Weighty

I began a month or so back to give my weight a little bit of… weight in my mission to tone up for the spring, summer, fall… and for life. I talked about how I gained a few pounds over the winter and it was annoying me. To track my progress (or lack of progress), I began to weigh myself once a week on Wednesday mornings after my workout before beginning my day. I found that my weight fluctuates a lot:

• 4/20: 159.1
• 4/27: 158
• 5/4: 156.6
• 5/11: 159
• 5/18: 156.8

Before the brutally, painfully cold winter, I was hovering between 151-154. 

What I forgot to recognize was that this weight gain could be partially from muscle gain. I do the elliptical and now use weights 3-4 times per week. Does anyone know if that could result in muscle gain? (The elliptical use, I mean, as using weights definitely causes muscle gain.) An as aside, I’m currently eating around 1300 calories/day. I know I need to up my protein and fiber intake, for sure. 

I know my weight doesn’t make me a good or bad person and it’s not even a particularly good indicator of general health if you’re in a safe range (obviously if you’re 300lbs and 5′4″, there’s an issue), but it’d be nice loose 5 or so pounds which shouldn’t be all that hard because I lost around 40 initially.

Am I about to give up peanut butter and cupcakes? No. Peanut butter is a food group to me. That’s probably why weighing 147 again will never be possible (which is what I weighed at my lowest when I first lost all of my weight, in a healthy way, in 2011-2012). And overall, I generally like how I look so I’m not willing to purge or starve myself. Please, I like food way too much to not eat it or waste it by regurgitating it. I might try to stop eating so much Italian bread though (the kind you get at restaurants). That shit is great but it’s mostly empty calories.

There probably isn’t really any advice that anyone could give because I like what I like, but i just thought I’d put it out there. 

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Food Cleanse, Post-Holiday

While abroad, I subsisted mostly from carbs (mini croissants, muffins, cinnamon rolls), meat, and the occasional carrot and potato. And coffee. So much coffee. They eat a lot of meat over there. They have the occasional vegetarian option (no, I’m not a vegetarian) but mostly all meals include meat. They have a ton of Mexican and Italian restaurants over there too (what) but I did not go to Scandinavia to eat Chiptole. 

So, I ate all of the meat. I ate deer, elk, and reindeer. I handed over the contents of my bank account on my first night in Helsinki for some seriously delicious reindeer. I kid, it wasn’t my whole bank account but it was probably the most expensive meal I’d had over there and it was worth every cent. 

They offered salads at certain places, but it’s rather cold in those countries so I’m pretty sure anything they were serving was being shipped from thousands of miles away so I ate regionally, as much as my body may have hated it. Aside from the occasional yogurt and granola at breakfast, I ate almost entirely differently from how I eat on the regular. I went 12 days without eating peanut butter (seriously, a guy from Hawaii who was working in a shop in the Stockholm Arlanda airport said that peanut butter is very American). 

Anyways, yesterday I started a week-long, self-imposed cleanse. Not a liquid cleanse because those are bullshit, but one with whole foods. I had a beet-carrot-apple juice for breakfast yesterday (okay, with coffee) and a kale salad with a little bit of grilled chicken for lunch (I was so excited for this). I broke down during the afternoon when I was very, very tired and ate the almond croissant that my dude had brought to the airport the night before incase I was hungry after 10 hours of traveling. Then I just had a piece of Ezekiel bread with almond butter on it for dinner. I wasn’t all that hungry anyway.

Hopefully I will have re-adjusted to my normal routine by the end of the week. 

Homemade Protein-Packed Peanut Butter Cups {Healthy, Easy & Sugar Free!}

I need to eat more protein so I’m putting this here as a reminder to try making these. Nom. 

And this too. And these. 

Homemade Protein-Packed Peanut Butter Cups {Healthy, Easy & Sugar Free!}