Spiga

Fourth Weigh-In

Unfortunately, I weighed in at 282.4 this week. That's a 3.8lb. weight gain, and I'll admit that I'm to blame due to some bad choices during Labor Day. I had hoped to get my workouts in after Labor Day to burn off the calories and at least see a small weight loss, but I was only able to get in one workout, and apparently, one workout didn't do it.

On Labor Day, I woke at 7:00am and left the house to pick up my kids from their dad's house. Once I arrived there, my phone rang. It was my dad. He told me something was wrong with him and thought he might need to go to the hospital. I told him I'd be over as soon as I picked up the kids. Now you have to know my dad. This is a man who hasn't been to a doctor in over 10 years. He's stubborn and doesn't like to go to the doctor, so when he said he thought he needed to go, I knew something was wrong.

Anyway, I headed to dad's after picking up my kids. He had a rash of some kind on his belly and thought it was a spider bite. He said it was hurting him and wanted me to go to the store to get him some Benadryl and see if that would help. I was concerned that the bite was causing him a lot of pain, but he refused to let my husband and I take him to the ER. He said he'd go Tuesday if the so-called bite didn't get better. I bought him the Benadryl and my husband, stepson, my kids and I headed for home.

The kids were hungry, so my husband decided to stop at Burger King to feed them. Yes, that was the first bad choice. Instead of ordering healthy from Burger King, I gave in to the temptations and ordered mozzarella sticks and a steakhouse burger.

Later that afternoon, my phone rang again. This time dad was in a lot of pain and said that maybe he should go to the ER. I headed back to my dad's house to pick him up and take him to the ER. We arrived at the local hospital at around 2:00pm that day and didn't get called back to see a doctor until a few minutes until 6:00pm; the ER was packed.

Turns out dad had Shingles and he'd had them since Thursday. That explained why he was in a lot of pain, but he was also very, very short of breath, which the doctor said wasn't related to his Shingles. She gave him a shot, prescribed medicine, instructed him to make a doctor's appointment for the following Monday and sent him home. By this time it was late and none of us had had supper, so after we took dad home, we ate a late supper at McDonalds. I was so hungry by this time that, again, I didn't order healthy. Not ordering healthy was bad on my part, but eating fast food after 9:00pm made things worse.

And that, my friends, is why I think I gained weight instead of losing it. I am, however, thankful that it was only 3.8lbs, because I honestly feared a bigger weight gain. I tell ya, it's so hard to order healthy when everyone else is eating the things you want and you haven't eaten in quite some time.

This week I plan to eat healthier, and hopefully eat at home. I also plan to workout more often, and I may even increase my workout to include a few exercises that don't involve the Ab Lounge. I'll let you know how things go next week, and hopefully that weigh-in will be different.

3 comments:

  Anonymous

9/06/2008 2:08 PM

Sorry to hear about your dad. Hope he's doing better.

Regarding the weight gain, I have a few comments. I'm not sure the weight gain is related to those items you mention. 1 pound equals 3500 calories. I don't know the exact number of calories on those items you mentioned, but the total is probably around 2000. Unless you ate like this every single day of the week, it's not possible to gain 4 pounds in a week (that would mean you ate over 14,000 calories! Believe me when I tell you --That's a lot). There may be other factors at play here. For example, you may be eating lots of salt and retaining water. Or you may be consuming calories from somewhere else and not realizing it. It may help to keep a food journal for a week. Just write down every single thing you eat and then use an online calorie calculator to add up the calories for the day. If you're consuming more than 1500 a day, you're probably eating too much. Less than that and you should be losing weight. If you're not, then you need to start looking for the problem in more detail.

  Misti Sandefur, Christian author/freelance writer

9/06/2008 10:26 PM

Diana,

It's nice to know that maybe all that fast food on Labor Day didn't contribute to all my weight gain. I did take the time to go to the websites for McDonalds and Burger King to look up the nutritional facts on what I ate that day, and my total calories for that day alone were 3,530.

Expect for what's in the food I eat, I've completely cut out salt since I began this journey to weight loss. Now I hear the Sodium is where the salt is in foods, and those fast food burgers all were very high in Sodium. :(

As for my dad, he's doing a lot better now; thank God. Of course for a man who hardly ever goes to the doctor and doesn't take meds, the meds he's taking now probably have him feeling great. :)

  Anonymous

9/07/2008 6:08 AM

Yeah, that’s exactly what I had in mind :) Sorry for not being more specific. Your body burns about 1500 calories a day just by being alive, so I was thinking you had about 2000 calories more than you really need (2000+1500=3500). So that’s not even 1 pound weight gain. Like I said, it may be something else.