Weekend Wrap Up - Granddaughters Version

Weekend Wrap Up

If I needed a reminder that energy in my 60's is not what it was in my 20's, this past week with my two no-end-to-energy granddaughters definitely hammered that home. While I'm pretty sure the granddaughters had an absolute blast, my spouse and I are definitely dragging by comparison. But, we're flying them home today, and once the hand off to Mom occurs at the airport, we can rest and just enjoy their energy without having to necessarily match it, lol.

Friday - Dropped the granddaughters off at Beach Camp, and went on a six mile walk around our local harbor. It was a gorgeous day, with a light breeze, and as usual, there were some out of the ordinary things to see, including these two parked helicopters in the middle of what is normally a picnic spot.

Stopped in at our favorite sandwich shop afterward to share a chicken club sandwich, which tasted so good! My spouse has been recovering from a fall, and just today got his mileage back up to six, which is the sweet spot that 'allows' us enough calories in the bank to share something yummy for lunch, post-walk. I'm so happy to have him back online - I've missed both our long chatty walks and the tasty lunch items we subsequently share.

Picked the granddaughters up from camp and headed to Taco Bell to pick up food for them, which they ate at the harbor before we all headed over to Shark Night at our local marine life facility. The granddaughters loved it, in particular getting to stroke petite horn sharks in the shark touch tank.

Saturday - Headed out to Newport Dunes RV Resort to enjoy their floating water park. The granddaughters had a ball, and we enjoyed watching the action from the shoreline.

Sack lunch on the beach, then a stop for frozen yogurt (granddaughters) and iced coffee (us). Next, we drove to my mom's to do a meet-and-greet with a Miniature Pony that resided at the horse stables where she volunteers. So sweet to watch the granddaughters gently approach and pet the skittish little pony.

From there we returned home to showers, dinner, and some much needed quiet-before-bedtime (us not them, lol).

Sunday - I was up bright and early to reserve our summer concert spot by laying out blankets and chairs. Walked home to get a little exercise before making the girls a last day breakfast treat of chocolate chip pancakes and bacon, plus strawberries.

We all headed out to do some clothes shopping next, one of my favorite things to buy them. The clothes are all so cute, and they look so cute in them!

Home for lunch, then off to walk to concert, where I’d already left our car in the AM to secure a close by spot for the short drive home. (We'd previously decided not to push our luck by expecting the granddaughters to make the return walk to house after a full day of activities!) 

We enjoyed pizza out for our last dinner together, then we put two very excited girls to bed (the younger had missed Mom, and both had missed their pets).

Today, Monday - 

Flying the girls back home. We made it, they made it, we all had fun, and they want to return next summer to do it all again. Hooray!

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How was your weekend???

Take 2: A Day In My Weight Loss Life

 A Day In My Weight Loss Life

I wanted a re-do of yesterday's meticulous tracking, in order to see if spreading out my calories just a bit more might result in a better food ending to my day. Spoiler alert: It did.

Morning Weight

117.4

Movement

6 mile walk (approximately 500-600 calories burned)

Food

Half a Bagel with one slice cheddar cheese & one slice deli ham, one cup fresh cherries (Approx 500 calories, about 100 of which was margarine added by my granddaughter before I could explain to her that I don't use it.)  Eaten at 11am

Banana (100 calories)  Eaten at 1pm

Small cup Greek Yogurt + 1/2 cup frozen berries (150 calories)  Eaten at 3pm

Trader Joe Bean & Rice Burrito, Salsa (240 + 50 calories)  Eaten at 5pm

Two frozen berries (10 calories)  Eaten at 7pm

Total:  1050 calories

AM Weigh-In This Morning

117.4, no change 

Takeaways

A much better day! I would normally not do a 500 calorie bagel 'thingy' here, because I don't normally use any margarine - just bagel, cheese, and a deli ham slice, but my granddaughter added it before I could stop her, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I ate it and elected to go a bit lighter elsewhere.

Anyhow, just some very mild food compulsions when we returned home from an early evening event, which I was able to satisfy with two frozen berries. (For any new readers - I've been at this for four months, I did not start off by being able to shut off my noisy brain with just two berries, trust me!)

Lesson Learned

A bit lighter at first meal allows for slightly larger later-in-the-day meals, and that seems to work better for me. OK, so now I know!

A Day In My Weight Loss Life

 A Day In My Weight Loss Life

I was interested in tracking very specifically the results of one day of calorie reductions, and how my scale responded, and here is how it went yesterday:

Morning Weight

117.6

Movement

6 mile walk (approximately 500-600 calories burned)

Food

1/2 of Board & Brew Bacon Chicken Club + One small container of their Secret Sauce (approximately 750 calories)  Eaten at Noon

Small cup Greek Yogurt + 1/2 cup frozen berries (150 calories)  Eaten at 3pm

Potato Chips (300 calories)**  Eaten at 7-8pm

Total:  1200 calories

AM Weigh In This Morning

117.4, down .2 pounds

Takeaways

Too many calories consumed in one meal (750) made it difficult to not eat in the PM, resulting in a choice to fuel up with potato chips. Terrible choice, even if I still ended up losing weight.

Lesson Learned

Its fine to skip breakfast, as its my least needed meal, from an energy and blood sugar perspective. Smaller lunch and larger mid-afternoon snack, should allow for healthier evening choices.

**I'm realizing I have to be careful not to let salt (potato chips) become my replacement sugar addiction. Da#n this eating healthier in an unhealthy world is tough!

Weekly Weigh In & Movement (July 10)

 Weekly Weigh In & Movement

Goal Weight:  115  112  (Revised slightly downward)

July 10 Weigh In:  117.6

Weight Lost Last Two Weeks:  1.4 pounds 

Weight Left To Lose:  2.6  5.6 pounds

I revised my weight loss goal downward by three pounds, from 115 to 112 pounds. I did this after running my stats through an online Body Mass Index calculator. At 112 pounds, my BMI would be at the low end of the range tagged as 'Healthy.' 

It looks like I can go as low as 110 pounds and still be in the Healthy range. Any lower, however, and I'd drop into the 'Underweight' category, which I don't think is advisable for my aging bones.  😐

At my current rate, I should be able to make the new 112 weight target by mid-August.

At which point, I'm going clothes shopping!

Weekly Mileage/Movement

• Fri- 3 mile walk
• Sat- None
• Sun- 5 mile walk
• Mon - 5 mile walk
• Tue- None
• Wed- 4.5 mile walk
• Thur - 6.5 mile walk
• TOTAL FOR WEEK: 24 miles
• TOTAL FOR JULY:  26 miles

No Sugar and Less Food Efforts

I'm pretty much humming along at this point, with regard to my No Sugar effort. Saying 'No' to myself, whenever sugar crosses my path, is really no longer an issue for me after four months, which does feel like a miracle, given my sugar-heavy past.  

So my latest effort has been to see if I could silence the post-dinner Food Noise that would sometimes cause me to look for something to crunch, even though I wasn't really hungry. And, I hope it is helpful that I can share that similar to having to get through those first few nights of saying 'No' to sugar, I'm having similar results with regard to Food Noise. After working hard to ignore the brain messaging for a couple of nights, the noise is fading. And doing so much faster than my sugar addiction did. 

Meaning that after just about a week, I no longer feel compulsions to find something to nibble in the evenings, which was way faster than I'd expected.

I found the following article really helpful in researching what I was experiencing, and how to stop it- 

How To Combat Food Noise

About my weight loss efforts in general - my current rate of progress has occurred by working diligently to get myself into a new mindset. A mindset where I'm deliberate and aware of what I'm eating, and one where I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid what I experience as mindless eating.

I'm also working hard to shift my focus away from food being viewed as a reward. Instead, I'm working to focus on how much enjoyment I'm getting from picking out my clothes, and how much happier I am about the way they look on me, with some 12 pounds shed. Iced black coffee is my pick-me-up treat, which I genuinely enjoy. And I'm having some fun trying out new coffee spots as I'm out and about.

Food just cannot be the/my focus going forward, if I want the weight to remain off. I have had to come to peace about this, which I think I have. I am increasingly comfortable having just one full meal on days we have social events that include food, and then doing a semi-fast for one or two days afterward, until any weight gained from food-heavy events has been reversed. This approach allows me to enjoy eating out, while still managing my weight and/or weight loss.

Weight loss might come easy for some, but it most definitely does/has not for me. The mental work I've had to exert to accomplish even a fairly modest 12 & 1/2 pound weight loss has somewhat shocked me. I'm doing it, and I'm very happy with the results, but it has been hard.

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If you are likewise on a quest to improve some aspect of your dietary or fitness life, please feel free to share here. The more we can work to support and encourage each other the better!

Happy 4th Of July + Lots Of Family Fun

Happy Holiday!

It's been a wild week with four extra people in the house, two of them little people with way more energy than their grandparents!

The Fourth of July was a great day. Exhausting, but great! We started the day with a three mile roundtrip walk to the beach, stopping at Starbucks on the return to fuel up the granddaughters with frappuccinos. 

We then headed to the harbor for Water Wars, a decades long tradition that brings out the kid in everyone. People paddle out on everything from SUP's to jet skis, and proceed to shoot water at each other, and the dry land crowd, from any and every type of water device. The folk on dry land do same in return, and it is a great and wild time.

The granddaughters loved it - I had bought them pink high powered water guns - but I think my son-in-law enjoyed it more. The kid in him definitely came out. 

After we returned home here, we headed to the HOA pool for an afternoon of swimming. For dinner, we enjoyed grilled burgers, corn on the cob, watermelon, and homemade ice cream (them, not me 🙂 )

Fireworks viewing was enjoyed from our balcony, which, I'm not going to lie, was awesome. So stinkin' easy!

Anyhow, the fun with them continues here for another week. I'm exhausted (LOL!) but they are all having a blast, and already talking about returning next 4th of July. Actually, my older granddaughter considers it a given, so I'm not sure her parents will have much say in the matter!

I hope your holiday was absolutely fantastic, wherever you are, and however you celebrated!

Weekend Wrap Up / Lots of Cooking!

Weekend Wrap Up

Well, another vibrant weekend is in the books! As a retiree still trying to live a big life (I can rest when I'm dead, as my Dad, who is still going strong at 88, always reminds me when we chat.), I often wake up on Monday mornings with gratitude that the life I've worked hard to build since we moved here eight years ago is now at a place where it pretty much moves along without me needing to be push it quite so hard. 

Everything we did this weekend built off of earlier efforts I/we made to establish a connection with friends or community. I say that simply to encourage any who might be floundering a bit in retirement. You do have to work to get things going, but you can then take your foot off the throttle and pretty much coast.

Friday - I spent a really enjoyable morning at our new fitness center. This is the first gym we've belonged to since retiring that I am actually enjoying. During my working years, I loved going to the gym in the early AM because lots of my friends and work colleagues were also there, and we'd chat as we worked out. That changed when I retired and stopped going in at 5AM, and I've been struggling a bit since to find my gym mojo.

But I really like our new fitness center. It feels lively, but not in any sort of look-at-me way that a lot of gyms do. There are just lots of active people of all ages, they are friendly, and I now look forward to my indoor workouts after many years of not.

My workout consisted of 10 minutes on the StairMaster, from which I'll begin to build, 3 miles on the treadmill, about 1/2 mile of which I ran, and a full body weight workout.

I stopped by two supermarkets on the way home in order to 'steal' their advertised loss leaders -

• Two containers of Thrifty ice cream at $2.50 a container
• 5 ears of corn at .50 cents each
• A pound of Hormel bacon at $5.00
• A small watermelon at $2.00

All of the above are in preparation for our soon-to-be-here younger daughter and her family, which includes my two (yeah!) granddaughters.

We officially kicked off the weekend in the late afternoon with a visit to our membership winery's new waterfront location. As we took our glasses of complimentary wine out onto their new patio, I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I am not going to hate this new location whatsoever!'

Dinner back home was another of my frozen stash of Pot Pie savory dinner pies, plus some roasted asparagus.

Saturday - I met my regular walking group for a four mile walk along the beach, during which we observed a Paddle Out. A Paddle Out (described in greater detail here) is a ceremony where people paddle out to the waves, form a circle, and honor the memory of someone recently deceased. I've seen several of these over the years, and they are always moving to observe.

Post walk, we all gathered for coffee where, surprisingly, a robust discussion about Shakespeare occurred. I was delighted, as I've read and attended about a dozen Shakespeare plays since retiring, one of my retirement goals that stuck. 

The process I follow before seeing a Shakespeare production is to download the play we are going to see, and read it while simultaneously reading SparkNotes online to assist with understanding the dialogue as written.

After returning home I spent the afternoon baking Ina Garten's Carrot Cake with Candied Ginger Mascarpone Frosting for a social wine event we were attending.

The event, once we arrived, turned out to be lots of fun (it actually always is 🙂), and my fancy carrot cake ended up being voted the Dish Of The Night, which earned me a $40 bottle of Pinot Noir, yeah!

Sunday - Spiritual services in the AM, then home to prepare to host my Book Club. For tonight's meeting, which I host once a year, I made a slow cooker honey beer pot roast with carrots and potatoes, steamed green beans, warmed Challah bread slices, and this Giada de Laurentis Ricotta Orange Amaretto Pound Cake that I served alongside small scoops of orange sherbet.

The book club discussion  - How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn - was interesting and robust, and the dinner turned out really nice, with seconds enjoyed by several of the guests (including me!). Clean up afterward, which my lovely husband did since I did all the cooking, was considerable, so we headed straight to bed once he finished.

Today, Monday - 

Although I didn't have any dessert, I did eat more pot roast than I should have last night, so I'm headed out the door shortly to try and undue any damage with a long walk. I'll weigh myself tomorrow! 😄

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How was your weekend???

Breaking In To Share A Brief Moment Of Success

Posting my weight loss efforts here on this blog has been such an incentive to keep going, particularly on the days when I really, really, really want to eat, so, a sincere and hearfelt . . . 

Thank You!!!

I hit a new low threshold this morning (118.6), got all excited, and took a quick photo just before heading out to meet my Saturday morning walking group. 

I still have a few more pounds to go, but d@mn it, after so many weeks and months of self-deprivation, I think I've earned the right to enjoy a brief moment of success!  😆

Edited to add: I want to quickly clarify that I don't consider giving up sugar to be a form of self-deprivation. That was/is a form of self care, due to the way sugar was negatively impacting my life. I'm thrilled to finally have that monkey off my back, hopefully for good.