I'm back from California, well rested, and ready to finish the home projects I put on hold a few weeks before my vacation. One thing I'm not willing to put on hold any longer: exercise. During my vacation I was more active than I've been in a decade. I return home with renewed strength from walking, swimming, sailing, and kayaking. A soak in the hot tub every night was great too!

I look at this photo and think, wow, if I look this big now - how big did I look when I was six sizes bigger? Okay, enough self criticism. I had a blast as long as I didn't look in the mirror while wearing my swimsuit.

The last time I was suited up and went in the water was 2006 and that was because I was in Hawaii and, obese or not, I was not not going in the water while in Hawaii. Ever since I was  very young I was in the water every chance I could an it's incredible to be back in the water once again.

My motivation to get into the pool during my vacation: I'm participating in a mini-triathlon at work. This means I committed to a specific distance of walking or running, swimming, and biking, over a six week period. Since my Long Beach friend goes to aquatics three times a week, I asked her if I could join her at pool to do my laps. One morning I even arrived at the pool at 6 am! 

Getting into the pool was difficult, as I am not as flexible as I used to be. Sitting on the floor has been difficult for me and I had to get over that on day one at the pool. I managed to sit at the edge of the pool, but then I froze for a few seconds. Was I really going to be able to slide in? Wait. Really? When did this kind of fear hit me? I LOVE swimming. It wasn't fear of the water, but of the process of getting into the pool. I've been so inactive for so many years that my body has become stiff and unbending. I told myself I was going to get over this right that moment, and then I pushed off the side of the pool and into the water. Once in, I was like a fish in water. Getting out, I climbed up a ladder, which defied a few laws of gravity, as I have no upper arm strength.

All of this is embarrassing to admit, but I suspect I'm not alone with these kinds of issues, so I thought I'd explore this a bit further with all of you and ask if any of you have had similar experiences. Have you?

During the past ten months, I've done more running than walking for exercise, but while I was in Long Beach I walked to the pool (and everywhere else) at fast-pace and it was invigorating. It helps to have a friend who walks faster than you do. We walked to the pool and back, three miles round-trip, during which time my favorite sneakers gave me corns. The solution: buy a new pair of sandals and (as I do at home) switch out my shoes daily.

I always travel with a pair of sandals and a pair of sneakers, and I always put comfort before beauty when it comes to shoes. This trip was different. This time I packed my favorite sneakers and a new pair sandals that are both beautiful and support my feel in all the right ways and just a tad shy of being orthopedics. I broke in the sandals in a month before my trip. On the plane, I wore sandals that I could easily slip in and out of at security and while in flight; they are not as supportive as my foot doctor would suggest, but they are comfy and beautiful. Keeping up with my friend as we walked about town, not so easy in these sandals, but hey - I looked great! Ha!

Why am I writing so much about shoes?  While on this weight loss journey, I discovered other areas of my health that also need my attention: resolving my feet and my knee issues, and building strength in my upper arms and in my core. Exercise, I now realize, isn't about losing weight, but about gaining physical stamina. I want to have a strong body so I can be active and live a long and healthy life. Exercise, it turns out is key. Ha-who's not at all surprised to hear this? What I'm saying is, okay this isn't the first time any of us have heard this, but this time I really get it.

After dropping a couple sizes last spring, even before I started to exercise, my feet hurt and I wanted to do whatever I could to resolve my feet issues before my vacation in Alaska. I went to a foot doctor and to a specialist to find out why I had pain in my right knee. My doctors gave me stretching exercises for my feet and knee, which I've done about three times since then.

A year later, my feet issues resurface from time to time, and they really surfaced during my California vacation. I've decided I'm SO ready to rid my body of these aches and pains. I'm ready to incorporate those stretching exercises into my daily routine, so I can maintain and expand an active lifestyle. I've been saying this for several weeks now, but today I put my words into action. I will not go to bed tonight until I've done my stretches!

BTW, thanks for keeping this blog going while I was on vacation. It was hard to blog from my iPhone, tiny keyboard and all, and I couldn't upload any photos, which drove me crazy. In the next few days I'll reply to many of the comments that I wasn't able to respond to properly while I was away. I've been following the Facebook thread as well. I even made yogurt Popsicles today, a take-off from an idea on the FB support group. Thanks for sharing recipes there as well as this blog!

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Exercise and I encouraged you to explore new ways to exercise. During my vacation, I took my own advise and I'm happy that I did. I'm going to look around my area and in Rhode Island for places to rent a kayak or a canoe. I really liked being on the water this way. Now that I know a) I can do it, and b) it will be more and more enjoyable as I strengthen my arms and my core, I'm going to fully explore kayaking and see if I prefer a canoe or a kayak better. Perhaps next year I'll buy one!

Have any of you come face-to-face with physical limitations due to your weight? Or, on the flip side, have any of you discovered you are no longer physically restricted because you've lost weight?

July 14, 2012

This week was such a challenging week emotionally for me.  My son and my husband both got hurt within a 12 hour window of each other which meant an awful lot of time spent in the ER all the while juggling my other two children.  In the past if I had a weekend like this, I would have run to my bucket of ice cream to console me and that would get me through.  Not this time!  I am proud to say that I not once thought of eating anything that is off program.  I actually sat down on Monday around 12 to try and get some work done while everyone was sleeping and realized that I had not eaten in 24 hours.  I know that is almost as bad but it hit me for the first time that I now eat to survive rather than live to eat.  This is such a great feeling.  Though this may be a little silly, I finally realized how much Julie was helping me.  It is not always about the measurements or the size cloths that I am in.  It is about the baby steps that lead to a better me.  Not depending on food to get through a tough time was one of the steps that I needed to get through before I could continue.  I did it!

July 13, 2012

I read a contest in my Oprah magazine this morning and thought I'd share it with the rest of you, especially those of you who have lost a lot of weight. I know the deadline is close, but I hope a few of you enter, because who couldn't use a jean makeover?

I don't have time to write and essay while on vacation, I hardly have time to write this, but I hope some of you go for it! Here are the details:
Enter the “Denim Style Star” contest for a chance to win a trip to New York City, a NYDJ denim makeover, and a custom photo shoot! Simply upload your photo and write a brief essay describing why you should win. One winner will receive:

• A trip to NYC with one guest
• A denim makeover by stylist Dale Sudakoff, founder of Dalestyle, Inc.
• An opportunity to model NYDJ’s latest fall fashions in your own photo shoot
• Images will be featured on Real Simple Offers Facebook page and NYDJ.com

Meanwhile, I'm still in Carlsbad, enjoying a relaxing visit with friends. Vacations are a great thing! I packed two tops that are way too big for me and those size 18 carpi's are tighter than I would like them to be, but all is well otherwise.

July 07, 2012

Last week while visiting with Mary, my childhood friend who now lives in Long Beach, Mary showed me photos she had of me over the years, to help inspire me to see how far I've come on my weight loss journey...

In October 2002, we traveled together in Italy (Mary took this photo)

South Hadley, MA, September 2010 

With Long Beach Mary, July 2012

July 05, 2012

Decades ago I took a "health, mind, and body" workshop and over the course of six weeks I met with a  group of about 30 others three times a week for three hours. At each session a different speaker talked to us about  health related topics. We learned how to meditate to reduce stress. We learned about nutrition. We learned a lot during these 18 sessions. The really great part, for me, was what we learned about exercise.

Running is just one exercise option; find the type that you enjoy and just do it!
Photo by Theresa

One of the doctors told us "there is an exercise out there for everyone, you just need to find out what it is". To help prove his theory, every workshop began with a different form of exercise. With this group, I walked, jogged, played tennis, swam in a pool, learned a bit of yoga, and explored a  handful more forms of exercise.

Before I left for my vacation, I thought about all those workshops and I made a decision that this year I would explore more exercise options once again. While here in southern California on vacation this past week, I began the journey and I've have had a lot fun along the way. Last week I walked a mile and a half to the pool, swam 24 laps, and then walked a mile and a half back home again. I was home having breakfast by about 10 am and I still had a full day ahead of me - and tons of energy.  

Getting in and out of the pool was difficult, as I have no upper arm strength. My first day at the pool, I pushed myself to squat down and sit on the edge of the pool and pushed myself again to jump in. I've grown so stiff over the years, and all of these movements that used to be so natural to me years ago, easily could have stopped me from getting in the water.

In fact, I know this is why I've stayed out of the pool for the past decade. Oh, and wearing a bathing suit in public too. As I sat at the edge of the pool, I knew I was going to get into the pool and didn't let my hesitations stop me. Instead of sitting and debating if I could push off, I just bit down and jumped in. It wasn't pretty, but I was in! Getting out defied the laws of gravity, but I did that too. Swimming laps was exhausting and my arms burned, but I kept going back and forth until I couldn't swim another lap. Sore arms aside, it felt terrific to be in the water once again! 

If my arms weren't already feeling the pain after 3 days the pool, I went kayaking. My friend helped me sit in the kayak and later helped me get out. That was the hardest part and the part I was most fearful of--what if I couldn't get in -- or worse - what if I couldn't get out? I pushed beyond the fear and just did it. What a blast it was. My friend is a great teacher and taught me the ropes and I did not tip over, another fear - how would I get back in if I tipped over? I didn't need to answer that question!

I have been a couch potato for the past fifteen years, but I wasn't always a couch potato. It's been great getting exercise by moving my body in new ways and having a blast. It took me 9 months of being on this program before I started exercise, but I want to encourage you not to wait that long.

For those of you who haven't been ready to start exercise, I encourage you to create a list of all the different types of physical activities you can think of and start trying them one by one until you find a form of exercise that fits you. If you feel too out of shape to begin, consider walking five minutes from your house and then five minutes back, then slowly increase your walking time, even if it's just a minute more a week. Take it slow, but start moving. It may not be walking for you, but find something you can do and start doing it.

July 05, 2012

Sitting at Starbucks in Carlsbad, CA, where I could hear waves crashing against the rocks, if only the music wasn't so loud. It's an overcast day, but I'm on vacation and a few clouds won't spoil my mood.

When I first sat down, a man next to me was quite chatty and friendly. He told me he's "never been this weight before" and I wasn't sure if he meant he had gained or list weight. Then he told me about a cool phone app that he uses. You speak into the phone, for example he said "Starbucks chicken salad" and it tracks your meal. "It's really easy," he said. "I've lost 30 pounds and it was effortless!" He then saw his wife, got up and they left.

There was no time to tell him I've dropped close to a hundred pounds.

This was a good reminder for me, that as excited as I am about my weight loss journey, not everyone wants to know how I got here. Even if they need to lose weight.

Thanks for Sharing Dude.

Anyone else experience this type of "kindness" from strangers?

July 04, 2012

Someone on Julie's guest book page posted a link to this article. Quite interestinG!!


I also posted this on the Face book page and someone that belongs to that group knows the doctor involved in this, so this makes it even more real to me!


This was published in the Sunday review paper in the opinions page...

What Really Makes Us Fat

By GARY TAUBES

Published: June 30, 2012


A CALORIE is a calorie. This truism has been the foundation of nutritional wisdom and our beliefs about obesity since the 1960s.


What it means is that a calorie of protein will generate the same energy when metabolized in a living organism as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. When talking about obesity or why we get fat, evoking the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” is almost invariably used to imply that what we eat is relatively unimportant. We get fat because we take in more calories than we expend; we get lean if we do the opposite. Anyone who tells you otherwise, by this logic, is trying to sell you something.


But not everyone buys this calorie argument, and the dispute erupted in full force again last week. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and his collaborators. While the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial — what should we eat to maintain weight loss? — it spoke to a far more fundamental issue: What actually causes obesity? Why do we get fat in the first place? Too many calories? Or something else?


The calorie-is-a-calorie notion dates to 1878, when the great German nutritionist Max Rubner established what he called the isodynamic law.


It was applied to obesity in the early 1900s by another German — Carl Von Noorden, who was of two minds on the subject. One of his theories suggested that common obesity was all about calories in minus calories out; another, that it was about how the body partitions those calories, either for energy or into storage.


This has been the core of the controversy ever since, and it’s never gone away. If obesity is a fuel-partitioning problem — a fat-storage defect — then the trigger becomes not the quantity of food available but the quality. Now carbohydrates in the diet become the prime suspects, especially refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (foods that have what’s called a high glycemic index) and sugars.


UNTIL the 1960s, carbohydrates were indeed considered a likely suspect in obesity: “Every woman knows that carbohydrate is fattening,” as two British dietitians began a 1963 British Journal of Nutrition article.


The obvious mechanism: carbohydrates stimulate secretion of the hormone insulin, which works, among other things, to store fat in our fat cells. At the time, though, the conventional wisdom was beginning its shift: obesity was becoming an energy issue.


Carbohydrates, with less than half the calories per gram as fat, were beginning their official transformation into heart-healthy diet foods. One reason we’ve been told since to eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets is this expectation that they’ll keep us thin.


What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight.

Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.


The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.


On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig’s subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low-glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they’d have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories. If the physical activity made them hungrier — a likely assumption — maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder. Why does this speak to the very cause of obesity? One way to think about this is to consider weight-reduced subjects as “pre-obese.” They’re almost assuredly going to get fatter, and so they can be research stand-ins — perhaps the best we have — for those of us who are merely predisposed to get fat but haven’t done so yet and might take a few years or decades longer to do it.

If we think of Dr. Ludwig’s subjects as pre-obese, then the study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the more easily we remain lean. The more carbohydrates, the more difficult. In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect. What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.


From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.


A controversial conclusion? Absolutely, and Dr. Ludwig’s results are by no means ironclad. The diets should be fed for far longer than one month, something he hopes to do in a follow-up study. As in any science, these experiments should be replicated by independent investigators. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century. Let’s put it to rest with more good science. The public health implications are enormous.


Gary Taubes is The author of “Why We Get Fat.”

July 04, 2012

OK, OK, I went and asked Julie about exercise and now I have to 'pay the piper' as the saying goes.

Exercise is calling my name.

OK, so now what do I do?

I have actually been having fun in our pool with it. We have an in ground pool (trust me, nothing fancy) and have an incline from the deep to shallow end. I stand on that incline so my shoulders are underwater and jog. I lift my legs high and use my arms underwater to keep my balance. I get a work out. and its fun AND I don't sweat!

I do jumping jacks in that same spot. I don't lift my arms out of the water, I keep them under and use them to keep my balance. I keep my hands cupped to add more resistance.

I then get in a tube and YES I FIT IN A TUBE!!!! and I bicycle around the pool many times.

When done with that I go to the middle of the deep end and do stomach crunches. Try it. Hold feet together and keep legs straight and bring them up but not out of water and then down.

Then while in tube, start turning circles using hips and legs to propel you around in circles. Then go the other way.

It is fun and this kind of stuff can be done numerous times during the day and it truly does not feel like I am exercising.

What kinds of things do you do? I don't mean gyms, I don't want to join one. I know walking is good, but I am looking for ideas or ways to get in some exercise in, out of the ordinary, fun ways, just around the house. I have an aunt who used to wash dishes and do knee bends while doing them. Stuff like that.

July 02, 2012