10% Off!

Who doesn't like to see 10% off?  Unless, maybe,  20% off is available.

I'll admit it right now.  This post is totally a brag.  It is not really relevant to homesteading, or frugality, or raising kids. . .  It's just me being proud.

Because as of this morning (Monday is my weekly weigh-in and take measurement day), there is ten percent less of me than there was six months ago.  I am almost to my "I'd settle for weighing twenty pounds less" weight.

When school started up for my daughters in September, I realized that for the first time since school started in 1996 (DS1's 2nd grade year, when we switched from public to private Christian school), I did not have to load anyone into my car/minivan/suburban, and make sure they got to school.  Nope, I could say "see ya later" and they would get to school without me.  I no longer had to spend 30-40 minutes driving my offspring to school every morning Monday through Friday.  Not to mention a similar amount of time picking them up and returning them home every afternoon.  How liberating it is to have my youngest in high school!
 
So, in celebration of that fact, and to reward myself for my fifteen loyal years of pseudo bus driving service, I decided I would take that new found time and do something for myself with it.  Something like workout, get back into shape, and hopefully lose the weight I'd been trying to lose, then gaining back, for over a decade.

I weighed, at the beginning of September, approximately three pounds more than I'd weighed on the day in October 1997, that I went into labor with my youngest child.  To still be carrying that pregnancy weight --plus three pounds!!--nearly fourteen years later was a mental burden to me.  I'd always been trim, active, athletic.  Okay, prior to baby #3 anyway.  I really did not like myself as unfit, flabby, and carrying way more pounds than I wanted.  More pounds than I'd ever weighed pregnant!  That fact alone was a heavy burden to my self-esteem.

I'd heard that for every child a woman bears, she keeps ten pounds of her pregnancy weight.  Well, I was nearly 65 more than I'd started as, and given 10 pounds times four pregnancies, I 'should' only be 40 more than I'd been before conceiving that first child.  So to be my highest pregnancy weight plus three pounds was just a depressing state. 

I began to do a 30-minute workout DVD every morning while my kids were in school.  I got sweaty.  I got winded.  I got sore muscles.  But I stuck with it. I even worked out when they were on breaks from school, trying to ignore their comments on how the house was shaking from my jumping jacks and how funny I looked panting and groaning.

I stuck with it because I discovered that it felt good to be soaked in sweat and out of breath.  I discovered  that I had more energy after working out than I prior to working out.  More stamina.  More strength.  I could even sing better in choir, holding notes for as long as 8 beats without having to stop for breath!  Not only that, but my mental state got a boost from working out too. A few months into my new life of working out, I read that regular exercise can help with depression. . .  Who knew?
Anyway. . .

I'm not quite to 20 less pounds yet.  It's been slow going, but it's been steady.  I have not regained a single pound, not at Halloween, not at Thanksgiving, not at Christmas, not at New Year's or even the Super Bowl.  There has been no yo-yoing in these last six months, unlike every time in the past I tried to lose weight by changing just my diet (side note:  I eat the same food I've always eaten, I just try to eat one serving instead of two, and make sure I get my 5 30-minute workouts in every week). 

I've plateaued a few times, holding the same number for three or four weeks in a row before dropping two pounds and continuing my slow descent.  But today I broke through the 18th pound.  I now weigh 10% less than I did when the school year started. Ten percent!  Eighteen pounds lighter, and am smaller by nearly nine inches (I measure waist, hips, rib cage and bust every week).  My waist is four inches smaller than it was in September. I think that's pretty darn good. 

It feels pretty darn good.  I'm so much more energetic and my endurance level has gone up a lot in six months.  I can kick over my head again.  I have one chin again, and it's getting pointy (my face used to be heart shaped, then it just became round.  I like heart-shaped better).  I'm starting to see my collar bones again. I can honestly say I have abs; not rock hard yet, but they are coming.  I like me.  I like feeling athletic again.  Who says being a mom means your body can't do the things you did before you had kids?  Who says just because I had four babies I'll always have a flabby belly and a "matronly" figure? 

I'm still going to keep my goal of 20 pounds lost at the end of the school year. Likely I will hit it a school-quarter early.  That would be just fine with me.  Because I also have the next goal made: to be 20% less on December 31, 2012 than I was on September 1, 2011.  Thirty-six pounds.  That will put me in the weight range I really want to be.  The one on the charts that doesn't fall under the heading "overweight".  The one that isn't only ten or so pounds away from the "obese" portion of the chart.


I can do this thing.  I can be this skinny chick again.  I can be healthy, and energetic, and fit.