Pound Cake

I signed up for Sparkpeople today because I need motivation / socialization / encouragement. I found the word verification to be quite intriguing, so I took a screen shot. 

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Yep, pound cake, I kid you not!

After dropping my daughter off at school, I went to the gym and swam 1/2 mile. To swim 1/2 mile, I have to swim 18 laps. I break this down into 3 sets of three different swim styles done twice. For example, I swim 2 free style laps, then 2 butterfly laps, and then 2 laps of flutter kicks with the kick board and then repeat the series three times. I kind of get lazy with the flutter kicks, so I was determined to put effort in them yesterday. Boy do I feel it today!  I was so sore last night, that I had a hard time sleeping. I made sure to eat a banana this morning and drink lots of water. 

Speaking of water, I didn't hit my goal of 8 glasses. I only had 6. By dinner time, I had only had 4, so I drank my last 2 too close to bedtime. I then had to keep getting up and go to the bathroom.  I'm going to try to drink today's 8 glasses evenly throughout the day. 

When I got back from the gym yesterday morning, I received a text from an old co-worker who is now working closer to where I live. She asked if I wanted to meet up for lunch. Adult conversation?  Why, yes I do!  We went to a sushi place in a shopping center that I used to live above. The sushi was great, but the adult conversation was even better!  I need to make it a point to make more friends in the area. I moved here last year, and didn't know a soul. I find it so much harder to make friends now that I'm an adult, especially since I'm not working right now. :-(

I went over my calories yesterday. For one of my snacks, I had a whole bagel with peanut butter and raisins. It was a lot of calories for a snack. I'll have to make it only 1/2 a bagel next time. Here's yesterday's log summary:

DEEP Breath

I need to...stop wearing flip flops, stretch my feet....lose weight. Yeah, that last one is probably the best solution. My arches are tender again after yesterday's long walk.  I swam again today. I absolutely love swimming for exercise, except that I have to dry and straighten my hair. I hate spending any time on my hair. Unfortunately, I was cursed with curly, frizzy hair.

I used to think that people who swam for exercise were cheating themselves out of a good workout. I had always went swimming for fun with the kids, never actually swimming laps. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I took water aerobics and didn't feel like I got much of a workout. The class was full of older women who took the class more for socialization than exercise, so I never realized how much exercise swimming can be until my in laws came and stayed with us for a month.

I was 3 months postpartum and we would go to the gym everyday. They would swim laps and I would walk and lift weights. One day I decided to swim laps with them. They told me that they swim 1/2 mile, so I was determined to do that too. I mean, if they could, then I could. Woah. I struggled. I was so wore out that I needed a nap!  All I wanted to do was sleep the rest of the day. When I put my activity into MyFitnessPal, I saw that it burned as many calories as running!  Since then, I've been swimming on my non running days. 

I've resisted putting my weight on here because quite frankly, I'm embarrassed by it. However, it wouldn't be a health / weight loss blog without it. So here goes nothing. 

There it is. This is from this morning's weigh in.  

The highest recorded weight I have is 248 and was recorded a week before I had my son (I'm sure I weighed more than that when I gave birth). He's now 7 months old. That means I've lost 50 lbs!  I'm also now out of the 2...somethingoranother. I had plateaued for a month and was dying to get out of the 2xxs. I'm also now just 6 lbs away from my pre pregnancy weight of 192. I'm very excited about this, but I've still got a LONG way to go. 

I've been working on setting some goals for myself as motivation. I'd like to set both weight and non weight related goals. I'm going to work on that and hopefully post it soon!