Back to my normal life

I'm back home from vacation and I'm definitely glad to have my own bed again.  I enjoyed spending time with my family, but I also was ready to come home.  The whole time we were there was about eating food, preparing food or thinking about what to prepare for food.  Not for me ... for them.  For me it was about making choices, even during the holidays, to be in a healthier space.  I made sure to get in a good amount of exercise every day except for today when we were traveling back home.  I also stuck to my Optifast program.  It was difficult to do, but I knew I made the right decision for myself and my health.  The difficult part for me was that I felt left out in a lot of the activities going on.  They tried to include me, but I was the only one not eating, so it was uncomfortable for me and for them.  Even if I had decided to eat, would it just be the Thanksgiving meal or the other meals that were made?  For example, my mother, who is Filipino, made lumpia, shrimp, pancet, chicken adobo and white race yesterday for a feast at my brother's house.  Should I have picked that over the Thanksgiving meal?  Instead, I went to Vegas with a plan to celebrate being together and to count my blessings, but to stick to my plan of eating.  If I would have allowed myself the indulgence of what they were eating since there was really nothing healthy on the plates, it would have been license for me to go ahead and just throw caution to the wind.  I'm not saying that wasn't okay for other people to do who are also doing Optifast or similar weight loss programs ... it's just that for me, this was the decision I needed to make for my long term care.  I am an overeater and I don't kid myself that I get to indulge for one day or one weekend because who knows if I'll have the courage to get right back on track.  Lord knows I haven't been able to do that before.

When I got home from my trip, I had plans to take a nice hot shower since we left Vegas really early this morning to beat the traffic.  Unfortunately for me, there was not hot water in my house.  It was fine on Thanksgiving morning, but now there's nothing.  I reset the circuit breakers, checked the switches on the hot water heater, even turned up the temperature of the water.  So I resorted to taking a cold shower.  That was NOT a good thing to do, trust me on that one.  Thankfully I have a home warranty that I always renew every year (thank you God!) and I can take a shower at the gym if I can't find any other place to do it.  If you have a home warranty, please keep it up!  I have saved thousands of dollars in repairs by keeping mine current.  Since I bought my house, it's saved me almost $7,000.  I'd say it's worth it.  I don't want to deal with it, but I can't put my head in the sand wishing it would go away.  Part of being a grown up who owns her house I guess.  After a lovely week off, this was not the way I wanted to end it but oh well.

Day after Thanksgiving

Hello from Vegas!  It was a great Thanksgiving spent with friends and family.  I was fortunate to start my day out with doing the 5K Oceanside Turkey Trot.  Check out some pictures I snapped with my iPhone.

View near finish line taken as I was heading to the start line

Sara and me before our group started

Family we followed ... and then passed

Woo hoo, we did it and have medals to show for it

Afterwards, I picked my mom up and we started our drive over to Vegas.  It was horrible traffic getting out of the L.A. area.  After about an hour or two, I did ask my mom to drive.  I have been having a hard time getting sleep at night and was feeling super drowsy behind the wheel.  I was able to nap for a little bit of the way, which was part of what I needed to do to take care of myself.

Dinner was fine for me.  I had Optifast while everyone else ate turkey dinner.  Of course, everyone was stuffed beyond measure afterwards, having to practically unbutton everything.  I felt perfectly fine doing what I needed to do.  In fact, I felt great.  There is a part of me that felt left out in a way, but I also know that I can't eat food like that and hope to have a normal body size.  Perhaps in time I can learn to have this meal in a healthy way, but it wasn't something that was available.  My brother and sister-in-law make very high fat food.  Sure, the turkey would have been lean, but all the veggies had other stuff in them that made them unhealthy and so I felt good knowing my Optifast products are what I needed to do for me.  I was watching the news last night and they were saying that the average for a Thanksgiving meal is 3,000 calories.  Good Lord, 3,000 calories!  Truthfully, I would always eat more than average.  No, this is better for me.  I checked my blood sugar this morning, which is something I normally do even though I no longer have diabetes, and it was 94.  Perfect.

We have some shopping on tap today.  Even with all the clothes people have given me because all of my old ones are way too big on my body, I do need to pick up some tops.  I just don't have enough of those and I like them to be a little roomy.  So I think I might brave the crazy Black Friday shoppers.  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Preparing to hit the road

As is my norm, I've procrastinated and now find myself scrambling a little preparing for my road trip tomorrow morning.  I'll be doing a turkey trot 5K in the morning, which I'm looking forward to doing with Sara.  But then right after that I'll be picking up my mom (thankfully she lives near the 5K) and then doing a 5 hour drive to Vegas to spend the holiday with my brother and his wife.  I'm definitely looking forward to it, but I wish I would have done some preparations sooner than now.  I'm washing laundry to throw in a suitcase and I still have to get things ready for my friend who is coming in to take care of my cats.  Breathe, Kathy, breathe!

I am grateful that at least I don't have to worry about food.  I will be on my full-fast Optifast 70 products during the holiday.  I know a lot of people who are going to go off of it for the day so that they can eat with their families.  I totally understand that and definitely don't sit in judgement of them at all but, for me, that month of being on the modified fast where I had one meal a day showed me I wasn't ready to be off the shakes.  I wish that wasn't the case because I was on the shakes for 8 months prior to doing the modified program.  Yet, there were times where that old familiar feeling of wanting to overeat for no good reason was with me.  Cravings came back and I did indulge a time or two.  It just showed me that I still have work to do.  The truth is that I have to let go of that life, as familiar and comfortable yet disasterous as it was and do things differently.  I can't go back there, I just can't.  Getting up to a top weight of 420 pounds is not something that is going to miraculously go away in a few months of being on Optifast and I totally get that.  It takes work and a lot of effort.  I have started journaling again, which has been great for me, and I will continue exploring not only the reasons why I may have/do want to overeat and also divorcing myself from that life so that I can have a better one.  I don't want to be fighting with the food for the rest of my life, that's for sure.  I have already done a lot towards being healthier, like exercising.  I do it practically every day and I have come to love it, honestly.  I wouldn't have always said that before.  I am also learning to appreciate the body I have now, knowing it's a work in progress, but that there definitely IS progress. 

So ... happy Thanksgiving to everyone.  May you appreciate the time you will be able to spend with your family, friends and yourself.  Take a moment to count your blessings.  We all definitely have a lot to be grateful for in our lives. 

I did it!

As is my usual practice on Sunday mornings, I met up with Sara and we went walking around Discovery Lake.  We did six laps around the course, which ended up being 4.3 miles.  I burned 801 calories.  Yay!  What's so amazing is that when she and I get together to walk every week, it never really feels like exercise because we chat as we go and we don't walk super fast.  Just a couple of girls talking, laughing and having fun while shrinking our booties at the same time.  If you want to get out and exercise and it feels too much like exercise, then do it with a friend.  I noticed we weren't the only ones out there with friends.  In fact, most people there were with other people.  After we were done, I committed to her that I was going to go and open that gym membership that I talked about yesterday before I went home so I wouldn't chicken out. 

Having just exercised and feeling all pumped up, I strolled into the gym and announced to Miss Peppy behind the counter that I'd like to join the gym please.  I felt like such a geek after the words came out of my mouth ... One gym membership, please!  There were no less than three people helping me fill out the paperwork.  Must have been a slow morning.  Their basic plan is $9.99/month, but their premium membership was just $10 more which then allows me to work out at any of their gyms, bring guests as many times as I would like, have unlimited access to massages, etc.  So I signed up for that one.  I looked around while they were processing everything and it was just everyday people, like me, working out there.  Older people, younger, married, single.  I wasn't intimidated in the least.  Funny how that is after how worked up I had gotten everything in my mind, isn't it?  I'm looking forward to hitting it tomorrow.  I texted Sara and told her I followed through.  I was pretty darn proud of myself.

There's something fun about a 5K
with people dressed up as turkeys!

On Thursday, before heading out to my brother's house in Vegas, I'm going to be participating in the Oceanside Turkey Trot 5K with Sara, her family and some of her Optifast peeps.  My mother dropped a bomb yesterday morning that we may need to leave for Vegas sooner in the morning and I pouted because that meant I wouldn't be able to participate.  My sister-in-law is having surgery the day before.  However, us leaving for Vegas just a few hours earlier is not going to change the fact that she needs to have surgery.  My mom wanted to help my brother cook the meal, even though he has friends that will be there.  I thought about it and this is one of those times in life I had to put my foot down.  First of all, I want to do the 5K.  I've been looking forward to doing it.  Secondly, exercise really helps with pain management for me because when I exercise, my body feels better.  Given we're going to be sitting in the car for five hours traveling to my brother's place, I want to feel as good as possible.  Besides, getting in physical activity is an important part of my life.  Third, and most importantly, we will not be able to prevent my sister-in-law from having to have surgery simply by being there sooner.  My brother has friends that live there that will be coming to the Thanksgiving feast who can help him with chopping celery and peeling potatoes.  In fact, he didn't ask my mom to come and help ... it was her idea to come sooner.  I get why she would want to, but our presence there sooner doesn't erase the reality of what's happening.  I'm the one that's driving and leaving after the 5K is over doesn't set us back timewise at all.  In fact, we'll probably get there the same time we usually do since the race is first thing in the morning.  After thinking about it, I told my mom that we'll leave when we orginally planned on doing so.  We're going to be there for four days afterall. I have got to take care of myself.  Is that being selfish?  I really don't think so because if my brother truly needed us, I would be there in a heartbeat. He knows that.  In fact, we texted each other today and he was perfectly fine with it, no worries at all.  When I told my mom, there was some silence on the phone.  Then she came back with, "But what if there's traffic on the road?"  I said to her, "Mother (she knows she's annoyed me when Mother comes out), when have we ever encountered traffic on the freeway on Thanksgiving??"  The truth is, no one is on the road on Thanksgiving.  One year there was an accident that caused a back-up, but normally there's nothing.  So I told her, no, we're leaving at the regular time.  Talk about putting my foot down ... I'm stomping my foot down!