One of the things I'm perennially working on is losing weight. I'm not so much a yo-yo dieter, but I am a yo-yo weight loser. I don't necessarily go for fad plans or crash diets where I suddenly lose a ton of weight, but I'll slowly but surely lose 10, 15, or 20 pounds... then much too quickly gain back 15, 20, or 25 pounds. My co-worker, Fifi, came into my office a couple months ago with a Weight Watchers flier and said "Are we going to this?" so I agreed to do it. I did WW in college, and I wasn't a fan, but my mom lost a lot of weight on it and now works for them, so I figured I'd give it a second chance.
One of the keys for me to lose weight is to maintain an active lifestyle, which I am sometimes good about and sometimes not. For example, this week I've logged six miles of walking and two trips to the local pool to swim laps. I always like to keep things in some kind of unit when I exercise, whether it's miles or minutes or calories. Usually I prefer distance measurements. For example, when I walk, I like to walk a 5K and when I swim, I like to swim the distance required for a sprint triathlon (half an Olympic-distance triathlon). It helps me feel like I have an end goal in mind. If anyone wants to help me keep active, I'm always looking for ways we can hang out together and do that, whether it's go for a walk, go sightseeing on foot, or spend a day at the pool.
I log my activity via President's Challenge which is a pretty cool site. It encourages people to be more active and assigns points based on what you do. If you're physically active, it's kind of a neat way to give yourself higher goals, and if you're not physically active, it's a way to start setting those goals. The Presidential Active Lifestyle Award is pretty cool -- it involves being active five days a week for 30 minutes or more, six weeks out of eight. I also use the Internet to read a lot of blogs about people who do things like "enjoy running." I want to be one of those people desperately. Certain types of exercise to me are enjoyable, like walking and swimming, but running is a chore. I'm not very good at it, either, but I figure with time I might get better. I'm trying to be active in 5Ks and other kinds of races, including maybe doing a 15K in December with my sister.
There are a lot of things I'd like to be able to do as I get healthier, like finish a triathlon (sprint distance) and run a marathon (maybe somewhere as part of a Hawaiian vacation). These are goals I talk about off-the-cuff like I don't really want to do them, but I actually do. So, if I know you and you want to be active, you can help me achieve things that will really mean a lot to me. There are little things I want to achieve along the way. On my trip to Asia, I was completely comfortable fitting into my plane seats (which I was not on my trip to Oklahoma last summer for my grandfather's funeral) because I had lost enough weight to do that. When I was sick on the way back and felt like utter shit, I was glad that I was at least comfortable in the seat as I tossed and turned and prayed for my Ambien to work better than it did. That was a big achievement. I'd like to be able to fit into a couple of the cute shirts that I own with buttons that don't button over my (huge) boobs (which will get smaller with weight loss... hopefully). So in all seriousness, I'd love the support of my friends and family as I work on making this effort a real goal that I achieve, and not another failed attempt with a net loss of plus five pounds.
I feel like this blog will be a combination of a lot of the different things that will interest me. There may be pictures of what I'm eating (I'm obsessed with looking at pictures of people's meals), what I do to work out, the nail polish that I'm wearing (I took one of those this morning -- I was wearing China Glaze Celtic Sun!), work, school, etc. So, consider this my introductory weight post.
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