Ballet with short hair would be a toughie that's for sure. I don't know if I remember how to do the rags! My grandma taught me when I was little and I just kinda got an old sheet and the girl and let my fingers do the remembering I think! I see people talk about it online,

Rag Curls? - Yahoo! Answers

Rag Curls??? in The AnswerBank: Body & Soul

but I am glad we don't have to even think about this any more because of the extra time and stress. It's easier without bangs I think but they were never too much of an issue because all our hair-dos had the hair straight back off the face and I would put superstrength gel all over it so was glued in place! Now we use superstrength pump hair spray.

I love the sound of an automatic reset on the pedometer. I'm going to have to have another look at this I think. I really could do with a bit of an extra push.

Woohoo! Scale this morning said 149.6 - first day below 150. This should be a good weight-loss week for me in general, so it's possible I might see my challenge goal of 148 by this week's weigh-in. That would be very encouraging!

Feeling unmotivated to exercise this week, so I did 30 minutes of DDR tonight so that I could get the exercise over and done with! I really wanted to do an hour (so the exercise would really be over and done with), but my feet and knees started bothering me, so I called it good.

Skipped the pushup part of my morning exercise this morning. This is the week I'm supposed to transition from girly pushups to normal ones, and I do not have the upper body strength yet. I'm feeling like I'm getting less able to do the girly ones, too, so I'm trying skipping a day to give those muscles a chance to recover. Did a second set of crunches instead.

Must get all my work projects done before the weekend, or I will fret all vacation long.

Tomorrow:
Normally I take DD to preschool, but she's requested my partner take her tomorrow. So instead of spending 8am-9:30am driving around, I have nothing scheduled before my haircut at 9:30. (Yay, haircut! I will no longer have hair dangling in my eyes!) Options for that time include:
- Go to work from 8:15ish to 9am. This is not enough time to get any of my projects done, and will result in me being late to my haircut, because I'm *always* late when I go from work.
- Walk walk walk from 8:15ish to 9am, which should get me 3 laps at the park, or 3.3 miles. Plus it would put me over the exercise for this week, and get me my 10,000 steps. But it will be cooooold. Looks like I have no client stuff scheduled for tomorrow, so I can wear jeans and be sweaty with no problem, though. Must remember to take a washcloth or something to at least wipe my face down before haircut.
- Sleep in an extra hour.

Also tomorrow:
- Do a big messy bunch of year-end tax planning for a client who I think will owe a lot of tax. This is a fun project, and I've already warned them about owing a lot of tax. Assuming I get back from my haircut about 11am, this could easily consume the entire remainder of the day.
- Print organizer packets if I have time. This is the sort of thing I could get started if I spent that 45 minutes at work, but it would definitely make me late.
- Clean my desk, which has 3 inches of paper strewn across it. Including some other client's year-end tax planning project. Also the sort of thing I could do in the morning, but would also make me late.

Well, my diet sucks today

no breakfast
scrambled egg + spinach + mushroom + cheese for lunch
half a bean and cheese quesadilla for snack
hors d'ouerves at class I had tonight. Last year, they had much better food, and fed it to us upon arrival. This year, they had lower-quality food, and made us wait more than an hour to eat. I arrived hungry, and ate more swedish meatballs than I probably ought to have. Avoided eggrolls and fried mozzarella sticks and fudgy brownies, though. I'd have eaten grilled chicken kabobs, except that the chicken tasted like paste.

Going by best guess + Fitday, 68g fat (32g saturated!!), 64g carbs (only 9 of fiber), 79g protein, and ~1,200 calories. Going by feel at least 150 calories more, which is a combination of measurement error (how many cups is 14 little meatballs?) and sauces I didn't even try to squeeze into Fitday.

I did, however, do my 3 miles in the morning before my haircut!

Scale this morning: 148.0. This is a loss I have not yet earned, so I don't expect to hold on to it, but it will come back.

Legs sore from yesterday. :P

I hope I'm fed something good for lunch today, since I have no say in the matter. :P :P

Too much work to do, not enough week.

Hi Phoebe

Congratulations on the new low and attainment of the challenge goal weight. Whether it is held is in many ways neither here nor there. Most people's weight fluctuates from day to day. My weight is up today from yesterday. The trend is the important thing. The fact is that it has been achieved and you will be unlikely to plateau at a point above it if you maintain your focus.

I always love new lows.

Well done for getting your walking done. I see that the pedometer is effectively challenging you to go for 10,000 steps when you can manage it in your schedule. This is what I found happened for me. I really love my pedometer. Well done for doing 10,000 again.

It is difficult for you having little control over the food that you are being given. You can not do better than choose as healthily as you can from what is provided and hope for the best.

Take care
Love
Margaret

Congratulations on the new low. I see that you have been making plenty of effort - both to keep moving, and to eat well as well as you can. I'm sure that your loss is deserved, despite whatever quibbles you may have with yourself. Margaret's right of course. Sometimes you have to just make the best you can of the situations that come up.

I was thinking of you while I charged around stressing at my girl's dress rehearsal during this week!! I wish I'd been capable of following your good example there.


Good luck with powering through the rest of those work projects before you take a well earned break.

Hi Phoebe

Just calling in to wish you a merry Christmas.

I imagine that you will be getting home from your holidays soon. I hope that you enjoyed it. It certainly has been positive for your weight loss from an exercise perspective. You have been recording some great step counts over the past couple of weeks. I imagine that you will be pleased that you got the pedometer as it is nice to quantify the exercise that you do. It gives a nice feeling of having done something positive.

Take care
Love
Margaret

Awww, thanks, Margaret! Merry Christmas to you, too.

Got back from vacation about 2 hours ago. I ended up eating just a bit below maintenance while on vacation, I think, although it'll take a few days at home before travel-related water retention settles out.

Wednesday before the final challenge weigh-in I was up 0.6 pounds above goal, so I went back to the old standbys of plenty of protein, plenty of water, and cutting out the late-night snacking (I counted calories through mid-afternoon and went into dinner knowing about what my budget for the rest of the day was, using my home calorie goal + whatever calories the pedometer said I got from walking), and was well below goal by Saturday. Up to that point, I'd really let myself fall back into old habits, so I was quite pleased to be able to get back on track. This was the first time I'd been off-plan for more than an odd day, and I'm down enough now that it would have been easy to completely fall off, which I had been anxious about, too.

So life continues as normal tomorrow. I think we're likely to "do" Christmas Wednesday, depending on whether Santa is up to wrapping / scrounging presents tonight. Back to work on Thursday.

Hi Phoebe
thanks for the visit to my diary. You are doing great on your weight loss. DD sounds adorable. I have 2 girls. One would be 20 but she passed away this past April and one thats almost 18....I also have a dog who's name is PHOEBE :-). She is such a sweetie....

Again thanks for the visit.....and keep up the good work...pedometor in the bra huh hahhaha thats cute..is it uncomfortable?

kare

Good for today: Second day in a row my scale weight has put me in "normal" BMI territory. Pants too tight in the thighs at 155 now fit.

Less-good for today: Still miserable and congested. Last night I was also having some GI issues, so didn't eat all my food. Both contributed to today's new low. The rest of the weight loss seems to have come from my breasts, which were a 34DD the last time I was fitted when I was around this weight (granted, I was pregnant then) and are now about a 34C.

At the beginning of 2007, I weighed 190+ pounds, and most of my clothes were sized to fit a 165-pound self. Even my super-stretchy pants that fit me at 36 weeks pregnant were too tight to be worn in public, and supposed-to-be-baggy sweaters made me look sausage-like. My mom got me a bunch of work clothes, so I'd look halfway decent, and the size that fit best was an 18.

Mid-May, I weighed 197, and had no shorts that would fit over my thighs as we went into summer.

My goal at that point was to lose 52 pounds in 52 weeks, and be at normal BMI by the end of May 2008. My super-secret stretch goal was to lose 50 of those pounds by the end of December 2007, because I've never lost much weight between February and April, and to maintain that loss until May. Then somewhere along the line, when I knew I had a good chance of making the 50-by-December goal, I revised to 70 pounds by May.

So now the end of December is upon us. And I'm down 50 pounds by trendline (which lags the scale quite a bit, but it lags by enough that it always goes down or maintains, rather than going up and down, which is why I pay attention to it), and nearly 55 by the scale.

In my closet, I have one pair of khakis (size 12) and a pair of plaid-ish dress pants (also a 12) that fit and are appropriate seeing-clients clothes. Maybe 4 more pair of work pants (2 12s and 2 16s) that wouldn't fall off of me, but are enough too big that they look it. Three pair of jeans (2 12s and a 15) that fit well, plus a pair of Taiwanese jeans sized LL (maybe the equivalent of an XL? The English on their labels is really inscrutable.) that are wearable but manage to be unattractively tight in weird places. Maybe some skirts in the closet at work. Sweaters disguise a multitude of ill-fitting tops, and I like big tops, so I didn't sort that stuff.

Also in the closet, an assortment of cold-weather dress clothes that won't fit for at least another 10-15 pounds (so about the time it gets too warm to wear them). No smaller jeans - I gave up on anything smaller than a 12 long ago.

I've got 15-20 pounds more to go, so there will be no intermediate-weight clothes buying except in the case of dire need. My giant spreadsheet says it'll take me until mid-April to lose those pounds, assuming I stick with my current methods rather than opting to maintain. (The giant spreadsheet starts on November 1st, and so far I'm about 1 pound lighter than it thinks I ought to be.)

I've fallen out of the excercise habit, somewhat due to the house being cold and damp, the outside being cold and damp and dark, and this nasty sinusy thing I picked up from my plague-ridden sister. Must fall back into it once I recover.

Have not fallen out of the good diet habit. Lots of protein, lots of veggies, a decent amount of fiber, not too many refined white carbs.

My mom has hereditary low cholesterol (she can eat anything and not exercise and her cholesterol doesn't change). My dad has hereditary high cholesterol (also unchanged by diet and exercise - but he had some sort of special scan done, and his arteries are squeaky clean, despite the cholesterol). Every time I've had my cholesterol checked, it's come up high, but there's always been an excuse for it - I was pregnant, I was nursing, it wasn't a fasting level, they squeezed my finger to get the blood drop... My diet is as good as its ever been, not pregnant, not nursing, so I'm going to go to the new walk-in clinic and get my cholesterol and blood sugar levels tested. (Hey, only $39 and no office visit charge - I'd pay at least that much to the lab, and more to the doctor who ordered the paperwork, going to a traditional doctor.)

So all in all, a good year.

Hi Phoebe

I am sorry that you have been ill. That is really bad timing (not that there is ever a good time to be ill).

Congratulations on the "normal" BMI. Something that I can still just dream of - but hopefully before too many months.... This is a gigantic achievement of which you can be justifyingly proud.

Also - I have to say well done for the way that you got back on track towards the end of your holiday. That will be encouraging regarding how you will cope with maintenance in 15 to 20 pounds time.

I like your overview of the year. I think that it would be wonderful if everyone produced such a report as I think that it makes fascinating reading. You have achieved (indeed surpassed) your end of year targets - both the initial ones and the revisions.

Our clothes sizing is different in the UK - but I can certainly appreciate you being at an intermediate size well below your initial size but a little up from your intended final goal. I think that buying a new wardrobe will be a chore - but I am sure we will manage to force ourselves to do it when we get to our final goal weights. Lets face it - our original clothes will be no use to us then.

I must admit that I don't properly understand the trendline and scale weights that you announce. I have probably skimmed or forgotten an explanation of it.

I think that getting a cholesterol test is a good idea. I think that mine gets automatically tested each year.

Take care
Love
Margaret

Actually, I think I may never have explained it, certainly not in my diary.

I keep track of my weight using the Hacker's Diet site - the Hacker's Diet guy's theory is that any given weight as measured by the bathroom scale isn't particularly meaningful, because of water and other fluctuations. So rather than obsessing over the number of the day, you should pay attention to the long-term trend. So he uses a weighted average of the last 20 days as your trendline weight for the current day.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Hac...t_tzoffset=360 is the link to my weight chart - the diamonds are what the scale said that morning, and the red line is the long-term trend. (The blue line is exercise, which you can see I've fallen out of the habit of!) You can see that the scale number goes up and down, but the red line drops pretty steadily.

Thanks so much for your nice comments!

Hi Phoebe

That is really interesting. I can see how a recent event average would produce a smoother result and why it would always lag behind. I wonder how he concludes the weighting and why 20 days are selected (and not for example 28). I presume that a higher weighting is given to more recent results.

I must admit that when I weigh every day I just keep a track of the various factors (I capture all associated data into a spreadsheet) and I analyse it to see if it makes sense. I tend to be happy as long as I can explain most gains of noteworthy proportions.

Thanks for explaining. I will look at the concept more tomorrow (it being after 1 a.m. now!)

Take care
Love
Margaret

Hi Phoebe

Hope you are feeling better

52 pounds in 52 weeks...I like the sound of that....if I lost 52 pounds I would be at 129...i havent been that low since i was in my early 20's....I wish I could get that low but I would be happy at 135...

I am just looking to feel comfortable in my size 14's now..then i will worry about the size 12's, the size 10's and so forth....

anyway I hope you are feeling better
kare