Yep, we’re going to try this one more time…
As much fun as it was to throw caution to the wind on our cruise and show no qualms about eating pizza and brownies at 1:00am before bed, now that we’re back on solid ground and my sea legs (and “vacation brain”) have had a chance to dissipate, I suppose it’s time to get back on the wagon with the whole weight loss thing one more time. Frankly, I kinda gave up about a month ago, and even before then I haven’t had a good, solid month of regular workouts since the springtime, but ultimately as the holidays and thereafter New Years approaches, well, let’s just say I’d like to at least have some progress on this one when we ring in 2010 in a short while.
So for starters, this week I’m focusing primarily on counting calories. I know that I tend to eat larger portions than I should, primarily because I’ve actually been gaining weight lately, so I’m tracking everything on SparkPeople now again and I know that it will help put things back into perspective. Sure, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to stop and do the math before eating a meal, not to mention taking the time to enter everything into the website either before or after, but all in the same I can still vouch that back in the day when I actually was making progress with my weight loss, counting calories made all the difference because it really helped to not only quantify my workouts, but also reinforce them by showing how easily a 30-minute workout could go to waste by binging on potato chips afterwards!
I still need to work on some various menus that I can eat for my different meals to take out the guesswork and help curb that last-minute desire for fast food that I fight when I don’t have everything already planned out – I think this helps a lot, too, because otherwise I find that it gets really easy to get wrapped up in what sounds good and forget that I’ve got a target to stay under by the end of the day. I also need to work at incorporating more fruits and veggies, and less sodium into what I’m eating, however just for this week, I think just getting back into the groove of tracking everything and also doing my best to stick more or less to my calorie limit are enough challenges for one week…
…which is a good thing because next week I want to start going to the gym again and boy, I can already tell that that’s going to kick my ass something fierce! I tried going for my 5-mile loop around our subdivision over the weekend and didn’t realize just how quickly the slacking can build up … I only made it about halfway before I had to call it quits that time, which kinda sucked. If there’s one thing that I’m definitely not looking forward to, it’s that two or three week period of getting used to exercising again where you have to re-teach yourself that exercise is for your own good and you will feel better when all is said and done! Up until then, it’s all battling procrastination and sore muscles, but that’s a blog post for another day. J