2012 Goals

I hope everyone enjoyed a safe and happy New Years!  I was lucky enough to spend the evening with a very good friend and made it home safely right at midnight, just in time to see some fireworks that were being shot off near my parent's house.  Last year, I followed 3-4 drunk drivers at about the same time of night but this year I didn't see any.  Go home town!  We woke up on New Years day to this:

Very pretty, but not enough to snowshoe in!  It's been a very mild winter and I have yet to be able to break out my snowshoes this year.  I'm very sad about this.  I need to find a place to snowshoe near the town I live in.  I've heard there's some good places but I haven't found them yet.

To follow up on my last post, here's my spring semester goals (mid Jan-mid May) and my long term 2012 goals.

Spring Semester Goals:

1. Be less hard on myself.  Everyone who knows me well will tell you that I can be very hard on myself.  This is especially true when I don't meet a goal or if I have a bad day at work.  I need to give myself a little slack as I can't be perfect and I don't necessarily want to be.
2. Let things go.  I take my work home with me.  I teach undergrads and a lot of issues tend to come up.  For whatever reason, I take these issues home with me and leads to a lot of stress.  Not good.
3. Get my fibromyalgia (or whatever it is) under control via natural methods such as supplements (I will be starting to take ribose as soon as it is delivered) and stress reduction.
4. Continue to take my Thursday yoga class.
5. Work out 4 days a week (aside from yoga).  I learned this past semester that I need to keep the number a touch lower as I get really down on myself if I don't hit the number I set for myself.  I am not willing to set myself up for failure!
6. Cook!  :)
7. Meal plan every week.  I am hoping to save on my grocery bills by planning my meals and buying specifically for them rather than just buying a bunch of stuff and then trying to piece together meals.  The one thing I splurge on is high-quality foods but I feel like I could save on it a bit more.

Long-Term 2012 Goals:

1. Read one book a month.  I got a Kindle for Christmas (thanks mom and dad!) and plan to put it to good use!
2. Hang on to the healthy living train for dear life (a classic repeat from 2011).  My plan is to cook and make 90% of my own food using whole foods and exercise 4 days a week (more if possible).
3. Try one new recipe every week.
4. Walk a 1/2 marathon, health permitting.  I hope to pick one in the next month and start training.
5. Make plans with friends and family more often.
6. Keep my house clean and picked up.  Let's just say that this was at the bottom of my list this past year.
7. Be more positive.  I've found that I have been more negative in the past six months or so than I have in a long time.  It's time to get out of that!
8. Finish the afgan I have been working on for nearly 10 years.

I think that's where I'm going to cap my goals for 2012.  I have a few other goals floating around in my head but I don't want to overwhelm myself.  For most of the goals listed above, I have plans on how I plan to obtain each of them.  I am trying very hard to set myself up for success this year!  2011 was a good year, but I plan to make 2012 a great year!

Happy New Years!

Year End Recap & New Year's Resolutions

Last year, my goal was to hold on to the healthy living bandwagon for dear life.  I definitely accomplished that.  The last year has been a rollercoaster ride and this is possibly the first year that I am so happy for a fresh start.  I am honestly not a New Year's Resolution person, but I do like going into a new year with goals. 

A little spring to get us through the winter.  :)

First, a 2011 recap!  For whatever reason, I do not have my stats from before last June, so I estimate that in the last year, I have lost approximately 48ish pounds, 26 since July. 76 pounds overall.  Yep, I'm a slow loser, but that's okay.  I feel more prepared to live my life healthfully once I meet goal. 

I have also completely changed the way I eat.  I try my hardest to stay away from most processed foods and have greatly decreased my meat intake (I only eat chicken, fish, and turkey in general).  I typically am only eating meat if someone else cooks it or if I go out to eat.  This means that my veggie intake is up!  Yay! 

So, here are a few good posts that puts the last year into perspective:

-Celiac and Healing Through Food Part I and Part II
-Hitting the big 5-0
-My biggest weight loss resource:  my food scale!
-The Awesome-ness of CSAs
-Learning to love veggies for breakfast
-Recap on being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia (more on that later) and my awesome Turkey Trot!

I thought I'd put forth some goals for 2012:  short term, for the spring semester, and long term.  Hopefully at the end of 2012, I'll be checking these off with glee.  Today, I'm just going to start with my short term goals for 2012 (the next three-four weeks).

1. Read From Fatigued to Fantastic!  I saw a pain management specialist yesterday who gave me a little shock: he doesn't think I have fibromyalgia.  I have all the symptoms and everything lines up but I don't "look like like a fibro".  According to this doc, I am too athletic, my muscles are in too good of shape, and I am in no means depressed (very often accompanies fibromyalgia).  Because he has no other ideas on what I could be dealing with, he told me to read this book and come back to see him with ideas about where I want to go on this.  I get to decide on my treatment options (and they will NOT include prescription medications if I have a choice)!  I like having this control and I'm glad he's giving me options.

2. Work out 5-6 day a week.  I've been doing well with this since the fall semester ended.  This is just a "keep it up!" goal.

3. Work 3-5 hours a day.  This doesn't necessarily mean work on work for next semester, but do something productive (like prepping for spring) or finish projects that I have started but never finished.  I tend to get very lazy during the breaks between semesters.  I stress myself out way too much over the semester and then just zone out until it's time to go through it again.  Time to get productive and get stuff done before the spring semester sneaks up on me!

4. Cook!  And cook good food.

5. Create menus.  I use a whiteboard on my fridge to sort out what I want to make each week but I feel like I could be making it easier on myself.  I plan to list out all the foods I make for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks so I can make meal planning quicker and easier.  I want to put these in sheet protectors on my fridge so I can look at it easily and make grocery lists easier (and hopefully save a little money this spring!).

6. Similarly to making food planning easier, I want to make calorie counting easier.  I want to go through the most common foods I eat and have a list on my fridge of the calories per ounce so that calorie counting doesn't have to be so time consuming.


Okay, off to eat breakfast (pumpkin yogurt and quinoa granola!).  I hope everyone had an awesome holiday last weekend and a very safe New Years!  Longer term goals are coming!

Mullings on Late November and Early December

Good evening folks!  I've been meaning to post for a while - life has been busy.  I've also been feeling not so great, so sitting on the computer hasn't been at top of my priority list.  I always think it's good to look back at the last month as see where I've gone wrong, right, and what I've learned.  So, a few things...let's start with the good:

1. I have been focusing on health, not weight loss, and it's awesome.  I feel great!  This is something that has been morphing in my life for a while now.  I try to eat mostly whole foods with some treats here and there.  I find when I focus on being healthy, I can more easily maintain or lose weight.  If I am obsessed with weight loss, I lose nothing and likely gain.  It's too much pressure.  What I really want is to be healthy, no matter what my weight is!
2. Even with fibromyalgia, I am able to keep up my workouts and increase my intensity.  :)  I'm just as active now as I was before diagnosis.  I find that if I do something cardio and/or free weights every day, I can hold off on pain a bit or at least the pain isn't as severe.
• Stretching is a huge thing with me right now too.  My muscles get super tight very quickly.
3. (Knock on wood...) I haven't gotten sick this fall!  I've had fibro pain, sure, but no colds or flu...nothing!  I'm no doctor, but I am going to guess this is because of two things:  (1) I have been working out outside for most of the fall (fresh air!) and (2) being healthier and more on top of my issues which likely causes my immune system to function better.  Either way, I'm happy!
4. I don't need caffeine to function.  I've had to severely reduce my caffeine because of my fibromyalgia.  I really do think it's helping.  I'm currently either drinking one (max) 1/2 caff cup of coffee in the morning or only decaf.  I know, decaf does have caffeine in it, but I love a hot coffee in the morning.  I'm working on it...

Now the weird weight loss discoveries that have come up in the last month:

1. Are you aware that your feet lose weight?  Yep, it's true!  I used to wear a 9.5 or 10 sized shoe and now I'm more in a 9 or 9.5 in dress/workout shoes (my feet swell).  My right foot is also now smaller than my left.  :/  When I put my work shoes on for the first time this fall, I thought it was odd that they kept slipping off (they are slip ons).  I didn't really think about it until I went to buy shoes a few weeks ago.
2. You are cold all. the. time.  Seriously.  I never understood why people were cold all the time.  Now I know.
3. Losing a lot of weight has caused massive hair loss for me.  I have been steadily losing tons of hair since the beginning of June.  I talked to my hair gal and she said that this is actually pretty normal when you lose higher amounts of weight.  Who knew?
4. You suddenly find bones you never knew existed!  I still have a good amount of weight to lose and I'm already finding new bones poking out.  Score!

And finally, the bad stuff:

1. Eh...not much worth talking about.  Besides a few slips in eating and a few extra days off working out, I've been going pretty strong.  Might as well stay positive!  I've been hanging out around 73lbs gone for a while now (which is not a bad thing!).  I think it's a mental thing, so I'll keep working on staying healthy!
2. The caffeine thing:  I gave up my regular morning joe right after Thanksgiving and it took about 10-12 days to really feel clear headed without caffeine.  That was not fun.

So, my thoughts for the rest of December is that I would really like to hit that 75lb mark.  I mean, I've been working at it for what feels like forever.  But, more than that, I would like to make excellent choices throughout the holidays.  Not too many gluten free cookies, not too much chocolate, and keeping up with workouts at least 4-5 days a week (6-7 days a week when the semester is over).  Last year, I was just trying to maintain my weight throughout the holidays and I feel like I can do better than that this year.

Sorry for the lack of awesome photos.  :)  I'll work on breaking out the camera for the next post.