Here We Go Again...

Have you ever gone body surfing at the ocean? You know, you wait for that perfect wave to come in, then you sort of jump and lunge forward and hope that it will carry you forward, allowing you to glide smoothly into shore? I'm a so-so body surfer. Sometimes I nail it, surfing onto the beach in such a way that it feels like flying. Or I just sort of get sucked under and tumble around a bit, cuing all the scary stories I've heard about people breaking their necks while doing this.

I always have an undercurrent of desire to be healthier and lose weight, but my desire to pursue it tends to come in waves. Sometimes I ignore the wave, letting it wash over me, and other times I try to surf it. Some goes are better than others, but I've net to really get it, to glide in to shore feeling fit and healthy and being able to stay that way.

Well, I feel another wave coming on. I feel motivated, ready to push aside bad habits and pick up some good ones. I don't know how this ride into shore is going to go, but I'm hoping this might be it. I know I can't expect perfection, because that will defeat me before I even really start - I have to be gentle with myself and know that if I screw up in some capacity that all is not lose and it's not an excuse to just stop.

So, as with any time I do something like this, I have a plan, and this is it:

• I'm going to try the Whole30...again. I did this last year with lots of success in terms of weight-loss (about 15 lbs. in 11 days), but I felt junky almost the whole time. I'll be honest, I'm going for it again mostly for the weight-loss, BUT there is a part of me that the whole, "It'll change you're entire perspective on food and life!" will happen for me, too. We'll see. Hopefully I can stick it out longer than 11 days!
• I'm also going to try out this CrossFit challenge I found on Pinterest. It's also 30 days, so, why not? I want to try CrossFit stuff out because it requires minimal (if any) equipment and is something I can do from home. I think I could even probably manage to do some stuff while the kids are awake!
• After the 30 days are up, I'm going to check back in with myself to see where I am and where I want to go from there. Maybe I'll stick with paleo or extend the Whole30 (ha), or maybe I'll try to reintroduce some other foods. The one thing I think I'll really, really need to stick with is eliminating or significantly limiting my refined sugar products. I don't currently keep white or brown sugar in my house, but that doesn't prevent me from buying things with refined sugar in it. 
• Rather than just tracking my weight, I'm also going to do my measurements. I like to see changes, and even though when I do put the effort in to losing weight I don't have a problem doing it (knock on wood that it's still the case now), it's nice to have one more marker of my success. 
• And even as I do track my weight, I'm going to track it a little bit differently. I saw this idea on Pinterest years ago and decided it would be a nice visual for me to see what my goal is and how far I've come to accomplish it.

And speaking of goals, here are my overall weight loss and fitness goals. They're not detailed, kind of like my plan above, but it's a starting point. As I get farther into riding this wave, I think my goals will gain more shape.

• I want to lose 90 lbs. Yes, that much. I currently weigh 230 lbs. and my goal weight, for now, is 140. Losing that amount would put me at a pretty reasonable weight for my frame size, which is large (thanks Dad - didn't get your height, but I certainly got your frame size!). (By the way, if you're interested in figuring out what your frame size is and then your ideal weight for your frame and height, check out here and here. Not a huge fan of the site's name, but they have halfway decent information.) 
• I want to be somewhat athletic. I don't want to do anything competitively, but I want to feel good when I move a lot. I want to not be the slowest or worst at something, either. 
• I wouldn't say no to a little muscle definition, but that's pretty low on my priority list. 

Consummate "before" side view.

That's where I'm at. I hope to add more as I go along, including my stats - I'm going to do my measurements in the next couple of days, right before I start the Whole30, which I should be starting soon. I hope, hope, hope this is going to turn into something I can maintain. I'm really ready to do this. 

Consummate "before" front view.

Deja Vu

Two years ago I lost about forty pounds between January and May. I ate well, exercised, and felt so amazing and so proud. That May, I got pregnant and promptly began to put weight back on, little by little. When I had M. the following February, I very slowly took the weight I gained during my pregnancy off.

Honestly, if I had exercised and ate right just as I had before I had gotten pregnant, I'd lost my pregnancy weight a lot faster, and then some. Instead I fell back on old and very bad habits, and while my weight went down, I'm finding myself, two years after the beginning of my initial weight-loss journey (which I started mainly in preparation for pregnancy), about ten or so pounds heavier than I was when I got pregnant.

So, here I am at the beginning of a new year, having committed myself to making better choices with my food and my activities (and with a very early birthday gift of snowshoes coming from my parents), and I'm wondering if I can't have that repeat success of a couple years earlier. If I lose a similar amount of weight between now and May, just as I did before, I'll weigh less than I did in high school. I know my weight, in the end, is less important than continually making healthy choices and creating healthy habits for my family. But...I care about that damned number on the scale and on my pants' waist band.

I don't think forty pounds is my goal for May - I think that would be a huge and overwhelming task. But I also think it would be good to have a number, or at least the idea of a number, tucked inside my head as I move ahead and will eventually need to look for motivation. I'm just not sure what that number will be, or how I'll go about this losing weight thing again (except for, obviously, in a safe way).

We'll just have to see what happens.

New Year

After a wonderful Christmas (though a holiday I have to say I'm a bit happy to see the backside of - it's always a bit stressful to get everything and everyone together) it's that time I simply cannot avoid, being the goal maker (though I haven't yet quite hit "keeper") that I am.

New Year Goals (Can I ever NOT do this?):

Eat less (and better) and move more

• Try to introduce daily exercise into my life once more
• Try to eat "clean" and have a lot less sugar in my house in and in my body
• Try to work on planning ahead and prepping meals to make our eating a bit easier
• Maybe take up a new "sport" like snowshoeing or cross-country skiing

Organize and purge the ridiculous amount of kids' toys and baby clothes I have in our basement closet and attic

• Wash and properly store all of E.'s old baby clothes
• Properly store all of M.'s outgrown clothing, give away/return some that we were given on loan
• Make a final purge of the toys upstairs and donate/throw away what we don't want/need
• Properly store the toys we're going to hang on to
• Start a toy rotation program and create some "rainy day" bags and busy bags for the kids

 Write more!

• I would like to blog more...
• But more than that I'd like to write more fiction (many moons ago that is all I did, and I miss it quite a lot)

Read more!

• This is the easiest - crack open some more books!
• I want more poetry in my life, but I somehow have a huge problem picking up a book of poetry; maybe I need to find a website or something that will send a poem to my inbox on a daily basis? (Update: poets.org does this, so yay!)

What are your goals (or resolutions) this year?