One forty WHAT WHAT!

Woot!  Weigh in day today, with some supremely happy results!  I got on the scale and recited the day's mantra: "onefortytwoonefortytwoonefortytwoonefortytwo" when I had the sudden thought: Wait a minute, it could be even BETTER than one forty two.  It could be like, like, one forty one.  Woah."  And I looked down and ya know what I saw? Awesome, that's what. 141.8.  I mean, it's not reality tv numbers or anything, but it's the first time all month I've managed to escape the 144-148 curse, and it gives me happy dreams of getting back down into the 130s soon.

May I say something?  When diets don't seem to work, they're the worst things to have ever been invented ever.  But when they DO work,  wow.  Makes you feel like a super hero or a magician or something.

That's about it for today.  Oh yeah, and we soared past 1000 pageviews last night.  Thanks for making this geeky social reject feel all popular and interesting and stuff.  That should really count as a public service or something.

Happy almost weekend my friends!

Excite Nite!

Tomorrow morning is weigh in day, and I have been a very good girl this week, and am waiting with bated breath to receive my reward.

Today has got to be day 9 of Diet, and it has been going difficult-ly.  Crap, which reminds me, I don't think I did my crunches today.  Okay, give me a sec...  Done.  Yuck, that was unpleasant.  40 crunches every day this week.  The goal is to push it up to 200 (100 regular, 100 reverse) crunches every day so that my abdominals may some day achieve peak awesomeness and send out a magical glow and sing the songs of angels any time they are viewed by the masses.  Which they will be.  All the dang time.  I might just cut all of my shirts off at the rib cage.

Anyway, day 9 of Diet.  Yes.  So far I can report that my "low" weights haven't been exceptionally low, but my "high" weights haven't been quite as terrifying.  My body and I have an interesting relationship, wherein it makes me prove my commitment to any diet before it shows me actual results from this diet.  This fact has killed me 1-2 weeks into a diet more times than I care to think about.  Because I have this crazy thing about me where I don't like depriving myself and seeing zero results for it.

But tonight showed me a bright light, a peak and a hope at some real good news tomorrow.  That light?  This mornings first thing nakers weigh in was 145.6 (and yes, I was mighty piqued at that).  Tonight's weigh in, post food, NOT nakers, was 144.6.  I think I've finally proven something to my body.  I think it may have finally relented.  Here we go, yo.

ALSO exciting about tonight:  Right before I started this post, my blog had 998 views for the month.  Which means, that for the first time in EVER, it looks like my blog will have be read over 1000 times in one month alone.  That's weird.  You guys are weird.

Anyway, it's been an outrageously long day, and I feel like it might almost be time for some relaxing.  And crocheting.  And maybe addressing the soft crying sound that's just begun in the other room. Arg.

Happy night y'all, Will be checking in tomorrow to show off what an amazingly low weight I've achieved!!  ::Desperately searching for something wood to knock on::

Diet Day Four... The Long Dark of Diet.

Today is day 4 of Diet.  Hunger, headaches, uncontrollable rage, all the symptoms are there.  Diet is mean.  But also there? The first baby signs of success I've seen since November.  So that's encouraging.  My lowest Then weight was around 136.  My highest January weight got up to 148.  Ouch.  And yuck.  12 pounds in 2 months is not an okay thing, I'll definitely have to learn how to be more responsible next holiday season.

Yesterday's official week weigh in was back down to 144, and today slipped a bit lower, 143.6.  Which means I have a MERE 16.6 pounds to go by May 23rd!  Teens pounds feel much easier to manage than twenties pounds.

And I gotta say, despite the occasions where I feel like I need to scream and die because depriving oneself something one wants is difficult, I'm feeling pretty good.  I'm feeling smaller, which is probably more psychological than actual, and healthier, which I believe is probably true.  Over Christmas and beyond I was starting to feel excessively muffin-toppish, and had begun avoiding all my hot new clothes and moving back instead to my older, larger, grungier garb.  Yuck.

So this week has been good, but today is a new trial.  I'm tired.  I have paperwork to finish and I'm still stressed about work and these things usually whisper in my ear that it's time to eat junk food.  And I've been known to appreciate that suggestion.  On top of this, there's a slight chance that today or tomorrow may have a date in it, and may have a restaurant in it, and that speaks of more danger.  I know it's not going to ruin my diet to have one bad meal, but if I don't figure out how to have a mostly-successful weekend, I'm going to spend the rest of my life re gaining and losing the same 5 pounds.  Which, by the way, GREAT way to do weight maintenance, TERRIBLE way to do weight loss.

Well the baby's napping and the toddler is resting, which means it's time for me to get to work.  Happy Friday, wish me luck for surviving this weekend!

Family Fat

How many times can I claim to be back on the wagon?  Is it seventy times seven?  Or was that in reference to something else?

Whatever the case, here's my 490th try again, necessitating your seventy times seventh forgiveness of me.  We spent the weekend with my husband's family, celebrating the life and mourning the loss of his fourth and final grandparent.  It's been a rough year for this family, as my husband's parents have lost 3 of their own parents in the past 2 months alone.  But despite the sad circumstances, this remains one of the most entertaining groups of people I know.  And if I may say so, maybe the most inappropriate group of people I know.  Larry.  You know what you did*.

So yes.  Enjoyable time with family.  And a couple of things learned:
1) My kids don't sleep in strange places.

2) My kids don't poo in strange places.

3) And most appropriate here: Mourning families serve large doses of fattening food.  And I eat them.

So I'm not doing so hot after this weekend, but today has been a SHANE IS EATING FOOD THAT I WANT AND CANNOT HAVE AND MY BRAIN IS EXPLODING better day, filled with lots of exercise and healthier food.  I may even have under-ate for the day, but I feel like one good jump start day for my diet will help get me on the right track.

Because I want to be skinny, dang it.  Also, I have hiccups, dang it.  Seriously? The hiccups?  Not cool, hiccups.

Anyway, if these hiccups don't kill me first, I'm going to look super sexy and lose 20 pounds or more and wear nothing but tiny super hot bikinis all summer.  Like, to work and out to dinner and stuff.  Because if you've got it, you wear tiny super hot bikinis all summer long, right?

Night y'all.  Time for the husband and I to retire to the bourdoir for some Sudoku and Homer's Odyssey, which is my round about way of letting you know that my marriage is nerdier than yours.

Goodnight again!

*Sorry for attacking you unprovoked, Larry, but I'm assuming you're not reading this.  And if you are, HA.  Called you out.

Hard Cold Realities

Last night I asked my husband if there was more pizza left in the fridge.  He said that yes there was, 3 whole pieces, in fact.  I said YES, and he said ...aren't you supposed to be on a diet?  And I said something that I should not have said then and am not going to repeat here, and he said, hey I'm just saying and I said fine, then I guess you don't love me, and I went home and I did Zumba and did not eat the pizza, or anything else, for dinner.  It was maybe my first real positive step this whole diet.

The other night, I weighed myself.  It was about 150.6.  Officially over 150.  Officially less than 5 pounds away from overweight.  Officially fat.  Officially terrifying.  Apparently it would be CRAZY easy for me to go from the 140s to the 150s, 160s, and 170s again.  So many times in my life before I've been discouraged by what the scale said, and instead of making better life decisions, I just hid from the scale, hoping that it would magically change its mind about my weight in a few weeks or months.  Speaking from significant experience, this is the world's worst way ever to lose weight.

This time though, no hiding.  I have not been doing well, I have not been making good decisions.  I don't feel good in my clothes, and apparently my belly measurement is "concerning".

So now I've got two Zumba (holy crap, that Zumba) days under my belt, a little extra sleep last night, loads of days worth of crunches, and the very baby beginnings of good diet choices under my belt.  It's all terribly exciting, I know.

Today I weighed 145.6.  ::sigh::

Next week will be better. Promises.

Quitters never...

I started my day at 6, left the house at 7, and I won't be home until 9.

My son is teething and getting himself into "I want to wake up and be held and fed and loved every 3 hours almost every night, and freaking forget getting me to take a decent nap during the day" cycles.

I am so tired I want to cry.  And fall down.  And maybe vomit a little. And quit.

IQUITIQUITIQUITIQUITIQUIT.

I can't quit.  I have responsibilities and I am a wife and a mother and we need my income for to live.  But sometimes it feels nice to scream the words into my head and just pretend. "GUESS WHAT WORLD?  IQUITIQUIT!"

Exhaustion is, at least as far as I am concerned, the absolute greatest diet-murderer ever.  It kills my resolve to diet, and makes me want to eat every sweet thing and carb in the house "for energy".  And forget exercise.  It feels like exercise just to get out of bed.  Zumba is starting to gather dust.

Just the same, I'm proud of a couple parts of my life:
1) I'm doing crunches every day.  Meaning, as soon as I dig down past all the belly chub, I'm prepared to find the sexy six pack I'm currently building deep down under there.

2) I'm reading my Bible every day.  This is my 6th time through, and I'm doing a pretty dang good job (read: better than normal for yours truly) of reading daily.  This year, I intend to finish fast, so I'm trying to read 2 days worth every day.

3) I am working a ton.  My productivity is impressive, and I'm putting my nose to the grindstone and GETTING POO DONE.  It stresses me out, but I'm doing it and it's getting done.

Those are it.  I feel like I'm on survival mode, and being able to say these things about myself feels good, even though I weigh about a million pounds and feel I've been rising more days than falling.  I know one day I won't be quite so tired, or I'll learn better coping skills, and I'll lose weight again.

But for today, I managed not to quit.  I managed to get a few things done.  Cheers to me.

Happy Hump Day, Y'all.  Hope yours is productive and special and all kinds of awesome sauce!

It's Zumba Time!

Weigh in day today says I'm at 144.  Which is not great because it wasn't so long ago (though it was a number of cheeseburgers ago) that I weighed 136, but is okay because last weekend I eeked my way up to 148.  I feel like I'm finally getting back on board for realskies, and I'm ready to undo all the damage I've done, plus get super extra sexy looking for the summer.

Except that at for this PARTICULAR moment, I may or may not be sitting next to left over baking chips and eating semi-sweet chocolate to my hearts content.

So maybe then I'm not quite ready after all. Maybe.

I started Zumba today, which was amazingly fun and made me feel amazingly ridiculous.  I learned that you don't have to be a good dancer to get good scores, you just have to be exceptionally wiggly.  Because during moves that involved no more than some basic neck stretching, moves at which I was spot-freaking-on thankyouverymuch, they thought my dancing was atrocious.  On the other hand, during dances where I got distracted and had to chase away my 3-year-old exercise saboteur, they thought my spastic "shooing" motions were pretty exceptional, dance-wise.  In other words, unless my parenting technique has suddenly become remarkably similar to the Samba, I'm afraid the hip-strapped Wiimote is not the world's most sensitive and responsive setup.

But dang if it isn't fun.

So it turns out I don't look attractive when I'm trying to dance, which sheds a little light on all those years of teenaged rejection, but I digress.  It's been a long time since I've been concerned about my attractiveness while dancing, seeing as I have been in love with only one person in my life and that person for almost 10 years and that person does not like to dance.  Which makes me think of THIS.  I'm not sure why, except that it's one of my favorite things on the whole internets and I may just turn this blog exclusively into links to funnier people doing funnier things.

Next week I think I'm going to measure myself around my belly button to see if the YOU On A Diet people would call me Obese.  I'm a little nervous because I think that yes they would.  First though, I'll have to find my tape measure which I keep hiding in very mysterious places because my daughter thinks it's a baby-brother lasso and she is becoming an increasingly good shot.

In the meantime, happy Thursday folks.  Go to bed, you've got work in the morning. Ooooh Yeeeaaaah.

Endorphin Woo

Yesterday I had my second work out of the new year (shuddup I'm working my way into it) and it was wicked freaking sweet.  I'm not sure if you could call it an official Endorphin Woo, but I can tell you that both during and immediately following, I felt absolutely alive in a way that I forgot was possible. It was GREAT.  

Tomorrow starts Zumba and I'm filled with emotions on the issue. Nervous and excited about how exhausted and stupid I get to look now. Zumba for the Wii comes with a Wii controller holster to wear on your hips, which makes me feel like a sexy-dancing cowboy, which is the EXACT WAY I wanted to feel while working out and leaves me feeling super hopeful for how awesome this is all going to be. Because I love you all so much, I fully intend to share the love by sharing some pictures. You're welcome in advance.

Husband just exclaimed an offended sounding "OHmyGOSH".  I looked over and he stared at me for a minute before letting me know the reason. "I'm pretty sure the cat just jumped on me, farted, then ran away".

Now, don't get me wrong, we love our feline pet, but without question, cats are absolutely the dicks of the animal kingdom.  If you didn't have enough proof before, well now you do.

Dear Diary...

A conversation with a friend this weekend ended in a question that I never anticipated would be asked of me.  Conversely, my behavior (or lack there of) seemed to have similarly startled the asker.

"Wait... you don't track your period on your phone?!?"

That's right, folks, there's an app for that.  And I, and it seems only I, do not have it.  Or, did not have it.  Because now I do have it.

Actually, what I said above (about there being an app for that) is a bit of an understatement.  There are closer to 327 apps for that.  I did a bit of researched and then chose a strongly reviewed application called Period Diary.  Which makes me feel like I'm 12 years old again, lying on my stomach stretched out on a floral quilted bed, chewing on the end of one of my braids while I "dear diary" about boys and, of course, my first visit from Aunt Flo.

When you open the app, the homepage layout is a pale pink flower.  The middle of this flower counts down from your last period to your next.  You get to log your symptoms, your moods, your ovulation cycles, and write little notes to your periods whenever such a whim might seize you.

Previous to this, I was amazed when my phone searched the internet, kept my grocery list, and masqueraded as a Zippo lighter, but being my personal period diary has quickly risen to the top of the list of the Awesome Activities of the iPhone.  Of course I wouldn't buy the full version yet.  I'm holding out till 2.0, which will come with it's own basal thermometer and pregnancy test attachments.

Anyway, I'm off to go think of sweet nothings to speak to my period when she decides to arrive, somewhere between 3 days ago and a week from now.  I'm not exactly sure as to her expected date, because as  I've already discussed, I have as of yet not been appropriately tracking her visits.  So long friends, say hi to all of your periods for me!

Oh, and P.S.- Did you read those petals?  Did you see the one labeled "Forum"?  Did you realize this means that you can chat with other period havers about YOUR period on the internets??  I've been having periods almost every month since I was 12, and I have never ONCE chatted about them on the internets! Which begs one question and one statement. First, WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!?  Second, I have a backlog of something like 315 periods to chat about, so I think I best be getting to it.

Happy chatting friends, may all your cycles be regular, and your symptoms log include impressively few zits, bottles of blue constipation juice, and angry-monkey faces.

I forgot.

May I say something mildly offensive here? Cuz holy crap.

Yeah. Holy crap.  It seems that after all of the dieting and weight losing I did in 2012, the laziness and general slackery of the last couple of months looms larger in my mind.  Starting the new year I actually thought I was excited to get back to healthy eating and disciplined living.

Well that was a joke.  Because it turns out what I really want to do is eat my weight in breadsticks and cookie dough.

Over the holidays the occasional friend or family member complimented my new, smaller-than-its-been-in-years physique.  And I said thanks, but I almost felt like I shouldn't.  I honestly started to feel like I didn't deserve any congratulations, because I hadn't "earned" the weight loss.  While being a bit thinner and eating whatever I dang well pleased over the holidays, I actual forgot HOW HARD it was to lose the weight in the first place.  It was this rose colored, almost mystical time in my memory, the period of 6 months of diet and exercise was remembered by the excitement of smaller numbers and progress pictures than by the two thousand times each day I had to resist temptation, by all the nights I went to bed with a faintly growling stomach, or by all the crankiness caused by a disturbing lack of tasty foods.

I remember now.  I remember it ALL now.

I'm working my way up to my diet, dipping my toe in and testing the water and oh lordy it burns us.  My husband does pushups every morning, he started at 10 and every week or two he ads 5 more.  Now he's at around 60.  I've decided to do the same with crunches, so that I can get in the habit of "sexy stomach".  I'm also going to start some Zumba when it shows up at my doorstep next week.  I hope it's fun.  It looks like fun.

And then there's the food.  I'm eating things like yogurt and fiber cereal (following the exuberant recommendations of my in-laws) and working toward eating real, healthy food at mealtimes instead of snacking on chips and Christmas candy all day.  At least of course, that's the idea.  We'll see how this works out.

Today's goal:  Do whatever it takes, up to and including cutting off my foot, to be back down to 142 by next week Thursday.

Happy New Years Resolving, Y'all!