Get Skinny Saturday: Week 2

The first week is over!

This was an incredibly stressful week for our family. Penny got very sick early in the week with some kind of bronchial infection. Thursday we ran out of propane on one of the coldest days of the year and had no heat source. Friday my grandmother died. I will share more about her here on the blog next week. As you can imagine, weight loss was not often the first thing on my mind, but I will share what I did.

This week I focused on making a few easy changes and one big change.

The easy changes:

• I drank water with every meal. I really cut back on all other kinds of liquid. There was a day when we all had upset tummies and I drank half a glass of soda, hoping it would help. I might have had a glass of orange juice once or twice, but mostly I just stuck with water. 

• I did at least 15-20 minutes of exercise 6 days this week.  Personally, I like short workout videos or DVDs because we don’t have a gym membership right now and I don’t love working out in front of other people anyway. It is hard to fit exercise in between the kids and work and the house and the husband and volunteer commitments and the kids’ activities. Sometimes it was just a 15 minute “walk a mile with me” You Tube video like this one and I did the whole thing while holding a crying baby. Something is better than nothing, which is what I was doing before. I did have to limit myself to one video a day. I shared last week that I get addicted to exercise very easily and it becomes unhealthy. Sometimes I would find myself thinking about doing another video instead of work that needed to be done or again after the kids were in bed, which is the only time I get alone with my husband. True, the weight might come off faster if I did several workouts every day, but I want to keep this about finding balance. I don’t want to be obsessively working out for a few weeks, then burning out and quitting.
• I did not snack very often between meals. Before, I had a bad habit of not eating breakfast and grabbing a handful of pretzels or goldfish crackers every few hours when I was giving the kids a snack.
• I started eating breakfast again. Just light, grab-and-go stuff like a banana or a granola bar.
• I didn’t put white sugar in anything.

The big change:

• I utilized the wheat grinder I have had sitting in the pantry for a few months and made whole wheat bread from scratch. REALLY from scratch, as in from wheat berries to bread. I shared the recipe here on Monday. I realize grinding your own wheat isn’t an option for everyone, but I LOVE carbs and I wanted to be sure to have a way to keep them in my diet without all of the sugars and other processed junk that is in store-bought breads.

Things I did NOT change:

• I didn’t give up anything. If I wanted an Oreo, I ate an Oreo. If I wanted bread, I ate bread. I tried to make sure at least 80% of what I ate was actual food that could be found in nature, but I’m not at all fond of the idea of strict diets where I “can’t” eat something. Or dieting at all, for that matter. That just makes me want to say “forget this!” very quickly. I did try to pick either bread or dessert each day. 
• I broke my own rule and weighed myself on Monday morning. At that time the scale said 178.2 pounds.
• I still ate out. We ate out a lot this week because of the circumstances. For what it’s worth, the new turkey chili at Panera Bread is REALLY good.

Other things I changed:

I set a goal weight. Not having something to work towards seemed kind of dumb. How would I know when I had reached my goal I I didn’t have one? The BMI chart (which I despise) says that since I am 5’3,” a healthy weight for me is between 105 and 140 pounds.

Let me just tell you right now that 105 ain’t happening, folks. I have breasts. Big ones. I haven’t seen anything close to that number since the fifth grade when puberty hit. So we’ll focus on the other end of the spectrum. My new goal weight is 140 pounds. If I get there and I still have gigantic knockers, I am going to consider breast reduction surgery because I have been having some chronic back pain for the past few years. (Don’t you dare try to tell me it’s only because I am in the wrong bra. I have been professionally fitted three times and I have the x-rays showing two reversed curves in my spine that say otherwise.)

Ok. Time to stop rambling and step on the scale.

Drum-roll please…….I started last week at 180.2 pounds and I am now…..

 178.6 pounds

1.6 pounds down

My personal goal is 1-2 pounds per week, so I am happy with that, especially considering all of the other things we had going on this week.

Next week I plan to increase the amount of time I spend on each workout, if possible, and eat out less.

Did you make any small changes this week?