Am I A Writer Now?

I am back!

My last post was on Mother’s Day and today, a month and 3 days later, it is Father’s Day and I am finally getting the time to sit down, focus and share my thoughts. My break from blogging wasn’t intentional. There were so many days that I had planned to write, had my topics and thoughts all planned out in my head but the time, oh my, the time – It has been so hard to find the time to sit down and just write.

Believe me, it hasn’t been a lack of inspiration that has prevented me from sitting down and assembling my thoughts. I find inspiration in so many things that I have even created a list of topics I’d like to someday blog about but it’s carving out those few hours to write and properly edit without interruption that has been challenging me lately.

I like to find a quiet area, usually the chair by my bedroom window, to sit and write; but recently, my life has been full, fuller than usual with things and people and events and stuff that has consumed all of my free time, if there is even such a thing as free time. And of course, let’s not forget about work – the thing you do that actually pays the bills that have to be done and must be prioritized.

We all have full lives and we tend to use the word busy to describe the fullness of our lives but the truth is we make time for the things and people that matter to us most, as such I am almost upset with myself for my unintentional hiatus from something I enjoy so much.

My Blog is my baby and I feel like a neglectful Mom that I haven’t been keeping up and doing all that I had set out to do with my Blog. My readership should have grown more by now but this stalling hasn’t helped one bit.

Alas, I am okay with it though because like my Mom always says, “The race is not for the swift but for those who endureth.” My blog will get to where I want it to be someday, I am sure of that, but for right now, I’ll just go with the flow and write not only when I find the inspiration but most importantly when I can find the time instead of trying to force myself into a schedule.

I have had a few of my fellow bloggers, followers, and friends reach out to me to ask where I have been. They actually miss my writing enough to contact me and say “What’s up? Where have you been? I miss your writing! When are you going to post another piece?”

Does that mean I am a writer now?

People actually want to “read” me. This has validated me in so many ways and given me enough confidence to start to think of myself as a writer since there are real live humans out there who have an interest in my blog posts and actually look forward to reading my words. 😃

The one thing I have been consistent with though is my quest to lose weight. I am down an additional 6 pounds since You’re Getting Fat! Of course, I wish I could report that I had already attained my goal weight, which is still a whopping 11 pounds away. These days the weight seems to take much longer to come off than when I first started the weight loss journey. It’s times like these when I eradicate my frustration by again remembering my mother’s favorite saying, “The race is not for the swift but for those who endureth” and focus and how far I have actually come and the 24 pounds that I was able to get rid of.

My new eating habits is a lifestyle change though so I’m confident that I’ll eventually get to my goal weight. I am pleased with my progress and I am excited about being able to fit into all those dresses in my closet that I could no longer wear because of my weight gain over the last few years, which has already started happening. I can’t begin to describe the euphoria of being able to slide into a dress I hadn’t worn since my 40th birthday, 5 years ago, or the experience I had when I went shopping recently for a dress for my friend’s wedding and realized that I have gone from a size 14 to a size 10!

Oh, that awesome feeling of not having to suck in my gut. Ahhhhh…You have no idea!😁

To all those who had missed my Blog and reached out to me, thank you for making a girl feel like she can actually write, the validation is wonderful. It feels fantastic to be missed, I am back now praying for consistency and hoping to still be able to keep you interested. 😉

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You’re Getting Fat!

“Babe, your thighs are looking a little chunky there in my boxers.”

I was startled out of my daydreaming. That was the sound of my husband’s voice but clearly, I wasn’t hearing the words spoken accurately. Did my husband just tell me I am getting fat?

I have a habit of wearing his boxers around the house and as I waddled up the stairs to our bedroom those were the words I heard coming out of his mouth. He was behind me.

“Did you just call me fat?” I said challengingly.

“Your thighs didn’t use to look like that in my boxers.”

“Like what?” I said threateningly, as I spun around to look directly at him.

“So big.” He said matter of factly. “Did you gain some weight?”

I was horrified! My husband did just call me fat.

I tried to answer but I stumbled over my words because this was a completely new one in our marriage. My sweet, dear husband, who, on my worst days always has something nice to say to me about my weight was now telling me I was fat. How many times have I squeezed into a dress that was obviously too tight and asked him if I looked fat and he always told me I looked “great”. I could feel and even look like a bloated pig and my darling husband always tells me I look great, he has always maintained that I am not fat yet here he was staring defiantly at my thunder thighs while asking if I had gained weight.

I was so hurt. I felt the tears forming in the corner of my eyes. Don’t blink, Racquel, don’t blink. I felt defeated. I was so hurt I couldn’t even get mad. Truth be told I had packed on the pounds, quite a bit of it too.
I sighed and tried hard not to let my husband see how much his innocent words had affected me, “Yeah, I think I gained a little.”
“How much?” He asked. Oh my Gawd, why won’t he stop talking???!!!
“I’m not sure.” I lied.
Of course, I knew how much weight I had gained. I weigh myself at least twice a week. I have been doing so for years. I had noticed the numbers steadily climbing for quite some time now but I was in denial. At first, I fooled myself into thinking it was muscle gain, after all, I lifted weights regularly in the gym; then my clothes started getting super snug and I explained that away since clothes generally shrink after a while when you wash and or dry clean them so, of course, that’s the reason my clothes were now tight. I was in major denial.😟
A few days later, hubby and I were getting dressed to attend our annual Christmas Ball and the zipper on my gown would not go all the way up.
WTF??!!!
Luckily, my Mom was visiting for the Holidays and was able to do some kind of trick with the zipper allowing me to still wear the gown but boy was I uncomfortable all night. I looked gorgeous in the dress, take a look at The Good, The Bad & The Downright Ugly but I didn’t feel gorgeous at all. When you stop feeling gorgeous that’s when you know it’s time for a change.

Weight Watchers

As cliché as it sounds, I decided that I would embark on a new, healthier me for the New Year. I had some success on Weight Watchers back in 2010 so a few days after the Christmas Ball, while examing the increase in cellulite on my thighs, as my husband’s words replayed on repeat in my head, I joined WW again.

I had heard about the Keto diet, which seems to be all the rage these days so I did some research on it but I wasn’t interested in trying anything which forced me to eliminate entire food groups. I needed something sustainable, a program that I could possibly keep doing for the rest of my life, as such I joined WW on December 31, 2018, and I am happy to report that it’s been 3.5 months and I am still sticking to the program.

My favorite thing about WW is that you can eat pretty much anything, no foods are forbidden, as long as you don’t go over your allotted caloric intake, or as Weight Watchers calls it your “points”. Mind you, those points go extremely fast.

When I first joined WW my daily allotted points would be all gone by lunchtime. I would freak out because it would literally be midday and I would have consumed all my daily calories. This frequent occurrence forced me to turn to the zero points food in order to sustain me throughout the rest of the day.

WW has named quite a number of foods such as grilled chicken breast, vegetables, and fruits zero points food. You’re permitted to eat as much of these foods as you want and not use any of your daily points. These zero points foods have saved me many times but it had gotten to the point where if I ate one more grilled chicken salad (without dressing) for dinner I was going to keel over and die. 😁

I hate boring food, and I especially detest vegetables. I am not much of a broccoli, eggplant, kale kind of person. I am a carnivore – a kind of meat and potatoes kind of gal so this is where I had to learn portion control. I had to exercise discipline and cut my eyes past that 10-ounce ribeye and instead whet my appetite with a more reasonable portion. Man, that was/is hard.

Portion control is the most difficult part of the program for me. I still struggle with eating just a cup of chips instead of ripping open a bag of Lays Wavy while reading and just popping a few pieces in my mouth every few minutes until the entire bag is gone.

I have developed some healthy habits on the program though, like juicing. Since I don’t like eating my vegetables (I swear I sound like a 4-year-old 😃) I had to learn to juice them and mix them with fruits in order to make it more palatable. The Nutri Bullet which I have had sitting in my kitchen cabinet for years has proven to be a godsend.

Exercise

Another great thing about Weight Watchers is that you get to eat your activity points. The more you exercise the more you get to eat. Each and every activity you can think of, even something as simple as walking the dog, is outlined in the WW app and has points value attached to it. Therefore, the longer I stay on the elliptical, the more points I get back so that I can devour that 10-ounce ribeye. 😉

I challenge myself daily to see how much activity points I can attain just so I can eat them later that day. If I want to have that martini or glass of wine then I have to stay on that treadmill or in the weight room or do an extra challenging class so I can earn that reward, this forces me to workout at least 5 days a week. Thankfully, I actually like working out and enjoy (yes, I said enjoy) going to the gym.

It’s been 3.5 months and as of this morning, I’m officially down 21.2 pounds. The first 10 pounds seem to come off steadily, then I struggled to get down to a 15-pound loss, and I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it was to reach 20. It seemed as if each and every time I got down to a 20 lb loss, that I’d wake up the next morning and gain back a pound or two sometimes even three. It’s a nightmare! I’m still not even comfortable announcing the 20+ lbs weight loss because it has been a struggle to maintain and sometimes it feels as if I have plateaued.

Plateaued or not, I am not about to give up because the non-scale victories blow my mind, like the fact that I can now fit in clothes I haven’t worn in years, that my jeans no longer pinch my inner thighs, that I can actually see a reduction in my cellulite (even though they aren’t all gone), that I have lost inches off of my waist (my girlfriend told me recently that my waist looked “snatched”), that I feel stronger, that my skin is glowing, that I can now see my collar-bone and my husband, the one who started all of this, has remarked that I shouldn’t “lose too much weight” because he doesn’t “like skinny girls”. 😉