karinchantal

Hey guys,

I know it has been forever, since the end of November I believe. And I am sorry for that but life got in the way and wanted to take a step back from Buddy slim for various personal reasons.

A lot of new names and faces here and some I don’t see anymore, I hope everyone is doing good and still going strong. As of about half of December I have reached what I set out to do in January of 2009. I know my weightgoal was set at 150 and I haven’t reached that but I am happy where I am now. People around me keep telling I have to stop - not that I always listen to what others say - but in this case I think they are right. I feel great, I went from a size 16 to a size 6. From 222lbs to 153lbs (or thereabouts lol) My weight varies between 156 and 152 on a daily basis which I think means that my metabolism is doing its job.

Does this mean I am done? I don’t know, I don’t think so. I have to keep watching what I eat and how much I eat although that is less hard than I thought it would be. Starting this weightloss journey at the beginning of last year I had one very important ‘goal’ in mind. I wanted to become healthier and I wanted to start that THAT day. So losing weight a healthy way. God knows I have tried it other ways and none of those worked for me. Anorexia… yes you lose weight but as soon as you start eating again you will gain it 5 times faster than you lost it and keep gaining until you stop eating again. Been there, done that, isn’t worth it.

I have an 8year old daughter and I want to be a good role model so I eat healthy, moderate portions and I work out. If there is any advice I can give people its to find something you like to do or think you could like to do when it comes to exercising and do it. Make time for it. Don’t do something just to lose weight but do something you like to do. You might have to try a couple of different things before you found what you like but once you do, you are set!

I found running is the thing for me (done it before and picked it up again last March) I started with walking in January and joined a learn how to run class in March. Now I am a member of the local Marathon club and am in training to run my first whole Marathon on May 30th in Saskatoon. I run 3 or 4 times a week with 2 or 3 7.2 mile runs and 1 long run that gets longer every week lol. I started logging my food and exercise in January 2009 and 2 weeks ago I saw in my running log that I passed the 1000 kilometre mark. A milestone. I don’t log my food anymore but I do still log my running just because I like it.

I stopped eating fast food all together last year too. Its just not worth it. The fat, bad carbs and sodium content are so destructive and for what.. the taste of grease and salt is all you get for it. If I want to treat myself on a nice meal I go out to dinner to a restaurant. I have discovered you can have great meals that don’t need to crush your calorie limit. A guideline I have embraced is ‘See-food’. Food that you can see, food without all the dressings and sauces. A salad with the right ingredients doesn’t have to swim in ranch or ceasar dressing. A charbroiled chicken doesnt have to drown in mushroom gravy and a baked potatoe doesn’t have to be covered in bacon laden cream sauce. Portions is another thing I have learned. I like oven baked french fries every once in a while but my plate isn’t covered with them. A handfull is enough. Icecream for desert on a special occasion? Sure but 1 scoop will do it .. and savouring every spoonful will make it last as long as shovelling down a whole bowl full.

Need protein, eat meat, or legumes or whatever has natural protein in it. Need fibre, eat raw veggies (LOVE CARROTS lol) whole grain breads. Need carbs? Eat fruits, whole grain pastas. Don’t step into the trap of those low cal bars, ’slim down’ shakes or cereal with artificially added nutrients. This journey is about learning to look at your food differently, learn a new lifestyle .. not just for the short term but for the duration. You want to get healthy? Get healthy now by living healthy now, and don’t wait until after you have lost the weight.

Its a journey, not a race and not a contest. Every day of eating healthy, moderately and doing something to move that body and get your heart rate up is a day that has been good. ‘Fall of the wagon?” that’s life, so pick yourself up and get on with the rest of it.

We all have it in us to do this right, to take care of ourselves the same way we care for others. We can all make time and make the right decisions if we want to. There are a lot of companies out that that spend the big bucks to make you believe that you need THEIR product to succeed but they are wrong. You don’t need fancy or complicated recipies or foods, you don’t need expensive memberships or workout sessions. You need to use your common sense and elbow grease and make healthy living a habit.

Buddy slim has helped me but don’t forget. Buddy slim is like a gym membership.. you still have to do it yourself. Signing up doesn’t make you lose weight, working at it does.

I don’t want to sound as if I know it all, but what I said above is what has been and still is working for me and I hope someone will pick something helpfull out of this.

I believe in you, in the power of you, as long as you do too.

Oh I am sooo happy!!! We got a call early this morning (6am) and our paper carrier lady had found him a couple of blocks over. She had also seen one of the flyers I had put up so she was in our driveway with Tiger. We put on pants and ran outside and there I changed in a blubbering mess, hugging her and crying LOL but I am soo happy we have our Tiger back!!  Right now the adrenaline starts to wear off or something because I am feeling extremely tired and am getting a headache but thats ok, Tiger is back!!

He is a dirty, dusty, matted tired fellow but is happily sleeping now. I already cut out some of the worst mats and made an appt with the vet tomorrow to have him checked out. (worm pills for sure lol) Other than that he seems fine. Girls thank you so much for your heartwarming messages on my post yesterday. That meant a lot to me!

It’s a happy day in our home!

Hey guys, yesterday was my birthday and I hope that that day is not a predicement of what’s to come my way this year. Yesterday morning I couldn’t find Tiger, one of our 3 cats. When I woke up my son to ask him, he said that Tiger slipped out (he is an indoor cat) when he came home at midnight. Robbert looked for him but couldn’t find him and went to bed (!!!!????!!!!!!#@&$#%^$%)

Me and Bruce rushed, got dressed and went out looking for him but nothing. I just couldn’t stop crying, still can’t. I spent all day yesterday walking around our neighborhood, posting reward flyers and calling his name. We entered his info on every website that cateres to finding pets, called the pound, and all animal rescue services and shelters, vets and the newspaper. I went out again last night in the dark, hoping he’d be hungry enough to come out at night but nothing.

This morning I am delivering flyers door to door 4 blocks in 4 ways from our house, asking people to please check their property.

I am a mess, we all are. This is the worst thing imaginable to me right now. Not knowing where or in what kind of shape he is. To some people he is just a cat but he is as dear to me, to us as anyone else in our family. He is Alex’s cat but I think it hasn’t really sunk in yet with her that he might be lost forever.

I would trade in every thing to get him back. Right now I am waiting for the next load of flyers to print out. And after I have delivered them all  I don’t know what else to do. I am sorry this is not about weightloss but its all I can think of right now.

My sweetest hubby gave me the coolest thing ever for my birthday. A ……… watch! lol… with a 74 page instruction booklet!   Its a training watch with a built in heart rate monitor and GPS device. How cool is that! So when I go running (provided I can figure out how this device works) I set the watch and it keeps track of where I run, my pace, my heart rate, calories burnt, incline etc etc. Then when I come home I can hook it up to the computer and see how fast I went, what my average, my low and high heartrate was, the course I ran etc. I can set it up to run against a virtual training partner, or run against myself on a previous run. See where I improve or not. I can also create a course on the computer and send it over to the watch and for instance I can set it at a certain goal for distance or heartrate or calories and if I go the wrong way the watch will tell me. Or once I reach my goal the watch will tell me. My head is spinning. I just finished reading the booklet for the first time and I am just amazed! I totally love it! And I cannot wait to use it! If I weren’t a tad hung-over from a dinner with Bruce and a bottle of wine yesterday I’d have gone today but Ill go tomorrow.

Tomorrow I am going to be 42 and I am happy! First of all… for some reason I thought - and have been telling people all year - that I was 42 already so in a way I won’t be a year older lol. Second of all.. looking back on the past year, I am in a way better shape now, than I was a year ago. 63lbs lighter and instead of a tight size 16 I am wearing a comfortable size 8. Instead of getting winded while trying to tie my shoes or going upstairs to do the laundry, I now run 11.6km every other day.  Yeah.. its been a good year, with a lot of improvements. Today and yesterday weren’t and aren’t going to be the best in terms of diet but hey… they won’t be too bad. The bad thing yesterday was definetely the wine. Today I am going to have fresh soup for dinner. Yup.. homemade veggie soup is my favorite dinner and so thats what we are having. For dessert I picked an apple berry crumble @ 210calories per serving + another 30cals for the light whipping cream on top so not too shabby I thought.

Anyways.. I havent’ been losing any weight the last week, lost a pound one day and it was back the other.. thats ok.. after tomorrow I am going to be at it again a little bit more serious to get those last 10lbs gone and then we’ll see if I am happy with the weight. I won’t be skinny by any means but I don’t have to be, I want to be fit and healthy and comfortable in my own skin and I am achieving that goal little by little.

Have a great day peeps and be good to yourself  and oh a shout out to Debra: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW GIRL!! Here’s to another year of losing, learning and improving!

A 159.2 actually, on the scale this morning, whoohoo and this, with TOM being here full blast! TOM is a regular guest these days. Its the 3rd period Im having in 5 weeks! Im thinking I am going through ‘the change’ and if so I wish it would hurry up already so I can be done with it!

In half an hour I get to pick up my kitty from the vet. Sox, (1 of our 3 cats) was in for surgery. Saturday I discovered a lump on his leg, took him in on Tuesday and the vet told me that they had to take that out asap. So here I am all worried. I could phone at 11.30 this morning to see how he did and he did great. The lump wasn’t cancerous, it was actually a fat tumour, which is just a fat deposit. So basically what he got was a liposuction.. geeezzz!! Now I am just scared what this is going to cost us.

Ive been doing good on the running, although I didn’t go yesterday because of TOM and heavy duty cramping.

But tomorrow Im going to be back at it again!

Alex is in Bruce’s office making me a birthday surprise …all a big secret lol. Its so cute to see her like that.

Well, not much more to say right now, other than that I hope to finally have a good sleep now that Sox is fine again. Kids, cats… grrrrrr!

Have a great day everyone and be good to yourself!

Thanksgiving (eventhough the Canadian one has already passed), Christmas, New Years and other holidays are looming around the corner. T’is the season where weight is gained. Do you guys have a ‘diet’ plan for these oh so tempting times?

I myself have been slipping a little bit lately due to bdays and accompanied stress and work. Haven’t been running every other day like I was - although I made a good start this week (ran Sunday and this morning) but the food just seems to keep finding it’s way to my mouth.. and somehow the water isn’t. So I figure, since all these holidays, my own birthday (nov 23), Alex’s birthday (Jan. 10) and to top it all off Bruce’s birthday (Feb 27) are all just about to hit, I need a plan to stay strong. I want to keep on running and find (yeah I am still looking) another type of exercise to do. The food is going to be a challenge and I also don’t want to sit there and eat carrots while the rest is gorging on pies and turkeys and stuffing (oh stuffing yess). The main challenge for me will be the drinking. There will be parties and what is a party without a bottle of wine … lol.

But I want to be somewhat prepared and have some sort of plan so I was wondering if anyone out here in buddyslim land has given this some thought for themselves. We can’t let our hard work and progress of the past years/months/weeks just go to waste (or waist I guess hehe) during this time right?

But! It was Robbert’s birthday dinner, and really good food, in a really nice restaurant and I would do it all over again. LOL.

First of all I ended up with 2 leather binders and 50 plus sheets with scrapbookpages and Robbert loved it. Its about his first 12 years, the years we lived in Holland and he was really happy with it. WHEW! We (Bruce and I) took Robbert out for a wonderful dinner at a really nice place where all of us drank too much lol but oh the food was soooo good! I checked my weight this morning though and I haven’t gained so thats good! I don’t know about right now because we had a little repeat of his birthday for Alex and grandma who weren’t at the restaurant and I had baked my annual Dutch applepie for this occasion (Robbert needs this every year lol) and I had a pretty big chunk.. oh well.. hey 21 is a special age so it was worth it. No regrets here and I will be really good for the next little while.

Here’s some pics of Robbert and me and Bruce either at home or at the restaurant with the delicious dishes. I had a beef tenderloin with oh what do they call that..  procetta. And we shared a wonderful 2 person chocolate/creme brulee (SP) caramel/coffee icecream of which I have to admit, I ate the most. Paired this with 2 bottles of wine and there you have it….

Anyway.. pics of my beautiful son (or I guess you say handsome lol) and wonderful husband) and oh one of Alex from yesterday all decked out as peacock princes.. so there’s my little family … *SMILE*

Hope you guys had a great weekend and are ready for a new week filled with jumping jacks, runs, carrots and gallons of water!

Alex is my daughter. She is almost 8 and weighs 60lbs and today when I stepped on the scale it said 161.6 which means I lost 60.4lbs so far.   When I lifted her up earlier she felt quite heavy..and I lost that.. soo whooohoo!! lol

Not the most uplifting title but thats how I feel. I’ve been feeling stressed all week, I’ve been having the munchies all week and this morning I woke up with a kink in my neck that seems to have cemented my head so I cannot turn it. Big fat BLAH!!  I was supposed to go for a run this morning but I so didn’t feel like it, so here I am, still sitting in my pj’s.

Today TOM has arrived too so that explains a lot. It just surprizes me how that time of the month can sneak up on me time after time. I should know by now when to expect it but nooo.

The other thing is that in 2 weeks (October 30th) my son is turning 21! And boy does that make me feel old lol. Its also one of those milestone birthdays that makes me remenisce a lot. Even more so because last month I decided that as part of a birthday gift I would make him a photo/scrapbook album about his first 21 years. Now having moved from Holland 8 years ago, this meant that my mom had to send me a ton of photos that were still there. She also sent me some kindergarten and school art work that he did so I can also put that in there. I have never made a scrapbook you guys. And it is ballooning into a monster of gigantic proportions. I cannot do this in the house because - eventhough he is in university - he comes home during the day and you all know that being a parent means you have no private space. So I have set up in the meeting space of Bruce’s office and go there in the afternoons when Alex is at school. The tally after 2 weeks is that I am now at his 2nd birthday, I already have over 50 photos in there and I haven’t even picked up the 184 photos I had printed out at our local photoshop of the years we’ve been living here. HELP !!!!!  I already resided in the fact it would probably be split into 2 albums because there are too many pics for one but at this rate its going to compete with the Encyclopaedia Britannica in volume.

Meanwhile, Robbert - not having a clue about what I am doing - is constantly telling me to be aware that his bday is only x days away… am I ready for it?  GRRRRR If only he knew!! Major stress!!! Oh the things I do to me!  Next week I have Alex staying in school for lunch so I can spend also mornings but my house is going to hell in a handbasket like this. Thank god for Bruce’s patience and understanding with his extremely crabby, bitchy and stressed out wife. I need to make up for this big time.

Anyways.. thanks for letting me vent, I know it will get better but I’m just not in a good place right now.

So, I dissapeared for a while, .. it was a weird week. Sunday I went for my monster run and felt great. That morning, before my run, I weighed 166.  The rest of the day I was in pain, lol. And, since according to my heartratemonitor I lost 1800 cals, I made sure I ate enough. No ‘forbidden’ foods though, except for 1 homemade chocolate chip cookie (YUM).

The next morning I stepped on the scale and it said 168!! I was totally depressed and surprised about that! I mean I just ran more than half a marathon the previous day. Made sure I drank my water and ate healthy and I gained!?!?! Tuesday and Wednesday I stepped on the scale several times a day and it ranged from 168.6 (?!?!?!) to 166.5. I did go out for a run on Tuesday morning but I was so depressed about what the scale was saying that my heart wasn’t in it. No run on Thursday but on Thursday I also decided enough of this scale thumping. I like to run, I love to run and I cannot and will not let these stupid numbers on the scale rule my mood day in day out. Sunday shall be my weigh day and NO other day of the week am I to step on that devils machine!

This past week was the first real time where I was ready to throw in the towel and say screw it. I had cravings and urges where I wanted to just grab a bag of chips and start stuffing my face, or have another serving at dinner, or have icecream instead of my yoghurt for desert. I just didn’t know what to do to lose weight. Yeah I could eat less but I don’t want that. I am eating healthy and I need to keep doing that. This is the time where I am going to lose the weight responsibly and in a healthy way. No matter how long it will take. So this morning I stepped on the scale for the first time since Wednessday with dread and it said 163.4! So all in all I lost 2.6lbs this week. But what a rollercoaster ride it was. I need to get away from the scale and I need to see my running as something I love to do no matter what. And I also need to be ok with not going for a run if I really don’t feel like it. I did go yesterday morning and loved it again but tomorrow morning I’ll see.. It can’t become a drag or a burden that I am dreading.

So, eventhough I lost this week, I know I still have a long way to go psychologically, losing this weight is as much a psychological road as a physical; those 2 go hand in hand and only once we can figure out how to handle both of those, we have a fighting chance to keep this weight off I think.

I’m writing all this while waiting for the Turkey stock to be ready. This weekend is the Canadian thanksgiving and we are doing a turkey with all the trimmings. Yes I am going to eat it but I am going to watch my portion. I want to enjoy it but limit the quantity. (doing a new walnut-bacon-stuffing recipe which will probably be 3gazillion cals a serving lol) Pumpkin pie for desert.

Portion control is my task for tonight. I figure, turkey meat is good and lean, half a potato, lots of veggies, a half a spoonful of the stuffing, just for the taste and a little drizzle of the gravy for the taste too. A sliver of the pumpkin pie with a topping of light-whipped cream (30cals per 2tbsp) No bun because thats another 180cals I don’t really need. And lots of raw veggies just before dinner to fill me up. So.. that is my plan of attack, lets hope it works.

Then NO weighing tomorrow morning! This scale ho needs a break!

Thanks everyone for their wonderful comments on my last blog. I love you guys and I hope you have a great weekend!