I just realized I haven’t updated my blog to discuss my weight loss since the first time. Bad Jenni!

So, this morning, I weighed in at 140.5 lb – that’s 4.5 lb down from my starting point. While I dropped almost 3 lbs in the first three days that was undoubtedly water weight as I bounced back up to 144.5 a couple of days later, but it’s averaged a fairly steady 1 lb / week over all (this week was 1.5 lb).  So far so good.

Now if I could just get myself exercising regularly again I could bump that up to 2 to 2.5 lb a week... we’ll see. It’s hard to get motivated for exercise when you’re still looking for work (more on that to follow).

:-j(enni)

Well, It’s been about 18 months since I reached my goal weight of 135 lb while with Jenny Craig. And in that time I’ve allowed my weight to creep back up by about 10 lbs, only half-heartedly trying to get it back down and blaming my lack of progress or even maintenance on being at school and a lack of opportunity for good exercise.

Well, no more.  My good friend Penny Parris has given me the incentive to get back those ten pounds, and possibly a few more (I secretly would really like to be down at 130 lb) by announcing her “Pounds off Penny for Pennies (or Twonies)” project (that links to her blog. There’s also a Facebook Event page).

Her plan is to use the incentive of getting pledges from friends and family per pound she looses over a three month period to be donated to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of BC. Many of her friends are supporting her and several of us have also “jumped on her bandwagon”, adding an additional pledge per pound that we are also able to lose over the same period of time.

To give me some more accountability, I’m also going to post details of my progress on my blog here, starting today. So, I started a week ago, weighing in on Sat. May 23 at 145 lb. After a week of concerted effort I’m already down to 142 lbs. today.  What a great start!

And as a “public service announcement” for anyone else who is interested in living a more healthy lifestyle, I highly recommend the Windows application Diet Power 4.4.

My mum discovered this application about five or six years ago (it was on V3 at the time) and my parents and I have all used it with great success several times since then (it was a particularly useful addition to the basic Jenny Craig program). The application allows you to enter your weight, your daily food intake and your daily exercise and from that information it tracks the your nutrition levels, total calories and progress against a goal weight (which can be lower, higher or even the same for maintenance). It calculates how many calories you should be eating each day, initially based on standard averages for a person of your gender, age, height and weight but recalculates the amount based on your actual metabolism as determined by the exercise, food and weight details you’ve entered. 

It’s an awesome program, and totally worth the US$39.99.

:-j(enni)

Owwwie. I think I have sprained or strained my foot, all because I was running late this morning and, in my haste, I tripped and fell getting on my bus this morning.

The B97 bus was crossing the intersection just as I came up the block, so I ran to catch it - crossing against the light - and managed to arrive beside the front door at the very moment the driver started inching forward to re-join traffic. He, did, however, see me almost immediately and stopped to let me board. Not wanting to delay his departure too much I rushed to get on board, "jumping up" into the doorway with my left foot first. Unfortunately, because the bus had moved slightly the gap between curb and the doorway had widened by perhaps four to six inches and this was also one of those "kneeling" buses with a level floor that sits a bit higher than a normal step when it isn't "kneeling" in my haste to board I misjudged where I needed to put my foot and failed to lift my foot high enough to completely clear the edge of the step.  This caused me to catch the bottom edge of my runner at the toe and, as I had "jumped" up, my momentum pitched me forward and landed on both knees on the floor of the bus. The situation was worsened by the fact that my hands were full with an umbrella and my purse (which I was trying to open to retrieve my wallet and bus pass) and I had a backpack with my text books on my back. 

The driver was very solicitous, asking several times if I was okay and I assured him I was and he even waited for me to get myself back together before eventually pulling away as I went to find a seat. As I rode the bus all the way to the end of the route at Lougheed Mall he took advantage of this to call me aside as I left the bus stop asking for additional information for his incident report. Together we went over what had happened and he took my name and phone number. He also asked me to make an official claim with Translink, which I did. 

Although my knees appear to be no worse for wear, after the adrenalin had left my system I realized my left foot - the one that caught on the edge of the floor - was in worse shape than I'd initially assumed. The discomfort was minor to start with but did worsen as the day went on (while sitting still there is a dull throbbing pain across the front part of my foot, directly above the arch and the pain sharpens a little when I point or flex the foot and gets quite bad if I twist it left or right) so I've arranged to see my doctor tomorrow morning and I've been icing it every half hour since I got home this afternoon.

Anyway, here's hoping the throbbing dies down by tomorrow morning and my doctor's appointment is more or less unnecessary.

:-j(enni)

Update: It's a good thing that I'm going in to see my doctor as I received a response to the "incident report" I filed with Translink that indicates that they will be informing ICBC who will determine where the fault lies. If ICBC will be involved then it's almost a necessity to have a doctor's opinion on the full extent of the injury. Personally, I ascribe no fault to the driver for this - the driver had barely moved forward when he stopped to let me on and the increased gap between curb and step was certainly narrow enough that any passenger taking just slightly more care would not have had a problem, but I suppose official processes must be followed. I just hope that this doesn't lead to the driver being punished in any way for letting me on after starting to pull out - if there's one thing I can't stand is bus drivers who just drive away even though they've seen you standing right there.  :P
:-j

Update 2: (12:45p, Nov 6): Just saw the doctor and he called it a "hyperflexion injury" and described it as basically having tendonitis across the top of my foot. He said it should get better on it's own over the next ten days to two weeks as it's a tendon injury vs. the ligament injury that is typical of a sprained ankle (tendon's, being muscle-to-muscle connectors, apparently heal faster than their muscle-to-bone cousins the ligaments). I'm to keep off it when possible, ice it frequently and otherwise hobble along to get about.

{sigh}  Just what I need with a post-Hallowe'en house mess and friends scheduled to come hang out this weekend. :P

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe, then.
-Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the sum­mer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: "I was singing, if you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You were singing?" says the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a wind­blown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundat­ed under the golden rain of my pee.

I was right.

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