Diary of a Fat Girl

Ohhhhhh mama.

Slowly but surely I've been losing weight. It actually started when I was pregnant, completely by accident. I was determined not to put on much weight, since I was already overweight to start with. I didn't really do anything special, I indulged my cravings (hello $1 McDonald's cheeseburgers almost every day at lunch and large fountain cokes....) but I guess I just didn't get crazy. I had morning sickness for most of my first trimester, but I actually lost weight when I got some 24 hour bug where I literally threw up every hour, on the hour. I lost about 5 pounds then and really didn't put much of that back on until the very end of the pregnancy. I think I gained maybe 7 pounds for my whole pregnancy (and Ben was just over 7 pounds at birth, so I left the hospital lighter than when I got pregnant).

The February following Ben's birth, I actually dropped a pants size from the year before (wahoo!) and since then, I've probably gone down another. Again, I'm not really doing anything special, however, we're eating a lot more home cooked meals than eating out. When we both worked, we ate out a lot. When Nick worked at EDS, he had crazy schedules, plus school, some nights we just didn't have time to do anything about dinner before he had to head off to school - so we did McDonald's or Wendy's or pizza or something of the sort.

Since I stay home now, well, there's really no excuse for me not to cook. I learned from my mom what my idea of a stay at home mom is. I watched my mom pretty much go to work every day, even though she didn't leave the home. She cleaned, cooked, sewed clothes and costumes - she was the stereotypical "housewife". That's the image I had for myself when I when I decided I wanted to stay at home with my children. Now, certainly my house could be tidier but that's a topic for another blog.

Anyway, I cook probably 95% of our meals. And those are from scratch. I don't make a lot of "heat and eat" type foods (my scalloped potatoes are from you know, peeled & sliced potatoes with milk, not from a box with hot water added). I think that had a lot to do with the weight I (and Nick - he's also gone down a pants size) have lost. I don't really serve my family a lot of overly processed foods and in the last few months, I've been trying to cut down on the amount of ground beef I feed our family as well.

My biggest obstacle with losing weight is that I'm lazy and a procrastinator. And I'm a freaking CHAMP of talking myself into doing something else instead. "I had a rough day with Ben, I owe myself a night of quietly reading a book" "I have the sniffles, I'll exercise when I feel better" you know the drill. Even that, though, I'm trying to overcome. We have a nice little circuit we walk around our neighborhood (I think it's just under 2 miles) and we can do it in about 20 minutes. I'm a lot more active now that Ben is more active, a lot more chasing him around, tickling, laughter (that's exercise!!!), running to keep him from falling on his fool head... :)

Anyway, the next thing I've done is I rented an exercise video from Netflix. I did a little bit of looking around and have seen it mentioned in a few places, so I thought I'd try Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred. It came today. I was a good girl. I moved our couches and the coffee table, I put on comfy pants and a tank, wore my shoes (I hate wearing sneakers on carpet) and I did almost the whole thing. I did have to pause for breaks and to chug water like some one was fixing to steal it and I can't do one of the ab moves (I need to figure something out though - I have a slipped disc in my spine that really hurts if I put certain pressures on it) but I did my best to do it all. My hand weights were two cans of veggies (I don't have any hand weights... ha ha - rock what ya got!).

But there ya go. I did it. I'm certainly not going to tell you my weight, but I will say this the number on the scale is making me feel a bit better about myself. :)