a new low, or alternatively: holy crap i'm going to run a half marathon!

I got on the scale this morning to a new low weight, which was a complete and total surprise given the amount of crap I ate this weekend. If I think about it, (and I don't really want to) in all seriousness I ate a bag of m&ms. Not a little bag. More like a the bigger bag you buy to fill up your little dish of m&ms or your candy dispenser or wherever you put your m&ms. So I'm not really sure what the drop is from, maybe just eating less dense food? Dunno, just not looking too hard at the weight. It disappears if I focus on it too much. But! I am now 3.4 pounds away from the Diamond Earring Weight, and I can hardly believe it.

One of the things that has changed a bit is eating, generally (except for the m&m fest of the weekend). We're sharing a CSA share with Mr. Bump's brother and his girlfriend, so we've had a lot of produce that needs to get eaten quickly both because it spoils with a swiftness but also because more is coming the following Monday. So far all we've had are herbs, salad greens and some radishes, but it has been good to have the salad greens, and so we've had lots of large salads, which help me a lot. Below is a picture of our bounty from last week:


I've also been increasing my mileage a bit, with a new long distance of 7.2 miles. I'm hoping to shoot for 8 miles this weekend, we'll see if the weather cooperates. Last night the weather was perfect around dusk, but I'm a little leery of trying to run at night. Seems like a dangerous thing, though probably more because of cars than personal physical danger. I'll have to see how it evolves over the summer. The 10 miler is on Labor Day, which gives me 10 weeks to work up to 10 miles. Shouldn't be too hard since I'm at 7 already. But there is a Half-Marathon on September 20th, which would be 12 full weeks. I would really like to am going to do it. Partially because the swag looks cool and the event looks like a lot of fun. Partially because it feels like a really great way to end the summer before leaving for Africa on the 23rd of September.
(Hey! Guess what! I just paused this post to register for the Half-Marathon! Look how I did that! Woot.) I'm also going to try to work in some swimming and some biking here and there. I'd like to try to swim once a week if I can.

Swimming looks to be the only activity that I can attempt in Africa. The running at the safari camps is discouraged for obvious reasons. But I think that a couple of weeks of rest seem like a really good idea after a half-marathon, so I'm not going to freak out about it.

So, the exercise stuff keeps plugging along. The food stuff is good in fits and starts and then I go back to thinking I can eat whatever I want, which isn't an option at this weight any more. As focused as I am on losing weight, and specifically on that magic number, I forget that I'm smaller all the time. When it comes to how many calories I think I can still eat, when I reach for a clothing size on the rack, when I look at myself in the mirror. These last 45 pounds came off rather quickly, so I think that is part of it. But some of it is just snapshot thinking. I have a picture in my head of myself and I look at that snapshot rather than what I actually look like. I've got to take some new pictures.

In other non-weight related news, I have tentatively started a bakery business on the side. I think for now I'm just going to see if I can do some cakes/baked goods for cost for people, for word of mouth and also because I have no earthly clue how to run a business and therefore I don't want to until I can get that lined up. If I decide to go through with it. Right now I have an email address: barefoot.bakery@gmail.com and some business cards from moo.com, and I've got my sister blog, but nothing really set up there in terms of business stuff. I think I'll try to work on that at some point, but for now I'm just going to work on passing out cards and hoping someone wants a baked good this summer. So if you know anyone in Denver or Colorado who needs baked goods, whether it be cookies or some killer brownies or a carrot cake, send 'em my way. This may seem contra indicative to weight loss, but I tend to get my fix from the smell rather than eating things. Also I'm not going to be baking m&ms, so I should be set.

I've got a post about my 10K coming, partially just to have it recorded for posterity somewhere what happened and how it went. So stay tuned!