NOVEMBER CHALLENGE: Shopping Freeze To Weight Loss

It's official - we're in the depth of Autumn/Fall-going-Winter.

So it seems only fair to admit a sad sad truth.  After I worked super hard to drop a bunch of excess weight I'd put on after college... it then mostly came back.  And it honestly caught me by surprise.

In the Spring, I set a personal record for a Half Marathon, and went Vegan for 46 days.  I still had physical goals and motivators regarding wearing all the clothes in my closet, and weight loss, and fitness... but I was generally in a physically happy place.  

And then, I hit a bad patch.  

I think it was the following formula of doom: 
Nothing to train for + Work stresses + Final exams.  

So I was no longer regularly working out and I was feeling the effects of it, but I also felt like I had no time to dwell on it.  And I was eating like garbage.  And I was not sleeping.  And the weight came on quickly.  

And then, while you'd think the summer would be a great time to get back at it... I just didn't.  My summer went by pretty fast.  I had made this ambitious list of things I wanted to do over the summer, fully recognizing I would be lucky to get to even half of it.  No complaints - summers can just get busy.  There was a lot of traveling and catching up with people I had not spent enough time with during the year.  Oh, and DC is actually a city built on a swamp, so by midday I wanted to do nothing with my life that involved more sweating.

Now, I am in a new Fiscal Year at the office, I am mid-semester in classes, I am teleworking, and really it's just time.  It's time to stop having those sad a-ha moments about how things fit or how I'm feeling, and to stop realizing when I've run out of time to get a workout in, and to stop falling asleep on my couch at 2am.

And instead of over-thinking things, since I've done it before and know how it works - I'm really just going to do it.  No gimmicky diets - just... more out than in... and a generally healthier life perspective.  

But as I am writing this on about 3.5 hours of sleep (fail!), clearly I needed a superficial motivator (it's HARD to go back to your first workout in a few weeks, and it's also HARD not to be so tired that all I want to do is order Chinese takeout instead of eat something that fuels me and not my growing waistline).

So I put myself on a shopping freeze.  All I want to do right now is buy fall clothing and fill up the closet I clean out every few weeks.  But no.  I'm going to wait until I'm a size I appreciate and this will give me a nice little kick in the ass to get moving.

So here it is - my November challenge.  I want to be able to shop on Black Friday.  That means I have to get off my shopping freeze.  So I started with a first weigh-in on November 1st, exactly 3 weeks before Black Friday.  And my goal is to lose 6% of that original weight by Black Friday.  "Goal" is actually not the correct word - if I don't hit 6%, no shopping all those magical Black Friday sales.  If I hit it, great!  Then I'll have saved on frivolous shopping for three weeks, and be able to celebrate.

The basics of my approach are to:

1. Eat better.
   Return to portion control, stop eating at one o'clock in the morning.  Stop ordering out when I can just cook fresh food.  Pay attention to what I consume.
2. Get on some kind of routine, RE: workouts.
   Use my gym membership.  Love yoga.  GO ON RUNS.  Move around more than just walking around the city.  Stop making excuses.
3. Get on a routine, RE: sleep.
   This will help with both of the above - being awake at one in the morning usually leads me to wanting to snack at one in the morning.  There's all that science about sleeping benefiting weight loss goals.  Also, I wake up on my couch a lot by accident, with a sore neck.  And then I'm just tired and don't feel like doing anything... which is then fueled further by the lethargy that comes from not working out.  So really... sleep because it's important.

But I'm not going to over-plan what my next day will look like - I'm really just going to do this, and my posts in November will be recipes I'm trying, workouts, revelations, and an honest report of where I am in my percentage-of-November-1st weight lost progress.

Hopefully I'll be running into you while I buy a fair isle sweater on Black Friday!