New bling, day 3 of the EC, and MEXICAN food!

First and foremost, I'd like to direct your attention to that shiny new bling on my sidebar. Oh, I'm sorry... it already blinded you? My bad. :)

So I got on the scale this morning with more than a little trepidation, but lo and behold, I was rewarded with an all-time low to help me get May off to a good start. I'm down 2.2 pounds from last Saturday and a total of... 60.1. So yeah, I barely squeaked in there, but I've been waiting so long for that badge (32 days, to be exact) that I'm claiming it as soon as possible.

To backtrack a bit... things have been going well. :) I started off May on Thursday with a perfect day (2 exercise stickers and an on-plan eating sticker). Friday I succumbed to a little snacking temptation, but still earned my minimum cardio sticker. And today felt great. I woke up early and went for my run on the actual race course (more on that later). It was 85 degrees, so I worked up quite a sweat, and I had to walk 20 minutes to the start and 20 minutes from the finish, so I was pretty worn out by the time I got home. But it felt great. I'm feeling really good about the Exercise Challenge (EC), and watching those total minutes increase on my spreadsheet.

When I got home, M and I decided to try making burritos. We'd been planning on saving it for after the 5k, but today seemed as good a day as any. She had bought a can of refried beans in Seoul, and my tortillas were going out-of-date, so we bought some lettuce, onion, and cheese and gave it a try. We were worried it wouldn't be delicious, what with the tortillas tasting a little funny and the lack of what I'd previously considered Mexican meal staples (meat and salsa), but they actually ended up being really delicious.

I spent most of the day around the house, but this evening around 7:30 I headed over to the gym. I hadn't done a full weight training workout for two weeks, thanks to being sick and my pulled back muscle, so I was hoping to really work hard tonight, and I definitely did. My back wasn't bothering me at all, so I kicked my own butt, and thanks to the hot weather, I sweated a lot. I did my first special ab workout for the EC, and the planks especially were killer, so hopefully I'll see some serious results at the end of the month. I measured myself today for that purpose. I always have a hard time with doing measurements, because I have a hard time remembering (or indicating in my notes) where I measured, and then I don't know exactly what to do... Should I try to be as natural as possible? Pull my abs in? So today I just did the smallest part of my waist and the biggest part, as I figure that'll be the easiest to replicate at the end of the month.

Smallest: 86.5 cm

Largest: 100.5 cm

I really wish I'd measured myself when I started, but this is the first time I've done it and recorded it, so hopefully I'll see some substantial changes on May 31.

Lynne asked me a question on my last post which I'm going to go ahead and answer here. :) I've written about it before, but it just helped me so much that I want to do it again. One thing that my Complete Idiot's Guide to Weight Loss suggested was to come up with a mantra for yourself. They encourage you to choose one for yourself, but the idea behind it is affirming that you are already at your goal weight. Not affirming that you can do it, but affirming that you already have. I pretty much just appropriated their sample: "I, Briy, am now a healthy and thin person. I wear a size 8, and I do what healthy and thin people do."

I am a healthy and (relatively) thin(ner) person now, that much is true. I'm not quite yet a size 8, but truly, after thinking this everyday for so long, I sometimes forget that. And the last part, as I've said before, is my favorite. It really helps me to think this way--to think of myself as one of those healthy and thin people I always envied before, and to remind myself to act like them. This alone has helped fight off a lot of cravings, when I say to myself: "Would a healthy and thin person do this? Would someone with a healthy relationship with food do that?" Obviously it doesn't stop me all the time, but it's a big help. So yeah, I just write my mantra in a notebook 8 times every morning. It doesn't take long, but it reminds me, every morning, why I'm doing this. And tomorrow will be day 60. It's nice to be able to flip back through it and see that I did something everyday for the past two months, especially as there are very few other things I can honestly say I've stuck to for that long.

I'm not sure, but I really feel like this has played a BIG part in my recent success. I guess, from a strictly numbers standpoint, that must be true. I've lost 12.7 pounds in 2 months (since March 1), and it took me a full year before that to lose 48. More than anything, I think it just keeps me FOCUSED, every single day, which inevitably helps breed good results on the scale. As part of my goals for May, I'm adding a step. From now on, every day, I'm also going to write down 3 victories from the previous day. They're not necessarily weight loss related, and often they're really small, but that doesn't matter. It's helped me, so far, just to focus on the positive for 5 minutes a day, when more often than not I find myself harping on what I did wrong instead. So yeah, that's my mantras book, in a nutshell. I hope you find it helpful, Lynne! :)

And now, a brief synopsis of today's run:

Today was #2 out of my last 8 runs before the big RACE day, and my plan was to run on what I believed to be the actual course of the 5k, in order to get an idea of how much I need to speed up my pace in order to finish the whole thing in my goal of 33 minutes. That's not quite how it worked out though. I set my alarm to go off after 32 minutes and started running. It was hot, and I was tired by the halfway point, but I just kept on trucking. As I started to approach the "finish line," I was still waiting for the alarm to go off. I even started to wonder if I'd missed it somehow. When I got back to my starting point and looked down at my iPod, however, I was shocked to see that I'd only been running for about 26 minutes. This does not, unfortunately, mean that I'm running sub-9 minute miles, I'm sure. :) It means that I must not be running the entire race route, which is not a huge surprise, as I'm guesstimating where exactly I should be starting and finishing. Either way I was happy with the run, but it means I'll have to find another way to figure out what speed I'm running at and work on adjusting my pace. There's a track at the local university which I've previously shied away from, because there's often students on it, or playing soccer on the field inside of it. But next Saturday I figure I'll get up early and do my run there, which should, theoretically, be way more precise than today's effort. We'll see how that goes!

Hope you're having a wonderful weekend! :)