I'm not ready

I was going to take a break during this challenge. Y'know, try out all my new habits without keeping track and see if I could continue to progress or at least maintain. But after how badly I bombed the majority of last week, I decided that I'm just not emotionally ready to go it on my own yet.

Something snapped in me last week and I just got sick of not having anything I wanted. It seems that for the last several months my life has been defined by stringent self-control and going without, not just with my health, but with all aspects of my life, and I finally just had a little temper tantrum and decided to eat whatever I wanted. Oh, I would start the day saying, "I'm going to try not counting calories today, but I'll still eat really healthy." Then I would crave a piece of Amish Friendship Bread leftover from what I had baked to give to Lily's 2nd grade teacher. "I'll just have one slice. It's only 160 calories, not a huge deal." And later I would justify going over my calories because I needed to get the rest of my vegetables in. Never mind that I could have eaten nearly a whole day's worth of veggies for 160 calories. Then, once I had gone over my calories I just decided to eat more since I wasn't going to get my 10 points anyway.

Or I would remember that we were having birthday cake and ice cream with our neighbors in the evening. I carefully planned throughout the day and left myself enough calories to have one piece of cake. I ate the piece of cake. Mmm, it was delish. "I'll just have one more piece and I'll lose my 10 points, but I'll only be over by a couple hundred calories and I can exercise extra tomorrow." So I ate another piece. Then I ate the leftovers on Amelia and Mack's plates. Then I got back home and upon realizing that it was two hours earlier than when I normally stopped eating for the day, I decided to just eat more since I'd already blown my calories.

Or my friend would remind me that there was a pancake dinner fundraiser at the high school that evening. I ate moderately most of the day, but when I took the kids to the park in the afternoon, I brought along the animal crackers. "I'll just eat 13, that's 100 calories." But with the open bag sitting next to me while I looked at quilting books from the library, I easily let myself eat at least 3 times that much because "I'm going to blow my calories eating pancakes anyway, so who cares?"

Are you sensing a trend? I sure am. I can stay committed as long as I'm within range of my goal. But the moment I go over my range, I just shove food in my mouth with reckless abandon. For me, I can do that once a week on a free day and still have success. But I think I had at least 4 free days last week.

So now I'm back up two pounds. I did at least exercise nearly every day last week, but I slacked off on weight lifting and interval training. Lately I haven't been able to stand the idea of working out to a DVD. I've needed to be outside, to exercise without my children, to breathe deeply and clear my mind. I've been running a lot and I'm finding that I crave that time of solitude. I need to meditate and pray and get my mind right for the day. I love being out at sunrise, watching my shadow on the sagebrush and smelling the fresh air.

I can now run 40 minutes without walking, at rate of about 10 minutes per mile. When I first started exercising, I could go for about 5 minutes before I felt like I was going to die. I started doing some interval training a couple weeks ago and that has helped my endurance a lot. I usually jog for 5 minutes, then do 5 intervals of 1 minute sprint (not a full-on 100 meter pace, but about a 400 meter pace) followed by 1 minute of walking. Then I jog again, do another set of intervals, and end with jogging. Now when I just jog the whole time I can go a lot longer. Read a great post about interval training here at Trainer Momma.

It's not official yet, but it's about 70% sure that my husband will be starting a new job which will take him to a training school in Texas for 10 weeks. Yep, that's the entire summer. While I'm HUGELY looking forward to a stable income, I'm dreading being a single mom for the whole summer. And one of the things I'm going to greatly miss is going out on my morning runs while Dan stays home with the sleeping children. Amelia has started riding a bike with training wheels and she's really quite good, so I should still be able to run with Mack in the stroller and the girls on bikes. But it won't give me that time of quiet and solitude that I love so much.

So, Melissa, I'm anxious to hear how your 3 weeks off went. Were you the Wonder Woman you hoped to be? PLEASE tell me how I can get there, too!