Starting Over

Don't die. I know it's a shock. Unexpected as it is, you may be totally unprepared for this.

I'm back to blogging.

I missed you. Sorry I stayed away so long. To make a long story short I hit a hell of a plateau which sparked a little bit of a funk and a very long hiatus from my pursuit of health. Oh I kept up token concepts, like my scheduled eating days, but a vegetarian day doesn't do much for you when you fill it up with pizza, ice cream, and grilled cheese sammiches. Hey, they're meat free so they count. I might have even put veggies on the pizza. My shaky logic showed in my waistline. Here's where I am with my weight: pretty much the same place I was in October. I'm actually up about 5 pounds, that being after I lost 5 in Vegas, gained about 10 while I recovered(we'll get back to that), got a little depressed and stopped eating , thus losing 5, then going on a cruise and finding 10, and finally getting back on the wagon and losing 5. That was confusing. Imagine how I feel.

Okay, so to make a long story long I have to take you back, WAY back, to October 2011. The last thing you heard from me, I had given up my health plan in favor of Las Vegas, Nevada. Well I went to Sin City and actually didn't go insane on all the food there. Add in walking about five miles a day due to the incredibly deceptive distance of things in the desert and I came back a little more than five pounds lighter. I also came back much, much lazier. The fact that I had an empty fridge and an empty wallet meant that I was looking for cheap easy ways to feed myself for about two weeks. Hello, cheap pizza; goodbye, five pounds of progress. Since I fell off a mule, yes I said mule, and seriously injured my knee, working out was, well, out. This, of course, did not do much for my resolve. In case you wondered, there's only so much of a five month plateau a sane person can take without questioning the point of doing something. Since my diet and exercise regimen were pretty much shot, I decided I no longer cared. The holiday season was upon me, and frankly I've never been one to pass up Thanksgiving in spite of the fact that I typically have at least two full blown Thanksgiving meals to attend. None of that stuff is particularly good for you, even the homemade stuff. After Thanksgiving I gave in to the terrible urge to step on the scale and promptly decided not to eat ever again. Of course, that's silly. One must eat. I did, however, totally abandon my appetite. I just had no inclination to put food in my mouth and enjoy it. Since I was only eating once or twice a day(I'd eat at work so nobody would ask me if something was wrong. Why is it that people think asking if everything is okay is a good idea? If something is wrong do you really think I appreciate you making me talk to you about it? Really? Sorry, minor rant over.) I lost around five pounds in the three weeks or so that I kept that up. Christmas came and went, as did New Years, without significant impact on my weight. Then I went on my 2012 Vacation Blitz. I went to Disneyworld the second weekend of January subsiding mostly on peanut butter sandwiches, home bake pizza, and fast food. Yummy....also, super healthy...right? No? Well okay, how about the floating smorgasbord Carnival calls a cruise liner? It wasn't that the food was particularly horrible. It was that it was available 24 hrs a day. Do you know what constant grazing on sub par cruise fare gets you? I do. Ten pounds heavier, that's what. I did have some really delicious, high quality, healthy food while visiting my Miami friend. I then ruined that trend by demanding a stop at Miami Subs(which, by the way, almost made me miss my flight). I returned to a sad number on my scale, a fridge that was once again empty, and restless energy I could never quite dispel. I bought a bunch of brown rice and canned veggies and stuff for grilled cheese sammiches(it's an addiction, get off me!) to combat my empty fridge. I hit the gym to combat the restless energy and the sad scale number.

I bought a used ipod touch. This is relevant only because it allowed me to access a calorie counting app called MyFitnessPal. I like it. I will be the first to admit that I'm way too lazy to calorie count on my own. It's a lot of effort. This app, however, allows me to see in a tangible way exactly how much I'm eating with relative ease. They have a database of foods that I can access wherever I happen to be, whenever I happen to be eating. My job is to search and choose my foods; the app does the rest. If I can't find it, I can add to the database. When I'm cooking I can enter all my individual ingredients and how many servings it makes and this thing does the math for me and will enter a per serving calorie and nutrient count. I'm in love. So far, I've seen a little progress and have lost at least two pounds in my first week and a half. I haven't weighed myself recently so it may be more than that by now. Now if I can only convince myself that I do not need to eat up all the calories I burn working out just because my app tells me I can I might just make it off my plateau.

Anyhow, I took a hard look at the last year and I've decided I tried to do too much, too fast. So now I'm going back to the last place I saw success and starting to build from there. I'm still working out all the details, but when I know, you'll know.