Distance Running and Weight Loss

First, let me apologize for getting your hopes up if you ended up at my blog after googling "distance running and weight loss." Truth is, my experience has been that distance running alone does not lead to weight loss. It leads to increased hunger and a false sense of security, which if I'm not careful, results in weight gain rather than loss.

My connection between distance running and weight loss has more to do with how similar the journeys are. I was running 8 miles this past Sunday, admiring the beautiful trail, adorned with trees of the many colors of the changing leaves, the sounds of the Wissahickon as it babbled alongside me as I ran. I had a momentary tug to try to run faster, get a better overall time, which I quickly dismissed. I have learned over the years of distance running that if I run a pace that's too fast for me I will quickly get discouraged and either need to stop or at best, feel like I'm struggling through the entire run. If I get the pace right, I feel like I could run forever. And at the end of the run, I have the same sense of satisfaction from having completed the run. Moreover, I often find that my pace is almost exactly the same as it would have been if I'd pushed it harder.

I realized as I jogged along that my weight loss journey is very much the same. If I go at too fast a pace (3-4 pounds a week), I have an unrealistic expectation that I should be able to maintain that pace and then when I can't I get discouraged and stop. The whole point is to finish the journey - to get to my goal weight - and I'll get there faster overall if I just pick a reasonable pace that I can sustain and just keep going no matter what. Pick it up when I hit a downhill slope (maybe when I'm feeling high energy and there are no holidays or birthday parties to deal with) and hunker down and really focus when I'm facing an uphill climb (like this next couple of months).

Anyway, it's really helping me to feel good about my 1-2 pound a week weight loss. In fact, the more reasonable the pace of my weight loss, the more encouraged I become because I know it means I'm doing things in a healthy way that's sustainable for the long haul. I know that I will get there if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

No More Facebook...

I was working out with my sister and she told me that one of her friends had seen on Facebook that I was "struggling with my weight." I am a firm believer in the law of attraction and so have decided to things as a result of this new information being brought to my attention:

1) I'm not gonna link my blog to Facebook anymore, since people can take one or two posts out of context and come to conclusions that may not support my overall goal of manifesting my fabulous body (shown right).

2) I'm going to spend more, if not all, of my time on here talking about where I want to be and the parts of where I am that I'm happy about, rather than lamenting the parts of my current situation that frustrate me.

Last weekend was a sugary blur and I'm not going to lie - I LOVED it. I had tons of fun with the girls at Giggleberry Fair in Peddler's Village, at the Cape May Zoo, in Wildwood, and just hanging out at home playing Monopoly. That being said, I didn't feel physically as good as I do when I'm eating healthy so I'm glad to be back to eating healthy.

Onward, healthy soldiers!!

Running in the Rain

It's raining. I have a six-mile run on my training plan for today and it's raining. Not only is it raining, the trail where I love to do my long runs is bound to be muddy and gross. But I will run it.

There's no guarantee that race day will be sunny and dry, so that is reason enough to get my fanny out there and run. But even more than that, I have learned to stay my course regardless of whether the sun shines or the rain pours down. When I ran the Philadelphia Marathon in 2005, I trained in the cold, the wet, the sunny, even the dark if I had to in order to get my training runs in. As a result, when race day brought sun and unseasonably warm weather for a November morning, I was more than prepared and ran a strong 5:25, stopping only once to pee.

My weight loss journey is much like training for a marathon. No matter what, I will stay the course. Having a positive attitude and strong faith through will only make it easier to make healthy choices on the days when I wake up on the right side of the bed and will keep me committed on the days when I don't.

I just have to keep going, keep running, keep moving forward... rain or shine.

Great Expectations

The positive side of having lost a ton of weight before (a time or two) is that I know I can do it, I know how to do it, and I can hold on to that knowledge and it can fuel me to keep going because if I just have faith, I will get to my goal. I've done it before, after all. The not-so-positive side is that it leaves me with expectations - expectations of how fast the weight should come off, what I should be able to do physically, what I should be able to get away with, etc. Then, when those expectations are not met, I start to get frustrated or even lose faith.

I have mentioned before that I really need to put my scale away. With these expectations weighing down on me, I cannot afford to be monitoring the daily ups and downs that likely have more to do with water retention and hormonal swings than any actual effort on my part. And truthfully, when I am monitoring only things like my energy level and how my clothes are fitting, I am pretty pleased.

So, my commitment for the coming week has less to do with how intense my workouts are and how much I'm eating and everything to do with staying positive and keeping my expectations reasonable.

Six mile run tomorrow - time to turn it in!!

Week 2 - Navigating Rocky Terrain

Week 2 begins with obstacles. Sunday was great – I ran my five miles, albeit slowly, and ate about 95% clean the entire day, despite the fact that it was my daughter’s birthday and it is a tradition in our house to start with donuts and end with cake. (I put a donut in the freezer, because I WILL eat what I want while on this diet, I just won’t eat it very often.)

Then on Monday, I had a scheduled meeting about two hours from my house that began at 10:30 am. I figured I would just find time in the afternoon to work out. How frustrated was I, then, when upon exiting, I discovered that security had lost my license? They asked me to check again in my wallet and with slight annoyance, I did and told them it was not there. Two hours later, my colleage said he would continue to work on it and I should go home. Exhausted and frustrated, I went right to Old Navy to buy a new pair of jeans (size 16 – finally!) rather than to the gym. When I got there, I figured I should re-sign the back of my credit card since I wouldn’t have my license to use as ID. There, staring up at me from within my wallet I was mortified to find…my license. Thank goodness I wasn’t bitchy to the security guard.

Today, I had a meeting that I was told started at 8 am, an hour from my house, so I was on the road at 7. Again, no time to work out, and I won’t get home until 6 pm. Apparently, that was a soft start because several people arrived between 8:30 and 9 and we didn’t actually start till 9:15. I suppose I can get up early tomorrow and workout. Definitely Thursday and Friday, for sure.

I am very pleased to say that I have done two things very, very well this week.

(1) I have brought food with me both days so my food has been crazy clean.
(2) I have kept up with my water – I am currently on liter #3 today, and yesterday I have about 3.5 liters.

The other thing I’ve been doing very, very well is that I’ve been listening to meditations that support this process. My goal is to keep my attitude, thoughts and words all very positive. It helped to find that I was a solid size 16 yesterday, down from a size 20 after the baby was born. I am doing a 12-week weight loss challenge on Facebook and my hope is that I will be a solid size 14 by the time it is over in early December, with even some size 12s fitting here and there.
The family is fairly supportive. The girls constantly tell me how beautiful I am, which certainly feeds my desire to think positively. I think it’s also a really good example for them, especially because I refuse to say I’m on a diet. On my daughter’s birthday, I said, “I’m just taking a break from junk food for awhile so that I can get back to the size I was before Max was born. I’ll be able to have snacks here and there, but I don’t have to have them right now. I’ll definitely have a piece of cake on Max’s birthday.” (That’s in March of 2012.) My husband continues to eat the way he wants (he had red velvet cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory on Saturday night. God was good to me – they were out of Linda’s Fudge Cake, which is what the birthday girl wanted). Last night, however, he had a turkey burger and opted to forego the bun. Not from anything I said, but I like to think that maybe he’s following my lead.

Here’s the thing. I have had people suggest in the past that I clean my house of all junk food, both to make it easier on me and to encourage my kids to not eat junk, ever. Personally, I don’t think that’s realistic. Junk is everywhere. It just is. I would like my kids to feel like they can have it from time to time and still be healthy, active and overall in good shape. I also don’t want to be sheltering them from it – I want them to know how to have it in moderation, how to increase their activity to counterbalance it, or how to have it one day and not the next. It seems to be working.

The girls have an account in their cafeteria and the first year they were there, I randomly monitored it and found that not only were they abusing it – ordering chips, rice krispie treats, ice cream every day, even an extra lunch one day that was eaten in favor of the one we had sent with them to school, which was deposited in the trash! We had a sit down and a conversation about it and I explained to them the importance of eating healthy and said that if they needed more snacks, I’d be happy to pack something. They said that would be good and I did pack them each two snacks every day – one healthy, one not as healthy (e.g., string cheese and a bag of baked Doritos).

Last week, I got a notice from the school that their accounts were low. I thought they had high balances at the end of last year, so I got worried. When I went in to check, how thrilled was I to find that all they’d been ordering was milk to go with the lunches we’d sent them? My honest opinion is that they are making healthy choices because they are armed with the right information and given the freedom to make choices. Plus, they are not forbidden anything, they are just encouraged to make good ones. So heartwarming to see.

So, I will just keep being the best possible example to them for how to make healthy choices with regard to eating right and exercising, not to mention staying positive. Esther Hicks/Abraham says to be appreciative of what is happening now and eagerly anticipate what’s yet to come. Learning the lesson of not speaking negatively about myself even before I lose this 40-50 pounds is so important. I do not want to teach my girls to be self-critical. I want to teach them to love themselves and always seek to be the best selves they can be. I intend to do the same!

Scale Madness

So, it looks like I'm going to have to go cold turkey off my scale. I have to ask my husband to hide it in order not to be tempted to weigh every day. Sad, but true. And I guess it could be worse - I could be unable to stop stuffing my face with sugary nonsense. Truthfully, I've done a pretty good job staying away from the sweet stuff - especially considering this was my daughter's birthday weekend - and I'm figuring that's probably more important in the long run when it comes to shaving off poundage.

That being said, this past weekend I definitely found myself facing the scale demon again. Food was squeaky clean, workouts were kick a**. Then, I snuck a peek at the scale on Friday and I was only down a pound. This is after five days in a row of squeaky clean eating and thousand calorie burn workouts that left me literally drenched in sweat. I ran the two miles I was scheduled to run yesterday morning and food was clean all day - I even packed a salad for my three hour afternoon gig. Had a protein smoothie after my workout, then the egg whites and oatmeal, then salad with an egg and salmon.

Then, the family wanted to eat dinner from the dreaded Cheesecake Ffactory. I ordered the Skinnylicious chicken lettuce wraps, which I had had the previous week at a business lunch. I had found them really light and yummy and I was proud of myself for ordering off the skinnylicious menu even though I knew it was a slightly smaller portion than the appetizer portion and I was starving (and had barely eaten all day). Anyway, when it arrived I realized the chef had decided to put some weird peanut sauce on it, so I tried to eat around it but could only eat two of the three. I was starving so I had about a quarter of my sister in law's burrito. That woke the dragon - he was still drowsy, but definitely sniffing around. I had a bite of my daughter's miniburger and about five fries, then a bite of my husband's cheesecake and some frozen grapes. I reined myself back in finally, opting for a true final meal of a pure protein bar and some green tea.

What the hell? Could this really have all been triggered by my stepping on the scale? Possibly. All I know is I really want to do things differently this time, so I confessed it all to my online trainer and got my ass up to run five miles this morning. Food was clean for the most part today and I had neither the birthday donuts that are a traditional breakfast in this house on someone's birthday nor any of the ice cream cake with which the rest of the family finished off the evening.

Monday's coming. Back to the grind. Tomorrow I will post the official week 1 weight. Till then, good night everyone!

It Hurts...Oh, It Hurts...

Or at least I do.

Every inch of me is sore, down to my hair follicles. My quads scream out almost audibly when I go up and down stairs. My shoulders are permanently slouched because the weight of holding them up is more than I can bear. I think my eye muscles are even strained. Or, maybe that's from all the blogging.

Anyway, I asked my trainer what he wants to see as a weight loss goal and I was happy to see that he is looking for 2 pounds, would be thrilled with 3. I think I lost six pounds the first week when I trained with him before, so I was really bummed when I snuck a peek at the scale and it looked like I had only lost a pound. I'll probably give him that two-pound loss but probably not a whole lot more.

The bigger question is, how do I sustain this level of exercising and eating clean as life continues to hit me from all angles? This weekend, my sister in law is coming down and we are officially celebrating my daughter's 9th birthday. She wants to go bowling on Saturday night and wants an ice cream cake (yay - not at all a fan of ice cream cakes, me), and then Sunday she wants me to take her to the mall for some shopping and an Auntie Anne pretzel (not yay - I am a fan of Auntie Anne). I've already decided that she can ask for whatever she wants - my new and improved lifestyle is not going to impact her, if I can help it. However, that does bring me to my...

Recreating My Body - Tip #1:

If you are trying to lose weight, indulge in EVERYTHING. Just don't indulge in it all the time. Here's what I mean - if my daughter had opted for the Genuardi's chocolate cake with the white icing, I would have seriously wanted a piece. My plan in that scenario was to cut off a hunk of it and put it right in the freezer for my dedicated cheat day. Whether or not I ended up having it on that day is not the point. Just the act of cutting the cake and putting it in the freezer would quiet the little kid inside that would be screaming, "WHY can't I have some? WHY? WHY? WHYYYY?" My response: "Oh, you can TOTALLY have some, sweetie. Just not today."

So, there you go. I know it's working. People are already commenting on how toned I look. I'm just looking forward to they day someone says, "You're not on a diet, are you? Because you're already so thin and fit!" And my response will be (say it with me now):

"No, I'm not on a diet. I'm on a MISSION."