Saturday, September 12, 2015

Weekly Recap



Each week that goes by, I am waiting for and expecting a backslide to happen.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that pretty much every single time I start losing weight and doing great, something happens and I start to gain weight little by little.  It’s such a frustrating occurrence.  It usually happens about a month to 2 months into my efforts.  So, we’re getting into that time frame now where, even though I am still counting my calories and keeping them at or near 1300 (usually less than) a day and I’m exercising most days of the week in some form or fashion, things start to go wrong for me.  I’m trying to keep myself mindful that this may happen and, at this point, may happen at any time.  That way, I’m prepared to handle it if (or when) it does happen.  As of last week’s weigh in, I had less than 10 lbs to go until my goal weight.  Let’s go over this week in exercise and then we’ll discuss how my weigh in went this morning.

Saturday: since I wasn’t able to swim last Friday due to the pool being full when I got done with my workout and meetup with the trainer guy, I had planned to go to the gym on Saturday and do my 600m.  It didn’t happen.  And I’m totally okay with that.  I had already hit the pool twice last week and have plans to hit it twice this week, so not getting that extra swim in didn’t hurt me one bit.  I did walk around my apartment complex for over 1.5 miles in the evening, so we’ll call that a good day.

Sunday: Sunday-funday!  OMG I love kettlebells.  Seriously.  I want to buy a 20 lb and a 25 lb kettlebell to take my workouts to the next levels!  Anyway, Sunday’s workout.  I did my kettlebell AMRAP with 4 floors of stairs each round again.  It was awesome!

Monday: went and hit the gym + swim action this day.  I did my upper body machine workout, minus the front & rear flyes because every time I went to use it, someone else was already using it.  Oh well.  Funny thing, I did my entire workout with my sunglasses on top of my head.  D’oh!  Didn’t even realize they were there until I went to get a drink out of the water fountain when I got done and felt them slip a little when I bent over to drink.  HAHAHAHA!  I had decided last week that I was going to up my swims by 100m each week until I get to 1600m and then I’ll just leave them there. 

Tuesday: therapy day!  So, just walking pre- and post-appointment.  Walked about 3 miles between the before and after of my appointment, though, so it was a good day!

Wednesday: went to the gym and did my “creative” workout plus a few new exercises.  One of those new exercises is:
--medicine ball overhead squats

After my workout, I was going to hit the pool, but before I changed into my swimsuit, I checked the occupancy of the pool and there was like 4 elderly people and another person swimming laps.  No pool for me.  Wah wah. 

Thursday: had my follow up appointment with my doctor this day and that went not good.  Not only did my doctor tell me that I had actually suffered a fracture when I popped the ligament (the explanation of what happens when you “pop a ligament” makes me want to throw up every time I think about it) on top of the sprain.  What does that mean?  It means I get to stay in the boot, my new BFF, for ANOTHER 4 WEEKS!!!  Yaaaaay!  Not.  Oh, and I’m also on medical leave for that same time.  More joy!  I get to be bored off my ass for an entire month!  I mean, I have things to do.  I will keep up my doctor sanctioned workouts and swims, plus physical therapy and the homework they give me (because they WILL give me homework to do between appointments).  I have a few sewing projects to do, I will keep up with my meal prep and calorie counting.  I will get some cleaning done that I’ve been putting off.  I have the last 3 seasons of Dexter on DVD (pssst: I’ve had them for 2 years now and they’re still in the cellophane…I’m horrible!) that I can watch.  I also have like 15 movies I’ve bought in the last year or so that I haven’t watched yet.  Anyway, I did make up my swim from Wednesday.  I swam my 700 meters!  Yay!  And I did it without taking hardly any pause breaks at the turnarounds at each end of the pool.  I just got it done!  My goal is to swim 64 lengths of the gym pool (32 laps, 1600m) by June of next year without stopping for any rests or pauses.  That means I need to relearn how to do the underwater turn and push-offs.  And I need to get a nose plug so I can do my freestyle swim with proper form.  Keeping my head above water is making more tired than if I was swimming face down. 

Friday: since I was NOT cleared to come out of my boot and resume my regular programming by my doctor on Thursday, I did not do what I wanted this day.  I wanted to do one of my tabata DVDs, but obviously that didn’t happen.  I ended up being pretty busy so I the only kind of workout I actually got done was a 1.4 mile, 31 minute walk around my apartment complex at the end of the day.

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At work on Monday, since it was Labor Day, there was an ice cream bar with lots of different toppings that a few people had put together and brought in.  Right off the bat, I didn’t want anything to do with that.  Didn’t even sound like a good idea to me.  It wasn’t even one of those, oh I’ll just have a teensy bit and be fine.  Nope, I didn’t want any at all.  YAY!  But, that wasn’t the end of it.  Someone else brought a bunch of BBQ.  Good thing I had just had BBQ on Saturday, so I wasn’t even remotely tempted.  But, again, I just didn’t want anything other than the food I brought to work with me from the get-go.  I made homemade chicken nuggets coated in buffalo sauce…so good!  I was just super excited to eat those nuggets…haha!  I rock at making chicken nuggets!  All I did was buy a 5lb bag of frozen skinless chicken breasts, thawed them out, used kitchen shears to cut them into large bite-sized pieces.  I mixed 100% whole wheat bread crumbs and garlic powder, coated the chicken pieces in the crumb/powder mix, then placed on a cookie sheet and baked at 375° for 25 minutes, then let cool for a few minutes and dip into the buffalo sauce to coat.  Easy peasy, low cal, healthy.  No egg wash, no oil, no butter, just simple and easy.  I’m making this again for next week’s lunches, except I’m going to use this paleo BBQ sauce recipe for the sauce.  I want to find a good sweet’n’sour sauce recipe that is sugar free (update: found one).  And then maybe some sort of a honey mustard sauce recipe (update: found one for this one too!)…which should really just be mustard mixed with some honey…haha!  Hmm…I might be eating chicken nuggets for lunch for a few weeks at this rate!

And now onto what the scale says about me this week:

How do I feel about THAT?  Hmmm…I don’t want to be upset, but I am.  Not hugely.  There will be no meltdown over this.  I didn’t gain and that’s basically all that’s keeping me from flipping out or from being just more upset than I am at the moment.  I don’t want to say “but I did everything perfectly” or “I did everything I was supposed to do.”  I don’t want to fall into that trap.  I want to spend the rest of today thinking about what I can do to improve what I’ve been doing because obviously something needs to change, even if just a little.  As you can see above, I did workout pretty much as usual this week.  I didn’t workout yesterday beyond going for a walk, but Fridays are usually light workout days for me anyway because I don’t want to be super sore when I weigh in on Saturday and be retaining fluids from being sore and give myself false weigh in results.  How was my eating?  I think my eating was good.  Here’s the breakdown of how many calories I ate each day:
• Saturday:  1543
• Sunday: 1354
• Monday: 1227
• Tuesday: 1172
• Wednesday: 1282
• Thursday: 1127
• Friday: 1288
Okay, so the first 2 days were a little higher than I would prefer, but that was the first 2 days of the week and really shouldn’t affect my weigh in today.  But maybe it did.  Also a couple days were below 1200.  I really need to keep my below 1200 days to just 1 or none each week.  I was doing much better with the weight loss when I was keeping my calories right at 1250-1300. 

So, what can I do differently?  Let’s start with the exercise.  For starters, I can see if I can do the elliptical so I can switch up my cardio a little.  Since the elliptical is 100% no impact, it shouldn’t matter that I’m in a boot so long as I can still do the motion without too much issue.  So, I’ll try that sometime next week.  I’ve also already planned on upping my swims from twice a week to three or four times a week (since I have nothing but time for the next month, why not?).  I can start doing that creative gym workout of mine twice a week also.  And then just keep the regular machine workouts to once a week.  I have a core workout that I want to start doing once a week.  I can also start doing pushups and pullups, since I do have a pullup bar in my bedroom doorway (and it’s adjustable so I can do leaning pullups to start off with).  I can also do my home kettlebell workout twice a week.  Maybe I can just do the kettlebell AND the core workout together and then do that twice.

What can I do with my food and eating?  Hmm…this one is a thinker for me for sure.  I’m really not sure.  I’m happy with what I’m eating and don’t really want to change anything I’m eating.  I do have to admit that I’ve been slacking on drinking my protein shake every day so maybe I should make drinking that a bit of a priority this next week.  Here’s an overview of what I eat each day:
• breakfast: 3 eggs (either boiled or 2 scrambled & 1 over easy w/sriracha), protein shake made w/almond milk
• lunch: 9.5 oz chicken (this week I ate it with buffalo wing sauce, next week I’ll be eating it with a paleo bbq sauce)
• snack: 0% fat plain Greek yogurt w/1 cup thawed frozen berries
• dinner: 3 roma tomatoes
I keep my dinner super light so that I don’t have a bunch of undigested food in my stomach in the morning.  This is especially important on weigh in morning.

Well, I can just do what I’ve said I want to do and see what happens next Saturday.

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