Down another 0.4 lbs. Not the biggest loss, but given my concerns about the accuracy of last week’s loss coupled with some errant behavior on Sunday (a sugar/carb laden brunch with booze — yummy!), I’ll take any loss I can get. I need to step it up a bit somehow, though — I have 4 weeks to lose 8 lbs to meet my team weight loss goal.

So, with everything continuing downward on the scale, let’s finally get back to that topic I wanted to talk about: wives who let themselves go. As a single, relatively fit individual (although I did have weight swings of +/- 15 lbs from time to time, and on the + side, the “relatively” part is generous), I’ll admit it: I held women who gained and retained weight post-baby in contempt. I didn’t understand how it could happen or why it happened, and thought it was shameful that it did.

Which, of course, is yet another one of the 4,126 things about parenthood that I didn’t understand until I got here. Yes, there are the obvious time and energy constraints associated with a life with small children, but I figured that if women wanted it bad enough, they could find a way to make it happen.

The funny thing is that I still think that: that if we want it bad enough, we can find a way. The part I didn’t expect was that I would reach a point where I didn’t really give a rat’s ass.

Let me try to explain the apathy by taking a look at my past. In the aforementioned +/- 15 lb weight swing, the - 15 lb body appeared without fail when I was either unhappy in or without a significant relationship. I don’t think I ever consciously thought during those times that I was heading to the gym on a path to catch myself a (better) man, but given the high level of correlation between the two, they are undoubtedly connected.

And then I found my mate. I’ve chosen well, so he loves me for those things on the inside far more than my external appearance, to the point where he’s obviously willing to overlook aesthetic flaws to see my (assumed) inner beauty (heh heh). This process, of course, starts out with something small — like they aren’t super repulsed by morning breath. Or the accidental fart in bed. Or the sight of a newborn’s bloody head protruding through some sort of bodily opening. And the envelope continues to be pushed… and through a series of baby steps, we’re ogres in comparison to our sexy, single selves. And while I’m sure that they’d love to have the sexiness back, they find it within themselves to love the ogre, since that’s who’s there.

So if attractiveness is about exactly that — attracting a mate — and you already have one who loves you… on some level, isn’t continued attractiveness a liability? (Crikes, am I Muslim?)

Seems like it would be, except that there are other reasons to be attractive other than to attract a mate — health, self-confidence and personal effectiveness, to name a few. The problem is that these other reasons aren’t nearly as immediate nor intoxicating as the giddiness associated with that split second when you realize the next Mr. Right is leaning in for your first kiss, and thus aren’t nearly as motivating.

For me, I’ve found my strongest motivation comes from wanting to model a better behavior for my girls. I want them to think of fitness and a reasonable amount of vanity to be something you just do, period — not because you’re worried about what today’s Mr. Wonderful might think, but because it’s an innate behavior like making the bed (which I also don’t do on a regular basis, but I’m working on it). I feel that this cannot be a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do lesson, and so I’m struggling to walk the walk.

But I wonder where — or if — I would find that motivation if I didn’t have girls. Similar behavior should be modeled for boys, of course, but I guess I see the father having the primary responsibility for that sort of lesson, given that I think it’s one of those things learned subtly. (I’m really interested to hear the thoughts of moms with only boys on this.)

So my follow up question to all of you — especially those of you who have really struggled with post-baby weight, and have been successful — where do you find your motivation?

This is a big win for the week — another 1.2 lbs!

Given that this is coming off of a two-day anniversary celebration (happy anniversary, love!), I am thrilled. We’ve been at the ranch in Wyoming for the past week, and the hubby and I sneaked off to Jackson for the last two days for a much needed break from the world. We are getting ready to check out of here, where we have wined and dined for the last 60-ish hours. I was fairly well-behaved during the day, but dinners for the last two nights were an oh-so-delicious hell… we broke out of our sanctuary for dinner last night at Jackson’s best restaurant, where my decadent meal was topped off with these homemade eskimo bars — they were a layer of brownie topped with a layer of vanilla ice cream, all dipped in chocolate and served with a yummy caramel sauce for dipping. To die for!

But it’s back to business, because if I’m starting to figure out my body, it will mean that next week I will pay for this week’s sins. I hope not, but at least they were meaningful sins.

Halle-freaking-lujah.

Now before we get too excited here, I have to add the condition that .9 lbs of this loss came from a change in scale. (My previous scale weighed only in 0.5 lbs, and absolutely desperate to see any sort of change, I thought getting one that showed weight in 0.2 lb increments might help.)

Still, I get to claim a 2.3 lb loss for the week. Finally!

So apparently, for me, the low-glycemic diet and the less-intense workouts were key. (Assuming this success continues, I think we can safely deem this a winner.) On the question regarding why the lower-intensity workouts — when I had the anaerobic threshold test done that I mentioned here, they determined that my most efficient fat burning zone was the lowest zone (zone 1). For me, this translates into a target heart rate of 116-125 bpm. Apparently, this is the case for many “sugar burners”… as soon as the body starts working anywhere near close to hard, it decides that it’s time to burn sugar instead of fat, and the weight loss resulting from exercise is pretty much nil. I was also told a classic hallmark of a sugar burner is someone who is flabby, even when reasonably fit — and this has always been the case with me.

For the diet, it’s starting to get a bit easier. I’ve noticed that days where I start to get a little hungry are days followed by downward changes in the scale. Noticing this has made it easier to deal with the hunger in telling myself I’m literally burning fat off my body at that moment. My new favorite discovery is the steel cut oats for breakfast — I make them in the crockpot overnight, and wake up to a nice hot breakfast. I’ve also discovered my local farmers market, which I’m super excited about — I’m looking forward to finding new and sexier ways to get in what feels to be my 86 servings of vegetables per day. My new easy vegetable fave is the steamfresh (I think it’s called; one of those steam-in-the-bag brands) garlic cauliflower dipped in Emeril’s horseradish mustard — super yum!

My challenge for the next 10 days is that I’m at my in-laws ranch, so I’m away from the safety of home and the gym. The good news is that my in-laws are very physically fit people, and are completely supportive of my efforts. My trainer put together a travel workout that I’m doing every weekday during the week (as I would be at home), and my husband graciously offered to briskly walk to the mailbox and back with me so as to help me avoid getting eaten by a bear. (To-and-from the mailbox may not sound like much, but given that the mailbox is over a mile from the house, it’s about a 50-minute round trip at my lame-o zone 1 pace.)

So that’s my report for the week. I still have a ton of fat-related thoughts I’ve been contemplating I want to discuss, but if I actually lose again next week, I won’t have much to bitch about — so I’ll save it for something to write about then. Thanks for checking in with me!

I never did make it back, did I? Sorry about that. The only thing with which I struggle more than my weight at the moment is my time management.

As you can see, this week represents my first real loss — 1 lb. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard for a one pound loss in my life. My workouts continue, but we’ve tweaked things a bit. For cardio, I’m doing cardiovascular endurance building (working out just below my anaerobic threshold) three days a week with my “Team” (aka fat club), and then working out in my lowest fat burning zone (about 60% of my maximum heart rate) for the other three workouts (for a total of six cardio workouts per week). The move to a lighter workout on my non-team days was very counterintuitive to me… apparently, I most efficiently burn fat in my lowest zone, so that’s where we’re focusing for now. It’s miserably boring… an hour at a time on the treadmill at an almost literal crawl. I’m going to start downloading some audio books to get me through… I’m open to recommendations!

For my strength training, I’m still working with my trainer 5 days a week, but two of those days have become dedicated to private yoga lessons to boost my overall muscle condition and flexibility. I’m finally starting to hit a stride to where this workout schedule isn’t feeling quite as heavy.

We tweaked my diet pretty significantly, too. My nutrition coach took me to a low glycemic diet — which essentially means that anything remaining before that was quasi-fun (i.e. whole wheat bread, sweet potatoes) is now gone. Apparently, I am what they call a sugar burner… my body gives complete preference to burning sugar over fat whenever it can find it, so the cure is to strip it from my diet. No, this is not fun at all. If I don’t eat every three hours, I get a pretty substantial headache… but as long as the scale keeps moving downward, I’ll find a way to deal. If it would pick up its motion by another pound a week, I’d be thrilled.

I’ve also started chiropractic treatment to correct some posture and muscular imbalance issues we’ve stumbled upon during my training. My chiropractor is amazing — his specialty is applied kinesiology, and the wide scope of treatments he offers is unlike anything I’ve witnessed before. Unlike other chiropractors I’ve had, he’s not solely interested in performing adjustments… he’s also interested in diagnosing (and, as possible, treating) the underlying biomechanical issues that are causing problems. With all of the folks I’ve got working on me right now, I’m definitely feeling like Humpty Dumpty… I just hope the King’s Men have better luck this time.

Wow, what a week.

Not in terms of weight loss, obviously, but in terms of time crunch. I have so much I want to talk about, and so little time. Part of the downside to finding my early mornings once again (with these workouts that begin at 6 am) is that my night time — my most productive time — has evaporated in exchange for sleep.

I’ll come back in the next day or two to get to the discussion I’d like to have, but I promised myself that come hell or high water, I would post these pictures on Tuesdays.

And so here it is — I lost that mysterious 1.5 lbs (it was actually gone the very next morning; we’ll see in a few days if your ovulation theory is correct, mommasteph), and that’s it. I’ve got a one-on-one scheduled with the nutrition coach (who is a registered dietitian) for Thursday afternoon to attempt to figure out what exactly is going on.

Be back soon. Thanks for keeping me company on what has thus far been an extremely frustrating journey.

I thought of a million different ways to open this post expressing my disappointment in this number, but I don’t feel like being clever. I’m too defeated at the moment.

All of my hard work and nearly perfect eating (save my Saturday night wedding reception binge that consisted of vegetables and 10 glasses of champagne — but no cake!) resulted in a 1.5 lb gain.

I’m going to call this water weight and move on. I had maintained the 2 lb weight loss for the entire week (which I wasn’t necessarily pleased about, until I saw THIS number), and then BAM — the scale *this* morning shows this overnight 1.5 lb gain. Fanfriggingtastic. Maybe it was the Chuck E Cheese pizza and birthday cake last night from my daughter’s third birthday that I DIDN’T EAT. (Grr…)

If not, my friendly nutritionist and I are going to have a little talk. Granted, she’ll probably argue something about the 10 glasses of champagne… blah blah blah. I had saved all of my fats for the day, and used them then. So while it wasn’t pretty, it’s not like I hadn’t planned. (Well, I hadn’t exactly planned on drinking 10 glasses of champagne. I don’t think that’s necessarily something one plans on doing… or at least, not something one admits to unless they’re hoping to be featured on an episode of A&E’s Intervention. What if I say there were extenuating circumstances that tempted me to do it? Does that make me more or less of a problem drinker? But I digress…)

Other than what the scale says, the week went fairly well. I ended the week very tired — my poor body is quite obviously not used to exercising 2 hours a day for 5 days in a week. I’m already feeling stronger though, and that’s pretty cool.

Last week, I had promised a discussion of the reasons I stay fat (and I’m not talking the obvious eat-too-much/exercise-too-little, but rather emotional ones), but the idea is still baking in my mind. (Maybe it weighs 1.5 lbs…) I’m thinking about the times in my life where weight management has been a priority — and the times that it clearly hasn’t — and trying to identify some trends. I’m curious… do any of you have any thoughts on when weight control was more of a priority for you in your life, and why? I’d love to hear them. It will give me something else to think about other than this poor result whilst I’m crying in my V8.

Guess who’s back?

Back again?

Almost as good as Slim Shady, it’s the not-so-slim mctex with my second attempt at dropping this baby weight. I guess I’m being a little hard on myself when I say second attempt — since the beginning of my first attempt, I did manage to lose and keep off 10 pounds. But that probably represented the rest of my legitimate baby weight with pregnancy number two, and so now I’m stuck with these same 40 pounds of pudge I’ve been carrying since my first daughter’s birth in July of 2005. And at 10 lbs every six months, she’ll be in kindergarten by the time things are back to “normal”. That’s just not going to cut it.

And so it is that I’ve regrouped and am back to share with y’all. In the spirit of a new start, I’ve changed my column name from “MS Biggest Loser” to “MILF*-in-Training” — I think it has a more positive sound. I could start by identifying all of my excuses for getting sidetracked in my first effort — the never-ending house construction; the trips here, there and everywhere; the constant stream of “as soon as this is over”. Except it occurred to me that I have lost half of an entire year waiting for the next thing to be over, and have made little progress.

Which is how it came to pass that I actually decided to stop in and join our neighborhood gym early last week instead of once again passing by. I am very fortunate in that my “neighborhood gym” is nothing short of a family fitness mecca — yet another upside in moving to the ‘burbs. This place** is nothing short of amazing in their offerings for the whole family, and they are first rate in terms of both facility and staff. Granted, you pay for what you get, but it’s one of those places where you just feel better walking in.

In a strike of synchronicity, the very day that I joined, the gym was starting a 12-week Biggest Loser-ish type of program that I rolled right into (pardon the pun). The program is structured so that we work out doing cardio (treadmill) work for an hour three times a week (under the direction of a certified trainer); we also are required to keep food diaries which are reviewed weekly by the gym’s registered dietitian. There’s nothing magical nor mysterious about the program — it’s Weight Loss 101: expend more calories than you take in.

Except there is a science to the program that was even somewhat new to this dieting pro. The gym strongly recommends having two tests performed prior to beginning the program, which they claim allows participants to “work smarter, not harder.” 5…4…3…2…1… that’s about how long it took for me to get sucked right into having these tests completed, and the results were very interesting.

The first test calculated my anaerobic threshold, which is explained here. I knew that it was better to work out at a lower percentage of maximum heart rate if I wanted to burn fat calories, but I also knew that things like running — which puts me WAY up in terms of heart rate — burned more calories overall, and I figured more was better. In weight loss attempt number -1 — when I’d been training for a marathon prior to the conception of baby #2 — I’d started to get a clue that this might not be the case when I cleared the 15 mile training mark fat as ever. My anaerobic threshold test result confirmed part of the reason that weight loss attempt had not been a success: my anaerobic threshold is a heart rate of 149 bpm. Looking back on my heart rate data from training (courtesy of my running watch version 1.0), I can see that I was hanging out at a heart rate of about 165 bpm.

From the linked article above:

People who exercise vigorously and have minimal fat loss are exercising above their AT level.

I’m typing one-handed as I’m raising my other hand.

So the results of that test are allegedly going to be helpful in making sure my cardio work does what I want it to do: get me skinny. Granted, while building stamina and speed might help me in my never-ending quest to catch (read: tackle, grope) Matthew McConaughey running Austin’s Town Lake (sightings are high up on the list of urban legends retold wistfully by Austin’s mommy set), the blubber bouncing long after I stop actually trying to move is not going to score me any points. Besides, maybe the baby stroller he’ll be pushing will help me in the speed department…

The second test calculated my resting metabolic rate — or how many calories it is that I burn in a day doing absolutely nothing, which is how I spend far more days than I care to admit. Turns out, I burn 1660 calories doing nothing according to the test, which is far more than I would’ve thought. What does this mean? It means that eating anything less than 1660 calories per day will send my body into a type of shut down, where it will slow the rate of caloric burn because it thinks it’s starving. Yeah yeah yeah, I knew all of this… but 1660 calories? Are they sure??? Given my fatness, I would’ve estimated that number to be about… 50. And based on that number, they’ve got me eating 1800 calories a day — a number that seems staggeringly high to me***. I guess time will tell. Just to be sure, I bought running watch version 2.0, which measures not only things like heart rate, but monitors where I’m working out in relation to my anaerobic threshold and projects total calories burned. I need to make sure I’m burning these bad boys off.

So the team training has me doing cardio work three times per week, which I’m supplementing with another 3 cardio workouts on my own. Because my life mantra is “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” (which I share with you in case there was still ANY doubt as to why I’m fat), I also decided to hire a trainer to work out with me doing strength training an hour a day five days a week.

So that’s where we stand right now. Because I couldn’t work out for 24 hours before the tests, which were performed on two different days last week, my workout routine only started last Thursday… and at the end of week 1, this has resulted in a 2 pound loss (which is the weight depicted).

I will close this entry in the paraphrased words of one of my personal idols, Smokey from Friday… “I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got shit to do.” (Thanks for the child care, Mom!) I might as well take yet another attempt at this, and tell y’all about it. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment — knowing you are there will be just another thing that will keep me accountable to see this through this time.

Up next time: Why I stay fat.

*Note to my own parental-types: um, MILF stands for “Mother I’d like to… Follow”. It’s a catchy little acronym our generation is using to compliment women who look good after having children. Nice, isn’t it? But since you’re not really up to speed with the lingo, I’d advise you to keep this one out of your own vernacular. Oh, and for the love of all things holy, don’t google it, ok? Thanks.

***That number does seem high, but after a week of keeping a proper food diary, I will say that I’m evidently not as aware of the number of calories I eat as I thought I was. For those who haven’t kept a straight-up calorie log (not points, but calories) in a while that are trying to lose weight, humor me and try it again for a couple of days. The numbers really were surprising for me.