Week 4 in Review, Slow but Steady

Week 1, Monday, 10/5/15, Weight: 148.8 lbs.

Week 2, Monday, 10/12/15, Weight: 145.2 lbs.

Week 3, Tuesday, 10/20/15, Weight: 147.0 lbs.

Week 4, Monday, 10/26/15, Weight: 146.2 lbs.

Week 5, Monday, 11/2/15, Weight: 145.2 lbs.  Down 1 lb from last week, and down 3.6 lbs overall in 4 weeks.

Slow but steady, still moving in the right direction.  Considering I just navigated through Halloween and a (perilously yummy) visit to my in-laws, I’m pretty psyched!  I’m averaging a loss of just under a pound a week still, and I’ve got about 1 ½ more pounds to lose in 3 more weeks (for my short-term goal).  I can do it!

My successes with my goals from last week:

1. I’m still working out 3x/week, increasing my time and speed on the treadmill.  I signed my husband JK and I up to run a 5K race on Thanksgiving Day in the early morning (crazy, I know!), so that’s additional motivation to keep jogging.  I’ve never done a late-fall race before, so that’s progress—I’m proud of myself for signing us up.  We’re running it with JK’s sister and husband.  It should feel really good to burn off a few calories before the big Thanksgiving binge meal.

2. I’m still eating green veggies, though I think I still have room to bump that up (not in 2 meals/day this week).

3. I’m still keeping my food diary up-to-date.  And I think it really helps to hold me accountable, and it’s nice to flip back and see what I ate.  If I were trying to figure out calories though, I would be in some serious trouble.  It’s hard to know exactly what you’re eating unless you measure/weigh everything (too much work), and then spend lots of time looking it up.  Homemade food is hard to estimate calorie counts too, so I’m glad I’m not trying to do all that.  I’d give up for sure, like I have in the past!

4. I could still reduce the quantity of my food eaten.  I’m doing better (since I remember finally feeling a bit of healthy hunger this week), but still need to work on this.

5. As far as sweets go, I skipped dessert completely on 2 days.  Not meeting my goal (dessert only 2x/week) yet, but better than last week!  Halloween definitely was a trick (ha!) because there are so many temptations lying around.  The good thing is that we didn’t open any bags of candy until literally right before the trick-or-treaters arrived, and then I just set aside a few pieces of candy.  We ran almost completely out of the candy from the kiddies, so that’s good.  Eating at my in-laws on Sunday was actually more difficult, because we were celebrating birthdays with cake and they had lots of leftover Halloween candy lying around.  Also, I decided to make my annual homemade caramel sauce (to put on apples) to share with everyone.  I ate WAY too many sweets on Sunday, but the good news is that we only had a teeny bit of caramel sauce left to bring home, so I can't continue to eat that all week and feel bad.  Yum, it was good, and now it’s gone.  Whew!

6. I met my goal of eating out only once this week, and I had a green entrée salad and side of soup, instead of a burger and fries.  Yay me!  Also, we decided to make homemade fish fry (beer battered!) instead of eating out.  It was awesome tasting, and I ate so much less than if we had eaten out.  It was a little messy (greasy drippings!), but worth it.  I’ve been thinking about eating out, though, and I don’t want to limit my number of eat-outs a week if that’s going to limit my time spent with friends.  If a friend wants to get together and eat out, then I’m not going to worry about it; I’m going to do it!  (Within reason—I won’t be eating out every day.)

7. This also goes for baking.  Baking has always been my relaxation time, my feel-good time.  This past week, I got together with a good baking buddy, and she and I made some new experiments (homemade English muffins), and yummy naughty goodies (S'mores cupcakes).  They were tasty, and I could freeze most of them to eat in the future for slow enjoyment.  It was good to see her, and I’m not going to say no to baking if it means turning down a good time together.  Incidentally, this week I did turn down a request to make cake (and made caramel instead) because I know cake is my weakness (I LOVE cake!) and I would have eaten way too much.  And I did not make apple pie (yet).  I’m definitely going through less flour, sugar, and butter these days.  Good thing for my waistline!

How did everyone do wading through the Halloween candy?  What’s your favorite?  (Mine used to be Snickers, but this year it’s Reese’s PB Cups, for sure!)  If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your comments!

Forward Flavor!