morning shift before my regular afternoon shift.

• Thursday: I had a nice cold weather run this day.  I had scheduled 6 miles, but since I had just worked a 16 hour shift on Wednesday after getting probably less than 3 hours of sleep the night before, I was really tired so I slept in a little more than I had planned to and so I did the 5 miles I had scheduled for Friday instead.  I love cold weather runs and don’t mind layering up at all.

• Friday: I was sooooo happy that the freezing rain they were forecasting for Friday morning didn’t happen.  Why?  I got to run!!!  It wasn’t as cold as Thursday, but layering was still necessary.  I did a long sleeved tech shirt and a running zip-up jacket, 2 pairs of capri tights, my running socks with a pair of regular knee high socks over the top, my balaclava, my ponytail beanie and gloves.  However, the gloves came off before I got to mile 2.

Overall, I call this week a success!  That video I did for the lady at work about my weight loss and how I’ve lost 70 lbs so far…well, she surprised me with a $20 gift card to TJ Maxx/Marshall’s/Home Goods!!!  So, Saturday night, I went to Marshall’s (this is by far my favorite place to get workout gear because I can get name brand stuff for super cheap) and found 2 items I just had to have.  One was a pair of ombre capris that started off with blue on top down to the knees and then faded to green to yellow.  The other was something I’ve wanted for the last few months as I’ve seen other runners on social media running in them: an ugly sweater long-sleeved tech shirt!  And I love it.  It was perfect for Sunday’s 15-miler.  It was warm enough without being too warm.  At one point during the run, it did warm up a little bit and so I just pulled the part that goes over your hands down to expose my hands and let myself cool down a little, then the wind picked back up and I pulled them back over my hands.  Just perfect.  And I look fabulous in it.  (sorry, forgot to take a full body pic of me in it, but I do have this selfie)

Onto the food aspect of this week.  I did a pretty good job of keeping at least a small cushion with my daily calories.  It was really easy on run days to have a nice deficit.  Sunday I had more than 1000 calories left over (thanks to the 15 mile run) when the day was over.  Most runners get “rungry” and just want to eat all the food the whole day after they run, especially long distances like that, but not me.  I’m rarely hungry after running.  It’s the days I don’t run that I’m usually super hungry and just want to eat, eat, eat.  Usually when I work overtime on a weekday on the morning shift (like I did on Wednesday), I go to the cafeteria in the courthouse and get the breakfast platter which consists of fried potatoes, 2 scoops of scrambled eggs, a sausage patty and a biscuit that I will put full-sugar jelly on.  It’s cheap money-wise, but not calorie-wise.  On Wednesday, I packed my cereal and almond milk.  I still went to the cafeteria, but all I got was 2 scrambled eggs…well, I ASKED for 2 eggs, but they gave me like 2.5 SCOOPS of egg which was more like 4 eggs…oh well, eggs are good for you and I had run the day before and was running the day after so no biggie.  I would have scrambled my own eggs, but they’re not as good when you reheat them and I’m not eating them cold.  I like my scrambled eggs freshly scrambled.

I had to unsync my Garmin Connect account from my MyFitnessPal account.  It kept doubling up my workouts and I had to go back in and delete one after I notice it says I did way more exercise than I know I did.  Not difficult to do but a pain in the ass and if I’m not paying attention, I might decide to eat all those extra exercise calories that I didn’t actually earn and therefore overeat by a few hundred calories…no bueno.