Maude Marches on, into Month Two! With a special bit of motivation. The 2020 Twenty: Entry Five.
March 7, 2021
It’s March!
So just about a year ago, I was nearly twenty pounds lighter than I am now.
I was also living in a different city, working a different job, living in a different domestic situation, and stressing myself to death. When the pandemic removed all of that, it also removed the (otherwise) good health habits I’d developed after finding out I was diabetic.
Now everything has changed and is still changing. As of this month I’m even back to work. That is: for an employer. The more things get back to “normal”, or something like it, the more I want to get back to where my health was.
What’s Getting Me Going
Today is my baby sister’s birthday. She recently moved from Alabama to New Orleans, and I haven’t seen her or her dear husband for over a year. Last year, I was delayed in sending them (both Pisces) a birthday gift I’d selected and packaged, and of course, the pandemic shutdown threw that completely off track. And the gift had a Zodiac-specific theme, so I just held onto it for this year and made sure to send it in time. She just sent me a picture the other day to show me she received it, intact, and it made her day! These two young ones are artists and pet parents who work in restaurants to pay the bills, so they are having a hard time dealing simultaneously with reduced wages and customers who don’t care to tip well or wear masks while dealing with service industry workers, who usually don’t have health insurance and probably aren’t eligible for the COVID vaccine either.
As soon as they are able to get vaccinated, I am planning on getting down there. Incidentally, that would be my first visit to New Orleans. And I’ve been trying to get there for more than ten years. Researching the lingering damage a few years after Hurricane Katrina, I decided I wanted to go on a church service trip there, to work on repairing another church of our denomination. Then I found out I was pregnant, and I didn’t go. And I’ve never been able to go since. All I’ve been able to do is read about it, watch The Princess and the Frog, and Girls Trip, and study Google Maps.
Now I have an even better reason to go, or at least a more fun one. And you bet when I get there, I will eat myself silly. Which I wouldn’t feel good about doing, unless I was in the happy weight, low blood sugar range my doctor gave me. Unless it was something I could recover from. So partying with my sister in New Orleans, and indulging in copious amounts of gumbo, étouffée, bananas foster, and beignet is now weight loss motivation.
And about that: as of three days ago, I weighed in only fifteen pounds over my March 2020 weight! That’s nineteen pounds from my original goal! And that means the 2020 Twenty has been reduced to the Big Fifteen! Since this journey began again forty-one days ago, I have apparently lost five pounds.
As I wrote in Entry Two and Entry Four, my home scale may not be the most precise, or the most accurate! My doctor’s office scales understandably do a better job at both, and are understandably less forgiving. But I’ve now had my weight checked at three different office visits in the last two weeks, and their readings do reflect the same drop. So I’m taking it!
I can still say this isn’t due to a heap of exercise. This is a result of calories closely monitored by MyFitnessPal and limited by myself. And I haven’t done a perfect job of that either, by any means! But I am getting back in the habit. And I know, because I’ve done this before, that it just takes a little victory to spark some hardcore motivation. Yesterday I took my first four-mile hike since beginning this series, and today I feel great!
By the end of this month, I would like to drop five more.
What do you think? I would like to hear from you, but you won’t find the typical Comments section here. If you have given the issue some thought or have an experience to share, please enter it here, or send your response to Maude@mauvereport.com. I would love to hear how the rest of America is doing with this in 2021.