Week 3 Results

The results are in... I've lost an additional 2 pounds this week for a grand total of 9 pounds lost. That's 2 pounds despite my Blizzard treat from yesterday. Jeez, just imagine what it could have been if I hadn't indulged, I could have hit the 10 pound mark. Oh well, that was my decision for that day and there's no use speculating on what could have been. I'm very happy with 9 pounds in 3 weeks. When I tried to do the South Beach Diet on my own last year, it took me almost 6 months to lose 9 pounds, so DTG is working much better for me. The "no-brainer" aspect of it is my favorite part and the food is pretty darned tasty too.

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Hi, my name is Vicki and I'm an ice cream junkie

Well, today I did it. I went and got one of my favorite treats... a Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard. I swear, if I ever need a part-time job, DON'T let me get one at Dairy Queen. I'd be as big as a tank if I worked there because I'd have a Blizzard every day. I LOVE those things. And so as I wrapped up week 3, I just had to satisfy the urge and so I got one. Ok, the deed is done and I'll probably pay for it tomorrow during my weigh-in, but it was soooooo worth it. :)

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I'm Ready For Spring

Springtime in Texas is a crapshoot. Some days are just glorious, some days are filled with rain and the chance for tornadoes. Some are full of sunshine and warm weather (but not too warm, yet!) and some are a flashback to winter. Today is one of those flashback days. It's back to being cool enough for a jacket with a sweatshirt underneath and they're even talking about COLD weather over the weekend. Ugh!

I'm ready for spring... you know, those nice warm days where you can open the windows in the house and air everything out. Unfortunately, spring and fall don't last nearly long enough around here. Before we know it, we'll be back to our normal 90+ degree temps, and swimming in the pool to cool off. But for now, I'd love a bit of spring before we get to summer.

And now I digress... I just wanted to thank those that posted comments to this blog about the loss of our cat. It was very nice of you to send your kind words our way, it's just sad that we all have to go through it when we choose to open our homes and our hearts to our furry family members.

Over the past week or so, I've come across a couple of DietToGo meals that I'm going to have to request substitutions for... One is the Black Bean Soup lunch in week 4, and the other is the Curried Shrimp dinner in week 5. Actually, I'm really surprised those are the only two meals out of nearly 3 weeks on the plan. So that just goes to show you how tasty the meals really are.

Oh, something else I forgot to mention... both my husband and I have switched our DTG plans from the 5 day/3 meals per day plan to the 7 day/3 meals per day plan. We both found that we have way too difficult a time controlling ourselves on our own over the weekends. For the past two weekends, I've weighed myself on Sat morning to see where I was and then the official weigh-in would occur on Monday morning. Well, I was in a much better position weight-wise on Saturday morning that I was on Monday morning for both weeks. That means I wasn't successful with my food choices on the days I was left to my own devices. So more control is needed, thus the change from the 5 day plan to the 7 day plan. I just need a LOT more practice in figuring out correct portion sizes for food cooked at home and at restaurants. So the food that arrives today will be for the full 7 days, and I'm looking forward to much better results over the weekends. :)

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It Was A Sad Day In Texas (and Week 2's Results)

I had an incredibly stressful week last week. One of my cats (we have two) was ill and wasn't eating. Anyone with cats knows that if a cat goes 3 days without eating, they can develop liver damage, so cats who don't eat are a big concern. I was hauling him back and forth to the vet every other day, trying different foods and ways to force feed him, the vet running different tests to see if we could find out what was wrong with him, etc.

In the middle of all of that, my other cat started having extreme difficulty breathing, just out of the blue with no prior problems. So we raced him to the vet to find that his chest was filled with fluid, a result of him having lymphoma which we didn't know about. So now we've got one cat hospitalized with a mysterious illness causing him to not want to eat, and we've got another cat stricken with cancer. Because of the severity of the 2nd cat's condition and his age (they're 16 year old brother kitties), the vet didn't think he would survive the weekend, let alone manage a round or two of chemotherapy, so the vet drained the fluid off his chest so he could breathe a bit easier and they sent him home with us for one more night so we could say our goodbyes.

I can't begin to tell you how hard it is to decide to euthanize a pet. It is the most heart-wrenching decision I've ever had to make, and even though we knew he was very sick, he's been a member of our family for over 10 years (we got them from the pound when they were 6 years old) and we didn't want to lose him. But, out of pure love for this cat, we also couldn't watch him suffer and die a natural death from the cancer, so we made the really sad decision to euthanize him.

Our cat died on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at around 12:30pm. He was such a good boy over the years, the loudest purring kittie anyone had ever seen, and he was just the sweetest cat, a really even-tempered guy. His brother, my husband and I will all miss him terribly.

After the shocking loss of one cat, we still had another sick cat left. The vet had started giving him antibiotics mid-week last week because he had started having a low grade fever. After several days on the antibiotics, he slowly started eating on his own, just a little bit. By last night, his fever had broken and he was eating a bit more normally. He's still wandering around the house looking for his brother, so I'm sure he's a bit sad, but he's doing much better now.

And in the middle of all of the chaos from last week, I still managed to lose 2 pounds. So that's a total of 7 pounds gone. I'm just grateful for the loss, no matter what it was, because the stress from last week was pretty intense and I figured my body would react poorly due to it. Thankfully we had DietToGo foods during those days... if not, I probably would have eaten my way through Texas worrying about my cats.

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Week 1 Results

Well, week 1 is over and I'm thrilled to say I've lost 5 pounds! Due to some internet connectivity problems, I haven't posted as frequently as I had hoped this past week, but things appear to be working a bit better, so here I am again. So let me recap some of the tastiest choices I had this past week:

The Good Stuff
Bistro Chicken Salad - very tasty!
Chicken Philly Sub - loved the onions and peppers
Corn Bread Muffin - what can I say... excellent with the orange marmelade
Chicken Pesto Sub - some other DTG dieters love this one and I did too
Mountain Berry Muffin - with that raspberry cream cheese, it was heaven for breakfast
Thai Turkey Tenderloin - spicy and tasty
Breakfast Pizza - I don't even miss my Friday pizza once I've started my day with this

So there we have it. Five pounds gone and we're now into week 2. With as much weight as I have to lose, I hope to continue to see good losses for many more weeks to come. Thanks to DTG for making it easy and troublefree. :)

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"Normal" People Don't Quite Understand

For anyone who has never really had a lifetime issue with weight, you'll never quite understand how it feels for the rest of us who do have problems with it. Essentially, we are NEVER happy in our own skin. Imagine spending 20, 30, 40 years looking at yourself in the mirror EVERY day and being unhappy with what you see. There has not been a day that has gone by since I was old enough to know I was overweight that I didn't think about it. Really... not a single day where I haven't thought about it or that it hasn't affected my decision-making process at some point during the day. That's pretty sad when you really think about it.

This issue came up during a fairly recent conversation with my husband. He has always been tall and slim and never really put on any weight whatsoever no matter how much food he shoveled into himself on a daily basis. But now, as he ages, he's very unhappy to find that he's put on about 15 pounds and that he's having to watch what he eats. He's even more frustrated that he can't lose the weight as quickly as he thought he should be able to with minimal effort. So I asked him to think about it from my point of view... to imagine that unhappiness and frustration on a daily basis for 30+ years.

Despite the fact that we've been together for 15 years and I've struggled with my weight and dieting every day during that time and then some, he still doesn't understand the amount of power that being overweight has over me. As a matter of fact, I don't even think my own immediate family understands either. But it is what it is and it's gone on ever since I can really remember.

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Monday, Monday

Why do we always seem to start "diets" on Mondays? Since Monday is probably one of the more stressful days of the week, you'd think we'd be smart and start our diets on a different day. But nooooo....

So today was my starting weigh-in and the first day on the DTG meal plan. Overall, I was pretty happy with today's choices. Wild Cherry Muffin tasted more like Maraschino (sp?) cherries than Bing cherries (which I prefer), but it did hit the spot with my growling stomach this morning. And the apple butter that came with the muffin was quite good. I had my orange as a mid-morning snack and I was definitely needing it when I ate it, my stomach was rumbling like crazy.

The lunch item, Bistro Chicken Salad, was REALLY good. I heated the pre-thawed dish in the microwave for a couple of minutes and had a nice hearty lunch. Very tasty!

Dinner was the BBQ Chicken and I was quite satisfied with that as well. I received a small chicken breast, a good number of fresh green beans, some red potatoes (gotta love those red potatoes), and some pork n' beans without the pork. I ate it slow and savored the flavors and it kept me pretty full all evening.

However, around 10pm or so, I started getting quite hungry again, so I added in a Light Yoplait yogurt I had in the fridge. Total calories for the day including the added yogurt, 1266.

Monday is also one of my workout days at the gym. So I did 42 minutes on the elliptical machine for a total of 402 calories burned (according to the machine). I used the interval training setting so it varied from difficult to semi-difficult every two minutes. After the elliptical, I did about 20 minutes of additional upper body weight training using the weight machines.

So overall, a good day. :)

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Here We Go Again...

Well, here we go again... only this time, I'm documenting it so maybe my results will turn out different. Maybe putting it out into the internet ether will keep me on the straight and narrow and honest with myself.

What's the "it" I'm referring to? It's my never-ending quest to lose weight. I'm going to be 50 this year, and I have been consciously aware of my weight ever since I was a child. In my teens, if I gained a few pounds, I was reminded by my father that I was getting fat, and that's back when I weighed 110 lbs. He had some real issues with women and weight gain. On the flip side, I had a divorced mother who was so obsessed with her weight that she'd ask me, just a child at the time, if she looked as fat as that person we saw across the street, or in the store, or wherever. Of course the answer was always "no". I knew that was a loaded question, even though I was only a kid.

So over the years, I've done it all. Weight Watchers, NutriSystems, Adkins, the grapefruit diet, some diet where you only eat cabbage soup, Medifast (that one DID work, as long as I never ate a morsel, but as soon as I started to eat again, the pounds piled back on), South Beach Diet and more. I've also got a Laproscopic Gastric Band, aka Lap Band, which I paid thousands of dollars for and which only worked briefly for me. Once I started getting adjustments with it (where you tighten it up with saline injections), I started having problems with it. Either I couldn't eat without throwing up constantly, or I could eat everything in the world and there was no feeling of "full". I was never able to find the "sweet spot" that lapbanders talk about, so eventually I gave up trying. Now I'm 15 pounds heavier than when I got banded, so I'm desperate to get this issue of weight under control.

In the past, one of the more reliable ways I was able to lose weight was to just limit my calorie intake, so that's where I'm headed again, with a little help this time around. I'm taking all the guesswork and the search for tasty low-cal meals out of the equation and I'm getting my meals from Diet To Go. I'm starting with the 5 day/week 3 meals/day 1200 calorie/day plan. Then I'm going to try to handle portion control and food choices on my own on the weekends. I may rethink this 5 day idea after I've tried it, but that's how I'm going to start off.

So my first week's worth of food has arrived, it's separated into the daily meals in the fridge and freezer, and I start tomorrow. Cross your fingers for me because I've got a long way to go! I'm going to shoot for 80 pounds of weight loss. My husband will be participating in the journey along with me, because there is no way I'm going to cook separate meals for him while trying to work on my own lifestyle changes. When I gave him the choice to either cook his own meals or get the 1600 calorie DTG plan, he chose the 1600 cal plan. He wants to lose about 15 pounds anyway, so he'll probably have that done in about a week! Sheesh, men....

Ok, so I'll weigh in tomorrow morning before my first DTG breakfast and I'll start keeping track from there. I'm praying this works for me because, if not, I'm in a heap of trouble.

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