one little word report #2: health/body

Ready to hear how my health goal for the first 2 months turned out?

Health
Goal: Shoot for half a plate's worth of fruits/veggies at every meal/snack.

How it went: This went well, too. I actually started Weight Watchers the week before Christmas (on purpose--Christmas cookies are one of my weaknesses!), and you track food based on a points system they give you. Guess what? Fruits and veggies are 0 points, soooo that is good motivation to eat more of them. :)

I've definitely noticed a change in how I set up my meals now. Breakfast used to be straight up carbs--cereal and milk and nothing else. Now my typical breakfast is toast with peanut butter, a small glass of milk, and some applesauce. (I'm working on getting the kids away from cereal breakfasts, too.)

Snacks used to be rolls, bread, crackers or, okay, let's be honest--a cookie or some chocolate! Ha! Now I eat an apple with a piece of cheese or some PB.

And we've started preparing an extra veggie side at dinner so we can make half our plates be vegetables. I'm even learning about roasting and seasoning vegetables instead of just steaming them (I am not a talented cook, my friends. This is all new to me.)

I still need to work on variety--I mostly eat apples, I've noticed--and consistency, even when I'm hungry. I also need to shift my mindset a bit, I think, so that I can convince myself it is possible to feel full with a tummy full of produce instead of bread. I also need to plan better.

What surprised me about this was how hard it was. It takes a lot of planning to change your diet (I don't know why this surprised me), and I noticed that if I didn't have a plan for a healthy snack before I got hungry, I would go right back to the carbs and sugar. (Steve has recently started to use the term "hangry" for when you're SO hungry you start getting angry/fussy--this is the point when I snap at my kids AND reach for the chocolate; I need to be ready before then!)

Also, it's been interesting trying to move to less-processed foods--the challenge here is shifting our budget from cheaper-but-processed foods to more-expensive-but-whole foods, like fruits and veggies. I miss California's cheap produce. :) But Aldi helps out here!

Also, as of yesterday, I have lost 10 lbs!

NEW GOALS: I'm also going to keep this goal up (obviously) and I am adding two new goals:

1. Continue training for a 5k.
I have never really liked running (translation: I have always hated it) but Steve suggested I train to do a Color Run with him in April. So I found the Couch to 5K sheet I pinned a while back, and I'm now two weeks into it. It's only 3 times a week, so its been doable so far, and I actually (*gasp!*) kind of like it!

2. Plan and prepare snacks ahead.
I need to have something healthy to eat all ready to go before I get HANGRY. :)

Oh, hey there bandwagon...

I'm not usually a bandwagon person, but every once in a while, when I find a good one, I think its okay to hop on. I mean, I did change my mind about wearing leggings as a grown up (they are just so comfortable!) and got peer pressured into a gym membership which I now use an average 5 days a week. So when I picked up Michael Pollan's Food Rules--which I read in an afternoon--I felt pretty good about hopping on his real-food healthy-eating train. (Does it bother you that I just switched from wagons to trains? Don't get distracted.)

I've read about real food eating before ("real" means it has just actual food components in it, not unknown preservatives and sweeteners and stuff), and two of my sisters-in-law do varying degrees of whole food eating, but I never thought I had the patience to do it myself. I do NOT like spending more time than necessary in the kitchen! Thank you. But Pollan's book skipped over the science lessons (which make my brain hurt--I'm a lover, not a microbiologist) and broke down the whys and hows into easy, bite sized rules, like:

Don't buy anything with ingredients you wouldn't keep in your pantry.

Well. That makes sense, right? Why would I want to eat something if I didn't know what it was? And I can still buy pre-made pasta as long as it has only things that I would use if I made pasta fresh at home. (Which I won't. At least not this year.)

Or:

Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.

That's where all the fresh stuff is kept, so that keeps it simple.

There were lots of other great, simple thoughts, too, and then at the end:

Ignore the rules on special occasions.

So, like, if everyone is at a party eating ice cream with who-knows-what kind of crazy stuff in it and you want some, or you need to use some food coloring to make a birthday cake, then fine. Not a big deal. The point is to adjust your everyday eating to be more natural foods.

After reading his rules it all just made sense to me for the first time. So I decided to just give it a shot. I started reading labels, mostly focused on following that first rule I mentioned above. I was shocked how many weird things were listed on most of the labels I picked up. (Why so much Xantham gum, America?) Even my "healthy" wheat bread had tons of random junk and processed sugar and stuff in it!

So part of my goal to engage this year is going to focus on engaging more with my health from a nutrition standpoint. Last year was a lot about exercise (which was so good, and which I will continue) and calorie counting (which can be good or bad, depending), but not so much about making sure I was fueling our bodies with good stuff.

I don't think we'll ever go 100% real food (I just don't think I am going to want to make my own salad dressing or pay like $10 for an organic whole foods version, and if Steve just wants to eat Pop Tarts sometimes, I think the right to Pop-Tarts-whenever-you-want is inherent to adulthood), but I've already made some small steps this year, and I've got a few more things to work on. So far my mini-goals are:

1. Replace cereal with more healthy, fueling, filling breakfasts.
2. Eat more greens and veggies, and fruit
3. Get the kids snacking on more fruits/veggies and less low-nutrition carbs (crackers, pretzels, etc.)
4. Add more lean protein and fiber to our diets so we stay full longer.
5. Focus on eating a mostly-real-food based diet (within reason)

WHOA.

I took the kids to WIC today for our check-in. We weighed and measured Charlie, and before I really knew what was happening (read: before the dread could set in) the nurse had me shoeless and on the scale, staring down at those calibrating numbers.

I saw the number stop and my brain said: DOES NOT COMPUTE.

I had a sort of out of brain experience (not uncommon, especially when I am presented with numbers) staring at it. What number is that? That is not the number I expected.

I was still reeling and confused when she had me step off the scale. My brain is pedaling around trying to figure out what happened and finally I think to myself that I haven't seen that number since... before... SINCE BEFORE GRACE WAS BORN!!!!!!!!!

...!!!!!!

I wanted to cry. In a good way. A sort of relieved, wonderful way.

Because for the first time I have been working on this. I've been trying to exercise more regularly, for real. Until I hurt. I have been watching what I eat--choosing vegetables or yogurt and granola instead of sugar sugar sugar--and drinking lots of water. I haven't been dieting (I'm still nursing Charlie so that is a no-no) and I haven't been utterly focused on weight loss, but I have been trying to be healthy. I eat when I'm hungry, but I eat better things. When I eat fats, I eat healthier fats. (And I give myself the little wiggle room of dessert in the evening if I am dying for something chocolate, which, lets face it, I often am.)

But when I look down (or from the side in the mirror) I still have a lot of stomach left over from carrying my sweet (but enormous) baby boy. A LOT. Mostly in just that one spot, so I have a nice front-hovering muffin top. And I'll admit, that's not the easiest thing for a mama's ego, seeing that. I thought even with all the changes, I had hit a plateau, and that made me feel very discouraged.

(This picture is from a couple weeks ago, but I actually wore this same thing again today [and Charlie peed on it, actually] so just pretend it is perfectly current.)

But my little interview with the scale today made me feel really good. I am not skinny. No. I still have my fair share of cellulite and some abs that I will continue taking to the gym. But that's totally okay! I have plenty of time. What I am SO excited about is that I punched my new numbers into a BMI calculator, and it was healthy! A whole number closer to the middle of the healthy range, instead of hanging by a point-something on the edge of healthy and overweight, like it was for the past several months. That felt really good. I am so excited!