Day 21 of 84 - Free Day!

It's finally the weekend!  Today is my free day.  It's the one day of the week that I can (legally) eat what I want.  When I first started this journey, it was a free for all.  Now... I utilize it (and definitely need to today) for irregular eating or eating certain items that are not on the approved list.

We had breakfast at almost noon (we were a little pre-occupied :)), a yogurt at 3:30 and by 5 pm I had a serious drop in blood sugar, energy level, whatever ... all I knew was that if I didn't eat within the next 10 minutes, I was gonna be in trouble.  Or at least it certainly felt that way.  So we had leftover pasta and some carrots.

Then the "I want something sweet" started.  We don't keep junk in the house any more, so I settled for a semi-sweet chocolate square.  And that was all I needed.  I made a big fruit salad full of berries, pineapple and mandarins ... I'll have a bowl of that in a while and that will be my food intake for the day.  Oh yeah, and I had my mandatory latte this morning.  But I make it myself, use skim milk with a bit of flavoured cream and some sugar.  Not nearly as bad as Starbucks.  (in more ways than one .....)

Barry (hubby) commented to me today that my legs and but had really firmed up.  And the other day he mentioned there wasn't nearly as much of me to get his arms around when he hugged me.    And there's not nearly as much torso as there used to be.  I'm stronger, more flexible, have better stamina and I really noticed the progress this weekend.

It's really amazing ... I had been going along, doing my workouts, eating fairly well, but not really noticing a lot of progress for a while.  It was like my body was adjusting after I had made good progress the first number of months .... it's like it needed time to catch up.  Then I re-focussed my efforts, amped up the intensity of all my workouts, started paying more attention to my food intake, and all of a sudden I'm noticing a difference.  I don't think about food nearly as much as I used to.  If I'm distracted with something better to do, I go longer without eating (which is not necessarily a good thing) and I'm definitely progressing better with my workouts.

So don't give up.  Don't get down on yourself if your body needs a little breather.  Sometimes taking a little "time out" from your regular routine is good, as long as it's only a little time out and as long as you re-focus your efforts and increase your intensity.

I hopped on the scale this morning ... I wasn't going to until next Saturday ... my weight is down is 213.6 pounds.  It hasn't been quite this low in a while.  Funny thing is, I started at 221.  Less than 10 pounds.  But 2 dress sizes.  It's amazing what happens when you combine weight training with cardio and healthy eating.  So if you're weight training as part of your weight loss regime, don't worry too much about the pounds as long as you see results.

Barry said tonight that once I get under 200 pounds we'd go celebrate with a nice big dinner (he was kidding)... I said he could buy me some sexy lingerie.  He was happy about that. 

Have an awesome weekend!