Cold chili

So I did an experiment tonight. I set out and made cold chili. My definition of cold chili is that the ingredients you use never touch heat.  It actually came out better than I expected. I will write up the recipe for or tomorrow. It's 100% vegan, well the recipe is. My batch however is less so as I took a divot out of my ring finger while chopping up the peppers.  Yeah, never a good idea to play chef when as tired as I am.

I need sleep. Will post more tomorrow.. Promise... Maybe..

Dead of night

Yeah, so got my shopping done and I'm gonna use that as my exercise for the night as I am sweating like a pig and it's almost five.

Hitting the shower and maybe getting 4 hours of sleep. Will work on my two meals tomorrow night when I get home. Bought the airlock tupperware bowls for portion and freezing. We will see how that goes. I am also cutting back on my oatmeal in the morning. I want to see where my hunger edge actually is.

Ok, shower then bed.

Late nights..

Woke up this morning and really didn't want to get out of bed yet. I know I am not getting enough rest at the moment due to all the overtime I am picking up. I am sure that I will catch up on the rest, just not today. The exercises are getting easier to manage and as I have said, I know that these are just the "softening up" exercises that will get me ready for bigger and better things.

I am adjusting my meal plan a bit this week. I want to see about using beans as my main protein intake this week and see how it goes. I am getting ingredients for a 3 bean salad and I am attempting to make a cold chili. I define cold chili as a chili that does not need to be cooked, sorta like a chili salad but not quite. I am going to use refried beans and can chopped tomatoes as a base and work in the rest of the ingredients from there and see how it goes. Also swapping out instant oatmeal for hot museli if it isn't too expensive. If i have enough cash left over in my budget, i might pick up a few veggie burgers to go with the chili and 3 bean salad.

I am nothing, if not adventurous.

Being at work til 3am is going to give me a unique opportunity to go shopping tonight as my paycheck MIGHT be in the bank before I leave work. If i do this right, I will be able to get my shopping done before I get home and try to get to bed before 5am. We will see. I will still have to be up and out of the house before 10:30 am so i can have enough time to fill up my car with gas for the week. 14 hours a day at work doesn't leave much time to do much else. I already have people asking if I ever go home.  I may end up just not working overtime on Sunday so I can crash and sleep.

There is a lot more to my health kick than just exercise, gotta balance legitimate rest cycles and ponder food. Joy joy..

Day 5 exercise

Doing the exercises when you are really tired sucks. I did them though and got them out of the way.

Still no progress on the scale and that's fine, I truly didn't  expect it to take a week before I saw things. I know this is just the loosen up stage before I start pushing myself a bit harder.

Horrible food day

So for End of Month days where I work, they go out and buy food for everyone.


In case you didn't know, i do technical support for Outback. So we get our food from Outback as well. For some unknown reason, I decided that a bloomin onion would be a good idea, that and a burger.

The burger was real good, the onion.. no so much. I could only get through barely half of it before my stomach was turning. Just the smell of it now is causing me to twitch a bit. So in my failure I find a success. Foods that I used to find attractive and alluring are now showing themselves to be gross and gag worthy. Which I find an interesting change.

As I wander down my new path I am taking, I am not dwelling on my supposed weakness of ordering something less than healthy. I am taking the lesson of learning that change is happening and that for every new thing  I am gaining, I am dropping an old thing that was not really necessary in the first place. I know a lot of people see it as a way to sneak food and justifying it. Maybe that is so, however for anyone that actually has known me for any length of time will know that I have always used food as a comfort mechanism. If I don't try something that I have long thought of a comfort to discover that it is no longer such, I will delude myself even worse in the long run. Or so I feel.

I am also accepting the fact that I will stumble. I never expected this to be easy. The easy part was getting this way, the hard part is to break the habits and molds that I have created.

This is but a stumble, of which I get right back up and continue forward. I will do my exercises when I get home and I will go to bed and prepare myself for the next 14 hour shift and make tomorrow a better day than yesterday.

Starting pics

The one bad thing about exercising before bed is that it wires you up for a bit afterwards.

So to fill the time til I am sleepy again, I cropped the before pics and uploaded them.

Day 4 of exercise

Just did my 3 minutes of hell exercise.

Heart rate is pounding,but in a solid way not fluttering,
The squats are getting easier, which is surprising to me on just day 4. I can't pick up the speed of the squats yet, but  the muscles seem to be accepting the work load a bit better today.

Food was not to par. I had a work meeting with the contracting company. So I figured I would order protein to support the muscle work i am doing. So I got a burger that came with home made chips. For supper, I grabbed one of my TV dinners I have hanging around for emergencies. I didn't want to tap into the food i bought for lunches as it will get me through to Friday exactly.

I also had a bad emotional day, which means I went out to get some chocolate to stabilize myself. Judge me if you must, but this is something that I have found that works. Usually I have a lindt bar of 80% to 85% dark chocolate in my desk, but with all the overtime I have been doing, I haven't felt the need for it, until today. So i got a couple of holiday candy from down at Walgreens to slap my chemical levels back into shape and I was good to go.

Tomorrow will be a 12pm to 3am shift, the first of three in a row. This will be fun. They haven't setup a OT schedule for saturday or sunday yet, but I am hoping that they will soon.

Shower time and then to bed. I have 3 "before" pics taken. I will add them later on. I am not happy about how I look, but to have progress, you have to have a base line. Meh..

It all starts at the beginning

I was not always overweight.

This truth took me years to figure out and I still have to remind myself of it almost daily when I think about myself and how I look.

I look back at the years I had growing up and I remember thinking that I was always fat becuase thats what other people always told me. I can remember the first time I was called "fat". It was my first day at  kindergarten in 1976. I was 5 years old and I was going to school for the first time. I remember getting on the bus that day and having an epiphany that I would be doing this for the next 13 years. What I didn't expect was the stigma of being different that would accompany it. At recess, everyone was playing and a ball rolled towards me from a group of kids that were playing catch. I stopped the ball and picked it to give it to the kid that was running to get it. His name was Chris. I gave him the ball and said "hi" or something. He looked at me and said, "You are fat" then turned around and went back to his group of friends. I stood there dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what just happened. I am sure at the time it didn't actually bother me and I don't recall any other time that was ever brought up. In fact it wasn't until 2nd grade when things really got out of hand. I had my own fan base of kids that went out of their way to pick on me simply because of the way I looked. To them, I looked fat. I have heard all the variations of the word through the school years. Some of the earlier years were worse than others, however its those early years that really stick with you.