Almond Avoidance

Have you seen these?

If you do see them and you love coffee and almonds and are are trying to lose weight, keep walking. I saw them in the grocery store the other day and totally rationalized them to myself. Almonds! Healthy! I'm a good liar.

Honestly though, they're not bad nutritionally speaking. For a serving of 24 almonds the stats are: 160 Calories, 9 g Protein, and 3 g Sugar. They can easily be worked into a healthy diet. I just have a problem exercising self-control with things that taste this good.

This is not easy

I don't know when I became so dependent on food, but yeah. Okay, I do know. It was when I was caring for my dying husband and nobody understood what I was going through. Nobody understood what I was feeling. I could talk to people, but it was impossible for them to comprehend the magnitude of what I was dealing with.

I think my feelings and emotions about the situation scared the hell out of me, so I looked for a way to avoid feeling them. Enter: food. I don't have this figured out by any means, but I think I've identified a big part of the problem. Now I just have to figure out how to deal with it. Easy, right? Sure. No problem.

I didn't walk today. All of my physical activity included gardening/weeding, digging a new patch for lettuce, and cleaning the garage. Can we talk about the garage for a minute? My husband, sweetheart that he was, was a borderline hoarder. I managed to keep him and his "treasures" confined to the garage, happily parking my car outside in the -10° winters, because I loved him and I wanted him to have the things he loved around him. But now? He's gone and I'm left with a garage that looks like a horror movie. Here is a picture. Don't judge me.

Okay? I mean the empty boxes in the foreground were hauled to the recycling station but come on. It's still a jungle in there. And that is AFTER a day of cleaning and sorting and hauling stuff out.

Learning to ignore the garage (I pretended it didn't exist) and confine my OCD cleaning and organizing to the house was one of the most difficult compromises I made in our relationship. I'm not even kidding. I practically needed therapy. But by the end of the summer that garage will be cleaned and organized and I will post a picture of my triumph.

So I already said no formal exercise. Calories came in at 1496. 

I finally did hop on the scale and weighed 204. That is the most I have ever weighed in my life, even counting three full term pregnancies. I'm not really upset about it. I mean, I don't like it but I feel like I gained this weight as a form of self-care because I was too grief-stricken and distraught to manage to care for myself in another way. There were literally days that my greatest accomplishment was NOT staying in bed all day crying, so I'm not going to beat myself up for doing the best I could at the lowest point of my life. It's okay.

Losing It

Not my mind, that's long gone. This weight. This widow weight. I'm barely into my 40s and here I am, widowed with 50 pounds to lose. The weight represents grief. I know that already. When you're forced to watch your husband, the love of your life, the only man you've ever loved, and your partner in crime since high school wither and die it takes a toll. Obviously.

Suddenly nothing matters. The most difficult thing you can manage some days is getting yourself out of bed and going through the motions of life. Weight and size and eating healthy sound like a ridiculous triviality. I mean, we're all going to die anyway, so who cares if I eat crap for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? That's how the weight gain happens. Happened.

Today marks eleven months since he left me. Correction. Today marks eleven months since he was stolen from me. The fog is starting to lift and I am not happy with what I see in the mirror. None of my clothes fit. I haven't exercised in two years. TWO YEARS. I used to exercise every day, but that seems like a different lifetime now.

I'm tracking my calories with LoseIt and exercising with daily walks with my kids and TurboFire. I like Chalene and I used to love TurboJam so I thought I'd give TurboFire a go. I decided to start with a short workout so I chose the Low HIIT 20 Class. Um, yeah. I made it halfway through and thought I might die. But hey, halfway is halfway, especially after two years without any kind of exercise.

There is a schedule included with TurboFire, but I think I'm going to just stick with the Low HIIT 20 Class until I can get through the whole thing and then I'll think about following the schedule. One day at a time.

My calories for the day, after subtracting the 200 calories I burned, totaled 1240.