Freaking Update for 2020

I apologize I have been absent for so long!

Things have been a mess here since about last November, an absolute Fiasco! 

I lost my grandfather in November and then my father in December and then I spent most of January sulking and then most of February planning and preparing for the pandemic.  I think this 2020 mess is my Fault.  I kept saying all last year "2020 is going to be my year!  The best one yet!" I jinxed it didn't I?

Then my kids were sent home from school and my husband started working from home.  I tried to continue working in a face mask for as long as I could stand it, but it meant way longer days with larger breaks in between each job.  I finally threw in the towel.  The mask makes me extremely panicky, especially now in warmer weather. 

Dieting went way off track.  I too have had some good laughs at all the weight-gaining memes and gifs.  It turns out they all were true for me.  I went completely backwards having gained almost all of the weight I have lost back due to the stress I have encountered over the last 8 months or so.

We are blessed that so far we have all been healthy, as I hope you all have been as well!  I am ready to stop focusing on all of the "stuff" going on around me and to Focus on me and ditch my Feelings of hopelessness.

I have some new goals in mind and a new announcement!

1.  I no longer support Weight Watchers/WW nor encourage people to utilize the Shipt shopping services, as both companies have thrown their hats into a political arena by supporting groups, the funding of which, in one way or another, furthers certain political agendas with which I do not agree.  If you want my business, you need to stay neutral politically, especially when the cause involves a mob mentality against police officers since I am married to one and have the knowledge regarding his job that too many don't seem to want to learn the truth of.

As an aside, it really chaps my ass when a company asks their customers/members to donate to a cause of their choosing while saying they will *match* the donations by these folks *UP TO* $X amount.  In Shipt's case, it is $50,000.  If you want and are able to donate $50,000 then just Friggin do it!  Oh, and I hope those police officers you have smacked in the face come running to your aid when needed!

2.  Mostly as a result of number one above, I have decided to utilize good old fashioned calorie counting and healthier choices, including more exercise, moving forward as my weight loss method.  If I can add up points, I'm pretty sure adding up calories with no extra steps to reach a "magic number" will work just fine for me.  I believe this is also called Freestyling!

I am sure you can still figure out the points for the future recipes I will share since they will still be diet friendly, but I won't be figuring out points moving forward.

3.  I gave Noom a try!  I will share my experience with that soon!

4.  I plan to revamp my blog and bring it into this century for easier recipe browsing since I will no longer be listing WW points.  Instead it will be broken down into categories. 

5.  I am toying with the idea of vlogging as well!  What do you think about vlogging?

Weekly Weigh-In Post Vacation

Welp.....big ol' sigh.  I've just returned from vacation with my Family and my parents.  My mother is a cooking Fiend.  I expected what I Found on the scale this morning.  We ate Fast Food on the drive down and the drive back.

The drive down was better, as we ate a Chick Fil A dinner in which I had a chicken wrap, Fries, and a pop.  The Following morning I ate nothing, as I had driven us to Atlanta from Michigan and was Fast asleep.  The Dole Shakers that I packed for everybody didn't stay Frozen even that long, so that planned low-point breakfast was a Flop anyway.  I know that I said it would be easy to Find a grocery story to buy them when needed, but I Forgot to Factor in my obsessive husband....Mr. F wants to drive straight through stopping only for bathroom breaks and gas refills. I have no idea what the others ate since I was out like a light. We ordered pizza as soon as we arrived at our rental because we had to unpack and get organized before we could go grocery shopping.  However, my mom had brought all the groceries into the house because she travels with only my dad and has room in her car. We drive separately via two different directions, and they usually tack on extra travel and sightseeing in other states on their way down.

I tried to eat according to my plan.  I took my oatmeal and bought green smoothie ingredients so that I only had to worry about dinner, but my mom had other plans.  I had even taken a number of bags of the SnaPea Crisps I love for snacking, of which I didn't do a lot of. I was too Full all of the time. I made it through the First Few days saying no thank you just Fine, but then I ran out of what I needed and mom had taken control of the refrigerator.  I actually only cooked one of my own meals, Pig on a Stick, a couple of salads, etc.  I resisted her homemade Belgian waffles piled high with pie Fillings and whipped cream until one theme park day we returned to the car at 10 p.m. to eat the chicken Caesar wraps I had planned out to discover Mr. F had covered the packaged wraps in ice and they were ruined by the water. I was starving and therefore ate one of the nutty bars and Cheetos bags he had packed. That night, at 11 p.m. as we all showered park grime off of our bodies, my mom made us all one of her Belgian waffles, and I ate it. I was too tired, too hungry, and too sore from walking all day long to care. She had bought two different kinds of ice cream.  I have no idea what Flavors they were. I didn't care to look and therefore didn't have any of that. So, overall, there were nonscale victories and just plain diet Failures.

I'm really shocked at the condition of produce in Florida.  I just can't get over how poor it is in the grocery stores.  The apples I bought for my smoothies were brown in the middle, as if they were going bad from the middle out somehow.  The avocadoes, which we can usually Find down there were bad as well.  I've never seen greener bananas in my life anywhere, not even in Michigan.

We had three park days in which I packed our lunches and in which we ate dinner at the park one day. The other two park days we waited until we got home to eat a dinner, and the traffic varied, so one night it was 10 p.m. and the other 11 p.m., and we all know how eating a dinner at that time of night derails weight loss. I had originally planned to take salads with me for my lunch, but my parents liked my salads and ate them.  Just after mid-vacation, I threw in the towel altogether.  I didn't go all ham on anything. I just quit thinking about it and quit worrying about what number I would get to report to you today.

I, as of today, weighed in at 234.5 pounds, which is a 3.75-pound gain since the last weigh-in I recorded on the blog, but 5.3 pounds more than the last recorded weight on my tracker at the beginning of March. That isn't too bad considering it probably isn't all vacation related, and I ate enough Fast Food on that trip than I have in months and care to ever again. I haven't really tracked any calories via MyFitnessPal or counted my points either because I can't Find my points slider right now.

Prior to vacation I had been suffering from a wry neck for months.  It has now worked it's way down into my arm via tingling, but the last two days has included numbness in my fingertips as well.  I'm tired of waiting for it to be completely Fixed and plan to restart my two-mile walking routine again tonight, weather permitting. I'm just glad I can move my neck again. Maybe actual movement via exercise will help because sitting around waiting for it to get better isn't working. While on vacation, I got what I had been calling my annual theme-park rash.  My ankles are itchy and sore.  I'm hoping that is not the case when I set out on my walk this evening, but when I got out of the car to pump gas yesterday after being in the car all day, it was the case and I Found myself waddling and grimacing. 

So that's what I've been up to since the beginning of March.....the chiropractor visits for a wry neck, arm tingling, fingertip numbness, a theme-park rash, a vacation derailment, and a cooking-Fiend of a mother who cooks Southern style.

Some will consider a painful and debilitating wry neck and a vacation excuses, but I don't.  I consider them obstacles and challenges.  How are you doing?

Update and Twenty FOURTEEN is coming!

I've had a few bad months.   I know it all sounds like one giant excuse, but whatevs.  Don't really care what anybody else thinks.

My hot flashes were cured by the antidepressant the doctor prescribed me.   In the beginning I was flying high, like literally.  I didn't like it, but hubby talked me into sticking it out to see if it normalized in my system.  The high feeling left, but I was still pretty hyper, which was nothing to complain about, just a noticeable difference.

Suddenly, a couple of months in, I crashed.  Literally.  It was like I was just shy of a medicated coma.  I could literally sleep 12 hours a day after sleeping 6 hours through the night. 

Yes, my sleep had improved, as did my back, with no more rolling around, but I couldn't stay awake.

I thought I'd take a stab at halving the dose, but the same thing happened.  I would immediately begin yawning incessantly after about 20 minutes of taking it.  The up side to the half dose was that I slept less.  I tried moving the dosage to bedtime, but I was up all night.  I can't figure that one out.  It's twisted really.

I could be standing in the shower and get an uncontrollable urge to just close my eyes, and once I did so, it was scary, as I felt that I could literally crumple down into a ball of sleep right where I stood. 

Then I decided I'd skip a day, my thinking being that I'd only sleep every other day away. 

Then I spaced it out to every 3 days.  Then the severe hip pain kicked in.  I could hardly walk and I barely made it through Christmas shopping having to stop frequently and give up about an hour in. 

I looked it up and, holy cow!  The problems people have had coming off of this medication are literally frightening, and it includes severe hip pain and weight gain.  I've gained 10 pounds from all the sleeping. Forget about eating altogether.  I drank a lot of sugary caffeinated drinks to try to combat the drowsiness, but nothing worked. 

I didn't realize the half-life of this stuff was so short, so I was essentially weaning myself off of it by playing with the dosage and spacing it out.  Every 3 days I reintroduced it to my brain and my brain didn't like it when it wore off.  I'm thankful I didn't have the electrical brain zaps and symptoms of stroke that others spoke of, but I'm done with this mess. It's not worth it.

I've been completely off for a week and the hip pain is completely gone.  I'm starting to have the Flashes again and difficulty sleeping, but what would you choose?  Medicated coma/narcolepsy, or severe hot flashes?  Pick one! Sigh.

It's winter, so the Flashes aren't as bad.  <Knocking on wood!>

The New Year is approaching, and I'm trying to remain optimistic despite my setbacks.  I don't really like resolutions because I obviously made becoming Flabuless a goal prior, but January 1st is a great start-over date regardless, dontchya think?

Fuhgeddaboudit!

Okay, so the F word for the past few weeks is FUHGEDDABOUTIT! As in, get it over with and then fuhgeddaboutit!

I've been so busy that I just can't find the time to think about tending to myself.  It doesn't help that I hit that point where cooking came to a standstill.  Have you ever hit that place where suddenly you just can't figure out what to cook next when dealing with one who doesn't eat chicken, one who doesn't eat beef, and three out of five who whine at the mere sight of a veggie?  I do.

If I had to estimate how often that hits, I'd have to guesstimate that it's maybe every 4 months or so.  It can last one week, or around three.  Probably weird to some, but it is what it is.  Hitting this wall was probably triggered by so much baking.

I spent a great deal of time the last few weeks trying to perfect a royal icing recipe to try out on the designer-style cookies I've been complimented on in the past.  This, in itself, is NOT a good thing when trying to eat right.  It involves a lot of taste testing. Taste it with/without this ingredient or that ingredient, taste it again a few hours in after applying to cookies, and taste it again the next day and the next to see how it's holding up.  The good news is that I finally feel I perfected my recipe and I will henceforth be able to make these cookies as they are ordered without having to taste them!  In the past, when making for special occasions and loved ones, I used a raw egg white in my icing, but to sell, you can't use raw egg whites.  Turns out meringue powder doesn't taste well to me, so off I went trying to find a new way to make a good-tasting icing for sugar cookies, and one that was neither too hard or too soft.  This may explain why you can't find any available for sale that actually taste good.

This is my first crack at a Halloween collection, and it's not as good as they could have been because they aren't very 3-Dish, which is how I like them, but my frosting wasn't drying very well on these, and to layer them into 3-D requires layering the frosting. I therefore just made the best of it for this batch. 

Here is the bouquet I made for my son to present to the girl he wished to take to the school formal, which is a masquerade.  She accepted his invitation.  You can see the layering on these.

And here is one of the 26 Slenderman cookies I made for my other son's school birthday treat, which took literally ALL day long to do.  These required the layering, but also spanning out each addition for a space of time to prevent the icing from running together, i.e. to delineate better.

These aren't even ALL of the cookies I made over the past few weeks, but you probably get it at this point, especially if I share that I had 14 different colors of icing made and ready to go for them all and my entire kitchen was covered in all of the supplies--every single surface. 

Some people will look at this as an EXCUSE.  I do NOT.  I look at it as a REASON why I'm fat.  You see, I had so many hours a day to try this out, and I did it from the moment my kids went off to school to the moment they came home.  I didn't even stop to eat a single bite for myself.  If it were an excuse, I'd probably have eaten whatever I could get my hands on, but I have a goal-oriented mind.  Unfortunately, some goals prohibit the accomplishment of others.  I could have decided to try to perfect my recipe one day a week for the next few weeks, but that would have only dragged out the reason why I would have been unsuccessful for as long as that lasted.  I preferred to buckle down and get it over with. Moving on!


So now that this is out of the way and the fridge is stocked, it's back to meal planning.  Wish me luck!

If you have a personality like mine, I highly recommend sticking to something and getting it straight out of the way and not dwelling on the minor set back.  You have to pick and choose how to make it all work together.  Some women like to say they can do it all, but something, somewhere along the line suffers.  Some let the house suffer, some the homemade dinners, and people like me, ourselves.  No judgment here.  We are who we are. 

Derailed

I got sick.  Some sort of upper respiratory deal that started in my head and is ending in my chest.  It was the deepest, strongest cough I've ever had.  Doctor said it can last sometimes for 6 weeks.  I'm at the tail end of it now. 

The "deep" adjective I chose is the best I can describe it because the lung junk wasn't moving, but my body was digging deep down to try to force it to, and so much so that it would trigger my gag reflex causing me to vomit if anything "light" or too much water was in my tummy.  Therefore, I ate once a day and cut back on my water, but I chose heavy, not-so-great things to eat and pop to get rid of the icky taste in my mouth. 

I haven't been on the scale since the last weigh in but am starting to get back on the right eating track.  Oatmeal for breakfast today! I'll check back in on Monday for my regularly scheduled weigh in.