Update!

Hey folks, it has been a super busy month and a half over here.  I've been so wrapped up in doing projects that I keep forgetting to post them!  Bad Kel-Bell, no dessert for you!

Anyway, I have LOTS in store for the next few days, while Poke is off working his overtime and I'm all alone.  I'm trying to take a little break from crafting & creating, mostly because 4L's first birthday is coming up in a couple weeks and I need to be fully prepared.

Stay tuned!

PS - I forgot to tell you guys I've lost 14 pounds.  Yay me!

Wii Fit Plus!

So, for Christmas, my FMIL (future mother in law) gave me a $50 gift card to Best Buy.  I was like "huh, what can I do with this?" because I don't generally buy anything there, and we already have all the electronics we could need.  Then, shortly after my 30th birthday, something (the fat pouch) inspired me to start losing weight - finally - and I began to come up with a plan.  I thought about going back to Weight Watchers, but they've changed their program so much and it's very, very expensive these days.  I checked it out and even though it would have been pretty easy to re-learn the new system, I wasn't interested in paying for it, so I ended up going back to SparkPeople.

SparkPeople is a website that offers nutrition, fitness, and other trackers.  They now have an app for your smartphone, too!  All I have to do is put in the foods I eat, and it will calculate it for me.  Almost every single food you can think of is in their database, or you can enter it manually.  To begin, you put in your weight, height, age, activity level, etc. and it tells you how many calories you can have per day, without exercising, to lose weight.  Then it says you should exercise, and encourages 30 min/day, 3x/week.  My numbers are pretty easy to follow: 1330-1660 calories/day, exercise 7 days/week to burn 299 calories every day, and drink 8+ glasses of water per day.

It's been a bit rough getting my calories in order, because I went from eating less than 1,000 calories a day to eating over 2,000 - thanks to working out and actually feeling hunger!  Silly brain, always going to one extreme or the other!  Anyway, it took about 10 days but I am mostly able to keep my calories close to 1660. I'm hovering around 1800, but I also burn anywhere from 310-490 calories per day.

...and that's where the Best Buy gift card comes in!  I started SparkPeople and didn't plan on exercising at all, just hoped that eating the right amount of calories would work (yeah, cuz it worked so well in the past...?).  Poke and I had left 4L at his Nana's house, and were running some errands when I remembered the gift card and suggested we go look to see what they had.  Originally I thought maybe I'd get a tablet or a TV, but even the smallest, cheapest tablets/TVs were well over $100 (I was willing to pay half).  We wandered around, checked out the GPS area, car stereos, and ended up by the video game systems.  YAY!  I thought maybe I'd get a few Wii games, and then it caught my eye - the Wii Fit Plus.  It was on sale, and with the gift card I ended up getting it for like $15. YAY!  It took a couple days to charge my batteries and get motivated, but I finally hopped on two days later.

At first, I was like "What. The. Fuck." because it was really weird to be standing on this balance board and moving the character on screen in all these strange games.  The little guy talked me through the process, doing a body test and introducing me to all the features.  I've been doing it for 16 calendar days now, 14 actual days (I take Tuesdays off), and I'm getting pretty good at most of the games.  It even includes Yoga and Strength Training, which at first I could not do and actually sobbed after trying.  These days I can do most of the Yoga and some of the Strength Training, and allegedly it will get easier as I go on.

The problem is, even though I've been working out steadily for two weeks, I haven't lost any weight.  I don't think I've lost any inches either because my jeans actually feel tighter!  I don't understand what is going on.  For the first time in my life I'm drinking plenty of water (36-44oz/day or more) and getting regular exercise, as well as burning way, way more calories than I take in.  My BMR is 2329 + 310 burned cals/average and subtract 1800 cals/eaten from that = 819 cals/differential.  They say to cut out 500/day to lose a pound a week... So why am I not losing any weight?!

I'm hoping that it's just a matter of getting things going, and sometime in the next week or so I'll start to see some results.  It'd be nice if I could just see something - even if my jeans just felt better.

Fat vs Thin vs Bottle vs Breast vs ...?...

There's a lot of speculation out there about feeding a baby too soon, with a spoon, and feeding it rice/oatmeal/etc.  They say it causes obesity and diabetes, but where are they getting this information?  IF they are getting it from looking at our generation, and even our parents' generation, it doesn't correlate.  We're obese/diabetic because of our current lifestyles, not because of what we ate 30+ years ago! Genetics does play a role; as I've said before, my brother and I were fed exactly the same way as babies and yet he turned out slim & fit whereas I'm morbidly obese.  His parents were small and thin, my parents were average and stocky. 

I even read an article just now about a "study" they did on 92 spoon-fed babies vs 63 breast-fed babies.  10 of the spoon babies were overweight, and 9 of the breast babies were overweight.  First of all, they clearly stated that all the children were within a "normal healthy" weight range - so these "overweight" children were probably just the top 10 and top 9 of their groups.  Second, 10 out of 92 (10.87%) is significantly less than 9 out of 63 (14.24%), which to ME would indicate that the breast-fed children were actually the ones who had a "problem"!  In fact, I have a friend whose son was born 10 days after 4L, and is considerably larger than him.  

Due to the complications from my C-section, I only nursed 4L for about 10 days, while her son has been nursed the entire time.  Using that as anecdotal evidence, in combination with the aforementioned "study", I'd say breast-fed babies do tend to be larger - and it makes sense!  They get all the nutrients, calories, antibodies, etc etc etc EVERYTHING from the mother, and who knows what she's eating (I don't mean my friend here, cuz she is healthy, but I mean other mothers that I don't know!).  Spoon-fed babies are fed specific amounts at a time, leaving no question as to how many calories they are actually getting and from where those calories are coming.

Obviously, I'm not a doctor or scientist, and I only took one nutrition course in college.  That being said, I do read a lot, on both sides of the argument (whatever the argument may be!), and I have my own experiences to draw from.  Personally, and I know others who agree, I think that nobody really, truly knows wtf is going on with babies, and it's all just speculation.  Thirty years ago my parents were told to put me on my stomach to sleep, along with millions of other babies, and we all lived.  4L HATED sleeping on his back, and now that he's old enough to roll around on his own, he sleeps 99% of the night on his stomach.  Babies who sleep on their backs still die from SIDS, because nobody knows what causes SIDS. I would be willing to make a bet that in less than ten years, we'll be back to formula is the best and sleeping on the stomach is correct.  I can picture it now, doctors telling insanely obese/diabetic mothers that their milk is just too diseased/fatty/diabetic/etc to feed to a newborn, and that formula would be safer. Right now there's a big push for ADHD medications/diagnoses, and I think that in less than ten years the medical field will agree that it's lazy parenting because they'll have moved onto the next thing that Big Pharm wants to hawk.

...And that's my blogpost for the morning.  Now we're off to baby laptime at the library, cuz one thing is for sure- books will never be bad! (Unless you're CS Lewis in Fahrenheit 451... ok, gotta stop there!)

Fat like Me

I never knew! Makes me feel happy!
Guess who it is...

To Me! To Me!

A very happy congratulations to myself for losing 15 pounds in two months. I'm 15% of the way towards my goal. If things continue on like this, I will have lost all 100 pounds within fourteen months. That's not bad at all. Even if I only lose half as much per month as I have been, that's still fifty pounds in a year. Go Me!

So, anyway. Some shit happened last week. That's all. I don't really want to talk about it.

The night before last I had a weird dream that started off with me coming over the crest of a hill in my car (my real life car, only silver not red but still with the busted bumper and same interior and all that) and seeing NSA, my sister-in-law, stalled out in her crap-ass LeBaron at the bottom. I tried to stop my car, but I wasn't quite fast enough and bumped into her. I mean, it wasn't a crash, I probably hit her car with mine with about the same force as say... pushing a shopping cart into a car. Regardless, there was no damage, and it helped her because it got her car moving to where she could push it off to the side of the road. I continued driving, and ended up at my old house in Macedonia. Apparently I lived there. I was getting out of my car when I saw a navy blue mini-van coming around the corner, and it was Y. That was the end of the dream.

Last night I had such a fucked up dream. It was ridiculous. Okay. I wsa going to an Indians game with TD, DJ, and some guy I didn't recognize from real life but we called him Kevin in the dream. We were "tailgating" if you will, although people don't really do that at baseball games. We had a little area set up along with all these other people - some had tents, some had grills, we had a little portable wall-thing... kinda looked like a 3-sided science fair board. Except it was the same length on all sides... Yeah. Anyway, TD and I were walking around, just wandering, while DJ and Kevin were back at the area, apparently making some food or getting some beer ready or something. TD and I got in line to get our tickets redeemed, and I found out I had to take my purse back to the car because they wouldn't let me take it in. I asked if I could take my small wallet with the strap attached instead, and the stadium lady said no way. No one could tell me why though. So I left TD in line and tried to hurry up back to our area to get the keys from DJ so I could go to the car. Oh, I wasn't allowed to take my cell phone in either. I tried to find our area, and when I finally did, DJ wasn't there but Kevin was. He didn't have the keys, and said DJ had gone to look for TD and me. We waited and waited, and finally I decided to just hide my purse underneath all our crap since there were security guards walking all around anyway, plus the only people who had tents and tailgaiting stuff were people who had tickets, and special permission to be in this area, and no one was allowed to leave the stadium while the game was on. So basically I had nothing to worry about. I told Kevin to go find TD and DJ and I was going to go get some nachos and beers for us, and I would meet them at our seats. I went over, stood in line forever, and finally got a huge thing of nachos and four beers for $13.00. That's how I knew for sure it was a dream! Ha! So, I'm walking down the "hallway" or whatever to our seats and I run into my dad. He says they have a seat for me, but I say no thanks because I've already got one. Then SL comes around the corner and says he has a seat for me, and I say no thanks I've already got one. Then they both make me feel bad for buying nachos and beer and not sitting with them. So I devise a plan to split myself into three parts so that everyone can have a piece, but when I do that and my 3 sections go to my friends, my dad, and my boyfriend, all of them are pissed because they all wanted the whole Kelly and what I gave them wasn't good enough.

Yeah, I can pretty much figure out the meaning of that dream. Nothing personal against TD and DJ, of course, I think they were just main players because they've both moved on from my life, so to speak. Not that we aren't friends, they just aren't in my everyday anymore.

Late.