Week One Completed

It has officially been one week since I started to make the changes in my life to become a healthier and happier person. I have logged all my food, as well as my water intake and daily movement with SparkPeople and MyFitnessPal. Though at times I had very stressful situations happen, I neither turned to or away from food as a comfort or a punishment.

I have tried to keep my calorie intake to around 1200 daily, but had some trouble on a few days. Not going over, but going under. I've also been paying closer attention to my sodium intake and am shocked at how easy it is to reach or exceed my daily goal.

I've been very surprised to see how much salt is in the foods you wouldn't normally consider salty. Unfortunately, this has limited the foods I would normally think were ok to eat. This week I will spend some time researching more healthy food choices in order to have a bigger selection.

Today is my official weigh-in day and though I have burned over 2.000 calories through exercise and eliminated 3.500 calories through calorie restriction, I am afraid that I have not lost even one pound. While I am tempted to be discouraged, I am taking into consideration that my size 12 jeans that were very tight, especially first coming out of the dryer, were actually very comfortable when I wore them yesterday.

Also, I never did take my measurements before I started this journey, so this morning I picked up a measuring tape in order to compare this week to next week just in case the scale doesn't move.

All in all, I feel pretty good about the past week. I did 30-45 minutes of exercise, 6 out of 7 days. Thursday I had to take a day off because I hurt so badly all over, especially my shoulder due to an old rotator cuff injury.

My energy level has been good, except for the fact that my sleep is in one 4-5 hour stretch at night and maybe a nap during the day, if I'm lucky. I would much rather a complete 8 hours at once. In order to do that and get up at 5 a.m., I need to go to bed at 9 p.m. instead of staying up until 1-2 a.m. every night. Not so easy.

Drinking over 8 glasses of water a day has been no problem. I started doing that back in January. I really have no desire to drink anything else, except for my coffee in the mornings.

In conclusion, my goals for this week are:

1. Take my measurements
2. Research for more healthy food choices
3. Get adequate rest
4. Cardio at least 5 out of 7 days
5. Add circuit / strength training to my workouts
6. Meet my calorie requirements
7. Get new measuring cups and spoons to more adequately measure portions (I did this this morning!)

Some small victories this week:

• I did not eat any of the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that DD14 baked
• Even though I REALLY wanted a bacon cheeseburger, I opted for a portabella mushroom veggie burger instead.
• When The Man insisted on going to Ryan's for the Mega Breakfast Buffet, I thought hard about how hard I worked this week and then settled for only a glass of ice water, a 3 eggs scrambled and 3 links of pork sausage. ( I admit, though.. it was pretty torturous)

My reward for getting through the week without 'messing up':

Dying my hair today! Really needs it... been putting it off.