Ready for Summer Update #7: Well, that was a surprise. A good one. And no, I'm still not on top of my game...

Tanita-san: 178.8
Last week: 179.8

Back down to where I was two weeks ago.

Waist: 34.75 (unchanged)

I had been as high as 182.2 this week . I though I'd show a 3 lb gain in this update.

(Why? Here's why: Lots of salty foods, more carbs than usual--a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon on Wednesday, and I hadn't had oatmeal in, sheesh, more than a year maybe? and beans 3x this week, black and navy and pinto/refried--as well as an increase in snacky stuff, like chocolate and gluten-free cookies).

Seriously, my food has been teetering on the verge of head-diving into the pit, teetering...teetering..

I have hardly been on the ball here.

I have had some of my controls in place--no binge, some exercise, moment when I had to say NO, NO hard when I almost called for delivery stuff out of laziness ,but then cooked the pasteured chicken breasts and made low-salt sauce.

But others waivered quite a bit( eg, no walking AT ALL, partly due to the loads of rainstorms, mostly cause I got really slothful and demotivated to do so. Sugar crept back in in chocolate and gf cookies) No gold star here.

Even my fluid intake was waffley--some days great, two days under desired amounts.

I am not proud of myself at all.

I am happy some good habits remained, enough in place not to send me totally into a tailspin of disaster. Good habits can only hold on so long before they fail if not reinforced.

This week, I plan to make a plan for reinforcement. Maybe tape it up to the kithen cupboard. Back to my 3 cups of water before meals. Back to focusing on less starch and curtail snacks. Back to my ONE diet-friendly dessert AFTER DINNER only. BACK TO WALKLING (even if I may have to do some radical rescheduling, since the rainy season seems to have come in and is keeping me in afternoons/early evening, when I normally walked). I'm not a morning person. AT ALL.So, it's either figure out how to MORNING-IZE my walk to do indoor cardio (hate that, really) with DVDs.

Stress is minimized a bit, but it's still simmering.

I've been praying. A LOT. I'd say I've prayed more the last week than in the two months prior. It's intensive. And I intend to keep that up. I've felt less frazzled emotionally doing so.

GOALS: Well, pretty much the original ones in the opening challenge post. It feels gargantuan to me in my state of mind (demotivated). Still...and again, I will be happy if I show no regain, but my head and heart want that 1/2 pound loss minimum.

I wish everyone a very happy holiday weekend. To all the mothers, God bless you. Be strong and courageous as you raise your young ones (or continue to advise and comfort your not-so-youngs ones) and have a lovely special day. My mother is in Heaven with the Lord, and I know she is waiting for us, like Moms always do, for the great homecoming.

Be well...

Day 3 of P4 of SoDDDY Challenge: Not Hungry, Feeling Calm, Eating on Plan, Gotta do the Walking, Still Really SORE! Ow, my abs! And a Peek at my Neglected "My Utmost for His Highest" Journal to remember that Slavery Sucks! Sooooo.... Does Food or Sloth Enslave You?

It's the third day. I am peaceful and calm, foodwise...so far. Nice. Yesterday, I was just a scosh over 1000 calories in a ratio of 53c/17f/30p. I liked this ratio. It left me feeling full (more protein) and didn't rack up the calories (less fat). (Had no appetite for my night snack, hence the lower number than the 1200 for the challenge.)

Breakfast: Ezekiel Toast/egg white/some chopped tomato and onions to make the egg whites interesting/milk-n-half-medium-banana-with-cinnamon smoothie/coffee/water/fiber supplement/cranberry supplement/Quercetin ~~~~  Calories:322

Snack: After walking, to be decided (prolly carrots and hummus or yogurt)

It's lovely not to feel food obsessed. Yesterday was calm. Today is calm. None of the nutty hunger like Monday evening's attack. Oh, Lord, let me stay this calm through til May 1 and beyond. Hear my prayer!

Speaking of Him and Prayer....I pulled out this journal I bought some years ago. Yes, dat's right, YEARS. I got it at the end of 1999 to document the Year 2000. It's a Christian inspirational type journal. Each page has a devotional taken from the Christian classic: MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST. You can read it FREE online. Same text that is in my journal.

I brought it out of the bottom drawer of my desk because one of the other things I need to get fit is my spiritual life. I've focused so much on other things in the last year, that this has taken a back seat, and that is NOT where God should be sitting in one's car. He should be inside me, choosing the direction and path. So, something else to work on besides food and fitness. And decluttering. And renovating. And moving. And becoming work-force ready again (after 2 decades out of the work force, which is scary as heck.)

So....I have never completed a journal within a year's span, ever. No diary, ever. This one is a little odd, in that instead of following the days--it's dated from Jan 1 on, one devotional per page with space for me to write my thoughts--I just date it from when I pick up my journal writing (very few entries, and I'm just starting APRIL's first day. April Fool's..hah!

 Inside I've put receipts from lunches and dinners out with hubby and sister and tickets from when we saw the Tutankhamun exhibit (woo, that was cool) and cards and other memorabilia. Even a piece of quality paper on which I wiped off some Ash Wednesday forehead ashes.

It's got lots of painful stuff, as my mom was a year and a half into her journey through excruciating illness, hundreds of hospital and doctor visits and death when I bought that thing. I was starting a dive into depression and rise in poundage.

A December 15, 2001 entry is where I started notating my weight in the white space above the devotional title. Almost 2 years since I bought the journal, but I was still in the January entries. I left a lot of blank pages in January. For January 31'st entry--this time 2002--I note I had lost 26.8 pounds at Weight Watchers, which brought me to 255.4 on their scale (so I was in the 280's prior to that, huh?) 

By 2003, I was regaining and was in the 260's. So I joined a gym. That was the year I built up some good muscle doing weight-lifting and exercises with a personal trainer for the first time. Negligible weight loss, but got nice and strong and just in time to lift my mom to and from a wheelchair when she got peripheral neuropathy. I wonder if God moved me to get that training to be ready. I never hurt my back or anything (and my mom weighed in the 180s when she was felled) cause I got STRONG. Stopped going to the gym by summer as she was getting worse and depression came knocking hard.

Slave Collar

August 25, 2003: 270 lbs. This is noted in the journal date of March 14 (I crossed that out and put in real date).  The entry  in the journal is titled OBEDIENCE (or YIELDING in the other translation that is available at the link I gave.) It quotes a verb from Romans:

"...you are that one's slaves whom you obey..."

And says this:

The first thing I must be willing to admit when I begin to examine what controls and dominates me is that I am the one responsible for having yielded myself to whatever it may be. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because somewhere in the past I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because at some point in my life I yielded myself to Him.

If you are fat/obese/overweight/supersized, and don't have some really rare medical condition to justify it, guess what? You and I, we are slaves to food, slaves to gluttony, slaves to our appetites, slaves to our stomachs. It's not easy to type that. Truth is like that.

It further says:

When you yield to something, you will soon realize the tremendous control it has over you. Even though you say, “Oh, I can give up that habit whenever I like,” you will know you can’t. You will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you willingly yielded to it. It is easy to sing, “He will break every fetter,” while at the same time living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. But yielding to Jesus will break every kind of slavery in any person’s life.

On May 25, 2004, the day my mom died, I hit my highest weight, which I recorded in the journal (on the journal date of March 15):  I was 299 lbs.

I'm not 299 today. See sidebar for my weight loss progress.

TODAY.....I don't plan to yield to food. TODAY. One day at a time. TODAY, I will not let it control me. I want to break this crappy, sinful, childish, selfish habit of letting food overtake me, of wanting to be ovetaken by the pleasure of food.

As a believer, I have never, obviously, fully relied on the power of The Risen One, cause I stayed fat for ages. Other sins in my life are similarly controlling me. I plan to break free from one of them at a time..one by one...and end up, on my deathbed, a woman who yielded in the proper way to The Good and conquered the Bad..the unfruitful or vicious habits.

You don't have to be a person of faith to admit you are a slave to food or bound by sloth. If you didn't do your exercise today, sloth has you, baby. If you overate, food is your master.

You don't have to acknowledge God as Master to master yourself. You do have to be YOUR OWN master and tell food who rules your world: You not it.

For a Christian, the answer is in yielding to the Spirit. If a sin has control over you--and that includes sloth and gluttony--then you are not sufficiently yielded. That's the ugly truth. Sin can get you sometimes, but if it's chronic, you're a slave to  it and not a yielded slave to God. The whole lotta fat folks in our churches says that we have focused so much on X sin or Y vice (be it sex or cussing or anger or envy or materialism or unforgiveness or vanity) that we've ignored gluttony. You know it's true.

God or You....or Food or Sloth. Something is gonna rule your day.

I am gonna write in the journal today, and by day's end, I intend to log there that I overcame food and I kicked the crap outta Sloth.

Pray for me or, if you are a non-believer, wish me well. I wish YOU well.