Well, I said I would be real, so here goes...

My first planned cheat day turned into closer to a cheat week.

Yeah, it's Christmas time and its not easy to turn down all of the goodies around me. Motivation is a hard fish to catch sometimes, but it is really the key. I wish I know the magic formula to get and maintain motivation. We all know what works in weight loss--exercise and eating a reduced calorie diet with the proper nutrition. But actually doing those things unless you naturally crave celery 90% of the time (which I do NOT!) or have a job that keeps you moving all day (again which I do not...) takes a little something extra. When it hits, its great! Especially when it actually sticks around for longer than a day, but I'm never totally sure how I get there.

I remember being really angry with my ex when our relationship went south, and I looked at me losing weight as a means to get back at him and make him regret being such a skeeze. That worked like magic. And I know at least a dozen other girls that lost their excess fat on the break-up diet. So yeah...that is a very effective trigger for motivation. But it's really not the most emotionally healthy way to go either.

Now I want to get in shape for myself, so that I can feel confident enough on the outside to let Me show through. I'm a singer, and I love to perform, but it is diminishing to me to look in the mirror and see all of my flaws before I get on stage and then worry if that is what people are seeing, rather than hearing my voice.

Not that I would mind hearing a "Wow you look amazing!" from the boyfriend, either...

With that said, I have been back on track for about a week now. I have stuck between 1200 and 1600 calories every day and worked out for 1 to 1 1/2 hours everyday as well. Last time I weighed in, which was about 2 days ago, the scale showed 144. Since it had crept up to 150 during my previous week of debauchery, that means 6 pounds down! I'm sure a lot of it is water weight, but if I keep this up I will get past that and see that number begin to drop consistently.

I have not yet followed through on my promise of pictures and measurments...sorry. I'll dig my tri pod out soon, wherever it is :)

Reposting of a Great Article From MSN.com Today

Let Your Heart Break
By Geneen Roth

When you accept that hurting and healing are part of living, you can give up the fantasy that being thin controls your happiness, and your resilient heart will enable you to love the life you have right now.


His name was David, and I was crazy in love with him. The way his shiny dark hair curled around his collar, and how his long fingers waved oh so eloquently in the air as he talked. Every breath he took, every word he uttered seemed as if it was designed to crack my heart open. I wanted to spend my life with him, grow old with him, have more children than Angelina Jolie with him. The only teensy problem was that he didn't feel the same way about me. "I'm not attracted to you," he said. "It's not the same for me as it is for you!" he exclaimed.

Picky, picky, picky, I thought.

I was certain I could persuade him to love me, that he wasn't seeing clearly, that it was my job to show him that we were meant for each other. I was also certain that when I finally lost the 10 pounds I'd been losing and gaining for a hundred years, he'd be smitten.

And so I pulled out all the stops. I developed a sudden fascination for 18th-century architecture (his field), I baked coconut layer cake (his favorite), I dyed my hair blond (his preferred color). And most of all, I starved myself. I ate nothing but Grape-Nuts without milk for six weeks (don't ask). I chipped a few teeth, leached most of the calcium out of my bones, and probably depleted my muscle mass by half, but I did finally lose those 10 pounds. A few months into Project David, he fell in love with a size 16 brunette and moved 3,000 miles away.

Most of the people who come to my retreats and workshops believe in Control-of-Life-and-Death-by-Weight. They are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn't love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.

But as you probably have already guessed (or experienced firsthand), when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh.

Talk about busting childhood myths. As children, we all believed that it was in our power to make our parents happy. If our mother was depressed, if our father was absent, if our parents fought incessantly, we were convinced that it was in our power to make things better. It wasn't. But how we self-medicated those hurts with food was, and still is.

Listening to me say this, one woman in my workshop said, "But wait a minute! The problem is that I'm not in control of what I put in my mouth. If I were, I wouldn't be here!"


I responded, "If there is one thing about which we are in absolute and irrevocable control, it's what we put in our mouths. I understand that you don't feel that's true. I understand that you feel at the mercy of potato chips and pizza, but truly — it's only you who lifts your fork or fingers and puts the food in your mouth. It's completely up to you.

"And," I continued, "if there is one thing about which you are not in control, it's who loves you, stays with you, gets ill, or leaves you."

As long as you are saying, "Well, I may not be in a relationship now, but when I get thin, I will find the perfect partner," you give yourself the illusion that you're in control. You may not be happy now, you tell yourself, but someday soon you will make a change and Prince Charming will suddenly show up at your door. You fool yourself into thinking that you have total control over when your unhappiness will end and perfect happiness will begin. And it has something to do with your weight.

Yesterday I received a letter from a woman who weighs 350 pounds. She wrote, "I have always believed deep in my heart that if I would just lose this weight, my parents would love me. They would also stop yelling, stop drinking, stop leaving. My husband would pay more attention to me. My money problems would vanish. My house would be clean. What if I lose the weight and those things don't happen?"

Losing weight does bring a feeling of lightness; more freedom to move; it puts less pressure on your joints. But it doesn't pay the bills, clean the house, or prevent people from getting sick or leaving or dying.

Before my father died, I tried everything to keep him alive. I bought him athletic shoes and exercised with him. I made sure he ate well. Part of my motivation, besides wanting him to be healthy, was that I was positive I couldn't live without him. But when he died, I grieved, I cried, and then life went on. When my cat, Blanche, died, I thought life was over. And then it wasn't. My best friend, Isabel, moved to Australia a few months ago, and I thought I'd never have another close friend. And then I did. Seems as if I've been wrong about quite a few things. But the thing I've been most wrong about is that having a broken heart is something to avoid at all costs.

It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.

The hard part of emotional and compulsive eating is that in trying to avoid big heartbreaks, we break our own hearts every day. We eat more than our bodies want, we binge on foods that make us sick, we carry weight that makes it hard to move around. We tell ourselves mean stories about our thighs, our arms, our bellies. The cost of having the "when I am thin, everything will be fine" fantasy is that we end up trading the heartbreak of being alive for the heartbreak we cause ourselves.

And it's all to avoid something that can't be avoided. While we are postponing our joy for a future time when everything will be perfect, life is going on with or without our consent — and we are missing it. People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

Hearts are made to be resilient. Think about it: Is there one thing that's happened to you that you haven't survived? Here you are, right now, reading this article despite all the heartache you've had in your life. Something in you is still awake, alive, eager to learn, ready to be moved.

And once you know that your heart is resilient, once you accept that part of being here on earth is, as a friend of mine says, living among the brokenhearted, then you can take in the huge streaks of delight, joy, and happiness as well. Once you understand that everything will end, you can finally let your life — the one you already have, not the one you imagine you'll someday lose enough weight to deserve — begin.

Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.

How Have I Tried To Lose You? Let Me Count the Ways…

I grew up living with my grandmother who was, as the stereotypical grandmother should be, an excellent cook. This woman could make cookies that filled your mouth with pure bliss and absolute comfort…all the things a child needs! I was destined from the beginning to be a chunk…

I can’t remember the exact moment the idea that I was fat came in to my mind, but somehow I was always aware that I wasn’t exactly cheerleader material. No, I would have to settle for Girl Scouts. Which worked out better for me anyways. Ya, know…cookies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of expendable income back then and the hand-me-down Brownie uniform that my mother bought for me at a yard sale was a little too snug, so I had to wear a t-shirt with my merit badge sash…

I think I was 8 years old the summer I went to visit my mother and found her stash of diet pills in the kitchen cupboard. I assumed these were just magic pills that would make me suddenly pretty and skinny like the cute little princesses from school that I envied so much. Lucky for me, the pills were just a cheap herbal supplement without much potency at all, so I was never harmed from the few that I tried.

However, I was sure my days were numbered when my brother found them in my jewelry box and told our mom. Surprisingly though, she sat me down, concerned but not upset—instead it seemed she sympathized with my desire to be one of the skinny girls… She’d known that feeling all of her life too. I seemed I had inherited this battle.

This began my first attempt at a diet. My mother was no nutritional genius, so with her advice, I basically ate all the same junk as usual that summer, but the low-fat versions. And let me tell you, low-fat food in the early 90’s was no where near even the caliber that it is today, so this still wasn’t pleasant. But I don’t remember it working much.

The next year, I think I took my first stab at the Slimfast diet. Again, in my young naiveté, I assumed, not that these plans would make you lose weight because you were so freaking hungry, but because there was something magical about these shakes. And again it didn’t work…

A few years later when I was around 12 years old, my mom had some weight loss success on the fen-phen diet. She even let me try a few of the little orange appetite suppressant pills which she assumed to be safer than the 2nd pill that increased energy. But we all know how that drug will go down in history… And ironically, it was the appetite suppressant that was banned in the U.S. not long after my experimentation with it.

I got lucky when puberty hit and naturally slimmed down some, though I still seemed so much bigger than all of my petite friends, so I continued my weight loss efforts. Some of the girls in my middle school saw it as a blatant sin to be seen eating lunch, so I started skipping meals on a frequent basis. Anorexia and Bulimia had become major topics for cheesy, made-for-TV movies, so my friends and I quickly caught onto the idea of starving ourselves and binging and purging. I wonder if the producers of those movies ever realized that rather than keeping young girls from developing eating disorders, they were teaching us how?

When I was in the 7th grade, I started abusing laxatives to keep from gaining weight when I could no longer stand to starve myself. I never became emaciated, but I did later develop some other medical issues which could definitely be related to my unhealthy practices. The cycles of gaining weight and then starving to lose the weight continued on into my early adulthood.

Once I hit college, things really went haywire. First I gained the Freshman 15. Then I think there must be another incident called the Sophomore 30, because by the time I was 19, I had gone from weighting about 140 pounds in high school to almost 190 pounds. I enjoyed all of the eating and freedom that came with adulthood so much that I didn’t even realize how big my butt had become…

But once I realized the difference in my mirror, I began to struggle yet again with a whole array of diets. Atkins was popular around this time, followed by Carb Addicts, the Lemon Juice Detox, the MonoDiet (a horrible diet where as the name suggests you only get to eat one type of food per day, the first day of which consisted of eating 15 oranges... Ick.), and the South Beach Diet. I even went to a few Weight Watcher’s meetings and joined a gym.

Then finally one day, a light clicked on. I realized that there was no quick fix and that if I wanted to lose weight it would take a long time and a lot of work…

But I decided it was worth it.

Writing it down...

The first three days have gone fairly well. My intake stayed right around 1300-1400 calories per day and I exceeded my goals of a minimum 1 hour of physical activity. I haven’t weighed myself since before I began Tuesday morning, but I do hope to already see a few pounds gone by the end of the week. Typically, I can expect to lose 3-5 pounds my first week of a diet by shedding the first bit of water weight. After that, I tend to slow down to no more that 1 or 2 pounds per week which isn’t enough to keep me motivated, and I then have to turn my attention to my workout goals rather than the number on the scale.

Weight is one of the least reliable measures of whether or not weight-loss efforts are having a positive effect. This weekend, I will post my measurements and take some current pictures so that I can compare in a few weeks.

I have decided to give myself one pre-planned cheat day per week. Most diets recommend this for 2 reasons—first, you don’t feel so deprived and are therefore less likely to quit altogether. Studies have shown that people who allow themselves a chance to indulge without guilt are able to stick to their plan and have a better chance at seeing long term results. Second, when you eat right, you feel better. Your body functions more properly, and if you pay attention to your body after those days of indulgence, you’ll notice that you feel sluggish and bloated, thus hopefully motivating you to eat right more often.

Even on my cheat day, I intend to write down what I eat. Keeping a food journal has always been the most important factor in keeping me on track. I have noticed that the days I decide to be lazy and not write down my foods and calories are the days I start to sway and get off track. It is like not keeping track of your finances. If you don’t write down what you are spending, it is likely your account will end up overdrawn.

My friend and I have even begun sending our food journals to each other via email. Even if she never read my food journals, it provides me with sense of accountability. The idea is that if I know I have to tell someone that I ate an entire bag of Oreos, hopefully it will make me think twice about doing so.

Also, by reading someone else’s meal plan, I can discover new foods to add into my own diet. Mixing it up and keeping things from becoming too boring is very important. Also, keeping my kitchen stocked up with plenty of figure-friendly and easily accessible foods helps me to stay on track. If I get into a pinch and find myself ravenously hungry, I need to have some quick and healthy snacks on hand, or I will go strait for the ice cream or the drive-thru window…sometimes both.

Setting Goals

The issue of scheduling time to work out is really an issue of commitment. I can make time, I just don’t like to. It feels so nice to go home after work and just lounge around until bed time…especially during the winter, because I am not at all a cold weather person. Being cold just makes me want to curl up in my electric blanket and sleep. Not to mention that darkness at 5pm makes the idea seem more acceptable. I would never go to bed at 9pm in the summer time, and going to work out at 7pm would be no problem.

I need to establish some fitness goals in order to have something more achievable to work towards than just a lower number on the scale. I did this when I lost the bulk of my weight initially and just got out of the habit.

For me, running was my goal. I have had asthma since I was 5 years old, mostly brought on by physical exertion or allergies, so I have never been very athletic and NEVER liked to run. However, because it was something I needed to work for and had to be diligent with in order to make any progress, I was able to stick with it for a long time and I saw major results. I began very slow, just pushing myself to run intervals. The first day, I would run for sprints of 30 seconds at 5.0 mph and then walk for 90 seconds at 3.8-4.0mph for a total of 30-45 minutes. This might not sound like much for an experienced runner, but since I was new at it…this was hard! (I should add that when I began, I had been walking for at least an hour a day for over a month so my legs and calves were already in slightly better condition. Others might want to progress more slowly to prevent injuries like shin splints which will interrupt your work out plans for a long time.) Each week that I ran, I tried to either increase the time I was running or decrease the seconds that I spent recovering at a walking speed. By week 4 or 5 I was running up to 10 minutes at a time before slowing to recover, and by 8 weeks, got up to 20 minutes! For me, this was a major feat! Again, I unfortunately got out of the habit so now I think my limits are somewhere around a 2 minute running interval again, but my hope is to stick to a plan and increase that to 10 minutes again by New Years. After New Years, I have a friend who is encouraging me to sign up to run a 5K with her in the spring. I think this could make a very good goal for me to strive for. If I could run consistently for 30 minutes strait at my 5.0mph pace, I could expect to finish the 5K in about 38 minutes.

Even if it comes down to just walking or strenuous housework, I have set a goal to get at least 1 hour of extra physical activity in EVERYDAY, though at least 3-5 days a week, I would like this to be a more intensive workout at the gym with my running and some weight and strength training.

I have gone over my schedule and I should be able to fit this time in. If not I am just making excuses for myself to be lazy. To start with, I am able to take walks on my 30 minute lunch breaks. If I do this, I only need to take another 30 minutes out of my afternoon schedule. Knowing my usual habits, if I get all the way to my gym which isn’t all that conveniently located, I will spend at least an hour there anyway so I can hope to exceed my goals.

The Math (Yeah gross, I know, but just read anyway cause it’s important…)

What a person weighs is determined by the ratio of calories they consume to the calories burned in their daily life or in a more common and pithy form—calories in vs. calories out. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to figure out exactly how many calories I burn everyday (that takes a lot of high tech and expensive equipment), but to get an estimate, there are several calculators available online to help get an idea of my BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate which is the number of calories that someone of my gender, height, weight, and age would generally burn per day if all I did was stay in bed. This is just the energy it takes a body to keep the heart, lungs, and other systems functioning. For me, a 25 year old female, at 5’2" and currently 148 pounds, my BMR is approximately 1470 calories per day. In other words, if I were bed ridden, I could consume this many calories each day and maintain my same weight.

A single pound of fat is made up of 3500 calories, so in order to lose those 28 pounds of fat, I would need to create a deficit between how many calories my body burns each day and how many calories I am consuming. (About 7000 calories a week to lose 2 pounds per week, which is considered a healthy rate of loss.)

At the same time, it is important to not reduce the calorie intake so much that it causes one’s body to slip into a state of fasting. At that point, rather than burning fat, your body will try to hold onto anything it gets and you are unlikely to lose. Also, take it from someone who has a long history with eating disorders, anything you lose from starving yourself WILL COME BACK AS SOON AS YOU START EATING AGAIN. Not to mention that side effects of constant fatigue, jitteriness and in severe states, fainting, hair loss, and eventually heart failure and death will result.

The Diet

I work at a hospital and have asked several doctors and also a few personal trainers and nutritionists what they consider a healthy number to cut back to. The consensus was in the range between a minimum of 1200 calories and up to 1500 calories per day for someone of my height and weight. Men of course get more calories since they tend to naturally burn more (punks…), as do people who work a very active job like athletes or some construction workers. As a rule, I was advised that if I became weak and shaky, or if I felt too constantly tired, I should try adding about 100 calories to my daily intake and re-evaluate. I have found that I can function pretty well when I stay between that 1200-1500 calorie range. I can usually vary within that range and stay on track, as some days might have a few more temptations than others. The beauty is that you can budget portions of those tempting treats into your diet without ruining it.

The Workout

Since you can only safely cut back so many calories in your diet, it is important to include physical activity in any weight loss plan. When I first started out at the 190 pound mark, I was completely sedentary so I started off by just adding some walking into my routine each day. I would try to skip elevators and instead chose stairs and purposely looked for far off parking spots. Eventually I got up to walking a minimum of 1 hour extra per day which I typically split up in a few walks of 20-30 minutes. Also a helpful goal in starting out is to purchase a pedometer and strive for about 10,000 steps per day. The average sedentary person only takes about 3,000 steps a day.

Since I am more physically active now, I can and need to increase the intensity of my workouts. I belong to a gym (which I should go to more often than I do, and intend to), and was blessed with an affordable opportunity to utilize a personal trainer. If it is something you can afford, I highly recommend it as you will learn a lot and have an added source of accountability. They will push you to discover your limits which are often much further than you ever expected and you will learn a lot.

The other bonus to working out is that muscle burns more calories than fat, so the more you work out, the more calories your body will burn when you are at rest. Every pound of muscle on your body will burn approximately 50 calories per day at rest, whereas each pound of fat will only burn about 5. Plus exercise will benefit your health in so many ways other than just your physical appearance.

I am sure my trainer would also want me to preach that weight and strength training is vitally important…not just cardio. A lot of women get the wrong impression that if they lift weights they will end up bulky like a female body builder. And that is ludicrous. If you ask any of those women about it, they will tell you that the muscles they have WILL NOT happen by accident. They train for many hours everyday to get that tone. Doing a normal amount of weight lifting (say 30 min, 3 times a week on various areas of the body) will give you a more attractive toned look, while building the muscle that will, as I said above, BURN MORE CALORIES!

So let’s do it! In my next blog, I will detail my own workout and eating plan. If I stick to it, I will soon get to start blogging about my my progress!

The Plan...

It is impossible to reach a goal or destination without first mapping out a plan, so the first week or so of posts will be concerning how I intend to accomplish my goal of losing 28 lbs by this summer. I will attempt to include as much of the useful scientific information and tips here as I can. An experienced dieter like myself should have much to offer. : )

I’ve successfully lost a significant amount of weight before, so I’m going to do what I already know works—which unfortunately is not a pill, patch, or potion…it’s diet and exercise. (Ugh!)

A Declaration...

Today begins another journey. One that I have set out on…oh…only about a million times in my life.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am determined to lose the weight.

I succeeded over the last few years in going from about 190 pounds down to about 135 by working out 6 days a week and eating a diet of about 1200 calories a day. Wow…I know, right?!

But the determination that made that possible was merely the "woman scorned" sort of motivation I got after ending a bad relationship. Every moment logged on the treadmill was made easier by the look of remorse I imagined on my ex’s face when he saw how incredible I would look after my efforts.

But now, I am in a good relationship, and I am facing the same challenge that most people who successfully lose weight face. I am quickly and steadily starting to gain weight back.
I call it happy fat.

For some reason it seems so much easier to be motivated to lose weight when you are angry or depressed, but now that someone out there cares for me as I am, it seems less important to avoid the pizza and cookies. Especially since he really likes the pizza and cookies too so they’re frequently around me.

But for myself—not for him, and not for revenge this time—I want to lose this excess weight. I want to fit back into the skinny jeans I bought myself at my lowest weight and maybe even a size smaller. This summer, I’d like to, for the first time in my life, slip on a 2 piece bathing suit and walk outside with no feelings of self-disgust or insecurity. I’d like to sit down without a spare tire muffin-topping over the waistband of my pants, and I’d like to run in shorts without worrying that the people behind me are taking too much notice of my jiggling, dimpled thighs.

I am 5’2". Most weight charts say that for my height I ought to weigh between 104-137 pounds. Knowing my previous weights before the post high school weight gain, and my bone structure, I would like to shoot for somewhere around 120 pounds. As of this morning I weighed in at 148. We’ll see where this journey takes me this time…