Second Verse, Same as the First!!

So, here we go again. I didn't gain any weight in the interim here, miraculous enough because of the holidays and the stress of personal stuff, but I did fall off of the wagon. This is something that seems to just go along with this endeavor - slip ups that sometimes take much time to recover from. But the new year was my deadline. It is not a resolution, because I don't much believe in them and feel that anything you want to do, you do, whether or not it is a proscribed time to announce your intentions. I am simply intent upon doing something that needs to be done, and having it happen now.

Current weight: 287lbs.

That is after a week of my resurgence into this. I have started watching my calories again, and my gym membership is getting a workout. I am starting off easy, I guess, with just some low-rep weight-lifting and elliptical sessions. But I am doing them as often as possible, which so far has managed to be four times in a week. There is no reason why it cannot continue. So away we go.

I find that one of the keys to watching calories for someone who thinks about food frequently is to present a creative problem to solve, involving food, and allow that to be the aspect that consumes thoughts. So I am learning to cook fish. I have not previously cooked fish, and have wanted to for some time, so I am looking at several recipes to see ways in which fish preparation is handled, what types of seasonings seem preferred, and what kinds of fish are which. Funny part of this is I live in an area where obtaining really fresh fish is a snap, so you would think I would have done this long ago. But my family was a red-meat tribe, as is my hubby's, so even introducing more poultry has proven to be a fight. I love seafood, however, and am enjoying teaching myself how to handle fish. I made some tilapia last week for the hubby and me, and it turned out well. It was not a complicated dish, by any means. I think the fish could have been a bit less... soggy, but he was gracious enough not to mention it, and I was hungry enough not to care. I will get there.

Another challenge I have specifically issued myself is to increase my intake of fresh fruits and veggies. That is going to require some expansion of produce horizons, because woman cannot exist on baby carrots and red delicious apples alone. Well, maybe she could, but she prefers variety, and that is just setting herself up for failure. So I have befriended the mango, and been lucky enough to find some accommodating cantaloupes, and am eyeing the pomegranates, waiting to get my nerve up to try them. Maybe papaya, as well. Also, I must watch out for seeds because of my own internal limitations, so this fresh produce mission has me preoccupied as well, which is always a good thing. If you are gonna obsess about food, let it be in a productive way, I say.

So I am on a great track right now. Slowly replacing the bad foods in my fridge and pantry with ones I am allowed to have. Who knows? I may end up actually being healthy at the end of this. I have also found a handy little tool, a calorie counting website called, predictably, caloriecount.about.com. I can plug in the foods I eat through the day, any exercise I do, and it will generate reports about my dietary intake, including letter grades for how nourishing the food is and guidelines for healthier eating. I also can track my weight and my goals for weight loss, and it makes little graphs to please the visual stimulatory centers of the brain. Handy, and easy, and useful. So there we go.

So, I have my feet planted, a sound strategy, and tools to help me get where I wanna go. Time to run with it.