Cara's Weightloss Journal

Well, I didn’t go WWTGs this morning. I went to bed around 11 last night and when 5:30 came around this morning, I was dog tired. I tried to get some energy going, but nothing was doing. I’ve done pretty good the rest of the week, though, and tomorrow I’m so looking forward to my bike ride. I’ve already got the protein/power bar ready to go. Daughter is going to go with me tomorrow. She has no idea what she’s in for. I got her a bar, too, so she can keep up. I’m still trying to make it to 10 miles. Tuesday was 9.25. If I left maybe 15 minutes earlier, I’m sure I’d have time to do the full 10 miles.

Wouldn’t that be awesome???!!!

I can’t wait. I want to go to bed early so I can get up early and try it.

I’ve been weighing myself every morning and I’m going down. I think I might be down a pound. Hope it’ll stay off. I really think it’s this extra exercise that’s making the difference. And I’ve been going over my original goals for this Challenge and making sure I’m sticking to them.

Have you guys written out any goals? If you have, I’d love to see them.

I remember one of our WW classes, the leader passed out a “Story Boarding” flier to each of us and told us to pick a goal that we wanted to reach and it didn’t have to be weight related and then figure out the steps it would take us to get there and to write each step in a different box on the flier until the boxes pointed to the final goal. Kind of like a cartoon where you have the different cells or frames of the story that all leads to the punch line or the last box in the story. And I remember thinking how lame it all was. I thought, I know what my goal is and I know what I have to do to get there—quit stuffing my face! But you know, what I did with stating my goals in my original post about the Challenge is essentially doing the same thing. But it was more than that for me. It was actually being able to visualize what I would actually do to accomplish such a rigorous goal. And it really help me take ahold of this challenge and take it seriously.

I just took a break to read over everyone’s blogs and we have quite a menagerie of Challenge participants. Let’s keep each other motivated! We’re gonna do this together!

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Challenge Update! – Week Two (update)
“18 Pounds in 18 Weeks“

Bento Box Diet – Week 2 loss: Lost 2.5 pounds. Way to go!!
Katschi – Week 2 loss: Lost 1.6 pounds. Woo Hoo!!
MaryFran – Week 2 loss: zero She’s holding the scale at bay for now but big losses are on the way.
Karyn – Week 2 loss: no report. (please send your blog address to carashow at gmail dot com or leave it in your comment. Not sure when her WI day is or how she’s doing.)
Donna – Week 2 loss: Lost 3.6 – Way to go, Donna!!!
Spunkysuzi – Week 2 loss: Lost .6 of a pound. (sorry suzi)
Cathy – Week 2 loss: zero, she’s just starting
Koala – I somehow missed adding Koala to my list of challengers. I apologize, Koala. Let me know how you’re doing and I’ll update you on the list here tomorrow.
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Hello Everyone!!!

I’m back!!!

So sorry for the long time I’ve been gone. So much has been going on. I’ll bet you thought, well, there goes another blogger come and go!

Not me!

I’m a die-hard blogger… life just got in the way.

Since I’ve been off-blog, so much has happened and I’m so sorry that I didn’t get a chance to blog any of it. I’ll try and reconstruct some of it, but my memory always forgets the juicy details so I’m sure it won’t be quite the same.

One big thing that happened is that today I hit my 80 pounds!!!

It’s been just a little over a year. We started WW on May 12th of last year. So it’s been a year and two weeks and I’ve lost 80 pounds. Can you believe that???!!! I still can’t believe it!

I just kept saying over and over today “I can’t believe I’ve lost 80 pounds.”

It sounds like so much weight!

My daughter weighed herself this morning and she said she weighs 108 pounds. I’ve lost almost as much as my daughter weighs!!! WOW!

I’ve been stuck between 75 pounds and 80 pounds for the last two months. Since the beginning of April.

I have to say that I’ve really tried to lose it, too. I haven’t slacked off or cheated. I haven’t been exercising like I wanted to. But I have been exercising some. But this past week, I only walked two mornings and didn’t run any and still lost a whole pound. So I don’t know if it’s really anything I’ve done or not done to take so long to lose 5 pounds. I think it’s just my body taking a break.

Who knows if my body is back from it’s break or not but at least I can say I’ve hit 80 pounds! I’ll still keep at it and keep trying. That’s the best I can do. I can’t get discouraged. I can’t give up. I still have 45 more pounds to go to goal. That could realistically take me another year to do. If things go like they did these past two months, it might even be a year and a half or two years before I can get down to goal.

But I will not give up. I will not falter. I’m in this for the long haul. I will hit goal. And once I hit it, I will stay at goal. For the rest of my life!

Well, I’m back and I’ll be back tomorrow to blog again. I’m so glad to be back. I really missed blogging. I miss the interaction and the accountability. I miss reading all of your stories.

Now I have to get caught up on your lives.

Hi Guys,

I hope you enjoyed before when my mom guest blogged on here. She’s got some amazing stories about her weight loss. So I hope you don’t mind me sharing them here. Enjoy…

A Month is a Month is a Month

During the month of March, I was getting ready for a cruise. This was my second cruise and believe you me I was not looking forward to it. This, of course, must be explained, but briefly. My first cruise was the cruise from Hades. We hit a horrible storm and had 40 foot swells and I was in bed sick for 3 days. We couldn’t even get into one port because of the roughness. I swore I’d never go on another one. But, I let a friend talk me into it and here I was again.

I don’t really know what happened the two weeks before the cruise but I had stayed on my diet and was really good and gained 5 pounds the first week and gained 2.5 pounds the second week. I was so disgusted that I thought of quitting but having lost 50 pounds already I was thinking to myself that I’d gone so far already that I didn’t want to let my successes go to waste, so I let my thinking get back on track.

Well… I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise or not but if you don’t like to eat, get drunk or gamble there isn’t much else to offer you while on board. I don’t like to gamble and drink only the occasional cocktail, usually a grasshopper after dinner when in a nice restaurant, so guess what that left…food! Wow, what wonderful food there is! And at any time of day or night. And it’s included in your fare, it doesn’t cost you anything extra. Since I had gained the two weeks before the cruise I had decided that I’d enjoy myself during the cruise (food wise) and get back to basics when I got home. I didn’t want to go hog wild (and didn’t) but I was going to enjoy myself in the only way that I could.

To begin with for dinner you can order as much of an item as you want so before every meal I ordered two shrimp cocktails. In this way I was being good since shrimp are low in points and it helped fill me up somewhat. I hadn’t had pasta in a while and the first night I ordered fettuccine alfredo. Wow, it was delicious. To my horror I could only eat one third of it and was full (well almost, I was saving some room for desert). By the fourth day, and after prime rib and beef Wellington and pizza and French fries and and and (it was a seven day cruise) I was missing my half can of soup and my half sandwich. Yeah, missing my diet! I couldn’t believe it! Missing the right food! What a wonderful thing for me! At that point I was aware that I have finally gotten my head on straight and will never be obese again. What a wonderful feeling it was and is.

When I returned home I had gained one more pound and I got back on it with a vengeance and I lost 4.5 pounds the first week. I didn’t even loose that much my first week on this thing. I felt great. And continue to feel great. I looked back at my weight chart and realized that I had lost a month because I am back to were I was 4 weeks ago. But, what the hey. Maybe your body and mind need a little break once in a while. In the past about once or twice a month I’d indulge in something that was fattening just to keep me on track the rest of the time and not crave the wrong stuff. I am of the mind set now that I need a week of indulgence to get me back in the right frame of mind. I’ve got 50 more pounds to go and right now I am ready to “get-r-done”. I’m not saying that everyone should do what I did. Some of you may do this and never get back on track, and that would be a bad thing. But if you are really committed to this weight loss regiment this might be the way to get yourself motivated again. It’s a thought.

Thank you Cara for getting me motivated in the first place on this long journey to a healthier me. Your starting WW got me to thinking about myself and how awful I looked when we took pictures of each other in Florida the winter of 2007. If it weren’t for you I’d still be a big ole fat slob. I love you very much. Guess we could say we inspire each other. How wonderful for a mother and daughter to be so harmonious.

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It’s me again (Cara). Could I ask everyone to leave a comment for my mom. I’m trying to encourage her to start her own blog. If nothing else, then just to keep a journal of her weight loss. But maybe if we can leave her some comments, she’ll think about starting one of her own. She thinks she doesn’t have anything to say on a blog. :)

I have invited my first guest blogger to blog on my behalf on my blog. (Okay, I think I said “blog” once too many times in that sentence.)

My mother.

She’s been losing weight on WW as well. Though we live 15 hours apart, we are losing weight together. She has it much harder than me, though. She’s doing it all alone. I have my husband, daughter, and close friends all around me to help me through the tough days. She’s all alone on her mountain that she only leaves one day a week for supplies. I am so proud of her for sticking with it. I know I could never have lost a pound if I were in her shoes. She’s my hero in more ways than one.

So, here is her blog…

Journey From Obesity to Health

What a journey this is! It is really hard being addicted to food. And that’s exactly what I have, an addiction. Food is in my every waking thought and sometimes in my sleeping thoughts.

I’ve heard it said (by non-food-addict persons) to just avoid it and it will be alright. Well, how do you avoid food? It is all around us, it is the sustenance of life. How do you avoid something that is necessary for life? Obviously you can’t. When you get up in the morning you start with breakfast, then comes lunch and then supper. When you open a magazine you find ads for food. When you turn on the television, one out of every three commercials is about food. When you drive somewhere you pass fast food places or restaurants. You can’t even fill your car up with fuel anymore because when you pay for the fuel you are accosted by food when you hit the door. So you tell me, how can you avoid food?

I have been obese in the past and gone down to a healthy weight only to return to obesity (several times) as have most obese persons. I am on that journey again and this time (at 61 years young) it is harder than ever. I am retired and therefore not as active or distracted as I was on my previous journeys. All I think about all day long is food. When is my next meal? What can I eat that will taste good? What can I eat that will satisfy? What can I eat and still loose weight?

What about advice from the “weight loss experts?” I haven’t heard any that have helped yet. One of the funny ones is to eat things that you like but in smaller portions. Well, the things that I like are not good for you even in smaller portions. How do you eat gravy on your mashed potatoes in smaller portions? Even one tablespoon of gravy (the way I like to make it) is extremely fattening. And one tablespoon of gravy is a joke. Chicken is wonderful fried in deep fat with the skin on and nice and crusty. Baked or broiled chicken (boneless and skinless) just isn’t the same and doesn’t satisfy the way a good ole piece of fried chicken does. I am not a fish eater and rarely ate it during my obese days. I could tolerate it battered and fried with lots of tarter sauce, but that surely isn’t low-fat. Another tidbit of advice from those “weight loss experts” is to spice up your food so that it satisfies the taste buds. Oh, I love spicy food and do that often but it still doesn’t satisfy as much as a big glob of butter or sour cream would.

The only advice I can give is to look at your journey closely. If you are just starting, look at the way you were. Ask yourself, “Do I want to look like that and feel like that the rest of your life?” If your answer is no then you need to get a plan and if the answer is yes then you have just wasted time reading this. If you are already on this long journey, look back at the progress you have made. Ask yourself, “Do I want to continue or just give up and destroy all the progress I’ve already made?” Then look ahead. Look at what you see in your future. Will you turn the head of the opposite sex? (You sure wouldn’t in the old self.) Do you want to be able to climb stairs without huffing and puffing? Do you want to shop in the regular section of the department store? Those are the things that keep me going. I have lost 47 pounds and have approximately 50 more to go. I want to get there and that is the only thing that is keeping me on this horrible weight loss program. And yes they are all horrible in my eyes. I’ve tried dozens of them.

Support from friends and family help some but you have to dig deep within yourself to find the strength. You can do it but not for someone else just for yourself.

–Debbie

i was blog-surfing this evening and came across this blog… MiddleSister

her name is cara, too. that’s what caught my eye at first.

then reading her first post i was hooked.

she sounds so real and i can identify with alot of her WW frustrations. you should check her out if you have a minute.