happiness

Some things that are currently rockin' my world:

1. Red lipstick. I love a good blueish red shade. It makes a great accessory.
2. Afternoon thunderstorms. This may not be something that would have made me happy a couple of weeks ago when we were re-siding a garage, but it sure made my run home last night a thoroughly enjoyable 78 degrees instead of a dreadful 90 degrees.
3. Ruby at summer camp. She's with my mom and dad for a couple of weeks, which is kind of a win-win. She gets to be with herMost Favorite Human and we get a couple of weeks to do date nights and such. We do miss her but we know she's having fun, and my mom loves having her, so it's ok. And sometimes it's nice to miss her.
4. New bras. The girls were needing a boost, you know? I'm a 36mumble, too! How's that?
5. My new watch. This was a birthday present from Mr. Bump, and he knocked it out of the park. Love love love. (It should be noted that it wasn't this expensive but he bought it from REI and it is now sold out.)
6. Nike+. I used this last night with my iPod touch and it was awesome.
7. Business cards from moo.com. I can't figure out how to link to our actual card, but I'll try to post a picture later.
8. Ice cream. I used to be able to take it or leave it but I can't. stop. myself. I'm trying to leave it at the serving size of 1/2 cup, but that adds up. Favorites: Bunny Tracks by Blue Bunny, Dreyer's chocolate, Dreyer's strawberry frozen yogurt, and this place. It takes all my willpower not to go in on my run home, as it is right on my route.
9. Size medium. Hello medium, long time no see! Nice to have you back on the team. Think you could talk to size 10 about coming aboard? I am currently dating both size 12 and 14, but I have no problems with cheating on them.
   
10. You. Is it cheesy to end with this one? Internet, if cheesy is wrong, I'm not entirely sure I want to be right.
    

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!

taking a fat day

I wish there was a category of illness that included just feeling really ponderous, just completely weighed down by your body. Calling in fat, if you will. Admittedly, my BMI recognizes me as merely overweight rather than obese at this point, but there are still fat days which come and go. Tuesday morning I was down to a new low weight, but then this morning I somehow had packed on two pounds overnight. This morning on my way into work I caught my reflection in the glass on the door and just didn't like what I saw. After months of feeling really good about how I look, it was a familiarly icky feeling I was hoping was gone. But here it is again.

I think part of where this is coming from is that I haven't really lost any weight since the end of April/beginning of May. I haven't gained any weight, but I keep jockeying up and down three or so really annoying pounds, and I'm frustrated. I hesitate to call it a plateau because I know that it mostly comes from exercising without regularity and really just eating whatever I want, at least sort of. I haven't gone hog wild but it is kind of out of control for this weight (brownies have been implicated, and pasta. Why must I love the pasta? Why??). The exercise part fell away for a while because I had bronchitis and I coughed like someone with consumption every time I ran very far, and for a good week there, I just didn't feel up to it. So I knew that would result in a weight loss stall, and I was ok with that. But I've started back into my exercise routine, and I've decided to train for that 10 mile race, so I'm going to be running or cross-training every day between now and Labor Day, which is when the race is. So that part should come together shortly.

I also know that eating whatever I want at this weight really does make a difference. I think if I was consistent with my calorie deficit, I might make more strides but I gotta say calorie restriction for about six months is a really long time to go without a lot of things I love. I keep thinking I just need to buckle down for a month and I'll be over this hurdle, but living on 1500 or so calories is proving to be just out of my grasp. When I'm working out, I try to burn 500 calories per day, so that should give me leeway to eat a bit more, but for whatever reason eating a bit more isn't cutting it. I'm back to tracking my food intake, so hopefully that will help too. These are the tools in my toolbox, I know. They're the way I've lost just about every pound ever, so I just need to pull them out, dust them off and push through.

This is the hard bit, and I knew it was coming. In fact, I'm amazed it took me this long to get here. But I have 6 more pounds to lose. I've lost 94 pounds but these last six seem to be really hard to shed. Some of the stall could be explained by water retention, and I've also been doing The 30 Day Shred, which may account for weight loss stall--muscle weighs more than fat, blah, blah blah. But 2 pounds overnight! Gah. I'm at a loss.

Does anyone have any advice? I could use some, or just a pep talk or something. It's a low day around here, in addition to being a fat one.

I should also say that I really don't know if anyone other than a handful of my friends (Hi Kim! Hi Chris!) are subscribing to my blog at this point. Sometimes I don't post because I think the only people reading here have already heard what's going on with me via normal email correspondence and I hate to bore them by putting the same info up here. This would explain the lack of discussion about my 10K race. So if you're reading this, please let me know. Post a comment, say anything, give me some advice or just say hi or ask me about my race and I'll post that story here. Now that I've gotten to a tough bit, I may come here a bit more to try and work through that.