Shrinking Sisters

Motivation Monday: Fitbloggin edition

Got a huge booster shot of motivation this past weekend at the second annual Fitbloggin' conference in beautiful-as-always Baltimore. I went last year -- its inaugural year -- and this year had twice the awesome, nearly three times the attendees and, as always, no trans fats.

I caught up with:

• Fellow Fitbloggin' veterans Karla from Fitness magazine and the Healthful Bites blog and Andrea from the blog AJ Loves to Lose and chatted their ears off.
• I also caught up again IRL (in real life) with Melissa and finally met her fitness video compadre Leslie. The three of us go back (at least through the mail and Internet) five years when I reviewed fitness videos for my former newspaper column.
• Carla (aka MizFit) and I reconnected from last year and I got to meet the Amazing Dietgirl Shauna, who jetted in from Scotland. Both of them do the Two Fit Chicks and a Microphone podcast, and I walk with them regularly -- me on the track and them in my ears. Shauna and I were among the dozens burning up the floor in Friday's Zumba class.
• And of course Roni -- we shared a bazillion e-mails with me proofreading her cookbook, the Fitbloggin website and the signs and brochures. (Typos were my biggest fear at the conference.) Last year's conference was great and you outdid yourself this year -- all while taking care of the Little Bean. (Ryan was a great sticker concierge.)

Finally met in real life:

• Kia (Bodhi Bear) and Greta (Middle-Aged Jock), who cheered me on through the Mamavation campaign a few months back. You know the phrase "fast friends"? Definitely applies here in more ways than one.
• Susan, from the blog Food Food Body Body. My grand scheme for a slumber party didn't pan out but you definitely threw an impressive wine and cheese party in your room. I've never seen so many people crammed into a hotel room before. And your one-woman show bringing your blog to life was truly moving.
• Julie, Queen of the Chubby Mommy Running Club. Read the blog, bought the T-shirt, finally met JulieJulie! She was our "cruise director" for the Saturday night Post-Rapture Celebration Dinner in Fells Point. And she had the cutest shoes of anyone. Lots of great dinner chatting.

I also met some new pals:

• Jodi from the blog Just a Bit Wicked and I walked Friday's 5K and on the way back got a wee bit discombobulated. 5K? 8K? 10K? You be the judge.
• Kerri from Kat's Adventures in Dietland, who was my paparazzo on Sunday morning when I spied KC from KC and the Sunshine Band standing right behind her.
• Annelies, the online community manager at Attune Foods, who hung out at the pool with me while others went night swimming. We discussed social media, journalism and myriad other things while making sure everyone's cameras, phones and wallets were safe.
• And Kenlie, from All the Weigh, who just Wednesday was merely "that woman who was on the Today show." As I watched that segment I checked out her blog and saw that she'd be at Fitbloggin'. "I've gotta meet her and say hi," I thought. The next day we were both on a SuperShuttle from the airport, probably boring everyone else on that van to death with bloggy stories. After we offloaded the baggage at the hotel, we headed out for lunch where we proceeded to talk and talk and talk and talk. What a rock star you are!

And I didn't get to meet:

Lynn, from Lynn's Weigh -- boo! We really were looking forward to meeting and being roommates at Fitbloggin. We've kept in touch ever since I interviewed her for my former newspaper weight-loss blog back in  2006. But car woes kept her from Baltimore and we both were bummed. Next year for sure!

And now for photos:

A bird found its way into the restaurant where Kenlie and I ate lunch Thursday and it had a fondness for lo mein.

 

 

 

 

Baseball geek that I am, I noticed the lights at Camden Yards Thursday night.

 

 

This year's room view. Last year I had a lovely view of a parking garage.

Saw this lovely site as I waited for an elevator. Aside from some clouds early on, the weather was fantastic and lots of us walked all over the city.

It's Britt from Less Britt More Life and Kenlie from All the Weigh on Day 1.

The extremely enlightening Intuitive Eating panel, with Katie Heddleston, Karen C.L Anderson, Christie Inge and Shauna Reid.

Julie Anderson, Kate Brown and Christy Mensi discussed community building -- they all have some amazing communities of their own. At left, Julie's shoes, from her sponsor OhShoes.

 

 

Sue O'Lear (MrsFatass), Jack Sh*t and Charlie Hester discussed using humor in blogging. It's an art, people! (I was their "mike wrangler," which sounds like a cowboy stripper name.)

Dr. Fitness and the Fat Guy closed the conference on Saturday afternoon, which was a real treat because their podcasts have carried me through many a power walk. You've got to load up your iPod with their show!

 

 

 

 

 

Kia won some Babybel cheese during the Laughing Cow discussion. She wanted me to snap this photo of her first-ever Babybels.

Saturday night it was time for some Fells Point fun. That's Melissa and Lisa of The Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans whooping it up with Christy and Ben in the background.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But no, the partying wasn't over. There was a wine and cheese party, where I wandered up for a bit, said hi and left before I dissolved into a puddle of sweat. That's Kenlie and me mugging for the camera, and yes, I was sweaty.

My OMG moment came Sunday morning, when I spied THE KC (Harry Wayne Casey) of KC and the Sunshine Band in the hotel lobby. (Crap -- did I have to be in my workout clothes?) The young'uns didn't have a clue who he was but if you're over 40, he's a big freakin' deal. As he said during a concert after a Marlins game, "If you don't know who I am, I was your mom's Justin Timberlake." The band can still shake-shake-shake its booty.

(Do I sound old?)

 

When I got back home, this bouquet was waiting for me. (I think the florist must have been a Smurf or something.)

The weekend began and ended with a whole lot of love.

And now, we dance!

Word of the week: Everything

Write down everything.

Every drop of ketchup, every stick of gum, every baby carrot.

That's what my diet coach and I came up with this week. I've basically been within the same pound or so since August and I'm beyond tired of seeing that number on the scale.

Now that I've been wearing my BodyMedia FIT for a week or so I've found that to lose 2 pounds a week (a lofty goal), I'd have to eat 1,600 calories a day, which is 1,000 calories a day less than my average burn for the day.

I had been following a program that lets you eat unlimited fruits and vegetables but apparently that hasn't been working for me, so everything's going on the list -- grapefruits, salads, baby carrots, the whole shebang.

I'm even counting my nutritional supplments, since most of them resemble candy. I regularly have two Adora dark chocolate calcium supplements (30 calories each) and my multivitamin is a gummy variety from Slice of Life (22 calories for two). Add to that my fish oil supplements and I'm already up to 122 calories a day in supplements!

It all adds up. Quickly, too, I might add. When you add EVERYTHING in, you get to 1,600 in the blink of an eye.

I want to really, really see how many calories I can eat and how many calories I can burn to actually lose weight.

I know I'm a superstar at maintaining but that's not the goal right now.

My immediate goal is to get to pre-baby weight by next month, which is the second annual Fitbloggin' conference in Baltimore.

It sounds a bit obsessive but as you can see, all those "invisible calories" add up. Everything gets jotted down in my Fitbook, then when I'm near a computer it goes in the tracker.

But now I believe I'll get there. I have EVERYTHING on my side.

37 weeks, and you're in on the deal

It was my first Monday since the Cleveland Clinic Non-Surgical Weight Loss Program ended. I got on the scale and was up a quarter of a pound. Not bad considering I didn't work out at all last week and I had some major PMS bloat going on.

Why didn't I work out all week? Because in the back of my sneaky, little sabotaging head I knew I wouldn't be weighing in with someone who wasn't me.

Who will I be accountable to now?

Being accountable to myself isn't good enough, so I decided that I'll be accountable to YOU, dear readers. Every Monday I'll let you know what the scale says. (Who knows, someday I may even let you know what the number is.)

But I had a productive summer. I lost 10 pounds and am sneaking up on PRE-BABY WEIGHT (that's right, old skool blinky type), which is only 4 pounds away.

(The, ahem, baby started middle school last week.)

So what's the 37 weeks, you ask?

 That's how many weeks until Fitbloggin' 11, the second annual awesome healthy living blogger conference that will take place in Baltimore, one of my favorite cities in the USA.

And I already promised Roni, the Queen of Fitbloggin', that I will be returning as a weight-loss blogger success story. Or pretty darn near it.

Here's the deal: If all I lose is a measly pound a week, I will be one size away from the Happy Weight by Fitbloggin' time. I also signed up for the 5K run this time. Last time I did the 1-mile walk, which was already too easy for me. I've gotta push myself more and will be training for that goal.

So I have a lot on my plate.

 Or a little.

Or a lot of broccoli. Yeah. I have a lot of broccoli on my plate. I'm going to meet this challenge. Last year I made a grand pronouncement before Fitbloggin' and fell far short of the goal. This time, thanks to my Summer of Success, I know I can do it.

(Oooh, that even motivated me!)

Have a food or cooking-related catastrophe?

Check out Shrinking Sisters Reviews  for my latest post for The Daily Laugh. I'm part of a dozen bloggers who are writing every month on the foibles of living a healthy life. And check out the Daily Laugh Hub for other bloggers' stories and for a chance to win $150. Just leave a comment below on one of your cooking-related goofs. That'll buy a lot of broccoli.

Shrinking Sisters 2.0: Now with actual shrinking!

"What a stinking fraud I am. I have a blog called Shrinking Sisters, and I'm not losing any weight!"

(I'm not going to comment on my sister's weight loss; I'll leave that up to her.)

That's what I was thinking a couple weeks ago leading up to last week's Fitbloggin' convention in Baltimore.

So I took that weekend to recommit myself to do some actual shrinking because by next year's convention I want jaws to drop -- or to at least go slack a little bit.

So I'm happy to say that from the Monday after I got home to this past Monday, I dropped 4 pounds.

And I'm keeping track of my weight by stepping on the scale every morning.

Scales drive some people crazy and evoke all sorts of hatred but after not weighing and weighing once a week, I find that stepping on the scale every morning keeps me aware of the little fluctuations and serves as a signal to keep going.

I decided to weigh every day because I'm the kind of person who can step on the scale once a week and see it swing wildly up and down 3 or 4 pounds at a time. I want to be able to see where things start going south (north, really). 

I'm really not eating any differently, but this past Sunday's episode of Ruby had me thinking about that. Ruby's scale has been stuck and she wants to get below 300 in the worst way, so she decided to make five changes in her life -- things like taking the stairs, changing her workout and dumping the diet soda.

So I thought about what five changes I could incorporate. Here are mine (cue the trumpets):

1. Cereal will only be eaten with a bowl and a spoon, not by the handful out of the Tupperware container.
2. If I'm eating for recreation (yes, it happens sometimes), I'll do it with raw vegetables. My trip to the new green market in town will keep the fridge stocked with good-tasting produce.
3. Exercise will not be negotiable. Something will be done every day, even if it's as small as the 12-minute strength-training DVD workout I did on Monday. That little bugger still has my butt sore from the squats and lunges.
4. Coffee, tea and water will be my liquids of choice. I don't have a diet soda issue (I can quit anytime!). Seriously, I drink maybe two a week, but that carbonated science project has been shown to trigger sweet cravings in people so when I'm out and about (because it's easy to control at home), it'll be an unsweetened iced tea or water for me.

Eeek! I've only come up with four!

What should be my fifth change? Is there a "rule" you incorporate for weight-loss success?

Fitbloggin' 10 recap

Daffodils -- one thing we don't see in Florida. All photos by me

The second I got back into town I promptly caught a cold (thank you old coughing man on plane!), so it's taken a few days to get my head clear enough to do anything (except Twitter, of course).

Anyway...

Fitbloggin' 10 was fantastic! And to think, Roni Noone of Roni's Weigh had never organized a blog convention before this. We certainly couldn't tell.

Baltimore is one of my all-time fave cities, so deciding to go was a no-brainer. Even better was getting to finally meet in person some of my favorite healthy-living bloggers.

Icing on the (rice)cake?

• The New Balance walking shoes, socks and shorts. Walking that predawn mile was great fun, and it wasn't as cold as I thought it would be.
• My groovy new Gruve device, which tracks my movements and gooses me when I need to move my butt (it's doing it now).
• The Fitbloggin' commemorative T-shirt from thriv, made from a comfy blend of bamboo and cotton.
• All the other samples, coupons, bags, bowls and whatnot that made my suitcase fall over in exhaustion on Sunday.

More highlights:

• The Friday cocktail party was a blast, and that one Pomtini went straight to my head (the only time I can refer to myself as a lightweight in anything).
• Roni put together a great list of speakers for Saturday, and every last seminar was thought-provoking and useful.
• I finally got to meet Melissa McNeese in person, someone who I've e-mailed and tweeted for years. (She was the person responsible for the 10-Minute Solution DVD table.) I said to more than a few people that Fitbloggin' was like 100 blind dates.
•  A group of us went to dinner with Lyndsay and Nicole from Weight Watchers and had a great discussion about everything under the sun. The poor waiter couldn't get a word in edgewise.
• I also got in a lot of exercise -- a Friday hotel gym workout, Saturday morning's 1-mile walk and another mile walk in the afternoon, Sunday morning's yoga class and a final 3-mile walk to Camden Yards and back. My Gruve was very happy.

I was inspired to exercise, eat healthy foods, and rethink what I've been writing and who I've been hanging out with online.

I decided to devote more time to Shrinking Sisters (this place) and to keep the focus on writing meaningful stuff for Examiner (the other place). I decided long ago that I wasn't going to chase down pageviews by writing garbage about various Kardashians and Snookies.

I friended and followed lots of great, like-minded bloggers when I got back. Conversely I pared down my Facebook and Twitter lists of people who I just don't have time for anymore. I met so many writers with a healthy, balanced attitude toward food and fitness that I don't need to waste my time with people who think certain food groups are evil.

I switched my food tracking back to Weight Watchers, and realized that having a finite number of Points works better for me than having an open-ended calorie count. Counting down the Points seems to work better for me than adding up the calories. And in the months that I've been away from the Weight Watchers site it's gotten a lot better and faster.

I'm also not going to stress about working out. I'm taking the theory of "diet for weight loss, exercise for health" and running walking with it. I have a crappy cold right now and I'm fighting off the guilt of not exercising. But it's OK -- when I can breathe again, I'll workout.

I'm making my online life and my real life less toxic, and I can't wait until next year's Fitbloggin!

Fitbloggin' fun starts tomorrow!

So psyched to be heading up to Baltimore for the first-ever Fitbloggin' conference. Way back when I decided I was going I made the grand pronouncement that I was going to lose 20 pounds in 20 weeks.

Did I? No, because, as I've said before, I suck at losing weight. I did lose a little but, hey, it's better than not losing or gaining.

I'm hoping Fitbloggin' will be a great motivational shot in the arm, because I really want to go back next year as a diet blogger success story (there's my latest grand pronouncement). There will be some great speakers and lots of fellow bloggers who I've only "met" online.

I've got the nearest Starbucks and Whole Foods Markets already scoped out and my workout gear is packed.

Now I just have to finish laundry and whatnot.

So bring on the fun and motivation!

I'm not going to use the 'middle aged' excuse

Another birthday came and went last week, shoving me officially into the late 40s. But you're only as old as you feel, right? And as long as I have a kid in elementary school, I'm going to keep up the "young" ruse.

What's acting "old" is my metabolism. Back in my 20s I lost 40 pounds and while I can't say it was effortless, it certainly was easier than it is now.

I watch those wonderful women who are my age or older on The Biggest Loser and think that if they can do it I can, too.

(That's middle-aged mom Helen Phillips, Biggest Loser season 7 winner at right. NBC photo)

Sure, they're sequestered in a weight-loss camp where they do nothing but work out and eat healthfully. But they probably had the same middle-aged metabolism as me -- they (and a fleet of experts) just figured out a successful work-around.

So where's my fleet of experts? There are some great new books that seem to be helping by emphasizing key pieces to the puzzle:

• Fiber, which is the centerpiece of The F-Factor Diet
• Antioxidants, which The O2 Diet is based on
• Balanced, non-bird-food meals, like those of The 400-Calorie Fix and The Flat Belly Diet
• Goosing your hormones with the right foods to release weight, which is the point of The Perfect 10 Diet

Right now, I'm finally getting back to reading The Instinct Diet (also known as The "I" Diet), which is based on more than 20 years of clinical research done by Tufts University nutrition researcher Susan Roberts. What I like about the book is that it explains why weight loss is so difficult and comes up with different strategies to counteract human nature. It focuses on 5 food instincts:

• Hunger
• Availability
• Calorie density
• Familiarity
• Variety

The foods in the suggested eating plans are all designed to keep you fuller, fight cravings and deprivation. My lunch today, for example, was a big salad that had in it garbanzo beans, turkey and crumbled bacon.

I like the "radical common-sense" approach of the book so far, and I'll let you know how it's working. And I'm not going to let the latest and greatest diet book deter me from getting through this one. That has been a problem -- I start reading one book, then another one shows up at my door and I get all ADD and drop the first one.

I'm going to do the Phase 1 plan up until Friday, when I head over to Fitbloggin' 10. It may be difficult to stick to the plan over the weekend, but I'll be among a whole lot of bloggers with the same healthy mindset so I'm sure we won't be wallowing in doughnuts.

How much weight can I lose blowing my nose?

Yay, vegetables!

Some odds 'n' ends as I empty another box of tissues:

I've only had this cold since Saturday night but I'm thoroughly ready for it to go away. I've got a bunch of new workout DVDs that I'd love to try but when putting laundry away leaves me winded I figure I'll just chill on that until my breathing's better.

One task I did enjoy was compiling a list of 10 wonderful healthy blogs, in a guest post I did for Blogs.com. You can find that list HERE.  I'm pretty sure I have let everyone on the list know that they're included.

It's only 35 days until Fitbloggin' 10 begins and I can't wait! It'll be great to finally meet some of the bloggers who I've tweeted with and e-mailed in the past. So what happened to that 20 pounds in 20 weeks grand pronouncement? Eh ... so far it's only 5 but hey, there's still a month left.

Which leads me to calories -- I need to cut back on them, so my new plan is to load up on fresh fruits and veggies when I head to the kitchen. It'll give me more fiber and antioxidants for fewer calories than other snacky things.

Speaking of fiber and antioxidants, I've been reading The O2 Diet and the The F-Factor Diet, two great books by two of my Twitter favorites. And they're not gimmicky "diet books" -- they point the way to foods high in antioxidants and in fiber.

Keri Glassman's 02 Diet touts foods high on the ORAC scale, or Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It's a food's antioxidant capacity. Blueberries, cranberries, black beans and artichoke hearts are all high ORAC-scale foods. Herbs and spices, such as cinnamon, cloves and oregano are also high on the ORAC scale.

And many of the high-ORAC foods are high in fiber. I knew beans and berries were excellent sources of fiber but I was surprised to learn that artichoke hearts were also fiber superstars. I learned this in Tanya Zuckerbrot's F-Factor Diet book. The "F" of course is for fiber.

The book also reintroduced me to an old favorite -- GG Bran Crispbread. When I mean "favorite" I don't mean "mmm-mmm good" favorite. These crackers are hard-core high-fiber roofing shingles. But as a crunchy carb fix, they can't be beat. Each oversized cracker has only 12 calories but 5 grams of dietary fiber. A little smear of peanut butter or guacamole or a smooshed Laughing Cow Light on top makes them much tastier and only adds a few calories. A great little snack.

So it's superfoods and fiber as my primary foods -- clean, real food. You can't help but eat fewer calories with all that goin' on, right?

'Do the thing you think you cannot do'

I gave the last of the Ben & Jerry's Half Baked FroYo to my husband and my son and walked out of the kitchen with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt ringing in my head.

"Do the thing you think you cannot do."

Eleanor Roosevelt as weight-loss inspiration? Definitely more creative than Megan Fox. (That's Eleanor, at right, if she was a Biggest Loser contestant.)

It's time to suck it up and stop allowing myself stuff like low-fat chips and cereal bars and diet candy and Ben & Jerry's. I had some yesterday, obsessively measuring a serving on the food scale. But Ben & Jerry's isn't going to bring me closer to my goal of losing all the weight I want to lose, a battle I've been fighting since I was a chubby 10-year-old.

I'm going to win this war.

But does losing weight mean avoiding certain foods? For me it has to. I'm way too easy on myself. I think back to something I read about five years ago, on the pioneering diet blog Skinny Daily Post, written by Juju Ridl, who lost 100 pounds nearly 10 years ago. Alas, the blog doesn't seem to be active anymore. My all-time favorite post of hers is titled "Not Right Now," which you still can find in her archives from August 2004. Here's an excerpt:

The real secret to my success over giving up foods I love for a little while? Knowing there will always be more.

I knew that I could give up those foods for a year, because at the end of the year, there they would be again. The pie, the cake, the chips. I know today that when I enjoy too many of these things, I have to say goodbye again for a while.

So goodbye Ben, and you too, Jerry (who once told me, at the factory in Vermont, that his favorite flavor was their Berry Berry Extraordinary sorbet). I can't see you right now. I'll be hanging out with the nonfat Greek yogurt for awhile, probably forever.

I usually don't attach any time frames to losing weight but I am shooting for one mini goal: FitBloggin' 10, which is this coming March (the month I turn 48 -- blaaaargh!) in Baltimore, one of my fave cities. As I write this, there are 131 days until the start of the fitness bloggers' conference, and I told FitBloggin' organizer Roni Noone (of the great blogs Roni's Weigh and GreenLiteBites) that I was going to make a public spectacle of myself to lose 20-something pounds in 20-something weeks.

So here goes:

I hereby vow to lose 20-something pounds (or more, who knows?) by the start of FitBloggin' 10 in March.

My starting weight is ...

(OMG, I'm not that brave! Suffice to say I weigh the same as Miami Dolphins fullback Lousaka Polite. You figure it out. Dude's got 7 inches on me.)

Every weekend I'm going to tell y'all how I did with the eating and the moving and the scale. And I promise I'll post more over here, even as I obsess over The Biggest Loser at Examiner.com. This is where I get to do all the "me me me" stuff.

And hey, "you you you" -- I need your support and encouragement. Tweet me, leave me comments, tell me I can do it. Losing weight sure isn't as easy as it was when I was in my 20s. But back then, when I lost 40 pounds, I did it with focus and determination and without Ben & Jerry.

I leave you today with the last verse of Coldplay's Nobody Said It Was Easy. Consider it a breakup song with Ben & Jerry:

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start.