The Weight: Documentation

I feel like a slug these days.  My energy is low and I am generally depressed, moody, and anxious.  A huge part of all of these things is the level of uncertainty in my life right now.  Added to that, my health and fitness routine have suffered significantly in my general domestic chaos.  We have spent so much time on the road in the past weeks that we have not been eating as cleanly as we should either.

This epiphany has led me to two responses:

• This won't do.
• I need to get back on track.

Even though we are packing up and preparing for a move, I can commit to maintaining enough open floor space to work out at home.  Right now my time is very much my own so I need to take advantage of that.

My ace in the hole though, is documentation.

Source

When I first began working hard on my health and fitness routine, I documented pretty much everything.  I was tracking my fasting blood sugar daily and I kept a food diary with those measurements and my after-meal readings.  In addition to that, I also documented my weight, my measurements, my fitness minutes, and my workouts.

When I lost that first twenty pounds, I eased up on my documentation routine.  I think that was a mistake because not writing down my workouts and not writing down what I have been eating has made me less accountable to myself.

Documentation is essential, even if it is documentation of only one thing.  There is quite a bit of writing about tracking calories, food, carbs, or whatever out there on the internets, but my favorite article on the subject by far is How to Properly Track Progress over at Nerd Fitness.

I created a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs to track all of my numbers.

Image is my own

It is not nearly as cute as the log image I found on Pinterest, but it does lay it all out there at once with no frills.  If you have a fundamental aversion to spreadsheets, there are a ton of online fitness tools and entire communities that are built around really nice documentation tools.  SparkPeople is my favorite.  You might not be able to tell from this screenshot, but in lieu of a food diary, I only included total carbs and total calories for the day.  I got that information from the food tracker tool at SparkPeople.

I am getting back on the wagon with tracking my activity.  Looking through my numbers and seeing the progress trend has made me wonder about where I am now and anxious to get back on the path towards a healthier, fuller life.

Ouch

Source

I have not been sticking to my workout schedule these last two weeks.

Excuses, they say, are the tools of the incompetent, and I have many, many tools.  The main one is that my gym membership expired with my student status.  I have a plan for working out at home, but somehow it's much more difficult to put in the hours in my living room.  At the gym, there's only the one thing to do-work out.  At home, the overflowing laundry basket, the overflowing kitchen sink, and general disorder keep calling my name and drawing me out of the zone.

I sucked it up Thursday and got a workout in.

Cardio: Two mile walk
Bodyweight Exercises: 50 Prisoner Squats, 15 Inverted Pull Ups, 30 Pushups (5 military style), 5 Dips, 10 Lunges (per side), Plank, Side Planks
Weights: Deadlifts (46 lbs total), Rows (46 lbs total), Clean and Press (46 lbs total), Chest Press (46 lbs total), Bicep Curls (18 lbs total)

All of my weighted exercises are done with dumbbells because that's what we have.  Most of these ended up being two sets of six reps each but for deadlifts I did thirty total in three sets of ten.

Even though it's been awhile since I did this workout, I was able to go heavier on everything except the bicep curls.  I think I need to go even heavier next time because I'm not feeling it in my upper body at all.

My legs, however, are screaming for mercy.

I still took them on a two mile walk this morning.

GANGSTA.

Is Wedding Fit . . .

. . . like being Prison Fit? In the sense that one is pumping iron under pressure?

Here are my thoughts on weddings and weight loss, which are pretty similar to my thoughts on weddings and weaves. . . .  Why are we expected to do everything in our power to look like someone completely different on our wedding day?

There is incredible pressure to jump on that bandwagon.  The presence of weight loss advertisements on wedding websites and weight loss discussions are just part of the package.  I didn't realize how much until I became a member of the Offbeat Bride Tribe.  Over there discussions about wedding weight loss are strictly verboten.  The absence of advertisements and discussions makes spending time on the tribe so much less stressful than cruising other websites that it was really kind of shocking.

What bothers me most about those discussions and advertisements is that they all approach weight loss on a purely aesthetic basis.  It's all about looking great on your big day.  I find that approach shallow and decidedly unhealthy.  As a plus size girl myself, I definitely feel the pressure.  As a matter of fact, I spent days before my first dress shopping trip agonizing about my fat back.  Worrying about how I look however, reminded me that it's more important to focus on how I feel.

I don't want to call myself a drama queen, but . . .  totally.  I get anxious.  I worry.  I stress.  And stress makes me feel like shit.  Stress gives me headaches.  Stress makes me depressed and tired and whiny.  Stress makes me EAT like eating is going out of style.  In other words, worrying about my weight makes me forget about my total health.

Not a good look.

Am I trying to lose weight? Yes.  Is it for the wedding specifically? No.  There is life beyond the wedding and I want to fully participate in it on my terms.  To do that, I need to be healthy.

My goal for my wedding day is to look like myself.  A better than usual version . . . but still myself.