Well – I’ve taken Reconstructing 30 on the road this weekend. I’m in my adopted hometown of Houston! I lived here for a little over three years, and I really did love it. Houston isn’t for everyone, and it’s very much a car-based city, but it really has some amazing assets, including the Texas Medical Center (the world’s largest!), some really beautiful neighborhoods with fantastic parks and museums, and wonderfully friendly people. If you’ve never visited Houston, here’s a taste of it – convention and visitors’ bureau style:
So I’m here to take care of a bit of business (if you know of anyone who wants to buy a beautiful 2BR/2BA condo near the Texas Medical Center and Rice University, send them my way!), but the nice side benefit is getting to see my wonderful friends here in Houston. Which includes visiting some of Houston’s amazing restaurants… Am I making perfect choices that would lead to consistent weight loss if I ate these things on a daily basis? No. Am I making mainly healthy choices, controlling portions, and eating better than I would have if I were here six months ago? Absolutely.
And that starts to sum up the lessons of the past week for me, which are really the lessons that are the culmination of an experience that’s been going on for three or four weeks now. » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In: Everything’s Bigger in Texas?
No, I haven’t joined an obscure Eastern religion – I’m still a Methodist. For those of you uninitiated in the Greek yogurt craze that’s sweeping foodies and health nuts across the nation, Chobani is a brand of Greek yogurt, usually with fruit on the bottom. My nutritionist recommended Chobani to me way back at our very first appointment on my actual 30th birthday last October. I’ve never been much of a yogurt person, thinking even Breyer’s or Yoplait tasted like flavored bad breath until I was well into my twenties, so this Greek yogurt thing scared me a little bit. Greek yogurt is more pungent than regular yogurt, and I blogged months back on how I just couldn’t do Greek yogurt, or a Scandinavian (maybe it was Icelandic, I can’t rememeber) yogurt called Skyr that I tried. You can read the details here, but long story short, I thought they tasted like @$$.
The last time I tried Chobani was literally the day after I first met with my nutritionist in October. That was enough for me at the time. Truly. My nutritionist is amazing, so I thought we just happened to have different taste preferences when it came to this stuff. Nutritionally, Greek yogurt has a much higher protein content than regular yogurt, so it fills you up more effectively (at least this is my layman’s understanding of the concept), but I had decided I didn’t like Greek yogurt, and that was that. (I can be quite decisive with food when I want to be). Then a series of seemingly innocuous conversations and readings of tweets got me to reconsider. A couple of weeks ago I was » Read more: Nutrition Monday: I’m a Chobani Convert
First, a little fun. Nearly every morning, I have cereal with either half a banana, dried cherries, or blueberries for breakfast. This morning when I had my cereal, I couldn’t get the Ba nah-nah-nah song out of my mind. (Yes – if you read last week’s weigh in post, I apparently go around on Saturday mornings with songs stuck in my head.) If you haven’t seen it – here’s the YouTube sensation you’ve been missing:
Getting down to more serious business… I apparently went bananas with my weight loss this week, too. Well, not quite, but I did post a gain for the first time in a long time. It’s fairly negligible at .8 pounds, but it’s a gain nonetheless, which is not the right direction for the scales to move. I had planned to substitute my weekly weigh in post this week with a six month retrospective. But I thought this gain deserved a post all its own so I could examine why it happened, and not spoil the celebration that will be my six month post.
So why did it happen? I could say it was fluid retention from a high sodium meal the night before, or just that inexplicable variation that sometimes happens, but I’m pretty sure that’s not it this week. As I looked back at my food records, I saw the Mexican dinner with my friend last Saturday night that included more chips than I would normally eat, a wickedly good margarita, plus my half of an order of sopapillas that the waiter sent out because it was our first time trying the restaurant. And I saw the sinfully delicious frozen mocha drink I had at Caribou Coffee later that night. And I saw the little mini-binge I had Wednesday night, when I came home exhausted after having had a sleep study the night before, and then spent 13 hours at the hospital with my dad after his knee replacement surgery. Other than those transgressions, my nutrition for the week was pretty good, but I honestly expected those two nights to add up to a little more than a .8 pound gain.
Especially given that I exercised once, yes once, all week long. My exercise motivation since finishing my 5K has been dismal. I think it’s a combination of things, including a bit of a mind-game that you play with yourself after accomplishing a goal like a race, and also a few things going on that have made my career and home life kind of bananas lately, but it’s not something I’m happy about. So today, when I saw the gain on the scale, I pulled the trigger on registering for my next 5K – the Save our Skin (SOS) 5K here in Atlanta benefiting the Skin Cancer Awareness Network on May 29! Having a race out in front of me really does give me the extra motivation to haul my fat @$$ off the couch and onto the pavement. And I’m going for a session with my trainer, Anna, on Monday where I fully expect and hope to be totally whipped.
So that’s my story this week, and as much as I wish I didn’t have to, I’m sticking to it… Here are the stats:
It’s been a full week. My dad had knee replacement surgery yesterday, and I spent 13+ hours at the hospital with him (he’s doing great – going home tomorrow), I had my own little medical test Tuesday night (a sleep study – more to come in a future post…), and a lot going on with my career right now, too. Which has left little time this week for a) exercise (ugh), and b) blogging. It’s okay – I’ve been focused on the things I needed to be focused on this week, but I’ve definitely missed checking in regularly here on the blog, and checking your blogs, too. I did make the rounds on Google Reader this afternoon, so I’m getting caught up on my blog reading, so I thought tonight I’d do a little blog writing, too. My weekend without blogging turned into almost a week, though!
This all reminded me of a time, maybe a month into writing this blog, when I got totally out of balance with blogging, though. I was spending almost all of my down time working on the blog. First it was the layout, then it was migrating from Wordpress.com to a self-hosted site, then it was getting myself setup with AdSense and as an Amazon affiliate, then it was checking my stats, and checking my stats, and checking my stats. I was a little obsessed. I was enjoying it, and I wasn’t sacrificing time with family and friends, but I was sacrificing time to exercise, and I felt like I was running out of material to write about, because my free time was spent, well, blogging.
I realized I had gotten totally out of balance with blogging. Reconstructingthirty.com had become my focus, to the detriment of » Read more: Blogging and Balance
First, a video to put a smile on your face and brighten up your weekend. The Pink Glove Dance from the good folks at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon (more below on why I’m sharing this):
This morning was my first weekly weigh-in after my first 5K, and I was a little worried earlier in the week that I may actually post a gain! I gave myself Saturday (the day of the race) off with my eating plan. That Saturday started with the free pizza they had after the race, and devolved from there into a Mexican dinner that included queso, chalupas, and cake (it was a party for a charity organization I volunteer with, and I wanted to enjoy it). I indulged without guilt, but the day after the 5K, my scales were up 4 pounds!!! I’ve done well with eating since, but since my exercise this week has also been half of what I strive for (my goal is 4 days cardio / 2 days strength training per week, and this week I only got in 2 days cardio / 1 day strength training), I was afraid I wouldn’t post a net loss this week. But I did! Here are the stats: » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In: Are you Down, Down, Down, Down, Down?
Occasionally on this blog, I’ll mention products or services, and I should make pretty clear that the makers of those products haven’t provided me with compensation of any sort. Unless you count the enjoyment or benefit I’ve gotten from discovering the product or store itself! And that’s definitely case with my new favorite place, Trader Joe’s.
I’ve heard friends and colleagues rave about Trader Joe’s for years, and I had successfully avoided setting foot in one until about a month ago. I’m the type who if everyone in my world seems to be doing something, it makes it kind of not so interesting to me. Not that I want to be different, because my alternative is shopping at the regular, old-fashioned supermarket, but more that I’m not one to get caught up in trends and more often than not, I find things that get rave reviews to almost always fall short of the hype. So I’d drive by the Trader Joe’s stores in the city and almost purposely avoid them.
Then some of my blogger friends began tweeting and blogging about Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter, and it sounded really good. So one evening after work, I decided to drop in and pick some up. If you haven’t been to Trader Joe’s before, their philosophy is » Read more: Nutrition Monday: My New Favorite Place, Trader Joe’s!
This past weekend was a bit of a nutritional challenge for me, but man was it good. I went to visit my Grandmother – and being a good Southern family, we call her MaMa instead of Grandma or whatever other more generic grandmotherly names you might imagine. Though in the South, MaMa is a pretty common term for grandmother. It’s a little more casual and down home than the more formal “Grandmother” (though my other Grandmother, was always, well, “Grandmother,” and she was the warmest, most casual person you’d ever meet – a far cry from the steely soap opera “Grandmother”), but not straight up country like Mee-Maw. Please. We do have a little class. ;-)
Anyhow, MaMa is an AMAZING Southern cook. She measures nothing, even when baking cornbread and biscuits, but everything comes out perfectly. This woman’s cornbread is to die for. I actually imagine that when I do die, I’ll pass through the Pearly Gates and someone will hand me a pan of MaMa’s cornbread and tell me the calories no longer matter! When we used to go visit when I was a kid, MaMa always had a huge meal waiting for us on the kitchen table of the farmhouse she and my PaPa lived in until I was a teenager. They weren’t actually on a farm, but their property backed up to one, and my summers consisted of feeding the cows next door, helping PaPa in the garden, and helping MaMa shuck peas. This was quite the adventure for the city kid, and I still long for it every now and then, even though I’m a dyed in the wool East Coast city type. Anyway, the meal on that farmhouse kitchen table usually had anywhere from 5-7 vegetables, cooked with bacon fat, and always including fried okra, mashed potatoes, biscuits, cornbread, fresh sliced tomatoes, and 1-2 meats (either fried chicken, ham, or roast beef). Did I mention the woman weighs all of maybe 120 pounds? Further proof that life is not fair. » Read more: Nutrition Monday: Grandmother’s Goodies
A while back, I was celebrating being out of the 250’s and into the 240’s. Then my scales broke, and I had to buy new ones – new scales that weigh about 7.5 pounds heavier than my old ones. So, my 240’s became 256.5 when I got the new scales a few weeks ago, and I’ve been battling to get out of the 250’s again ever since.
Yeah – I know. My total loss hasn’t changed, but that doesn’t make my desire any less to see the 240’s on the scale again. Last week, when I weighed in at 251.8, I thought this week may be the week to leave the dreaded Two-Five-Oh’s once again. But this morning, I was at » Read more: Weekly Weigh In: Eff You, 250’s…
Wow – it’s been a really busy week. So many things coming together, coming to an end, and new beginnings all right at once! I’m doing my best to stay on top of my nutrition and exercise in the midst of this craziness, but I’ve been fresh out of time to blog in detail, read your amazing blogs, and keep up with all of you on twitter! I should have some time to catch up this weekend, but until then – how do you manage with nutrition and exercise when life gets busy beyond normal levels?
This morning, I read the blog of a good blogger friend of mine, and it had to do with cravings and emotional eating. Well, I’m an emotional eater, and while I have no scientific evidence for what I’m about to say, I’m willing to bet the vast majority of overweight/obese people also struggle with their emotional relationship to food. For some it’s worse than others, I imagine, but I’m perfectly willing to admit I was a complete junkie when I began my reconstruction. If I had a bad day at work, I had no interest in downing a bottle of wine or having a few stiff martinis. Nope – an alkie, I’m not. But if I had a stressful day, I would sure eat the hell out of a box of Fudge Stripe cookies, or a pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, or most of a pizza, or…well…you get the ugly, way too honest picture.
This past week in fact, I was under a good bit of stress, and I ended up having a few snacks late at night that I normally wouldn’t now that I’ve seen the light, yelled hallelujah, and changed my ways. The snacks were fairly healthy, portion controlled, and nowhere in the same zip code of a binge, but they were a few more calories than I normally would have eaten that late at night. And they usually consisted of a craving of one sort of another.
Cravings are a fact of life. We all have foods that we love that aren’t the greatest thing in the world for our health or our weight loss efforts, and it’s just a given that we’re going to crave those foods from time to time. In the beginning of my journey – the cravings were intense and frequent. Now they’re fairly rare, with varying levels of intensity. The most recent was for a Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuit, a craving I tried to blame on my dog. I’m a firm believer that as soon as you make a food forbidden, you’re going to crave it even more, so one of my little rules for myself before I even went to my nutritionist for the first time was that nothing would be totally off limits. Over time, I’ve come up with my Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings – which I’m sure are heavily influenced by tidbits of advice I’ve gotten from my nutritionist, as well as some of my readers, and I’ve put all that advice together with some of my own common sense: » Read more: Nutrition Monday: Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings
I'm Chad, and I really am reconstructing my life at 30. I'm taking charge and creating what my life will be as I plow into my 30's at breakneck speed! The main focus of my transformation is losing weight and getting healthy by changing my lifestyle with nutrition and exercise. But I'm also pursuing my passions, looking for love, and trying to have some fun along the way.
