Round

I’m finally catching up with some of the blogs and I keep leaving comments about how I’m really off track (I am) and how I am just ‘thinking about’ “when” and “if” I might get back on track.  Or track down an Oreo McFlurry.
I sound pathetically wishy-washy to myself and I need a plan.

It looks like we will be stuck in Denver for several extra days due to the Iceland volcano explosion, and this time in Denver has been a diet free-for-all, and extending it is NOT a good thing.

A large number of the good habits have been pushed aside to get at cheesy Mexican food and cinnamon rolls, although a small handful of things are still around (don’t drink your calories, drinking green tea).

So since I can feel so much mental resistance I need to start in a way I can manage - and that’s going to be Low Stress Weight Loss, as it so often is.

So the babystep I can take on right now is Drink Lots of Water.  Not earth-shattering, not going to ‘blast away the fat’ but a solid, healthy move that will get me going in the right direction.  Maybe in a few days I’ll be ready for another babystep, but I’m taking this one onboard for now.

My commitment : To drink at least 2 liters of water a day for 3 days.

Totally feels do-able to me.

Next up will probably be to hit fruit & veggie servings of a certain number (5?) but let’s take it one step at a time…

Well, it’s not Monday (yesterday we were still out of town) but I’m actually glad to be a day late on the Weekly Plan, because I’ve been a bit less motivated these past few days.

Last week exercise did not go well (I was very busy with traveling).  Eating over the weekend was on the over-doing it side (although not terrible).  The weather this weekend was yucky and we were tired and lazy and we didn’t go for long walks at all.

I did hit the gym this morning, and the day has already been much better than the past week.

I’m excited that Spring is finally here, and there is actually sunshine today in Paris.  We usually have amazing weather and glorious flowers for Spring, but this year it’s been slow to start, and today’s been the first day it’s looking like it’s coming.

Plan for the week?

Do the best I can.

That’s it.

Whew, I’ve gotten through the week without any major detours to my diet.  Food has been good, exercise has been pretty absent, but moving between cities every day I wasn’t expecting much.

I fly home to Paris this afternoon, have a ton of things to take care of at home tonight, and then we head to our summer place in the South Saturday morning.  We come back Monday, and Monday will be a challenge just because I’m working and needing to balance calls & work along with traveling via train. 

The summer place has been empty for months and since we’re just coming for the weekend we’re planning on mainly eating out - which is fine in theory except I’ll need stuff for breakfasts at home or else things will be trouble with my diet. 

I know we’re going to a traditional French place for lunch on Saturday when we first get in, then to a new Michelin-starred restaurant Saturday dinner.  Lunch I’ll find something diet-worthy without too much worry, and I’ll skip any treats to make sure I have a little wiggle room for delicious tidbits (and dessert) on Saturday night.  Sunday lunch I think is with friends (no control over the menu, so I’ll do the best I can) and Sunday dinner will likely be the local pizza place (which has really good pizza).  The last time I had pizza was the last time we were here - so in October I think, and I did fine & will again. 

Now that it’s written out, it seems pretty manageable, not a big “challenging weekend”. 

Exercise will require effort, but there are several hiking trails near our house, some of which I’ve never explored, and usually my husband is game to show me around.  I now have an old pair of sneakers I keep at the house so even if it’s muddy or rainy I’ll plan to get out there.

What is your weekend plan?

How did the week go?

The week was okay.  The scale is not showing any change, but I’m letting the scale do it’s thing for right now while I just worry about eating well and regular exercise, and I’ll put more emphasis on the scale again in about a month.

I feel like I could have put in more effort overall during the week, but generally things were okay.  The small detours however probably did add up - chocolate that has more sugar than usual (I usually eat very very dark chocolate, and the chocolate I’ve been eating this week is 70% not my usual 85% or 99%).  I had nibbles here and there of other things, and while I exercised regularly, I felt like the intensity early in the week was lacking.  I did better about that this weekend and saw a corresponding increase in sweat.

Last week I had 3 goals :

1) Exercise 4 times this week :  DONE. My progressive goals towards becoming a regular exerciser are paying off.   I now routinely exercise at least 3 times a week, and I’m trying to make that 4 times a week when I don’t travel.  This week I had a one day trip out of town, so I was hoping to surpass the 4 times goal but I didn’t.  Still, it’s success.

2) Try a new food / something I don’t think I like. Not Done. This is one of those goals that sounds fine in theory but falls apart in real life.  I don’t actually want to eat food I don’t like, and why should I want to start to like foods?  I mean, I eat a healthy balanced diet, does it really matter if I don’t like strong fish? I take fish oil capsules to make up for it.  Maybe I’ll try this another time, but right now I have a fair amount of stress going on, I’m not going to add to it at the table.  The goal was an error of judgment.

3) Work on my 100 Things That Make Me Happy List. Underway! I got this started with this blog post last week, and did add a few items to my list.  I’m going to start to publish it in chunks here.  I do think for a weekly goal the daily Relax Report was a better option, however, so that’s what I’m picking up for this coming week.

The Coming Week : Challenges, solutions & focus opportunities :

• The coming week has plenty of challenges.  Business meetings, travels to places I don’t know (so food will be more challenging) and lots of business meals - mainly lunches. On the road 3 nights, and away for the weekend too after that.
• Biggest challenge is probably the lunches on the road.  I’ll have to play it by ear and have healthy snacks at hand.  When out at a restaurant it’s usually manageable, but sandwiches in a conference room are not very easy to navigate if you restrict carbs, so I’ll need to see how that goes.  I’ll definitely plan big breakfasts…
• Exercise this week won’t be stellar.  This is a week where just getting my minimum 3 sessions in will require effort and discipline.
• Focus opportunities?  Monday.  Everything else will be about doing the best I can.

Goals for this week :

1) Keep a Relax Report. I’m feeling tired today, so I need this goal to get past the inertia that might otherwise show up.

2) Manage the business meals well by eating beforehand, having good snacks with me, and dealing with hunger. If I eat a decent breakfast and have snacks for later, I should be able to make it through any kind of lunch without too much difficulty.

3) Do a new plan just for the weekend.  This week seems hard to me already, I feel overwhelmed when I think about a weekend away at the end of it.  So I’m only thinking through until Friday right now, and then on the flight home Friday I’ll think about the weekend.

What’s your plan for the week?  More challenges? Or more focused?

I think it’s the cold gray weather - I’m feeling kind of blah.  I’m ready for Spring.  I see ads with women wearing shorts in the metro station these days.  There are some crocuses in my front yard that seem to be optimistic, pushing their thin green stalks up.

I feel like a sunny vacation would be very welcome right now, but it’s not going to happen.  Next trips will be to Germany, surprise, surprise.

This weekend should be pretty manageable - no major challenges, and I’d really like to get in a few good long workouts.  I’m also planning on finally getting to the market today, which means organic fresh veggies galore will be the main menu focus for the weekend, since this week has been a lot of raiding the freezer & making eggs…

How did the week go?

All things considered, I had a good week.  I got on the scale today showing no change in my weight, but my body is bloated from monthly hormones & I had a bit of indulgence on Saturday.  Although I suspect the scale might be kinder tomorrow, I decided to just take a flat week on the scale, since it’s just a number & I know that I’m heading in the right direction, even if it’s at a snail’s paceI

My trip to Berlin was nice - nothing spectacular, nothing disastrous.  Food wise we went to a really fabulous restaurant on Friday called Ma, and on Saturday had a “traditional German” nice restaurant (read : heavy, potatoes, pork pork pork & sauerkraut).   It was really cold so we did less walking than I’d hoped, but there was a pool at the hotel so did at least some movement each day.  More meals wer on-plan than not, and the treats were kept to a minimum. 

Last week I had 3 goals :

1) Keep a food journal : As is often the case when I make this goal, I start out strong & finish weak.  It was VERY helpful the first few days, then got boring, then forgotten.  I still made better choices than I would have without it, but I need to bear in mind in the future that I really only have about 3 days of attention span on this MAX, so to put those days where it counts.  I started the food journal before I even left home, and the first 2 days of my travel were pretty easy meal-wise.  I’d have been better off putting the food journal at the later part of my week.  I also maybe could find quicker and easier ways than the iPhone to do this.  I used Lose It on the iPhone but it takes so long to log everything (no way to copy a previous meal unless you set it up special).  Paper & pen is frankly the quicker solution.  Overall I give myself a weak positive because it did help me and I did do it, but definitely room to improve in the future.

2) Be Prepared.  Done! I made sure to have healthy snacks with me in my purse, hotel room, bag & focused on tea at coffee breaks.  Making choices of what a ’standard’ breakfast or lunch was before I was faced with temptation was a big help too.  Made eating healthy and for weight loss pretty easy, took a lot of temptation off the table.  One of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

3) Make a Relax Report. FUN! I did this on paper (unlike the food journal) and enjoyed noting things during boring parts of my meeting.  I brought a candle with me from home, took 2 baths, went swimming, ate chocolate, drank tea & generally just concentrated on my enjoyment and relaxation as much as possible.  Such a nice way to put some ”happiness balance” into losing weight.  I really think that linking “relaxing” and “weight loss” in my mind is a powerful trick.   

The Coming Week : Challenges, solutions & focus opportunities :

• The coming week is a pretty normal one.  Mainly at home, quite a few meetings and running around town, a one-day trip (long). 
• Biggest challenge is probably that the house is not stocked for healthy eating.  We were gone last week, and got home too late on Sunday to stock up, so going into the week with a poorly-stocked kitchen is going to be a challenge. 
• Exercise is planned for most days this week, although I’ll give myself permission to cut one of the morning sessions if I’m too tired.  I do plan a serious-exercise weekend.  I enjoyed swimming last week at the hotel, so I’d like to build on some momentum and head back to the pool in Paris, although not sure when that might happen.
• Focus opportunities?  A lot.  Most days, most meals, and that won’t be the case next week, so I want to take advantage of it.  Also since I took the flat weight for this week I should see a nice loss next week if I stay the course, so that’s the plan.   

Goals for this week :

1) Exercise 4 times this week. I’m feeling tired today, so I need this goal to get past the inertia that might otherwise show up.

2) Try a new food / something I don’t think I like.  I had a  colleague report to us last week that if you try something 14 times you grow to at least tolerate it, if not actually like it.  I don’t intend to eat eye of newt or foie gras, but there are a lot of healthy, readily-available foods that I wish I liked that I don’t.  Maybe I can get myself to like (or at least tolerate) some of them.  Will it be a bite of salmon?  Will it be a stinky cheese?  Tune in next week to find out…  I’m only promising to try something ONCE by the way, not FOURTEEN times. 

3) Work on my 100 Things That Make Me Happy List.  Details to come in a future post, but I’m going to be writing up my 100+-Things-That-Make-Me-Happy in a series of blog posts.  Iniya is going to join me on this - and we’d love others to play along too!  Having that list of things that make me happy (or that relax me) really helps me put focus on taking care of myself, pampering myself and general enjoyment of life at the same time I’m making the effort to lose weight.  Very good cycle of self-care and self-love. 

What’s your plan for the week?  More challenges? Or more focused?

Will you think about joining us in developing a list of 100+ Things That Make You Happy?

How did the week go?

I had a decent week.  Mid-week challenges were indeed challenging, but nothing disastrous, and I put into practice “Forgive yourself & move on” on two consecutive nights.  Let’s just say I was shaking up my metabolism to make sure I wasn’t in the deprivation zone too much.  And eating some really good food, at least on Tuesday night.

The weekend went well too - luckily I thought it through on Friday, because that made a real difference.  I made it to the gym both Saturday & Sunday, and advanced on a few projects quite nicely.

The weigh-in? Down another half a pound this morning. I’ll take it!

Last week I had 3 goals :

1) Focus on relaxing : hmmm… overall a weak positive I guess.  In the past I’ve actually written down somewhere the relaxing things and that’s helped me to SEE them.  This week thinking back on it I did in fact do a number of them, but I guess I didn’t put enough emphasis on them.  Keeping a list of the positive things I do for myself really helps, especially in heavy-stress times.

2) Go for FOUR exercise sessions this week.  I did it! It was indeed a bit of a challenge, but I did it.

3) Let go of the daily weigh-ins. Done, but it wasn’t easy. I physically removed the scale on Tuesday morning after my weigh in.  I put it under my bathroom sink, where I’d have to bend and risk spiderwebs to get at it.  I wanted to get on it several times, but each time I managed to avoid it.  I was surprised how much hold the scale had over me, as I wasn’t conscious of being so dependent on that evil little square.  I was glad I didn’t have it after the mid-week excesses, however.  I won’t keep it as a goal for this coming week simply because I’m going to be out of town and there will be no scale to stay off — I’ll have plenty of other challenges I need to manage.

The Coming Week : Challenges, solutions & focus opportunities :

• The coming week has plenty of challenges - I’m out of town for work to Berlin from Tuesday night, and my husband & stepson are joining me there for the weekend.  In addition to all the normal business travel challenges (coffee breaks, hotel breakfasts, work dinners, long days) I’ll then have my foodie husband to contend with.
• Exercise is planned for both Monday & Tuesday before I travel, and I’m assuming getting plenty of walking in on Saturday & Sunday.  I’m packing the gym gear in case I have time for the days at the meeting at the hotel.
• Focus opportunities?  I almost wrote none, but that’s not true.  Monday and most of Tuesday should be fine.  A bit more eating out than is usual because we have some starving artists making a short film in our house this week, so daytime cooking will be out.  Breakfasts in hotels aren’t a big problem for me, I just stick to basically the same things I eat at home.  Dinners of room service are usually pretty manageable, and I can do that Tuesday night, and maybe beg off work social engagements on Wednesday - that’s a bit more iffy.

Goals for this week :

1) Keep a Food Journal. It’s my go-to strategy of choice for challenging times. I can’t really fool myself when I’m writing it all down. 

2) Be prepared.  Buy snacks to keep in my suitcase before I leave.  Grab healthy options to keep in my purse at the meeting.  Actually eat that stuff :-)  Find a shop to re-stock if I need to.

3) Keep a Relax Report.  Management attention drives behavior, or so we say in my line of work.  So I’ll pay attention to Relaxing.  Looking forward to meditating, listening to music, and I think I’ll put a small travel candle in my suitcase as well.

What’s your plan for the week?  More challenges? Or more focused?

This week has been a bit more challenging than is ideal.  Last week went much smoother, even though I was traveling, probably because I was doing more checking in with myself.  I probably need to work on that.

Last weekend worked out well in large part because I planned for it on Friday, so I’m doing that again today.

Friday night : home alone w the hubby!!! A nice change of pace, as we’ve been MUCH too busy recently.  I did manage to buy something for dinner yesterday before my 24 hour trip to London, so dinner is now in the oven.  Easy as long as I got that done.

Saturday : Will get a nice long gym session in tomorrow, and otherwise eat normally.  We have theater tickets and will eat dinner out somewhere, but I’m confident that I can handle that well.

Sunday : Morning gym session and normal food at home.  I’ll stop by the market but only for Sunday & Monday, as after that we’re gone for almost a week to Berlin.

Ahhh…. feeling better about it already.

Next week exercise could be tricky but I’m making sure to bring the big suitcase so I have room for gym clothes, just in case.

Well, my weekend was a success and this week should be okay now that I’ve thought it through.

Challenges, solutions & focus opportunities :

• The coming week has plenty of challenges - two dinners out, one at a restaurant (which is manageable) the other at someone’s house (much less manageable).  For the dinner at the friend’s I’ll bring a healthy snack to eat on my way there, and know I have good choices at home, so if what’s for dinner doesn’t meet my diet I’ll just push it around the plate a bit.
• Some travel, which will be 2 lunches, one dinner & one breakfast on the road.   All those are situations I know how to deal with, and I should be fine.  I probably should grab a nice salad at the train station for the trip home - a good snack, full of veggies & knowing I’m planning that should make the second day’s lunch easier to manage.
• I get back fairly late on Friday, so dinner that night will be either takeout or maybe I’ll get it together to have something ready to go when I get home.  There are some decent takeout options that I like, so it’ll be okay.
• We have far fewer commitments for this coming weekend, and I’m hoping to catch up on relaxing… and maybe some organizing too.

I should be able to get in plenty of exercise - at least that’s my plan.  I’m going to the gym tonight and then at least one of Tuesday or Wednesday morning.

Last week I had 3 goals :

1) Maximize Relaxing : I did well on this - it helps to have it in focus.  As my life is more stressful these days for a variety of reasons I’m going to continue this goal this week.

2) In-room exercise (while at hotel) : I did NOT do well on this. I had longer days than usual and felt really tired all week (probably because I was up so early on Monday).  I did 10 min of ab work on Tuesday night but that’s it.  I’ll need a different plan for this in the future - something easier to achieve and probably more specific.  But just a babystep.  I’m putting this goal on hold because I won’t be back in Munich for any length of time until sometime in April.

3) Adjust to hunger : I give myself credit for doing pretty well on this. Anything to do with attentive eating and listening to hunger etc is really hard for me, so any kind of progress on this front is good.  Long term I’d really love to be someone who eats when she’s hungry & stops before she’s too full.  Doesn’t that sound like a good goal? Right now I do a lot of “defensive” eating for *in case* I get hungry.  I made some small progresses on this, including one night when I ate a snack around 7pm (before dinner) but by the time I got to the hotel at 10pm I realized I was thirsty and tired but not really HUNGRY so I just drank a ton of water and went to bed.  I almost never skip meals so I thought this was a good thing to make progress on.  The goal will make a reappearance in the future, but not this week.

Goals for this week :

1) Focus on relaxing

2) Go for FOUR exercise sessions this week.  With a short business trip & two evening events four sessions is a stretch, which is why I’m making it a goal.

3) Let go of the daily weigh-ins.  I will report my weigh in tomorrow and then not get on the scale again until Monday.  I know from this weekend that this will be hard for me - breaking the daily scale routine is not going to be easy.

What’s your plan for the week?  More challenges? Or more focused?

I’ve had a decent week.  Pretty much stuck to healthy eating but exercise was lacking.  I’ve done well on the Relaxing front, and it really helps me mentally to link that in to my whole ‘healthy living’ mindset.

I also pushed the scale under the bathroom vanity this morning.  It’s going to come out only once a week (well, that’s the plan).  I’m stopping the daily weigh ins for now, and pushing the scale out of the way is necessary, because when it’s in the middle of my bathroom I have a tendency to step on it every time I walk by it… not healthy for my head at all.

This weekend should be full of fun relaxing activities but I want to make sure I get in exercise & lots of sleep too.  I’m also going to try to have my food be really under control, because this weekend it looks like most meals will be at home & without friends over (therefore fewer temptations).  I bought lots of gorgeous organic produce this morning plus some meat at the butcher and several French cheeses so we’re well-stocked for good meals at home.

Weekends are often one of my biggest challenges, so it’s nice to find one that can actually be a help not a hurdle to the bigger picture weight loss goals.

A few months ago I started doing separate planning for weekends vs for the whole week and I think it really helps me.  I used to plan the week on Mondays (well, I still do) but now I also try to look specifically at the weekend on Friday because it helps me keep a plan to manage any challenges in mind, and helps me keep my eye on the prize.  Monday morning weigh-ins are probably the most important factor in having good weight-loss weekends, but the second factor now is awareness & a bit of planning on Fridays.