I'd grown dissatisfied with how strong and healthy I was feeling and frustrated over clothes that didn't fit anymore. Here's what I've been doing to change that:
– Eating more fresh food and cooking more from scratch.
This is an old habit I'd fallen out of so I have good skills here that just need reviving. One of my biggest tools to help with this is a weekly produce delivery from Planet Organics. They have grocery items as well as produce and even have recently added a CSA box within the order, selectable or not by the week rather than being locked in, which is a big help for folks who travel a lot.
– Walking 10,000 steps or more a day.
Still trying to reach the point where I do this without fail, but the treadmill desk helps a lot. I haven't left the house today and haven't been doing much around the place, but as I write this I'm going 1.9mph and have already hit 3300 steps just catching up with email, doing my weekly review, etc. The tool that helps motivate me here is my Fitbit. I thought about adding a Nike Fuelband, but I tend to hate bracelets since I'm typing a lot of the time.
– Measuring my weight and BMI.
I use a Withings scale for this (Joe has one), but actually track the measurements on the Fitbit site. The other tool that supports me here is the Bang Bang diet app, which is basically a tracker tool for the Hacker's Diet: if you're on track for your weight loss goal, eat normally, and if not, eat light. Haven't tried the Withings app, but am about to try it out.
– Making chopped salads.
I know this shouldn't seem like such a big deal, but I think having one of these every week has really helped, and they're so delicious I feel confident I could up that to twice a week. I got the idea from this Jamie Oliver podcast.
Is it working? Well, after gaining about 10lbs in the last year (when I was actually trying to lose 13lbs), in the last two weeks I've lost over 4lbs. I blame restaurant dining, inactivity, and cocktails, but mostly restaurant food. Now probably half of this recent weight loss comes from when I had food poisoning (not salad related, I'm pretty confident), but even if I am losing a couple pounds a month, I'm going to be feeling a lot better by spring and will have installed some good habits under my skin.
MetaGrrrl 