Yeah, I'm still at it.... :-)

Fifty-six days.  I've been at this "lifestyle change", diet, whatever you want to call it, for 56 days.  Actually, I don't consider myself to be on a diet, but rather to be calorie budgeting.  I think that is a much more accurate description of what I'm doing.  I'm simply managing the number of calories I'm allowing myself each day, just as you do with your finances.  I'm not limiting myself to certain foods - hell, I eat whatever I want.  I just eat less of it less often.

So 56 days in and how am I doing? Well, I've lost 17.6 pounds as of my weigh in Monday morning!  I think I've actually lost a little more because later in the day on Monday, after breakfast, I weighed a second time - I just really wanted to enjoy that smaller number on the scales one more time!!! - and ever after eating breakfast if showed an additional .6 pound loss.  I only officially count that first number so that .6 will just have to be recorded in next Monday's count, but damn if it didn't make me feel good.

With two weeks of vacationing between my first entry and this one, I have at times struggled to find foods that would be filling, enjoyable and fit my budget. I managed everyday but one.  One day out of 56? I can live with.  :-)  I hit a bit of a plateau between those vacations, only seeing a .6 loss in three weeks, but then this week made up for it.  Well, nearly.  But I do expect to see a larger than normally desired number this next Monday.

I must say I'm pretty happy with this.  I have only been hungry a couple of times when my budget was exhausted and I had to just suffer through it.  Most days I hardly realize I'm on a budget and more days than you'd think I end up with surplus calories at the end of the day.  Who'da thunk it???  Today I got the mean old frowny face for not eating enough.  This is the message MFD gave me:

Too few calories.  Consuming too few calories can decrease your metabolism.  This will hurt your long-term weight loss efforts.

Note:  Make sure you have entered all of your foods for the day.

 

I was 608 calories under budget, but that included an extra 378 from doing my Couch 2 5K run this evening.  I really haven't explained all of that I guess.  Really it deserves it's own post.  I started C25K.  I bought a Polar FT60 heart rate monitor watch and some fancy running shoes.  I'm gettin' my shit together, dudes. :-)

Well, gettin' my shit together that doesn't include cleaning my house or going to bed on time.  I don't guess running at 9pm helps with the bedtime, though.  Really need to start doing my run in the morning, but then I have to try to keep SweetPretty off of the treadmill, out of EVERYTHING, etc, etc, and it's just easier to fucking run at night and be sleep deprived!!!

I'll be blogging more....I miss it honestly.  Though only one person has even read this - or even knows about it - besides myself.  Oh, well.  It gives me somewhere to share and all of my "real life" friends are sick of hearing about all of this I am sure.

Later -

Inaugural Post or HI! I'm Muffyn Top. Nice to Meet You :-)

Well, hello there.  My name, for purposes of this blog, is Muffyn Top, and I have a big fat ass.  Now I guess you are thinking two things now.  One: thank god her name isn't Muffyn Top in real life and two: it's a shame about her big fat ass.

I've been fat for as long as I can remember.   I was a fat baby. I was a fat kid.  I was a fat teenager, though now I realize I wasn't really that fat in my mid teens.  In fact, I'd KILL to be that fat now!  I was just comparing myself to my stick thin friends, where at 140 I was a little rounder than desired, but I had more grown up curves.

After age 16, I've gone up, up, up.  Now, at 42, I am at my heaviest ever.  Well, I take that back.  Three weeks ago I was at my heaviest ever.  After a shocking trip to try on clothes on a Sunday morning, Monday brought a change in my eating habits.  Now, three weeks later, I've lost 12 pounds, and today I weigh 248 pounds.  I know.  How in the hell did I allow myself to get so fucking fat?

I can give you the technical, scientific reason: I ate more more calories than my body required to sustain itself.  I ate when I was bored, when I was happy, when I was sad.  I ate because I was lonely, then I ate because I was with people I cared for. I ate because I love food.  I ate because it was put on my plate.

It is a bit easier to tell you why I have decided to make a life change and get my dietary act in order.  I have two beautiful kids who I do not want to grow up to be obese.  I want to live a long life and play with them and hopefully one day play with my grandkids - though by that fucking time I'll be so old I'll probably be eating out of a feeding tube! I want to feel better physically, to not be winded by the most simple activities.  I want to be able to buy clothes at any store I want.  I want to feel like I look good.

I am not on a strict diet.  I pretty much eat whatever I want, I'm just watching my portions and through that controlling my caloric intake.  I'm tracking my food intake using MyFoodDiary.com and I love it.  It is super easy to use and makes tracking my intake a no brainer.  Right now I am consuming 1800 calories a day, give or take - mostly take - a few. Three weeks in it has been pretty easy.  I've had some fast food, but having attempted eating out at any restaurants where I wouldn't have a good idea of the nutritional details of what I'm eating.  That will come with time.

I've got a long way to go.  My goal is 128, but if at some point higher than that I feel and look like I want?  Well, I'm not hung up on a number.  I just want to feel good again.

I'll be posting my ups and downs here, tracking my progress, and blogging about anything else that I feel is effecting my diet.  I want to figure out the triggers for overeating for me, so that I can learn to deal with them and make them a thing of my past.

Thanks for joining me on my journey.  It's gonna be a long trip....