PadawanOfHappiness

It is crazy I have never been quite so introspective as I have been since I started my weight loss journey.  In some ways weight loss is pure science, we know what calories are and what each food is in terms of calories, how much exercise burn in terms of calories, and we know which foods are better for us than others and even some that are really bad for us. That part is pretty straight forward and very much based in science. The art part comes in because we are human and as individuals and as such we are not going to react the same what to everything.  If you are doing your own journey you probably notice that there are some foods that seem to stick with you no matter what, and some it seems you can eat a ton of and that doesn't affect you (even if the reality is different than your perception).  And let's take into account that people can have food allergies, and some people can eat onions and they don't bother them and others cannot eat them without feeling mi...

So there is a phrase out there... The zeal of the convert is a phrase describing the typically fierce devotion of someone whose belief system has changed because of personal experience or argument, especially as compared to someone who has held their beliefs since childhood. In addition to some empirical support of the phenomenon, the occasionally excessive fervency of converts has long been proverbial ~ RationalWiki I was riding my bike the other day and I was thinking of some people that have expressed their frustration about their weight and health, and I was just bursting with then need to evangelize to them about the system that is working for me because I was high on this achievement. But I realized that I needed to contain myself, and live my life as an example. I needed to be open to questions and offering suggestion but only when and if they are asked for because if I offered with my zeal even though my intentions are good they will likely fall on deaf ears....

I need to set some new short and medium term goals to focus on while I work to my big goal, which I have yet to mention.  I don't know if I want to put it out there or not because it is a scary to me number and honestly it is embarrassing even though I know I am not the only one in my situation.  And as I think about this I have certainly dropped breadcrumbs about what I want to lose and how much so lets just put the scary out there so it is not so scary. From my heaviest which as I mentioned before was a few years ago, I would like to lose 85 pounds. So if I look at the amount I lost prior to this fresh start and combine it with what I have lost in the past 30ish days I have lost 26 of the 85.  Do you know what that means?🎉 🥳  It means that I am just over ONE QUARTER of the way to my goal!!!!!  Because 85/4=21.25 and I am at 26!!  🎉 🥳 Medium Term Goal (12-13 weeks from now (roughly Dec 15)) Lose another quarter of my goal which would put me at ...

My first success, is not solely related to my most recent weight loss and healthier life journey but it has lingered in the back of my mind.  It was not too long ago that I hit my highest weight, and so I did start to exercise more and I lost some weight it was in the double digits but then I started to slack and hovered around the same weight for well over a year.  So if I look at how much progress I have made since I was at that heaviest point I have lost roughly 26 pounds.  That is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Secondly, since I started this journey about 30 days ago I have lost roughly 7.6 pounds, again that is a healthy and respectable amount.  During this time I have dropped down a BMI class. I have various feelings about BMI and I know that there are flaws with it but this was a big mental thing for me, my BMI was going down!  If you are interested in the different categories of BMI  you can check out the table at the NIH and the NIH also has a...

Light Bulb Moment! I was pondering something this morning after I had shared a small success with Mr.Padawan, specifically that I don't think I celebrate the little successes as much as I should.  I have this huge goal that I want to reach and I have hit a few mini goals or successes without realizing that they were there, but each time I noticed them it was a mental boost, I felt better, happier and more energized to continue.   The phrase that came to mind was: A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. ~Anthony Trollope via Outer Order, Inner Calm I kept turning that phrase in my head thinking of the mini successes I have had and realized that I could paraphrase that into: Small successess, achieved with some regularity, will get you to the larger success, while focus solely on the larger success is likely to get you nowhere. In my previous attempts at weight loss, I know that I have focused on the larger picture an...

My journey on this healthier lifestyle change really comes down to habits, bad habits I want to break and good habits I want to foster or make.  So I started using the Noom app (previous posts talk about this) but now 25+ days plus into this I have seen some victories. This is an example of what inspires me to keep going. This dress, I had in my closet for 10+ years, in fact, my husband has never seen me wear it EVER.  I put it on and he said: "hey did you buy a new dress that looks nice."  That felt so good.  So I took the picture and wrote the words and now that is my phone lock screen so I see it often and remind myself why I am working so hard to make these changes. Seeing this and wearing this dress made me realize I achieved this goal by changing my habits.  On some level, I knew this but I didn't really internalize it, yet I took the picture as inspiration to keep doing what I was doing. Once I internalized this I knew I had to lean on my guru, G...

I like data, but just looking at it in plain form is relatively meaningless for me, for example, my Noom app lists my data in my history but only graphs my weigh-ins and I thought that was cool.  But alas I am not able to internalize the data like I thought I was.  For example, I thought my calorie intake was fairly consistent over the past 25 days but the graph shows otherwise. I also thought my exercise was consistent, but the graph shows otherwise. I thought my weight loss was consistent and I am in the ballpark, it is not as consistent as I thought but not as erratic either. In previous weight loss experiments I logged and graphed, that way I had the data but I could more easily see trends, I did this with a simple spreadsheet and only logged my exercise and weight.  This helped because I was also able to log in and see trends to help me fight mental demons.  Things like hey I "gain weight" during my period, nope not really because it disappears pretty qui...

I have trouble re-reading books even when I want to re-read them. I just love to read so, of course, I have some books that I find worth re-reading but most of them I enjoy them and move on they served their purpose of entertaining me or giving me something to think about and then I move on.  It is fleeting but good. However, there are books that I want to re-read because they really helped me with something that was going on in my life and I still hold them dear to me.  And I want to re-read them as part of a tune-up if you will of my life.  However, that has been a problem for me and I wanted to solve it because it was actually making me unhappy that I didn't get around to reading them. As with anything you want to do you need to make time to do it, time won't just magically appear.  This meant I had to find something to motivate me to get it done.  I believe I have stumbled onto something that is working for me, book clubs.  I noticed on my town's...

What I liked or thought was good So I gave MyFitnessPal a try and in some ways, it was good and possibly better than Noom.  For their free version, it broke down the nutrient content which may be a bonus for some but not for me, at least not yet. I did like that they had a web interface that  I could use in addition to the app.  I also liked that I could import a recipe from a URL or type it in and then it would spit out the calories for you. What I didn't like MyFitnessPal So while I liked that I could import the recipes it was not great when I wanted to change things within the recipe to adjust the calorie count.  For example, I wanted to specify that I was using 93% lean ground beef, or I added more veggies to the recipe.  It was clumsy and difficult to work with. The other thing I did not like was when logging my food I could change the measurement of how I logged the food so I could do things like mL, or serving size but for me what works be...