Update / Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss

I'm sorry, I'm sorry...I'm awful at consistently blogging! But lucky for you..my life is fairly boring so it won't be hard to get you up to speed. On September twenty-seventh, "J" and I celebrated three years together! It's a weird, contradictory feeling....I feel like our first date was not that long ago, but at the same time it seems like I've been with him forever. In honor of the special day, we took a weekend trip to San Antonio! This is a really big deal for us because we've lived in Texas for well over a year and had never visited any city besides Houston.

Me & "J" - Picture from Oct 2010

San Antonio was aahhhhh-mazing! To be honest, we only took our "trip" there because of SeaWorld; Neither one of us thought we would fall in love with the city. We immediately noticed that it was a much different place than bustling Houston. Everyone is so much friendlier, it has a much nicer "vibe", and is actually really pretty. Unlike the bayou city, San Antonio actually has hills :o :o which makes for really pretty scenery! SeaWorld was a lot of fun (I got to feed and pet a dolphin), our hotel was awesome, and visiting the River Walk was really neat. As soon as we got home, we started looking at apartments and homes in SA. I think we are honestly going to move there as soon as I graduate.

Diet wise...I'll be honest, I haven't been making strides. The only thing I've been doing is taking Alli and trying to be slightly more conscious about what I'm eating. I've lost a couple of pounds, but it's been verrrryyy slow and nothing to be excited over. However, my doctor put me on prednisone last week and warned me that it can increase appetite and bloating. Perfect! Also, I don't think it'd be a good idea to take Alli with prednisone because it could decrease absorption. Lastly, my arthritis has been pretty bad recently and I don't see me being able to comfortably work out in the near future. For all of these reasons, I decided to get really serious about finding a weight loss plan that will work for me.

My sister told me about an intermittent fasting plan called the 5:2 diet. To put it simply, you choose two days out of the week that you will fast. On your "fasting days", you can eat up to 500 calories for women or 600 calories for men. On the other five days of the week, you can eat as your normally would. Weight loss from this diet plan is typically 1-3 lbs per week. It seemed like a really do-able plan for me because it is flexible and doesn't feel as "permanent" as a normal diet. What I mean by that is that you don't have to look at a cookie and think "Oh my God...I'll never be able to eat that on this diet". Instead, you can think "I can have that cookie tomorrow." Because of this, you're a lot less likely to cheat. I don't want what I just said to be misunderstood, so let me add this disclaimer...you are not supposed to binge on your regular days. Just eat your normal amount!

I've done one fasting day and one regular day so far. I ended up going over my calories slightly because I didn't plan appropriately. I ended up at 530 calories for the day. Although I was really disappointed in myself for going over, I was still insanely proud of myself that I could eat so little and still be fine. I've struggled to get down to 1200 calories a day for such a long time, so 530 calories is like a landslide victory!!! My next fast day is tomorrow and it should be a lot more successful since I've planned out exactly what to eat. Let me know if you guys are interested in this, and I'll keep you updated!

My Boyfriend is making me Fat!

My boyfriend, J, is a fat ass! Not literally...he's actually quite slender. Figuratively. He will eat or drink almost anything in his sight; day old soda that is flat, the leftover broth from my chicken noodle soup, an entire pack of fruit snacks a day, etc. His obsessive eating didn't really bother me until he started eating up all of my food. When we shop for groceries we buy mutual foods (things for meals), he'll pick out lots of snacks, and I'll pick out one snack. That snack, my snack, is sacred. I'll eat a few of my cookies the first day, and come back the second day to an empty container! Or even worse, find one cookie left....half eaten.

You shouldn't mess with a woman on a diet's snacks! You need to indulge every now and then when you're dieting. If you don't, you might give up and binge eat like you'll never see pizza again! Unfortunately, binging has been the result of my boyfriend's food stealing. I'll buy a snack on my day off when he is at work and compulsively eat it before he gets home. All of it. If I leave anything, he'll just finish it off and I'd never get to enjoy it again! Oh God, I sound so fat right now.

So yes, my boyfriend is making me fat haha. Not only that, he is also trying to kill me. I bought women's low calorie protein bars to use as a meal replacement for breakfast. I went to grab one and noticed there was already one on the counter, half eaten, still in the wrapper. Knowing that if he didn't finish it he probably didn't like it, I grabbed it and decided to finish it myself. As I'm eating it, I feel an ant crawl on my wrist. I flick it off. Then I feel another. And another. I take the wrapper off the protein bar and notice ants crawling all over the protein bar. I almost puked lol.

So moral of the story is....don't let your boyfriend eat your sacred snack foods. Or you will get fat and die from ant poisoning. Don't get fat and die from ant poisoning.

Subway Conspiracy Theory

Being on a diet sucks! "I'm really craving a salad," said nobody ever. Why can't salad and fish be the fattening foods and Ben & Jerry's, cheese fries, and cupcakes the healthy alternatives?  That is one diet I could definitely stick to! Actually...that's the diet I have been sticking to *blushes*. I'm working to change that, though. Eating those foods is the reason I went from 140 pounds to 172. Although I wouldn't consider myself "fat", I am not at a happy place with my body. Clothes don't fit me the way I'd like them to and I'm embarrassed to let my boyfriend touch or see my stomach. And that has got to change!

When I used to make plans to eat healthy, all I could think of are chicken breasts, cheerios, Jimmy John's, and chicken noodle soup. ((Oh and...I just figured out that Jimmy John's is really not a diet food. My sandwich there is over 600 calories alone! Jared must have been hired by the sandwich industry to deceive us all into thinking sammiches=weight loss. Very sneaky, Subway. Very sneaky.)) Anyways, after three days, my limited options of "diet foods" get boring so I go back to the unhealthy foods. There is only so much un-fried chicken a girl can take!

I finally realized that I need to go about dieting in my own way. I've decided to make small, slow changes to my diet so I don't just binge and I give up. My goal this week was to have a Smoothie King smoothie every weekday for lunch and only have one soda the entire week. I was able to successfully do this and I really didn't feel challenged by it at all until the weekend. That might not seem like much of a diet to some of you, but its a definite improvement for me. I was having 1-2 sodas a day and I usually ate Taco Bell or McDonalds for lunch. But hey, I'm a work in progress! Wish me luck!