21 Day Challenge: Day 12

Yesterday I woke up with the blah Monday blues. Doesn't happen to me all the time, but when it does, I feel it before my feet hit the floor. I don't want to do the things I need to do, and that leaks over to the things that I should do like eat right and exercise. Days like this used to send me on a eat-what-I-want binge. But it didn't happen yesterday!

Instead, I focused on my diet goals. No sweets, no snacks, no seconds (except for days that start with an S--and it wasn't Smonday). The blah feelings might be linked do the fact that I was able to eat what I wanted over the weekend and Monday marked an end to that and back to the weekly restrictions. The fact is that I am totally satisfied physically during the week without snacks or desserts, and I think my blah feeling was tied to my mental and emotional connection to food. I often used it to help me through boredom or stress, not just to feed hunger. Mondays are busy and I didn't have food to pacify me.

Once I got past breakfast and lived until lunch without snacking, I regained my momentum. Losing weight certainly isn't about eating what you want when you want. Once I got my head on straight I changed my focus to the benefits I'll see down the road. My weight is dropping along with my BMI. I even went out for my hour walk in our balmy 40 degree weather. That's huge progress for me! I'm heading in the right direction!

New Year, New Approach

This is my first post for the New Year, and that tells you something. But what? When I disappear it is often because I've gone off the deep end with my eating and I don't want to face my readers. This time, that's not the reason. My workload has tied up most of my time, and let's face it, that takes precedence over blogging. However, I'm here now, and thank all my readers who have contacted me to see that I'm okay.

I'm really more than okay. I've started to exercise regularly again. That always makes me feel better. I've started thinking about my upcoming garden plan and adding a section for herbs. And for my eating...it could have been better over the holidays, but it could have been worse. We chatted about this quite a bit over at the diet forums.

Currently my plan, if you want to call it that, is to limit snacks between meals to fruit. I'm also trying to plan ahead to know what I'll have for breakfast or lunch so I don't grab something on a whim that triggers a binge. Eating healthy is a one day at a time process. Instead of saying I'm doing this for six weeks, I say, "I'm doing this today."