What's right

I'm trying to get my routine back, and it's not proving as easy as I had hoped it might be. Today I'd wanted to spend some time on the comp, get the flat cleaned up, go for a river walk, then have time to relax and journal tonight and whatever else I might like.

Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans..

I did get my comp time this morning, more than enough, actually, but that wasn't so bad. But then the phone started ringing, and the next thing I know the afternoon is gone. I was also feeling somewhat lethargic. I was hoping that after I ate something and got some protein into me, that I would have some energy and morale to get going on my list of things, but I ended up only getting some of the flat sorted, then got together with a friend. We ended up eating out, and I've not gotten home till late, so no river walk for me, and not able to properly count my points for today because there is no NI available for the restaurant. Not the worst of days, but definitely very little of what I had planned. And at the end of it all, I'm still hungry, even after judging that I dipped into my flexies none too lightly. I've not blown anything, and I've not necessarily failed anything, but tomorrow I really want to get some organised activity in, and I want to get my flat sorted out better than it is right now. At least I got the fridge more organised, and my veggies all have a place in there and the rubbish is cleared out. I can't believe how chaotic my life has gotten...but then maybe it just seems that way compared to how strictly regimented it had been for so long there. The scale is showing me up, time will tell how things are going. I don't know if things have made a permanent shift, but time will tell...time always does.

My fall will be for you

Oh, what a day!

It's late and I'm tired and I don't have the words for it, but I am well fed and content and things are good. I've been getting all closing shifts at the store lately, and I'm back to getting home around 10:00pm and having to make supper. I've not been around much and my flat is a disaster area, and I was low on food, particularly perishables. I did get the kitchen cleaned up some this afternoon, and I did a bit of shopping tonight after work, but I have a lot more to get sorted tomorrow. I'm out of premade main meals in my freezer, so I need to make up a few dishes so I can freeze for taking to work when I need to. I've been eating a lot of fruit lately, other people's, mostly, but I didn't pick up any tonight. I'm wondering if I might go into fruit withdrawal, actually. I'll have to look in to starting to keep some around for desserts; I always wanted something sweet after supper, but the last few weeks I've gotten used to having fruit after supper to control my sweet craving, and it worked rather well, particularly with some lite Cool Whip. The problem with liking fruit is that it gets to be expensive, particularly during the winter months. Why can't food be free? I wish I could grow all this stuff myself! Anyhoo, bed for me! Squee!

APs gone MIA

I've done okay today; I've met all the guidelines and I've not gone over my DPs, but I have none to spare and I might be going out this evening, so I might end up using the rest of my FPs since I never had a chance to earn any APs today, aside from doing some more housework. I'd planned yardwork and a bike ride, but like always seems to happen these days, my plan got changed around. I'm not planning to eat anything else tonight, but I might have a beer, and that will cost me FPs unless I come home and exercise. I don't have many left for the week after eating out on Tuesday and having a lot of high cal food that night. I am definitely not used to being this low on FPs at the end of the week, let alone on Thursday night! I'm glad I've started tracking again tho, because I am in obvious need of being specific about what I eat if I want to keep losing weight. I felt so much better last night when I was having some fruit, because I knew I had the points for it, and I knew exactly how much I could have. It was weird, when I was measuring it out, I didn't feel restricted, I felt empowered because I knew I was not overeating, I was completely within my points. It made me realise that when I'm not counting I have this little nagging worry about everything I eat, thinking that maybe it is putting me way over in points. It is easier to enjoy my food when I know I am not putting myself in a bad way by eating it.

I was starving tonight for supper, and the salad I'd made tasted soo excellent. A friend has reintroduced me to putting things in salad other than just the romaine, and I am now wondering how I ever got by eating all of those plain boring salads without cucumbers, mushrooms, tomatoes, and celery. Yes, you heard me...celery! Celery on its own is definitely not one of my favorite vegetables, but throw it in a salad and it tastes GOOD! Eating the salad tonight was a real treat, it was tastey, and I was so conscious while I was eating it that it was not just something I was able to it, it was something that tasted really good to me, and I was looking forward to every mouthful. What a gift that I've gotten to a point in my life that I can say that about a green salad, and that I am able to truly enjoy the things that I am eating. I heard people say that as they got further along into a healthy lifestyle that they came to like healthy foods that they hated previously. I was rather skeptical of ever being able to experience this myself, I mean seriously, you either like something or you don't, right? How could that change when it comes to food? But here I am living it, and definitely loving it! Food tastes definitely can change, thankfully, and hopefully I can get to a point where rich foods and/or junk foods don't taste good to me any more. A couple weeks ago in a weak moment I had a Wendy's burger for supper. We were running late, I was starving, and no time to shop for veggies etc, plus I just wanted one and made the choice to have one. No fries, no pop, nothing else with it, just the burger. It tasted wonderful to me and I enjoyed it soo much...until a few hours later when I woke up in the night to a VERY unhappy tummy, and puked the whole thing up. Does NOT taste as good coming up as it did going down, that's for sure. It's almost as if my body said "Uhh...are you kidding me? What's that thing doing in here? I don't think so. Nope. No Way. Get OUTTA HERE, evil Wendy's hamburger!"

Well, that's what I was imagining it was saying, anyway. I had felt awful beforhand but after the burger was evicted from the premises my stomach felt okay again and I actually had a giggle over imagining that it was a result of my body's indignation at having been forced upon by greasy fast food.

No, I didn't enjoy getting sick, but in a way I was almost pleased by it, if it really means that my body has embraced healthy eating. If I had to choose I'd rather have a body that ejects fast food than one that drives me to eat more more more of it. But then again, maybe I just had a bad burger, who the heck knows? I don't and I don't care, it's not like I'm going to be putting these theories to the test any time soon. I don't plan to go back to eating greasy fast foods, if I need to eat out fast, there's almost always a subway closeby, and it's getting so that most places have sandwiches and salads/soups to choose from. But maybe I actually am getting to a point where junk food is going to have less of a positive effect on me than before at least, even if it stil tastes good going down. Maybe in time it won't taste good either, at this point I'm ruling nothing out, I've experienced WAY too many firsts on this journey to assume anything!

Motivated tonight

It has certainly been a long time since I've been here!

I have to write a post just about my trip home, but I don't think that is going to get done right now. Tonight I just want to make a post and start getting back into the routine of journalling again after being away for so long. I'd never intended to take such a long haitus...well, technically I hadn't intended to take a hiatus at all, but there you go. I put my laptop in to be serviced the day before I made the trip home, figuring it would be a good time to have the screen issue I've been having looked at, since I wouldn't be able to use it to go online at home anyway. They did a bunch of diagnostics and told me the hard drive was corrupt (aren't we all?) and that it had to be replaced. They sent it out while I was away, and I picked it up on my way from the airport when I got back in town, but when I get it home I discovered that the screen issue was still happening, so my next shift at work I brought it with me and gave it back to them so they could address it. It had to be sent away again, and I only got it back Saturday night, so I've been without a decent means of getting online. Yes, I had my old comp, but it has gotten so slow and unreliable that I only used it to check email, I even stopped trying to get on the WW website, which means I've not been tracking for the better part of a few weeks. I'm not sure if this has been good or bad, surely there have been benefits, but there is always a price to pay.

My visit home was wonderful in so many ways, but as always I went through the usual slump after I got back in Windsor. In many ways I had a much harder time adjusting to getting back after this trip than I had after any other. Part of it was feeling completely and utterly off my eating routine; I definitely had been eating foods which I was home that I am no longer accustomed to eating, and I was not eating much of the foods I have grown accustomed to having regularly. When I got back in town I found myself hungry through much of the day, and not finding my meals as satisfying as I used to. I was mostly okay with the foods I was eating, I just wanted to eat twice as much of them. I was also craving foods I have cut out, but mostly it was the hunger that was making my life difficult. As well, when I got back I discovered that summer had set in in full force, and the weather had gotten very hot and humid. I was able to stand it okay, but I definitely was not motivated to be going for walks or to exercise. My regular workout was out anyway, on account of not having my laptop, tho I did try to do the best I could using my PS2 to play my WATP dvd, and trying to do the core workout from memory, but the strangeness of it didn't help me to get back into my old routine. I've also been a lot more active socially than I normally am since getting back in town. Suddenly I was going out a lot and getting together with people almost every day, and I've had a lot less free time. I was trying to get workouts in, and having some measure of success, until I sprained my wrist while out boating and that effectively got rid of the possibility of strength training. I've done a bit of walking, and have been starting to go for bike rides on a friend's bike, but I'm still not back into the strength training yet. I spent today doing housework, and while I have pretty good range of movement with my hand, by the time I was done my wrist was aching like crazy and I had to take some acetaminophin for the pain. Still, it is getting better, slowly but surely, and that's the main thing.
Admitedly, the majority of the issue has not been the weather and the sprain and the laptop being serviced, instead the issue has been the fact that the thing I have been obsessing over for a year has happened and is over. Going home to see my family and surprising them was something I thought about constantly, and was one of my main sources of motivation throughout my journey so far. I had thought from time to time about how it would be for me after the trip was over, and how it might change things, but honestly I didn't put an overabundance of thought into it. Mostly I believed that while the trip was a huge source of motivation, it was not by any means my main source of motivation, and that after the trip I would still have my desire to be thin and healthy and active and strong. But to be honest, a tiny little part of me was afraid to think about what would happen afterward, because part of me must have understood just how much I was using the trip as a source of drive and determination to do the best that I can. I didn't want to consider the possibility that the trip had somehow become my largest source of motivation, because I didn't want to think about how that would affect me when I got home.

Well, I made the trip, and I came back, and I found out just how much my brain had been filled constantly with thoughts about the trip, because when I got back I suddenly felt extremely empty and directionless. No, I am in no way saying that I didn't care about my goals any more, but my intense drive to be active and to get as many APs as I could and my discipline over every meal with the thought of losing as much as I could that week seemed to have fallen by the wayside. Exercise for its own sake was not enough motivation to get me going, and I didn't feel that urgency any more in terms of losing every pound I could.

Now of course, it could very well be said that this has been a good thing; I was certainly feeling the strain mentally and even physically there in the last weeks before the trip, to the point that I was looking forward to the surprise being over just so I could stop feeling urgency to the point of panic almost constantly. I let myself get intense over it all because I knew it was temporary, and that it was not how I was planning to live for the rest of my life, and yet after the sense of relief was over after the initial meeting of the family was done, and after I got back in town, I am feeling the absence of that sence of urgency very, very keenly. It was so much a part of me for so long that it has been a huge adjustment since returning, getting used to it being gone. I suppose this has been a critical point for me in the sense that this is a point in my journey where I could potentially start wandering off track instead of keep moving toward my goals. I did go off tracking for a while, but I've tried my best to stay OP even without counting points, and since I have not gained in the last month, and have even lost a few, I have been very successful there I would think. On that count, the past month has been good for me, because it gave me a chance to live like "normal people", without counting and just trying to live healthy. I know now that I can do a reasonable job at following a healthy lifestyle without counting every morsal I put in my mouth, something I had wondered about more than once the past year. But before the trip I never would have allowed myself to go off counting points for a while in order to learn how I can do without points, I never would have relaxed enough, never would have wante to risk that I might not lose, of gods forbid, even gain a pound! I feel a lot more confident in myself and how far I've come after the last few weeks, I truly have changed a lot of my habits, because I still made healthy choices even without planning everything out and being accountable to my planner at the end of the day.

Now all that being said, I've still made the decision this week with the return of my laptop that I will get back into the habit of tracking what I eat, and to start trying to get daily activity in, even if I can't do proper workouts on account of my wrist. While I've been doing well at making healthy choices, I've definitely not been perfect, and I'm all too aware that I'm at a critical junction, and that I could still start slipping backwards without proper care. It's good to know I can go off points without going crazy, but at this time in my life when I am still adjusting to having one of my main sources of motivation out of the picture, I want to maintain at least a measure of discipline, because I don't want to get too far off track. I either need to find something else to motivate me, but then again, perhaps I just need to find a place mentally where I am able to maintain a style of eating and a method of exercising that is no longer so dependent on some outside source of motivation. Most people do well with short term goals, whether they are time goals (do X amount for 6 months) or end-point goals (till I lose X amount or till I can run X miles), and I do well with them too, I think, but I am getting very close to reaching my goal, and it is time for me to start thinking more long term. The ideal would be for me to just establish a healthy balance of eating and exercise that are not dependent on me feeling a sense of urgency about something in order to maintain it. Perhaps the level of food-strictness and the amount of exercise I'll have to do to maintain my goals will not be so strenuous that I will need to focus on some time goal or an end-point goal in order to stay motivated. Now that I'm getting over the feeling of emptiness and almost letdown that I had been feeling after the trip, I do confess that I am starting to enjoy this feeling of being relaxed about my eating and my exercise. Of course, I'm starting to track again, but that is because I don't want to get TOO relaxed about things; a certain amount of effort and vigilance is needed. It's all about finding the healthy balance, and I think I'm starting to gain my feet again.

I think the title of my last post is very fitting.

Earned 8 APs today: 2 hours (didn't count it all) housecleaning, 50 min bike ride