Odds and Ends

My computer is on the fritz so there isn’t much of a way for me to write here these days. Yes, there is my iPad, and my husband’s laptop, but both are a pain. Eventually we’ll fix it. It’s only two-years-old and I’m not in the mood to buy a new computer.

1) I’ve only lost another pound since I last checked in about this topic. Nine pounds since May isn’t bad, of course, but it seems stalled out. I reexamined all of my eating logs, etc., and made a tough decision: Rejoining Weight Watchers.

I lost 50 pounds on Weight Watchers before throwing my hands up at it all. I hated how it set food up into “good versus bad,” and seemed to boil down to gaming the system, which discouraged eating good, whole foods. Plus, and I don’t care what anyone on the program says, the harder you work out, the hungrier you get, and when you’re at a certain weight, the allotted points you’re given didn’t cut it for me and felt very punishing.

The good news is that now they’ve restructured the program so that virtually all fruits and vegetables are “free,” which seems so much healthier and responsible than what the program emphasized before. In Bethenny Frankel’s Naturally Thin, she writes in several places how “no one ever got fat eating carrots,” which has always made sense to me and why it always bothered me that things such as bananas were rationed on the Weight Watchers program with a value of two points. If you’re a dieter, you gonna use those points for a banana or a cocktail? That setup makes healthy, whole foods the enemy. Now? Now bananas are free. People gravitate to the foods that don’t “cost” them anything on the plan. And since I don’t think there is any such thing as “too much fruit and vegetables,” I love that this new plan actually finds people filling up on the unprocessed, healthy foods and taking a healthier approach to losing weight.

Life is much easier when you know you don’t have to forgo an entire portion of your dinner because you had a larger bowl of fruit than planned in the afternoon.

I still sort of hate counting POINTS, and I’m not going to meetings, but Weight Watchers is still the most amazing online dieting plan, with the most user-friendly tools available, and their new apps for the iPad are great, too. I don’t really mind a more regimented approach with my diet, as long as it means I don’t have to be hungry. Since Weight Watchers generally lets me eats fruit and veggies to my heart’s content, I can stay satisfied, on-plan and still have enough POINTS for real meals.

Plus? A friend of mine really loves the new plan and has had a lot of success with it, and I sort of have a crazy crush on this woman from New York who is just lovely. I love her biking adventures.

2) In the same vein, my workouts have stepped up. I’ve returned to boot camp and spinning classes, and have started going to a weekly Hatha yoga class here in my neighborhood. I’m still running twice a week, but still just doing a walk/run combination, and for only 30-minute stretches. In spinning class today - taught by a woman who is six-months-pregnant, seriously - I was reminded how thankful and happy I was to be working out at this pace again. Even if I never drop another pound, just being able to move and sweat to this degree is such a gift.

I know what it means to take this sort of time out of my day. I couldn’t do it without Scott’s support. I grapple with a bit of guilt about it – time away from my kid on Saturday morning, just the energy I use up in thinking about my workouts, the actual working out itself, especially since I’m still a ways away from not being anything but pooped after a hard work out – but I’m blocking out that noise. I want to be an example for my kid, and I want her to know a mother who takes care of herself and her family. It takes effort, and going to bed earlier than I like, but in the long run my family is better for it. Besides, in a month Abigail will be big enough for the jogging stroller so we’ll be able to go on runs together and I’m ridiculously excited about that.

3) So I’m officially in self-improvement mode, obviously. With that comes a need to any number of the following: write something with a modicum of creativity that doesn’t have anything to do with Some Big Topic Related to My Kid, but maybe just the normal day-to-day, and read books that don’t have anything to do with health or babies. So tell me: What book have you read recently that you love? I have a library, literally, around the corner from my house. As much as I love the Kindle function on my iPad, I don’t need to be buying new books at every turn. Plus, I need a new place to take Abigail, and there is nothing wrong with starting the weekly library trips before she’s reading. I think she’ll love it there.

I hope.

4) My husband went to go see a movie tonight – Captain America, no thanks – and I have the house to myself. And with a sleeping baby, that means I’m off to take a hot bath, drink some hot tea, put on a face mask and do my nails before retiring with the iPad, Netflix and SNL reruns. I wish I could tell you that I wish I was somewhere sexy and exciting, but I’m certain there is nothing better than this in the whole world.