Status Update on My Journey for all of 2018!

I have very few followers, but thought I should update those of you still with me. I was MIA in 2018 because I got a new job that took me out of the house and got me moving! It is a great change of pace. I enjoy it (most of the time)! I became a Shipt Shopper!

It also took me away from meal planning, cooking dinners most nights, counting anything points related, and blogging, social media, etc.

I'm not going to lie....there has been a huge shift in this house due to my absence. A huge struggle actually. My husband is no cook. That still fell to me despite being gone most evenings. The peak shopping times are from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.--straight through dinner. As a result, there was a lot of not-so-good choices being made in this house for dinner, as well as late-night eating for me anywhere from 10 to 11 p.m. when I got home, but I still lost weight!

The homefront struggles aren't all limited to dinners either. Everything else related to kids and home falls onto my husband in my absence, and it is stressful on him too after working his full day. Twenty pounds in 11 months with a couple of big chunks of time off due to vacation and family emergencies. I'll take it! Hell, I got it and I'm loving it!

Now I am trying to get my organization skills back out and figure out a plan of attack to get things in order here at home for everyone else while I am away and on the run out there and everywhere. I will get it eventually.

This "job" (since I am self employed, as all Shipt shoppers are), requires a ton of walking and pushing heavy carts and a lot of lifting, sometimes up to 40 pounds (think bags of water softener salt pellets, dog foods, and kitty litters, as well as 24-count packs of heavy bottled water). My muscles have made a comeback. I suffer less back problems from strengthening my back muscles in a way working out never seemed to do for me. Overall, I see improvements all around.

I have been injured a few times as well. There are risks involved in this line of work believe it or not and being self employed means you pay the price. This old bird has fallen on an icy driveway and has had an emergency tear-filled doctor-visit day trying to figure out what I did to my shoulder (inappropriate lifting of 2.5-pound jugs of water did the trick), but I am learning as I go what NOT to do as well. For instance, I created a list of orders I will not take again...the lady with 400 pounds of this and the one ordering 40-lb bags of dog food to be delivered in dangerous terrain. Plus, I can overlook a lot of the annoyances that come with this job by simply reminding myself that I am earning money as I lose weight and tone-up my body! Win!

My confession is not eating well throughout the year. By making a conscious effort this year to do so combined with this physical job of mine, I'm interested to see how 2019 ends!

Friday Weigh-In

Jumped on the scale today, a Friday, to see how I've done the past 5 days without my points calculator and not having enough time to enter calories for my homemade meals into MyFitnessPal....I'm down 2 pounds since Monday and weighed in at 230.75. Color me happy with that!

I think I like weighing-in on Fridays because if something goes awry over the weekend, I have time to recover and save a little "Face".

Weekly Weigh In - Down 1.75 Pounds

I tried some new recipes last week, which I loved, but I am not able to share just yet.  I still can't Find my Weight Watchers slider/points calculator, so I just eyeballed it or winged it last week.

I lost 1.75 pounds last week--possibly more.  I weighed myself today at 10:30 a.m., so I could be a tad heavier than when I First wake up and run down to the scale.  Considering I Flew by the seat of my pants last week without being able to Figure my points, I'm happy with the 1.75-pound Figure.

I also spent most of the week with unplanned meals and cranky-to-be-back-to-school kids.  I ate some Fast Food the day I had to run my daughter to an oral surgeon for a consult an hour away after school because her wisdom teeth are coming in.  From there, we visited my sister and my mother and got back home around 10 p.m.

I also had a naked chicken burrito from Qdoba during the week, which I know is okay on days where I've kept my breakfast and lunch points minimal.  Naked means sans tortilla wrap.

So with two Fast Food nights for me, no points calculator, cooking some new recipes, drinking pop, and weighing in at mid-morning I consider an almost two-pound loss a huge positive.  There, I think that is the end of my diet confessional.

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?

First Weight-In of March 2015

I had Mr. F take some before photos of me in regular clothes.  See this shirt? It's the shirt that I want to make look Freakin' sexy.  That's right....make a T-shirt sexy. lol

The shorts are maternity shorts that I wore when pregnant with my now 17-year-old. Yikes. The belly size is about right though.

So here I am, in all my Freakin' glory. I didn't even bother to do my hair or makeup for these photos.  I don't recognize myself. I don't want to be recognized. I hide. I never go out. I never buy myself clothes. I don't hate myself. I actually like myself. I just don't like the body "me" is living in.

I weighed myself in January at 235.75 pounds. I began, in earnest, my dieting after some organization that I knew would get in my way and derail me on February 9 at 233.5 pounds.  Today, I weigh 228.75 pounds, so I am 7 pounds down in these photos. I find it strange that I seem to have lost more weight with minimal effort before I began on my "start" date though. At any rate.... F-O-R-W-A-R-D!

Official Restart Day!

Turns out I gained some weight back....about 9 pounds. Here we go.  

Weigh-In

I haven't been weighing in weekly because I've been weighing myself every day due to a couple of Diet Bets I'm in, but as of today, I down' 6.3 lbs. Woot! Woot!

Forgot!

I forgot to weigh in for my starting over.  I'm going to use the weigh-in I used for the two Diet Bets I joined last week, which was 229.25 (they round up on that site though). EEEEK! That's a huge gain from where I left off prior to trying that anti-depressant for hot flashes. That freakin' sucks.