What motivates me?

Let’s talk motivation. As you might already know, my friends at Fitbit are my main motivation to walk every day and do something for my health and my weight-loss. But of course there’s some other incentives that come along while losing weight as I start to feel better and look better. That’s what I call my “friendly internal motivation”.

There’s an unfriendly type of motivation though. One I experienced firsthand this week. My husband just started a new job and he invited me to come over to have lunch with him. I accepted happily to have a lunch date! I came to his new office, rang the doorbell and a thin, young woman with long hair came towards me, walking like in a movie: in slow motion, bouncing hair and gleaming smile included. Her beauty was the first thing that popped in my head in that very moment, I honestly just thought “what a pretty young girl”. But then my “soundtrack LP” scratched just like in the movies and my second thought was: “hold on a minute! she’s the one who opens the door and makes coffee for my husband?”
Mind you that early in the morning the last he sees of me, is me in my PJs and my hair looking like a lioness saying goodbye. And there you have it! This is what I call “unfriendly outside motivation”. I wonder if I have to get up at five in the morning to get ready before he even gets up? Because even though some may not agree with me, I have to put a little bit of extra effort to look good for him because if my PJs every morning are his last sight, and goes off to work to “THAT” hey! I have some competition to beat. I know I will get there and be successful one day and he won’t have to look the other way! This sort of motivation will probably beat my Fitbit friends any day!

“Bloody” good results

Every year in March I go to the doctor for a general checkup (a physical). This year was no exception.

This time and after some weight loss (20 pounds so far) I have two great achievements to report. The first one was when they did the ECG the doctor came in and saw my results and asked me if I was practicing sports. He is a man (hence not so attentive to that kind of detail) and I am notorious for my yo-yo dieting so he definitely did not notice it because of my weight loss. So I was curious just by how he noticed. Instead he said that my resting metabolic rate was so much lower than last year’s, just the way it happens with athletes. He by no means tried to compare me to an athlete, but he said that my values compared from one year to another were extremely different. This made me extremely happy because I never ever practice any sports except the 3+ months I’ve been walking. It works!

The second news came a week later after the blood results came back. I have to say that I’ve never had anything that’s not healthy like cholesterol, sugar or triglycerides on abnormal high levels, but even these went down a bit. But the best news came in the form of my iron levels going up. They were always below normal And without any supplements or vitamins I have normalized them after three years of suffering very extremely low iron levels just by eating healthily and why not?: Those spinach green smoothies are really working! In all seriousness this has a wonderful effect on all the side effects I was having from having a low iron level and I am happy as can be.

Funny side note: since my Fitbit was clipped to my bra the doctor asked me what it was. I explained it to him and he was sold. For a moment I thought I should contact the company asking them to give me some incentive for being such a proactive advertiser of their product, hey I’ve sold a couple for real! I love it.

Healthy habits paying off in many ways!

Do we need a “safety blanket”?

The other day I ran into a woman I had met 12 years ago in a Weight Watchers meeting. We started our journey together and we both had similar amounts of weight to lose. So we bonded during those hard months and became each other’s motivation with a tiny hint of very healthy competition. At this time, 12 years younger, I did the Weight Watchers program pretty successfully and in a very reasonable amount of time I lost the weight I was hoping for, was fitter than ever and feeling better than I’ve ever felt before.

This woman and I finished at the same time and received the gold star to put in our “Weight Watchers 10% keychain” (for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: when you join Weight Watchers and lose 10% of your bodyweight they give you a keychain and then you collect a couple of charms at some milestones) the golden star is symbolic that you’ve reached a gold membership. This entitles you to go to all the meetings and not having to pay for them.

Well, I reached my desired weight and thought I was “cured” forever and so I stopped going. As life went on, I gained a lot of weight back and I have never been able to reach that goal again.

Coming back to the present: I ran into this woman and we immediately recognized each other. Upon asking her how she kept her weight off and was fit after all these years she just took out her keychain and oh boy was I surprised! What I saw made me jealous and angry at myself. Her keychain had 12 stars!!! She knew she had to keep on going every year to keep the weight at bay. She did it right, she kept it up, she realize her battle with weight was an ongoing one and she needed the support.

I on the other hand, needed the support but didn’t use it. I still have my keychain with one lonely star while she has been fit and healthy for the past 12 years and that could’ve been me. I guess looking at my star now let’s me know I could do it too.

I spoke about it with a friend and she “psychoanalyzed” it and told me that it couldn’t be healthy that it was just a “safety blanket”. But boy do I want that safety blanket! In fact I need it! This also reminds me why I hate commenting about this with people close to me. (Read my previous post)

(https://jellybean10k.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/i-absolutely-hate-sharing-my-weight-loss-journey/ )

I realize that the keychain is probably a good outside motivator (that obviously only comes in second to the feeling of a fit body)

So here I am trying to go for that gold trying to go for filling my own keychain. I hope I make it this time and then I won’t stop until it’s full! Maybe by that time I’m in the habit of being healthy. Or maybe I’ll just get a bigger keychain.

My Fitbit fiasco!!!

Yesterday I woke up and as always was trying to get my exercise done first thing in the morning because otherwise I get lazy during the day and then it won’t happen or only with a lot of extra effort. So by the time it was 10 o’clock I already had clocked in 8000 steps on my Fitbit.
At night I was invited to a party, but otherwise wasn’t feeling very well during the day so I spent long hours laying down and by the time I had to leave I only had 1,000 steps more. Needless to say I went to the party and spent a lot of time sitting down (eating of course) and didn’t walk much. By the time the party people started getting into the mood of dancing I looked at my Fitbit and it had already turned 12 o’clock so I couldn’t see how many steps I did that day! (This made me really anxious because there was a chance that it was under 10,000) I came home and immediately synchronized Fitbit and what I saw made me want to cry. In six weeks of nonstop 10,000 I reached only 9,602 steps for the first time. I cannot start to explain the horrible feeling I got and I can’t undo it. (398 steps short: that is 4 minutes walking or dancing to one single song)

I don’t know why and even though no one can see this but me, it still makes a “hole” in my whole idea to never go to bed with at least 10,000. I need to add that dancing that night gave me 6000+steps before 2 o’clock and still this didn’t serve as consolation for me.

Even though today will be a very successful day given my 6000 steps before I even woke up, my chart isn’t uniform anymore and my distress is big (insert sad face and violin music here)

This can never happen again and that is another reason why I love my Fitbit! It brings an ambition and a drive I never knew I had.

Here’s to a future of 10,000 or more and NEVER less!

My XL Birthday

As my daughter was looking at Roman numerals in mathematics, my birthday was coming up and I realized that even the Romans thought 40 was an extra-large number and hence XL!

I don’t know why a depression of sorts washed over me in that moment because I’m not one to be “down”on my birthday. I actually love celebrating birthdays, but I don’t know what it is with 40 that made me so sad. It was maybe the fact that I was already an older teenager when my mother turned 40 and to me she was an “old person” in my eyes. I realize now that she was young but that’s not what you see as a child. Also the fact that I’ve been watching too much “Sex and the City” and heard too many times the cliché “40 is the new 20” but when I looked in the mirror I looked nothing like those fabulous girls in their 40s. I was also expecting a sort of sexual awakening which people talk about and it just didn’t happen overnight. But that is a whole different subject that in my case has to do with my body and self-esteem.

Anyway it hasn’t been an easy pill to swallow, but I guess I’m here and I guess everybody gets to that point at some point in time. I won’t deny that it is so depressing to read biographies of actors and see that they were born in the 90s it just sounds so unrealistic to me, but it is ultimately reality and life goes on!

I decided to take a whole new approach and see that if I want to become who I wanted to be at 40 I still have 365 days to make it happen “carrying” the same number on my drivers license and it was a coincidence that the number 40 is also the pounds I’m carrying overweight according to my size and frame.

So here I am looking for support and if only in form of a blog in which I get to vent and hopefully share my experiences because I am really open and “verbal” but this is no subject I like to share with my close friends.

Hope I find some like-minded people around here. Till then happy XL to me!

I absolutely HATE sharing my weight-loss journey.

I was thinking about why I absolutely HATE sharing my weight-loss story with people. But no,no,no, not you, please keep on reading my good anonymous friends. If I didn’t want anyone to know I wouldn’t write it. I am talking about people I know personally.

During my newest and hopefully last weight-loss journey I am taking a new approach: it’s called “Workout and Shut your mouth”, but not only shutting it not to shove unnecessary foods in it (that too) 🙊but to not say a word about it. I say new because all my previous efforts had involved a whole lot of calorie counting and limiting but never combined with physical activity, and I gave all information to my family and friends about every single ounce I dropped and all the hard work involved in my process. All to no avail.

Why don’t I like sharing my experience with anybody I know? (friend or family member). Not because I don’t think they don’t wish me well nor love me ( I know they do) but because this is for me and I do not enjoy sharing my biggest struggle and weakness with people who clearly have not understood before and seemingly won’t understand now. This is not my first time around and I have proven myself that whenever people get the information that I am “dieting” they immediately used their self-appointed right to give their opinion and/or start asking me if I’m allowed to eat something, if I have stuck to my exercise routine that day or when they see something in my mouth being chewed, that is the cue for them to ask wether or not it is conducive to my goal to eat this or that. Those things are rather discouraging for me and don’t help me further. On top of it all I seem to be surrounded by people who have never really struggled with this and naturally thin people trying to give me advice is not my idea of motivation and makes me eventually go back to square one.
(Please note I said naturally thin people and am not talking about people who have struggled with this experience and are now thin, as I believe those could understand)

This time I’ve kept my mouth shut and by all means have even resorted to “lying” to get out of some situations which otherwise would have meant that I am in some sort of weight-loss quest. When people know I just don’t seem to find the right balance between being open about it and successful at it.

This is the reason why I like my Fitbit friends so much, I don’t even know where they find themselves in this big world, still they are so motivating to me without even knowing it. Then there are my favorite: weight loss bloggers: these are the people who I really like to share my story with because these people understand what I’m going through, we are battling with the same.

Because let’s be honest if you’re anything like me and you’re struggling with weight loss how many times can you hear the words “it’s about what you put in your body versus what you burn” or “you have to be more active” “change what you’re doing” or “it is so easy, simple mathematics just eat less” and the worse “you must have a slow metabolism that is the way you are meant to look”. We all know that we are not here because we want to.

So for now I’ll continue writing about it and just look forward to the day the people who know me and love me approach me and (after skipping all the ugly middle part) tell me that I look great! I really can’t wait.

Who feels this way? Or do you find it better to share?

A Fitbit for Christmas

So I got a Fitbit for Christmas,

And I wanted to write about it because when I first got it, I took hours upon hours looking in the internet for somebody who has had experience with it. Of course what I secretly wanted to find was probably 200+ pound people that now were 120 using it for a couple of months, but we all know this won’t happen even though I feed myself off of these success stories and I never seem to be able to write my own.

I have been obsessed with my weight since I was a teenager, and it is not a nice obsession especially when you hit 40 and you realize that all of your efforts have always been in vain. I have tried so many diets and exercise efforts to try to lose weight but as my grandmother once told me: “don’t ever lose weight, whatever gets lost can be always found, try to get rid of it!” And that’s exactly what I haven’t been able to do. Of course I’ve lost weight and when I think about it, in my lifetime I’ve literally lost my “whole” self twice but every time I’ve gone back to the beginning with some extras too.

To add to my failed diet efforts, ever since I was a child I never liked sports or any type of physical exercise. I don’t know if I can say that is because I suffer asthma and it is really difficult for me to breath while exercising. It makes it so much harder for me to catch my breath and therefore I get tired very easily then I stop doing what I’m doing, the next day I don’t do it anymore and it just becomes a circle that I never get out of.

People tell me that maybe walking would be the perfect exercise for me but my nature has made me really lazy and every movement “costs”me so much. Besides, to be quite honest I just don’t picture myself going around a park 20-30 times looking at the same trees. I think I’d be bored to pieces. Now give me a Shopping Mall maybe that’ll do it! 😀

I just wish one day I will get that feeling to exercise and believe all the perky-permanent-smiled fitness instructors who say: “it was so awesome to sweat and run and feel my muscles hurt” to me is almost like saying ” I love feeling jet lagged, I love feeling tired or I love feeling sad” . I just don’t get it.

This is my first time writing about it so please don’t think I have a success story. I haven’t had one (well at least I haven’t had one like the ones I love, of people who have lost pounds upon pounds of weight)
But my very short success story to share is: (and I won’t say there’s nobody because I’m sure there are, but I belong to the top of the list of people who hate moving) ever since I got my gadget I have been compelled to quantify how much I move and therefore I MOVE!

I was shocked to read that an average American walks 5000 steps a day (of the 10000 recommended) and when I first read it I thought: “well 5000 is not that bad” But I didn’t realize that I am even more sedentary. And on a normal day I walked 2,500 steps!!!!!

So how can I ever accomplish 10,000? I have to say it is not easy, I really have to push myself. But looking at numbers at the end of the day really makes me look forward to it.

But if something has really motivated me it is my “friends”. No, I am not talking about the people I know and hang out with here, because for some odd, maybe subconscious reason, I am constantly surrounded by very skinny people that have never had a problem with their weight, go figure!) My “Fitbit friends” are the people that I randomly chose on the Fitbit website based on a starting date comparable to mine. It is a group of 19 people and granted they don’t even know it, but they are the ones that keep me going. I have set myself the goal to never to be under the top 10 of these 19 people and it is not easy because there’s a lot of power walkers among them. But those keep me motivated by waking up every morning and seeing what position I find myself from 19. It is very interesting because every day I’ll be in a different number since not everybody synchronizes so readily like I do, sometimes I am in a really high position and all of a sudden somebody who really walked a lot but had not synchronized in a couple of days, comes pushing me “down” and taunting my pride so that even my lazy self has to go back up.

Since I live somewhere where it almost rains 360 days of the year I don’t really go out and like aforementioned going around the same trees doesn’t really motivate me, so I’m doing my steps following “walk away the pounds by Leslie Sansone”
I turn the volume down and play music that makes me move a little more. It is still very difficult for me and this is the hour I dread every day but it is the only thing that gets almost 7000 steps in an hour which obviously combined with my normal daily I reach 10,000 and I even started moving a little more on my daily life so basically I am averaging 11 to 12,000 every day which is something I never thought possible. I still have asthma issues and I take my medication sometimes before, sometimes after the workout. But I have never and I am being honest: NEVER kept an exercise routine for 4 weeks and on top be happy and looking forward.

I guess this little gadget is not going to make me lose any weight just by existing but it’s making me move more and every time I move I think it is so much work that I really have to think about what I put in my mouth and then I try to be more rational and make cool comparisons like “OMG I need to workout 37 minutes to burn a snickers bar! Is it worth it?” because as my grandmother also told me (and it is not just saying she really told me these things since she fought my same battle) “sweets and cravings spend a second in your mouth and a lifetime in your thighs😁