The Nifty Foodie's Life

Weight loss comes with a lot of changes. Both mental and physical. Sometimes, they’re wonderful, and sometimes, they’re kind of depressing (realizations mainly).

One of the biggest changes is my closet. I mentioned to y’all that my sister gave me her “before” clothes. Well, shortly after that, a friend from college offered me some of her clothes (she’s lost a lot of weight as well!). I told her to send me whatever you don’t want, and she filled up two bins worth of clothes. Whoa…

So, I organized my closet, and quickly realized that I needed to pare down on some things. My “before” clothes. Some of those clothes in my closet were from college. So, I went through my closet, and got rid of everything but my size 26 “before” jeans. It filled up two bins and two garbage bags.

A friend from high school happened to message me about my clothes (since she saw my weight loss statuses on there), asking me if I had anything in her size, she’d love to have it. Well, after going through my closet, that friend is getting two bins of clothes. (I placed the larger sizes in the garbage bags for the clothes drop box down the street.)

It was weird packing those clothes away forever. Those clothes held memories (bad and good), and I could easily go in my closet and know what to wear. I memorized everything I had. It was easy to get dressed in the morning for work…VERY easy.

After paring down and re-organizing my closet, I looked in there and realized that I probably had more clothes in there now than I did to begin with (originally). Crazy. Then, a good blogger friend asked me if I’d like to have some of her “before” clothes. Her before clothes are smaller than the clothes I received from my sister and my other friend, so I definitely knew that I could eventually use them (I hope..), so she shipped those over to me (Thank God for flat rate boxes!). Knowing that I have clothes in sizes 10-14 now in my closet (with size 10 being my ultimate goal size…I think) is SO incredible. My closet is beyond full with the help of generous friends and family! It’s wonderful.

One of my biggest worries with my weight loss journey was clothes. Clothes aren’t cheap, and I work in a fairly professional environment 5 days/week. Yeah…work clothes, especially, aren’t cheap. So, I’m very thankful. As much as I want to shop and buy everything in a regular size, it’s definitely easy to steer clear of the mall knowing that I have all of these options.

The only negative feeling that I have is that everything in there is new (to me). These clothes are unfamiliar, and it’s weird to not really have memories from the clothes in my closet. Am I the only one who wears a shirt, and can almost instantly remember something that happened before while I was wearing that shirt? It will take some getting used to, but this is my life right now. Lots of unfamiliar changes.

• If you stepped outside in Louisiana today, you’d have no idea it was May. February? Sure. March? A stretch…..but May? It’s chilly outside…my poor flowers are crying for consistency, Mother Nature. Hot and humid consistency!

• I love Diet Coke. I know it’s full of chemicals that eat away at metal or something, but I love it. I need one every morning. Preferably fountain. Judge away, but this is just how I feel!

• You know you like to bake when butter goes on sale, and you feel the need to buy 5 or more boxes at a time when that happens. I also like to confuse the cashier with said butter purchases. 6 boxes of butter, a bunch of cilantro, four limes and a box of eggs were in my cart. I don’t know about you, but when I used to be a cashier in high school, I had fun figuring out what people were cooking up based on their grocery cart. Beer, potatoes, lemons, onions, and frozen corn on the cob = seafood boil. 10 packs of hot dogs, 10 lbs.of ground beef, buns, chips and soda = cook out. I’m sure butter, cilantro, limes and eggs were a real head-scratcher, if my cashier that day was anything like me.

• I’m gonna brag on my sister today. She’s a music performance major, and every time I go to her performances, I’m blown away by her improvement. On the way to see said performance on Thursday, I had Phantom of the Opera blasting in my car (in stand-still traffic), and I was seriously jamming (rather off-key) to it. Yeah, I jam to musicals..so what? Didn’t realize guy in the car in the next lane was listening in on my off-key antics and giving me major side-eye. Oh well…enjoy? I so don’t have the vocal talent in my family (my two sisters both sing beautifully). Embedding the video below…you have to fast forward to 23:45 on it, if you’re interested.

Video streaming by Ustream

• Have any of y’all been keeping up with the 52 Week Savings Plan? I’ve been doing it religiously every week, being sure to pay myself in a little savings account using my personal $ (what my husband and I call fun money). I know a lot of people say it’s a terrible idea, but it’s not my husband and I’s way of saving $$, I promise..it’s more a personal savings account for me to splurge when I hit my weight loss goal. I’m sure I’ll have a bunch leftover after that, but knowing that I could potentially have $1300 saved up for a new closet is pretty fantastic, don’t you think?

• Need some weight loss motivation? I love reading Runs for Cookies blog, especially since she started her Motivational Monday posts. This is where readers post about their weight loss victories and she shares them. I look forward to it every week! I just love reading about people who are going through the same things I am on their weight loss journeys. It’s so relatable, and helps me step away from the junk food cravings.

Have a great weekend y’all!

It’s always a bummer to write news of a gain on here. I know what I’ve been doing wrong ::coughsplurgescough::, and I’ve been slacking in my weight training. One of the things I realize in moments like this is that I’m only human. I will make mistakes along this journey, and this is where I learn those harsh lessons. Going back to my old ways certainly shows up on the scale…

Week 67′s Weight: 225.0
Today’s Weight: 227.8

Weight Lost: +2.8 lbs.
Total Weight Lost: 70.7 lbs.

I’m not beating myself up too much, though. I know what I need to do to get back on track, and I can’t wait to see those numbers go back down again.

Some thoughts about the past week:

• I’m still so thrilled that I was able to run a 5K non-stop. It just feels so unreal. It makes the half marathon that I signed up for seem absolutely doable. Last year, I was struggling with Couch to 5K, and now I run 2-3 miles for a work-out like it’s no big deal. Ch-ch-changes!

• While I gained weight, I’m going to focus on what I’ve done so far. I find myself being negative about 70 lbs., thinking that it’s really not THAT much weight lost (yeah, I’m weird). However, my husband bought a bike machine for our house and when he told me it weighed 80 lbs, I thought that was ridiculous. Then he said something about how he used to carry that every day (well that + another 35 lbs….he’s lost 115 lbs. y’all). What did I used to carry every day? After doing some googling, 70 lbs. = 14 bags of flour or 7 sacks of potatoes or 8 gallons of water or 2 bags of cypress mulch. It is unbelievable that I carried that extra weight around every day. So, while I gained 2.8 lbs. (whatever), I’m excited about the progress I’ve made so far.

• 70.7 lbs. down. 50-ish more to go. Oh…and 227.8 lbs. means only 27.9 lbs. until ONEDERLAND! Wowza.

TGIF! I can’t believe it’s Friday…this week sort of flew by!

• Since the DietBet ended, I’ve been splurging just a tad too much lately. Oops. I just had one of those weeks where I just had craving after craving after craving. Don’t you just hate that? I notice if I go back to eating junk food, all I crave is, well…more junk food. It’s taken a lot to get back on track, but here I am. I guess I just needed a little break. :-\

• When we moved into this house a couple of years ago, the garden was really nothing but a bunch of irises, amaryllises and a huge crape myrtle right dab in front of the window of our house. I ended up digging up all the bulbs, and moving them to different parts of the garden in clusters to make room for shrubs and annuals. H ended up cutting down and digging up the crape myrtle too. This was about a year or so ago, and as of this week, they finally bloomed. OMG…they’re gorgeous! I have an amaryllis about to bloom as well. Love all of the color in the garden right now, and just how nice it looks in general since we gave it an overhaul last Fall.

• Last week was Sherwin Williams’ big 40% off sale. We’ve been wanting to paint a few rooms in the house, and so we bought a couple of gallons to do that. The chips that are pulled are for our kitchen and guest bathroom (whatever we use in our guest will eventually be painted in the master as well…we’re just doing this a little at a time). I know the kitchen color may look a TAD drastic…I promise it really brightens the room. I can’t wait to take some pictures to show y’all how it looks now!

• I’ve had my eye on this particular shirt for quite some time, telling myself that I’d only buy it if I fit in the female cut of this shirt. This shirt just screams New Orleans to me…Winter = Mardi Gras ladder, Spring = crawfish season, Summer = snoball season and Fall = FOOTBALL! They had a flash sale on this particular shirt earlier this week (50% off OMG), and I had to scoop it up! However, when trying it on last night, I didn’t realize how small American Apparel shirts run. I think the shirt will look a lot better on me in about 10-20 lbs. It’s a bit snug. Oh well…motivation, right?

• I can’t believe we’re almost in May now. February seemed to drag, and March/April have just flown by! I am super excited about May though, because Food Blog Forum is in 3 short weeks! I can’t wait to meet a bunch of food bloggers that I’ve been following for years, and get my hands on a Dole Whip! (What? Priorities, people!) May also is our anniversary month…can’t believe we’re approaching our 4th year anniversary. Crazy how time flies!

I was pretty nervous about this race. For one, they had the race scheduled to start at 10am, and around here lately, it’s either 85 degrees (full-on humidity) or 40 degrees (Brr..). I haven’t had much luck with warmer weather running so far this year, and it makes me wonder how in the heck did I run in 90+ degrees 3 afternoons/week.

We got downtown around 8am, because I was just nervous about the parking situation. I met up with my friends, and we took up a table at the Main Street Market near the farmer’s market to just pass the time. I ordered a peanut butter/banana crepe, because while the smell of bacon permeated around the building, I just wanted to stick to my pre-race tried and true (well, not the crepe part..the pb/b part). Around 9:30, we decided to walk towards the starting line, and we saw this.

::jaw drop::

The starting line was WAYYY up there (beyond the inflatable arch you see in the picture). Goodness…

…and 20 minutes later, this was behind us…

My friend and I realized based on the number of runners, there was no way we’d get a run in today. Just SO many people…it was ridiculous. We were standing around for a while, and realized the race was running pretty late. It was 10:20am, and we were still stuck. My sister heard that they were releasing people in small groups, which makes sense, but had I known, we would have edged towards the front more. Since we were waiting for a while, we decided to take a few random pictures. Here’s us & the shirts that we made with our team name.

I totally googled “color run teams” to find our team name, by the way. It’s not original at all.

Before we knew it, we were in the front section by the starting line. The Color Run folks threw a few promo items, and after that, they mentioned that while this race is about having a good time, we shouldn’t forget about what happened in Boston earlier in the week. They said that a few teams even changed their name to give tribute to the marathoners, which I thought was a great gesture. After pumping up the crowd, they started a countdown, and we started (finally) running at 10:47am.

When we started, we all semi-agreed to stay together. However, I’m a slow poke. I tried to catch up to my friends/sister, but before I knew it, I was battling a nasty side cramp, and decided to slow it down. I didn’t turn on my RunKeeper for this race, because I just didn’t want to obsess over my pace. I wanted to enjoy the Color Run experience, and just have a good, solid run. It was hard to keep running through a side cramp, but I remembered reading somewhere to inhale/exhale hard and that would rid of it. It definitely helped.

After what seemed to be FOREVER, I approached color station #1. Holy cow…major blue cloud!

I wanted to get some color on my race shirt, so I ran along the side and got blasted. LOL! Those volunteers were having the time of their lives, it seemed. After the blue station, my leg cramp started to go away (I usually have leg cramps like crazy the first mile or so…), so I told myself just run to one more color station. I can do this. At this part of the race, I started to get annoyed. I stayed on the left/middle part of the street, because while I’m not the fastest, I certainly was passing a few people up. My annoyance was from the fact that despite the great amount of signs that said “Runners Left/Walkers Right”, no one seemed to give a flip about it. It was hard to go around these groups of friends/families, who were really just strolling along. I didn’t want to stop running, though, so I did yell “Excuse me!” quite a few times to people who just wouldn’t move to the right.

It seemed like it took quite a while to get to the yellow station. I was happy to get there though, because at that point, the streets were a lot wider and I took it as an opportunity to up the pace and pass some groups. And yes, I did get a good bit of yellow color, too. At that point, my legs were feeling fine (surprisingly), and I told myself…one more station.

The pink station came a lot quicker than the yellow one, in my opinion. I was in the zone, running wise, and was so thrilled about it. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the pink station, but I stayed towards the middle since I had a good gap there. Before I knew it, my mouth was FULL of pink cornstarch. Blech…a volunteer got me right in the face. I ended up coughing quite a bit, slowed my pace down to feel back to normal and saw the water station. It was like a God send. Sadly though, the line for the water station was ridiculous. I realized that I was probably a mile from the finish line, so if I could just push through this last mile, I’ll get a bottle of water soon enough.

It was then that my friend called me to tell me she crossed the finish line (and yes, I was jogging while talking on the phone…crazy!). Holy cow…she usually finishes in 30 minutes, so that means I was on track to finish in 45 minutes if I was (what I thought was) a mile away! So, I upped the pace a little bit, and before I knew it, there was the purple station. The last color station. WHEE!

After the purple station, I made the last turn in the street. There it was…the finish line was there. I looked at my clock and realized if I pushed it and made it to the finish line in 3 minutes, I would finish in 42 minutes. OMG. So, I went for it! My legs were a little bit tired, but I was thinking “OMG…I just ran the WHOLE FREAKING 5K. No walk breaks!”

Y’all…I can’t tell you how happy I was. Last summer,  I was straining through 1 minute jogs, and less than a year later, I ran 3.1 miles like it was no big deal. WHAT? I got to the finish area just in time to watch the crowd throw their color packets. So pretty.

I would have ran towards the crowd, but since I was meeting my husband for lunch right after, I didn’t want to get too colorful. Watching from a safe distance was just as fun, though. After the race, I finally met up with my sister and we got an after pic together. I wanted to also get one with my friend, but she had plans that afternoon, and since the race ran a bit over, she had to leave fairly quickly.

All in all, I had a good time at this race. Will I do it again? Probably not. I think it’s a wonderful event for families and friends to get together, but it was just SO crowded. I also think it’s a bit on the spendy side for a race that isn’t timed, so I have a feeling this is my first/last Color Run. I think everyone should give this type of race a try at least once in their lifetime…it’s definitely a different race experience!