Tag Archives: hydration

Weight Watchers Thursdays

1 Sep

Ok so I have given up on Weight Watchers Wednesdays and changed it to Thursdays because even though I prefer how Wednesday sounds I never make it to that meeting. *rolls eyes* Might as well just admit that Thursdays are my WW day and adjust the blog accordingly, shrug.

So I have some happy news, the scale was most definitely my friend this week! 🙂 Not just my friend, my bestest friend! lol

My body is reluctant to lose weight so every week I stand on that stupid scale and consider myself lucky if I have managed to lose 0.8lbs. I had already done the math and figured how long it would take to get to goal if I continued on at that rate and oh man was that depressing math, sigh.

This week though, oh wow! I stepped on the scale and kinda freaked out because it showed I had gone down by 3.6lbs! Three point six pounds! Oh. My. Gawd! How is that even a possibility?

I am crediting the crazy awesome loss to three things:

  1. two weeks ago I had a super active week and apparently it can sometimes take a week for the results of extra work outs to show on the scale
  2. I cut out peanut butter…it almost killed me to do it but I realized I kept lying to myself about how much of it I was eating and it was burning through my weekly points like crazy so I cut it out completely and will sloooowly work it back in, when I can trust myself to measure and track it honestly
  3. Magic, and unicorns, and fairy dust…obviously it is mostly these that did it! 😉

The loss of 3.6 pounds resulted in my surpassing my first 10 pounds lost (I am at a grand total of 11.8 pounds lost right now) aaaaaaaand it resulted in my losing 5% of my body weight. Boom!

In the land of Weight Watchers this means I earned me some bling! 🙂

2016-09-01 13.48.01

The charm with the WW I got at 4 weeks as a celebration of sticking with the program for a month.

The charm that says 5% is celebrating my having lost 5% of my body weight, yay!

The charm of the running person is for a Try-A-Thon challenge that has been going on for the last 9 weeks. The challenge is to try something new every week, something that falls under the category of Fun, Food, or Fitness. I managed to try (and track) at least one new thing every week.

Oh, I also got a sticker for having lost another 5lbs, you get one with every 5lbs lost, but I didn’t take a picture of that lol

The WW app gave me this lovely message after I input my weigh-in weight…

2016-09-01 13.09.38

The team leader gave me a high five, I did a girly happy scream in my car, all in all, a good day. 😀

Things we talked about in the meeting today:

Hydration!

This week is all about hydration. Apparently most people don’t drink enough fluids in a day, I don’t really have that problem thanks to my tea addiction, but doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep an eye on how much I am drinking just to make sure I don’t start cutting back without realizing it.

An average person should be drinking six 8oz glasses of fluid a day, that is 1 1/2 Litres each and every day.

That’s a hella lot of fluids! Are you drinking enough?

There is a myth that you should be drinking all that fluid as water but that is not true. Any unsweetened, non-alcoholic drink counts. So tea, milk, diet pops, basically any 0 SP drinks. You can also get some of your fluids from certain foods, like watermelon, celery and the like.

Drink up my friends! 🙂

Fun fact I learned about water, it has been shown to help women regulate body temperature so if you are going through menopause drinking lots of water might help control the hot flashes.

Something else we talked about was the truth of the scale. The scale never lies, it will always tell the truth but it is only the truth in that moment, it is a snapshot. The scale will tell a certain truth, it doesn’t give the big picture of how a person is doing. If you do everything right and you step on the scale and it doesn’t show the result you are expecting think back to the last 24 hours. Did you eat something high in sodium and are retaining water? Is it super humid? Are you taking a new medication? There are a lot of things that could affect your weigh-in so sure, the scale never lies, but maybe in that moment the scale is showing the effects of that salty popcorn you ate the night before. Take that number with a grain of salt…heh, salt, get it? 😉

Lastly we talked about treats and tips for dealing with parties. One lady said before she goes to a party she thinks about what she wants to get out of that event, does she want to lose, maintain, or gain. She says she never wants to gain but may be ok with gaining because of what she ate at that party due to circumstances.

The other tip was about keeping treats out of easy reach. One lady has so much trouble not eating allllll the treats allllll the time that she keeps them in a box in her trunk in her underground parking. That way, if she is craving something she can’t just go to the cupboard in her kitchen but would have to go down 3 floors and get them from the car and that extra effort just to get a cookie (or whatever her treats are) is usually all she needs to get her aiming for some fruit. She goes the extra step by giving herself rules about the circumstances in which she is allowed to eat those treats. She must eat them in her apartment, so she can’t just grab something from the trunk when she is about to get in to her car. I figure she must be very good at following her own rules to resist just grabbing one when on the go…but hey, whatever works for her! 🙂

My treat to myself for losing my first ten pounds (technically 11.8lbs, not that I’m counting or anything…) is to buy a new book, Chapters here I come!

Advertisement

Couple Weeks Ago…

7 Sep

A couple weeks ago I had this awesome week, was super active, always seemed to be doing something, not every part of it was good stuff but hey, life isn’t 100% good stuff so ya gotta make room for the crap stuff every now an then lol 😛

I tried some new activities and want to give my take on them:

The Grouse Grind

This is a hike in North Vancouver, BC that is pure evil, grr! to you Grind, grr! It’s not that it isn’t do-able, people hike it everyday but it isn’t fun and costs you$10 at the end…lemme explain…you drive there, you pay for parking, you hike up 2.9 km (1.8 miles) and sure that doesn’t sound like a long distance but think of how this hike is described, it’s called “mother nature’s stairmaster” I kid you not! Go look at the website for it: http://www.grousemountain.com/grousegrind then when you get to the top you have to pay $10 to take a gondola ride down the mountain so you can rush back to your car before your parking expires because you mistakenly thought you’d do the hike in a short-ish amount of time so didn’t pay for too long of parking…hmm, that last part might be just me…lol. It’s not a fun hike, which is what I realized part way up the mountain. I thought it was just me who wasn’t having fun (I went alone, most people seem to go with someone), but when I looked at other peoples faces as they were going up they all had the same look on their face, one of torture. Uh, why the hell are we all climbing this stupid mountain if it isn’t fun?? Everyone looks like they are being forced to suffer through some torturous ordeal but uh, hello, didn’t we all make the choice to be there? And no way they were all first timers like me, so some of them must have known what they were getting in to, and yet, they went back, what’s with that? I guess a lot of people use the mountain as a personal challenge and keep returning so they can better their time, it’s like a point of pride or something…weirdos! lol

Most of the hike is man made stairs but every now and then is a part where nature has been allowed to stay in charge so you do a bit of scrambling over rocks (boulders? no, I think they are rocks…what’s the difference?) I prefer the rocks to the stairs. I like to hike, like for real hike, not climb a bunch of stairs hike, if I wanted stairs I’d go use a stairmaster at my gym lol, but ah well, it was still an experience and one I am glad I did, if only so I can say I did it lol.

My recommendation though would be to not do as I did and hike it on one of the hottest days of the year with minimal water in your pack and having not yet eaten anything that day (oh, and it was around 3p or so I think so not like I had only skipped breakfast, oops!), if you are hydrated, dressed for the weather, fed and not being roasted to death by the sun you’ll probably do all right. 🙂

The next thing I did that was new to me that week waaaas…

Bikram’s Yoga

For those of you who don’t know, that is a series of 26 yoga poses that last 90 minutes and are performed in a room heated to 40C with 40% humidity…so it’s hot! I paid $30 for a week of unlimited classes at a studio near my place. A friend from dragon boating said I have to go at least 5 times that first week because any less then 5 times I will hate it, 5 times or more and I will love it. I wanted to get the most out of my unlimited for a week so I made it my main source of exercise for that week. They teachers say your only goal for your first 5 classes (there is that number again) is to stay in the room, even if you feel overwhelmed by the heat just lay down on your mat and try to get through it, yeah, it is just that hot! lol. I managed to go 4 times in that week and am happy to say I not only stayed in the room each time but I performed all 26 poses each time, meaning, I didn’t stop and rest on my mat cause I couldn’t take it, yah me! Hey, don’t judge! I’ll take positive re-enforcement where I can find it! lol 😛 The Bikram yoga websites and teachers all tout the amazingness of this style of yoga (of course) and apparently there are all kinds of health benefits etc…I don’t know about any of that, but I do know you sweat a lot and I figure that has to be good for detoxifying your body, right? I dehydrated one day, got all dizzy, ran in to a wall in my apartment when going from the bathroom to my bedroom, kinda crazy, so it really is important to hydrate. It is suggested drinking lots of water the day prior and the day of your Bikram yoga session, I suppose since we should all be staying hydrated anyways this shouldn’t be a problem but who are we kidding? We all slip up at some point, shrug.

I decided against continuing on with Bikram’s Yoga. Even though I know a bunch of people who swear by it it’s really expensive and not what I am needing at this point for my main form of exercise. If it wasn’t so freakishly expensive I’d be really tempted to continue on with it, using it as part of my exercise routine but $160/month is too much to spend if I’m only going two times a week. You have to be really committed to Bikram’s to get your moneys worth.

Since then I have been doing my normal stuff, dragon boat practices (although season just ended, sadness, so no more of that for a while), gym time…I unfortunately got really sick two weekends ago and it was a pathetic recovery, took longer then I would like so I stayed away from the gym longer then I wanted to, mostly cause I had no energy, if walking to the store across the street caused me to get light headed and a bit dizzy I figured going to the gym was probably a bad idea lol. I seem to be all better now so I’ll be starting my gym time again soon, probably tomorrow before work. I’m going to be signing up for my boxing classes again once payday comes around since that’s my off season sport and I’m looking in to trying OC’ing, something a lot of dragon boaters seem to do once db season has ended…not sure I want to be on the water during the winter though, brr! lol 🙂

Too. Much. Drinking.

5 Aug

I noticed over vacation I wasn’t taking in as much water (or any fluids really) as I should be. I spent all that time working up to drinking 5 or more glasses/cups of fluid a day and over vacation – poof! – back down to 2 if I am lucky.  So today, the first day back to work and my normal routine I drank a disturbingly large quantity of fluids. Let’s just say that it’s a good thing I sit so close to the washroom at work. lol. 😀

gotta pee! gotta pee! gotta pee!

At work I had 6 cups of tea (large cups) and 3 big glasses of water; once I got home I had a huge bottle of water and as a result spent a lotta time over the course of the day in the washroom. lol. By the time I was s’posed to be thinking of dinner my tummy was feeling all sloshy and I didn’t really want to eat. It wasn’t a good feeling – I felt overly acidic, ugh. I really wanted something that would soak up some of the fluid which I am sure sounds stupid but hey, it’s what I wanted so I made myself a sandwich. After my stomach had some time to realize there was something solid in it I started to feel better. 🙂

I learned last night that your daily 8 glasses of water don’t have to be water – when did that change? Now it’s 8 glasses of fluid; much easier to do! I got well over my 8 glasses of fluid since I drank 10 glasses/cups and all were over a one portion size. Yah for staying hydrated! 😀  You can also get your daily fluids from the liquid that is in foods; like your fruits and veggies. There are all kinds of ways to stay hydrated which means it should be easy to do but really, how many people actually get the amount of fluid in them they are supposed to on a daily basis?

Drinking so much fluids today brought up a concern I have never had before; can I drink too much? Will this damage my kidneys or some other organ?…cause that would suck! I remember hearing years ago about a contest to win a Wii, it was called Wee for Wii or something stupid like that. Basically, it was who can drink the most water without peeing? Whoever wins gets a free Wii. The reason I remember the contest is because a lady who was in the contest died from drinking too much water. Too much water?!?! Ack! So there is a line we need to stay on – don’t drink too much don’t drink too little.

After a little research I learned that drinking too much water is called hyponatremia and results in a dilution of sodium in the body. It is most commonly found in babies under 6 months old and athletes. I could list all the deets about water intoxication but that’d just be boring, if you want to read them just go to http://chemistry.about.com/cs/5/f/blwaterintox.htm Something I do want to point out is that it is not how much you drink but how quickly you drink it. A healthy adults kidneys can process 15 litres of water a day, so the normal person is highly unlikely to suffer from water intoxication as long as they drink the fluid over the course of the day and not all at once. So yah! No dying from drinking too much today! lol

Today I ate:

3/4 cup Red Berry Special K = 2 points

1/2 cup 1% milk = 1 point

1 banana = 2 points

1/2 cup Sidekicks broccoli and cheddar rice = 3 points

1 hot dog weiner = 3 points

1 granny smith apple = 1 point

2 triangles Light Laughing Cow cheese = 1 point

1 cup blueberries = 1 point

1 peanut butter sandwich

    – 2 pcs bread = 2 points

    – 1 tbsp peanut butter = 2 points

    – 1 tsp Eating Right Margarine = 1 point

1 serving of crisps = 4 points

Today I used 23 points exactly! 😀 Day 2 of hitting my points, wOOt! I should have had veggies in there at some point, normally I would have had some at dinner but since my tummy wasn’t up to that I ended up having a veg free day. I had a decent amount of fruit though…not quite as much as the food guide says I should have but hey, I can only do so much a day and I got my fluid in so let’s focus on that victory, k?

Fiesta Friday!

26 Jun

Hola mi amigo!

Today was Fiesta Friday at work, it was supposed to be a team building thing *rolls eyes* but really it was an excuse to eat a lot of food, drink at work and goof off on a sunny friday. Normally I would have been thrilled for this but it seems a cruel world that during my first week trying to lose weight throws at me bday cake, mexican food, alcohol and invites for after work today for more mexican food and margaritas. It is totally patio season! Today was all sunny and warm, slight breeze but not enough to get your hair in your food and I could envision myself sitting out there with a nice big drink and some nachos. I felt that I would not have had enough willpower as of yet to resist ordering something horrendously bad for me at the restaurant so I didn’t go, sad for tonight but a small sacrifice to be made for my happiness in the future.  This whole looking at the big picture thing can kinda suck. 😛

I was concerned about what I would be eating today since I wouldn’t be able to acurately calculate my points but I don’t think I did too badly. shrug. I didn’t eat as much fruit as I have been used to and I found that I was unconsciously drinking more water. I don’t know if I was drinking more water because I wasn’t eating the fruit and my body wanted the hydration or if I am just a bit more used to drinking water now. I guess it doesn’t really matter why I was drinking more it’s just good that I was. AC, a friend at work, she brought in dessert for today (well, one of the desserts) and she is so awesome, she knows I am trying really hard on weight watchers so she brought in a Mexican Fruit Salad, it had cut up fruit (duh) and she used the actual juice from fruit instead of juice juice and there was a bit of rum in it and chili powder. I would never of thought to put chili powder in a fruit salad but it was really good. 🙂 I totally owe her because the other desserts were brownies, expensive boxes of chocolates and the candy in the pinata – none of which I could touch.

I took a nice big salad with me to work thinking that I would eat that with my taco thereby making me full and not tempted to go back for a second taco. Well, lunch ended up starting later then planned and I was going on an errand with S so we both scarfed down our tacos and bolted. By the time we got back I didn’t want the salad so I figured I’d bring it home and have it with my dinner or eat it tomorrow…great plan but it is still sitting in the fridge at work cause I totally forgot about it. sigh. Hopefully it’ll still be ok on monday! Mid afternoon I was getting peckish so I grabbed my cut up pineapple and nibbled on it, I had 1 cup of pineapple but only ate half at most so I brought that home too. Seems to be the day for bringing food home with me. lol.

So here is what I ate today:

1 light whole wheat bagel = 3 points

1 tbsp peanut butter = 2

tea = 0

1 cup grapes = 1 point

1 taco = 6 points

-taco topped with ground beef, guacamole, sour cream, lettuce, tomatos, shreeded cheese

grilled veggies = 0

fruit salad = 0.5 points

1/2 cup pineapple = 0.5 points

whole wheat pasta = 5 points

1/4 cup Knorr’s Alfredo sauce = 2 points

mixed veggies = 0 points

That puts me at 20 points, 4 left over!

Not enough left over points for cookies and milk but that’s ok, I had that last night. 🙂 I will finish off my points with some fruit which is apparently becoming my “go to” food. lol. Who’d of ever thought that would happen? I may keep a couple points un-used just in case my calculations for the day are off and I used more then I realized. It’s so hard to guess what the points used are when you can’t measure. I made sure to be really sparing with the peanut butter, guac, sour cream and cheese but when those things are all combined who knows what number they add up to? I think this whole worrying about points thing will get old really fast, or I will become strangely obsessed and be one of those annoying people that talks about their food and points all the time…I realized yesterday I am talking about food and points way too much at work to my friends so I am trying to shut my yap about it. Just cause I am getting all absorbed in this doesn’t mean they want to hear about it. lol. I must remember that!

%d bloggers like this: