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All my life road trips meant food.  Before we even left town we were shopping for salty snacks and sweet candy goodness for the road.  Hungry or not, road tripping meant stuffing my face with whatever I wanted and loving every minute of it.  Once we were at our destination it was all about where we could find the yummiest, most bad for us food around us and have it delivered.

I guess it must have been that way ever since I was young.  My family and I used to make the long trek from Maine to West Virginia in the old station wagon every year to see my dad’s family.  I don’t remember much of it other than it being riddled stops at fast food places to keep us kids quiet on the road.

Ever since I have been dieting, road trips have also meant a free pass on eating.  No matter what diet I was following, I looked forward to each trip so I could gorge on food with the excuse that finding food on my diet was “Soooo hard!”

Today we are taking a vacation to Santa Cruz.  It is not all that far from my house but it would normally still be an excuse for eating my weight in pizza.  It was last year when we came out here. 

Last night, I carefully portioned out healthy snacks for the road which we didn’t even touch because…we weren’t hungry.  Interesting concept huh?  I also packed some bagel thins and portioned out cereal for the continental breakfasts in the mornings.  They will have toasters and milk so we will be set for the morning.

So far we set out to find a Subway but the closest we found was a different kind of sub shop where my husband and I split a turkey sub with no dressing and a diet soda.  Totally delicious and satisfying.

Tonight we will get some Mexican food(hey, it’s cinco de mayo!) but I will get a vegetarian burrito w/ guac and sour cream on the side and then transfer it all into a high fiber tortilla that I also packed ahead of time.

It may not seem like much, but it is a huge step for me and I’m pretty proud of myself.

Okay, time to hit the pool for some exercise!

Sunday began with having breakfast with my in laws. We chose the same restaurant where I had the dreaded French toast last time. I managed to make good choices this time. I stuck with an egg beater and fresh veggie scramble with turkey sausage links so I was pretty proud of myself.
Once breakfast was done I went grocery shopping and I bought a small bag of jelly belly cold stone ice cream jelly beans. I thought that would be a nice little treat for me when I wanted a little something sweet at work.
When I got home Rob and I opened them to sample the flavors and they were yummy. As I was sampling my fifth jelly bean there was a well known crunch in my mouth. It is the crunch I feel in a lot of my nightmares.
You see, as a result of my two years of bulimia, I had spent most of my adult life with horrible teeth.  Add to the bulimia, an intense fear of the dentist and you have a mouthful of rotting teeth and no end in sight.  Thankfully, after moving out to California I discovered a dentist that specialized in sedation dentistry.  You just sleep all day while they take care of your mouth.  Twenty thousand dollars later I have a mouthful of crowns but I’m no longer in pain.
Due to my history with bad teeth I often have reoccurring dreams of my teeth falling out of my head. When I have these nightmares I shake my head repeatedly in my sleep to wake myself up because I can usually make the connection that it is a dream while still in the dream.
Yesterday, as I chewed on a strawberry jelly bean I felt myself crunching on a crown. I shook my head a couple of times but no luck, I wasn’t dreaming.  I spit out the crown only to find that most of the tooth had come with it.  This wasn’t just a crown coming unglued.  I knew I was in for it.

Since my dentist loves me(who wouldn’t with the kinda cash I drop in their office??) they got me in this afternoon and it was just as I suspected.  This would not me any easy task.

I have three options.  One of which isn’t even really an option because it is far too expensive and time consuming.  Of course that is the “best” option out of my three but I just can’t afford the time off work or the financial aspect of pulling the tooth and replacing it with an implant.  My second option is a bridge which is the second most expensive option so that leaves us with getting another crown on it.  If only it were that easy.

In order to put another crown on this existing tooth they basically have to dig way down deep into my gum.  The tooth broke off in such a way that if they just put a build up on it, it would just fall off.  They need to build up on the actual tooth tissue and that tissue is pretty far up into my head right now.  This is the option I have to go for.

They do not recommend just plain extraction.  I wish they did because that would only run us three hundred bucks and one visit.  They say that we don’t want the other teeth to start growing weird because of the extraction and I actually know what they are talking about.  Years ago I had to have a tooth pulled after a really bad root canal.  Thankfully the tooth was my furthest back molar but the tooth above it has managed to grow itself sideways in the years since.

Okay, so here is the reason that I am posting this story on my Weight blog instead of my regular blog, and it is the thing that is pissing me off the most about this tooth situation.

It’s totally effing with my couch to five K training.  I was due to start week for today but since I had to go to the dentist I couldn’t take my lunch which is when I do my running.  Tomorrow and Wednesday I have friends coming for lunch so I can’t do it those days either.

I worked myself up into a tizzy yesterday about this and finally today I realized that my lunch break is not the only time of the day I can run.  Sure, it is the most convenient but if I am going to let a little think like this stop me than I wasn’t very dedicated in the first place right?  So tomorrow morning I am hauling my butt out of bed and driving to the park down the street(I’d walk but it’s not the safest area for pedestrians) and doing my training.  Why not?  All it means is going to bed a little earlier tonight which will do me some good anyway.

So screw you tooth!  You are not bringing me down! 

Today at work we had a baby shower for my good friend Michaelle.  From past experience I knew this would be an occasion to have cake and bread and lots of bad foods.  Not to worry friends, I had a plan!

Instead of having this:

I had this:

I’m pretty pleased with myself.

I will never say that low carb dieting doesn’t work. It worked for me for a very long time. The problem that I had with it was that if I didn’t have a lot of variation, I would cheat. The problem with variation on a low carb diet, is that it usually involves a lot of cooking and preparation.

Let’s face it, I’m lazy. That’s not a secret. For a while I had a good run where I would cook all weekend and freeze stuff up for meals on the go. That didn’t last that long. I found myself cheating repeatedly. Maybe not a full blown cheat meal, but a little of this here and a little of this there, with a lowcarb diet that is a recipe for disaster. It all added up to me not losing any more weight.

Then there was the phase where I did really good on the weekdays only to blow it all on the weekends. The vicious cycle of using the weekdays to lose all the weight I gained on the weekend was not only counterproductive but extremely frustrating!

Since I started Weight Watchers I did have one cheat weekend where I ate out of control. However in learning the program, I have realized that with portion control I can actually have some of the foods I like as long as I don’t stuff myself silly as I wrote about here.

I’ve also started training to run a five K in May. I’m using a very useful app on my phone called C25K(couch to five K) which starts you out week by week running a little at a time, gradually increasing your endurance. I do that three times a week on my lunch breaks and then on my off days, if my knees don’t hurt too much I will walk around the loop at lunch.

What I have noticed since I added the exercise and actually stopped cheating on my diet is that my shape changed. I know it is impossible but it feels like it changed overnight. Of course I usually wear the same clothes week in and week out for work and they always look the same to me, but my husband started making comments that first my butt was slimming down and then my belly.

This weekend it was raining and I decided to cheer myself up I would get my summer and spring clothes out of storage in hopes of better weather. I had forgotten that most of the clothes I had stored had been banished there since they were starting to get too tight or had been too tight to begin with.

For the heck of it I started trying them on and was thrilled at how they fit.

Yesterday I wore a dress to work that I had only worn once prior to a friends wedding and had to be shoehorned into a pair of spanx before the thing would fit. No spanx yesterday!!

I’m also fitting into clothing that I was wearing when I was thirty pounds lighter than I currently am…but when I never exercised. Wow, does it really make that much of a difference??

It just seems odd to me that I am just noticing all these changes in my body all of a sudden, but I am in no way, shape or form, complaining.

My husband plays guitar.

I mention this because it is significant to today’s story, I don’t just randomly blurt out facts…well too often anyway.

Once a month or so he takes off from work on Friday nights and drives down to Castroville to “jam” with his buddies.  It used to be every Friday but he’s starting to lose interest so now he only goes when he really wants to.

I use this night to my advantage an have some much needed me time.  This usually involves chick flicks, toe nail painting, and maybe a glass or two of wine.  What it ALWAYS involved was take out from the Thai place in the village.

There is one dish there I love and I don’t think it is especially bad for you other than the oil they use to stir fry it in.  It’s just flat noodles, veggies and chicken, but the portion size is GIANT.  I never realized that until this last Friday.  I always ate the whole thing throughout the course of the night and never thought a thing of it.

This time when I got it home I took my handy measuring cup and portioned it out into one cup portions, of which there were three and a half.  That means I was basically eating three meals in one sitting right before bed.  That’s kinda scary.

Anyway, my point is that I ate my one cup portion and felt perfectly satisfied.  I counted it within my points to the best of my ability and was able to enjoy it’s super yummyness for two separate meals and still have some leftover in the fridge.  I’m quite proud of myself.

In other news I had a dream that I went to work on Monday and forgot my running shoes.  I was pissed.  I guess that means I’m starting to actually enjoy it??  Yikes.

I weighed in this morning on my official weigh in day and I am only down 1/2 a pound. Of course a half a pound is still a loss and I am quite proud of it but my lesson has been learned. No more cheat weekends. If I hadn’t cheated I would have lost more. I know this because I peeked at the scale mid week and found that I had gained two pounds from my little one and a half day binge. Oh well. You live you learn right?

It’s still a loss and I’m happy about that.

So I am changing the way that I eat and I am changing my mobility as far as starting to exercise, but there is one more behavior I really need to modify.

As far back as I can remember when I start a new diet, I also begin a slightly obsessive habit to go along with it.

I sit down with a calculator and a calendar and I note what weight I will be every weigh in if I lose 2 pounds a week. I do this until the calendar is fully marked with weekly weights, finally ending in my goal weight. I tell myself it is to inspire myself and keep me motivated and in a way that is true. I get truly excited thinking about what size I will be by what date and how thin I will look for an event coming up in the not so near future.

On the other hand it really kind of destroys my self esteem when I don’t meet that two pound goal and see it staring back at me when I open my calendar.

I am fully aware that this is an obsessive compulsive behavior. I accept that and realize that there are far worse things I could be OCD about.

This time around I haven’t written them in the calendar. It’s a step in the right direction. I just wish the numbers weren’t still emblazoned on my brain.

Starting tomorrow I am going to be pursuing a different kind of diet.  I’m still trying to keep it lower carbs, at least as far as the “bad carbs” go but I’m going to start adding whole grains and fruits in.  A little more portion control maybe.  Kind of like a lower carb weight watchers almost.

The reason for this is that I find myself cheating a lot more often lately and I think I need a break.  My plan is to eat higher carb foods in the morning and dwindle them off the rest of the day.  The other reason for this is that I am also planning on starting to train on Monday to run a five K in May.  You read that correctly, I said RUN not WALK.  It’s something I just really want to prove to myself that I can do and since my friend Paula has committed to train with me it’s time to do it.

Now since I will be keeping my meals at night as low carb as I can, I will still be sharing low carb recipes and trying to work on Low Carb Cafe as much as I can.  I’m not deserting you, I’m just trying to refocus my energy and by doing that, hopefully get back on track to losing weight.

This new plan may just blow up in my face and I might find that I cheat more.  If that is the case, I will chalk it all up to experience, regroup and reevaluate what I need to do with my diet.  Either way I will keep you posted.  This blog is all about a weight loss experience no matter what method is used.

Oh and one more thing I wanted to share:

And I quote:

“eh … I watched a video from you from like 1.5 years ago, then watched this which was shot 1 month ago and you’re just as fat. Did you not make any progress in 1.5 years of low carb? wtf”

This was posted on one of my recent episodes of Lo Carb Cafe. Like I needed someone to point that fact out, but yes, the truth is I have been low carb dieting for quite some time and I am still fat.

What wasn’t taken into consideration, is that I have gone through periods of “falling off the wagon” or trying other diets and gained weight back…MANY of these periods.

The truth is, I am human.  I LOVE carbs, and often sabotage my progress because I convince myself that I can’t stay away from them.  I am guilty of using every excuse in the book to cheat on my diet.  “I had a bad day at work, I’m going to cheer myself up by having pizza.“  “I’ve been so good this week, one little cookie won’t hurt.”

And my biggest problem is, is that I can’t stop at one little cookie.  I can’t stop at one cheat meal.  One turns into two and two turns into an entire weekend of gorging on sweets and starches.  It’s all about feast or famine with me and it always has been since I first cheated on the low carb lifestyle in 2004.

I had been so good and so consistent for about a year and a half on low carb.  I was completely dedicated and dropped 80 pounds in that time.  I would NOT cheat.  I went through a phase of eating low carb snacks and candy’s in abundance and that slowed my loss but I never let pasta or bread or potatoes pass my lips.

I remember the night it all ended.  We were living in Phoenix at the time and my dream had come true.  My favorite band on the planet was finally playing the states after having broken up in the 90’s and reformed in the 2000’s.  I had never seen them live and it was a 17 year long dream of mine.  We flew out to California and saw them in all of their glory.  It was one of the best nights of my life and I decided I needed it to be perfect…so we ordered pizza.  And breadsticks.  And the next day as we were on our way to the airport, a stop at In & Out Burger for burgers WITH buns and fries.  After that it kind of never stopped.  I mean, I would go back on the diet to lose a percentage of what I gained back but in the end, over the course of the last six years I had managed to regain 40 pounds.

Here is the good news.  In the last month and a half or so I have managed to get dedicated to the diet again.  Not only that, but I have begun exercising regularly.  Something I never did when I was losing the weight previously.  And while I have not lost enough weight to be as low on the scale as I was in 2004, the adding of the exercise has proven very affective and I am now wearing a size in jeans that I have not worn since before I met my husband.

That is ELEVEN years ago!  I was actually dancing in the dressing room when I tried them on. 

So yes, I am still fat, I still have a long way to go, and I will always struggle with my weight.  But I am TRYING, and little by little I have proven to myself that as long as I keep plugging away I will get results.  As frustrating as it sounds, it may take years, but it will happen.

So keep the comments, good or bad, coming.  Either way, they are encouraging me to better my life.