PadawanOfHappiness

 First of all DO NOT PANIC!  Nothing good ever comes from panicking. Second, take a deep breath and then say a prayer, then count your blessings.  People that lean into their faith are happier.  Here and here Third, focus on your small circle what is going on there and focus on that.  So the stock market is crashing you really can't do a how heck of a lot about that other than don't panic.  So focus on what you have been doing to care for yourself and your family, use this time to identify an area or two to be frugal.  Being wise with your money is always a good thing, and this is a way to make lemonade. Fourth, largely ignore the news especially that of overseas tragedies.  Humanity sucks, but it is also beautiful.  We were not designed to have all of this information especially horrific information coming at us 24/7/365.  There is absolutely nothing I can do about some far off place to make it better, if I focus on those areas I feel ...

I have continued to walk each day, my youngest challenged me to do 21 minutes rather than 20 and I took him on that challenge. I also need to do more exercise to lose more weight I am stagnating where I am.  I also need to watch my portions, which is a HUGE problem as well because I really like food, and darn me for being such a good cook!  Just kidding...sort of. :) As humans it is easy for us to go back to what we know even if that is no longer working.  That is the predicament I find myself in right now.  I know that working out in the morning with a cardio/strength video, plus walking, plus portion control worked really well and I 'easily' lost about 20-25 lbs.  Yeah it wasn't really easy but I made rapid and sustainable progress. Well I fell off the wagon a bit in the sense that I didn't continue to lose, and I mostly have stagnated as I mentioned before and I have fluctuated+/- 7ish pounds.  So in one sense that is a victory because that fluctuation i...

Thank goodness the end of the year is drawing near, like many I am really looking forward to it with great enthusiasm that is trying to mask my apprehension of expecting more of the same if not worse. I am looking forward to what I hope are positive changes, and believe it or not things that I am looking to maintain into the new year.  2020 while overall, has been pretty darn craptastic, there were some really good things that I can focus on. It was often reported in the news and social media about a huge weight gain of many, and knock on wood I didn't have a huge weight gain but a bit.  I am re-invigorated by the treadmill that I got for my birthday to reverse the slide and actually pick up on my weight loss journey.  For the most part I mainly stagnated, toward the end the jeans were getting a bit tight so I made some tweaks. My 2 cents for things that have helped me or have inspired me to continue on my health journey (which for me does include losing weight): COVID - ...

  Over the past summer I kept saying I would get back into my exercise routine because I had been slacking.  Sure I had kept up with my 20 minute walks but that was it, however for weigh loss I need to do more:  I need to do more exercise and more watching what I eat. The thing is I wasn't ready to get there, and therefore I kept putting it off.  I had not hit my metaphorical bottom, until now. I finally stepped on the scale after putting my jeans on and noticing that the legs for my jeans were tighter than I expected them to be.  I had regressed.  That is not a huge deal it was only a few pounds but it was enough for me to say it was time to get my act together again. I went back to things that worked for me in the past to see if they would work again. It has been two days and yes so far it seems to be working.  I have gotten up and exercised before breakfast, I am starting slow only 20-ish minutes but I have to start somewhere. I have also made sure ...

Image by Blue Shutters Web Design. I have been toying a lot with Gretchen Rubin's Secrets of Adulthood , specifically this one. Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy And one morning Mr. Padawan and I were talking about things that we should do because they make us feel better in the long term but really hate doing them, and it hit me that secret of adulthood applies here. So I know that I feel better when I exercise, and I don't feel better in the moment, in fact I feel pretty miserable.  But when I think about how I feel over a period of time I feel better, less stressed, less tired, happier, less likely to be snappy with my little Padawans or Mr. Padawan, I have more patient. I have tried a bunch of different exercises and I haven't found anything I love, but I have found things that I can tolerate.  But because I don't love exercise it is very easy for me to put it off (aka forget to do it) and just say oh I'll do it tomorrow.  And sure I feel good in ...

Last Friday was a week in sequester and I started to lose it and needed to take some serious extra time to be alone.  I even went as far as watching three shows on demand that I know Mr.Padawan does not like and leaves the room when I watch them just so I could be alone, crazy right? Things were getting better on Saturday and I did get a bit of extra time alone that day too and things seemed to be settling down nicely, sure there were a few bumps along the road but nothing major.  And then before I knew it, Friday is here and I am feeling the pressure again.   My mind is going a million miles a minute and I am having difficulty concentrating on anything.  My kids, seriously are doing fantastic given the circumstances and their specific challenges, but are driving me batty and every last little thing is getting on my nerves.  I keep reminding myself of how good they are doing and that my perception is off, which is of itself a weird feeling, I know one th...

I am still working on getting back into the groove of weighing food, and counting calories, it is less successful than I had hoped it would be.  Part of the issue is that for dinners I love casseroles and one-dish meals, and those are really hard to count calories.  In my previous posts, I think I had mentioned something similar because NOOM doesn't have a place to input recipes and have it spit out portion and calories, and while MyFitnessPal does I find the interface clunky and therefore I don't use it.  To combat that a bit I have focused on this month's menu to not feature casseroles as much even the ones that I have altered to make a bit more on the healthy side.  I realized today as I was in the middle of my cardio work out that even though I had the intention of doing better in January, in reality, I was just in what Jillian Michaels calls 'showed up mode'.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing because some is better than none, but since I want to see pr...

Ok so the good news is that I don't have a full fledged mask with my CPAP machine, it is just this uber sexy nose pillow and the hose sits at the top of my head so it doesn't get in the way too much.  And it is really pretty quiet which is good. It does feel kind of weird as I get used to it and for the most part I don't feel like I am driving down the highway with my head out the window which is good.  Last night was a bad night, something wasn't quite right and there was a hissing sound like there was an airleak somewhere and I couldn't find it.  It couldn't have been that bad since my app gave me a good score but I did see that last night's "leak' value was higher than any other night.  Normally I am between 1-3, last night I was at 8.  Not sure what is up with that. I have noticed that for the most part I have been waking up around 5 AM fairly well rested and ready to go, but I just don't want to leave my bed because I LOVE my bed and...

In my previous post, I was frustrated by my up down up down cycle and then, of course, gaining a ton (reminder a ton is all relative) of weight.  At the end of the post, I figured out what caused the weight gain and I felt better because I had a reason why I gained it; I had drastically undercounted my calories.  I wasn't happy it happened but as long as I could explain it I could deal with it. Well despite my issues earlier in the week yesterday I hit the target I was aiming for.  I lost 5.2 lbs in 23 days which is an average of 1.58 lbs a week, again a totally respectable number and within the 'suggested' rate of losing 1 to 2 lbs a week.  Go me!  So why isn't it enough to keep me going? The numbers on the side in blue are to represent the increments not actual weight! :) I am not feeling all that great, my face was killing me, sinus issues are not fun.  And we had a wind advisory last night with insane winds.  I DO NOT LIKE THE WIND, especi...

So this week was really tough for me, I kept bouncing around the 1-1.5 lbs.  Up....down....up....up....down...up...same...same....down.  GRRRR! So each day has been a struggle to stay focused and keep working the system but I have done that with the help of my awesome helper, Mr. Padawan.  Honestly he really helps me reset my mind, work through the difficulties, and remind me of my past victories, and helps me see the long term goal. My biggest issue was looking at my weight this morning, I was so frustrated and I thought WTF!?  I was in my calorie budget and I worked out what happened, why?  This is where I kept reminding myself that the body is a weird and mysterious place. I had a potato soup yesterday for diner and I used Noom's calories for the soup and I realized today that their calorie count is very off from the count I got by using Happy Forks.  Once I adjusted yesterday's calories using the numbers from Happy Forks it became crystal clear w...

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 ...

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...

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...

Why did I try Noom? I need to lose weight, I know this, my doctor knows this and quite frankly I am tired of being tired and not feeling good.  They (Noom) are a sponsor of a podcast and so I figured I would give it a try.  My doctor had really strongly suggested I count calories which I have been so against for a long time and in fact it took me about 2.5 weeks before I could bring myself to do it. Noom and my doctor gave me the same calorie intake amount to shoot for so I was pretty happy with that, and it seemed fairly easy to use. What I liked or mostly liked The psych tips, and information about motivations and triggers and how to help counteract them.  Overall they did remind us that we will fall off the wagon and that is ok, just get back on, we are human.  That is very reassuring and something that I know in my head but it is so hard to embrace, I need to see that often. The daily weigh-in, this is a good and bad thing, it certainly helps keep me ...

One of the frustrating things about committing to an exercise program is the fact that I feel I never lose weight, which has always been my goal. I never liked exercise and never got the endorphin high that many do, so if I am not losing weight I become discouraged easily. So what was I getting out of exercise if I wasn't losing weight, which was my purpose?  As you can see with that line of thought it was very easy to stop the exercise program.  However, even as I stopped and started I knew logically that I needed to continue it was important for me to do this, so I needed to come up with a new motivation. I sat and thought about some truths and accept my reality. I am never going to have those endorphins I have to accept that and I need to stop working for that. I know that when I exercise consistently my overall mood and happiness is elevated over the long term this is not a short term play for me. I know that for my emotional health, how I deal with stress from ...