Surviving the mental battle

The past few days have been difficult for me, but I feel like I have managed the challenges pretty well.  Yesterday my weight was up 1.5 pounds and logically I knew it was because of sodium.  I had made some french onion soup and there must have been a lot of sodium in the beef broth I used.  Nothing makes me retain water like salty soup (think Vietnamese Pho!).  Of course knowing this didn't help anything and I still felt really down all day long.  I did however manage to try out a new Barre class at the gym, it's a ballet style strength training class and it is right before Zumba.  So I'm planning on making it to Barre, then CXWorx and then Zumba on Wednesday mornings.  It's a killer combo but it's doable because Barre and CX (abs) are strength training whereas Zumba is cardio.  I want to add more strength training in, but I have to be sneaky about it because I absolutely hate strength training.  I like the Barre and CX classes because although they are intense they aren't hard core.  Body pump is hard core and the classes are always packed and everyone is fighting for equipment and space.  Body Pump is a really tough class, maybe someday I will learn to love it but this is not that day. 

After my two hours at the gym I came home and got ready for my friend to come over, I was doing her nails that day and we still hadn't gotten a new entertainment center so the cords were hanging down from the TV as you can see in my last post, and she was bringing her two kids (same age as mine: 2 and 4).  So I spent the next hour cleaning up the spare bedroom that has all the spare kids toys and the cat bathroom and the long table I like to do nails on.  I had to sweep the cat litter off the bathroom floor, and scoop the cat box and rearrange the toys so the old tv and vhs player could fit, and then vacuum all the cat litter out of the carpet over by the bathroom door.  It took a while but it was worth it.  We put Blues Clues on for the kids and my friend's kids loved playing with all the toys and we were able to spend the whole time in that one room.  I am just loving doing nails, I need to schedule more friends to come over.  I have another one coming over tomorrow and the room is all ready for her and her kiddos! 

I was able to maintain control yesterday despite feeling upset.  Usually when I have a bad weigh in when I've been doing good I throw away the whole day and then I have to undo the damage over the next three days.  But yesterday I was really good.  This morning I weighed in at 153.4 which is still .2 higher than last Saturday but I am much happier with that.  However today was a much harder day for me food wise and I had a really hard time controlling what I ate.  Despite that I still managed to stay within about 2,000 calories for the whole day which is great considering a bad day usually looks like somewhere around 3,500 calories.  I didn't make the best choices today, I had two servings of chips at lunch time for example, but I was also reasonable and didn't go overboard.  Around 2pm I really wanted to eat something and I finally caved on eating the brownies.  I took a couple pieces and ate one piece and put the rest back!  They are almost a week old now and although my tupperware is trying it's hardest, they can't help but get a little crunchy and I didn't figure crunchy brownies were worth all those calories and if I were to eat brownies I should make sure they are fresh and fabulous. So that was a victory.  This afternoon I tried not to snack much, I did eat pretty healthy: an apple and some hummus and baby carrots.  I tried to keep busy by playing around with my swatch sticks and trying some looks that I found on pinterest.  Of the three I tried the only one that came out looking good was the watermelon. 

Totally doing this on my nails in the summer

After dinner tonight I tried so hard not to eat anything.  I chewed gum, read blogs, looked at nail polish stuff online, but in the end I was just so hungry!  So I air popped some popcorn, put butter on it and shared it with the kids.  I could have chosen better I know but it was easy and something the kids would also enjoy.  We haven't had popcorn in several weeks.  I saved hundreds of calories by air popping it instead of cooking it in oil, and hundreds more by sharing it with the kids.  So despite being over my calories for today, I still feel like I tried by best.  I was just really exhausted and hungry today.  Chloe woke up last night and stayed awake from 1am-3:30am and guess who was also awake for most of that time either rocking her, lying down with her, trying to stop her from screaming, listening to her cry, and then listening to her play around in her room.  Yup!  Me!  I can't sleep when the kids are making noise, it's like we as moms are wired to wake up to the slightest noise our kids make, so even when she was  happy in her room I was lying there awake listening to her. 

In other news we did manage to finally get a new entertainment console thingie.  Nothing big, Matt wanted small and compact.  So we went from this

To this

You can totally see me in the TV screen taking the picture ha!  I think it's a nice upgrade.  The only thing I don't like is all the cords running down from the TV to behind the entertainment center.  The TV is super sweet, and looks awesome.  I wish Matt hadn't mounted it so high up, if it had been lower (around the top of the entertainment console) then we wouldn't be having as many problems with cords reaching, and dangling but I guess that is what happens when you mount the TV without the console to go with it.  It doesn't seem to bother Matt much though and it's his birthday present. 

All in all I'm not really disappointed with today, bad days are bound to happen and thinking about how my days usually go this really wasn't too bad of a day.  I've also been thinking about how when you are losing weight time seems to become distorted.  For example one day can seem like an eternity and I was thinking today "I've been really good for a long time so I can have some brownies"  When in fact I have only been good for about two weeks.  It seems like I've been doing this forever and I just want to be done losing weight so I don't have to stress over it so much.  I'm dying to be back into the 140s but I know that I have to work hard every day to get there.  There are no short cuts.  I just have to be patient.... which unfortunately is not one of my strong points.