Unexpected and cool

I went back to the clinic today to pick up some new birth control pills. While I was there they weighed me and took my blood pressure. Now the last time I was there, just over three weeks ago, I hadn't yet started eating better and exercising yet. Obviously numbers weren't good. But now I have some proof of the good I'm doing and honestly, it feels great. I'm not too convinced with their scale, it shows me weighing at least 5 pounds more than my one at home, but nevertheless they recorded me as weighing 10 pounds less than the last time I was there. My blood pressure was kinda high the last time, she actually took two readings about 15 mins apart just to be sure. 155/83 the first time and 133/81 the second. Today? 130/70. Pretty sweet.

I slacked off, my bad

On my posting, that is. :) Anyways, here I am. So the first week of the year went fairly well. Keeping up with my healthy eating and writing everything down. Check. Exercising. Kinda check. Hey, I worked a couple days out of the week. Better than nothing. :) Taking all my various supplements. Check. So everything went swimmingly all week long and then I got derailed last night. Jeez, I know, always fucking happens. We hung out at his brothers house and I drank. A lot. It was just irresistible. But I'm not letting it bother me too much, I haven't drank like that in months. So of course the drinking led to a few poor food choices and then today I just ate whatever I wanted to as well. Which included awesomeness like pizza and a burger and chicken wings and even a couple donut holes. Sigh.
Anyways, so tomorrow morning it's back to business as usual. I will weigh tomorrow and find out the damage of the past day. Saturday morning I weighed 344. So yay for that right? I noticed my clothes fitting slightly better lately. You know what I can't wait for? Like really just fucking cannot wait for? To go down a size. Just one size. I wear a size 28 right. 26 on a good day. I just want to be a 24. I want a little taste of victory. And yea, I know, instances like this weekend will not help me one bit. Bad Jovia. You should fucking know better by now.
You know what though? I feel happier lately. Not so depressed. I mean, nothings really changed much, still dealing with......everything. But I feel better about things. And I'm thankful for that. I hate feeling like such a depressed, moody bitch all the time.
So here's some things I would like to do this year, my resolutions of sorts. I will get dental insurance and get my teeth taken care of. I will start school. Or at least get the ball rolling on going back to school. I will take a trip, a vacation. Not really sure where yet but I know it's about damn time I took one. I will focus on doing some more sewing. At least cutting my ginormous fabric stash in half, lol. I will settle my insurance claim from the car accident. Not quite sure why I haven't done this sooner, been reeeeeally slacking on that one. And I could sure use the money. I will spend more time this year being active outside, ie hiking, fishing, definitely swimming and the likes. I would like to check out Acadia National Park this summer. Well, that's all I got for now. I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting but it's getting late and I need sleep.
Till next time.

2012 is going to be so way better than 2011!

Starting all over again. Everybody should get second chances. And third.....and fourth. Lol. I actually jumped the gun on this one and started my journey again two days after Christmas. I want this to work so bad. I feel like I've found my motivation, my drive, or at least enough of it to keep me going. I toyed with the idea of waiting until Jan. 1st to begin and scrapped it because waiting just makes no sense when it comes to your health. I have been treating my body horribly and it's about time that stopped. I have also missed blogging and believe me, I have thought about it almost every day since my last post in November.
When I started again I was back up to 357. A gain of 12 pounds. So that's that. Luckily I write my weight down every day in my food journal. So I can see when I started going off track. I actually continued being 345 until 11-23. After that I stopped writing consistently in my journal and there are only 4 entries between 11-23 and 12-27. Which showed me hovering around 351-353. Ok, so lots of numbers, I know. My current weight as of 12-31 is 350.  I have no doubt it will be less tomorrow morning as I stayed on track very well eating wise.
So what's my plan this time? Or do I even have one? Well, no, I have nothing written in stone. Basically I am following what worked for me before. Tracking my eating via food journal, measuring everything I eat, eating more veggies and fruits, very little junk food, and being consistent. I try not to allow myself in situations where I do not have control over food choices, but if that is inevitable, then I make good choices before and after so as not to slip up so much. It's hard, I won't deny that, but I need to do it for myself.
I feel like my state of mind is in a better place now. I am taking a multivitamin, fish oil, and st. john's wort every night before bed. The st john's wort is helping me with my depression, at least I'm hoping it is. A positive state of mind can't hurt right? I'm also on birth control pills now. That's something I recently started, on Nov 28th. I actually started them, not because I don't want a child, but because I was having major issues with my period. I know this isn't something everyone likes to talk about, or hear about, but I'm writing this now in case there's other women out there like me. When I started taking the pills I was already going on 2 and 1/2 weeks of having a period. This wasn't the first time I've had abnormally long periods. I've had irregular periods since I was 18 but it's only been in the past 2 years that I've started having abnormally heavy and long ones. Followed by months where I wouldn't get one. When I started eating healthier and losing weight last year, I got my first normal period in a long time. I actually started to even out and become regular. This issue of mine has been a huge stress for me for years. And of course, since I have no medical insurance, I have no way of knowing what's wrong. However, when I stopped eating healthy and started gaining the weight back, they have gotten out of control again. I believe that my weight plays a large part in this issue. Anyways, I started taking the pill at the end of Nov. and my period didn't stop until last week. I am hoping taking the pill and losing weight/eating healthier will help me become normal. Having PCOS has crossed my mind a lot among several other things. Which of course weight plays into hugely. But again, no insurance equals not knowing what's wrong. I am lucky to have found a family planning clinic that bases it's fees on a sliding scale so that I can get the pills and finally have someone to talk about my fears with. Because I do have fears, especially about not being able to have kids. If it was the sex, I should've had 4 or 5 kids by now, but I don't. I hope and hope it is just my weight holding me back from that. So there's that. It's terrifying to put that out there but it feels good to get that off my chest. Another reason to stick with weight loss.
So besides the eating, of which I've been doing well, there's exercise. I'm excited about the new weight machine I got for Christmas. it's got cables and pulleys and everything. :) I started doing some workout tapes a few days ago, but I had to take the past 2 days off because I overdid it. Back to it tomorrow. Or I might take a walk outside.
So I'm feeling a lot better about things and this is definitely going to be the better year for me. I can feel it. I think tomorrow I'll write some more about my goals for myself this years. They're not necessarily resolutions or related to weight loss. Just things I want to do to better my life as a whole.

Makin it work

Felling pretty good about things lately. I weighed 345 this morning. :) I can dig that. I was so hungry last night, it didn't seem to matter what I ate I was still hungry for more. Frustrating. I ate fruit and no sugar added tapioca, drank a lot of water and finally gave up and went to bed. I hate when I can't seem to get full even though I've eaten enough filling food. But something must be working because the scale is still going down. I plan on going for a walk in a bit. It's low 60's out right now, which is actually decent for New Hampshire nowadays. I wish the sun would come back out though, it seems like forever since I've seen it.

I found out my dog was put down on Saturday. It was very unexpected and I'm sad about it. We got him when I was about 13, and even though I haven't lived at home for awhile now, he was still my buddy whenever I went to visit there. :( Still upset about it. It feels like another part of my family is gone now. One of my brothers moved south 2 years ago, another is somewhere out west and haven't spoken to him in months. A third still lives up here, but he's on the road a lot for his job. Now my dog is gone and all that's left up here is my mom and stepfather. I know, things change, and people move on. But I feel a little lost.

Anyways, that's what's going on right now. Eating has been good, work is alright, and Mike went back to work. Which is great, he gets out of the house now and doesn't drive me crazy. And the money helps too. Well I'm off, otherwise I'll never get anything done.

Food and other stuff

Such a yucky rainy day over here. I hate november rain. But despite the miserable day outside, everything is going fairly sunny with the weight loss. :) I weighed in at 347 this morning. I started writing in my food journal again. Which, while it is extremely helpful in accountability, can also be a huge pain in the ass. Sometimes you just get sick of writing down every little thing you eat, ya know? Anyways, started that again on halloween day no less. No candy for me btw. Start weight on 10-31 was 357. I was actually starting to lose a little weight before I put the effort into tracking what I eat. Again. I'm happy with the loss though. Noticed a slight difference in how my clothes are fitting. Another good sign right? I'll take all I can get. No exercise really right now. Planning on working on that.
I've been also trying to get up earlier. Being in a funk where I don't wake up until noon or later gets old quick when the sun goes down in late afternoon now. I've laid off the weed quite a bit. Only gotten high a couple times in the past month or so. Once was the halloween party I went to, other was at home. Btw, I made my halloween costume completely by hand, pretty proud of it, I'll have to see if I can find a pic of it somewhere. I was dorothy from the wizard of oz. Sadly the shoes did not make it thru the night. We had a freak snowstorm and the glitter glue on the shoes started coming apart(yes I made the shoes too!).
Which brings me to the next project I'm working on. A new winter coat. Have you noticed how much plus size winter coats go for? Outrageous! And I'm not even talking about nice ones either. So I have a pattern for a nice lined pea type coat which I really need to get a move on. Winter is fast approaching. I've really started to get back into sewing the past couple months. Plus size clothes are expensive and hard to find something that fits well and doesn't make you look.........matronly. I'm only 26 for christs sake. On the other hand, I'm trying to lose this weight as well and it's simply not in my budget to buy clothes all the time. So look out soon for pics of this awesome new coat I intend to make. :)

I made the shells and cheese recipe featured on the cover. Delicious. The filling was goat cheese, ricotta, egg whites, mint, corn, and parsley. The sauce was a roasted red pepper sauce. Unfortunately don't have a pic of it, made it last week and it's long gone now. :) Future note however, don't use quite so much parsley as it says.

Today for lunch I made some pita pizzas. Quite excited about the pitas I found.

Only 60 calories apiece, yay.

Finished product, mmmmm. I took 2 pitas, covered the with 1/2 cup classico sweet basil sauce(leftover in fridge), topped with 4 oz diced sweet onions, 5 oz chopped roasted chicken breast, and 1.75 oz of mozzarella cheese. 600 calories total for both pitas. They were loaded and quite filling. I had a small breakfast this morning, otherwise I might have only made one. Or I still might have made two but put less toppings. Easy, healthy and a good way to get rid of leftovers :)

                                                                         Bon appetit!

Why does it seem so hard to take the first step?

It's not like I don't know how to do it. It's not like I haven't done it before. So why does it seem like this great invisible barrier is knocking me on my ass everytime I try to break this cycle? I know I haven't posted in a long time, almost 3 and a half months! I have been struggling that entire time with making the right choices that I should be making. I have gained back almost all the weight I have ever lost. I am floating between 361 and 368 lately. Not many of my clothes fit correctly now and I only have myself to blame. So what else can I tell you while I'm on this pity train.
I broke up with Mike. Which can be and still is extremely stressful in light of the fact that we still live together. There is a lot going on with that whole.....situation that I don't really want to get in depth with right now. Suffice to say, that has certainly not helped with my self esteem and general mental health. Not that I'm entirely unhappy now, don't get me wrong. It feels like a load has been taken off me now that I am unattached.
I'm grateful to the people who do update their blogs consistently, it helps when I read others struggles and triumphs. I spent last night looking at photos of myself from the past year or so. There have not been many pictures of me this year at all. I have avoided the camera with a vengeance and for good reason. I looked at these pictures, some from my trip to Florida last year, some from another trip up north last fall, and it feels like I'm looking at someone I don't know. You know how anorexics will look at themselves and see nothing but an obese person? I feel like I'm the opposite. I AM obese. But I look at myself in the mirror and just don't see how bad it is. Sometimes I catch glimpses of the sad and frustrated overweight person looking back at me. But most of the time, even though I see how I'm overweight, I just don't think it's that bad.
Then I look at pictures of myself, and I see it. There's no way I can miss it. How can I look in the mirror and see one thing and then take a picture and see something entirely different? Self image is a tricky little fucker.

Florida trip, at least 377 probably more. I am not much below that right now.

Another one, just a day after the first. It was my face that really made me stop and just go, wtf. Seriously. What the fuck.

Kinda self explanatory.

Anyways, I'm just pointing this out. I feel like I hide a lot of how I feel and issues related to my weight. I hate, hate, hate letting people know I am trying to lose weight. I don't know why. It's not like they don't know I'm fat, lol. It just bothers me and I guess it shouldn't so much. When I look at these pictures I understand the times Mike told me he wasn't attracted to me. I wouldn't be attracted to me. I would look at me and think, oh great, another fat person. Awesome huh? A fatty hating on other fatties.
I don't know. I can't keep doing this. So welcome back to me, let's get the ball rolling this week. :)

I'm still here. Am dealing with a lot of negative feelings about myself, my weight, things in general. I'm having a really hard time picking myself up this time. Meanwhile all my clothes have gotten tight again and I've gained back a lot of weight. Which only serves to make me more depressed about the situation and I eat, so much, so very much, to try and feel something. I don't know how to fix my thinking so that this weight loss becomes important again. Feeling pretty lost right about now.