Day 27: Adding Minutes To My Life

First of all, gotta show you my progress pics!

 



I can tell a huge difference even this month seeing the pics side by side like that. And look how much smaller my arms are compared to the previous picture! I can really tell a difference even in a slightly different position. One of these days I will take a pic where you can actually see my face, lol!

It's crazy how much weight I've lost just from amping up my workouts. I've literally dropped 8 lbs and almost 2 shirt sizes in just over two weeks! My entire weight loss for the month of August was 10.4 lbs, which was great since most of that loss was at the end of the month. :-)

I have also brought back another idea, which was the "Pounds Lost" jar. It was actually supposed to be a "Pounds to Lose... Pounds Lost" set but I have never found the other jar, lol. I may actually do some shopping around later in the week and see if I can't find another one that looks sort of the same. It was kind of an indication of the different type of person I was at the time, that I worked so hard on the first jar and then kind of gave up on the second one! I wish it was that easy to lose the actual pounds that the jar was supposed to have in it! lol. I also had a friend that I went to high school with suggest putting a set amount of change in the jar (e.g., quarters, dimes, nickels) so that when you lose the weight you have money towards something new! All I really keep around is pennies so I would have about $1.06 when I got done. :-D Yup, I've still got 84 pounds to go before goal but I am making progress!

Here is a picture of the jar:

 

It is much more full than before! When I started it I had 11 stones in the jar and now I have 22! I have doubled my weight loss from when I used it last. :-) I would love to do different color stones for each 10-11 lbs but we'll see how it goes. It would be cool to have a rainbow in there. :-)

 

I also did a nice light workout today, 5.4 miles on the bike. I will do a 15-20 minute run later on today and will do a bit of strength training tonight before the fiancé comes over. I did it this way for a few reasons: firstly, because I wanted to take it a little easier and not do two super hard workouts in a row. I'm basically doing two light workouts and one hard one in the middle. That way I won't be super exhausted and sweaty at the beginning AND end of the day. Secondly because I want to confuse my body a little bit! I have done the workouts pretty much the exact same way each time and my body will eventually get used to it. I don't want that to happen, especially after some major plateauing at the beginning. :-)

 

I hope everyone has a great day! I will hopefully be posting for a second time later on tonight (the fiancé understands my obsession with this blog, and I think he enjoys seeing the photos, :-D) and adding day 16 to the 50 Days of Running challenge! Be blessed all!

Day 26.2: And On The Nineteenth Day, She Rested

I'm feeling a bit better thanks to getting some chemistry homework out of the way and it just being quiet around the house for a change. I'm enjoying sitting around reading everyone's blogs and leaving comments, and just doing things that don't hurt. After a huge welt on my... back end... from the 47 minutes of biking last night, and sore knees from running 15 days in a row, it feels good to take a rest day. And surprisingly, as I rest my weight goes down instead of up! I was expecting the weight to come creeping back on if I didn't exercise. But I guess that's more of a long term thing, which is good.

I have gotten back on my antidepressant, which I'm not sure if it is making me feel better or worse. I have not been on it for two weeks now, and the scrip just came back up for refill (I lost almost a full bottle in Illinois somewhere while I was at my best friend's party. I tried to refill it and received a snarky message that my insurance carrier was not going to pay out for a lost bottle and they would not refill it for another 14 days. No bueno.) Either way, we will see if they turn me into a blabbering emotional wreck^200 again. This particular antidepressant has not caused any problems with my weight loss, in fact it makes my weight drop off twice as fast when I'm exercising regularly. Go figure. :-P

Tomorrow my fiancé is coming over, yay! We will watch a movie from home on Saturday and do our annual apple picking outing on Sunday after church. Either way, it will be very HOT. The Honeycrisps came out earlier because of the unseasonably mild weather for most of the winter, and so we are picking them in very early September instead of late September. We will also go back for the pumpkin picking in October, which is another of our traditions. I don't think we have ever eaten much of our fruit bounty except while we're out there picking. (Though I've never eaten a pumpkin whilst picking another pumpkin. That just sounds hard to do. And messy! :-D)

My birthday is in 16 days. I will be turning 29, one year away from the big 3-0. That kind of frightens me a little, and a little sad that I've wasted my twenties just sitting around being depressed and stuffing my face. That's no fun at all! Hopefully my 30s will treat me a little better. :-)

Well, I am going to work on some more chem homework and shower, but not while doing the chemistry homework, lol. Be blessed all and have a great labor day weekend! :)

Day 25.5: Demotivation Becomes Motivation

I have had a very... interesting day today, as in, really kind of blah. My mom was in the same mood I was but for a different reason, and when you add two people who want to kill everyone and especially each other in the same room, it does not bode well for either person. Mom was telling me about how I spend so much money and how they aren't going to pay for my overdrafts (Which really is not a huge deal, it was a glitch in the system and I will pay it off tomorrow after I get my paycheck. It was just the way she said it, she knows how to push all my buttons!) I don't consider myself to spend massively either. I just have things that come up that I need to take care of, like having some gym shorts and some deodorant, and I take care of them when they come up. There is a lot of stuff I want but I am still prudent. :-)

Anyway, my mom's words and my general bad mood apexed today when I went and tried to bike. I made it 2 miles (actually, closer to 1.76) and I just broke down. I'm sure I kind of surprised the guy next to me, but I got up and left, feeling completely defeated and just blah. I posted to my GOF page on Facebook, thinking everyone was going to knock me for it. What can I say, sometimes I can be a tad pessimistic. But I got a lot of encouragement from some great people, even some I didn't even know. I decided then that I am a lot of things sometimes, but a quitter is not one of them.

I got home just as my parents were leaving to go out of town and I was determined to attack my dad's stationary bike. He has a different type of bike than I'm used to using, I usually use a recumbent and he uses one that looks more like a regular bike. I got on and turned on the beauty hour on HSN, and proceeded to kick butt. I rode for about 40 minutes, and knocked out 10.3 miles out on the treadmill, beating my dad at both time and mileage. My dad and I have always been a bit competitive when it comes to the stationary bike. I am always trying to beat him, and now I have. I rode for a grand total of 12.06 miles. :-)

What is really sweet is that I have obliterated another mini-goal of mine which was to do my gym's requirement for biking for a short-track tri (10.2 miles), which I set kind of half-jokingly cause at that point I was much heavier and knew that it would be a bit of a long shot. Now I have not only met that goal but I have beaten it by 0.1 miles! That is completely awesome.

I am so glad for everyone's encouragement. :-) It is super awesome on a bad day like this. I get on my blog and write about it and I hope other people are encouraged by it too. Sometimes you just have a blah day. You can still get it done! Never settle and never give up. You're just one step away from a breakthrough!

I hope everyone has a fantastic evening. Me, I've got to get some chemistry homework done, because as far as I know, it has not done itself, lol. :-D Take care everyone!

Day 21.5: More Progress Pics!

I have some more progress pics that I want to share:

 

Pretty cool, right? I am pretty stagnant as far as actual weight loss goes but look at the definition on my legs! I can also see some arm definition despite the bat wings I'm sporting (gotta love them bat wings!) I'm super excited about wearing shorts now because I have some gorgeous calves to show off. And needless to say, the fiancé is pretty excited too. :-)

 

I actually dressed up yesterday! I wore a black top and this crazy glittery skirt that I got on Beale Street when I worked on the next street over. I got so many compliments and good vibes from people, and it felt great! It was much better than when I used to go to places and people would walk on the opposite side of me so they wouldn't have to stand next to me (sad but true, I'm afraid). Now I'm more confident and carry myself so differently. I don't have the actual photo, but I took a selfie and sent it to my man, and I noticed my eyes. They just looked vibrant and full of life. I smiled and texted him, "Now that's the look of a happy woman."

 

I got my first grade in... 100 percent on my first chemistry homework! I am excited about that, especially considering how much I struggled with it. I still remember Dr. Bob's chemistry class and learning about the different states of matter. I had no idea what was going on half the time, but I remembered for years that a puppy is a heterogeneous mixture, but I had no idea what a heterogeneous mixture was or why the puppy was one. Now I found out that a heterogeneous mixture is a piece of matter where the chemical composition varies in each sample you take. Obviously the puppy is composed of different kinds of chemical composition throughout! Chemistry mystery solved. :-D

 

I hope everyone has a great evening.... and remembers to hug their puppies. :-)