ArmdandFabulous’s BodyBlog

SO yesterday I decided to buy some corn tortillas to make chicken enchiladas with.  Every other time I buy tortillas, it’s always whole wheat ones that I get. And I normally only eat whole wheat bread as well. With the cleaned up diet that I have been on, I haven’t been hungry really in-between meals too much. I thought it mainly had to do with keeping the blood sugar up with more frequent small meals and all, but I had an experience that drove the point home to me that it’s also because of what foods I have been eating, and not eating.  I anticipated changing my diet to be something that would be difficult, but it hasn’t been that bad. Yesterday I had some of the corn tortillas with my dinner and a couple hours later I was starving. I couldn’t figure out why I was so hungry because I don’t get hungry like that anymore. I was hungry like I hadn’t eaten in hours. I ate a few walnuts and drank a lot of water because I didn’t want to eat anything else after dinner.

I wondered if the hunger had to do with the tortillas, or hormones, or stress or something. To test the tortilla possibility, I had a couple of them with my lunch today.  All morning I stayed on course with my meals, but after lunch, two hours later I was starving again!!! Wow. I know there are good carbs and bad carbs, but never really paid attention to how they affected me before. The hunger I had is the kind you get when you eat sugary cereal then two hours later you are starving! I had dinner tonight (the same amount of food I normally eat) no corn tortillas, and I am not hungry now, which proves to me it was definitely the tortillas. 

*For comparison: the carb count of the wheat bread I normally get is 25g per serving, the carb count of these corn tortillas is 27g per serving. Not too big of a difference in carb count, but a huge difference in their effects on the body!

We can be told over and over again what good carbs are and bad carbs are, but it really sinks in when you can pinpoint how differently they affect you in a positive or negative way…. 

Today’s workout almost didn’t happen.  I woke up with a bad headache and felt crappy- out of the blue, cuz I felt fine last night. I didn’t want to skip my workout so I ate breakfast, had coffee then headed over to the gym. I still had the headache when I got there, but once I started running I felt ok, just kinda tired. I don’t know if this was the start of some virus or allergies, so I was a little worried about overdoing it and getting really sick.

I did an arm workout that really hit some spots I need to get better at working though, and that was awesome. I did some pushups before I lifted weights and that helped me to fatigue the muscles more.  I did dumbell bench presses, lying tricep extension, incline dumbell press, cable shoulder pulls, closed grip barbell raises, dips (arms on a low bench) and tricep extensions intermittenly. Then I did some dumbell lateral raises, and chest presses.  Most exercises I did 3X10, some I did a 4th set. I spent more time lifting instead of finishing with a run like I normally do. The headache was pounding and I didn’t feel like running or doing any kind of cardio : (

I made sure I did enough to exhaust the muscles, and I almost couldn’t feel my arms when I left the gym ~

Ok, so my legs don’t hurt as bad as I thought they would today after yesterday’s workout. I guess I am healing faster? I definitely did as much as I could and pushed myself more having someone else there to motivate and challenge me. Normally I don’t run or do any other cardio on leg day and then the day after is a rest day, no workout. But results aren’t coming like I think they should be. I think I am plateauing again or something and I haven’t lost any more weight, so I decided to run today. I watched the diet closely as well, I am having a hard time getting 5-6 small meals in. I am not that hungry now that I have upped my protein and I am drinking a lot more water. Maybe all I need is a change of some of the foods I eat for some new variety in the diet??  Right now i eat a lot of chicken, tuna, eggs,oatmeal, wheat bread, soy protein shakes (that taste like chalk, but they are high in protein so I drink them with milk) and salad. This diet combination has really helped me eliminate cravings for candy, desserts and carbs in general.  I never thought it would be this easy to pass them up. I am normally a dessert FREAK, I can eat dessert instead of dinner, or any meal, anyday…But lately I don’t crave it at all. That’s unbelievable for me :)

…I still drink coffee though, and I just found some Peppermint Mocha coffee mate creamer at the store. It is seasonal and only around during the holidays. I had forgotten all about it but I really like it and have been drinking it for a couple years now. When you put it in your coffee, it is so much like the $5.00 Peppermint Mocha version at Starbucks that you can’t tell the difference!  For Real! If you’re a coffee drinker and like peppermint–give it a try.

Today at the gym I was starting to do squats when the girl using the smith machine next to me pointed out that my foot placement wasn’t exactly right. She showed me the correct way to avoid injury, work different muscles, and correct way to stand for lunges too.  Since I am just starting out with weightlifting I will take all the help and pointers I can get! I was grateful for her assistance–it turned out that she just moved to this city from a town just south of where I grew up as well. What a small world! I’m so glad she was kind enough to offer the feedback.  She used to be a personal trainer and said she can’t stand to see people doing exercises the wrong way that could potentially injure them, so she speaks up when she sees it.  We went thru and did an entire leg workout after that and I felt like I was getting a free personal training session (well, I was basically) since she was so knowledgeable and gave me a lot of tips to increase my workout results. I also realized that I need to put more exercises into my leg workouts. :[  I am afraid of the pain in my a&@ and legs I will no doubt have by tomorrow :)  

For the last two days I have felt my motivation to meet my goals fading.  It came out of the blue, I have been stayin on track with everything, but just not as excited and driven as I have been up to this point. I have a pair of "skinny jeans" in my closet that I haven’t been able to wear since around 2002.  I kept them this long as a measuring- my- progress tool, as they are, of course after that long, out of style and I wouldn’t want to actually wear them now.  Well I pulled them out today out of curiousity to see how far off I am. They are DKNY, size 8 slim fit. To my surprise, they actually fit me again Wow, I didn’t think I had come this far.  This realization boosted my spirits, I looked in the mirror and admired the slimmer me, but this time I looked at more than how the jeans fit, I looked closer at my entire body and fitting into the jeans isn’t enough of a goal anymore.   I have worked my way down to this size in the past and this is the point where I feel content, mind and body, and think that fitting into the size number is enough of a goal, but usually I have only looked at how the clothes look, not at my muscle tone and overall health.  Thanks to this site, and all the unbelievable body transformations that normal everyday people have made here, I have set my sights on a bigger goal, but I need to get my mind in line with it.  I want to shatter the old goal, move past it as though it never existed…but I think my internal thoughts are stubborn and they believe that this is all the work I need to do because of past lower expectations. Kinda like "muscle memory" only it’s "size memory" or something?

I figure it is what has been draggin me down the last couple of days. Today’s 4 miles were dang hard to do, I had to really talk myself into going to the gym, I didn’t feel like it.  I even drank some of an energy drink before I went when normally I just have some coffee about 30 minutes before. The energy drink usually really boosts my run and makes it easier, but not today. I had to push and push myself to finish. When I get to this size, I lose my drive to take it to the next level and don’t feel that I have any more work to do, just maintenance, and that requires much less time at the gym for me. It’s like I have to eat bad food to get back the guilt and self loathing to motivate me to go to the gym at this point… this is where it gets tough, I am on an unprecedented mission by my own body’s standards and it is a battle of the past me versus where I want to be…

I have been having another good week diet and exercise wise, decided not to weigh myself so I wouldn’t have any reason to get discouraged if the scale didn’t show a loss.  Yesterday I did an upper and lower body workout, but I don’t think I put enough into it. Normally I just do upper or lower by themselves, and I may keep doing that for now to target areas individually a little more.  The first exercise I did was bent over rows, and everything felt fine until I did squats and then my lower back was threatening me with a little pain after that.  I didn’t want to turn that into a full blown lower back injury that would keep me from working out for a while, so I backed off and didn’t really do as much as I needed to. But better to be safe than sorry, right??  I do have some muscle soreness in my upper and lower body today, so yesterday’s workout wasn’t a waste after all.

After I worked out I went to the grocery store and decided to "just take a look" at the Halloween candy aisle.  MMMMM….candy, all kinds of candy! I picked up a bag of candy corns and thought for a second about buying it, thinking, it’s candy corn, it’s a Halloween tradition, it has no fat, what is the harm in that?  Then I turned the bag over and looked at the ingredient listing: High Fructose Corn Syrup was the first one. That stopped me in my tracks and snapped me back into reality.  Yeah, there is harm in that!! So I put the bag down and kept walking thru the loooooong Halloween candy aisle. But now as I looked at the bags of candy, I thought, wow, look at all the empty calories I am not eating anymore. My thinking in the past has always been, if I try to eliminate something completely out of my diet that I like, it will backfire and I will surely end up bingeing (sp?) on it later. That thinking has kept candy in my diet, believing it would be unrealistic for me to end my long relationship with it. But surprisingly I don’t crave candy. And I know that if I allow myself to eat it, I always end up eating too much—it is something that creeps up on me piece by piece, not all in one sitting or anything like that, so I never think I am going overboard until my jeans get tight and I am left wondering, how the heck?, I only had a few pieces of candy!! But the proof is in the pants, and it is a slippery slope that is just not worth it…

I left the store with no junk food, and ended the evening on excellent terms with my diet…and then the morning came.  I can honestly say this is a first for me:  Before I got up I was having the kind of fitful sleep where you are about to wake up, but so tired that you fall back asleep and then an hour has gone by and you realize you didn’t get out of bed yet.  Well during the time I fell back asleep I had a dream.  In this dream, I ate 1/2 a peanut butter pie that had a chocolate top, kinda like a big Reese’s Peanut Butter cup.  Really, really like a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup.  Did I mention earlier that I saw those too in the candy aisle, peanut butter cups? Well, I did, and they are–no, WERE, a favorite of mine. But not just at Halloween, all year long. SO they are a 12 month diet threat to me, and seeing them in their new bags that you KNOW are fresh and haven’t been sitting on the shelf getting old and dried out, (if you have ever bit into an old peanut butter cup that crumbles you know what I mean)because they have special seasonal packaging, it was a little hard to resist…but I did…and this is the only reason I can think of as to why I dreamt about eating the peanut butter chocolate pie thing.  Anyways I believed the dream was true for about 2 minutes while still groggy and not quite awake yet and felt the real guilt and disgust with myself that I would normally feel if I did something like that. I really believed my good diet week was ruined and I started wondering why I let this happen.  I was so mad at myself! And then I woke up and realized it was just a "sweet dream."  Oooohhhhh thank goodness!!! …P.S. …don’t let this happen to you, stay OUT of the Halloween candy aisle!!!

Well I can say this past one was great actually! I stayed on track diet wise and made up for last weekend’s indulgence at the Olive Garden’s unlimited pasta extravaganza going on right now. I actually could only eat 1 medium bowl of it and only tried out 1 new kind of sauce because I filled up on breadsticks before it came out   So I felt super guilty at the start of this past week, sure I was gonna be playing catch up all week trying to re-lose what I had already lost,  but after Sunday and Monday’s healthy diet days, my body got right back into the losing weight mode and I think the zig zag (higher calories then lower calories) actually worked for me in getting the metabolism a little confused so when I ate healthy all week, it burned faster.  I still haven’t weighed myself as the gym scale is still broke…they say it will be fixed by next week.  But my clothes are getting looser, so I’m sure I did lose some.  

The bad news is I was able to stay on the healthy diet track all week because I stayed away from my diet sabotaging, waistline- suicide friend who at this point has zero interest in anything healthy for her. She eats fast food daily, smokes and drinks and I am hoping that when I am successful with my weight loss goals she will be motivated to get healthier habits herself. SO that is another one of my reasons for doing this, to make someone who has never been health-conscious change their ways when they see how AWESOME I turn out!

I skipped lifting weights all week for running, so I took Friday off then today, I did a little mixed upper body workout to wake up the muscle that just had a week long vacation. It feels good and my arms are sore already.  I ran half as much as I usually do, just did 2 miles because I was feeling tired. I might run another 2 before the end of the day though.

And the best part about this week???…today I noticed a little muscle tone in my arms in the mirror when I was doing a dumbell shoulder press that definitely wasn’t there before!!!  I am so excited and proud to see my hard work starting to show!!!!!

I ran my 4 miles again today as I have decided not to lift this week, and just stick to cardio for the next few days.  I have gained a lot of strength but still no visible muscle tone yet due to the weight I need to lose.  It has been discouraging to not be able to see much muscle tone after the work I put in.  I am wondering if I should just do more cardio until I get closer to my goal weight and start lifting then. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on that?  I would appreciate any words of wisdom!

Other than that, I stayed on track diet wise again for another day. I did have a brief moment where I wanted to go get some Baja Fresh or something like that, but talked myself out of it and ate my tuna and oatmeal +protein shake for dinner instead. Yay me! That was a small battle won in this war. I still don’t know if I lost the 3 lbs I gained because the scale is still not fixed at my gym. GRRR I feel like I did though, clothes are fitting me a little looser.

yay! I have had 2 good diet days so far this week.  I think the overindulgence of last week has been burned off now!~  But I am only guessing at this, the scale at my gym is the one I use and it has been broken for the past 2 days. Maybe it will be fixed tomorrow and I can see what the real deal is and if I have lost the 3 lbs I put on. 

As I was heading to the gym today, I threw a bag of trash out and ended up cutting my finger on a tuna can that was in the bag.  It freaked me out a bit because it seemed kinda deep and was bleeding a lot.  I think I remember having a tetanus shot back in 2003 and I hear you only have to get one every 7-10 yrs so I am not gonna get another one.  I just cleaned up the cut and put neosporin and a band-aid on it and went to the gym but I didn’t lift because I thought I should keep pressure off the cut finger.  The good news is I have managed to keep my diet in line today.  I have been struggling with being hungry in the evening and wanting to snack lately so I ate a bowl of oatmeal with my dinner to keep me full. It seems to have worked, I haven’t been hungy at all tonight. And I ran 4 miles at the gym. I will lift tomorrow…as long as I don’t get tetanus overnight…pray for me