Wow, I can’t believe another week has passed by already!  I guess going back to work last Monday has certainly made time pass more quickly.

I don’t have a weigh in to report this week because I wasn’t able to make it to my Weight Watchers meeting yesterday.  I’ve had a bit of a setback with the recovery from my knee surgery.  It started hurting again about a week ago and has just gotten progressively worse.   By the time yesterday morning rolled around, I knew I needed to stay home and keep my knee iced and elevated.  Thankfully, I have an appointment with my surgeon on Tuesday for my one month post-op checkup so I can hopefully find out what’s going on with it.

In other news, did anyone get out to take in the Supermoon on Saturday night?  Being the space geek that I am, I couldn’t resist getting out on my patio with my camera and snapping a couple of photos.

Canon EOS Rebel T3i - F/22 - 1/800 - ISO 3200

Canon EOS Rebel T3i - F/22 - 1/640 - ISO 3200

While I was home this weekend, I also took the opportunity to give myself a manicure.  The color choice du jour was Mistress by Ciaté which I purchased online from Sephora.  I LOVE this red!!

Ciaté Mistress

I pretty new to the Ciaté line of polishes.  I recently ordered three colors and I’ve tried two of them so far.  I have to say that I’ve been very pleased with them so far.  They wear really well!  I normally start feeling like I need a touch-up after 3-4 days when I use my beloved OPI polishes.  With these, I don’t start getting that feeling until around the fifth day which is awesome!  When doing my own manicure, my standard method is one coat of base coat, two coats of polish, and topped off with one coat of Seche Vite dry fast top coat.

Until next time …

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Welcome Back Flowers

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It’s Monday, so that means it’s time for another weight loss check in for me.  I went into my Weight Watchers meeting yesterday a bit leery about how I would actually do given I’d lost over 6 pounds total in my two previous weigh ins.  In the past, whenever I had two really good weeks like that, I would usually either maintain or even have a small gain sometimes.  I’m thrilled to report that wasn’t the case this time!  I was down another 0.8 pounds this week which is practically a full pound.

As I mentioned in last week’s Metal Monster Monday post, I was kind of hoping to hit a total of 8 pounds gone for the month of April with my weigh in this week.  I fell a bit shy of that goal, but I still managed to drop a total of 7.4 pounds this month and I’m very pleased with that fact!   I certainly didn’t gain all this weight over night, so I’m not expecting to lose it overnight either.

Honestly, I’ll be thrilled as long as I can lose an average of a pound per week, as will my doctor.  He’s told me repeatedly that he would like me to shoot for about 1 – 2 pounds per week which is right on track with what Weight Watchers recommends as well (1/2 – 2 pounds per week).  The orthopedic surgeon who did my knee surgery a couple of weeks ago would be thrilled with that as well.  He told me during one of my visits that for every 10 extra pounds of weight one carries, it puts THIRTY extra pounds of pressure on the knees.  Wow!  Yeah, that’s some motivation.

At my meeting yesterday, the leader was encouraging all of the members to really take advantage of the free eTools membership we get as monthly pass holders.  Up to this point, I’ve mostly used my eTools membership only for tracking purposes and for using the Recipe Builder to calculate PointsPlus™ values for recipes that don’t include nutritional information.  One of the areas she specifically talked about were the various challenges that are available in the Community section of eTools.  I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I decided to check it out when I got home from the meeting and grocery shopping.

After putting away my groceries and making a bite of lunch, I settled in to cruise around eTools.  Jacki (my leader) was right.  There are TONS of challenges out there!  After searching around for a bit, I decided to join in on three different challenge that I think all sound pretty cool and very attainable (Note: must be an eTools subscriber for these links to work):

• Cook Up Something New
• Lose 10 Pounds by the 4th of July
• OP Every Day in May

I think they all seem pretty straight forward as to what each challenge entails.  Just to be safe, I’ll give a bit of detail anyway as well as my plan for each challenge.

Cook Up Something New – In this challenge, participants are encouraged to make at least one new recipe per week.  I’m going to expand that a bit and make it be either cook a new recipe or try a new food.   By participating in this challenge, I hope to break out of my typical rut of eating the same foods all the time.  I’ll try to remember to update each week with the new food/recipe I tried.

Since this is now a challenge goal for me, I spent part of the afternoon looking through a new cookbook I purchased recently.  It’s called Eat More of What You Love by registered dietitian, Marlene Koch.  I flagged a LOT of recipes I want to try because they sound soooooo good!  One of the things I love best about this cookbook is that each recipe includes not only the basic nutritional information, but it also includes diabetic exchanges and PointsPlus™ values.  How good is this cookbook?  Well, it just hit the New York Times Bestsellers list yesterday coming in at #13 in the Hardcover Advice & Misc. category!  If you want to get an idea of what her recipes are like, check out the free recipes section of her website.  If you’re interested, she’s also on Facebook and Twitter.

Lose 10 Pounds by the 4th of July – Initially I thought that seemed like a pretty low weight loss goal since July 4th seems a long time from now, but then I did the math and realized it’s only nine weeks from now!  Given that means losing an average of slightly more than a pound per week, it doesn’t seem so low anymore.

I’ll actually be going on a cruise to Alaska in the latter part of July and would love to be down 15 pounds by the time I go on vacation.  I have 11 weeks until then, so if I’m really diligent in my efforts, I can meet this goal as well since that averages out to less than 1.5 pounds per week.  It won’t be a “give me” goal, but it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility either.

OP Every Day in May – I basically decided to join this challenge in an effort to help me reach my goals outlined in the previous challenge.  For those unfamiliar with the OP acronym, it stands for “on program” or “on plan” depending upon whom you ask.  I’ve always considered it as on program.  Here is what OP will mean for me during this challenge:

1. Track my food in eTools every day.
2. Do not exceed my Daily Target/Weeky Points Allowance limits for the week.
3. Check off all of my Healthy Guideline check boxes every day.

That last one will probably be my biggest challenge.  I freely admit I’m horrible about getting in my healthy oils.  It’s extremely rare that I check off the oil boxes, so I want to work on that.

Well, that’s my check in for this week.  Here’s to another great OP week!

Until next time …

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Yay for bunnies!!

Thanks, Annette!

April TUSAL

Year to date TUSAL - April

That’s my April update for TUSAL.  Until next time …

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I’ve decided to make Monday my check-in day  for my weight loss journey here on my blog going forward.  The Weight Watchers meeting I attend is on Sunday, so that gives me Sunday afternoon and/or evening to write my post for Monday.  Given I’m heading back to work next Monday (finally!), I think this plan will work well.  I’m dubbing my new plan Metal Monster Monday.  For those that don’t understand the reference, the metal monster is what I call my scale.

Things have actually been going really well with my weight loss since my knee surgery!  I think the fact that I can finally starting getting some exercise again is making all the difference.  In fact, I was down 3.4 pounds at my meeting yesterday.  That makes a total of 6.6 pounds lost thus far for the month of April.  I’m not setting a specific number goal for this week, but I would love to hit a total of at least 8 pounds gone for the month if possible.  That means I definitely need to stay on the tracking p’s & q’s this week!

After I left the meeting, I headed to the grocery store to stock up on lots of healthy food for the week.  I was kind of stoked about one particular item I found:

If you recall, I had some amazing grilled carrots for my birthday dinner back in February.  When I saw these on sale in the produce section, I couldn’t resist picking them up to have a go at trying to recreate them at home.  Time will tell whether I succeed.

Here’s another new item I picked up to try:

C’mon now, how could I not buy salad mix with “happiness” in the name?!   It has a very interesting combination of ingredients, too.  Check it out:

I’m not sure that tango and mizuna are, but I look forward to trying it.   I also found one other new thing that I decided to try:

They’re little baby biscotti and are delish!  You could probably eat one in a single bite, but I eat them in two bites to make them last longer.   They are 1 PointsPlus value each and trust me when I tell you, these things are awesome with coffee.

Given that Spring is definitely here in SoCal, there were also some amazing deals on produce this week.  Here are just a few of the other goodies that made their way into my cart:

Bell Peppers - 99 cents each

Strawberries - 99 cents

Pink Lady Apples - $1.49/lb

As you can see, I’ve definitely set myself up for success this week.  Now I just have to stick with my plan and all should be good!

Until next time …

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