Chubby Girl in the Skinny Girl's Clothes! This Momma Needs a Style Makeover!

This last week I shipped my final box of maternity clothes off after selling more than 35 items on Ebay.  So they are all gone, all of it!  I really had a good time going through them and remembering times when I wore a certain dress to a wedding or the shirt I wore to my baby shower.  I truly miss maternity jeans.  How nice is it that when they finally hit my problem area (my flabby stomach) there was just a piece of stretch material that kept it all in!  Why can't they just do that with all jeans?!

So I bought this outfit (minus the shoes) from Banana Republic with some of the money from those clothes:

Here, the dress has wider straps and with a large chest I need to wear a regular underwire bra and only if it's a formal even do I pull out a strapless corset.  Also, I watch the material content, is is stretchy (because if that garment plans on stretching across my doughy stomach or thick thighs, I will not be a happy camper!).  But then the package arrives, I try it on, and well, it's cute but looks NOTHING like the picture.  And duh, I don't have long slender legs and a sleek body but I wanted it to look a little better than it did.  For a little while, I shopped at Torrid since it was the first national plus size store in our state.  But you know what, I honestly can't relate to the models and the outfits they put together.  It's just not me.   My friend wears a lot of their stuff and she always looks cute but I just can't pull it off. 

I'm seriously thinking of starting a blog called chubby girl in skinny people's clothes.  Why?  Because I do not have an eye for style so I typically will just buy the outfit as I see it on the model making sure I'm looking at key features that flatter my body.  I'd love to see how girls my size (16 at the moment) are making clothes work for them to wear to the office, lunch with friends, on a date with their husband, etc.
I've read several chubby girl style blogs and a lot of them have outfits that well, my clients would not take me serious at all in, and since I don't go "clubbin'" anymore, they just have no business in my wardrobe.  I'm trying to find a style that is more business casual and can be dressed up or down for an almost 30 year old.  Any blogs or websites you all read out there?  Any favorite clothing stores I should check out?   This momma needs to get some of her sassy-ness back ASAP!

Weekly Weight Watchers Weigh In: Okay, making progress!

I lost .8 lbs:)  I don't want to follow that last sentence by saying I should have done better because, heck, it was almost a full pound!

I stuck to the PCOS diet plan only for 3 days.  The weekend was terrible and I used all my allowance points on Easter which included 22 points of candy, oh my!  There are definitely things I like about the PCOS diet plan but it was very difficult at dinner time when I had a grilled chicken thigh, spring mix green salad, asparagus and a sweet potato because my kids had no interest in eating ANY of it and my husband wasn't thrilled. Like he can handle one meal like that per week but not every night.  And it took a lot of work making a dinner like that with no prepackaged foods only to turn around and have to make the kids something else.  I know I need to do this for me but let's face it, making 2 separate meals a night is exhausting and in no way helps me feel great!!   The lunch I ate from the PCOS diet was definitely filling and easy to pack my lunch the night before.  Only little glitch I had was some days I had to eat in the car on the way to back to back appointments with clients and I couldn't eat the soup.

Our BOB stroller finally arrived!!  My kids went nuts for it the minute my husband had the last piece of it put together.  The oldest climbed right up in it and said, "Ride! Ride!" and Dylan was trying to crawl up in it.  Then they didn't want to get out of it when it was nap time!  We took them on a 40 minute walk and I burned 227 calories which is awesome. 

So I'm feeling good this week and still have 1.2 lbs left to hit the 15 pound mark so I'm trying not to stress and just keep moving forward!  Have a good week everyone!

PCOS Diet Plan: Changing It Up

So here goes, this is what I have stocked in my kitchen to eat this week!

Breakfast:
1 C. Multigrain Cheerios
1/2 C. 1% milk
handful of blueberries

Snack:
Banana

Lunch:
1 Slice whole wheat bread with 1 T. Peanut Butter and 1 tsp. 100% fruit spread
1 C. Chicken noodle soup
1 C. carrots and celery with 2 T. low fat dressing
1 Apple

Snack:
2 wedges Laughing Cow Cheese on 4 Reduced Fat Triscuits and bell pepper strips

Dinner:
3 oz chicken or salmon
1 cup sweet potato with spray butter  (or 2 tsp. smart balance spread, need to check the points value) and cinnamon or 1/2 cup brown rice
1 c. steamed veggies
Small green salad with tablespoon chopped almonds, a few mandarin orange slices, 2 Tb. light Asian dressing
8 oz 1% milk

What do you think?  Seems like a lot of food huh?  Nothing very exciting.  When I did the points value it came out to 6-10 points too much per day....I can see places where I could eliminate food but I'm not sure if that screws up the whole concept of the PCOS diet.  Any thoughts?  Anyone out there that's followed the diet mentioned in the book?  And you'll notice, there is no suggestion of bunny shaped sugar cookies with frosting damn it!

Weekly Weight Watchers Weigh In: Exactly the same

Well, I didn't gain or lose and I guess that will just have to do considering the bad week I had.  This week our leader asked us to focus on tracking everything and it's nice to have that reminder.  I'll have my scale, measuring cups and spoons out and I'll work towards a better loss this week:)

My Love of Baking is Killing my Weight Loss Dreams!!

It's true, I love mixing butter and sugar and flour and making incredibly delicious baked goods or combining yeast and olive oil and bread flour and other add ins in my bread machine and turning it all into a carb addicts little piece of heaven.  I love, love, love to bake and I just have yet to get the satisfaction out of baking healthy foods.

My head is foggy again, I can't seem to focus or complete any goals right now.  I really wanted to have an awesome week of weight loss but here's how my week has been so far.......

Saturday- weighed in then went home and popped in a batch of homemade cinnamon rolls, Clone of Cinnabon, and I could have stopped there and made that my treat for the week.  But nope, I decided to go ahead and make Lemon and Vanilla Bean White Sugar Cookies from Annies-eats.com with Butter cream frosting in the shape of bunnies with the kids.  I ate 4 of these over the course of the week.  First I'd break off one ear and eat it, then I'd go back a few minutes later and break off the other ear, then half of the face, and then, forget it, let's finish that bad boy off because who leaves half of a face of a cookie right?

Sunday- Ate another cinnamon roll (13 pts.).  At our family dinner I ate 3 pieces of garlic bread plus a piece of pumpkin pie with cool whip.

Wednesday- Slightly annoyed by something at work so I decided to eat a package of Special K Strawberry Thin crisps, 2 bunny cookies and 4 OREOS, WTH?  I can tell you how bad I wanted to Oreos by telling you they were in the cabinet above my fridge on top of some pans which required me to use the BBQ tongs that are like 2 feet long and I had to "knock" the package of Oreos down.  OMG, what was I thinking?  Total sugar overload day.

Thursday- Lunch with my friend who was having a really bad week.  I suggested a cute cafe knowing I could get a side salad and 1/2 of a sandwich or soup but she said she really wanted some greasy food so we went to Boston's.  She had  nachos, I had a Santa Fe Salad (22pts) and didn't eat 2/3 of the fried chips or the sour cream and sour cream, but still, not within my points range.  And I ate 5 Reese's PB eggs.  Awesome since it was 2 days before weigh in.

And today is Friday and so far so good and I ate all those bunny cookies so there will not be those to eat when I get home and I packed my lunch.  But this is just ridiculous.  I'm just off track.  My Weight Watchers leader always says that just because you trip on one stair, don't throw yourself down the entire flight of stairs.  I'll post tomorrow my weigh in results and my new menu for next week based on the PCOS Diet book (still don't like the book but I'll give it a shot for a week).  Sorry to just rant on here but it's kind of like therapy for me:)

Weekly Weight Watchers Weigh In: Frustrating.

I don't even want to type it because it's so pathetic.  I lost .2 lbs and this after burning 2011 calories exercising by walking and jogging 14.4 miles.  What the heck??!!!  I didn't even eat my activity points but I did eat my 49 weekly allowance points.

I'm not even sure what to make of it.  I totally want to blame my PCOS because it shouldn't be this hard to lose weight!!  So I'm going back to square one.  I'm going to dive into the weightwatchers.com website, find some meal plans and measure and weigh everything single thing (like I'm supposed to do anyway but when I weigh a potato or chicken breast one day, 2 days later I eyeball it, same thing with pasta) and see if this week I can get this body of mine to show me what it's made of!    I'm also going to reread the PCOS diet book, I didn't like it the first time, but I need to figure out why my body is really holding on to this weight.

Last week was such a worse eating week with almost  non-existent exercise and this week was the opposite and I lost .6lbs less than last week.

All I can really say is at least it isn't a gain, I'm losing every week but .2 lbs is just sucky:(  But I leave you with these photos of our Easter Bunny cookie decorating from this afternoon!

Searching For on the OWN Channel= Puffy Alien Eyes

I got sucked into the show Searching For last night and watched 3 hours of it in a row.  I'm a big bawl baby and watching reunion shows pretty much turns me into a hot mess!  I went to bed at midnight, not good, and when I woke up my eyes were almost swollen shut!  I actually had to put ice on them for a couple minutes and eye cream just to look normal to come to work. 

One thing I struggle with is what we will tell AJ as he gets older about his mom and what if he wants to track down his mom when he's an adult.  I see so many reunion shows about adopted kids searching for their birth moms and over and over it's said how unselfish the birth mom was by choosing adoption.  And I agree, in these shows when a mother, be it a teen mother or just a woman that is not able to parent another baby chooses to place the baby for adoption, I do think that takes a lot of courage and strength.  But that's not what AJ's mom did.  She put him in harms way by overdosing right in front of him and even contemplated giving him and his brother pills too.  After he was placed in our care, she still fought every week to get him back and bring him to drug rehab with her....3 different times even though she knew she was still using.  Where I live, if you have young children, the rehab programs are night and day better than if you are just a single woman trying to get a bed in a rehab program.  It was pretty apparent to the social workers and myself that a main focus for getting AJ back wasn't to parent but to get into a better program.  And I will never tell him that part.  But I'm just saying, our story is different than those I'm watching. 

I do believe she wanted to love him and have him back but she chose drugs and alcohol.  Only after 19 months of fighting the state did she decide to relinquish her rights.  She's never wrote him a single birthday card and the first present she got him was this past Christmas and she got it at a toy drive by Salvation Army.  Yet she has no problem asking us for money to go buy a case of Coke so in the past 2 years she could have bought him a $2 toy from Walmart. 

I just wonder what the future will look like for him and how, especially when he's a teenager and an adult, what kind of emotional turmoil he will go through.  We feel like when he's in 5th or 6th grade we can tell him she used drugs and alcohol and that's what made her sick.  Before that, we'll just say that she was sick and needed to take care of herself and she knew we loved him so much that she asked us to be his parents and we are so thankful to be his mom and dad.  Our latest dilemma is what do we tell him when we show him pictures of his baby sister.  I thought we would just say that it was his sister, my husband said we should just say it his cousin, but I don't like that either because that's a lie. AJ's aunt has the sister and she's really nice and we are keeping the communication lines open at this point. Any suggestions out there on how to go about the sibling pictures?

 

Workout Goal: 2000 Calorie Burn

My trainer for bootcamp said she likes to have a calorie burn goal versus time or days at the gym and I really liked the idea so here goes! I'll update after each workout this week.
4/10/11 463 Calories, 3.3 miles, 55 min.
4/11/11 446 Calories, 3.1 miles, 52 min.
4/12/11 Rest
4/13/11 385 Calories, 3.1 miles, 50 min.
4/14/11 Rest aka I was too lazy to work out:)
4/15/11 717 Calories, 5 miles, 85 minutes

Week Total=2011!!!!!

*4/13 I forget my Polar watch but wore the monitor which transmitted to the treadmill so Calories are low because it was not based on my body profile.
*I am doing the Couch to 5K program but besides making sure I jog 60 seconds, walk 90 seconds and repeat that, I'm not following the plan perfectly.  I'm overdoing it.  As of today, 4/12,  my shins are killing me.  I should have started out slower, I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing when they said to start out with 20 minutes.

**I have a Polar F6 heart rate monitor that is a band the goes around my torso and a watch that reads the heart rate and converts it to calories. I've had it for 4 years and today was the first day I used it and it rocks!!!!

Weekly Weight Watchers Weigh In: Every Little Bit Counts!

Well, I lost a whole .8 lbs.  I ate BEYOND and I mean WAY BEYOND my daily and weekly points.  It was bad:(  My husband's birthday was this week and he asked for a Thanksgiving Dinner as his birthday dinner.  And you know, it was darn good and it we did not try to lighten up any of our recipes and I even made the Pioneer Woman's mashed potatoes which were insanely good and probably cost me a days points allowance for just one scoop.

I'm not even sure how I lost weight this week!  I'm not proud of my eating and I certainly don't think I should be doing that again any time soon, but it was nice not to gain weight!!

Our leader is asking all of us to really commit to exercise no matter how little it is, even 10 minutes a day.  We discussed how after 3 weeks something is a habit and in my experience, exercise did not become easier at 3 weeks and the minute I skipped one day it turned into 2 days and into a week and so on.  Finally some of our streets are clear so I can take the kids back out on a nightly walk besides going to the gym but we have to figure out our stroller situation.  Last year we packed the kids, this year we definitely need a double stroller. So I'm weeding through all their old stuff trying to figure out what to sell to pay for the stroller I want.  I really want a Bob Revolution Duallie, but I'm okay with the Bob Sport Utility after reading lots of reviews on it but those bad boys are expensive!!  And it will only get used 4-5 months out of the year.  I'm trying to be smarter about spending money on the kids this year so if it's not in the budget, then I sell things that are just taking up space in the guest room anyways to pay for it!

How was your week?  Do you tend to lose more weight during the summer?  That's when I always gain back my weight and I'm not sure why but I'm determined to not let it happen again this summer:)

Thanks for your advice and thoughts!

I really do appreciate your thoughts on whether it's reasonable for me to expect that I could get pregnant without infertility drugs even if I lost weight.  Since reading your responses I've decided that I need to focus on losing the weight not as a cure to my infertility but to improve my overall health and to feel good about myself.  Because the last thing I want is to hit my goal weight and then have a break down if I end up needing fertility drugs of any kind since that would most likely just lead to me gaining a ton of weight from being depressed AGAIN about my infertility. (And I can't promise there won't be some small breakdown if I go through fertility treatments of any kind again, I'm not the greatest at just putting on a happy face in tough situations!)

And I'm with some of you as far as realizing that my ovaries as far as I know, are broken.  They just don't function perfectly all the time or consistently.  But they functioned perfectly for a brief second so I'd love them to show off like that once again when I'm ready. 

Do you all read Ronisweigh.com?  She's got great before and after pictures of her tummy tuck after losing a lot of weight on Weight Watcher's and she still had loose skin. I'd assume my stomach would look similar because it's been stretched for oh, something like almost 20 years!  I really liked that she posted pictures because it's good to know that even at your ideal weight, you could still have the same belly skin issues as you did at a much higher weight.  I'm totally getting my skin chopped off when I'm done having kids and lost weight.  I've been planning it since the age of 21, haha!  Sorry, I got off on a tangent there:)

What if Losing Weight Doesn't Cure my Infertility?

In my perfect world, in a years time I will weigh 135 lbs and then I'll start trying to conceive and within 3 months of trying I'll be pregnant and carry a healthy baby to term.  But the world isn't perfect.  Sometimes I feel like life has given me the big middle fingers on several occasions.  I do have so much to be thankful for but there are times when I just wish some things were easier.  Like having a baby.

I went back and looked at my last 10 years of weight loss on Weight Watchers.  Crazy right?  That I've done it 4 different times over 10 years, usually giving up after 4 months and sometimes I lost 20 lbs and sometimes I lost 2 in that time.  So when I was looking at my "post-wedding" weight history, I realized that I weighed 161 for quite a few months and did not get pregnant.  I was convinced I was around 175 when we started trying and so I'm a little freaked out that I have 27 pounds to go to be at that weight and chances are that is not enough to cure my infertility.   Which even at 161, I did not love my body.  I still wore a size 12 and it was still hard to find clothes that looked good on me so I had no plans on stopping at 160.

So what if this is the time when this weight loss journey really is successful and I hit my goal weight of 135 and then..........I still can't get pregnant on my own.  I'm convinced that I could ovulate on my own at my ideal weight and that Metformin wouldn't even be necessary.  Because really, I get nauseous just thinking about taking 2000mg of Met again during my next pregnancy. 

I've said it before, I was 11 years old and maybe 4'9" when I last weighed 135 so I have no concept at all of what my body would do at a normal weight or even how I'd look.  So what if at 135 I'm still screwed up?  I should not focus so much on the what if's and the parts I can't control that may happen in the future but it's hard not to let my mind go to that place. I feel bad sometimes for even complaining because yes I had to take some pills, well lots of pills, and get shots a few times a week and Dylan was born healthy and I'm so lucky to have him.  Sometimes I feel like when I tell people I had infertility issues that they think of course I did, I'm overweight, lose some weight!

Anyone out there ever taken Clomid or Metformin to conceive and then lost a significant amount of weight and get pregnant without all of that?  Or vice versa, lost the weight and still had to take the drugs?

Field Trip with my Family!

We took a little trip yesterday to a conservation center with tons of "wildlife" and the kids loved it!  It was cold, like freezing cold and windy but it was still a fun time.  I have a couple pictures of AJ on here, I can't show his face really, but i'm this close to showing you all:)

Dylan and Me, he wouldn't look up:(

AJ:)

Yep, that's right, eating the snow that's been there all winter, yum!

He LOVED it so I let him just go for it:)

Wild hat hair and the look of 'I've only slept 30 minutes today, and I am not going to take a nap!" (Don't worry about his shoulder strap, we weren't moving, I fixed it!)

My husband and AJ.

Weekly Weight Watchers Weigh In: Still chugging along

Again, .2 lb loss.  It's okay, I didn't eat all my weekly points allowance but I did not work out.  And AF came this week, yipee!  I was kind of in a funk this week and by Tuesday Dylan was really sick with a cold, AJ had a cough also, and so I decided to leave work at 1 on Tuesday and I just took the rest of the week off:)  It was nice that Dylan wanted to be held so much and cuddle because he's just on the go all the time these days and I miss that time with him.

During my time off my husband and I went on a 3 hour date (while the boys ate lunch with my mom and then napped because I didn't want to leave Dylan for too long) and I did most of my spring cleaning including cleaning out my closet (again).  I finally let go of all my maternity clothes because the truth is, I don't want to be a size XL with the next baby.  When I was going through them all I remembered just how awesome it was to just go to Motherhood Maternity, grab anything that was an XL and 90% of the time it looked cute and fit great.  Why can't regular clothes have stretchy expandable tummy areas?!  And fit nicely across my larger chest?!  Oh well.  And I've finally learned, I think, that Lane Bryant clothes just don't fit me right because and I always forget to send them back and get my money back, so no more LB for me.  Also, I like Torrid but the truth is, everything I've bought from there has been poor quality and doesn't look great after the first wash or just is cheap material so I need to stop going there also.  Again, the clothes that seem to work best for my shape are Banana Republic and Gap and they hold up pretty well from one year to the next.

I'm currently on the hunt for a nice double jogger stroller.  Not because I am going to become a runner while pushing two babies, but I do want to get back to nightly walks with the boys.  I've had  my eye on a BOB stroller but until I can sell the rest of the boys clothes I have stored and some other things, I just can't justify it.  I keep an eye out on craigslist hoping to get lucky and score a used one:)

I don't really know what this post is about, LOL!  Not really any point, just some random thoughts!