Progress?

Well, tonight I get to find out if I'm making any progress. I feel like I should be - I'm really embracing this gnawing in my stomach... odd as that may sound.

About 10 years ago, the husband and I got in very good shape and lost quite a bit of weight in the process. I'm trying to do the same thing now as I did then - only I'm kind of stepping it up a notch on the food part of it, tracking every calorie and severely limiting them.

At that time, I had heard about people who were using prayer to lose weight. It was an interesting catch-phrase that made it national news at the time, but it turned out what they were really doing was just waiting until their stomach growled to eat - which is really the point, right? You should only eat when you're actually hungry. But then they used prayer to help themselves get to the point that their stomachs were growling.

So, I tried to implement that idea along with the idea that calories out must equal calories in and suddenly the pounds started melting away. I'm hoping that if this "crash diet" gives me the kick-start I needed, I'll be able to keep up the weight/fat loss for awhile. I'll be 40 next year and it's my goal to be fit and healthy again by then.

So you know what can really help out in the "calories in" part of the equation? If you go for a bike ride that should only take a couple of hours, but then it ends up taking four hours and by the time you get home, you've entirely missed lunch! Which is what happened to us yesterday. (but I don't really recommend it)

We decided to take the kids mountain biking at Double Lake Recreation Area. We've been here before and it's a great place to mountain bike - and it's only an hour away from our house! The problem is that there are quite a few rolling hills on the trail and Marxo's little bird-legs just don't have the muscle-strength to get up them. She has to get off and walk in many places, so our average speed ends up being about 3 miles per hour. And since we haven't been riding much lately, the kids' tolerance level has decreased and their whining index has increased and then the 1st of Newton's laws comes into play: things at rest tend to want to stay at rest. Ugh.

Since a cold front came through Saturday night and it was significantly colder on Sunday morning, we didn't want to get out too early. But then we ended up getting to the park a little later than we probably should have: Noon. That's Ok, though, I thought - we'll be done and home by at least 3:30 or so. We'll have plenty of time to eat a (very) late lunch, clean up the house, have dinner, and still have time to finish putting up the Christmas decorations.

Hrmph. After taking two snack breaks and noticing that the sun was starting to get low in the sky, I was getting rather worried about our plans for the rest of the day! We finally made it back to the car at 4:00, which meant we got home at 5:00, we missed lunch and went straight for dinner.

Calories in yesterday = 1250
Calories out yesterday = 609 (approximately - hard to tell, we were going so slowly!)

I think by that calculation, I should have lost about 2 pounds just yesterday! (kidding) But, we'll find out for sure tonight when I weigh-in...