November 24th Reflections

Reflecting back on this last week, I ran into some serious challenges and I even made a few realizations.  I started off the week great.  Sunday and Monday were perfect days, getting in lots of healthy eating and exercise.  On Monday I was even down to 157.8 and I was feeling excited and energetic and wanted to hit 156.8 for today's weigh in.  Then came Tuesday.  Tuesday was the day that I had my Pampered Chef open house for my neighbors so that we could all get to know each other better.  It was a blast and I met three other moms who have children the same ages as mine and we are all stay at home moms!  I also booked four shows and was able to get two recruit leads, so I would say that party was a super success (even if I did have to scramble for the extra sales afterwards to boost the show up to the required $150).  Anyway, I bought diet soda for the show, and I made all the lovely desserts that you can read about on my Holiday Treats Blog Post
I ate way too many of the Pumpkin Pastries and even though I didn't eat dinner I knew I blew my points out of the water with chips, brownies, and especially those pumpkin treats.  (I think I ate half of them!)  So it was no wonder that the next day I felt sluggish.  I was drinking my diet sodas and I ate some of the left over pumpkin pastries.  On my Thursday weigh in I was back up to 159 and feeling sick and exhausted.  I took the whole day off of exercise and basically just tried to rest wondering what was going on and if I was getting sick.  Friday came and I don't even know what happened Friday, I wanted to eat everything in sight, and since I was already feeling down, I did.  By the end of Friday I was feeling worse than I have in months and I knew it was because of my poor food choices over the past few days.  But I couldn't figure out why I had felt so hungry.  The it hit me:  what was the one thing that had remained the same all week that I hadn't been doing before?  Drinking Soda.

I was shocked to realize that my increase in hunger was most likely due to my renewed soda consumption.  I haven't been drinking diet soda for over a month and as soon as I re-introduced it into my life I start feeling incredibly hungry.  I think this is what drove me to eat so much on Friday because I just couldn't feel full.  I also had a horrid headache from not drinking enough water and having too much soda.  So!  Saturday came along and I vowed to Eat Clean and gave myself a new challenge:  I am going to eat clean from now until the end of the year with three exceptions: Thanksgiving, Lily's birthday, and Christmas.  That means no artificial sweetener, no soda, no sweets, and only whole healthy unprocessed foods.  It is time to get back into the weight loss mode and stop floundering around! 

After only one day of eating clean I feel so much better!  I don't feel starved anymore, my stomach doesn't hurt and my headache is gone.  All things considered I am happy with today's weigh in: 158.5.  I am only down by .7 pounds but considering that Saturday morning after Friday's fiasco I was up at 161, I am happy to say that I can actually record a loss this week.