Chatty Weekend Recap

I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie

To the hip, hip-hop and you don't stop the rockin'

To the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie

To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat

You're welcome and kudos if you rapped it.

source

I hope you had a bitchin' weekend and are rested to begin another weekly grind.  (Me either.)  Friday I took down the tree.  All other Christmas accoutrements are still up because that was all I had in me and I'm good with that.  The room always looks so empty with it gone but when the stuff is off the floor, we're grateful for a little more moving room in the shoebox.  

Last week, we were formulating how we were going to do a new to us approach to weight loss.  I came across some YouTubers who are big number crunching gals and the stuff they said made some sense to us as we were dreading going back to the usual BS we've done for over 10 years.  Basically the gist was instead of following a massive calorie deficit and grueling exercise programs that throw your body into constant inflammation and stress, you start with an 11% deficit of your TDEE maintenance calories and do exercise you enjoy like walking, chasing your kids at the park, strength training maybe 2-3x week and make stress control/sleep a priority.  Track everything as far as how you feel, if you're going through some emotional crap, periods, your food, etc.  When you hit a plateau, you bump up to maintenance calories for a week and if you see something needs tweaking like your stress or sleep and then go back to the deficit.  Does that sound too good to be true?  Maybe.  But a lot of people said they were killing themselves with HIIT, tons of exercise, following the calories from calculators and not losing, or worse, gaining for all of their efforts.  This sounded familiar and since we're beginning again while still wading through grief and needing something to focus on, this sounded like a new approach that was somewhat exciting for us.  The biggest thing though was a TDEE calculation gave us a number so outrageous for our 'maintenance' calories that we were not comfortable with it even after subtracting 11%.   The spreadsheet those ladies created (which you have to pay for with their coaching services) is shown in enough of their videos you can see the columns.  It tracks fat mass and muscle mass.  I found a very inexpensive scale with over 160K positive reviews that measured both as well as other metrics.  So I added it to cart and we had it the same day.  Come Saturday on weigh in day, we were able to measure our body fat.

source

When we went to the TDEE calculator and were able to enter the missing body fat percentage in there, it made a huge difference in our maintenance calories which I don't know if that was ever mentioned in their videos.  So subtracting 11% from those numbers seemed much more manageable to us and we're going all in on this philosophy for a bit because we're just ready for something different that doesn't leave us feeling broken.  It will also be nice to potentially have new metrics to use because if there are weeks the scale doesn't move and I feel like I've been perfect and done all I could do, it could tell me maybe body fat went down a little or something like that.  Who knows.  We'll see.  

We both agree we still need our high cal days but we would put a cap on them calorie wise.  We got close and added exercise by walking at a park which we don't normally do on Saturday.

It was cold but nice to be out and about and later I used my floor bike to get me to 500 calories burned for the day.  We concentrated on eating slower and made sure to get way more water in than normal Saturdays.  Actually I started all last week with chugging my 25 oz water bottle before getting out of bed which was a big help in me getting to my goal of a gallon of liquid a day.  I've made it two weeks in a row before and this is the start of week two so we'll see if I can pull a week three out of my bum next week.  I made a point to try to focus on my sleep last week.  You all know I'm a bonafide night owl like my mama and 12:30-2am is a normal bedtime for me and then broken, crap sleep most nights especially the past year.  So I made a point to tell the Golden Girls I was going to have to break our nightly date and put on some dark ambient scenes from YouTube to eliminate the flashing and annoyances of commercials.  I made a point to attempt to stop scrolling by 11:30-11:45, pop in my earplug, have my nightly chat with Mom then do a 'stress scan' and start with the top of my head and move down to purposeful unclench.  This seemed to have me asleep within 20 minutes every night except one.  The night we watched a show before bed called Rico to the Rescue on HGTV where the dude helps people who have been screwed by contractors and calls them in to either recoup money/help out or calls them out and it made my body as hard as concrete.  My shoulders tensed, my heart rate shot up and I could NOT shake it at all.  So that night's sleep was horrible.  I immediately took it off the DVR schedule.  I told the Mr he could watch it if he wanted to but I couldn't because it brought back too many bad memories with our contractors over the past 3 years.  So there's the sleep portion that I'm trying to take care of.

With a new plan and needing to up our protein meant a lot of groceries and trying to figure out how the hell to do it all, what we could prep ahead of time but that would be a Sunday activity.  Saturday prep of a different kind went on.  I had been uploading our tax documents into our tax program and it said efile wasn't available until the 29th.  Well, the tax lady was like "I've started working on your return" and I'm like "uh...I was just uploading documents."  (I usually do them then have someone look them over at the end to make sure they're right and I like to do that as a control freak.  Their question system seems to get more convoluted and frustrating every year so I wasn't exactly looking forward to it especially with Mom's stuff in the mix.)   Then she's like "it's done, I've applied a $100 coupon to make it more reasonable" and I told her we always do them, I didn't realize she was doing the whole thing and what is her idea of reasonable because we weren't planning on paying more.  I was freaking the hell out because we're at a money bleed right now and she wasn't telling me the total.  I told her what we were used to paying and waited for her response.  She ended up applying a ton of discounts and got us to $40 less than we've paid and she did it all for us which was a first.  I was beyond thankful since I didn't know how death stuff all figured in and it took a huge mental burden off of me this year.  

Then came Sunday and prep time.  The Mr had soaked some beans overnight and got them cooking in the crockpot for adding to salad and eggs and stuff.  I made a protein breakfast for each of us to have two days this week with an egg, egg whites, garlic hummus, cottage cheese and nutritional yeast whipped up in the Magic Bullet.  Then I put them in some glass dishes with 2 cubed slices of Canadian bacon, black beans, onions and red peppers and popped all four into our family sized Hot Logic in the dining room so it wasn't taking up valuable kitchen space while cooking.  Then I had to make lunch and a bit of a complicated dinner so I felt like I was doing nothing but cooking all day which I did not care for.  Meal prep is always my nemesis.  Sounds so good until you actually realize how long it all takes.  Pfft.  When I'd had enough and we let lunch settle a bit, we went down and did this Fitness Blender upper body strength session.  I still kept my weights low at 8, 10 and 15's because my left shoulder is probably a good two weeks out from not feeling like it's going to fall out of the socket.  We got a decent little burn to bank and I figured since I was making a new to me recipe that was going to require about a 40 minute cook time on one ingredient that I'd better get to it.    So I went back into the kitchen and got to work on the sweet potato nachos I scrolled past at some point to see if they were a rotation meal or not worth all of the trouble.

Crap...they're worth the trouble.  😕  Maybe not every week but I thought the Mr was going to kiss me long on the mouth for that one.  That about did me in and my feet were definitely not appreciative.  Which brings us to now.

Oh, before I forget...I hate to have to ask this but if you follow me on Facebook, can you please make sure you throw a "like" at a post even if you don't get to read it when you see it?  Algorithms have changed again and if you don't, I won't show up in your feed and that is being highly reflected in the numbers.  You may need to only do it for a week or two for it to be consistent, I don't know.  I don't make money here so I don't have $14 PER POST to 'have the potential to reach 532 people' and some of them may not even be my regulars.  I barely break even through the generosity of those who click on Amazon links or put up with those curse worthy Google ads that literally took me 18 months to get $100 from.  I'm just trying to be transparent with y'all!

How was your weekend?  Any meal prep, walks, shenanigans to share?

====================
Follow me on Bloglovin. Some posts may contain affiliate links that help keep this blog running at no cost to you.  See the Disclaimer page for more info. All posts copyright Success Along the Weigh. All rights reserved.