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Follow my struggles and triumphs as I attempt to gain a healthy lifestyle. |
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Hello! My name is Carissa and I am third generation sweet tooth. The love of sugar runs very deep in my family, especially on my dads side. Consequently, diabetes also runs very high on that side of the family. Both of my grandparents had the disease as well as 4/6 of their kids. As a teenager I will never forget what it was like watching my grandma give herself a shot of insulin with a deep sigh right before she injected herself or the horror in my mothers voice as she tells me that my grandma is in the hospital because she passed out at a store; due to her blood sugar dropping too low. I also had an uncle pass away suddenly in his early 50's because of diabetes complications. He had a daughter, the same age as me, in college and a son still in high school at the time. In February a doctor told me that I have polycystic ovarian syndrome (referred to as PCOS) and pre-diabetes. This news is not surprising to me, but it still makes me tremble. I want to learn how to have a well balanced healthy lifestyle and still enjoy a sweet delicacy occasionally and have the hope of someday having a baby to call my own. Currently I am 28 years old, weighing a little over 300 LBS and I am using Dieting for Dummies as a workbook. Follow me on my journey for a newer healthier lifestyle. |
| Today's blog is not going to be about weight loss or healthy eating. Yesterday was a very weird day, I just glided through it without facing any struggles or large triumphs. It is nice to have a day like that when I have been trying so hard for what has seemed like an eternity, but has really only been six weeks. Over the weekend I was feeling very frisky and wanting to have sex all the time. For three days all I could think about was how badly I wanted to dance between the sheets with my husband. Noticing how horny I was, he made a comment that has left me excited with a hint of mixed emotions. He told me that the last time he couldn't keep me off of him is when we got pregnant and had the miscarriage. That is a very good observation and until this weekend I have never been as horny as I was when we became pregnant. The two of us have wanted a family for a very long time and he has never lost hope like I have. The observation has left him desperately hoping a pregnancy will happen again. If I become pregnant I will be excited, but my weight is going to have me stressing out. My first concern is what if I lose another baby. The first miscarriage crushed me and I don't know if I could get through another one. My other major concern is a little silly but legit. I am already a large woman, if I became pregnant will I be able to find any clothes that will properly fit me? I still have a long way to go on my getting healthy journey. Do I have the strength to continue the changes I have made to my lifestyle? I know I am unnecessarily freaking out, but now I feel I am between a rock and a hard place. I want to be hopeful of a pregnancy, at the same time I don't want my hopes to get up. P.S. I am doing a great job of not stress eating! |
| I am extremely happy that GPS' are monotone. I can not count the times I have missed a turn or deliberately went the opposite direction. My GPS has never gotten angry with me. She simply says recalculating route and then makes adjustments to my directions. Once I had finished my blog yesterday, it occurred to me that the reason I have never achieved my healthy living or weight loss goals was because there is one major problem I never tried to find a solution for. It is a necessity I recalculate my route, or my journey will never be completed. I have always focused on eating better and exercise regularly. Everything I read or watch on TV informs me that this is the healthiest way to transform my body. People see a problem and they want to fix it, I too am guilty of this, but with a healthy transformation I need to take a different approach. The added pounds are not my problem, they are the symptom of a larger problem. For me the larger problem is finding happiness and comfort in food. It is crucial I address this and change my ways, otherwise I will do the same thing I have done for the last 10 years. I will succeed for a small amount of time, but ultimately go back to where I was before because I did not address the root of my problem. I am still going to try to eat as healthy as I can and exercise, but now I am going to try and find out what activities make me the most happy. I am very excited about this challenge. |
| I blinked and three days have blown by! For the last six weeks I have encountered my fair share of struggles. Often, it seems as though every new day brings a new struggle that I could not have seen coming. Even though I am usually caught off guard I have always had the knowledge to know what steps needed to be taken to succeed. The last few days have been no different. I have made some great progress but now face a new obstacle leaving me unsure how to handle it. It is important you know the accomplishments I have recently made, because it is the accomplishments that are causing my current obstacle. My cousin returned from Georgia with a new girlfriend and we had a family get together so we could see him, meet his girlfriend, and get to meet my newest cousin Charlie who was just born two months ago. We had such a fun time. An inflatable pool had been set up for the toddlers, complete with water guns. It didn't take long before a few of us adults were engaged in a water war! The water felt great on a hot day, the only problem was that what started as a little teasing turned into a few of us getting soaked! I didn't want to go inside my aunts house soaking wet, so we talked my mom into showing us a pond her dad built when they were growing up and the siblings always talk about memories they had at the pond, making it sound as if it were magical. My aunt and uncle have bought part of the land my grandparents owned, but this infamous pond they always talk about isn't on our family's land anymore, so we never get to see what they are always talking about. We asked permission from the current owners before we walked to it. I'm happy the current owners were nice enough to let us see the pond. It was a nice walk there and allowed for my clothes to dry out. When we returned to the house supper was almost ready. I was able to leave their house feeling very proud of myself. Having the water war gave me much needed exercise and I did very well not eating unhealthy food at my aunt's house. My biggest accomplishment was that I had brought sugar cookies to the party and I grabbed one on our way out and left the rest at the party. At the party we ate an early supper and around 10 pm I started to get hungry again and craved cookies. In February we were planning a trip to visit my friend in the Chicago area and I had bought some Girl Scout cookies to take with us. I had put them in a bag and almost forgotten I had them. Our plans have recently changed because I lost my job and we are no longer going to Chicago, but she is coming here instead. I decided I no longer needed to save the cookies for our trip and opened them up (I also found an unopened bag of Robin Eggs, my favorite Easter candy). While I was eating the cookies I felt like I wanted to gag and quit eating them. I have never experienced a gag reflex with cookies, usually eating pasta invokes it. On Sunday I decided I needed to throw away my bag of goodies and it nearly broke my heart. In the last few weeks I have ate different foods that I used to enjoy and find comfort in, but now I can't stand the taste of them. The obstacle I am facing right now is that I feel like my whole world has been turned upside down. I try on my clothes and they are fitting the same as before or I step on the scale and it tells me that I have not lost any weight. These things tell me that there is something I am not doing right. Then, I begin to think about the achievements I have made the past 6 weeks like going to the grocery store and not buying junk food and I am instantly glowing. My newest achievement is not bringing me pride or happiness. I am not finding comfort in food, like I used to. I know this is an achievement, but I have never found disgust in fatty foods before and I do not know how to handle this. I have always found my greatest pleasure in food and I can't say that anymore. I feel lost. |
| I put all my eggs into one basket and then I ate them. I spent all my time the last couple of weeks worrying about my time at my parents house. I questioned my abilities to continue doing well while I was staying at their house, but I was very excited to return home and I ignored what might happen when I did. It's easy to take the comfort of your own home for granite. When my husband and I go on vacation we enjoy ourselves, but we are always excited to sleep on our own bed again. Being away from my own house for a week I looked forward to returning back to a quiet lifestyle without kids as well as all the comforts my home gives me, like walking around in my underwear. My struggle is that I have been seeking comfort for the last week and all of my hard work the last couple of weeks has been anything but comfortable. I am slowly reverting into old habits. Since my return home, we have ordered pizza 2x. As you are aware of by now, ordering pizza is one of my most difficult challenges. Now I'm upset for reverting to old habits and it's time to get back on track! |
| In nearly every food you buy, unnecessary ingredients are placed in the food. If you go to the canned vegetable isle and look at the ingredients label, you will be shocked to see how much sodium they have added. There are a multitude of added chemicals, cooking shortcuts, and dyes that are added to a lot of the food products we buy on a daily basis. How much healthier could we be if we bought whole raw foods and added ingredients ourselves? Last night our menu said for us to have chicken and noodles with a side of carrots. Chicken and noodles is one of our favorite meals because it is quick and tastes great. We have taken our favorite comfort food and transformed it into a healthier choice and still try to limit how often we have it. Our food is beginning to transform with us. When we originally cooked it we used butter, flour, noodles, chicken, chicken broth, and pepper. Our new recipe takes the same exact foods, but a healthier version of them. Our Healthier Chicken and Noodles 3 TBS Butter 3 TBS whole wheat flour 1/2 LB shredded chicken 24 OZ low sodium chicken broth 1/2 bag of Whole Wheat Wide Egg Noodles Salt and Pepper to taste *For this recipe we find most of our ingredients in the organic section of the grocery store. On medium heat melt butter in a sauce pan. Once butter is melted add flour until all the butter has been absorbed. Add the chicken broth and shredded chicken. Let the mixture cook for 5 minutes to allow broth to thicken. Add a pinch of salt and pepper to taste. Turn heat to low, stirring occasionally. While the sauce is simmering cook your noodles according to directions on package. Once your noodles are finished cooking add chicken sauce to them and enjoy your healthier version of Chicken and Noodles! Last night I took this recipe to a new level by adding carrots to the boiling water a few minutes before I added the noodles and it tasted great. If unnecessary ingredients are going to be added to our food anyways, why not buy the healthiest ingredients and add vegetables and other spices to the recipes ourselves. We would know what is going into our bodies and that we are optimizing our health. |
| Yesterday on Fighting For A Life Worth Living we discussed goals. How experts suggest you make goals and my past experiences with them. I mentioned there are multipal routes to take towards most destinations and goals are no different. Stay tuned to hear my alternative route! I have been battling being over weight for many years and have tried everything I can possibly think of to achieve my goals. When one avenue closes I find another one. Last summer I based my goals on the advice it takes three weeks to develop a habit. My first goal was to drink 80 ounces of water a day. When the three weeks were finished I felt drinking all that water should have become second nature and then I could move on to a new goal such as consuming a piece of fruit with every meal. What I learned is that you can not force yourself to make a habit and if that is your goal it will never be achieved. I believe the only way to make a habit is subconsciously. Any time I have successfully developed a habit, whether I wanted to or not, was done subconsciously. For example, my husband and I made the decision to order water when we go to restaurants. Our reasoning is that it's cheaper and better for us than pop. At first it was very difficult to order water. Our previous habit had not been broken yet and our first instinct was to order a beverage with lots of unhealthy sugar in it. We never said that we expected this to become second nature, but the more we practiced ordering water, the easier it became. Now, we have no issues ordering water when we eat out. We knew the decision we had to make and a new habit was created naturally, without us knowing what was happening. When it comes to goal setting and habits I believe less is more. My new approach to becoming healthy is more relaxed than it has ever been before and I am succeeding more than I ever have before. My ultimate goal is to get to a healthy weight, but the first small goal I made for myself was to ask myself before I eat if I am truly hungry. Here's a secret, I focused on that goal for two weeks max. Putting all of your effort towards one thing is exhausting and I feel that when I put all my effort towards one goal other areas in my life suffer. When I focus on writing my house isn't clean and vise versa. The same is true with trying to get healthy. By not focusing on a particular goal I am trying my best to become healthier in all aspects of my life. We all know what healthy is and what it looks like. The tough part is actually doing what is necessary. Last week at my parents house, they always had fruit juice available. The family's favorite was the blue Hawaiian Punch and I drank it more often then I should have. Coming back home I still wanted to drink that sugary beverage, but going to the store I told myself I didn't need it. I haven't given that blue punch any thoughts until right now. Last night I had an interview at 6pm and hadn't fixed supper because I was preparing for the interview. The interview lasted longer than I expected and when I got home I didn't want to cook. My first instinct was to order pizza, but that would cost too much. My husband suggested we buy frozen pizzas because they are a lot cheaper, but I said no because I knew the frozen pizza would be high in calories and I would buy cookies since I was hungry. We ended up fixing a frozen lasagna. It's because of instances like those that I believe I am achieving more without focusing on particular goals. If I would have focused solely on only eating when I was hungry I might have missed the opportunities to advance in other areas. I still have my destination of being a healthy weight, but my route is smoother with less stress. Don't misunderstand me, the stress is still there, but it's in smaller quantities than before. |
| In this day in age, it seems like everywhere you go experts are telling you how to live your life. Have they themselves tried any of the things they are suggesting us to do? Lets take a minute and discuss goals, what the experts say, and what I am starting to believe. It appears to me that as a society we are constantly being reminded to make goals and the consequences if you do not set goals are grave. Experts and teachers give the impression that the only way to be successful is to have goals. When setting goals experts suggest you use the acronym SMART. Which stands for: Specific Measurable Achievable Reward Time Experts say that if your goal contains all of these elements you are more likely to be successful. A good goal may look like this: I am going to eat a serving of vegetables with every meal by the end of June 2017 and if I succeed I will reward myself by seeing Tom Cruise in The Mummy. An expert might be happy with this goal, but I am not. I used to believe that goals must fit the SMART acronym and that in order to have success in anything it had to start with a goal. After years of practice I have a new conclusion. I still believe goals are important. They act as a final destination, but how you get to that final destination is where I disagree. If you have ever used a GPS navigator you are aware there are multipal routes to get to a location. One route is the SMART way. I have tried to use the this formula for weight loss and here are two separate instances it failed me. The first time was a few years ago. A doctor had given me the goal to consume under 1500 calories, wanting to achieve this I made a goal. My goal was to consume under 1500 calories for ten days in a row. Once I achieved this goal I would be rewarded by purchasing a shirt I had picked out purposely for this goal. This goal was everything it needed to be. The 1500 calories is what made it specific and measurable. I felt ten days was a short amount of time making it achievable and giving it a timetable. While the shirt was the reward. During the ten days I put all my energy into making this goal and it added stress. At the end of my challenge I had achieved my goal and it felt really good. My reward backfired because online the only size they had left was a size larger than what I wore and when I went to the physical store hoping to find it in my size, I found it had been moved to clearance and the only one they had left was two sizes too small. I bought it hoping it would keep me motivated to lose the weight. To this day I still can not wear the shirt I worked so hard to get. The other downfall is that once I met my goal I went back to life before the goal and ended up gaining all the weight I had previously lost and then some. After this my husband suggested a different way to have goals. He made a spread sheet and it consisted of three columns: weight loss goal, date achieved, and reward. This too was SMART other than the time frame part of the acronym. My first goal was to lose 5 LBS and we would get to go on a picnic with my new picnic basket. I was determined to get this goal and it took me a while to achieve it because somewhere in the course of trying to lose the weight I actually gained three pounds resulting in me having to lose eight pounds instead of five. Once Again I put all my effort into losing these pounds and was burnout by the time I finished. My ten pound reward didn't excite me and I was not willing to work towards meeting it. In both of these examples I met my goal but was not able to move on to other goals for various reasons. It was very stressful trying to achieve these goals. I have found a better avenue that I like much more, tune in tomorrow to hear my solution. |
| The first time I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Colorado we drove by a Dairy Queen and my uncle told me that is where they like to ride their bikes to. It was a decent way from their house and a nice bike trail took them straight there with little interference with traffic. When I looked at him strangely for rewarding themselves with ice cream; he told me something I will never forget. "When you do the work, you get the payoff." This is a great mantra that you can live by in all aspects of your life, today I want to look at it in the healthy lifestyle way. I have given my best effort for the last 35 days. I still have a long ways to go until I reach my goal, but that does not mean I haven't tried my best. As I continue to make my best effort my skills and willpower will increase. Trying my best is the work part of it. Today I received the payoff of my hard work. It's strange to me how our taste buds can change. You don't realize how much salt or sugar something contains, until you cut a lot of it out of your diet. Only when you eat that food again and all you taste is sodium or sugar do you feel disgusted that you even put it in your mouth. This happened to me twice yesterday and I can not be more happy about it. First, We had been out shopping later than we expected and decided to eat at Fazolis Italian Restaurant. I used to love their breadsticks, but now I can't stand them. I took one bite of a breadstick and all I could taste was the salt. I ended up eating 1 and a half, they didn't taste bad when I dipped it in sauce from my lasagna. This is a skill I need to work on, after taking one bite and not liking it I should have thrown them away or given them to my husband. Secondly, I am hosting a couple of parties in July and I am trying to prepare for them. One is an under the sea theme and I found a recipe on Pinterest where you can combine 2 vanilla wafers to look like clams. You put frosting on one, place the other one at an angle on top, and finish by adding a pearlized sixlet. I tried one and all I could taste was sugar. It almost made me sick. The frosting has since been thrown away. I may not be losing the weight at the rate I want, but I am doing the work and getting the payoff. Our bodies don't always reward us in the way we expect. The way I see it though, a reward is still a good thing and my body can reward me in any way it sees fit! I can not wait until the day when I am rewarded with more energy. |
| It has always baffled me why I am afraid of loopty looped rollercoasters but I do not mind the ones without loops. For years I thought this was strange and then one night my husband and I were at my parents house and our day trips to the theme park were brought up. I mentioned how weird it was that I will go on regular rollercoasters but not the ones that loop because I was deathly afraid of them. My parents gave me a strange look and told me that I have been on a looped rollercoaster (growing up I was always tall for my age, by fourth grade I was as tall as my mom who is 5'2. Since theme parks have a height limit and not an age limit I was able to go on most of the rides at a very young age). They said that I wanted to go on it when I was four or five and I came off of it screaming and crying because I was terrified. I still do not have any memories of this incident, but in the middle of our conversation my brother, who is 10 years older, walked in and remembered it too. I can assure you that I have not been on any physical rollercoasters this weekend, but it feels like I am trapped on an emotional one. Friday evening my husband called me and told me that I received something from unemployment. Wanting to know what it said I had him open the letter. The judge had sided with the credit union saying I was terminated for misconduct. This is a load of bull s***, in the letter it even gave the definition of misconduct. Misconduct was a behavioral problem or me trying to intentionally get fired. When the judge asked the CEO if she thought I was intentionally trying to get fired she hesitated before answering no, so how the hell does she rule in favor of them? I wanted to see the letter for myself as well as make a plan for where I want to go next. I needed some time to myself to vent and try to find a solution for this problem. Before I knew it my bags were packed and I was on my way back home. Now, I am just browsing for jobs and applying if I think I would be happy there. I have promised myself that I will not take anymore banking jobs. Without question, this has been the low point in my rollercoaster; Let's talk about the high point now. On Friday I wrote that I had exciting news to share. The News was supposed to be that I had lost 9 LBS. While at my parents house I became anxious and weighed myself. I wasn't sure if there would be a difference in scales and it turns out there was. Unfortunately I have not lost 9 LBS yet, but after the crazy week I had with all the stress and tests hurled at me, I returned home without gaining a pound! I think that is doing pretty good. BUT WAIT THATS NOT ALL! The other thing I am very proud of is that with all the extra stress I have faced I have not turned to food! When I first started this journey I would turn to food at any little bump in the road. I still have a long way to go, but I am making great progress at becoming healthier! |
| I am super excited for tomorrow to be here. I have decided to go back home right after my cousins bridal shower so I can watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs and not have to keep my hooting and hollaring to a minimum. This week has tested me in several ways I did not anticipate and I overcame the challenges like a rockstar. I had been going to the grocery store if we needed anything but the kids were consuming all my attention and we had to send my dad to the grocery store instead. He brought home candy for the candydish just like he used to. This irrates me for 2 reasons. The first reason is that he has lung cancer and he is trying to fight it the all natural way, without cemo. He is supposed be sticking to a healthy diet as well as take his supplements to strengthen his immune system. I would like to think that if his life rested on eating clean foods and developing a healthier lifestyle, he would. Secondly, I am doing everything I can to change into a healthier lifestyle. I know he is aware of this, so why is he bringing this s*** into the house while I am here? As a parent you would think that he would want to do everything he could to help me stay on track. Thankfully I will be leaving tomorrow. EXCITING NEWS TO BE ANNOUNCED ON SUNDAY! |
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