So who hasn’t met their big, publicized weight goal?

Ooh, ooh—me, me!!

For those of you who’ve been around for a while, you know that I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in the past two or three years that I’ve been doing this blog. And recently, I’ve been much more up (weight wise) than down.

Last time I checked in (in February), I was down to 277. Unfortunately, I’ve been in a really bad head-space since then, between deadlines, financial issues, and the onset of hot weather which always makes me miserable. So I’ve fallen back into old eating patterns . . . and regained even more weight. I knew I’d regained weight, but I’d been avoiding the scale, because I didn’t want to be slapped with the truth.

But then I saw this picture, taken when I was in Pennsylvania two weeks ago:

And I couldn’t deny it any longer. I needed to start making healthy food choices and get moving again. And when I got home from that trip, I bit the bullet and stepped on the scale. As of the end of June, I was back up to 291.5—within 25 pounds of my highest weight ever. NOT where I wanted to be at this point in my life. I mean, the whole idea behind the title of this blog was that I’d be fitter and healthier (and smaller) by the time I turned forty. Guess what—that happened five weeks ago!

With my mom’s encouragement, I’ve started a new nutritional plan which includes cutting back to low-fat poultry and fish, lots of digestive-cleansing vegetables, a little fruit, and yogurt for the first two weeks, then moderating on to a basic low-carb menu.

Since that weigh-in on June 30, I’ve lost 8.5 pounds. And as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, seeing that number on the scale not just going down, but racing down, makes it much easier to stick to a more restrictive diet for a couple of weeks—even to the point of abstaining from the chips and salsa and my favorite chile rellenos when I went out for Mexican food yesterday (I had chicken fajitas minus the tortillas, beans, and rice—just the chicken and vegetables with guacamole, sour cream, and salsa).

While I’ve set a goal for where I want to be by Christmas (250, or down about 30 more pounds), in the short term, I just want to get back into all of the clothes I bought a couple of years ago when I first started losing weight which are currently too tight. By Christmas, I want those clothes to all be a little too big for me.

What’s your health/fitness goal you’d like to reach by Christmas/the end of the year?

Coming Out of Hibernation

Well, it’s been three months since I broke my ankle. Three months of very little activity but the added benefit of being reliant upon Mom (mostly) to fix my meals for me. And we did try to keep it somewhat healthy/low-carb. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been indulging just a bit, but after stepping on the scale this afternoon (a couple of hours after eating a very large breakfast), I may have found the motivation I need to get back on the healthy-eating track.

Previous Weight (10/13/10):
283.5

Today’s Weight:
277

Difference:
-6.5 pounds

Granted, I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be just three months out from my fortieth birthday—I’d hoped to be down in the low 200s if not the high 100s by now. But between self-sabotage and lack of willpower and motivation, I’m still working to get back down to the lowest I’ve been in fifteen to eighteen years (which I reached about a year and a half ago, in the 260s). However, even though I’m not going to hit my goal weight by the date on which I turn forty years old, that isn’t going to keep me from being fabulous by forty—by being on the path to a healthier, happier me!

The next step is to set a realistic short-term goal for myself—on step of which will include rejoining Weight Watchers for the accountability and moral support (hopefully this Sunday). Next week, I go back to the doctor for my three-month post-surgical follow-up and to find out if I can start going to the gym and walking on the treadmill, even just for a few minutes at a low speed. So, once I clear that hurdle, I’ll be able to set both weight loss and fitness goals.

What about you? What are your fitness/health goals for 2011?

Going on Hiatus . . . Again

Well, I’ve been lax about keeping up with my weight-loss efforts the last several weeks, and now it’s going completely on hold. In case you didn’t see the post on my main blog, I broke my ankle on November 4, so, needless to say, that’s going to make exercising almost impossible, and tracking my weight pretty hard. I do plan to try to get my eating under control (still need to break the sugar/carbs addiction) while I’m in Arkansas with my parents over the next six to eight weeks. So, until I’m (literally) back on my feet, I’ll be taking a hiatus from this blog.

Wednesday Weigh-In 10/13/10

Christmas Challenge Beginning Weight:
286

Previous Week’s Weight:
285

This Week’s Weight:
283.5

Difference:
-1.5 pounds
(-2.5 pounds total)

Pounds to Lose for Christmas Challenge:
13.5

Wednesday Weigh-in 10/6/10

Christmas Challenge Beginning Weight:
286

Previous Week’s Weight:
286

This Week’s Weight:
285

Difference:
- 1 pound

Pounds to Lose for Christmas Challenge:
15

Goals:
At least 30 minutes of activity every day of the week.
Hasn’t happened yet—may not happen before October 15, which is my next book deadline.

Make healthy food choices every day—and document it on FitDay.com.
I’ve been struggling with cravings this week, so my food choices haven’t been the healthiest. But I haven’t gone out and gotten fast food or anything like that (well, I did pick up a frozen pizza at Kroger Saturday for dinner when I was there picking up a prescription). I also don’t have time to detail every single ingredient in everything I’m making to put it into FitDay right now, so I may just do a more generalized food journal here daily. I did go through my fridge and freezer and get rid of everything that was either expired/spoiled or that I shouldn’t be eating and made up my meal plan for the week, which I am trying to stick to pretty closely.

Lose FIFTEEN pounds by Christmas. I’ll weigh myself on Wednesday mornings and report it here.
In progress.

Wednesday Weigh-In 9/29/10

Well, my baseline/starting weight for my Christmas Challenge isn’t quite as bad as it looked when I weighed on Monday (and the scale showed me four pounds higher). My starting weight for the Christmas Challenge is 286. So, even though I said it’s a fifteen-pound loss goal, I’m actually increasing that to sixteen pounds, to try to hit 270 by Christmas.

What I have done since Monday:

• Started watching what I eat, making healthy/low-carb choices whenever possible. I’ve begun the arduous task of eliminating sugars/refined carbs from my diet, so I expect the next couple of weeks to be full of headaches and cravings as I go through withdrawal.
• Reinitialized my FitDay account (see link in the right-hand column to my FitDay journal). I plugged my food in on Monday, didn’t have time to do it yesterday, and have put my breakfast stuff for today in so far (I know, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon so there should be two meals listed, right? Well, when I don’t get up until 10:30 and don’t have breakfast until 11ish, lunch doesn’t come until three or four in the afternoon).
• Got my toning sneakers. Have worn them around the house to get used to them.

What I haven’t done since Monday:

• Activity—so far, I haven’t gotten in my 30 minutes of exercise daily. This is always a challenge for me.
• Tracked food every day. (Working on it.)
• Take the white-board into the kitchen and made a meal plan for the week. This is a goal for today, in addition to cleaning the kitchen. I always find I have an easier time sticking to healthy meals, prepared and eaten at home, when I have a sparkling-clean kitchen to work in.

Have you thought about setting a health/fitness goal for the last quarter of the year? What small steps can you take in the next three months to welcome 2011 as a healthier you?

A Christmas Challenge

I’m starting to become one of those people I can’t stand—someone who makes big noise about setting goals and then never accomplishes them.

Traveling so much this year has been hard on me, as has being in a financial crunch for most of the year, meaning that I’m either having to eat whatever’s put in front of me (or fast food when I’m not being reimbursed for travel expenses) when I’m on all these trips or that I’m having to buy the cheapest foods available to eat at home—and those are never the healthiest choices in the store.

But, I am now going to be home for the longest stretch of time in 2010—almost nine weeks at home without as much as an overnight trip anywhere. Then, it’s a week with my parents at Thanksgiving (where my mom and I can egg each other on to make healthy choices together) and back home until I go back to see them the week of Christmas. So I have three goals for the last quarter of 2010 (at least as far as this blog is concerned):

• At least 30 minutes of activity every day of the week. This can be walking on the treadmill or swimming at the gym (and I just ordered a pair of the Danskin toners from Walmart—only $20!), walking in the neighborhood (the weather’s supposed to be absolutely perfect this week), or getting out my Shimmy (belly dancing) exercise DVD and using it.
• Make healthy food choices every day—and document it on FitDay.com. I’m going to be sticking to a healthy low-carb diet: basically leaner proteins, veggies, limited whole grains and dairy, and fruit after I break the sugar addiction a few weeks into it. (And if you’d like to check in and make sure I’m doing this, sign up for a free account of Fit Day and become my “friend” so you can access my Journal.)
• Lose FIFTEEN pounds by Christmas. I made this commitment verbally to Jeane Wynn, my publicist, at the ACFW conference, so now I’m putting it in writing. I’d love to rejoin Weight Watchers, but it just isn’t in the finances right now. So I’ll weigh myself on Wednesday mornings and report it here.

Obviously, the main reason I need to do this is for my health. I’m tired of feeling tired; I’m tired of my back hurting when I wake up in the mornings. But I also need to do this because I need to fit back into all of my clothes. After regaining twenty pounds of the fifty I’d lost by this time last year, none of my size 22 clothes fit, which is most of what was in my closet, as I’d been getting rid of clothes as I got too small for them (I almost said as they got too big for me). I’ve had to spend far more money than I should have on larger size clothes this year—mostly stuff I could wear to all these events/meetings/conferences/speaking engagements, since I couldn’t just show up in stretchy knit pants—and I’m not wanting to have to buy more larger-size clothes for the winter. I want to wear all the cute stuff I already have: sweaters and tops and skirts and pants and jeans and jackets. Mostly, I want to regain the confidence I’d started feeling when the numbers on the scale started inching down toward 260—and then broke to 258, the least I’d weighed in I don’t know how long.

It’s sad . . . two years ago at the ACFW conference, when I’d been losing weight (working out and eating right) successfully for nine months, I jumped into group pictures and handed people my camera so I could have pictures of me with everyone I know. This year, even though I wasn’t consciously avoiding cameras, I didn’t make an effort to get pictures taken with anyone—and I only ended up with one photo on my camera of me with anyone else . . . with a member of my local writing group, Jodie Bailey, before the banquet:

I was so uncomfortable in that dress and in those heels that I ended up leaving before the actual awards portion of the evening started, went back up to my room to change into comfy (larger-sized) jeans and a (larger-sized) T-shirt, then took my laptop back down to the lobby where I sprawled on the sofa and read the live blog of the awards presentations.

So, Monday morning, I’m taking my whiteboard back into the kitchen and going through the relatively well-stocked fridge and freezer and making a food plan for the week. Wednesday, I’ll weigh in for my baseline/starting weight for this fifteen-pound challenge.

Wednesday Weigh-In 8/18/10

So I weighed this morning . . . and I was down 2.5 pounds to 280. Yay! And that was without making it to the gym at all in the last week. So that’s my goal for the next seven days, is to try to get to the gym at least three days, possibly five.

Six months later . . .

Well, as you can tell, I haven’t been working on my weight loss with any consistency in 2010. My excuses are that it’s because my writing deadlines have been too close together and life has been too hectic. But even I know those are excuses. Healthy lifestyle choices shouldn’t be dependent upon deadlines and stress. The truth of the matter is that when the going got tough this year, I went back to all of my old eating patterns: sugars, refined carbs, fast food—those foods that are linked to addiction because they release dopamine in the brain and make us, momentarily, feel better.

Before I went to Arkansas in May to visit my parents, my weight had crept back up to almost 290. Yep, I’d almost sabotaged myself right back to where I’d started. But then my mom and I made a commitment to each other that we’d stick to a low-carb eating plan and try to get to the gym a few times each week so that we could take off a few pounds before my cousin’s wedding in Charleston, SC, in the middle of July. Even though I didn’t make it to the gym all that often, and I occasionally slipped with the food plan (and didn’t track as often as I’d committed to), I got my weight down to 285 before we left for Charleston.

When I came home, though, I had another book deadline looming—with more than half the book to write in about two weeks. And I was flat broke. So the last two weeks of July were spent eating and sleeping on an irregular schedule, and what I could afford to buy at the grocery store was definitely not healthy: a big sack of potatoes, peanut butter and jelly and bread (wheat, but not the more expensive healthier whole wheat with extra fiber), and a value-pack of Ramen noodles.

So when the first week of August hit, and a check for a small freelance project I did in June finally arrived—enough for a trip to the grocery store—I determined I was going to get back on the healthy track—that I was going to do the Atkins Induction for a couple of weeks to break the sugar/carb cravings and get back to the gym again.

I weighed myself on August 4, and was at 287—so at least I hadn’t completely sabotaged myself while on that deadline. When I weighed again last Wednesday, after a week of sticking to low-carb and getting to the gym several times to swim and take water aerobics classes, I was down 4.5 pounds to 282.5.

Until I can afford to re-join Weight Watchers, I’ll be weighing myself in on Wednesdays (yes, that’s tomorrow). I know I do better when I’m open and honest about what I’m doing—and when I’m doing it publicly, so that’s why I’m restarting this blog.

I also know there’s no way I’ll hit my goal weight of 170 by my 40th birthday next May. But I’m still calling this blog Fabulous by Forty, because the point, more than hitting a goal weight, is to be healthier, happier, and hotter by the time I turn the big 4-0.

Four months later . . .

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious when I fall off the wagon, isn’t it?

If you look at the widget to the right –> you’ll see that, over the past four months, I’ve actually re-gained 12 of the almost 50 pounds I’d lost. While I’m not proud of this fact, admitting it and putting it out there for everyone to see is a huge step for me in getting back on track to losing.

Do you ever get to a point in your life—in any area of your life—in which you know you’re sabotaging yourself, but you just can’t help it? That’s where I’ve been since November. I fell back into all of my old eating patterns . . . except for the ten days I was in Baton Rouge over Christmas. I think the only reason I’m not up 15 or 20 lbs is because I actually lost 3 or 4 lbs over Christmas because I was so careful about what I ate. For some reason, it’s a lot easier for me to do that when I’m around other people than when I’m alone.

Of course, since returning home from BR, I’ve been indulging in stress eating because of the deadline for my next book (which I missed and am now late on) and the tons of freelance work I’ve had come in (and dreading the knowledge that I’m going to owe a few thousand dollars in taxes this spring). I’ve subconsciously used that as an excuse to indulge in high-sugar, high-fat foods which have, obviously, taken their toll on the progress I’d managed to make over the past two years.

Well, no more sabotage—at least I’m going to try not to.

I’ve rejoined Weight Watchers. (Gained three pounds the first week I was back on it. Hello!!!) And this week, I determined I was going to start exercising again. Pulled out the DVD I made of the exercise program Shimmy from Fitness TV (edited out the commercials so I don’t have to stop and ffwd through them) a couple of days. But then yesterday, I found myself online looking at treadmills and thinking how nice it would be to have one at home so that I could walk while the weather’s cold. And then started thinking about how nice it would be to start swimming again. And maybe start taking some actual exercise classes. So I opened up a new page to the YMCA of Middle Tennessee website and discovered I could register/pay online. So at 1 a.m. this morning, I did that. And at 10 a.m. this morning, I walked in the door, got my new ID card, and got up on the treadmill.

I knew I’d have to take it easy this first day, so all I’d planned on was one mile. But once I hit one mile, I figured I could go at least another quarter of a mile. And once I hit 1.25, I realized it was only a few more minutes until I’d been walking for 30 minutes. So I did 1.5 miles in 30 minutes, which gives me a baseline for setting some fitness goals for myself.

I have fifteen and a half months until I turn 40 years old. And my goal (as stated by the title of this blog) is to be at or at least within 10 pounds of my goal weight by the time I turn 40. I have 100 lbs (+/-) to lose to reach that goal, which works out to losing an average of almost 7 pounds per month. And supposedly, the more I lose, the harder it’ll be to get the weight off—so I really need to work hard at it now to get the “easy” pounds off (and to fit back into all of my clothes that I could wear four or five months ago which are fitting a little tightly now) and to start regaining control over my health, well-being, and self-image.

How are you doing? Where are you with your weight and fitness goals?