When last we saw our intrepid hero (i.e. me), he was facing a cliff-hanger of epic proportions (literally). He had plateaued, become relatively inert, started to despair, and wallowed in frustration. I needed a break. So I took one.

My “goal” for my break was to take my mental energy off my weight and health, and while I wasn’t planning to abandon all my new practices, I didn’t want to be tracking everything every day, only to see no progress. I stopped in early February, and planned to go to the end of March. That was this past Sunday.

So what did I do over the previous seven weeks?

On the positive side, I didn’t go completely crazy. I didn’t throw away my plans to eat breakfast more regularly, although I didn’t try to fight that hard to make it at home either. For snacks, I gave myself a break from preparing them by taking a financial hit, and so I bought my veggies at work more often than pre-chopping them at home. Lunches weren’t bad, but not great. A bit too much pizza thrown in as a treat rather than sticking to other healthier choices, but again, I didn’t go nuts either. I did better on drinking water through-out the day. And dinners stayed relatively the same. We tried out the Hello Fresh delivery service, and while the food was interesting, it also included more prep time than normal, and more prep time than say SupperWorks. We’ll stick with it a bit more, building up some extra recipes perhaps (the yakitori was great, also a couple of others), and then likely try some more SupperWorks. Finally, on the positive side, if I rely on measurement as my progress, my overall weight stayed relatively the same. Up and down a pound or two, but nothing much different than when I was plateaued. The real benefit is that I didn’t expend a lot of mental energy on it in the last seven weeks. That’s at least an indicator that some of the habits are part of my “new normal”.

On the negative side, I had a health scare in there for my heart, which turned out to be (likely) more reflux-related as my body gets used to my new meds. Speaking of which, I started taking a baby aspirin a day for my heart stuff, although my GP removed that from the regime now that my heart issues are “resolved” (i.e. no signs of a problem). I went up to five meds (2 BP, 1 diabetes, 1 reflux, 1 aspirin) and then down to three (dropped 1 BP and 1 aspirin), and then back up to four (added a cholesterol med). Long-term, maybe I can get rid of them all, but for now, we work with what we have.

Continuing on the negative side, I’ve been eating ice cream a little too regularly in the last seven weeks. Not excessively, but since it’s my Kryptonite, I was using Ross’ philosophy from Friends (“I was on a break!”) to allow myself to do it…DQ, Frosties, Laura Secord. It’s a slippery slope.

I’ve also been a giant house slug with the snow challenges. I’ve been hibernating way too much. Sigh.

CTRL-ALT-DELETE

But Monday marked my overall reboot, and the beginning of round 2 / attempt 2 to start the next 25 pound goal. It’s 10 weeks to my birthday, which is probably too short a time to get all 25 pounds lost, but I have smaller goals in there to get things done (like getting my basement done so I can work out in it — or as my new advisor, the Kinesiologist, suggests, I should picture the goal of getting the physical set-up in the right layout as the first exercise / workout). We had a great first appointment, and I suspect we’ll have 2-3 more before I’m fully on track for the future.

After restarting Monday, I can feel the challenge for the week…yesterday was my first day back at work with full menu control. Today I sacrificed a bit at lunch to have pizza with a friend, but I’ll adjust for it in my other items for the day. And I’m planning to BBQ on Saturday night. How wrong can the week go when it ends with BBQ?