It's the little things

It's been a while since I've written.  I've been up and down.  Had some good days and some bad days.  Mostly what I'm struggling with is a very strong sense of apathy.  We are planning on trying to get pregnant again sometime within the next several months and a large part of me says "what is the point of dieting and trying to lose weight when I'm just going to gain it all back when I get pregnant anyway."  Therein lies the problem.  I never really changed my habits and desires.  It was all something short term to do to reach a goal, and therefore never sustainable.  Yes I lost weight, I had my moments in the spotlight, but when challenges came my way, my feeble grasp and pathetic claims to have changed my eating shattered as there was no substance behind it.  I still want sugar, I still want soda, I still want crackers, and when I refrain from eating those things I want, I end up binging.  And so I have decided to embark on what will probably be the slowest weight loss journey in history.  Looking at my fitbit, with my current weight, I burn about 2500 calories a day (as long as I reach 10,000 steps).  So I decided to start somewhere and just track my food.  I set my calorie goal at 2,000 calories and at the moment I don't even care if I go over.  Just get in the habit of tracking, see where I'm at, see what I'm doing.  I do have my goal set at 2k so that is in the back of my mind as a target to work towards.  I can't just jump in where I'm at and all of a sudden go from eating what I have been over the past 5 months to eating 1400 calories a day and exercising an hour a day.  I'm not sure that is healthy anyway. 

I'm going to go painfully slow, especially because as soon as I get pregnant I will have a 9 month hiatus from weight loss but I'm still going to track my food.  When I get pregnant I will adjust my daily calorie limit to 2300 and while nursing, 2400.  Use those numbers as guidelines and use the 9 months as a learning experience and also to get me in the habit of tracking and I can also begin to work on changing some of my habits.  Right now I like to eat chips with lunch, and I like to eat dessert every day.  Some things I have been thinking about are: only eat one dessert a day.  If I have something sweet, then after that I am done for the day.  I can't eat two cookies after lunch, a handful of skittles at 3 and two cookies after dinner.  But it's something I'm working towards.  Slowly, as I work on it I will eventually tip the balance so that more often than not I am eating only one dessert a day.  I have a similar plan for other unhealthy habits I know I have such as eating chips for lunch.  I'm thinking that when I am ready to tackle that issue, I will switch out my chips for a fruit or a vegetable one day a week, if there are other days where I don't eat chips that is fine as circumstances allow, but when I am ready, I will purposefully only switch one day.  When I get comfortable with that, I will move it up to two days a week until I find a good balance.  I actually feel really good about my breakfast.  I usually eat either eggs or oatmeal for breakfast and most of the time I don't eat again until lunch time.  It's lunch-bedtime that is the hardest for me. 

An interesting thing happened today.  I took the kids to the bounce house today.  Now, when I was losing weight I was always tired.  In the afternoon I would be so tired, I could barely stay awake, many times I fell asleep on the couch while the kids watched a movie.  Every other time I have taken the kids to the bounce house I was so tired, practically falling asleep while trying to play with the kids.  Today however, I had plenty of energy.  In fact, my afternoon slumps have practically disappeared over the past month.  Now I wonder if my lack of energy during weight loss was because I was exercising too much and eating too little.  Eating only 1400 calories a day while exercising an hour on top of running around with the kids was just too much on my body, and I didn't have enough fuel to make it through.  Also, feeding it the right kind of fuel.  When I was just eating junk during my miscarriage phase I felt awful (which could also be due to hormones).  I did the Whole 30 for two weeks and while my diet now is far from perfect, I have cleaned up a lot of my more horrid habits (such as eating nothing but junk all day and constantly snacking all day on cheezits and what not, and stuffing myself to the point of stomachache with sweets).  So while I may not be eating the best, and I may still be eating a bit too much, I actually feel better now than for most of the time when I was successfully losing weight.  I'm not hungry, I'm not lethargic, my mood is more stabilized, I don't get angry as quickly. 

Now I'm not saying that everything is better this way because it's not.  I have plenty of bad habits I need to work on.  In the afternoon I get really snacky and want to eat for about an hour and a half straight.  I am 30 pounds above the weight I was before I got pregnant and I am at the borderline for being obese again (which for my height is 175, and I'm sitting around 172).  It's harder to move around with the extra weight on and my desire to exercise and ability to do so has diminished.  (one of the reasons it has been so hard to exercise besides my decreased physical fitness is because I did Zumba the day before my miscarriage, and I just haven't been able to get back into it.  Which is unfortunate because that was my all time favorite exercise and I just can't bring myself to do it yet.) 

But I think I am on the right track for me.  It's going to be an awful, grueling test of patience, but with the pressure to "conform" to a particular diet or limit my calories to a small number each day and focus on reason, and practicality and making slight subtle changes I can actually live with that actually work with me for me and with my lifestyle, that is going to be a huge key to success.  One small thing I have started doing is filling up my soda stream bottles before I go to bed (I have three 1 liter bottles).  I make sure they are all full, and I usually drink two of them during the day!  How's that for good progress!  What I realized about myself is that what I hate about drinking water is sitting and waiting for the glass to fill up (It's a stupid and trivial thing but it's real, and poses a real barrier for me actually going and getting a glass of water).  We have a filter on our faucet and it just trickles in slowly and seems to take forever to fill a glass of water and for reasons unbeknowest to me, it irks me to no end.  So I fill up my bottles when I'm not actually going to be drinking the water and I can do other things while I wait for them to fill.  Then when I am thirsty the next day, I grab some water and start drinking with no waiting to fill it up.  It's a little and easy change that has greatly helped me increase my water intake.