Refocusing

I am convinced that this is the hardest thing I have ever done. I get a good week and then I slip up and then I spiral down, and then I realize how far I have fallen and I climb back up.

THAT IS THE POINT! I climb back up... I have spent my WHOLE life eating bad and enjoying all that "bad" food. My mind frame and the way I have lived is not going to change over night. I am going to have slip up and off weeks, but now I have the ability to realize that I am messing up and that I need to pull myself back on track.

Don't let bad days slow you down, don't let bad weekends slow you down, and don't let bad weeks slow you down!

I CAN DO THIS!

OK, now I am a Believer

This juice has really started to grow on me. I woke up this morning (one of my days off) and CRAVED my morning juice. No coffee, no sugars, nothing but the juice. So I woke up, Friday is my weigh in day... (scary music plays now) and I have decided to measure myself this go around (even scarier), and weighed/measured myself....

7 pounds this week and 9 stinkin inches!!!!!

Now, when I saw how much weight I lost I thought it was just gonna be the usual water weight I lose at the beginning of a diet. But then the 9 inches came into play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you lost weight, now what? Well, I am going to keep drinking the juice. Maybe not as religiously as I did this week, but really it tastes pretty darn good! I am also going to eat more then a salad for dinner. I love my salad but I need other foods in my life... :) I am really happy right now. If you ever wanna start a new lifestyle, I definitely recommend juicing. I am going to drink it still because it tastes good and I feel so much better... ok this post is more of a rant about how HAPPY I am but its 9 freakin inches I am allowed to celebrate a little.

Hiding Sugar

I have A LOT of time on my hands at work.. so that just gives me more time to look up dieting stuff. I found an article about Sugar that I found pretty interesting. Sugar is hiding in everything! In the article they listed some of the secret names that food companies use to hide the sugar in their food. 

• Sucrose
• Evaporated Cane Juice
• Agave Nectar
• Fruit Juice Concentrate
• 100% Fruit Juice
• High Fructose Corn Syrup
• The -oses (sucrose, glucose, and fructose, but did you know galactose, maltose, dextrose, and lactose)
• Blackstrap Molasses
• Organic Brown Rice Syrup
• And Many more... (Barley malt, golden syrup, diastatic malt, diastase, treacle, panocha, sorghum syrup)

On the last page they tell you this... 

"... the key to monitoring your sugar is determining just how much each serving contains. How? Check the nutrition label for total grams of sugar, and divide that by four (each teaspoon of sugar is equal to 4 grams.) That’s how many teaspoons of sugar are really in your cookie, your ketchup, and your no-sugar-added fruit juice."

I did not know that! I thought it was definitely interesting, and a good way to be able to visualize how much sugar you are eating. 

Day 3 Juicing

Yesterday was hard. I think I hit the juice fast wall I think. Its normal, I guess, I did stop caffeine pretty suddenly and I ate like crap for the last 14 years (I am pretty sure my mom fed me pretty well the first 10 years of my life... its when I started choosing what to eat is when the problems started).  There has to be an adjustment period, my body has to get used to be fed, actually fed instead of the crap I have been shoving into it. 

I am going to work out tonight for the first time since I started juicing. I am actually pretty excited I have been missing it the last couple days. 

I'm not creative today...

I am on day 2 of juicing... WooHoo! 

I want to chew. The salad for dinner last night was Great! We did lots of red and green leaf lettuce, spinach, bell peppers, onion, tomato, some sunflower seeds from sprouts, and Chicken! Talk about tasty... and now I am drinking juice again. 

Ok, the juice isn't that bad. This morning I am having Carrot, Apple, Ginger juice. It is really sweet, but  good. I still don't know how I feel about the ginger. It definitely has its own taste... Here are some pretty pictures of my juice this morning. 

Now the Green Juice is a whole different story. Yesterday all I drank was the green juice. (I woke up late and didn't want to have to mess with making two different types of juice) I also did not cut the yellow part of the lemon off, so that made it super bitter. I also learned that I really don't like celery juice, so I cut that in half. 

Here is my juice from yesterday... 

When I went grocery shopping on Sunday I bought 2 bunches of Kale, and used it on yesterday (monday) so I had to buy more after work. But I found purple kale, regular kale, and italian kale. So naturally I bought some of all of them. I tried the purple kale last night when I was juicing, and we found out that purple kale doesn't give much juice when the regular Kale gave a lot more, so I have both in my juice for today. So needless to say my juice today isn't that green today... and actually looks pretty gross, but I think it tastes better then the bright green one.

Well, I feel great so far! I lost 2 pounds last week just doing a normal watch my calories and exercise plan. I wanted to amp it up a little this week before I go back to school. I am really happy I did, I feel great. Yeah, I wanna chew and eat and not drink anymore juice, but energy and just feeling wise I feel pretty good!

Good luck everyone!

The PLAN

I have been posting that I am working on making my plan. There are two that I have made, one for my compulsive overeating and the other to try out this juicing stuff.

I will start with my overeating. I told ya'll that through my research they suggest keeping a journal and letting your emotions out that way instead of eating. Then there is the good old plan of a food journal, we all know what this is, you write down every single thing you put in your mouth to keep track of calories, points, fat, or whatever else you are counting. (I'm personally counting calories) Now both of these journals seem wonderful, and like a great idea that will really work.

So my plan is that I am going to do both (seems pretty obvious), and then Sundays I am going to compare. This is something I haven't seen a lot of, maybe its an obvious step that everyone just does naturally. I am going to look for really bad days emotionally in one journal and then flip to my food journal and see how I did that day. If I ate like crap I will be able to see that I was emotionally eating or if I ate really great I am going to give myself a little pat on the back.

It seems pretty simple, I have gotten a lot better about writing everything in my food journal this last week so this week I will start my feelings journal and see how it goes. I am "healing" myself and it is going to be a process. For example, if I was writing in my journal yesterday I would see that I was super upset with the way the Broncos played in the stinkin' playoff game and then I would see in my food journal that I ate a bag of popcorn to ease those emotions (I was gonna go for a bag of potato chips that my boyfriend was eating but chose popcorn instead, so I should probably put that in my journal as well)

Now for the juicing experiment. I don't think this will be something that I am going to get crazy about. I might be wrong, but there are a lot of blogs about it so if I really enjoy it I will just post links to the blogs that focus solely on that. Like my first post said, this blog is probably going to be more for me then anyone else. So my plan this week is going to be a temporary thing as of right now for a "Kickoff" and then I will go from there.

This is an example of what I am going to try to do...

Breakfast	Lunch	Snack	Dinner	If you’re hungry
Carrot Apple Ginger Juice 3 Carrots 2 Apples 1” Ginger	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Reboot Green Salad Reboot Dressing. Grilled Chicken	Veggies Nuts Fruit
Carrot Apple Ginger Juice 3 Carrots 2 Apples 1” Ginger	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Reboot Green Salad Reboot Dressing. Grilled Chicken	Veggies Nuts Fruit
Purple Power Juice 6 cups Concord Grapes 1 Golden Delicious Apple 2, 2x2” pieces Ginger ½ cup Blackberries	Reboot Green Salad Reboot Dressing. Grilled Chicken	Sunset Blend Juice 1 lg Sweet Potato 1 med Carrot 1 Red Bell Pepper 2 lg Red Beets 2 Golden Delicious Apples 1 Orange (optional)	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Veggies Nuts Fruit
Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Reboot Green Salad Reboot Dressing. Grilled Chicken	Sunset Blend Juice 1 lg Sweet Potato 1 med Carrot 1 Red Bell Pepper 2 lg Red Beets 2 Golden Delicious Apples 1 Orange (optional)	Arugula Spinach Salad 2 cups Arugula 1 cup Spinach 1/3 Avocado ½ cup thinly sliced Red Onion ½ cup chopped Tomato ½ cup Jicama	Veggies Nuts Fruit
Carrot Apple Ginger Juice 3 Carrots 2 Apples 1” Ginger	Green Juice 6 leaves Kale 2 cups Spinach ½ Cucumber 4 Celery stalks 2 Apples 1” Ginger root	Sunset Blend Juice 1 lg Sweet Potato 1 med Carrot 1 Red Bell Pepper 2 lg Red Beets 2 Golden Delicious Apples 1 Orange (optional)	Reboot Green Salad Reboot Dressing. Grilled Chicken	Veggies Nuts Fruit

It seems pretty intense and a lot of juice to me, so I may be chewing on a lot of the veggies, nuts, and fruits. I also incorporated Grilled Chicken into a salad at night because I know myself, and I will want to eat at dinnertime or at least at one point in the day.

Great story though, my dad ordered a juicer from an infomercial late one night. We used it a couple times and then it got put into the box and shoved downstairs. So just my luck my parents had a juicer that I could use to see if I will like this before having to spend a lot of money. Granted, my juicer is from 1999 and its not really "high tech" but it will get the job done.

There it is, I will keep you posted on how all of this goes!

Do this... Don't do this

I have been reading and reading and reading about all of the different diets out there...

I have also been watching a lot of stuff some of which includes:

Food Matters

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead

Weight of a Nation

Hungry for Change

and some other documentaries that I cannot remember at the moment.

What a lot of these videos are talking about is Juicing and/or juice fasting. What they were saying really starting to peak my interest, I mean Joe (from Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead) did some amazing stuff for his health! So i started looking up what I could do and how it all worked and stuff. Let me tell you, do a search on juice fasts and you will get a lot of results... but how realistic is this for my everyday life. I know your not suppose to fast for the rest of your life but how do you go about it? So I looked, I recommend you look, and Joe has come up with a program called Rebooting, and it seems like a great idea to kick-off a diet.

My only concern is that you are eating/drinking all fruits and veggies ALL of the time. I know people do this all the time, and I have learned a lot about getting back to "nature" and eating the way we all should. Right now however, I need some other stuff in my life, I need some bread, nuts, and meat. After all  this is going to be my eating habits for the REST OF MY LIFE. So I dug deeper, and I decided to search "implementing juicing into a healthy diet" and all I got was juicing fasts. Now I cannot be the first person to read/watch/listen to all of this great stuff about juicing but still want something that resembles a normal diet. 

I see that juicing is great reboot (look it up seriously) for your system, but if it is so great for that how do you keep doing it and eat other food too? If you find something let me know! I am going to come up with my own little plan for right now though. 

I Eat My Feelings

My last post I mentioned that I had every "bad" eating habit that there was. Well really they are all about the same thing. you can call it binge eating, compulsive eating, overeating, whatever you would like but they all end up being the same thing I think. 

I have learned that losing weight is a physical journey and that is where most people leave it (including me until now). There is a HUGE mental part of losing weight and becoming healthy. I understood this, but how do to attack and handle something when it is something you can see. The mental part is the hard part, you can't see the change and other people don't know that it really exists (half the time you don't know that it does) but at the same time it controls EVERYTHING you do. When your sad you eat, when your happy you go out and celebrate and eat, when your stressed you eat, your tired eat something... 

What do you do when you want to end this endless cycle of eating and then eating again because you feel bad for eating. Well, I'm not a professional so don't ask me. I do have this handy friend Google however, and Google happens to have answers for most questions I ask. I found an article/blog called "Overcoming a compulsive eating disorder" Everything she was saying, I have felt! Imagine that... someone else has fought this battle and they are letting me read about it. If you struggle with something like this I recommend reading it, and if you don't (lucky!) I still recommend you read it, because you never know what you will get from it! 

One thing that she said in the article was:

"Telling a person with compulsive eating disorder to eat smaller portions, go on diet or eat healthier foods is like putting a burger and chips in front of someone with anorexia nervosa: pointless and painful." 

I have felt that. I know everything I am suppose to do. I have read and read and read all about the best ways to diet and know all the tips and tricks that you are suppose to do. It is just actually doing it that is the problem. In comes the mental plateau, I can know everything and try and try and try but if I don't feel it deep in my soul and in my thick head it isn't going to go anywhere. One thing they suggest when you look up how to overcome this obstacle is to make a journal, not just a food journal (like everywhere else) but a old school, honest to goodness, journal. Putting your feelings into words and then letting it out somehow instead of eating those feelings. 

I just started really researching this, but I haven't seen a lot of my plan. (Next post... I am still getting my thoughts sorted out on that one) 

So I'm Back....

So a couple months ago I wanted to lose weight and wrote a couple posts about what I was doing. Then... I dislocated my knee cap (ouch!) and I gave up. I know what I should have done is focus on my diet and keep pushing forward, but I didn't.

I gave in, I have a problem with emotional eating, overeating, compulsive eating, binge eating, basically every kind of "bad" eating, I do it. So I gained and gained and gained. So now restarting this journey I am even bigger then before. I still don't have confidence to do this, so I am trying to start small and to just keep trucking.

Something really cool though is Colorado has the super cool program right now called "Weigh to Win." They are going to pay me money to lose weight! Now I know that I should be losing weight for myself, to be healthy, and to live a longer life, BUT who wouldn't want a little incentive like money? So you go to one of the free weigh in sites (they are everywhere) and weigh in every quarter. This first quarter ends April 17th and the first step of the money is if you lose 5% of your body weight and you get $15. Now its not a lot of money but it is something. So I am making that my first small goal. I would prefer to do it before my birthday on March 26th (so that is my real goal).

Lose 5% of my body weight by my birthday. There now I said it, I am putting it out into the world and am not going to let myself down.

Oh, did I mention that they take a picture of you when you weigh in? Yeah not so pretty, here it goes... I am never going to have to look like that again!