Normally for breakfast I have a Kashi TLC granola bar that counts as 2 Points (old Points system, not Points Plus). Recently, however, I bought several boxes of Planters Nutrition bars, which just barely come in at 4 Points. Perhaps I could count them as 3 Points or 3.5 Points. But in any case, having a 4-Point granola bar with breakfast seems to be really throwing off my day.
I guess I need to keep my head about me and not get so discouraged and thrown off by this.
A rainy afternoon here, but the rain doesn’t bother me. It’s sort of nice to have a respite from the constant pressure I feel to Get The Kids Outside. That being said, I should really do a grocery run before it gets too close to dinner and to my gym time.
I gave in yet again to cravings, boredom, etc., and dug into junk food this afternoon. This means that my scheduled trip to the gym is going to be a real drag. I already blew off one workout this week, so things are not headed in the right direction with making my health a priority.
Just have to keep slogging along. Tomorrow is a new day, and more importantly, there is no reason I have to keep eating junk today. With any luck, I will manage to press my internal re-set button and make the rest of today something to be proud of!
A lot has changed since I last put a real update on this blog.
MIL issues – she is still out of my everyday life. I’ve had one session (alone) with the family therapist my husband has been seeing about our issues with his mom. It was the best 50 minutes I have spent in a long, long time! More on that later.
Weight loss – I haven’t attended Weight Watchers meetings for a few months now. I have maintained my 30-lb weight loss fairly well (not perfectly!). The last few weeks have been really rough with stress eating. I finally made myself step on the scale this morning, and it confirmed that my choices have resulted in weight gain (duh!).
GTD (Getting Things Done system by David Allen) – I am still using my GTD Coordinator (paper planner) and am benefitting from GTD, although there are things I am NOT doing well that are having an effect on the overall benefits from GTD.
Things on my mind lately
Yesterday wasn’t my best day ever, any way you look at it. I was crabby with my 4yo son, Adam. I ate junk food all day long. I didn’t do much of anything “fun” for the kids, like take them to a park. Frankly, I didn’t feel like going outside much.
A lot of my problems yesterday stemmed from a poor night’s sleep. Once again, it struck me how my whole day can succeed or fail based on how much sleep I got the night before.
It also struck me that when I eat junk, then I feel “big,” and I don’t feel like putting on clothes that might possibly feel tight, and add a few more steps in the chain reaction… then I feel cruddy about how I look, and therefore don’t feel like going out of the house.
Today is shaping up to be a better day. I got a decent night’s sleep and have a decent amount of energy and patience (so far! it’s only 10 a.m.). I have my GTD Coordinator in use, and have made my daily planning sheet, which includes a place to record Weight Watchers points. (One of these days, I’ll post a photo of my daily planning sheet. It is nothing fancy, but it just provides a touchpoint for me to return to throughout the day.)
My 10-month-old son, Mark, has gotten too tall for his Exersaucer. Bummer! So yesterday I went out and bought a Graco Pack & Play to use on the main floor of our house. This provides a safe place to put him anytime I can’t be right there to watch him. This means it’s time to get the Exersaucer cleaned up and ready for our local consignment shop. Who knows, I might even get to that task today.
In an earlier post, I reviewed the new Mint Chocolate Vita Top from Vitalicious. The batch of Vita Tops I had received was so minty that I could hardly finish eating one.
Then, I received word that Vitalicious had trouble with some early batches that had too much mint flavor. I received a second order of Vita Tops, free of charge (which I thought was very classy), and these were indeed less minty.
While I do like the correctly made Chocolate Mint Vita Tops much better, and they are not “bad” by any means, they still are not my favorite. I think I would like them more if they had more gooey chips in them; they strike me as a little dry and not as indulgent as some of the other flavors.
For me, the best thing about Vita Tops is feeling like you are having a real, gooey treat (that is a good size) while only spending 1 Weight Watchers Point. This new flavor doesn’t quite fit the bill for me, though it might for some people who are dyed-in-the-wool mint fans.
Those of you who follow Hungry Girl are probably aware that Vitalicious recently launched a new Hungry-Girl-developed flavor for the VitaTop — Chocolate Mint.
Normally I am a fan of all things chocolate and mint, but I have to report that I do not like this flavor of VitaTop. I believe that mint extract is used to give the muffin its mint flavor, and it is a very strong flavor. It reminds me of the time I tried to use peppermint extract to flavor my hot chocolate, but I wasn’t careful and ended up using way too much.
My hot chocolate ended up being un-drinkable, just like the Chocolate Mint Vita-Top is, for me, almost un-eatable.
**UPDATE** I did indeed hear back from Vitalicious. They offered a choice between a refund and a complimentary batch of the new, less mint-y VitaTops. I chose the VitaTops. I will provide an update once I receive them.
Today is a rough day.
I ate like a banshee all day yesterday, so today I have that yucky experience of getting back on track. Kid_1 came down with a stomach bug yesterday morning, so that was my “excuse” to comfort myself with food.
Kid_2 fell and hit his head this morning, via pulling a kitchen chair on top of himself and landing on his back on the kitchen tile. He seems to be doing all right, but it gave me quite a scare.
Kid_1’s birthday is tomorrow, and his party is on Saturday. I’m excited for his birthday, of course, but it’s hard to summon up the gumption to do everything that needs to be done. MIL will be coming for his party; that will be INTERESTING since I haven’t seen her or spoken to her in over a month. Thankfully DH and I are very much on the same page about this conflict with his mom.
I haven’t quite gotten enough sleep the last several nights, and as a consequence I feel irritable and easily overwhelmed. I hate waking up in the morning and having that feeling of “How am I going to get through today without being the crabbiest mom ever?”
The last few days, I have been operating in a fog, it seems. Not quite enough sleep, and feeling hungry a lot. For the first time in my 7-month-long Weight Watchers journey, I have consistently had problems with the feeling that I must reach out, grab, and eat anything that is within reach (my baby’s puff snacks are a frequent target). It’s almost as if a biological urge is taking over!
Soooo…. this afternoon I was able to sneak in a nap (a small miracle). Feeling great after the nap, I had the idea to mix up a batch of brownie batter and enjoy some “me time” while the kids were still sleeping. I’m not proud to say that I did very little to resist this urge. It truly felt that every fiber of my being – mind and body – wanted to seek comfort in the form of food and rest. Not even the knowledge that weigh-in is this afternoon motivated me to stay on the straight and narrow.
I also wanted to avoid dealing with the messy house and some other things that require my attention, such as preparing for Kid_1’s birthday party on Saturday.
What have I learned today?
My official loss to date is 22 lbs. I haven’t decided on a target weight yet, but I do know I need to lose at least 10 more lbs.
My loss has been quite gradual during the last month or two. It may have to do with my milk production (nursing), which is down from where it had been. I have toyed with the idea of moving my daily points target from 28 to something like 26 — just in my own mind, since I don’t think the eTools will let me tweak like that.
The main thing I have to struggle against is the desire to eat in order to deal with (or, rather, NOT deal with) feelings of stress, anxiety, boredom, and so on. On Saturday, I decided to go off plan, and I wasn’t even hungry at the time. I just WANTED that feeling of eating whatever I wanted, in whatever quantity I wanted. Sort of like a little vacation.
If there’s any silver lining to this cloud, it’s that I do this only once every few weeks or so, and I am back on plan the very next day. In the past when I’ve done WW, those bouts have lasted much longer than one day!
Yesterday I bought Hungry Girl’s 200 under 200 cookbook. I made the Big Bad Burger Wrap for dinner, and I was very pleased. And only 4 Points! My husband, who has started counting calories (go, hubby!!!!) also had one for dinner, and he liked it as well.
Of course, WW has plenty of its own cookbooks, and all (?) their recipes are online. There is just something about Hungry Girl that gets me motivated. Anyone else out there an HG fan?
It has really struck me over the past few months how constrained my life is right now. By constrained I mean that I cannot, as a general rule, do what I want to do, when I feel like doing it. The reasons are as follows:
1) Pumping breastmilk. For the first few months of my son Mark’s life, I hardly left the house, mostly due to my pumping schedule. It not too easy to run errands or socialize when you have to factor in a 6-7 times/day pumping schedule! I am down to 3 times/day now, which is certainly easier to maintain, but is still a challenge. No matter what day it is, no matter what fun things might be going on, I need to pump before bedtime, which takes at least 30 minutes. Not such a big deal, if I could sleep in once in awhile. But every morning, after waking up I race to the pump, while every minute that goes by, I am leaking (wasting) milk into my nursing pads. Not to mention that having a 3-year-old and an infant isn’t very conducive to sleeping in in the first place.
2) Naps. Adam, 3 1/2 years old, still takes an afternoon nap most days, so that is part of our schedule with only a few exceptions. Mark, 5 months, was a very difficult napper when he was younger. Some days it seemed I spent half of my waking hours just trying to get him to sleep (typically 3-4 short naps per day). Things have gotten easier, but I protect his nap schedule (as much as he has a schedule) quite diligently. To say that I feel tied down to the house would be an understatement. If we are somewhere like church and he doesn’t get his morning nap, my life is a hectic hell until I can get him his nap; therefore, I am not too interested in skipping or delaying his naps! In fact, Sunday morning church has taken a backseat to Mark’s morning nap. If I have to arrive late or not at all, so be it. I realize that I am in the minority in my approach to this, but I am not willing (or able?) to handle the stress that results from missed or delayed naps.
3) Bedtimes. Adam needs to have lights out around 7:30 p.m. Mark is “completely finished” for the day around 6 p.m. most days, occasionally later. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in a restaurant or even at a friend’s house with Mark after 6 p.m. or even 5:30 p.m. And, of course, I don’t feel it’s fair to him to put him in that situation, unless it’s for something very important and/or very occasional (travel, important appointment, etc.). As a result, we don’t have much of a social life. If anything, one of us goes out while the other stays home and takes care of bedtimes. (As for a babysitter or grandparent putting him to bed… that is another topic entirely. We tried that last night, with disastrous results.)
3) Weight Watchers. In January, I joined Weight Watchers with at least 30 lbs to lose. So far, I have lost 17 lbs, and I am very happy about that. At the same time, anyone who’s done WW or any other plan knows that it takes dedication and structure, day in and day out, to make progress. I can’t just throw caution to the wind a few times or even one time per week, and also expect to lose any weight at my weekly weigh-in.
Last night, at a get-together at a friend’s house, all of the above-listed factors came into play in a very typical fashion. My MIL came over to babysit, and when I left the house, I was concerned about Mark [bedtime factor] because he seemed to be going downhill fast, with stranger anxiety and with getting tired. Sure enough, my husband, who was still home at the time, had to intervene and put Mark to bed because he had completely gone off the deep end.
I had left home early so I could go to Subway and get a Weight-Watchers-friendly dinner before going to the party. For me, I am much more likely to succeed if I can have a filling, healthy meal before being exposed to all sorts of fattening yummies. I spent a few hours at the party, and had only a few sips of margarita [pumping/breastfeeding factor] and almost nothing to eat [Weight Watchers factor]. Then I had to leave early (around 9 p.m.) so I could get home, relieve the babysitter, pump, and get to bed at a somewhat decent hour.
To an observer, I suppose I would appear to be rather a dull sort — no eating, drinking, being merry, or staying out past 9 p.m. In fact, I am a little self-conscious about how I am perceived, even though normally I’m perfectly comfortable being seen as the straight-laced one.
But the bottom line is, I cannot achieve the goals I need and want to achieve if I don’t consistently make decisions that respect the inherent boundaries of the above list. I have to take care of myself (sleep, health, losing weight) and protect my children’s sleep; if I don’t, there are prices to pay. I guess this is all part of being an adult and being a parent.
The Honest Mommy 
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