Dieting Is Weird

On the one hand, I'm not happy that my body decided to retain nearly 4 pounds of weight, somehow, between Monday and Tuesday. Not only that, but my weight bumped up above 150 for the first time since January 2nd. In January, I thought I had this calorie counting thing worked out. I thought this was going to be a relatively smooth thing. 

But I also knew that my weight loss for January was more than I should have gotten in that time period. I was prepared for some backsliding. And I'm almost certain that this bump is a blip. 

And there is another hand here - at least I'm able to show Ambrose that he's not the only one that can perform that kind of awful magic trick. That is, making several pounds of weight appear overnight without any discernable effort or rhyme or reason. I have been feeling pretty ill, so it's possible that is related. Especially because I haven't been getting my exercise in. 

I also haven't been eating as well as I should. I'm finding it harder to eat lately. I think that's from being moody due to being on my period, and I hope it clears up as the period leaves. This past weekend I kept forgetting to eat and then I'd start feeling really bad and not want to eat at all. I do a lot better with a routine when it comes to my food. 

I do think that this weight bump will pass. I do believe that I will be able to make this work and that I can get down to 140 before backpacking season. It's just going to take a lot of work and a steady effort. It takes ignoring these bumps instead of leaning into the doom and gloom they invite me to wallow in. It takes focusing on what I'm doing right and staying healthy. I'm not going to focus on weight this week. Instead, I'm going to focus on staying healthy and getting my exercise on. 

Headache

I was going to write a blog, but instead I got a monster headache. 

Counting Calories

For most of my adult life, I've been within 5 pounds of weighing 150 pounds. At 5 foot 3, that's in the overweight section of a BMI chart. I've weighed more, especially during my first marriage, and when I bulked up to do a Spartan Race. I've weighed less very rarely; one time when I was running nearly every day I dropped weight, but I didn't own a scale at that time, so I'm not sure how much. Another time I managed to dip down a bit with a 30 day diet challenge, but those results didn't last. 

And now, I'm trying something that the old me would have called impossible. I'm doing calorie counting, and I'm not miserable. I'm not hungry all the time. I am, at times, struggling to eat enough to support running and CrossFit. I had no idea calorie counting could be like this. 

Not that it isn't a pain in the butt to record every damn thing that I eat. Oh and don't get me started on the annoyances of weighing out food to make sure my portions are correct. But I've been doing this for nearly two months now, and it's been doable and I'm losing weight. 

And while the pounds are taking their time to leave, I can see differences in my body composition, in addition to the small actual weight loss so far. I'm planning on trying to get my weight down to 140 and then re-evaluating. I might try to go lower at that point, or I might try and stay there. I mean, I've gotten there before and couldn't maintain it, so if I can get there, staying there might be challenge enough. 

I'm hoping that the weight loss will help me do better on body weight movements in CrossFit, specifically pull ups. I've got the strength for pull ups, but I figure if I can manage to lose some of my extra padding without losing that muscle, then I should "magically" be able to do more and better pull ups. And so far, I'm even seeing some improvement with those, but it's nothing to write home about, yet. 

I think one of the big reasons that I couldn't have done this before is that I used to eat crap. Not literally, but I now consider most fast food to be food that I don't want in my body. Along with junk food. I wouldn't have been able to just cut those out for the sake of weight loss, but I had already cut those foods mostly out of my diet for my digestive issues. So calorie counting at this point wasn't about restricting foods, because I'd already done that. It was just about counting what I was consuming. 

And it doesn't hurt that my husband and I are in this together. It's super hard to make a dietary change when you live with someone who is not making those changes. It has been hard, even with us calorie counting together, because there are some foods that are great for weight loss that I just can't eat. Like popcorn. Oh, do I get jealous when that air popper starts perfuming the air with that delightful scent. 

But the drawbacks are outweighed by the support that we're able to give each other. We're both learning more about the caloric content of various foods, and we also talk about how we react to various foods. It's not just about calories for us, but also watching sodium intake (minimizing) and protein intake (maximizing).

I don't know where this particular journey is going to lead me, but I'm glad that I'm on this path. And grateful that I'm not walking it alone.  

Almost Ready to Publish

I've got my proof copy in for the latest Hike with Me book, Idaho Centennial Trail Frank Church Finale. This is a big one, as I knew it would be. Poor Ambrose had to ration his time reading it because holding the book up wore his wrist out. He has finished his read through; I now need to do a read through, and then input all the corrections to the large print file. 

Once all the corrections are made, I'll be doing a save as on the Word document to create the standard print. And then a save as on the standard print to create the ebook version. I'll need to do a little fiddling with the cover to create the standard print sized cover, and a bit more fiddling to create the ebook cover, but it's really just about finished. Just a matter of a day's work or so. 

Then I need to really settle into writing the ICT Challenge book about the two day hikes I took north of the Magruder Corridor. That book will be a small one. It might be the smallest one, but we'll see. I do have that one other short one where I was connecting from Stanley Lake to the Middle Fork of the Salmon. I have gotten that one started, and I even wrote 1000 words on Sunday. But then I started feeling sick again and I haven't gotten back to it since. 

But I know I can settle right into writing 1K per day and get that one knocked out in two weeks or less. The photo process should be similarly quick, and the cover should be quicker than the last one just because I did one recently. I'm hoping to get this second one out no later than the end of April so I can be ready to write about my new adventures once backpacking season starts. 

Actually, I'm hoping to write about early spring car camping first this season. We'll see if we can find some open and accessible campsites in April and early May, and get ourselves sleeping in the woods well before we can start our backpacking.