Challenge Results, Goal Setting, and More

I have a lot of little things to talk about today. I will cover the fruit challenge results, goal setting for 2012, exercise changes, and a few random thoughts.

FRUIT CHALLENGE:
The fruit challenge was kinda fun! I had to look up what exactly a quince and a pummelo was, and how to eat them. The pummelo turned out to be like a very thick skinned grapefruit. It wasn't quite as sour and tart as what we think grapefruit can be. It was very difficult to peel off the outer skin and the inner membranes. It might qualify as a negative calorie food because it takes quite a bit of work to prepare it for eating! I would not bother buying one again.
The quince was even more challenging because you had to cook it to eat it. There were several recipes for using quince to thicken applesauce as it reports to have somewhat of a jelling property to it. I chose to cook it, add sugar to it and eat it as a dessert type food. It reminded me of cooked apple but didn't have much flavor of its own to add to the taste. I will not be buying quinces again.

I might be having a taste bud issue though. Both of the new fruits were not impressive in their tastes. I have also noticed that things like grapes, cherries, and most berries seem to have no flavor! I've heard that "the elderly" have changes in their pallet as they age. Maybe my taste buds are shot? I would like to think it is more because some of these foods are just not in season right now and taste like juicy air and water, but no flavor.

GOAL SETTING:
What is a goal? For me, I see it as a specific vision, with a plan, a goal timeline, and a specific reward for completion. The more I get into my lifestyle changes the more I see the need to always keep a goal or five, in mind to help keep the motivation going. So far I have come up with a few goals for 2012, that I plan to work on. I am trying to make some short term goals and some longer term ones. If I don't meet the deadlines, I will erase the end dates and put in a new one! There is no giving up acceptable. Of course, I will make goals that are reachable!

My list of goals so far:

1. To be in by Valentine's Day, February 14, 2012
2. To reach my goal weight of 191lbs by Tax Day, April 15, 2012
3. To sign up and do another 5K before June 1, 2012
4. To stop eating anything after 8pm by New Year's Day, 2012
5. To be at my secondary goal weight of 175 by my 58th birthday. (October 2012)
   

I need to set up a reward for each goal and then write it down in stone, or on the side bar of my blog, for all to see. Just the act of making goals is very motivating! I would recommend this exercise to everyone!

We all worry so much about losing the weight and getting to an ideal goal weight we have in our heads, but not what to do after that. Even though I have hit a hard plateau in the weight loss department, I am also thinking about how things will be when I declare I have reached my final goal!

I go up and down a pound or a half pound here and there and have been doing this for over a month now. I have still managed to go down if you look at the beginning of the month and compare it to the end of the month, but it has become agonizingly slow.

Much of the research I have done, points to eating more food to lose the weight and/or doing more muscle building exercises to gain muscle mass that will boost my metabolism and cause more fat pounds to go off my body. They say that a starvation diet will only work just so far before the body slams on the brakes and will not let a single pound leave, because it thinks it is starving.

Scientific weight loss....eat as the thin person you want to be...do not starve yourself. I hear this all the time. I am afraid to let go of the old tapes though. The old tapes say that if you are not losing weight, you need to cut even more calories and exercise even harder. I bet you all think this too! I want to believe that I can eat 2000 calories a day and just do my exercise routines as they are and that the weight will still keep going down. So far though, I just can't grasp the belief that this will happen!

What I plan to do about it is to take a month to track my food intake even more stringently and to increase my muscle building exercises. If there is not a significant change, I will have to revisit my whole plan to see just where the problems are. That is the plan anyway.

Recently a person contacted me via email and wanted help to lose weight. I offered to help in any way I could. I asked her to start doing ten minutes a day of 'on purpose' exercise and to write down what she eats. I never heard from her again. This makes me sad. I can just hear her telling herself that she couldn't find ten minutes to do exercises and couldn't write down all the food she ate, and that she was a failure.

You tell yourself this when you set yourself up to fail from the start. I know. I did that at the beginning of this whole thing, last year. When I handed over my $20 to pay for the books for our support group, my inner brain was telling me that I was wasting this money, buying this program, and it would fail like all the rest of them that I have spent money on, in the past. I am super-duper happy to tell you that this time I was wrong! And now look at me! I have lost over eighty pounds. I can walk up stairs easier. I can fit into clothes that don't have half the alphabet on the size tag. I used to be afraid of hills when I went walking. They still challenge me, but I no longer stick with a specific route to avoid them. It has been a long journey, but it has been short too. The biggest thing that bugs me right now is why it took so long to get things right? How different my life might have been if I hadn't carried this monkey, no, this GORILLA on my back?

The past is past though. There is no going back...only forward. I'd like to think I am helping others move forward with me! Hang in there everyone! Go for a walk and keep a smile on your face!