I realize I haven't updated much on my health/weight loss.  I try not to become one of those people who posts incessantly about my body, but it's also nice to look back on previous posts & see how far I've come.

I've been tracking my food & exercise on sparkpeople for the last few months, though my exercising has been very inconsistent.  I was worried I wasn't keeping up w/ my goal to get to pre-Trin size by December of this year, but in the last couple of weeks, I've seen a significant drop in my weight.  I'm blaming that on stress b/c I have just not been hungry much lately & I can only guess that stress is the culprit.  I don't typically have a hard time eating; I have a hard time NOT-eating.  But for the past 2 weeks or so, I've been hard-pressed to consume more than 900 calories a day.  (In fact, most days I'm only taking in about 675-750 calories.  Which is WAY TOO LOW.)  I should be burning about 1100 calories per week through exercise & eating between 1200-1550 calories per day.  I actually stopped myself from working out last week b/c I was worried it would be too hard on my body if I burned calories when I wasn't bringing in enough.  But this week I'm back at it b/c I'm training for that virtual 5K.  I'm not going to force myself to eat if I'm not hungry, but I'm making sure that when I do eat, it's a lot of whole foods & hardly anything processed.  I'm also making sure to take my multi-vitamin every day b/c it can't hurt.

In spite of my lacking appetite, I've seemed to maintain what I would consider an average energy level, sometimes even above average.  Although I do think this lack of hunger is a side effect of stress, I also have to trust my body a little & assume that it knows what it's doing.  If it's not hungry, it's not hungry.  There's no use causing myself even more stress worrying about it.  Unless I start to have symptoms of illness or anything like that, I'm just going to accept this very strange phase my body is going through.  It certainly isn't hurting me so far & I can't complain about the jump-start on meeting my weight loss goal.

Speaking of weight loss, since the end of April, I have lost 13 lbs.  That puts me 1 lb lighter than I was last summer at this time and only 6 lbs heavier than I was 2 years ago.  I also managed to fit into a size smaller jeans, which was perfect b/c the only 2 pairs of pants I could wear were both getting pretty ratty.  I muffin top a little in the smaller size, but not excessively & I only own mostly big tshirts anyway, so that covers it up pretty well.  I've decided that if I do reach my goal weight on time, I'm going to treat myself after the new year by buying a few new outfits.  Nothing expensive or fancy b/c I'm just not that kinda girl, but it's time I have new clothes.  I'm still wearing all the same stuff I have been wearing for the past 6-7 years.  I hardly ever reward myself, but if I reach my goal, I'll deserve the reward.

I'm a sucker for tickers b/c I like to see my progress.  It's motivation.  The ticker on my sparkpeople page has starting weight from 2-3 yrs ago, so I made this pretty new ticker to track where I started from in April.  I'm about 1/3 of the way there. :)