Hot By Thirty

This post is brought to you by the letters G-U-I-L-T

I have been ROCKING this week, people. I need to send Jess a big purple bouquet or something for hinting at the writing-down-what-you-eat deal. Between that and weighing myself every day (I KNOW I KNOW THIS IS NOT HEALTHY BLAH BLAH) I can really identify what foods are okay and which ones aren't. BYE BYE PEANUT BUTTER. (And it's not like I thought peanut butter was GOOD for me, I just... sort of ate more than I realized, I think.)

I'd already dropped another pound when I weighed myself this morning. And then my DAY happened. A few bites of pastry at the meeting I went to this morning. And flinging whined-to-death self on the mercy of friends this afternoon and staying for dinner, which was a totally scrumptious eggplant panini with a scrumptiouser salad from the garden with this crazy delicious (and probably sky high in sugar) poppyseed dressing. I didn't eat a LOT, but I DID eat it and my obsession with tracking things propels me to believe this is NOT. GOOD. (Need I say I didn't exercise today?)

AAAAAND a friend of mine is having a bad weekend and needs some Happy Hour With Her Girlfriends Time so I'm about to walk over to a restaurant and partake of Happy Hour, which is probably going to involve Alcohol since: WALKING. *SIGH*

In other words: way to undo the entire week, MAGGIE.

Gloom

I am never going to lose these last two pounds. Ever.

(Perhaps my mysteriously rotten mood all week will account for not losing. Also the inescapable primal need for chocolate. And the kids not napping at the same time, meaning I can't exercise and can't recharge my mommy batteries, and OH GOD I AM REALLY TIRED.)

That's all.

I don't have any money to buy anything pretty anyway

I'm not very encouraged about my weigh in tomorrow. As of Friday I was UP one pound. I would like to blame the 30 Day Shred (muscle weighs more than fat!) but that seems kind of lame. I thought I did pretty well this week, too, giving up marionberry pie and doughnuts and brownies and the last loaf of pumpkin bread I thawed out for dinner guests.

Of course, I did just eat several handfuls of Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips, which is my coping mechanism of choice. What did I need to cope with? Not being able to say I lost the baby weight in five months. Something's wrong in there...

Even if I didn't lose any weight this week, I am close enough to my pre-baby weight to fit into all my clothes. EXCEPT I'M NOT FITTING INTO MY OLD CLOTHES.

REASON ONE: I am still breastfeeding. And it appears I shall be breastfeeding for quite some time as my daughter will only accept a bottle on alternate Tuesdays in months beginning with the letter 'M' and 'J'. It's nice to know I can still lose weight while breastfeeding (which wasn't the case with Jack), but I must be losing it in different places. I'm one of those girls who can zip the dress up all the way except for the last couple inches, so it's not like this is anything new. But still. Kind of a bummer.

REASON TWO: Having two babies has irrevocably altered my shape. My butt did not used to be this big. I know it.

Anyway. Maybe that's why I don't feel all that triumphant about being this close, or at all content with this weight. Someone wanted to know if I intended to lose more, and I do. I have no idea how much as losing more means I will quite literally be a size I can't remember being. And that seems unreal, you know. Impossible. But I think I will keep doing what I've been doing, which is do my best to not gorge myself on sweets and do my thirty minutes of exercise a few times a week. I'll see what happens.

Oh, speaking of exercise: I've been alternating the 30DS with the treadmill. And that is alternated by days when my kids don't nap at the same time. If I can't get my thirty minutes in when they're both napping I don't do it at all. I don't have the energy or inclination to get it done when Phillip gets home from work or when they're both in bed at night. Sometimes I give myself a hard time about it, but mostly I focus on the fact that I am exercising AT ALL. Where did I read recently that you should plan to exercise every day and not feel guilty about the days that you don't? This made a lot of sense to me. Having, like, a Monday/Wednesday/Friday exercise schedule is, to me, a fast way to fail. Because if you don't do it on Monday you 1) feel guilty because you missed your Scheduled Day and 2) don't exercise again till Wednesday. For me it's easier to think I should try to do something every day, and then if it doesn't happen, there's always tomorrow. A perspective thing, I realize, and not everyone thinks that way.

ANYWAY. I'll weigh in tomorrow and let you know. You're all biting your fingernails, I'm sure.

***ETA: I'm down half a pound this week. Two pounds to go. (And five till I hit the weight on my driver's license!)***

A mozzarella stick is a poor substitute for sugar, let me tell ya

I've decided to update my blog instead of pulling everything out of the pantry in search of a few errant chocolate chips.

Some days are easy. Other days I swear I'm going to keel over and die if I don't find a piece of chocolate to put in my mouth. ANY kind of chocolate. Right now I would probably even accept a piece of WHITE chocolate and just so you know, white chocolate means things are getting DESPERATE.

I didn't feel like exercising today. I debated this over and over in my head while a friend and her kids were visiting this morning. I even brought up my 30 Day Shred DVD with her, just to see if it might kick my butt into gear. Then she left, I put Jack down, Molly was sleeping and I thought: okay. I don't HAVE to get yelled at by Jillian Michaels today. I could just run on the treadmill like always. So I went into my bedroom to get my sports bra and, at the slightest rustle, Molly woke up. And I ate lunch instead.

Molly is back asleep, but I am not risking precious nap time for exercise. Are you crazy?

Oh, and then Meghan noted that she GAINED weight doing the 30 Day Shred. Weight that is no doubt MUSCLE but STILL. Sigh. And so my DVD sits, opened but not fed inside the DVD player. But I bought little hand weights, people. I'll start it this week, promise.

(GAH. And now I WILL have to start it. Stupid blog accountability.)

So what are your tempting foods? For me: chocolate, obviously, in nearly any form. I can eat an entire bag of those little Hershey milk chocolate chunks in the silver wrappers. More chocolate and easier to open than a Kiss. I can make the effort to resist a cookie, but I have no defenses against cookie dough. I don't crave ice cream, for some reason, although if I have a tub of it in my freezer then I will sit there with a spoon and not stop until I realize I've eaten the entire thing. I can ignore most baked treats, unless they are the kind smothered in frosting, especially CHOCOLATE frosting, and then I must make multiple frosting swipes. And batter. Yeah... I have no control around mixer paddles.

Potato chips however, my husband's favorite junk food, do nothing for me. Salty stuff in general does not interest me at all. Oh, I will EAT it, for sure. My parents get that big jar of mixed nuts from Costco and I can sit and eat those all day long. But chips? Nah.

Anyway, my inability to ration junk food is why I can't have it in the house. I know healthy eating involves moderation and all that but I can't do moderation. This is why I gave my giant bag of chocolate chips to my sister. If I hadn't, I would be sitting here munching away. That bag was already half gone AND I HADN'T BAKED ANYTHING. I'm much better off when there is nothing sweet in my house except sugar-free chocolate pudding and those Healthy Choice fudge bars. Because there are obvious end points for those (one fudge bar and I'm done). Of course, I'm not HAPPY about it. Seriously. I have written a whole blog post, albeit an extremely not interesting one, and my longing for chocolate is still forefront in my mind. Time to write about something else, I think. Good thing I have to come up with something for Parenting tonight...

This is just to say...

I am not feeling the exercise this week. I know how bad this looks coming so soon on the heels of that "I like to run!" claptrap, but I just don't feel like it. I finally got both kids down for afternoon naps and usually, as soon as I'm sure they're asleep, I haul me and the laptop and the baby monitors down to the office for my blink-and-you'll-miss-it exercise session.

But today I think I'm going to heat myself up some lunch and watch one of the audio commentaries on the Mad Men DVD my fabulous husband bought me for Christmas.

I'd like to say at least I'm eating well this week, but I'm not really. I busted into the last bag of Christmas candy and could not help myself. I'd start to feel guilty and then I'd think, "But they're so SMALL! And they're DARK CHOCOLATE! That's practically GOOD FOR YOU!"

Eventually I threw it away. What was left anyway. And later that evening I contemplated GETTING IT OUT OF THE TRASH.

I think this has to do with being tired. I'm a lot more tired lately, and that's because we're working on putting Molly down earlier, which means she no longer sleeps through the night. I know. What is wrong with us? Are we stupid? It does sound counterintuitive, but I have this hope that she can go down at a reasonable bedtime AND sleep through. Eventually. I would actually prefer one or two night wakings to the baby who sleeps from midnight to noon. But it does mean I wake up tired, do breakfast and baths and naps and lunch tired. It means that by the time I get them both in bed, all I really want to do is go to bed myself.

That said, my darling daughter has fallen asleep on her own for both of her naps. So you know what? I'LL TAKE IT.

So this is just to say I'm not expecting much this week. I've got 6 pounds left and I should be feeling pretty good about that, but for some reason I'm feeling really fat. Feeling like I'm never going to lose these last pounds until I'm done breastfeeding. I'm tired. I want to eat all the chocolate. And that is all.

The junk in my trunk

I'm not sure what my weigh in is going to look like tomorrow morning. I was actually pretty proud of myself this last week. I exercised nearly every day and ate the right things and Friday I hit my lowest post-Molly weight. But I screwed that up pretty quick. I ordered pizza at a restaurant Friday night thinking Jack would share it with me (he didn't, was too busy screeching and whining and embarrassing me), I ate breakfast, lunch AND dinner out on Saturday, not to mention the copious amounts of wine and sweets I managed to consume at the office party that night. (The former owner threw a replacement party at his swanky new digs. You can do that when a national conglomerate buys your tiny software company and makes you a multigazillionaire overnight.)

So yeah. Tomorrow might be ugly.

**ETA: I'm down a pound and a half. Which is fine. Except that I was down a lot more on Friday. I should totally do my weigh ins on Fridays. That would take care of my weekend carb habit!***

Even so, I now fit into most of my clothes. The clothes in my closet are three different sizes and I can fit into all except the smallest size. I feel pretty good about that.

I remember, though, that even when I lost all my Jack weight there were still things that didn't fit me. My favorite pair of pants, for example. I have a pair of beat up Old Navy khaki pants that I wore everywhere before I had Jack. You know, the comfortable Who Cares What I Look Like pants. Everyone has them. I was dying to wear these pants again, but they never fit. Even when I lost ALL the baby weight, probably 10 pounds less than what I was when I originally bought those pants, they still didn't fit. Sure, I could button them and possibly wear them out, but they didn't fit the way they had before. My body was totally different.

I know this is true because one way I stay motivated is to take measurements. (I also weigh myself every day. I know you are not supposed to do that, but WHATEVER. It's a lot easier for me not to eat a cookie when I know I gained a pound rather than weighing myself once a week and thinking I can get away with that cookie because I'm SURE I did great that week.) So I measure things every couple of weeks. And I still had the journal where I kept track of weight loss before I got pregnant. And I compared my measurements. After losing all the Jack weight, my waist was smaller than pre-Jack but my butt was BIGGER.

And I'm afraid that's just the way it is. Things that fit me fine before probably won't, even when I've lost the last 10 pounds. Having a baby makes you a different shape. You're different. IT SUCKS.

I bet a box of cookies would make me feel better

I am typing this while Jack is eating in the high chair and Molly is in the sling. MULTITASKER!!!

So, is it possible to be discouraged about losing weight BEFORE YOU EVEN START?

That's right. I haven't started yet. I'm starting to cut out the obvious carbs, but I'm still eating fruit (fruit is verboten for the first two weeks) and (hangs head in shame) chocolate. Not, like, chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream, but CHOCOLATE. The pure unadulterated Hershey stuff, my favorite kind. But people, I believe chocolate is the thing keeping me even keeled at the moment and THAT IS A GOOD THING.

(Also? Someone brought me butternut squash lasagna this morning which is, like, God's favorite lasagna.)

ANYWAY.

I also want to start on my Treadmill of TVLiciousness, but I've run into a little problem, that being: WHEN? The available options are Nap Time and Bed Time and oh man am I loathe to give up my internet time for a TREADMILL. Obviously this is what people are talking about when they say you have to FIND THE TIME and MAKE SACRIFICES and PRIORITIZE but this is going to be harder than I thought. Just because I am watching TV doesn't mean I'm going to want to sweat during NAP TIME. GAH.

So there is that. The actually having to start doing something. And then there is the fact that I am sort of done giving myself a break. Not voluntarily. I've had a much easier time of the Post Partumness simply because I knew what was coming. But now I feel like things are back to normal (or, the new normal) and I'm ready to wear People Clothes again instead of shopping in the Hippo Section and WAAAHHH DON'T SHOW ME PICTURES OF MYSELF. Don't let me watch The Biggest Loser either because DUDE I am such a SLACKER.

And? AND? Molly seems to be rather fond of this nursing thing. More than her brother was, at any rate, and guess what I did not lose until I stopped breastfeeding? THE LAST TEN POUNDS. And yes, you read that right. Your trusty blogger has considered the thought of weaning early simply to lose the last ten pounds. DON'T SAY YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT ABOUT IT TOO.

No really, though, I am positive I don't have one of those magical bodies that loses the baby weight (and more!) through breastfeeding. Wouldn't that be nice? But it's not going to happen.

BOOO. Am feeling FAT and GLOOMY.