All posts in category Daily Struggles

Happy Mother’s Day to Me!

After having an absolutely horrendous week of eating whatever I could think of I decided to give myself a Mother’s Day present:  I’m going back to eating a plant-based diet.

The life of a mom with a newborn is taxing and I can feel it wearing on me daily.  The nights are a little rough and the days can get long and demanding.  With 2 kids and a husband I often feel like I get pulled in three directions constantly.  What better gift to give myself than the gift of health?

I had a wonderful talk with my husband about a week ago and it involved excuses.  I was going on about how when I get to six weeks postpartum it will get easier because I can exercise.  He totally called me out on my crap and said “you always say it will be easier when…”  fill in the blank.  I know that I have thought about these excuses before and light bulbs constantly go off in my head and I have plenty of AHA moments.  The problem is keeping myself motivated.

Do or do not, there is no try.

I thought I would take a little advice from Yoda and not put the word TRY into this post.  I almost wrote that I was going to TRY and get back to a plant-based lifestyle, but then I got taken back to my retail management days and I would get so annoyed when people said they would TRY to do the thing I was asking them to do.  It basically meant that they had an easy out clause with the word TRY.

This week will be all about getting myself back on track with eating (it is 70% of weight loss).  I’ve given myself permission to eat as much as I want to this week, but the only stipulations are that it has to have vitamins and nutrients of some sort, not be to grain heavy, and cannot come from an animal.  I’ve meal planned and I told the hub’s I don’t care if it doesn’t sound good the night I’m suppose to make it, that’s what we are eating.  He is surprisingly on board (I will mention that after this last pregnancy he is the heaviest he has ever been, and is motivated to lose some pounds).

I’m hoping that I will see great results like the last time I practiced this diet.  I lost weight, started sleeping better, was in a better mood, and I just felt great!  I’ve already had a great first day (which was Sunday, Mother’s Day mind you) and I am excited to get through this first week.

And because a post is always better with a picture, here are my two girls hanging out in our 80 degree house in their diapers (Air conditioner gets serviced on the 16th and it can’t happen soon enough!):

944667_4808877061090_1537861817_nHappy Monday!

2 Comments
by Shrinking Carrie on May 13, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Challenges, Commitment, Daily Struggles, Diet, Goals, Health, Making It Happen, Meal Planning, Mindless Eating, Motivation, New Mind-set, Nutrition, Plant Based Diet, Postpartum

Posted by Shrinking Carrie on May 13, 2013

http://shrinkingcarrie.com/2013/05/13/happy-mothers-day-to-me/

Will I Ever Learn?

Sweat it Out:
50 minute hilly walk burning 500 calories
triceps/biceps/shoulders/lats weights

Every time I say “this is the last time ever”, I mean it.  And then a new day comes along and my resolve goes out the window.  Motivation is fleeting and so is trusting yourself when you say with matter-of-fact “this really is the last time!”.

The past 3 days I have been on a bit of a detox.  From what?  Oh, I’m sure if you’ve been reading my blog for some time you will already know that I have an addictive personality, and that caffeine is one of my BIGGEST vices.

Some of you may be thinking “caffeine is not that big of a deal, you could be addicted to something much worse than harmless old caffeine”.  I try to tell myself this too.  The only thing is that I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me that caffeine is slowly going to killing me.  Dramatic much?

The thing is, being the independent person that I was brought up to be, I hate the fact that if I go half a day without a drop of caffeine I get headaches.  If I go a full day of having no caffeine I start to get body aches.  I don’t think those are signs that caffeine is good for your body.

I went cold turkey like this last year and it worked for quite some time.  Then they came up with Dr. Pepper 10.  Damn you soda makers!  The hub’s and I had a love affair with this drink for quite sometime and after I got up to 3 cans a day (that was nothing compared to how I use to drink Diet Coke back in the day) I knew I was falling back into old patterns.

These 3 cans wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t gone back to an even worse habit of starting my day off with 2 Excedrine every morning.

So now I have been taking Excedrine daily, and then sprinkling in extra Diet DP 10′s throughout the day.  I’m a mess.  I wish I could say that it was helping me lose weight, but I didn’t see a drop in the scale one bit even though I felt like these things were curbing my appetite.

So what have I done?

Quit Cold Turkey.

This concerns the hub’s.  I told him if I don’t do it all at once I will never get off the stuff and I will feel awful forever (once again, so dramatic!).  The past 3 days I have had a constant headache, irritability, and I am so tired I fight every time Hanna goes down for a nap to not put myself down for one as well.

The only thing I can think of to help myself stay off the juice is by rewarding myself with something after a period of time with none of the junk that I get myself roped back into every few months.

I’m proposing a 90 day caffeine cleanse, and vow to have no form of caffeine enter into my body.  I’m trying to talk my hub’s into letting me get the Jillian Michaels 90-day Body Revolution if I complete the cleanse (get it, 90 days of “soberness”, and then 90 days of body revolution), but he is leery of how much money I will be spending on my prize.  Don’t worry guys, I’ll wear him down.

Or I may just buy this shirt for my reward.

7 Comments
by Shrinking Carrie on July 11, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Addiction, Caffeine, Challenges, Commitment, Daily Struggles, Diet, Energy

Posted by Shrinking Carrie on July 11, 2012

http://shrinkingcarrie.com/2012/07/11/will-i-ever-learn/

The Daily Struggle

I woke up to these staring me in the face:

Three lonely little cupcakes that will have to take up residency in Dustin’s stomach because I ain’t touchin them (how’s that for some fancy white trash talkin). I’m proud to say that I recorded all of my calories yesterday, and didn’t do nearly as much damage as I thought I had.  What, what?!

This morning I woke up with a pretty serious pain in the back of my knee, and it hurts when I try to fully extend it.  It feels like something is going to pop, and so I went for a leisurely walk and avoided some of the major hills I usually go up and down to see if I could loosen it up.  Nope.  Still hurts.  Looks like I may be putting the running schedule on hold for a bit to see if I can get it back to feeling normal.  I was afraid this might happen.  I’m not frustrated though!  I can still walk, therefore I will still be doing some walking for exercise, and until it’s feeling 100% I will have to be watching my calorie intake like a hawk.

I can say that I have had a successful week of tracking these last seven days and I am curious to see what the scale will say tomorrow.  I have not weighed myself all week, and I will see if that has made any difference in the numbers tomorrow morning.  I do know that I haven’t had my Thyroid medication in almost two weeks (because I am lazy and didn’t get it refilled, and then there were no refills on it, blah, blah, blah), and unfortunately I do think that it will have an effect on my weigh in.  But that’s ok.  I’m in a good mind-set right now and I’m ready to face the numbers good or bad.

As far as my daily struggle goes, here it is:

No, not that adorable child that won’t eat hardly anything (her stomach must really be the size of her fist).  It’s all of that extra food that is on her plate. I don’t know about you, but I hate wasting the food I have prepared, and I have had to change my mind-set real quick.  Hanna eats pretty much anything I put in front of her, but she never finishes it.  I’ve even tried making smaller portions, but she will just eats less.  Weird, I know.

One of the hardest parts of my day is not finishing her plate of food.  I have to immediately throw it down the garbage disposal or else into my tummy (and onto my tummy) it goes.

Although, I will say it gets a little easier everyday.

What is your daily struggle?

2 Comments
by Shrinking Carrie on May 31, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Daily Struggles, New Mind-set, Wasting Food

Posted by Shrinking Carrie on May 31, 2012

http://shrinkingcarrie.com/2012/05/31/the-daily-struggle/

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