BuffedWildCat’s BodyBlog

There have been many changes in my life over the last 6 months.  We put our house up for sale in NC, I had a baby, we moved into a friend’s house to rent, and now we have just moved to Crestview, FL.  Amongst all this I’ve tried to stay in shape and since my daughter’s birth I have tried to work on getting my pre-pregnancy body back.

I’m happy to report that I have lost 2 inches off my waist so far, and have lost in other areas as well, legs, hips/butt, etc.  My daughter is 4 months old, so not too shabby I think especially considering that things haven’t been ideal as far as dieting and working out.  We moved to FL on the 16th and just yesterday we finally got the garage cleared up enough to put some of our free weight equipment up.  So with moving, I had to take an unscheduled 2 week break from exercise.  Of course dieting hasn’t been ideal either since I’ve been SOOO super busy that I haven’t been eating right, mainly not eating enough and when I was eating it was whatever I could grab, quick, processed foods.  Despite all this I’ve done pretty well.  And now things can only get better since we are just about all settled in our new place, I’ve got some weight equipment available to use, and I’m finally going to get to start speed skating again, tomorrow as a matter-of-fact!!  Woohoo!!  I haven’t speed skated, at least not consistently, since 2004, when I got pregnant the first time!  So this will help me shed those last bits of fat, yay!

What’s really weird though, is that after losing all but 3 lbs of my pre-pregnancy weight right off the bat, I continue to be stuck at 145-146 lbs!  But yet my waist measurement went from 31.5 inches down to 29.5 inches (my mid-section has been noticeably tightening up), so I know I’ve been losing, and the way my pre-pregnancy jeans fit also attest to that.  But yet the scale isn’t budging, telling me I still have 2-3 extra lbs on me, and most days I still cannot get my wedding ring on!  The only thing I can think of is that I have some weird fluid issues going on.  I also keep waking up with my hands and/or fingers asleep which also started happening during my pregnancy so it’s like I’ve still got pregnancy induced carpal tunnel syndrome.  It’s caused by fluid build-up and usually goes away after pregnancy.  But for some reason I think, I must be, still having fluid retention issues, I have no idea why but hopefully it will correct itself soon.

And that’s the scoop here.  In a nutshell, we’re moved and I’m getting back into the swing of things, well on my way to having my pre-pregnancy body back, not much more to go and I’ll have it!

I wish I had time to keep this up better but I just don’t (for now).  So to all those interested…

I keep pictures on MySpace if any of you are interested.  I also keep a more updated blog on MySpace.  I would do the same thing here but honestly I’m just too busy to keep up more than one website.  I can barely get enough time to get on the computer as it is these days then even when I do, I’m usually interrupted too many times by my 3 yr old.  It’s just tough getting any personal time when you have a 3 yr old and an infant, heh.  I’d love to catch up here but I just don’t have the time, keeping up one website is difficult enough so for now, until my kids get older and I get more time, my blog here (and uploading of any photos), will have to take a back seat, as in, it’s not very high on my priority list.  Anyhoo…  but thanks so much to everyone who has visited my BodySpace and left comments, I really appreciate it!

I’m FINALLY getting around to getting on here, just been WAY, WAY, too busy and sleep deprived to even think about logging on until now.  I will type more later, again, sometime, I’m out of time now (as usual, story of my life these days) but I thought I’d type a quick blog to let you all know that Karissa arrived safe & sound via C-section at 9:54 AM on Monday Sept 15, 2008.  She was 6 lbs 7 oz and 18.75 inches long.  By contrast Conner was 7 lbs 15 oz and 20 inches long when he was born, so quite a difference there.  Anyway, by coincidence I guess, Karissa would have arrived on Monday Sept 15 anyway whether or not I picked that day to have the C-section!  I actually started having contractions at about 5 AM the morning of my surgery!  We left for the hospital at 6:30 AM and by that time the contractions were about 10 min apart.  Then they had me up on the pre-op table getting me ready and my water broke, THEN, the contractions REALLY started coming fast and HARD!  All I wanted then was for them to hurry up and give me the spinal already cause I wanted to be FREE of the PAIN!!  So though we were informed that they were running behind on the C-sections, they had to hurry it up anyway to get me in there.  My C-section was scheduled for 9 AM but they were running behind.  Well, they couldn’t run too far behind cause she was coming whether they were ready or not, LOL!  So anyway, that’s the story.  Now I’m just extremely busy taking care of her and Conner.  She is eating about every 3-4 hours and unfortunately she has her nights and days mixed up (what baby doesn’t, Conner did too) so I’m up all night with her with barely any sleep then I have to be awake all day yet to take care of Conner!  So the only real sleep I get isn’t until hubby comes home from work in the evenings then he takes over while I sleep.  Hopefully this won’t go on for too much longer but I certainly won’t hold my breath on it!  By 4 months old most babies will sleep 6-8 hours straight overnight without any feedings so hopefully that will hold true for Karissa cause I sure am tired of being tired!  Sleep deprivation is NO fun!  Just…  gotta… get thru…another…  few… months….  of this….  ugh…  gotta… make it.  I’ll be SO GLAD when that part is over!  The first 3-4 months are definitely the hardest when it comes to taking care of a baby!  Twice is DEFINITELY enough for me!  Heh.

And in other news…  so I lost all but 3.5 lbs of my pregnancy weight in the first month.  Same thing happened with Conner, lost all but 3 lbs in the first month.  Interesting…  Now I just need to tighten back up, mainly.  I can already make out 4 packs when I flex my abs.  ~grin~  I should have my pre-preggo body back by summertime, yippee!

Latest news in my pregnancy is that I have gotten my scheduled C-section date of Sept 15th.  My baby daughter will be arriving around 9:15 AM on Sept 15th.  Other than that the pregnancy is going well.  I’m having more achiness this second time around and for some reason over the past week or so I am getting a lot of middle back pain which I never even had with my first pregnancy.  So this second pregnancy has definitely been more challenging than my first starting with the nausea in the beginning which I didn’t have at all with my first pregnancy.  And for some reason this time around, this little girl, boy when she pushes and kicks in there sometimes it really hurts!  I don’t remember it hurting when I was pregnant with my son.  I don’t know why that is, perhaps it has something to do with my whole mid-section support structure not being as strong since I was stretched out once already.  Oh and of course trying to bend over at all or get to my feet is VERY uncomfortable and next to impossible!  Yeah, I’m at the point now, just past 8 months, that the pregnancy has gotten pretty uncomfortable cause my belly’s so big, or at least it feels like it!  I sometimes have trouble getting comfortable at night, can’t bend over hardly at all, can’t twist, like to turn back to look for cars coming when I’m driving, etc.
Anyway, I am still working out.  I’m still weight training and doing cardio.  Pulldowns for back have become pretty darn uncomfortable because it just pulls too much in my mid-section, I’ve really had to cut the weight there.  You just don’t realize how much your core muscles are involved in all your lifts, especially in pulldowns, until your whole mid-section is all stretched out like a rubber band leaving you virtually no strength in your core!  I’ve lost 15-20 lbs in my major lifts, 5-10 lbs in other lifts.  It’ll take me a while to get my strength back after I have the baby, as it would anyway, but more so for me due to the C-section.  For cardio I’m down to mostly using my nordic track because it’s just gotten too hot outside these days to be outside walking or biking.  In addition, the biking up and down the hills/mountains around here pregnant AND pulling an extra 55 lbs with my 3 year old son in the trailer just became too taxing.  I couldn’t make it up a lot of hills and I was having to catch my breath, (I even fell trying to get off my bike once, I was that exhausted) couldn’t get enough air, etc.  So that’s when I decided that unless I could find flat terrain, that the biking had to come to an end.  I think I was trying to push myself way too hard especially since I had trouble catching my breath and definitely couldn’t hold any sort of conversation and that started worrying me that the baby might also not be getting enough oxygen.  So I stopped.  Other than the nordic track for cardio, I skate at the local skating rink when I can, the last two Mondays it’s been too crowded for it to be safe for me.  I had to sit out.  The DJ said once the kids go back to school it won’t be as crowded, but yeah, there have just been too many little kids and even tho I’m a good skater, it’s the other people and kids who are NOT good skaters that I gotta watch out for and this far along it’s just too much of a risk when it’s crowded like it was last night.  It kills me to just sit there and watch my buddies skate but I just have to get over it for the sake of my unborn daughter.  Hopefully once the kids go back to school I will have 4 last good Monday skate nights.  Phew…  with all that said…  in addition to a new baby, there are a lot of other changes going on in my life this year…

My husband is retiring from the Air Force in November and is currently looking for his next job.  The bad news is that as much as I love this area (of western NC), have lots of friends here, and really wanted for us to settle down here, it looks like we are going to have to move out of state.  The good paying jobs are just not here but instead are in Ohio and Illinios.  Several of my husband’s previous Air Force co-workers who have retired are now working for a good company up in the Dayton, OH area.  It really looks like that’s where we’re going to end up moving, much as it pains me to do so, but, bills have to be paid and food has to be put on the table so what can ya do?  So in addition to the big change of hubby retiring and getting a new job for the first time in 20 years, we’re looking at a move as early as November and probably out of state.  We just put our house on the market to sell about a week ago and plan on being out and moved into a friend’s house by Sept 1st.  We have a good friend who owns a business who is shutting down his business in this area and moving down to SC and he wants to rent his house here out to us.  So we are going to do that.  We are hoping that our house sells within the next month so that we won’t have to come up with a rent AND a house payment and then when/if we need to move out of state, we will be free from trying to sell a house.  Even if by some miracle we CAN stay here, the house we are going to be renting is an upgrade from the place we live in now with more bedrooms and a huge shop for hubby to work on his cars, etc.  We would be perfectly happy to just rent to own our friend’s house which he would let us do if we can stay.  Regardless, I really want to be OUT of our current house BEFORE our baby daughter arrives because if by chance our house is NOT sold til then, I do NOT want to still be in it with a newborn and a toddler and have to try and cater to people wanting to come in and look at our house.  It would be way too much for me to try and take care of a toddler and a newborn, breastfeeding around the clock, PLUS try to keep the house show-ready all while trying to get enough sleep, NO THANKS!!  It was hard enough on me the first time around with my son, breastfeeding him around the clock and only getting to nap around the clock and I didn’t even have another child then NOR a house to have show ready and be prepared to cater to people wanting to come in and look at my house.  So I made it VERY clear to my husband that we need to be OUT of here, BEFORE the baby comes whether we have to make two payments (rent and house) or not.  Hopefully our house will sell before we have to start paying rent otherwise my husband’s never gonna be home (which means zilcho help for me with a newborn and a toddler) because he’ll be working two jobs everyday just so we can pay all the bills.  So yeah, lots of changes coming up, it’s probably going to be a tough time for me for a while.  And that’s the latest news with me, for anyone interested.  I probably won’t post again until we’re moved and settled into wherever we end up, I think there will just be too much going on with having a newborn and moving for me to even think about posting a blog here.  Until then, take care everyone and keep training hard!

Took me a while to post this but the new news is that I’ve hit my goal of becoming pregnant, heh.  As of Friday, April 18th, I was exactly 4 1/2 months along.  Weight gain has been right where it should be, 8 lbs gained as of Friday, so I’m pleased with that.  I have continued to weight train and get cardio in, usually about 3 times per week at a minimum of 30 min.  I have lost strength but it’s nothing that can be helped.  I’m sure my strength loss would be even worse if I stopped lifting during my pregnancy.  I am still session skating on Monday nights at the local skating rink from 7-10 PM and I also usually get in 50-60 min of brisk walking pushing my almost 3 yr old son in the stroller and an hour of off road mountain type biking pulling my son in a bike trailer, which adds up to about 55 lbs.  That is without a doubt the most challenging for me, being pregnant and pulling an extra 55 lbs behind me trying to peddle up hills.  And it’s not like I was in shape for mountain biking in the first place, heh!  So yeah, long story short, I’m staying active, doing my best to stay in the best shape possible during my entire pregnancy.  I’ll be doing all these activities up until the day I give birth via a planned C-section.  Then after I recover from the Cesarean birth I’ll be doing my best to start lifting and doing some cardio again around breastfeeding and trying to get some sleep, plus taking care of two kids and a house (yeah, that’ll be a challenge in itself!), getting myself on the road to getting my pre-pregnancy physique back and once again being in the best shape possible.  And that’s the latest here!

Still trying to get pregnant, coming up on try #3.  I still can’t get over that it’s taking me this long to get pregnant when I got pregnant the first time on the very first try.  But anyhoo… hopefully it’ll happen soon, there are several reasons why I want to be pregnant now as opposed to later.  One of the biggest reasons is because I want to have child #2 before child #1 turns 4 (he’s coming up on 2 1/2 right now) cause once child #1 turns 4, I’m wanting to do a lot more with him as far as getting him involved in different activities.  And I really don’t want to be trying to take care of an infant, with the breastfeeding and all, while trying to tote around a 4 yr old and do things with him.  I think it would be much easier to have a ONE year old while doing things with the 4 yr old.  Past experience tells me that I won’t feel like doing ANYTHING but sleeping during at least the first 6 months of child #2’s life, the breastfeeding is just a killer.  I’m the only one who can feed the infant and infants eat every 2-3 hours so every 2-3 hours I’ve got an infant on my breast, makes it difficult to get much quality sleep at a time.  So anyway, that’s that, as far as my training and diet goes, I’m still weight training 4 times a week, two day split, so hitting all upper body muscles twice a week, usually.  Still skating once a week, I’m now taking my son skating once a week too.  I want to give him the opportunity that I didn’t have, to become a good skater.  He also walks pigeon-toed, so putting skates on him will help since he has to keep his feet pointed forward to go anywhere.  My diet, well, not much of a diet, just eating really.  I am still tracking everything I put into my mouth on fitday, that will always be the case.  So since Nov 1st I’ve averaged 2350 calories and my weight is staying at 142 lbs, works for me, as even at 142 lbs I am pretty pleased with the amount of muscle definition I have (see Sept pics).  So I will just keep doing what I’m doing, once I get pregnant is when the challenge will begin, or I should say about a month AFTER I get pregnant, as that was about the time I really started FEELING pregnant the first time, with all the fatigue and what not, then it became more challenging for me to get thru my workouts.  That’s all for now, will keep you posted. 

Keeping in mind that my activity level has been the same for MONTHS, basically stay-at-home mom duties and the same workout/exercise routine.  But anyway, here is something strange that just happened that I thought I’d mention in my blog…
Over the course of 5 days, my calories averaged 1947 (not one day even at 2000 calories) and my weight went UP 2.5 lbs.

Over the next course of 5 days, (when I said heck with it, I’m tired of restricting myself, of being hungry much of the time), my calories averaged 2463 (lowest day 2232 and highest day 2741) and I LOST 3.5 lbs!!

I’m still trying to figure this one out.  I don’t see how it could be a water issue since I should have actually retained MORE water if anything during these last 5 days cause of my eating less clean than usual.  So I’m really not seeing any reason it could just be a simple water issue.  Or perhaps it is a bowel issue, as I do have constipation problems when my carbs are lower, which they would have been on the 5 days of lower calories, so maybe I’m just not as full of shit anymore??  LOL.  (Note to self, from now on keep notes of bowel movements, heh).  Anyway, the only other explanation I can come up with is that I’ve perhaps revved up my metabolism??  Maybe my body has figured out that it’s not starving anymore?  As we all should know by now, when you eat under your maintenance calories for an extended period of time, the body’s metabolism does slow down (some more than others depending on your genetics) and your body hangs onto every bit of fat that it can.  So once you raise your calories back up for long enough, something seemingly magical happens, suddenly you start dropping weight again cause your body is no longer in starvation mode!
Now I don’t know if that’s what’s going on with me or not, let’s hope it is, but all I do know is that it sure is nice to be finally dropping some unneeded weight without having to starve my ass off!  Yay!!  Oh, and yes, I am still planning/hoping I am pregnant.  I just won’t know til the 22nd, pregnancy tests ya know, you can’t take them too early.  But if all went as planned, I should hopefully be pregnant now, we’ll see…
So no, I’m not actively trying to lose weight anymore, obviously, it just happened, without my even trying.  I was originally planning on keeping my cals around 2000 then increasing them up to about 2250 once I found out I was pregnant but it looks like that’s just not gonna happen now.  I mean seeing as how I’ve lost 3.5 lbs on an average of 2463 calories, heh, I’ll still watch it, still track my calories, but put it this way, if I’m hungry I’m going to eat and I’m going to eat til I’m not hungry anymore, not like before when I’d eat and still be hungry but have to wait until the next meal, screw that!  Also, another good reason to NOT restrict yourself too much on calories during your pregnancy is because you want to be able to start a new diet after you have the baby with a metabolism that is running full throttle and not be compromised from the getgo by having restricted yourself already during the pregnancy.  Know what I mean?  That way you’ve got a lot of room for slowly decreasing calories when you need to and you’re not already starting off at restricted calories, not good, just not the best way to go about losing weight.  So anyway, I won’t go nutty and eat a bunch of junk food or everything in sight sorta thing, but just eat when I’m hungry and eat enough so that I’m not hungry anymore, as opposed to eating til I’m full or stuffed, there’s a difference ya know, not that I WON’T do that once in a while though, heh. 

To get pregnant again.  So I went off my diet about a week ago now.  Heck even before that though I had let up on it due to my trips out of town to visit with family.  So I probably gained some fat during that time (actually I KNOW I did) and then didn’t go back to my diet long enough to lose it all again.  So anyway, that brings me up to now.  I am now a "fattie" at 22% body fat, heh.  I guess that’s okay for now since winter is approaching and now my new goal is to get pregnant and then to have a healthy pregnancy and baby.  So I won’t worry so much about muscle definition, for a while anyway.  About a month after I have the baby though, IT’S ON!!  Yet again, hehe.  So anyway, that’s the update.  Mainly, besides the goal of having a healthy pregnancy and baby, my goal is to NOT GAIN over 35 lbs.  I gained 33 lbs with the first pregnancy and I really didn’t watch it much, I mean I did, some, but not as much as I should have.  So this time I am going to try harder to not eat too much, and to be especially careful of not eating too much junk, I think I ate far too much of it the first time.  So anyway, I have one more week before I should ovulate so that gives me another week to try and keep my calories steady to see what my weight does so that I will know where to keep them during my pregnancy.  One only needs (if I remember correctly) about an extra 200-300 calories for pregnancy.  So my goal is to find out what my maintenance calories are at my current weight, about 141-142 lbs and then to make sure I don’t eat more than about 200 extra over my maintenance.  And I may, I’m thinking about it, start a journal here so that others can follow along with my workouts and diet during my pregnancy.  Somebody may be able to learn from me plus it will help keep me motivated as it gets particularly difficult when you’re pregnant to stay motivated.

Great article I’d like to share here:  http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/

This article explains things that I already knew, things I’ve personally observed, experienced, and read about from various sources, it’s nice to see that the rest of the world is finally catching up.  Page 5 is my favorite:

The key is that among the many things regulated in this homeostatic system—along with blood pressure and blood sugar, body temperature, respiration, etc.—is the amount of fat we carry. From this biological or homeostatic perspective, lean people are not those who have the willpower to exercise more and eat less. They are people whose bodies are programmed to send the calories they consume to the muscles to be burned rather than to the fat tissue to be stored—the Lance Armstrongs of the world. The rest of us tend to go the other way, shunting off calories to fat tissue, where they accumulate to excess. This shunting of calories toward fat cells to be stored or toward the muscles to be burned is a phenomenon known as fuel partitioning.

The job of determining how fuels (glucose and fatty acids) will be used, whether we will store them as fat or burn them for energy, is carried out primarily by the hormone insulin in concert with an enzyme known technically as lipoprotein lipase—LPL, for short. (Sex hormones also interact with LPL, which is why men and women fatten differently.)

In the eighties, biochemists and physiologists worked out how LPL responds to exercise. They found that during a workout, LPL activity increases in muscle tissue, and so our muscle cells suck up fatty acids to use for fuel. Then, when we’re done exercising, LPL activity in the muscle tissue tapers off and LPL activity in our fat tissue spikes, pulling calories into fat cells. This works to return to the fat cells any fat they might have had to surrender—homeostasis, in other words. The more rigorous the exercise, and the more fat lost from our fat tissue, the greater the subsequent increase in LPL activity in the fat cells. Thus, post-workout, we get hungry: Our fat tissue is devoting itself to restoring calories as fat, depriving other tissues and organs of the fuel they need and triggering a compensatory impulse to eat. The feeling of hunger is the brain’s way of trying to satisfy the demands of the body. Just as sweating makes us thirsty, burning off calories makes us hungry.

This research has never been controversial. It’s simply been considered irrelevant by authorities, all too often lean, who have been dead set on blaming fatness on some combination of gluttony, sloth, and perhaps a little genetic predisposition thrown in on the side. But contemplating the means by which we might lose weight without considering the hormonal regulation of fat tissue is like wondering why children grow taller without considering the role of growth hormones. Or, for that matter, like trying to explain the record-breaking triumphs of modern athletes—Barry Bonds, say—and never considering the possibility that steroid hormones (or human growth hormone or insulin) might be involved.

If it’s biology, and not a lack of willpower, that explains why exercise fails so many of us as a weight-loss tool, then we can still find reason for optimism. Since insulin is the primary hormone affecting the activity of LPL on our cells, it’s not surprising that insulin is the primary regulator of how fat we get. “Fat is mobilized [from fat tissue] when insulin secretion diminishes,” the American Medical Association Council on Foods and Nutrition explained back in 1974, before this fact, too, was deemed irrelevant to the question of why we gain weight or the means to lose it. Because insulin determines fat accumulation, it’s quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much or exercise too little but because we secrete too much insulin or because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer than might be ideal.

To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it’s quite possible that the foods—potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer—that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.

As for those people who insist that exercise has been the key to their weight-loss programs, the one thing we’d have to wonder is whether they changed their diets as well. Rare is the person who decides the time has come to lose weight and doesn’t also decide perhaps it’s time to eat fewer sweets, drink less beer, switch to diet soda, and maybe curtail the kind of carb-rich snacks—the potato chips and the candy bars—that might be singularly responsible for driving up their insulin and so their fat.

For the rest of us, it may be time to take a scientific or biological view of our excesses rather than a biblical one. The benefits of exercise include the joys of virtuousness. I worked out today, therefore I can eat fattening foods to my heart’s content. But maybe the causality is reversed here too. Maybe it’s because we eat foods that fatten us that the workout becomes a necessity, the best we can do in the battle against our own fat tissue.

So August was a busy month for me with traveling and visiting family so basically I ended up taking a break from my diet, about 3 weeks if I counted correctly.  During that time/those days, I either didn’t track my diet at all or I tracked it just to see what amount of calories I was eating when allowing myself as much as I wanted.  Mostly it seems I like eating around 2400-2500 calories, no surprise to me really cause I’ve been tracking my diet for YEARS now.  Some days, days I ate WAY too much JUNK FOOD, my calories were as high as 3660!!!  WOW!!  Anyway, so as far as I can tell there was about 25 days, so just over 3 weeks that I wasn’t watching what I ate over this last month and a half, (since August 1st).  Out of that time, there was 2 weeks when I also didn’t weight train, the two weeks that was spent traveling and/or visiting with family.  That brings me up to now…

Today I put myself back on an 1850 calorie meal plan (160P/112C/86F) to get rid of the extra pudge that I can feel around my lower abs/belly button area, ick.  It seems like that’s where all the extra calories went, heh.  Cause oddly enough, I still have my quad separation (when I flex) and that really surprises me since my lower body is where I carry most of my fat and it’s always the hardest to get rid of fat there while being the first place I put it back on, but apparently not this time around.  I probably shouldn’t even worry about it since winter is fast approaching but I just can’t stand feeling and seeing that extra pudge that wasn’t there before.

The break I took from my diet (and the two weeks off training) really did me good though because I am definitely, without a doubt, stronger than I was prior to the break.  I am putting up an extra 5 lbs on most of my lifts at the SAME REP RANGE now!!  Woohoo!!  I am also back to what seems to be my normal weight, my body ALWAYS seems to want to settle around 140 lbs (give or take 2 lbs) and in the past it’s the weight I’ve always been the strongest at.  So there are advantages to being a bit pudgier, lol.  So anyway, prior to all the traveling and visiting with family, I was weighing in at 137-138 lbs, now I have been consistently weighing in at 141.5 lbs.   Back on a meal plan I go, it’s the only way I can keep my weight down and my physique where I want it.

And that’s what’s going on with me, thought I’d go ahead and write this update to let those interested/curious, know.