34
Yesterday I had a 7 point breakfast and a 12 point lunch. Throw in an after-lunch treat of six Hersey kisses for 4 pts and that left me with 8 pts left for dinner.
Usually on Tuesdays I've been going to a church group but it was cancelled for Valentine's Day so Jim and I decided to take the kids out for dinner. I had an e-mail from Qdoba about a buy one get one free deal for Valentine's Day so we went there. I got the chicken gumbo. While we were in line to pay Gracie asked if she could get a brownie and Jim gave me a little head nod to let me know he wanted to take the kids next door to Coldstone Creamery after dinner.
I ate about 3/4 of the gumbo, shared with Jacob and threw the rest away. We went next door and I knew I was going to get the apple pie ice cream mix in. I looked at the prices and saw the medium was only a few cents more than the small, but I still went with the small.
I didn't feel any anxiety about what I ate. I was aware of my choices, but I wasn't beating myself up about them. I knew that I would track it later and figure out a game plan if I needed to.
When I had talked to Jim during the day he asked if I was working out that night. I told him I would probably go to the 8 p.m. Zumba class since I didn't have my church group. I was on the fence though, I could have easily talked myself out of it.
As I was eating my ice cream I told my family that I was definitely going to Zumba.
I was worried about all the food in my stomach as I headed to Zumba, but at that point I didn't care. I had to get some exercise in. My body was craving it.
I ended up getting to class around 7:20 and stayed for the second class which ended at 9 p.m.
I got home, watched New Girl (love that show), showered and went to bed without even thinking about eating anything else.
When I sat down with my tracker this morning, I was shocked by the numbers. I shouldn't have been, but it's always a gut punch when you type in the numbers and see what the calculator spews back at you. The 3/4 of gumbo was 15 pts. The small ice cream was 17 pts. That small ice cream was over half of my daily point allowance.
Just as I was starting to feel the panic set in I typed in my numbers to calculate my activity from last night. I put in 90 minutes at high intensity and the calculator showed that I earned 21 points. Well my panic switched immediately to relief. (activity points are different for everyone, but I've learned what to calculate for myself that actually is confirmed on the scale week-to-week.)
That simple exercise of entering my points made something perfectly clear to me. I'm not getting enough exercise. I can not stress that enough. I'm not getting enough exercise emotionally or physically. I've been really frustrated at how hungry I've been lately and how I feel 31 points is not enough to survive every day (while not admitting that I shouldn't blow all my weekly points on the weekend). And seeing those activity points show up on my tracker helped me to remember that that is how I did it before. When I exercise I can eat more. Seriously, when I type it out it seems so simple.
The moral of the story isn't that it's ok to eat chicken gumbo and Coldstone Creamery all the time and then go and workout for an hour and half to work it off. Quite the contrary. Last night I learned what a bad idea it was to have made those choices and how much work I had to put into fixing them. If I would just workout consistently and make healthy food choices I would be losing so much more than I have been the last few weeks.
I'm still learning everyday. I just need to put it all together.
One thing I've learned is that blogging is hard when I'm not losing. I don't like typing the story above. I would much rather type out all the wonderful food choices I made for myself AND my family while getting in exercise, but I'm not there yet. At least admitting it here is helping me, I just hope that it's not hurting you guys that are reading. I want to be motivating for you and I feel like such a failure at that lately.
I have to keep going though. For me. I have to keep striving to figure this all out. I feel like I'm right there at the starting line and I'm just ready to take off and win this race.
35
36
37
38