An unexpected Self Esteem Boost

The last few weeks have been pretty stressful.  Lily has been sick.  The poor girl was diagnosed with strep throat, and then had a fever the whole weekend and diagnosed with an ear infection the next Monday.  She also had a bad cough that my neighbor has termed "The Cough of Death" in which case she would cough so hard it would cause her to throw up.  Of course she had to give this cough to every member of the family.  I can only be thankful that no one got it as bad as she did.  Then her antibiotics were making her throw up if she didn't eat a large enough breakfast.  I'm glad we are officially done with her meds and we are on the mend! 

This morning I worked out to Turbo Fire.  Yesterday I also did Turbo Fire.  I really can't do all the high intensity moves, and I've noticed my body just naturally switches to the lower intensity versions, I don't even have to look at the girl on stage.  I just do what I can.  I can get through the program and that's pretty awesome even if I have to do lower intensity.  I've been working hard on accepting where I am now and trying to take baby steps.  I know that if I try to just jump into some sort of diet to lose weight quickly I will just end up back in the same old cycle.  So I'm hoping that if I can take smaller steps this time, I can make longer lasting changes.  I'm tracking in MFP, most of the time.  I've set my goal at 1700, but it syncs with my fitbit so I always get more activity calories.  What I'm trying to do is make it so that I don't go over my goal plus my activity calories. 

I enjoyed my workout today, and burned about 500 calories during my 47 minutes.  I think that is super important for continuing with any program.  If I hate it then there is no way I will continue doing it for the long term.

I had a friend come over today and she told me she was amazed at all the things I do in my spare time.  I have my flute stand and my cross stitch stand in the living room and my language books are in the TV stand, also in the living room.  It made me feel really good that she thought I was amazing.  I've never thought of myself as amazing before, I've always thought of myself as mediocre and falling short of where I would like to be.  It really made me feel good about myself. 

I thought I would put up a picture of my progress on my cross stitch project, which is Chloe's Christmas Stocking.  I wanted to get it done last year but that didn't happen.  So I really want to get it done this year, which is entirely possible, but I have to make it a priority. 

Well I think that's all for now so I will say:

Gute nacht. Ich kenne nicht Deutsch, aber Ich lerne Deutsch.

And if anyone who reads this speaks German you should totally correct anything wrong I say in the comments.  I thought it might be fun to put up a few sentences at the end of my posts.  My vocabulary is extremely limited right now so that should say "Good night.  I don't know German, but I'm learning German." 

Starting Over But Not Quite

It's been a long time.  I've thought of taking my blog down, but I just couldn't make myself do it.  Lately I have been thinking of writing again but I knew that if I started writing again, I didn't want to change my mind and then take it down anyway.  If I started writing again, I would have to commit, and I wasn't ready to do that until now. 

Part of the reason why it was so hard to commit is the fact that every month I would hope I was pregnant and every month I wouldn't be.  And so the cycle would start over.  At the beginning I would be gung ho about losing weight, and then in the middle/end I would start wondering if I were pregnant, and then hoping and then thinking that I shouldn't be trying to lose weight if I were going to be pregnant, and of course I never was.  And so on and so forth.  I never did receive an answer.  The OBGYN wouldn't see me since it hadn't been a year yet.  In hindsight I would have approached it from the point of: I'm experiencing these symptoms...... what is going on with my body?  Instead of: I can't get pregnant I think something is wrong.  My blood work pretty much revealed nothing.  Or rather, I should say, the doctors couldn't interpret anything based on my blood work and the answer they gave me was "your body went through some extreme trauma, and you should give yourself more time to heal and see if you get better."  So pretty much "I don't know what is wrong why don't you see if it goes away on its own."  And I'm sure you can imagine how that affected me.

I've been doing well with exercise since the beginning of the year, but my eating has been sub par.  I started the year at 191.6 and my lowest was 182.4.  Yesterday I was 188.6

Lily took the picture for me, standing on a chair.  I think she did a pretty good job.  I think my legs look thinner than they really are in this photo.  I'm actually thinner on top than on bottom, so I thought it was interesting how the picture came out. 

I'm doing a combo of exercise.  I want to sign up for some events to do to help keep me motivated.  I think it will help me stay motivated to actually have a goal in mind instead of just mindlessly exercising for pretty much the same goal as I've had for forever.  Trying to mix it up a bit.  Today was a busy day.  I'm doing the 10K trainer app by Zen Labs and I'm on week three meaning I'm "running" a total of 9 minutes during my one hour workout.  I was trying to run at 6mph, but that's too hard to sustain for three minutes so I had to drop it down to 5.5 and then 5.2.  I try not to think about how much I regressed.  My friend who works out with me keeps telling me to give myself a break and that I'm doing a good job and at least I did work out today and I have to start somewhere.  It's going to take a while and a lot of hard work to get back to where I was, and I just have to accept that and try to go forward from where I am now. 

The title of my post refers to the fact that I feel like I'm starting back at square one.  But I'm not all the way back at the beginning.  I started at 211 and now I'm 188 so I'm still 23 pounds lower than my highest weight.