I'm Home

This week has been going really well for my weightloss, which is amazing because I ate off plan again last weekend. I saw an ad for pizza and it really made me crave some so that's what I had on Friday. One of our local spots has this thin crust that's just amazing and I ate until I was pleasantly full and had a Diet Coke with it too. That Friday afternoon meal gets me through until the following morning. We have started a new Saturday ritual of eating lunch before we grocery shop because now I'm typically making a family dinner on Saturday evening. So Saturday we ended up going to a Mexican restaurant which I love because I can get the taco salad and just not eat the bowl. That was the plan anyway. Once they set the warm, salty tortilla chips in front of me I lost my resolve. I ate a lot of chips with salsa then proceeded to finish my whole salad and eat part of the shell. I washed it down with two diet sodas too. Yikes. Dinner that night was requested by my younger son, barbecue chicken with corn. I was going to use a low-carb BBQ sauce for my chicken brrast but by that point I just figured I already ate all those carbs so what's the point. I also took a scoop of my husband's mashed potatoes which I swore I wasn't going to eat. It was a little much all in two days. I was happy to wake you and eat keto again on Sunday. Last Friday I made my way back down to 175 pounds and that creeped back up to 177 on Sunday after the indulgences, but by Monday afternoon I was down to 176 and today I was 175 so there's hope that I can get back below 175 by the end of the week. I plan to stick to keto pretty religiously for the next 2 weeks because I have my annual physical at the end of the month and am curious about my blood labs. The Peleton challenge through my work ends in 2 days and I am already at 618 minutes, which puts me 118 minutes over my goal. Barring any obstacles I should be able to get a 20-minute working in these last 2 days and end up with a total of 658 total minutes in Peleton classes for the month. I will say, the desire to workout and push myself really is night and day different now that I'm not taking a caffeine pill anymore. I literally have to talk myself into working out now when earlier in the challenge when I was popping my caffeine pill I was so ready to blow the challenge out of the water. Sigh. I am doing OK getting through my day on just coffee but part of me still thinks about returning to a caffeine pill after my physical if I'm still having trouble motivating myself to workout. It makes me feel weak for thinking about backtracking on something I know I could get over if I stick with it, but at the same time, I took that away before I developed a habit of working out and I'm worried that without it and in the absence of a challenge that I'll just get lazy and stop working out. Time will tell. I have decided to not have sweeteners this week. I was able to maintain my weight with only drinking it with meals but I found that it didn't feel like a huge treat like I expected so I think my mouth will get used to it faster if I just don't have it consistently. I did chew some gum on Saturday and that felt like a treat. I ordered some Twinings cold infuse teas and they arrived yesterday and man is that good in water!

My mouth was thrilled with the flavor despite not having any sweeteners. My challenge is to not use them in every drink. I have to believe my not using sweeteners this week is a huge part of the ease of weightloss. I am eating plenty of dairy this week and still losing. I have only been fasting for 13 hours right now because I'm in progesterone phase and fasting stresses the body and raises cortisol. progesterone is blunted by cortisol so thus the smaller fasting window so as to not stress out the body. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep sticking to the fasting schedule I'm on long-term, I'm not sure I need the 24-hour fasts twice a month. In some manners having a structure is great for me because it takes the guesswork out of the equation but in other ways it makes me feel like rebelling. I think this past year has seen me making a lot of changes in a short time. it will be interesting to see what sticks long-term and what morphs to completely new ways of doing things. Even though I have days or weekends where I eat as if I'm not eating low-carb, I don't feel as if I could ever go back to eating that way all the ti. Keto makes me feel like I'm "home".