The Bare Bones of How I'm Workin' It...

I’ve been meaning to get to this blog post, but things have just been so busy lately. Work is going great, and with the rest of my time, I am rehabilitating my knee in the springtime weather.

Spurred by another Susan’s query as to how I’m losing weight, I’m finally getting around to this post.

Today is day 101 of making good body decisions. It started on a lark, back on January 26th. Michael and I made a wager over which one of us could lose the most weight by the time I left for Colorado. That day I weighed 237 pounds. By the time Superbowl Sunday rolled around on February 7th, I had lost a crazy 14 pounds. All of that was, I believe, attributable to stress. I was trying to organize a cross-country move, get my daughter settled in her quasi-adult life, say all my good-byes, and deal with some extreme dysfunction in terms of splitting up a household.

The next 24 pounds are a different story. It comes down to burning more calories than I consume. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex.

Some of the simple parts include the predictable things. I joined a gym. Unlike similar attempts in the past, I am at a place in life where the gym and the office are less than a block apart. Geography is a huge help. My lunch hours are no longer filled with running errands at a breakneck pace. Instead, I go to the gym. If I don’t have time at lunch, I go after work. Evenings are no longer the hoop-jumping chaos of kids, activities, supper, housework, etc. Having time is a real blessing. Being at the gym helps with the empty nestedness.

I live in an area that is full of open spaces and trails, and loads of places that beckon exploration—the plains, the mountains, old Native American settlements, watercourses, and canyons. With the longer days of summer approaching, sometimes I can’t leave the office fast enough to go out and be in nature.

I live alone. I am solely in charge of what goes in the refrigerator. Currently, the only sweet thing in my entire pantry is a jar of sweet pickle slices. Everything else is healthy, natural, low- or no-fat. Some day I aspire to manage “sometimes” foods, but for now, having the ability to keep them banished works for me.

Because I have never been that zealous about time in the kitchen to begin with, I have developed a pattern of really only cooking once a week. Usually on Sundays, I bake a roast or a chicken or what have you, and make a few meals out of it. With the scraps, I make a pot of soup, or goulash, or something along those lines. I divide all of that up into meal-sized portions and I stick to it.

Some of the more complicated pieces of this story revolve around WHY I eat. More about that in my next post.