Finding my way....

Wt: 273.7

PS-- I'll start with a "p.s." and let you know that I never made it 24 hours sugar-free. My last post in November 2011 said I was going off sugar cold turkey. Right. didn't happen.


Hi again,
Its been an interesting 2012 so far. Inspired by my brother's weight loss over the holidays-- when I saw him he had lost 35 lbs (and currently is maintaining a 45 lb loss), I decided the time had come to get serious this year about diet and exercise. Armed with the motivation that I'll be a Nurse Practitioner in 18 months and I do not want to be an obese NP, and with my brother as my diet buddy, I got started....

My brother wanted me to weigh each day. Now I've always had a love/hate relationship with the scale. Well, mostly a hate relationship. Weighing every day was mental torture. But each day we texted our weight, food intake and exercise to each other. I also started working out 5 days a week at the wellness center at Southern. In fact, I even hired a personal trainer for some extra wisdom, motivation and accountability.

2 months into it, I've lost nothing. Well, I did lose 8 lbs, (from 274 to 266) but now as you can see I'm back up. I hung in there for 5 weeks pretty well, but was frustrated with the extremely slow weight loss. After all, aren't obese people supposed to drop tons of pounds the first month? So I started reading books. Books, blogs, websites, research articles, etc. I filled my brain and my Nook with all sorts of information on weight loss, fat loss, food addiction, sugar addiction, hi carb, low carb, no carb, no protein, lol.... I read up on slow-burn cardio exercise, and interval training.... I even went for a Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) test and a VO2 Max test.

And here is what I've learned: There are as many opinions on weight loss out there as there are people and websites. You can literally find whatever you want on the internet, and I swear each plan has research to back it up. With my mind swimming with conflicting information, I gave up for a couple weeks and immersed myself in peanut-butter chocolate ice cream.

Here's what I've decided. Its kind of a conglomeration of everything out there....
1. I want to be healthy.
2. I want to feel good every day
3. I like coffee with creamer
4. I *need* coffee with creamer as long as I'm stuck on night shift
5. I think we're better off with few animal products in our diet
6. I think good carbs are good for you-- brown rice, pinto beans, etc
7. I think Mexican food is terrible for me yet I'll always love it and eat it
8. I'm not sure if lots of fruit is good for me or bad for me, but I'm fairly certain its better for me than peanut butter chocolate ice cream
9. My body doesn't like to lose weight :-(
10. I don't like to weigh
11. I do enjoy exercising, and thanks t0 Mike Bruce in Somerset, KY for a new exercise routine that I'm enjoying and challenged by.
12. Sugar addiction or not, I can benefit from a support group
13. Sugar is not a safe food for me. One bite makes me want lots more of it. Makes me obsessed.
14. I like water, so I can drink lots of it.
15. I think juicing and green smoothies are good for me and I can do those too.
16. Even if I stay fat, I want to feel good, so I need to exercise and eat good.
17. I'll always turn to ice cream when feeling down. Just deal with it. If someday I get the victory, great! But meanwhile, accept it and don't berate myself for it. Beating myself up only makes me want even more.
18. There are a thousand ways to lose weight, so rather than research the perfect way, I just need to live life, exercise daily and eat fruits and veggies.

At any rate, here I go again on the blog. I definitely am enjoying exercise even if I never lose a pound, because it makes me feel good. I think anything "extreme" will be short term-- as far as a juice fast, or the rice diet, etc... But perhaps a combination of them would be worth a try. So yes, I'm still trying to figure it out as I go. And if I die fat, well, its because I just couldn't let go of that mexican and ice cream.