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Sugar Wars: I don’t want to talk about it.
I did do some pilates this morning. Not even pilates. Pre-beginners pilates. Pilates For People Who Are Too Out Of Shape To Do Pilates Or Anything Else For That Matter. Worse, I only did one round, and you’re supposed to do two. I am pathetic.
And the office floor needs vacuuming.
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Sugar Wars: Wagon? What Wagon?
After closing out my 30 day run at this, I didn’t so much fall off the wagon as take a long low running dive and strike out away from the wagon as hard as I possibly could. I even stopped counting calories. There has been a distinct To Hell With It All vibe, and I’ve been Just Fine with that.
Today, however, marks the start of another go at this, with a 6-week run ahead of me instead of 30 days.
I don’t know quite how I’ll handle this go. Back to counting calories, but I don’t know if I’ll be more strict, or less strict, with myself regarding actual sweets. I’m leaning toward more strict, which means no hot chocolates on Thursdays, but we’ll see how much willpower I have in that regard come tomorrow.
Even with most of a week of throwing it all to the wind, I’m down five pounds over the past five weeks. That’s a perfectly reasonable rate of weight loss, although not a terribly inspiring one. (The lack of inspiration is probably part of why I flung myself off the wagon so readily. Thanks to biology my lowest weight this month was a couple weeks ago, and I’m actually slightly lighter now than I was when my 30 days were up.) Anyway, inspiring of not, that rate of weight loss will eventually get me where I’m going, so here we are, back on the wagon.
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Sugar Wars: 30 Days Done
Today was sort of a weird day. I’d fully intended to get up and make pancakes and really just blow the whole thing out of the water, but we ended up going into Dublin, so I had a decent breakfast instead and headed in.
Had my beloved mint hot chocolate there, and thought “This is really very very sweet.” That was a kick in the pants. o.O
Ate a small sensible lunch, had some gorp for a snack, ate quite a lot of dinner and some cookies afterward, but stayed close enough to within my calorie allowance that it’s hard to condemn myself.
It’s clear it’d be very easy to slide directly back into bad habits. I feel like I’ve earned some indulgence, of course, but at the same time my indifference to sugar-based foods has grown considerably, and there’s no point in throwing that all away.
I have a couple of…plans, going forward. One, unexpectedly, may be going ahead and cutting that weekly hot chocolate, because…well, that was really very sweet. It’s the ritual of it that I’ll miss more than the actual drink. But hey, you know, Lent is coming up, and assuming I’m in the right ballpark for the calorie count on those hot chocolates, six weeks without would theoretically add up to about a pound and a half of bonus weight loss.
Other plans will be referenced when they crop up, because I don’t like making much in the way of predictions about this kind of thing. At some point I’m going to have to actually make a real effort to properly overhaul my diet, but honestly, I don’t see that happening in this next round. I think probably most of what I’m going to be doing is working on staying the sugar wars course, and perhaps making some modest effort toward a slightly lower average daily calorie count. A hundred would make a…very modest…difference, and is probably what I should be aiming for, realistically.
Anyway. I’m out for the night.
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Sugar Wars: 28 Days Later
I’m doing this for 30 days and keep thinking “4 weeks” and also keep forgetting what day I started, so today is 4 weeks but I’m not quite done yet. Not, she said grimly, that this can ever be *done* for me, because I’ll just fall back into old habits if I loosen the rein. Old, tasty habits. Still, I may treat this as sort of a wrap-up post, although hey, don’t worry, there’ll be a new leg of it starting soon.
The only other time I’ve gone off sugar for this long I was MUCH stricter with myself. I went absolutely cold turkey that time. I’d say I’ve run somewhere between 80-90% on target this time, which, since I’ve stuck with it, is certainly sufficient for my purposes right now.
The scale hasn’t moved much over the past couple weeks, but I think that’s as much a combination of bad timing regarding my digestive cycle and biology, as anything else. I’ll see next week where things are. Even as things stand, I’ve lost 7 pounds in the past 4 weeks, which is completely reasonable. It’s not, of course, the mega-dramatic OMG LOOK WHAT AMAZINGNESS HAS HAPPENED JUST BECAUSE I CUT SUGAR that one dreams of, but it’s completely reasonable. It would also be better, of course, if I hadn’t regained ten pounds in the six months previous to starting these sugar wars, but there’s not much point dwelling on that either.
As much of a triumph as the actual cutting of sugar aspect is that I’ve kept a calorie calendar going for 28 days, too, despite eating out. I don’t really know why I’ve managed to, but it’s probably helped, because I was able to see that the problem wasn’t necessarily that I missed sugar, but that I’d cut so many calories that I missed FOOD. That probably helped me choose wisely about what to eat to make up for the sugar, instead of just throwing the towel in and eating an entire cake.
Exercise has been hit and miss, and when I say exercise I mean ‘getting my 10k steps in’ because I’m not even trying to accomplish anything else. Most weeks I average pretty close to 10K a day, but I don’t often hit 10K every day. I’d say I’ll try to do better, but realistically I won’t. There are days when I just don’t leave the house, and nothing I’m really honestly going to do is going to get me 10K steps on those days.
Anyway, so that’s not quite a wrap, but it’s where things stand at the end of four weeks.
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Sugar Wars: Whoops
Despite my careless confidence yesterday, I went over calorie budget today. Given that I was below all week (drastically below on the day I inadvertantly barfed up dinner @.@), I’m not exactly concerned about this. It’d be nice if all this nonsense reflects in the scale on weigh-in day. We’ll see.
I went to a movie this afternoon and was quite hungry going in, but reluctant to get popcorn or any of the other crap available at the theatre. I stopped at a local bakery and got an eclair instead.
I mean, I ate it, because I was hungry, but I could tell from the first bite that I wasn’t really impressed with it. (I mean, beyond the fact that with one glorious exception, I’ve never had eclairs that I thought were as eclairs should be. The exception was at a farmer’s market where one of the businesses made eclairs that were the Platonic ideal. Like, these things were what God had in mind when God said “Let there be eclairs.” They used real, dark chocolate, almost a ganache, and chantilly cream, and a lavendar blossom on top, and they were *perfect*. As it happened, the last time I saw that company at that market, I stopped to tell them that these were the perfect eclairs. The guy said to the woman, “See?! I *told* you so!” and then they were never there again. Perhaps I broke the spell?)
None of that was the point. The point was that normally even if an eclair wasn’t the Platonic Ideal, I’d have been all like “eclair nom” and I was much more “eclair meh”.
It’s certainly nice to be past the murderous stage of this, to feel like I’ve turned a corner. I know all too well that it would be exceptionally easy to fall right back off the wagon, but right now, at least, it’s nice.
