Merry Christmas

We celebrated Christmas here at my house for the first time last night and it was wonderful. It was our first Christmas with out dad, so I think that's why mom suggested having it here at my house (that, and I know she doesn't want to deal with the mess afterward!) On Christmas Eve we get together to open gifts and have an appetizer smorgasbord. As anyone knows, appetizers are one of my biggest downfalls and we had some gooood stuff last night! Although, we did decide not to go with any chips and dips this year, we had other stuff in it's place! Since it was Christmas, I didn't want any bad moods to disturb my good cheer and lay off myself and enjoyed it thoroughly. I ate whatever I wanted and I'm so happy to say that my "eat whatever I want" is of much more normal proportions these days! The last week or so, I've still been hovering around the 15lb loss mark, which is ok by me. Now that my knee is on the better side of things, it's time to get back to my gazelle again. I have 2 wonderful weeks off to enjoy myself, "walk" and fix up my office/guest bedroom. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

Monday

What a crazy weekend here! Saturday I had two Christmas parties to go to. One was the faculty Christmas party at our school secretary's house (it's a small staff), and then I left that a little early to head down to our bowling Christmas party. Had a great time at both parties with good food, friends and family. Sunday I was up at 6 to finish a partylite order (I'm a consultant), go to my mom's church for 8:00 service because her choir was singing a Christmas contata, go to my church for 11:00 service because the students were singing. In the afternoon I headed to a friend's house for a surprise graduation party for my best friend who has graduated from college. I left there to go to my mom's house where we were driving up to go to another Christmas concert at another church. Everything was great and I'm glad I did it all, but man am I tired today! My eating went well during all the parties as well, so I'm glad about that. Christmas Eve is going to be at my house this year with lots of appetizers and good stuff to eat which is my downfall...I love appetizer type food and it's harder to keep track of that than like a regular sit down meal.

This week was supposed to start off with a meeting tonight and one tomorrow, but luckily the one tonight was canceled so I can go home and do a load of laundry so that I have clothes to wear for the rest of the week. After that it's just getting things finished up here at school before break, and cleaning my house so people can come over next week. I also made a deal with my friend to keep ourselves accountable from now on. So far it worked, I got my butt moving again on the Gazelle for 10 min every day. My knee was even protesting that, so I couldn't do more, but it's feeling a bit better today, so I'm hoping for 15 or 20 minutes. It feels good to get my butt moving again, I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't keep it up once I get started.

Dusting myself off

OK, so the last 2 weeks were kinda hellish. I sunk down into this depression that scared even me. I didn't care about anything, I was stressed about work, I was binging, nothing mattered. My eyes definitely were off my prize and it showed.

Once again, I am coming back up and out of it and ready to go again. I was home sick from school on Friday due to a 24 hour flu bug and I watched a show called The Doctors where they were talking about the 4 F's that women fear the most: Fatigue, Forgetfulness, Fifty and Fat. What intrigued me was a site they talked about called Weightview.
I submitted this picture:





And this is what they did to me:




Wow! Do I look healthy!! I look like I can do all the things I really want to do! I don't know that many people find this inspiring, but I do! This hasn't been an easy road and it'll continue to be rocky (I'm definitely a tortoise!) Even though I have down times, I know I can do this and I can look like this person and do all the tennis, rollerblading, hiking, whatever I want and that feels amazing!