Making a U-Turn

Weight’s up this week, which although it annoys me doesn’t surprise me. It’s frustrating that I was up even though I worked up a sweat for at least 45 minutes every day last week. It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how much you exercise, if you don’t watch the food intake, nothing will budge.

The other annoying bit is I wasn’t even that bad and I still gained a whole pound. I didn’t stuff my mouth with chocolate, cakes or decadent food at all (to be honest the only reason I didn’t is that there wasn’t anything bad in my house TO eat). But if I had, at least then I’d have still have delicious taste memories to relive. Nope, after reflection, this is what I’m blaming my weight gain on:

1) Switching from afternoons to mornings at work was harder than I thought. I am just not designed to wake up at 4:30am every morning. Between 5 and 6 I could handle, and even learn to enjoy.. but before 5am? Not for me. It spent all week trying to be in bed for 9pm but never seemed to make it there before 10pm.

2) Not sleeping enough = hormones out of whack = tired = bad food choices. I had so many more cravings this week than normal. The only two unhealthy foods I had left in the house was a fiber one granola bar and a batch of hot chocolate mix. (note the paste tense) One night this week I actually spent 5 minutes searching the pantry, in disbelief that I didn’t even one thing stashed away somewhere.

3) Not having enough vegetables on hand. I’ve been having a lot of fruit as snacks.. yogourt and fruit at work and then fruit smoothies in the afternoon. Which yes, fruit is healthy, but there’s still tons of sugar in them. So I’m going to go back to fruit with breakfast and only one snack. I made my own hummus yesterday so I’ll cut up all sorts of veggies to go with it.

4) Not eating enough. My eating schedule was thrown off and in my attempt to “be good,” I tried to fight against my cravings. That usually ended up with me caving and eating frozen grapes, hot chocolate or fried eggs. Which in the long run isn’t the worst for me, but when you’re eating that an hour before bed…

5) I also wasn’t tracking my food properly. I’d right it down, but usually not until the next day. Then I’d look back and think “Oh, of course I was starving at 7pm!” If I had just had a salad or a snack rather than trying to convince myself my hunger was just boredom, I’d have been much better.

6) Having my life revolve 100% around weight loss. July was so busy with family and running around that I didn’t have time to think and was just on autopilot making good choices. The past two weeks I’ve had more free time but I realize it didn’t seem like I did. If I wasn’t working at Curves or working out, I was reading weight loss blogs, reading books about food, searching for recipes or cooking or washing dishes from all the cooking/eating. It was too much and I’d like to have a better balance in my life.

Basically, it was all rookie mistakes that I’ve done before. But I’m not going to let it derail me from my goals. It was a good learning week :) And now my head’s back in the game.