A Penny Day

A Penny Day is a day when you “splurge” from your healthy eating lifestyle.  It is best explained by using the pennies in a jar analogy.

The first jar has 365 pennies in it which represent the days of the year.  Now, make a list of every day in the year that you might stray from your healthy eating lifestyle.  Days like birthdays, weddings and holidays are some examples.  For each day you list, take 1 penny from the first jar and put it in the second jar.  Now look at jar 2.  In the 2^nd jar, you have 25 or so pennies.  The remaining 340 or so pennies are still in your first jar and represent the days you will be living a healthy eating lifestyle.  The 25 or so pennies in the 2^nd jar represent the time each year you know you are going to splurge and stray from your healthy eating lifestyle.  Using this example you can see that what you do on the 340 days of the year that you are following your healthy eating lifestyle closely is much more important that what happens on those 25 or so days that you splurged. 

The problem though is it is not always easy to get back to our healthy eating lifestyle once we had a Penny Day. 

Strategies for Success:

Give Yourself Permission--If the Penny Day is one meal or one day, plan to enjoy it. Agree with yourself that is it okay not to have a healthy eating day. 

Frame Your Splurge--Keep your indulgences to one meal or one day.  Make sure you keep your exercise program and eating structure healthy the day before and the day  after your celebration. This is called "framing" your splurge.

Have a Plan--Plan the details of your splurge and the days before and after so you can stay on track.   

The Splurge--Remember that your splurge isn't your last one ever.  The goal here is to have a great time and enjoy your company. Focus on those foods that you love, eat slowly, and give yourself permission to savor them.

Take Pride in Your Recovery--Now it’s time to get back on track. If you overate, don't beat yourself up about it. Your overall success depends on how quickly you can recover from these special days.  Remember the pennies in a jar analogy.

My near future goal is to figure out my penny days.  What are yours?

~Amy

Excuse The Look

First and foremost, excuse the look of my blog!  I'm tring to change the look of it just a bit and, as you can see, I'm having issues.  From what I understand the real problem is with Blogger and there being an issue with it working correctly to be able to change the look of your blog.  It looks like this has been going on for months, so who knows when I will have my blog looking pretty again.  So, please excuse the "mess" that you see currently!

Okay, on to the next subject.....life post VSG.  Life has been pretty decent in my VSG world although October was a CRAZY month weight wise.  I ended up only being down 4 pounds from where I started in the beginning of October.  In the real world (non-VSG world), this loss is okay at best.  In the VSG world, 4 pounds in a month totally sucks!  I have to take some, okay all :-) of the responsibility for it though.  I haven't been watching my diet.  That is, until the last week of October where I lost all of those 4 pounds.  Terrible, I know, but it is what it is and I've moved passed it.  Now, I'm just trying to move forward and focus on what is now and what is in front of me.  It's been "awful" at work from a trying to lose weight perspective with all the Halloween candy, cookies and other goodies around here.  I've eaten a bit of it and consider eating the small amount I have a moderate success.  Hey, considering what I was eating on Halloween last year and for many years before that I should probably call it a HUGE success.  But, for now, I will call it a moderate success.  It wasn't perfection and I think I can only declare a HUGE success had I stayed out of the junk all together.  Besides, the major part of life post VSG is learning to live with food....all kinds of food.  I'm not a big supporter of those, what I call "Food Natzi's" that I see a lot of people have turned into post VSG.  I want to learn to live a healthy lifestyle at a normal weight and I don't want to always live with the diet mentality.  Denying myself all the "bad food" just perpetuates that diet mentality and I'll be darned if I will live like that for the rest of my life.  So, as I move forward in my journey, I am learning all kinds of things.  One of those things is how to balance my eating.  In other words, how to eat healthy and how to include some of the "junk" like a normal sized person.  I still struggle sometimes, but today I am miles away from where I was on June 4, 2012.

~Amy

The Ups and Downs of the Scale

As I've said before, I weigh everyday.  It is the first thing I do every morning after I wake up and pee.  However, I only record my weight once a week.  On September 3rd, I was 1.8 pounds away from the 60 pound mark.  I was sure I'd hit it that week.  Boy was I wrong.  That following Monday, September 10th, I was 2.8 away from the 60 pound mark.  I had gained weight over the prior week and my motivation was really lacking.  Another week passed and now it was Monday, September 17th and now I was 3.4 away from that, what seemed to be elusive, 60 pound loss.  Around this time, the information at my support group really sank in and my motivation seemed to start improving at this point.  When I weighed in on Saturday following that September 17th weigh in, I had now reached my 60 pound weight loss and today when I weighed in I'm showing a total loss of 65 pounds!  I'm worried I will start wavering again in my losses since I lost 5 pounds in 4 days.  However, I'm hoping not.  I guess time will tell.

~Amy