It’s been a month since I publicly committed to exercising, and the results are in. And they’re mixed. But it’s OK! Even though the weight didn’t shift as much as I would have liked, I lost a lot of inches. Here’s the tally so far: I’m down 6 pounds since January 1 and have lost 2.5 inches off of my natural waist, 3 inches off of my low waist, and 2.5 inches off of my hips. Sometimes I lose in a funky pattern like this—the weight stays the same or even goes up, but I lose inches. The point is to be smaller, not necessarily lighter, so in that regard, I’m winning. Measuring yourself or going by how your clothes fit (unless they involve elastic waistbands) can be a really good motivator when the scale isn’t moving. I was totally convinced that I wasn’t making any progress (because of the scale) until I tried on a pair of pre-baby-#3 shorts and discovered that they fit.
Almost immediately after I made the public declaration that I would be exercising, I got sick with a nasty, nasty cold that kept me off the bike for at least ten days. Then kids got sick, and I was running on like five hours of sleep and my muscles hurt, and life more or less got out of control. We did finally run out of clean underwear (but it took an entire month—this new record is progress!) For about a week the laundry was at that dangerous point where the clean stuff had gone unfolded long enough that it could almost be considered dirty. All of the dishes were dirty because….I don’t know why. I’m lazy? (Frankie is not lazy about dishes—as he will tell anyone, he used to be a professional dishwasher. He is a dishwashing machine.) All this to say that things have not been operating at their best these past few weeks, so I’m not really sure how I shrunk.
Certainly part of it is diet. The constant salad for lunch has been a huge help both in limiting less-nutritious stuff and in getting enough vegetables. Breakfast is still consistently fried eggs or oatmeal, and I rarely snack when I’m on campus. Since I’m there for eight hours two days a week, that’s a good long stretch with not eating mindlessly. If I were at home, I’d just be stuffing my face while I procrastinated on scrubbing toilets or something. I know my habits.
Another part is movement. The cycling has been much more sporadic than hoped, but apparently lugging a giant backpack around campus is an acceptable substitute for “real” exercise. Actually, the CDC agrees. They recently updated their recommendations to say that anything that gets you off your butt and gets your heart beating faster counts. When you commute and are on campus all day, you have to lug everything around with you instead of popping in and out of your dorm room to lighten the load. And when you’re old, you get the bonus of not being able to stand electronic textbooks, so on most days I have at least one giant, heavy science text. Yesterday I had the iPad, chem lab manual and notebook, a smaller notebook, my chemistry and microbiology textbooks, a statistics book, my wallet, a travel coffee cup, and probably a pound of random crap like pens, tampons, and wads of old (unused) napkins. I just weighed it, and the backpack is around 25 pounds. I don’t do a lot of walking because the campus is small, but I do take a lot of stairs because the campus is on a hill. I was worried that spending so much time sitting while studying would be my downfall, but I guess not.
So what’s next? Just keep it up. Now that everyone is hopefully recovering from the most recent bout of illnesses (Bug and I had a stomach bug this week) and the bike shorts are washed again, I can get back on the bike. Tonight I was kind of organized and made a big pot of oatmeal for the week and started soaking beans for a bean, ham, and kale soup tomorrow. We have fruit and salad stuff. And now I’m going to go to bed so that I have the energy to make all of this happen.
