Quick Update.

Thanks for the encouragement! Every little bit counts, keep 'em coming!

Yesterdays food:

B - same as the day before, 1 c. strawberries, 1 c. Kashi, 1/2 c. banilla yogurt

S - apple and 1 tbsp. peanut butter

L - leftovers, 2 c. cantaloupe

S - banana w/ 1 tbsp. peanut butter

D - 3/4 c. feta cheese mashed potatoes, 2 chicken rollatini, 1 1/2 c. roasted green beans, 1 c. skim milk

Dessert - 1 small squares Dove dark chocolate

Exercise - W2D1 of C25K, 15 min. bike, and weights burning a total of 560 calories!

Every single bite was tracked accurately! Success!

Maybe it would be more fun if I took pictures of my food... What do you think?

Today's dinner plan is up in the air, it's Pub Crawl tonight. I'm only planning on having one drink, but I'm not sure what's for dinner. I don't have a ton of points left, but my week did just start yesterday, so I have extra points. We'll see.

Taking a Break

I'm still here, just feel like I don't have a lot to say about being healthy since I've gained for the 3 week in a row. And school is super stressful.

I don't have any motivation anymore. I'm getting really frustrated. I thought I was doing good, at least for the past two days, and then I step on the scale this morning. See? That's the problem, I stepped on the scale. It changed my whole mood. I actually thought my pants were a bit big, and now I feel like a fat lump.

I know I'm still down 21 pounds from where I started last May, but I should loosing, not gaining. I know I can do it! I've proven that I can do it, so where the heck did that motivation go?

I'm trying to take a step back and figure out what I can do. First of all, I downloaded an app on my iPhone - My Fitness Pal. It's like sparkpeople, counts calories and other nutrients, but it has just about every brand name you could think of.
Jif natural peanut butter? Check.
Stonyfield banilla yogurt? Check.
Kashi GoLean Cruch Honey Almond Flax? Check
It's awesome, so I've been tracking on there for 3 days now, and I think I like something different. Rather than points where my banana, cantaloupe and strawberries are "free" I can realize that they do have calories, but they're good for you, too.

And I'm not stepping on the scale until May 11th. I'm taking a week off. I'm also going to join the OP2Overcome challenge. 21 days completely OP - no going in the red, and tracking every. single. thing. that goes in my mouth. I weighed my food this morning to accurately track it and I'm going to start measuring food, something I've never done before. Yes. You read that right, I've been on WW for almost 1 year and I've never measured my food. It's that bad.

I just restarted my weight history on WW. Fresh new start at 159 starting today. My next goal is my 5% goal at 151. I'll get there. It's a slow trek, but I will get there.

I think I'm also going to post on here what I ate yesterday. Everything I ate yesterday. This is more accountability than anything else. So I know that if I ate a cup of peanut butter and oreos, I have to tell you all - so keep me accountable!! If you have any suggestions, please tell me.

Yesterday's menu:
B - 1 c. Kashi cereal, 1/2 c. Stonyfield yogurt, 1 c. strawberries
S - 1 small apple, 1 tbsp. peanut butter
L - Leftovers, 2 c. cantaloupe
D - 3 oz. pork loin, 3 c. roasted cauliflower, 1 c. skim milk, 3/4 c. quinoa
Activity - 50 minute aerobics class - burned ~319 calories

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Any words of encouragement, stories, advice?

I'm alive!

I'm alive, I promise. I've been reading everyone's blog, commenting when I can, but school is taking over my life.

This weekend was a food fail involving pizza, onion rings, Red Lobster and delicious subs. But hey, it happens to the best of us and we learn from it. I got back on track yesterday, and I'm even more on track today. I'm still not sure if I'm going to WI tomorrow, I might wait until next week and see what the scale says. I need a break from the scale, it's owning my life.

This all looks SO good!

I'm finished my huge paper - 17 pages later! And I have a list of what I need to get done before my semester is over. It's a long list, but I'm slowly crossing things off.

Exercising has been pushed aside, too, although yesterday Mr. Skinny and I got out and I started couch-to-5K again, and I'm really hoping I'll stick to it this time. Hopefully, I can work my way up to increasing miles. Hopefully finish a 5K and work up to a 10K, but I'll get there if and when I get there.

I loose weight slowly. And it's okay. I think.

I'm coming to this realization. Yes, I only had ~40 pounds to loose, and I've been on WW for 1 year and only lost 20 pounds, but I can maintain this. I don't think I could gain that weight back. Yes, it might take me another year to loose the rest, but studies show that the slower you loose weight, the less likely you are to gain it back.

And that's okay with me.

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How do you balance stress, exercise, and healthy eating?

Tips would be appreciated!

Lovin'

Wow! Thanks for all the love about my blog title! I didn't realize it was so well liked. I think I'll keep it for now. I must admit, when I thought of it, I thought it was genius and the best title ever. It actually was "The Road to Skinny and Bikinis" but I chopped off that last part when I switched my blog from a WW blog to a real blog. What do you think about that?

Now if I could only find more people to read it...

Anyways, it's another beautiful spring day! I actually ate lunch outside today, and did homework outside! I even wore sandals! First day of the season! Yay! I realized though that I need a pedicure...

I was going to post a picture of my feet, but who really wants to see feet that are in need of a pedicure?

Sorry I'm rambling, but this is my way of procrastinating on doing my senior seminar paper. I actually enjoy doing my paper, it's just knowing that I have to do a 15-20 page paper by Tuesday that makes me want to put it off. I will say though, I know Mr. Skinny will be thrilled when I'm done because it means we can clean up my mess that's been growing since February...

It really is that bad. But I will be done with the draft on Tuesday and then have to wait until I get that back to finalize it. I will graduate!

Happy Thursday!

Are you a procrastinator? How do you deal?

- I don't know how Mr. Skinny deals with me. I'm terrible! I do always get everything done, but I know it's never to the best of my ability.

A New Title??

When I first started WW last summer, it was mostly about vanity. I wanted to look like the models, really thin and look super hot in a bikini this summer. I know, it was vain (I've said that) and I realize now that it's not all about being "skinnny" - as my blog title implies.

After being on WW nearly one year, I have learned so much. I might be slacking on actually using those things that I've learned, but nonetheless, I have learned them. I found out that fruit and veggies are good, and are good for you. I've cooked more healthy food than I ever have before. I've experimented cooking food I would have never touched before, or even foods that I've never heard of in my life!

I've picked up exercising, and started running. Yes, I'm slacking on it now, but I will pick it up again once school is over. I found out how strong my body really is, and how far I can push it. I found out how terrible I feel when I don't get a good workout in, and how good water really does taste.

I've learned how to properly fuel my body, and how I feel when I eat fast food for 3 meals in one day, or binge on Reese's or brownies. I get it now, and with all the stuff I learned, I realized that my blog title isn't as accurate and clever as I thought it was when I started my WW blog last summer.

So now we're stuck. I'd like a new blog title, and I need help. I don't want to do The Road to Healthy, that's really common, I feel. I'm not creative at all and anything I come up with is a steal from someone else's blog. This is where you come in - any suggestions?

I normally don't curse, but I thought this was an appropriate comic.

WI Wednesday

First of all, do you like the new blog design? I think it looks pretty nice!

I'm really getting discouraged. I think I need to try something new. It's not the tracking that's bothering me, it's the weighing. The scale went up again folks. I know why, I ate Panera for lunch yesterday, and I didn't eat lightly. I had a steak and blue cheese half salad, and broccoli cheese soup, with the bagette, of course. I know I could have had healthier options, but I can't say no when it comes to that broccoli cheese soup and bagette! The salad was eh, but I ate it all anyway. I was full, but Panera has such delicious bagels! I just had to get one! I only ate half, but I didn't really need it. I chugged water for the rest of the day, and had a pretty light dinner.

I'm still up 0.6 this morning. No, it's not a huge gain, but I am so sick of being stuck in the high 150s for 4 months! That's rediculous!!! So, what do I do? I mentioned a few weeks ago about getting to worried what the scale says that if it goes up, that sets my mood for the week, or at least the day. I stay on track, but I still just want that scale to go down.

I think, starting in May, I'm going to go to bi-weekly weigh ins. We'll see how that goes, and I might even go to monthly weigh ins. I really should start taking progress pictures, and tracking measurements. My life is too busy for that right now though. I know, I shouldn't push my health to the side, but until school is over, that has to come first. I'm going to aim to get to the gym twice each week, for about 40 minutes each time. After school is over, I'll aim to get there 4-5 times each week, and actually focus on progressing somewhere - running again, weights, yoga. But all that good stuff has to wait until May 12 and my finals are over.

On another note, I have something to mention:

1. We do owe those taxes because our jobs didn't withhold enough MD taxes - bummer.

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Do you like the new blog? Any suggestions for it?

Do you track measurements, pictures, weigh yourself? How often?

Random Dinner

We have a TON of food in our fridge right now from our Costco trip this weekend. I actually had a meal plan, but we gotta eat the leftovers from last week before I start making new food. So tonight's dinner, which I photographed (yay!) included some random foods thrown together, but we aren't picky so we ate it, and it was good.

Mr. Skinny had chicken noodle soup.

I had Mexican Brown Rice Casserole.

And we split a bagged caesar salad.

What did you have for dinner?

I overate

In October, during Fall Break, I made a HUGE batch of my momma's homemade chicken noodle soup. I stuck it in the freezer. Well this weekend, I decided that the last big batch of it was just taking up too much space in the freezer and since we went to Costco, I needed that extra space. I took the soup out and we had it for dinner last night.

Well, I was a bit made at Mr. Skinny because he told me he was going to help his foreman cut a tree down quick - quick being the keyword here, folks. This was around 5 o'clock. Okay, no big deal, I'll make the noodles for the soup and just wait for him. 6 o'clock came, 6:30 came, 7 o'clock came. This is ridiculous!!! I text him and say I'm starving, where is he at? He just tells me to eat.

Fine. I'll eat. I won't be a nice wife and wait for my husband. And while I'm at it, I'll eat as much as I can so there's not much soup left. Yeah, bad idea. It didn't help that while I was waiting and starving, the noodles were calling my name something fierce. So I had a few spoonfuls of noodles. By the time I got around to eating the soup, I wasn't even that hungry. But it tasted SO good, and I wanted to deprive Mr. Skinny of eating too much of it. So I had two bowls. With croutons, and parmesan cheese (what? you don't put parmesan cheese on your chicken noodle soup?? you're missing out). It was glorious.

I didn't feel glorious though, I felt like garbage. Heck, I treated my body like a garbage. It wasn't pretty. Tuesday is my "peak day" and when I stepped on the scale this morning, it hated me. So I had to down as much water as I can today, and we'll see what the scale says in the morning.

It's a learning process. Last night was entirely emotional eating since I was mad at Mr. Skinny. I'll eventually learn not to do that. But come on, would you or could you say no to this...?

I love New York!

Weekend recap: I went to New York City on Saturday! I really do love New York. It's such a different atmosphere than what I'm used to - being from the county and all! You really do see things in New York that you don't see anywhere else. I went with my two friends, and one of my friend's mom. My friend's mom has never been to the City, so we had to hit up the typical tourist-y spots - Central Park, Times Square, 5th Avenue, etc.

We also went to see Phantom of the Opera. I really didn't think that I'd like this show, but it just goes to show you that if it's a Broadway Production, it's gonna be awesome. I didn't know anything about the show, the basis for it or anything, but I loved it. Other than the fact that the company that purchased the tickets for the college canceled the tickets and told no one. So the students who were in charge had to foot the bill for 18 students, and while they'll get refunded, that's still a rediculous amount of money considering that the tickets were nearly $100 a piece!

NYC food was awesome as usual. I got a pretzel with mustard while waltzing around Central Park. For a late lunch/early dinner, we found an Irish Pub on a side street - Pigs n Whistles and I got delicious salmon, mashed potatoes and asparagus. Then we hit up the Hershey's store and no amount of self respect stopped me from buying a bag of Reese's mini peanut butter cups. Has anyone seen these? They're delicious!!! They're a million times better than Reese's pieces, which just suck, in my opinion. You don't even have to unwrap these mini beautys, just pop 'em in your mouth. Which is why I ate them all in 2 days - even though the nutrition information saying 6 servings. Oops. Here's some pictures, some taken with my iPhone, and some stole from Facebook - that's what it's there for, right?

Getting ready to pose on Times Square. I didn't post that picture because I am terrible at faces. No really. Ask my friends.

Times Square!

Yes, that is a peanut butter cup that weighs 0.5 pound each! I really wanted to buy this, but the $15 price tag detered me.

Majestic Theater

Central Park - Quiet Zone! I'd love to be able to just wake up and say "Oh, I'm gonna go hang in Central Park today."

But it was an awesome day, I'm trying to convince Mr. Skinny, country boy that he is, to come with me to NYC sometime. I think he'll like it if I plan it really well. He just might deck himself out in his Red Sox attire and get beat up. We'll see.

Sunday I hung out around the house. We plunged ourselves further into debt by going to Costco and fully stocking our freezer that was almost empty, as well as our fridge. Now we won't be going hungry and since I can continue working (yay for the government not shutting down), Mr. Skinny isn't quite as stressed. On the other side of the finances, we're having our landlord, who is an accountant, double check our state taxes so that we can see if we actually owe that money or not. Hopefully we don't, but we'll see.

Spring has sprung!

I'm making it official - spring is FINALLY here! That darn groundhog lied when he said that spring was coming early this year because it's just coming now! April 7th it finally looks like the temperature is going to be staying above 60 or so. Many now I can switch out my sweaters for my tank tops at last! You think?

Maybe I should wait.

The flowers are blooming, the grass is finally green. Well everywhere except for the yard behind our apartment, so I had to search for these daffodils to photograph since our grass is still yucky.

And might I add that the wasps were swarming around these babies, that's why it's not a very good picture. You should be lucky you're getting pictures of any flowers.

On the drive home it was that perfect mid 60s (although I could have gone a little warmer), and the sun was shining. A perfect day to put the windows down and blast the music. So I did just that!

Don't worry, I was parked in this picture.

Okay well maybe I just have to get through tomorrow and then it'll be spring. 48 tomorrow? Really, is that necessary? Sigh.

Oh, and you might notice that I finally got an iPhone! That's another selfish, materialistic thing to cross off my 101 in 1,001 list!

One last thing, I don't know if I've mentioned it on here at all, but I'm a federal employee (NPS), so all the talk of a shutdown directly affects me. Keep me in your prayers please, with all the money that we may or may not have to pay for taxes, we currently have no savings and don't have anything to fall back on. But it looks like a shutdown is imminent. I'll keep you all posted though, not that you won't know if you look at any major news website, listen to the radio or watch the news.

Hope you have a great evening!

An answer to prayers

Not in the way that we would have wanted our prayers answered, but alas, they are answered. I thank you for the prayers, it was a hard time. Prayers do work!

As my mother-in-law finished up our state taxes, she saw that my employer wasn't taking any local taxes out, and so we owe a large sum of money to the state now. This sudden bill drained our savings account down to just about nothing, so a house is out of the question. As much as it's terrible we owe this money, it's an answer to prayers since we didn't know if we wanted to buy a house in Maryland, stay in our apartment, or move back to Pennsylvania. While this doesn't answer all of our prayers, it does knock one out.

We'll still be turning to God for answers regarding when we start our family, and when the timing is right for our move back to Pennsylvania, but right now, I feel at peace. I know that this is an answer from God in regards to our questions. We'll stay in our apartment now. No, we don't love our apartment, but it is a nice place, it has plenty of space for just the two of us. Maybe we'll have time now to go through our stuff and get rid of things we don't need, clean up and organize everything before we move back to Pennsylvania. Everything happens for a reason, even if we don't know what that reason is.

WI Wednesday and Weekly Reflections

Score! The scale is going in the right direction - FINALLY!

I know that it was due to my own fault, no one was forcing me to eat the junk food I was eating, but I got my motivation back. Took a few weeks, but as I was talking about it with a co-worker, I stayed within 3 pounds of my lowest weight, which means I can maintain successfully. Yes, I still have 20ish pounds go loose, but I learned something.

Anyways, I did loose this week, and I'm down 1.2 from last Wednesday. I can get the scale moving in the right direction now. Summer is coming, graduation is coming, and I want to feel good about myself!

My goals for last week went pretty successfully, too!

1. I tracked everything! Even my Burger King, Rita's, Sheetz and I still have a good loss!

2. Work out 3x - WIN! I went to the gym last Wednesday for an awesome run, went to my spinning class on Thursday, and went for a long (mostly) walk, little run on Monday when it was beautiful out.

3. As for my papers, both were a fail. I am going to be interviewing my uncle for my seminar paper, but I haven't had time yet to start my Native American paper, although I did pick a topic.

4. My daily devotions - another win. I look forward to this time every morning, where I can spend time in God's word, read a devotion and pray for God to impact my life that way.

5. I like to think that I've been a good wife this past week, but I've had my moments. Everyone does though. I do think I've done a pretty good job though.

Next week's (4/6 - 4/12) goals:

- Continue tracking everything. I'm going to NYC this weekend, but I plan on tracking whatever I eat.

- Keep emptying our freezer. We're coming up short on money since we owe a HUGE chunk of taxes this year, that came out of nowhere, so we don't have a ton of money to buy new foods each week. I think we're going to have to be pretty creative and start emptying our pantry and freezer.

- Work out 3x again.

- Start on my seminar paper.

- Get a bibliography started for the Native American paper

Happy Hump Day!

One Day Without Shoes

Today, April 5th, people all over the world, from all walks of life spent the day without shoes on. Why you ask? To raise awareness of the millions of children and people that can't afford shoes. The people who have to walk miles to get clean water and to get food. They have to spend years without shoes, so we can spend one day without shoes. It's sponsored by Toms shoes, which is an awesome organization that when you buy a pair of shoes, they give a pair to a child who doesn't have a pair. The shoes are SO comfortable, too!

It was not the perfect day to walk around outside without shoes on, and I started out this morning with my sneakers on and went to my aerobics class, forgetting what day it was. Once I changed my clothes after class, I realized that I forget shoes to wear for the rest of the day. It was a sign, I should participate in One Day Without Shoes.

I got a sticker and signed the waiver - just saying that you would put shoes on if a professor asked you to, you would wear shoes in the dining hall, science labs and wherever else poses a risk to your bare feet - and was set to go!

At first it was kind of freeing to walk around without shoes on, even though it was a bit cold, and kind of rainy. Then after walking on the sidewalks for a bit, my feet started to hurt! Man, I really appreciate my shoes after walking around all day without shoes on.

For more info check out this link.

When to move?

This is what's been on my mind in the past few days.

We were looking at houses, and we did find one we really liked, but the weekend we put an offer on it, someone else did too, and we didn't get the house. We have a pretty low budget ($100K) and there aren't too many houses that we could get. Okay, scratch that - there are a lot of houses, but a TON of them are short sales. I mean, out of 54 houses, 50 of them are short sales.

Another factor is that the houses in the "city" - and I say it like that because it's not like NYC or another huge city, but it is a city - have really expensive taxes. Like, $3,500+ in taxes each year, and we can't pay that on top of a $700/month mortgage. We're getting frustrated, really frustrated. So this leads us to ponder the idea of moving back to Pennsylvania earlier than anticipated.

I'm not sure if I've explained this at all, so I'll explain it now:

Mr. Skinny's grandparents, at one point, owned about 20 acres of land in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA). They bought it with the purpose of giving to their kids and grandkids to build on. My in-laws and Mr. Skinny's aunt and her family both have their houses on the land, which was given to them. Now Mr. Skinny's cousin has his land, and we're next in line for getting the land. Mr. Skinny has the land all organized, and we actually started clearing the land last spring, as well as getting it "perked" for a septic tank at some point in the next few years. We've always known that we want to move back there, heck, I've known that was a requirement since I started dating Mr. Skinny wayyy back in 2004. Ideally, I wanted to stay in Maryland until we had babies, since NEPA doesn't really have a ton of jobs in the history profession. But with everything that happened with Pop Pop, we feel like God is calling us to move back to NEPA sooner rather than later.

The 3 1/2 hour, 200 mile drive home at least once a month, if not twice a month is really getting to us. We can't stand our apartment, we have to walk up 39 steps before we walk through our back door, which doesn't have a lock, only a dead bolt lock (seriously, who does that?), wasps like to chill on our back porch light every summer, which is where the washer and dryer are (it's a back room more than a back porch), and the porch is slanted, you feel like you're walking down a hill, or like the back of the building is going to fall off. It's not insulated and when it's really windy, the attic door doesn't stay shut and it makes it seem haunted.

I love the area, I truly do, and I wish that we could move our families down to Maryland and we'd stay here forever. Mr. Skinny has a really good job down here, and I'd have a better chance to get a job in my field down here, but then why isn't the house aspect working out for us? Are we really meant to stay in our apartment for another year until we move back?

We're not on a strict timeline - since both of our parents are in NEPA, we can move back in with one of them until we find an apartment or buy a house, or whatever we decide to do. We do need jobs though, preferably for both of us, and not paying rent would help us a lot, even for a few months to just get us back on our feet. We're having a little financial trouble right now because I'm working part time and Mr. Skinny has had a few extra rain days in March, when we never really caught up from taking about a week off when Pop Pop was going downhill, and for his funeral and such.

So we're stuck. We know we're going to move to NEPA eventually, and probably sooner than later, but what do we do about a house? Find a new apartment? Hold out for a house? Move back to NEPA this summer, or as soon as we find jobs? Only God knows the answers, and we really need to turn to him for guidance and direction.