Denise Austin for teh win

So...last we saw, April was ending and I had great goals and high hopes for May. Too bad I didn't go to the gym 1 single time in May. My weight is 176.8, and I didn't check the body fat. Basically nothing's changed since the end of April. On the plus side, at least I didn't gain any weight back!

So here we are, slightly over 1 week into June. Oh boy, June. I've been at this since end of March and I've lost what, almost 5 lbs? Woooot, haha. I still have a really hard time with food. I'm mostly pretty good about picking the right kinds of things to eat (and when I do pick the bad stuff, it's rather infrequently). My nemesis is portion control. Portion control, portion control, portion control. How I loathe thee!! You see, I love food. LOVE. Which means I want to gobble it up. And since eating correctly means not really feeling full, just satisfied, I have an incredibly hard time stopping the gobbling before I reach full. Then I really feel satisfied!

I've been reading alot about fitness, and people seem to love to tell me not to eat for pleasure, to only eat out of necessity. So I can't even enjoy my smaller portions now? I don't see how this can be encouraging to anyone. How many people do you know that go "Oh god, time to eat AGAIN"? No, usually people look forward to a meal. But me wanting to lose weight and get in better shape, I can't do that? If that's not discouraging, I don't know what is.

I can't seem to avoid the starve-binge cycle. Yeah yeah, eat 6 small meals a day and bam, you're done. Too hard to do, sorry. If I were at home all day, sure. But packing 4 meals to have during work EACH DAY and remember to go eat them at the right times, and assuming I even have that time free? Too many variables. So I end up starving by the time lunch gets there, which means I eat quickly - who's gonna sit there and eat slowly when they're starving? No one, that's who. And yes, I'm completely aware that this is what causes me to reach the "binge" state, because I'm full but it hasn't registered yet because I'm eating so quickly. Well I try to avoid that by simply putting in front of me the correct amount of food, so when I tear through it, that's that. But unless I have ridiculous amounts of water, that's not enough. And it's not that easy to drink that much water. First, I'm just not that thirsty. And second, then you're in the bathroom all day long, ridiculous.

I'm really not sure how to pry my way out of the diet hole. I realize I have no one to blame but me. Too bad my appetite isn't much smaller. I get that I have to eat less so that my stomach shrinks, but that takes awhile - and in the meantime I starve (or at least it feels that way). So for now, I'll just do my best to not eat insanely huge amounts of food. I think for now, snacking is the enemy. No, I'm not snacking on chips, crackers, and cookies, but a few 100 calorie yogurts and bam, you're over your calorie limit. I'm trying my best to limit this - I guess I have to try harder.

On the exercise front, like I said, no gym since April. But I did get a workout video from my Blockbuster queue on Friday. Denise Austin's Indoor Walk. And boy, what a walk! Here I was, thinking I had picked the most losery of all videos, and it would just contain stuff that I could incorporate into my daily *outdoor* walk to make that more calorie-burny. No, no. It is a true exercise video. No strolling about for me. It has 3 15-minute segment videos, and 1 10-min video of stretching. The 15 min segments go from "easy walk" (yeah right, that's why I'm breathing heavily and sweating), to "fat blasting" (now the name is correct), to ...something else. All I know is it required dumbbells, of which I had none. I used 2 bottles of beer instead. I'm not sure that helped at all, haha. In any case, by the time I was done with the 45 minutes of "walking", I had supposedly "walked" 3 miles, and I was sweatier and more out of breath than I am after 45 minutes of elliptical at the gym. Yet I could still complete the exercise, so I wasn't pushing myself harder than I should. I had alot of fun, and Denise Austin is very positive and motivating. I vowed to do her video 3 times a week - so far I've done it 1.5 times since I got it on Friday. Some more of her videos are in my queue now, I hope they're as good as this one!