There is no excuse - and I'm the sweatiest person ever

I have not blogged in a week and I have no excuse. I’ve still been exercising, still been tracking calories. I guess you could say I’ve just been busy with, well, life. I mean, there is a reason this blog has been retitled… life has a tendency to get the best of me sometimes.

Let’s see… I last updated on Thursday, with every intention to post Friday. My 6 year old has judo on Friday nights. We don’t get home until 8 or after and at that point he’s usually on the verge of a meltdown because that is his usual bedtime and there is still the matter of bathing and teeth brushing and story reading to attend to. He gets a little cranky. I was hoping that after dealing with this crankiness that perhaps my wonderful husband would put the grumpy child to bed so that I might lift heavy things and sweat and breathe hard in an effort to look AWESOME. But no. This did not happen. Grumpy child needed mommy to do bedtime.

Bedtime did not go as smoothly as planned. It ended up being almost 8:45pm. Then my friend John came over. No exercise for mommy on Friday night.

I still had an awesome Friday night. It ended up being an impromptu party with John and Caitlin and Neal. And, as impromptu parties tend to do, this impromtu’d me to drink many of the beers… and when I say many, I only mean 5, but for some reason these were magically Miller Lites that made me much more inebriated than usual. I stayed up until 2am chatting and being wildly witty and entertaining (actually, probably not). I collapsed into bed and slept a deep sleep for… 4.5 hours. When my children awoke.

Now I was a grumpy mommy. And Grumpy Child was STILL a grumpy child from staying up too late the night before pitching a giant fit about bedtime. Grumpy Mommy + Grumpy Child = WORLD WAR III IN THE TROTT HOUSEHOLD!!!

From 7am until 10am (when Always Happy Baby went down for a nap), James (aka Grumpy Child) and I bit each other’s heads off, whined and complained (mostly him, but a little bit me too), and generally didn’t get along. I was so exhausted. I just wanted to take a nap in hopes that I could pull it together for my friend’s bridal shower and Bachelorette revisited later that day/night. The baby went down for a nap… and instead of crawling back into bed with my husband, I put on my workout clothes and headed to the basement for my workout!

I was so proud of myself. I was hungover, tired, grumpy… and I knew that pushing through that workout would definitely make me feel better. It did. However, it didn’t really fix my tired… and the Grumpy Child decided he needed to come to the basement and play while I did my exercise and talked to me the whole time. I tried to explain that exercise time is mommy’s time and that it was fine for him to be down there with me but there was not going to be extensive conversation being had about all things Transformers and superheroes and Skylanders and and and and and and… this point was lost on him. LOST.

It did not lend that whole “stress relief” portion of exercise to the situation, that’s for sure.

So, yes, it was great. I worked out on a Saturday. Awesome, super duper. But then: I continued to sweat buckets for the REST OF THE DAY. It was disgusting. I wasn’t even warm! I don’t know what the deal was! It would.not.stop. Super embarrassing. Also ruined my hair-do. 

One downer thing I want to talk about: I went up a little over a pound 2 weeks ago... and haven't come back down. In fact, Tuesday morning I weighed myself just to see and I was up ANOTHER pound back to 197!! This morning (Friday) I stepped on the scale after sticking with exercise for the week and doing much better on my eating... I was still at 196.4. I'm very disappointed. My strength routine is doing an excellent job of toning me up - and I'm trying really hard just to focus on that. But between counting calories and exercise I was expecting to see at least some kind of results on the scale - and if not, at least maintain, not go up almost 2 lbs!! I just have to keep reminding myself of this:

But it's much easier said than done. I'm not really "okay" with the idea of being over 200lbs again... even if I look like I'm less than that. 

I decided to go back through MyFitnessPal to figure out what I was doing food-wise when I dropped from 197 to 195 in like 9 days (I wasn't exercising at the time except for occasional short walks at lunch and cleaning house - that type of stuff). I was averaging higher caloric intake during all of my recent weight drops. I would plateau for 2-3weeks, then have a week or two where I would go way over my calorie goals most days, and then see a 1.5 to 2 lbs drop at the end of that week. 

I understand that there isn't really a "starvation mode" - that's pretty much a total myth in the standard way dieters think of it. However, everyone operates differently and apparently I was operating a little more efficiently eating closer to 2000 calories a day than 1500 calories a day. So.. I'm giving that a try. We'll see how it goes. 

While we are sort of on the negative side of things for a moment... I feel like ever since I started regularly exercising again I've become completely fixated on my calorie burn and feel totally guilty and crazy if I don't at least walk EVERY. DAY. Plus I feel like I'm beating myself up over what I'm choosing to eat and drink. It's like, I'm finally doing what I've been aiming for for all these months, and I was much calmer about the weight loss and food and, well, everything when I wasn't even trying - when I was just kind of being conscious of my calories and being happy for whatever loss happened. 

What's up with that? 

It's almost like exercise is having a negative impact on my mental health rather than a positive one. Am I allergic to endorphins or something? Do they make me crazy instead of sane? Depressed instead of happy? I mean, that's doesn't seem particularly fair. I'm obviously still keeping up with it since it does make me feel good at the time, even if when I'm  not exercising it makes me feel like a pile of mental poo. I wish there was like "A Tall Girl's Guide to Eating and Exercising" - because I feel like 90% of the stuff I read only applies to the "average" girl, who is 5'4".. so I guess I should just start paying more attention to men's stuff since the average man is 5'11". Much closer to my height at 5'10". 

I feel like when I started drafting this post 4 days ago I was actually trying to go somewhere with it and then I got distracted and/or didn't have time to wrap it all up and now it's all "blah" and all over the place. Sorry for not keeping things updated this week. Hopefully next week will work out a little better. 

Food stuff for those that are interested can be stalked here: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/PrettyGirlsOnFire