WLW: Inching Along

This is going to be a stupidly short post, because I'm up to my ears in work and dance and roller derby stuff.

So I did my measurements for the first time since November. I am down another 4.5 Inches. Two of which I believe are from my waist.

Fuck, yeah!

That's gotta count for something, right? I think it's now a total of nine inches or something. Slow and steady wins the race, I guess.

Although I'm bloaty out to here and I really need that to stop, like soonish. Anybody know of some good non-bloaty foods I can consume before I have to show my belly off to all of FSJ on Friday? Maybe I should just not eat until after the show.

Yeah, that won't happen. Not with it being Easter candy season and those Reese Peanut Butter Eggs are out there, taunting me like the little assholes they are.

Asshole!!!

I will say that upon uploading that photo, the egg was promptly eaten. What the fuck happened to all that will power?

At any rate, I did post a loss this week – I'm back down to 223.5 lbs, although that may have changed after eating that egg. Probably be five pounds up if I weighed myself tomorrow. Which I'm not going to do.

So yay for that, boo for peanut butter eggs and meh for all the rest. I'm back at roller derby (SUPER YAY!!!) and have a belly dance performance on Friday (MEGA YAY!!!) so life is doing all right.

Now I gotta do write an article.

Peace and Peanut Butter,

Ginger.

Project 365: Week Eight

Eight weeks already... man, time flies!

Had a few more delays this week in getting photos up on the Facebook, but they're all there. One way or another.

February 19

K-Sports, first week on the job!

February 20

Wish there was more money than plastic in my change purse.

February 21

I've got a lot of crap on my desk...

February 22

This is what keeps me busy during the day, page after page after page.

February 23

Gas prices went up, again. Rawr.

February 24

My lovely comfy blanket, that Stormy horked up a hairball all over at 4:30 AM

February 25

Oh look, winter came back. Bastard.

So there ya go. Eight weeks down, 44 more weeks to go! That's the right math, right?

Math is Hard,

Ginger

WLW: Multiple Motivations

Yay! I'm on time this week!

The last month has seen me overworked and overstressed. I think I'm retaining stress fat instead of water like I usually do.

Work, work and more work, plus a couple stomach attacks and a lack of sleep have all fucked with my eating habits, though I've pretty well stuck to the exercise routine, so that's a bonus, I guess.

I do have to say, despite all the lack of poundage actually coming off me, I am still seeing a pretty substantial difference in the way my body looks now as opposed to how it looked last summer.

Here's how I looked mid June, about a week before I decided it was time to stop being a fat ass. Sorry it's not very big, or a full body shot, but it's the only shot of me I could find from then. I shoulda done a before shot...

Blargh!

Definitely on the chubby side. And here's how I looked as of Friday.

Na na na na na na na na na na BATMAN!

Visual aids are so helpful. And wow my hair has grown!

There's definitely a difference. Less belly for sure. Less face fat too. I'll take it.

That has actually given me more motivation than anything else. Knowing that I am toning up and could quite possibly get into The Dress for the June weddings has enabled me to resist muffin temptation this week. I really really wanted that muffin.

I also have yet another thing to motivate me – I'm officially registered for The Emperor's Challenge.

Go ahead and click that like and see what it is. Go on, I'll wait...

...

Done now?

Okay, so now that you've read that I'm going to be doing a 20k run OVER A FUCKING MOUNTAIN, you can tell me if it's awesome or stupid. Stupidly awesome, awesomely stupid? Whichever.

This means I'll need to start hill training soonish if I'm even going to make it 1k in. Luckily there's a nice hilly community forest for me to venture into once the snow melts.

So yeah. Trying not to have any Debbie Downer or Negative Nancy moments... those bitches have been running my life for several weeks now and I've kicked them to the curb. I've got more important shit to focus on.

As for my weight, I'm at 224.1 this week, which is fine. I can deal with that. Like I said, stress fat! Once I get some shit sorted out at work, most of the stress should go away. Until then, I'm just going to keep eating my salads and keep going for runs... and get back on my skates on Sunday!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

This coming week will be a good one, I can feel it.

Positive Vibes,

Ginger.

Project 365: Week Seven

Lucky number seven! Whooooo!

Although it wasn't as lucky as I'd hoped, as I had something like 4 days between actually posting the photos on the Facebook album.... Gotta watch that this coming week. Not that I hadn't taken the photos, I just wound up forgetting my camera cable at work, or on at least one occasion, the camera itself at work.

Whatevs. New week, new chance to get it done right!

February 12

There's a little orange monster on my fridge.

February 13

Looks like a real locker room, doesn't it? It's not.

February 14

How I spent my Valentine's Day. Or as I called it, Tuesday.

February 15

Coffee was desperately needed.

February 16

Jersey in magenta light.

February 17

Proving I did in fact wear a Batman t-shirt to work.

February 18

Such pretties I now own, I feel so girly.

So that's week seven! My goal before the winter is over is to get at least one decent shot of the aurora.... Hopefully I can get a decent one in the next few weeks.

Seven weeks down, 45 more to go!

Batman and jewels,

Ginger.

WLW: Fitness finesse

Welcome to another edition of Weight Loss Thursday! Something I ate wasn't agreeing with me yesterday and I had another bought of really-feeling-like-I'm-gonna-vomit-but-then-I-don't-becuase-the-universe-hates-me. I'm really starting to get annoyed by it.

Anyhoo...

One of my derbies posted a link on Facebook to her Pinterest board (confusing, I know) that I think I should start keeping as my mantra.

You can't out-exercise a bad diet.

Oh, how true that is.

Running, or I guess jogging, has started to ramp up a bit as I'm now on Week 5 of the Learn To Run 10k program (for something like the fifth time I think). But all the jogging in the world isn't going to make Scale be nice to me.

I know it's bad and I know it makes it seem like I'm slacking off or whatever, but I've been so stressed out this week that I can't even fathom stepping on Scale. I'm running on four hours of sleep and eating next to nothing all day, I can't even imagine how fucked up my body is at the moment.

So yes, I'm a loser, baby. And not in the good way. I will be back to normal with posting next week, hopefully. I'm just so wrecked right now I can barely think. I need to focus on my eating again, since the stress is just making my stomach hurt which makes me not want to eat. Which puts me in starvation mode, which means my body clings to every ounce of fat on me. Boo-urns.

So for now, I'm off to take a bath since I haven't washed my hair in three days and it's getting really greasy. Then I'm going to bed.

Sweet Dreams, Bitches!

Ginger.

Project 365: Week Six

Has it been six weeks already? Time really flies when you're doing a project like this one, I don't know how I feel about that.

I got some cool photos this week, in the sky and on the ground. I'm still able to find thing to take photos of – I was concerned I'd run out of ideas by now, but it's still working. So yay for that.

Here's this week's bounty:

February 5

If I jumped from the balcony, would I land in the pool?

February 6

The moon has been ginormous lately!

February 7

Penguinball purchased at the airport to stave off boredom.

February 8

100th Ave at about 8 a.m. That big white circle is the moon

February 9

My button is supposed to be Jack Skellington.

February 10

Speaking of pumpkin heads...

February 11

Roses? For me? You shouldn't have! Oh, you didn't? Fine then.

So there ya have it. Six weeks down... ummmm, 46! Yeah that's it. 46 more weeks to go!

Math is hard,

Ginger.

There are good people...

My faith in humanity has been restored. At least for the day.

I've been having a rough go of it lately. I can barely remember the last time I left work at my regular time. Most of it has been waiting for copy, having one of my newswires taken away and try to write columns that people in this area will care about. That's a lot harder than it sounds.

Usually I take the silly route, since being sardonic is a lot easier for me than tackling a more serious topic. Plus, I always figure that someone can write about a serious topic and say what I'm thinking better than I can.

But last week I was stumped for a topic. I wasn't even going to turn in a column. My Managing Editor gave me a list of suggestions for topics to help get the words flowing. One of those topics was February and V-Day.

By now, everyone knows about V-Day and The Vagina Monologues and the slogan "Until The Violence Stops." I have been fortunate enough to have never experienced physical violence myself – I count my lucky stars that I've never been in that situations – but it still gets my ginger rage up to hear about it happening to other women and girls.

I think what really got me writing was the reports of multiple assaults in FSJ were done by the same teen, and a cabbie in Dawson Creek holding women captive in his cab and sexually assaulting them.

What a way to kick off a month that's supposed to be dedicated to ending this sort of shit, huh?

So that's the route I took. I decided to do a ranting column and even though I didn't really quite feel that I expressed it the way I wanted, it was still pretty good.

I turned it in, it printed, I moved on to the next day.

Then, today I came back from getting soup for lunch and found a letter on my keyboard. I just figured it was another letter to the editor ranting about some issue in the area. But then I actually read it.

The letter was from a lady who was in town last week and happened to pick up the friday paper and read my column. She thanked me to writing about such a topic, as she had been a victim of abuse 50 years ago, and it really spoke to her. There was nothing in place back then to help women in her situation, and even though abuse and violence is still out there, at least there are now resources to help women that need it.

She's 75 now and can still remember how she felt back then, going through all that. Honestly, I was so touched I almost started crying at my desk.

I always appreciate any thank-yous I get from the public, but this really got to me. The fact that this woman was moved enough by what I wrote to sit down and write a letter herself just makes all the shit I deal with in this job totally worth it.

Here's the column in question if you want to read it.

So a big giant thank-you to the woman from Wembley, Alberta and the letter she sent me. You turned my whole mood around, and I felt genuinely happy for the first time in weeks. People are good, and you proved it to me. Thank you.

Peace and Love,

Ginger.

WLW: Craving Steak

I am so bagged and so totally not doing weigh in this week.... I ate and drank so much shit this weekend that I'm sure I will spend three days crying, and I don't want to put myself or anyone else through that, so there ya go!

I had a craving for steak this weekend. Like a all-I-can-think-about craving. A nice, pink, juicy slab of former cow. Sorry vegetarians.

Moo.

I must have been deficient in something, because I don't usually eat a lot of red meat. Chicken, fish, pork, those are my meats of choice. Occasionally I'll have ground beef or a minute steak, but for the most part, I don't want red meat.

Websites are telling me it could be due to a lack of protein, which I call bullshit on, because I do eat protein. Maybe not enough, I don't know.

I never used to eat steak – never liked it, never wanted it and when I did eat it, it was cooked to the point that is was the consistency of an old shoe. Maybe that's why I never liked it?

But as I got older, I started having my steak cooked well done to medium-well. Now I'm down to just medium. I don't know if I can make the jump to medium-rare, though I've had many people tell me that's the best way to eat steak.

Either way, it was fan-fucking-tastic. I would have taken a photo of this amazing steak, but I ate it too fast. Whoopsie-doodle!

Okay, I'm done talking about meat now.

After feeling like shit from the food I ate all weekend, I've eaten nothing but veggies, fruit, yogurt and soup since I got home. I haven't even felt like eating that, but I know I need to, so I am.

So that's that for this week. Gonna be less of a carnivore for awhile, just to get my system straightened out.

Bloody beef,

Ginger

Project 365: Week Five

Week five has been nuts. I took photos every day, but forgot to upload a couple of times... I did take all the photos on the right day, though.

Cats, weather, and other random stuff filled out this week.

January 29

Snowstorm hits FSJ, one of the only ones we've had all winter.

January 30

Decisive moment shot. It's Stormy's turn to play with the mouse!

January 31

Not a single fuck is given by Dante

February 1

Movies help stave off the boredom...

February 2

...So do pretty shoes!

February 3

I can fly! And hopefully not crash.

February 4

I nearly had a heart attack when I saw this, had to buy it.

Five weeks down, 47 more to go!

Truly Outrageous!

Ginger.