Week 4

Week 4: June 29, 2011

Weight:              180.6
Week Loss:           1.2

Cumulative Loss:  11.0

This week's milestone:

Real Pants!

For those readers with wise posteriors - no, I have not been wearing imaginary or invisible pants.  I simply mean that I wore my pre-pregnancy non-maternity jeans for the first time this past weekend.  And I have to say, wearing something other than maternity pants after so long is a very strange feeling.  I now only feel normal if I have a stretchy elastic waistband that comes up to my chest.  It's amazing what you can get used to.

But yes, I'm fitting back into my 'real people' clothes again.  Mind you, my 'real people' jeans are a size 16 so I have a long way to go until I fit into my 12's, but at least I fit into something besides maternity pants.  It's a start.  It feels good to see some measurable progress after a month of dieting aside from numbers on a scale.

Another start: I woke up early this morning and took the dogs for a walk. (I'm writing this Tuesday evening). I am now utterly wiped from getting up an extra half hour early.  While the pups enjoyed the walk, I don't think this will be an every day thing.  But it's some kind of activity at least.  We'll see how often I'm inspired to do it.

Seth's doing really well, too.  He was commenting that his jeans are feeling loose.   Even more exciting than loose clothing, he suggested a meal of chicken taco salad with beans for a dinner next week.  Beans!!  He's hated beans his entire life!!  I'M SO SUPREMELY PROUD OF HIM!!

But to sum up our first month of dieting: Even with a sizable loss this month I feel like we're just getting started.  I suppose that's what I should be feeling, though, since we still have 11 months of dieting and blogging to go.

That, and we're still hungry.

Week 3

Week 3: June 22, 2011

Weight:              181.8
Week Loss:           2.7

Cumulative Loss:    9.8

Another great week.  Our blend of Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers continues in full force, with extremely gratifying success.

Seth's down 9.7 pounds, so the Team Mintz Weight Loss Tally is at 19.5 pounds.  Go Team Go!

Now, for those who are unfamiliar with Weight Watchers, let me explain how we're tracking what we're eating.  

WW uses a Points system.  Points are a simple value assigned to a food based on some obscure mathematical formula involving Calories, Fat and Fiber.  I hear that the newest version of the Points system takes Protein into account as well, but the older version we're following doesn't.  To calculate the Points value for a food you can either use a little slide rule that WW gives out to newbies if you have the nutritional info label handy, or you use rules of thumb from their info booklets such as 1 oz of white meat chicken = 1 point.  You get to eat a certain number of Points each day based on your weight, activity level, gender, age and height.

Right now Seth gets 31 points.  I get 24 plus 5 because I'm breastfeeding.  If I were breastfeeding exclusively I would get another 5 above that, but I have to supplement with formula more and more frequently lately, so we'll just call it 29.

And yes, with 5 extra above-and-beyond points, I still get less than Seth.  That's because men get 6 points more than women do right off the bat, just for being men.  

Obviously, this is because God is a misogynist.  

Women get the joys of menstruation and then get to to go through labor.  What do men get?  Bonus Points.  Fabulous.

And then He said "Let all men eat an extra piece of cake while still losing weight."  And there was cake.  And it was good.

OK, the cake is a lie - he doesn't get THAT many more points, and besides it makes God sound like Marie Antoinette.  Oops.  But the point is that Seth still gets way more food than I do when I'm not breastfeeding, which sucks.  (For the Portal Geeks: You see what I did there?  Heh.)

But in any case, my vision of sitting down and planning menus for an entire week ahead of time has not yet come to pass.  I'll stick to planning a day here and a day there.  I have the menus we used from this past weekend while we were doing WW rather than Jenny Craig.  I'm going to save them and build on them and come up with new ones.  Hopefully we'll get enough days' worth of menus that it eventually becomes easier.  Eventually I'll have a variety of days to choose from and I'll be able to mix and match.

So long 'til next week!

Week 2

Week 2: June 15, 2011

Weight:              184.5
Week Loss:           2.0

Cumulative Loss:    7.1

Wheee!!

While I remain fully cognizant that the first weeks' losses are flukes and the multiple-pounds-per-week trend won't continue, I'm still psyched about the progress so far.  Nothing is a better motivator than seeing results.  (The inverse of this, of course, is nothing is more DE-motivational than *not* seeing results.)  Team Mintz has lost about 15 pounds so far, when you add Seth's & my losses together.  That's a whole Raven-baby and then some, given that she's around 12 pounds now.

This week's big decision is that we aren't going to stay on Jenny Craig.  It's just too expensive, too mediocre and in the end it's just not worth it if we can do it on our own.  We'll use the shipment of Jenny food we received this past week during Seth's work week (Mondays - Wednesdays during the next few weeks) and we'll track Weight Watchers points the rest of the time.  The trick with this plan is that now I have to plan out some menus and shopping lists and all of that fun stuff in order to make the Weight Watchers thing happen.  

Ah, time, why is there so little of you?!?

Even so, that's our strategy for right now.  What I'd really like to do is get back to Weight Watchers meetings, so I can get all the new material and have the additional support of a weekly meeting.  For those of you who've never done Weight Watchers: the meetings sound corny and hokey - and maybe they are - but they really do help.  Unfortunately, with the kids it's really difficult to get out to meetings, especially if Seth is doing the program with me.  So for now it will be the old points system and no meetings.

The 'Jenny Craig At Home' program has a counselor that calls me every week, but the woman has all the warmth, sincerity and passion of a flounder.  Motivational? Not so much.  It's like listening to Ben Stein reading technical accounting pronouncements from a teleprompter.  Zzzzzz.  This week she even got the time wrong, so I couldn't even spend the allotted 15 minutes on the phone since I was busy putting Jade to bed.  And evidently there's no calling back if they happen to - I don't know - screw up and call you at the wrong time.  Bah.

Next week I'll share a little more about our menus and the WW points system, since I don't have any to share at the moment, and by then I'll HAVE to have something.  We only have enough leftovers from this weekend's meals in the fridge for Thursday and Friday, so I'd better have a plan in place before that food runs out!  We'll see how that goes.

Wish me luck and steely resolve!!

Week 1

Week 1: June 8, 2011

Weight:              186.5
Week Loss:           5.1

Cumulative Loss:    5.1

"Life is like a box of chocolates.

  It doesn't last long if you're morbidly obese."

         - From some angry British guy on twitter... I didn't catch the name

First off, I know that losing 5 pounds in a week is a fluke.  The same thing happened to me when I went on Weight Watchers the first time.  It comes off FAST in the very beginning, and gets less as time goes by.  So, let's put a little "Results Not Typical" label over this week's number and move on, lest it become an expectation.

This was our first week on Jenny Craig.  You might recall that I got 2 weeks of food from Jenny Craig, but split them with Seth instead, so we're both on the Jenny diet for one week.  We stuck to it very well, though we made our own diet-appropriate meals on Sunday so that our Jenny food would cover Seth for his work week through Wednesday.

The food is OK.  There's some things that are really awesome (I'm looking at YOU chocolate peanut butter caramel snack bar!!) and some that are decidedly poor, like the blueberry mini pancakes with tofu sausage.  (Not a fan of the tofu sausage.  At.  All.  *shudder*)    But most of the pre-packaged food falls smack in the middle of "meh" territory, which is pretty much par for the course for most of those light-fare frozen meals.  Really, light fare in general is pretty "meh".  It takes fat & calories to pique my interest, gastronomically speaking.

Now those of you who know Seth will probably think this next bit sounds like the one of the Signs Of The Apocalypse.  Seth has been eating his veggies.  Every day.  Lots of them.  He's had salad and cucumbers and tomato.  He's eaten spinach, cauliflower, carrots, zucchini, yellow squash and butternut squash. We had artichokes, which he has finally agreed do *not* actually taste anything like pistachio nuts.  He now thinks they taste a bit like potatoes.  He's wrong again, they taste like artichokes, but I digress.

He ate Broccoli.

...  BROCCOLI (!!!)

It'll worth it to me to stay on the Jenny diet if this is going to be the result.  I've been trying to get the man to eat veggies for years with no success.  I've been tickled pink all week.  I'll give him massive credit, he's really trying and sticking to this.  But then, so am I.

Overall, while it seems like it's working and I'll surely stick with it for at least one month, for the money I'm not enthralled with Jenny Craig.  Seth is more a fan than I am, I think.  The convenience is fantastic, which is what we were thinking, but I keep going back to the question of whether the convenience is worth the cash.  The amount of food you get for your money is pretty sad.  We've both been hungry most of the week.  This exchange from Sunday afternoon sums it up nicely:

Jade brings me a book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Me:    "OK, I'll read you the Hungry Caterpillar book."

Seth:  "He must be on Jenny Craig."

A year of weight loss blogging

Day 0: June 1, 2011

Current weight: 191.6

Cumulative weight loss: 0 (duh)

I've decided that after 2 pregnancies it's time to lose some of my accumulated padding.  To stay motivated, I thought perhaps I'd put together this little blog.  I'll post my results for the week and perhaps spout out whatever random thoughts might be in my head.   The aim is to do a post once a week for a year and lose some weight.

How much?  Well for now I'm content to set my goal at size 12's.  I have a lot of size 12 pants I like.  I'm guessing that the size 12 milestone will be around 165lbs.  That will be a loss of roughly 25 lbs.

This blog is the first part of my plan: Motivation!  Dieting is the second part.  (Yes, I know.  It's not "dieting", it's "changing how you eat in order to have a healthy lifestyle and sticking with those changes for life".  Bah  Humbug.  It's dieting.)  Exercise... I'll deal with exercise later.  Like when I can sleep through the night again.

With Jade at almost 2 years old, and Raven at 2 months, it's utter chaos here all the time.  I don't have time or energy to cook and plan, and never mind exercise. (I've written this in 5 minute blocks over the past week, to give you an idea of my life at the moment.)  Weight Watchers is a great program and I've had success with it in the past (2002-ish), but I thought I'd try something new that requires slightly less planning.

Today I started Jenny Craig's meal plan.  They send you all of your meals and snacks in a big box and give you a menu to follow.  There are 2 weeks of pre-planned food per shipment, and there's not a lot of thought or time required.  Microwave for 4-6 minutes and consume.  So far, so good.

Of course you also have to buy regular grocery items to supplement your meals like vegetables and salads and yogurt and milk and bread and... you get the idea. So it's not as easy as it could be.  Plus Seth wants to join me, so this first week we're both doing the Jenny diet using the food they sent, and then we'll do a week on our own.  We would have both joined at once, but we lack the requisite freezer space.  A chest freezer is going to be delivered next Thursday - a good thing to have in the house with 2 kids.  But anyway, if we both like the plan, he'll join up and get his own food once we have somewhere to store it.

So that's it.  This blog is essentially a motivational tool.  I'll consider the blog experiment a success if come next May 31st I've completed 52 entries, and lost some weight.

Let's see how it goes!