In my last entry, I talked about my need for more exercise and diet. Well, I’ve not come close to meeting my exercise goal for the week, but I did manage 2 walks with my friend, 1 treadmill session, and 1 walk with my little girl. Hopefully the next week will be better.
On the diet front, I stayed pretty close to the program. I sort of eased into things about 2 weeks ago, but got officially on board with a diet a week ago yesterday. I lost 5 pounds so far. Not bad for 10 days to 2 weeks. I hope it will be a bit better next week as I tweak some of the choices I make.
My goal is to lose 100 pounds. That sounds pretty ominous. So I’ll start with the goal to lose 50 by my birthday in July. It’s a total of 26 weeks from the time I started until then, so that’s a loss of less than 2 pounds per week. That doesn’t sound quite so overwhelming. Although the endurance through to the goal is the hard part. Hopefully, once the first 50 is gone, that will motivate me to keep going until the second 50 is gone.
I really don’t want this to be a flash-in-the-pan sort of effort. That’s part of why I decided to write about it here. But I have written about weight loss efforts before, and as we all know, they weren’t successful. I don’t want to make excuses for past failures. I just want to focus on the task at hand.
Hopefully, you’ll check in now and again to see how I’m progressing. I’ll still blog about other things, but this will be a regular feature.
On a completely different goal, I wanted to note that I have challenged one of the high school girls at church to read Les Miserables with me in 6 weeks. I’ve had this book for 16 years, and I have never been able to get past the first 30 pages. In conversation, it came up that she has been trying to read it for the past 2 years, so I told her we could work on it together. We are also trying to get others on board. I’ll try to keep you posted on how this endeavor goes as well. Perhaps success on another long-time failure will motivate me in the weight loss area too.
how funny about les mis – i own the book as well (have for 3 1/2 years, not quite 16!) but also could not get far into it. maybe on your suggestion i shall pick it back up and try again. i must say i LOVED the Broadway musical, both as a high schooler and an almost 30 yr old.
also, congrats on your efforts with your diet and exercising. i really hope this will be a great success and reap many encouraging rewards for you. thanks for sharing with us…
Jennifer,
Congrats on the first five pounds. You should definitely keep plowing through the first section of “Les Miserables.” It’s a great book; I’ve read it twice. Believe me, it picks up later, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
By the way, did you know you’ve been tagged by Barb? Hope I’m not violating some secret blogging etiquette by telling you.
No, in fact I was just dropping in to tell Jennifer that I tagged her.
There’s no escaping… 😉
Hi,
just a couple of health/fitness thoughts, if they are of any use to you. I figure it is better to lose weight slowly rather than quickly, since that signals a more long term commitment to lifestyle change, so I wouldn’t worry if you don’t make 2 lbs/week, as long as you keep going down consistently.
Another thought is to see if you can add a little bit of strength training. The reason for that is that when you build your muscles, your body burns calories faster to feed them. There’s plenty you can do without any fancy equipment.
FWIW
Hi, Jennifer! I hope the weight loss regimen goes well. I will pray for you! One woman at our church lost a whole lot of weight, which I told her was very inspiring. You are so right, though, that prayers can be a great support. It had never occurred to me to pray for Laura, she was doing so well “on her own”.
Walking is such great exercise! Jay loves going downtown in his stroller, and that’s one thing I’m pretty determined not to lose if we find a new house. If not for that, I would never get any exercise.