Posted on 8 Comments

How much improvement can one girl take?

Weight Loss Challenge - Thursday

This is everything I ate yesterday. Wait – what’s that sound? Why, it’s the collective gasp-in-horror from all of the motherly-types out there reading this. My own mother scolded me in the comments for this photo on flickr. She knows me pretty well – you’d think she’d have realized by now that I eat like some kind of carb-addicted salt fiend whenever possible. Neil has made feed-bag and salt-lick jokes at my expense many times. Don’t worry, I don’t take that kind of abuse lying down. I usually take it sitting up, Dr. Pepper in one hand, other hand halfway down the throat of a pretzel bag. Heh.

So, anyway, when I saw that Laura of Katydiddys was having a Weight Loss Challenge, I thought maybe it wouldn’t hurt to jump on that bandwagon. Now, if you recall, less than two weeks ago, I grabbed the tailpipe of the Flylady bandwagon, and I’m still hanging on. I’m not really sure I can stand on both wagons at once without incurring a nasty groin injury (just how much self-improvement can one girl take?), but I’m going to give it a shot.

Week one’s challenge is twofold:

  1. Keep a food diary, including a visual record (hence the photo above), and be artistic about decorating the diary. I have a nifty little software program on my Palm that helps me keep track of Weight Watchers points, so I plan to use my Palm instead of a physical journal, but I am considering making some kind of decorative sleeve for it, so that I get to stretch my artistic muscles.
  2. Go for a 30-minute walk alone every day. This is going to be really hard for me. Thechallenge began two days ago and I still haven’t done it. I almost did it this morning, but after filling up four huge garbage bags of unwanted garments and lugging them to the van [see Flylady reference above] I figured I’d gotten all of the exercise I wanted for now. The thing is, the goal of the exercise challenge is not only to get moving, but also to have some peaceful time out in nature to help the creative juices flow. I love that idea. In theory. I just need my legs to get the message and take me outside…

Part of the challenge involves getting hooked up with a partner. Your jobs are to support each other, send each other encouraging little things in the mail, etc. My partner is Kara of Innocent Charms, who, coincidentally, just won the color challenge the other day. Small world, eh? So wish us luck over the next 6 weeks – my goal is to lose 10 lbs, which may or may not be attainable in that time. Hopefully I can stick with it long enough to find out.

He got a bike

Oops – gotta go get this little stinker from preschool! Hopefully I’ll be back later to chat about creative things.

LET’S KEEP IN TOUCH!

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Posted on 8 Comments

8 thoughts on “How much improvement can one girl take?

  1. I saw this challenge at Kara’s website yesterday (nice stuff, btw) . I did think about what I ate & considered writing it down, til I had cake in the afternoon & didn’t want to see that in writing. Also, I didn’t have a nice shiny new journal of the right size, maybe I should shop for one!

    As for the 30 minute walk, I just don’t get into exercise & could use that time doing a flylady misssion. Yea, I know, exercise is GOOD for you. Maybe if you do it, I will too!!

    1. Well, I did manage to take a walk on Saturday morning, but that’s all I’ve done. I really do like the idea, but when I drop Eamonn off at school in the morning, I know I have two hours to accomplish certain business and household goals that are easier to do alone. If I exercise for 30 minutes, I lose some of that time. I’m having a hard time accepting that idea.

      What I really need to do is get up half an hour before the rest of the house and sneak out and do it then. Having a hard time accepting that idea, too 😉

  2. What a great post! I need to think about this project as I certainly need to do something about my own weight.

    1. Unfortunately “thinking about it” is pretty much all I’ve done 😉

  3. Hehe, those pictures are funny, like your color challenge – you’re eating in the same color family :-). Me? I don’t do calorie counting, but I am trying to eat stuff that comes out of the ground or that comes from an animal, and less that’s processed, packaged, or otherwise manufactured. Also, for Phil we’ve done the psoriasis diet, which is might difficult indeed. Alkaline! Yikes!

    Anyway, good luck with your project(s)!

    1. Good for you – we eat so many packaged foods around here, it isn’t funny. These last few months, though, I’ve been trying to stick to packages with very small ingredient lists 😉

      Yes, I’m very good at eating beige foods…

  4. Hey Buddy.

    Now don’t get disheartened this early on, I equally have not had a fab weekend as it was my sister’s birthday and it turned into a whole weekend event, including cake/deserts and take away’s.
    So deal, we have had not a great weekend, I have only excercised once, we start a fresh on Monday, love the weight watchers palm, how cool is that, I am having to write it down but that sounds amazing, I am using ww too, how strange.
    I don’t get much chance to excercise too and I already get up at 6am to go to work, so I am going to try 15 min a day and if I can do half hour great, what do you reacon.
    Take care and you know where I am
    Kara
    x

    1. Monday is a new day, right? 🙂

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