In the beginning...

1/29/2010

I have been reading a blog written by a friend I used to teach with in Colorado, and daily facebook entries logged by a friend in Wright. Those two are inspiring and I started exercising today! :) I've been working on the eating right thing, though I think it's time to start journaling, but I hadn't exercised at all since before I had pneumonia...okay let's be truthful here, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before I had pneumonia. Anyway, I wanted to share :).

The hardest think about blogging so far has been thinking of a title for my blog! In fact, I had so many ideas running through my head that I just wanted to start WRITING down, that I opened up a word processor document and figured the blog could wait till I felt inspired enough to come up with a title ;).

I guess one of the first things is that I have a complete and total lack of energy at any given time. I just feel drained, wiped out, exhausted, TIRED, like I can’t do anything. I get sick easily, more easily than I have ever in my life. I was laid out in the hospital with pneumonia for four days! Four days! The most exercise I have gotten in the past six months was probably my 3 laps around the hospital floor. That is sad. Very, very sad.

To tell the truth, I haven’t even the foggiest idea what I weigh. I know that the last time I was at the doctor’s office the scale jumped way, way past 250 lbs., but I couldn’t give an exact figure. I don’t even own a scale….but if I wait and let perfectionism insist that I have to have a scale and workout wear, and this and that and the other, then my very SHEness (Sidetracked Home Executives, see flylady.net) will keep me from ever beginning. Babysteps, my friend. Babysteps.

So, here we go! Off to Never Never Land…but it’s not going to be Never Never Land, because that’s not very encouraging! Off on our journey to the land of healthy eating, the land of fitting into an airline seat, a movie theater seat, a restaurant booth, A BATHROOM STALL - yeah, you know the ones I’m talking about…the tiny cubicle where when you walk in, you have to straddle the toilet in order to swing the door shut without crashing into your knees…and when you sit down, your left hip brushes the sanitary waste can bolted to the partition, and your right hip bangs the mega toilet paper dispenser screwed to the other. Even if your thin these can be challenging! Now pretend there are three of you trying to do this all bound up together in one body. Not quite as easy as you thought, is it? Of course any men who are actually reading this blog are thinking “What? What in the heck is she talking about?”

I love being a woman. I love having curves. Now if only I could find them again…



Daily Accountability:

Got up (that’s a great start!)
Searched and DVR’d exercise show of my choice
Showered (always makes me feel more awake)
Had quiet time A(VERY important start to the day, best way to get things rolling right)
Drank one bottle of water during quiet time and during exercise
Turned on the TV, found the DVR event I had just recorded, and spent 30 minutes keeping up with Denise Austin, the best I can…don’t laugh. Yes, it is from 1993. But she’s familiar, she’s encouraging (though sometimes annoying), and she encourages you to do your best and just “Keep Moving”…it’s okay if I can’t do a double back pirouette split jump kick, as long as I am doing something that gets my heart rate up and my body moving. And, she was right. I did feel better! I still feel better, and it’s 4 hours later!…okay, 5 hours later. No, I’m not intrinsically motivated to get up at 4 am. I get up with my husband in the mornings when he gets ready for work… or at least I try to. Lately I’ve been hauling myself out of bed just in time to kiss him goodbye and drag myself to the door to wave…now how loving is that? And I love my husband very much, it just seemed like an insurmountable effort to get myself out of bed!!!! Yesterday I went so far as to crawl back under the covers (for a quick nap) after he left for work. The next time I moved, the remote was next to my hand, my head was on the pillow, the covers were over my face, and one of my daycare kids was knocking on the door!!!!!! That’s laziness…and utter, absolute exhaustion. I didn’t get to shower until they went to preschool at noon and I had my own kids working on their independent projects. I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s time for a change.

Okay, back to the accountability piece. No weigh-in, because no scale. That’s okay. We’ll get to that. I sat down and had a cup of coffee with breakfast after exercising and before my kids came down (well, mostly). For breakfast: Leftover eggs - they were fried, but they were leftover, hence not grabbing the sugar rushing cereal because I want something NOW and don’t want to wait till it’s cooked…not great, not horrible. ¼ cup plain yogurt…I actually like it, use it in place of sour cream, and as an addition to a lot of recipes. If you’ve eaten at my house, there’s a very good chance you’ve had…*gasp*…yogurt. I’m even trying to be better about my coffee consumption. It’s funny, because I didn’t drink it at all for a long time. Or I would make a pot on Monday, have a cup each morning before I went to school, and dump it at the end of the week. Now I drink it all the time, all day long. It’s more than replaced my water consumption, which is NOT cool, and I drink it with stuff in it, so it’s doubly bad. I don’t know where the sweet tooth came from. You can ask my mom, but I don’t think I had much of one as a kid. I mean anymore than any other kid…it was something that developed as an adult. And, like many others who have problems with sugar consumption, I can’t eat one piece, or one bite, or one teaspoon and stop…It’s a conduit for more, more, more…So I am trying to drink one cup of coffee, without sugar. Milk okay, but NO SUGAR. If I absolutely have to believe that it is sweet, I use one tsp. of honey…measured, not just poured. I’m hoping to taper that down as well, but they do say 1 tsp. of local honey a day is good for allergies… and leftover fruit salad. I found cantaloupe on sale for 44 cents a pound last week, which is pretty darn great for this time of year, at least in Wyoming, and blueberries for 99 cents (they are usually 4$!), so I threw them together with some apples and our last banana for fruit salad last night. Yum J. I do serve fresh produce, green leafy salads, fruit, veggies, whenever I can, but, not making excuses, it is sometimes difficult to A. buy enough produce to last until the next trip to town, and B. not buy so much produce in my effort to make it stretch, that it goes bad before I can go back to town…

One bottle water
Thyroid
Iron
Multi Vitamin
Fiber

Breakfast
Coffee, 1 tsp. honey, milk
½ cup fruit salad
¼ cup plain yogurt
2 eggs

Snack
3 2 1 0 cubes of cantaloupe (kids ate the rest all of it)
1 string cheese
1 bite of egg (kids got the rest J)
1 bottle of water

And I actually wasn’t hungry anymore!

I think we’ll have something with lean hamburger for lunch since I still have 20 pounds in the fridge that need to be repackaged and frozen. It was 99 cents a pound at Safeway, and when you have a family of 6, you don’t pass up deals like that!

Oh yes, the thyroid. I have been on Armour, which is a natural thyroid (as opposed to Synthroid, which is man-made. Last year Armour became very difficult to find. At this time, no pharmacy in town has it, in any dosage. The compounding specialists are able to make a thyroid that is an approximation, but I don’t think it’s doing the job. The total exhaustion and lack of energy I have felt for the past couple of weeks, the extra clumps of hair falling out in the shower, are things that point me towards that conclusion. I will have to make an appointment for my yearly physical pretty soon anyway, so that’s definitely something I need to remember to talk about with my doctor!

And yes, it has occurred to me that my obsession with food, my gluttony, doesn’t make me a very good role model for my children, or a very good emissary for Christ, so there are two more very important reasons to “get ‘er done”!


From the Armour Thyroid homepage:
Updated Statement from Forest Laboratories Re: Availability of Armour Thyroid:
Forest Laboratories understands how frustrating the back order situation of Armour Thyroid has been for patients, and we apologize for the supply interruption.
A supply of powdered Thyroid gland, the active ingredient of Armour Thyroid, has been made available to Forest by its supplier. Forest has produced and shipped a limited supply of 1 grain, also known as 60 mg.
We understand that this limited distribution will not meet the current anticipated demand for the product, and we continue to work diligently to meet demand.
Although Forest is addressing the backlog of Armour Thyroid as quickly as possible, we are not prepared at this time to give a definitive date by which the product will be fully restocked. Please check for future updates on the availability of Armour Thyroid through the Forest product availability toll-free hotline at (866) 927-3260.
In the meantime, we encourage patients to speak with their physician regarding appropriate treatment for their condition.


Lunch: 1/2 cup leftover homemade egg salad (mostly egg, a little mayonnaise and a little mustard, and seasoning), 2 cubes of cheese - then I could only eat half...
apple
bottle of water