FAT Friday: 7/13/12

Soooo, as I mentioned earlier this week I have been having a hard time on the weight loss front for the last few weeks. Busyness, stress, exhaustion and being a little down has all driven this emotional eater to her vices of choice, sugar and bingeing. I won't delve into the details but I am up 3 pounds. I'm not happy.

I haven't been running. It has been hot. I haven't had time. I have just been lazy. It's such a cycle, when I run I feel like eating well and when I eat well I feel like running. Take away one of those and I seem to lose the other.

The bad part is that I just don't know when I'll get it back. As much as I want to lose weight for all the reasons I have mentioned before, I just don't feel like doing the work. I don't feel like running. I don't feel like counting calories, even though there is no way I'll drop a pound without it. I don't feel like sacrificing food when I already make so many other sacrifices in life.

I'll get it together, I'm just going through a rough time emotionally right now. I miss my kids. Yeah, I see them everyday but I want to be part of there whole lives all day long. I'm not happy as a working mom. Yet, I don't see a way around it. We could survive on one income but it would be very hard and my husband is really not even remotely supportive of the idea. So every morning, my heart breaks in half as I walk out the door and it stays broken until I get home. It doesn't help that my 2 year-old has started begging me to stay every morning. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt.

If you aren't an emotional eater, you probably wonder what all that has to do with weight loss. If you are an emotional eater then I don't have to explain the need to fill the whole in your heart with food.

It's my problem to figure out. I'm trying to come up with some ways to earn some income while being home with my kids. It would help if I was creative, artistic or a good writer. But I'm not any of those things.

For now I will just remind myself why I want to be healthy and hope that inspires something in me.

1. For my kids. They deserve a healthy mom. I don't want them to have a fat mom. I want to live to have relationship with my grandkids.

2. For my husband. He deserves a healthy attractive wife. His health goes as my health goes. When I'm doing the right things, he does too.

3. For myself. I want to have energy. I don't want diabetes and all the other health problems that go with obesity. I want to run races again. I want to fit into my old clothes and take pride in my appearance.

I will run tomorrow morning first thing. That is a promise.

Wordless Wednesday: Tiny Dancer

Summer pasta sauce

It's summer time and veggies are flowing in. I love it. This recipe came about a few years ago when we were buried under zucchini and yellow squash. It is so delicious and healthy. It is all veggies but my meat and potatoes husband and 12 year-old stepson both love it.

Ingredients:
1  can crushed tomatoes with basil
1 small yellow onion-diced
2 cloves garlic-diced
1 small yellow squash-chopped into bite size pieces
1 small zucchini-chopped into bite size pieces
3/4 cup sliced mushrooms
1/8 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
 olive oil

In a deep pan, heat olive oil and sautee onions, garlic, squash, zucchini and mushrooms until tender. About 10 minutes.

Add tomatoes and and the red flakes and simmer 10 more minutes.

That's it! The sauce is done. Usually, I serve this over spaghetti but this day I was making lunches for the week and wanted too add some protein so I put it over tortellini.

So healthy. So delicious.

Catch up

:big, long, exasperated sigh:

Yeah, I've been absent. I got busy. Then I got stressed. That resulted in me dropping the ball on a lot of things. Blogging for one, by the time I sat down at a computer at night, I barely had energy to read a little Facebook or Pinterest before I passed out.

Fitness is the other area that went awry. And I don't mean a little. When I'm stressed I eat. My pills of choice in those times are M&Ms, I don't want to talk about how many have been consumed in the last 2 weeks. Also, I failed to plan. I wasn't planning my lunches or snacks and that resulted in trips to the vending machine and deciding on what to eat for lunch when I was already starving (Chick-fil-a, always Chick-fil-a). Worst of all, I haven't run or done any exercise in 2 weeks. I have excuses, it has been hot as a mother trucker so I can't go during lunch. My kids have been waking in the early pre-dawn hours which has made it difficult to go early morning (getting out the door when they are awake is next to impossible), I've just been so busy.

But things have eased up a little now and I am back on focus. I'll delve into the ugly on FAT Friday this week.

For now, some randomness of what has been going on in our lives:

• My daughter starts ballet lessons today. She and I so excited. I try not to push her into the girly stuff but she makes her way there naturally and I refuse to be ashamed of loving every minute of it. There will be pictures. Hold on to your ovaries.
• We found out last week that my son has a paralyzed 6th cranial nerve. That means that his left eye has limited movement. We were really hoping for a muscle issue rather than a nerve as there are fixes for muscle problems. There is nothing to do for the nerve issue. He will likely develop ways of compensating for the double vision that can come with it. For now we just monitor him and patch his good eye occasionally to make sure his left eye doesn't shut down. The ophthalmologist will be a part of his childhood. 
• A couple of years ago we had our house on the market and put a lot of our junk in storage. The house didn't sell but we never bothered to take our stuff out of the storage unit until finally with a price increase up to $200 a month(!!!!) we finally cleaned it out. Now my entire bottom floor is covered in boxes of junk. I'm slowly going through it all and planning a heck of a yard sale in the coming months. Everything must go. 
• We are less than 2 weeks away from our beach vacation. I am so excited to spend a week where the adults outnumber the kids!!!!!!

FAT Friday:6/22/12

It has been so hot here this week that I have been running at 5:00 AM. That sounds worse than it is. I am used to early mornings. My daughter got up between 4-5 every morning for a year. We are early morning people. I love working out in the morning. I love to have it done before the rest of the day gets in the way. Unfortunately, it is only during the summer, when Scott isn't working that I have the time. 

I'm linking up with Ginger for her FAT Friday series

You know I like to get to the nitty gritty first.

I am down another pound this week. Honestly, I am lucky to have lost it. I wasn't great this week. I wasn't awful, but I wasn't great. I had a real problem with night time snacking. I always struggle with the desire to have snacks after the kids are finally in bed and I can relax a little. It has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with wanting to treat myself at the end of a long day. 

In more important news, I am now a three time graduate of the Couch to 5K program. I finished it up a few days ago with a 30 minute run. I am still a little shy of 3 miles so I'll keep working up to 3 miles and then settle in a that distance until I run the    5K in August. Then I'll start working on adding mileage with the Frederick Half Marathon in May as my goal. Hopefully, I'll be carrying around significantly less weight by then. 



Next Week's Suggested Topic:  Summertime=Vacation Time=Overindulging= FUN Possible Derailment!  What summer vacation(s) do you have planned and how to you plan to be proactive in staying (mostly) on the healthy living train?

I was just thinking about my upcoming vacation. In 4 weeks, we will be heading to Virginia Beach where will be staying in a house with my parents and my sister's family. I'm finding that it is a little less stressful to go to the beach fat because I'm not trying to drop as many pounds as possible before hitting the beach in my bathing suit like I would if I were thinner. No, at my weight, a couple of pounds isn't going to be the difference between a bikini and one piece. Let's face it, after 2 kids, one of whom was almost 11 pounds, my stomach is never going to see the light of day again. So I'll just put on my lovely Land's End swimsuit and enjoy playing on the beach with my kids.

But that's not what the question was. It is going to be hard to stay on track. My mom is a wonderful cook but doesn't have low cal repetoire. She is old school Southern. With my sister there, hopefully we can help steer the meals toward the leaner side. Grilling is going to be the way to go, I think. I don't really have a plan yet but I'm working on it. I may have to volunteer to do the grocery shopping (ugh, I HATE grocery shopping) in order to have the right kind of foods on hand. 

I will definitely be going on a few runs while I am there. With so many babysitters on hand, I have no excuses not to work out. My sister is a runner too, so I'm hoping we can go on some bonding runs together. She lives in California so we don't see each other very much. 

Whether, I stay on course or fall off miserably, it is going to be a great, relaxing vacation and I can't wait.

See you next week. 

Potty Training Success

Last fall, my then 21 month old daughter sat on the potty and peed. A few days later she did it again. And again a few days later. I was getting smug. My little prodigy was going to be using the potty by the time she was 2. What a wonderful mother I am.

And then she didn't pee on it anymore. Oh, she sat on the potty. Played on the potty. Sang songs on the potty. But she didn't pee in it.

Until now!! 8 months later!!!

Last Wednesday, as part of his "exhaust the children" summer program, he took them to the library for Wiggle, Giggle Story time and to pick out a few books. He brought this book home

It's the story of Ashley, a little girl learning to use the potty. I don't think there is anything more special about this book than a lot of other potty books but for some reason it spoke to Caroline. She wanted to read it over and over. That is the case with a lot of books though.

On Thursday morning we were reading it and Caroline announced, "I have to pee pee on the potty" and then she did.

Conquered!

On Friday morning, I got a call from my husband informing me that she had independently taken herself to the potty and used it. She walked out, announced what she had done and demanded 3 gummies (the reward for potty pees. yes, we bribe). And that was that. She has peed and pooped on the potty during waking hours every since.

Oh she still wears diapers at naps and at night, though she does wake up dry sometimes. And she wants nothing to do with the big toilet. But I know that we are at the place where there will be no going back. There may be accidents. There may be resistance sometime. But we're done with full time diapers on this girl.

I wish I could pat myself on the back for my great PTing skills or that I could tell you there was a trick but really, we just kinda dumbed into it. When they're ready they're ready and all that.

Lest I get too happy about it, this morning Landry peed all over the bed, the changing table and my husband as a reminder that I still have many days ahead of me dealing with the excrement of small humans.