Monday, January 22, 2007

Surprise, Surprise

Last week I received some exciting news. Utah Valley Magazine is a great, high-end magazine distributed locally. I was just flipping through the February issue and was very surprised to find that the magazine named my company in the top 3 "Best Products Made in Utah Valley". I was so excited, I asked the magazine to send me a PDF of everything so I could send it to my friends. Click here to view the article in a PDF... Very exciting!

An update on my smelly endeavors - Urban Botanic is now in 17 states and we're growing day by day. It is such a JOY to build this company and come to work each day with a great support system and the most wonderful fragrance designing Scent Consultants around the nation who are excited about our products and creating a business for themselves!

For those of you that missed it, I was also on TV last fall. It's pretty mortifying - what will I wear? What if I mess up? What if you can see beads of sweat running down my face? What if I accidentally snort while laughing? OMG WHAT.IF.I.FART.ON.TELEVISION? Then what???!?




So, it turned out okay. I didn't make a complete fool of myself, but it's still complete torture to watch. I cringe at my voice and my laugh... but I guess wouldn't we all - it's the self-critic thing. The bright side? I consider it practice for being on the Oprah show.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Pushing for $6300

It's Thursday again and I just had my weigh in for the week. I am now 242.3 lbs. That's 5.3 lbs less than last Thursday and another 2.13% body weight.

I promised I'd tell you what I am doing to lose weight. There are two things. One is my diet and exercise regime and the other is my motivation source. And here they are:

Diet
I'm doing a program called Isagenix and it's the easiest diet I've ever followed (and I've followed pretty much all of them). It's easier than Weight Watchers, South Beach, etc. My mindset has changed, so I know that's some of it, but what I love about it is that it is completely automated for me. I don't have to THINK about food which is a great thing because as soon as I start thinking about food, I start drooling over cheese and chocolate - although not together... hmmm maybe something to try as a reward sometime.

Motivation
I'm in a group of local people competing to lose weight. We all put in money each week which goes into a bank account set up for the group. Each week is a mini-contest on its own because the "Biggest Loser" for the given week, doesn't have to pay anything for the next week in the contest. 2nd place only pays a small fraction, 3rd place a bigger fraction, 4th place gets a small discount, and everyone else pays full price. There's enough people in the competition that the end winning pot includes $6300 cash for the one with the most percentage of weight loss. For me, because I'm bigger, this will be a challenge because if I lose 10 lbs and someone small loses 10 lbs, their 10 lbs kicks butt all over my 10 lbs. Last week with 4.9 lbs and 1.63% loss, I was in 16th place - still 15 from the bottom! ROUGH COMPETITION! Results don't come out until tomorrow morning but I did better this week than last and I have a feeling this is going to be a "tortoise and the hair" race. I may not be losing 14 lbs per week like our current winner (what on earth is she doing!?) but she'll slow down and I'm NOT backing out!

Wish me luck for next week.

Beginning Weight: 252.0
Current Weight: 242.6
Next Weeks Goal: 236.6lbs

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Back In The Saddle

Ok I know rule #3 for blogging is to never make excuses about why you haven't been posting... So I won't! I was going to wait until my one year anniversary of slackerdom, which I believe would be May 17th but SURPRISE! My three readers get an early treat!

I have always hated New Year's resolutions. My New Year's resolution is usually to avoid the peer pressure of making a New Year's resolution. Simply because it's usually just a set up for failure and I believe if you want to improve upon yourself, you shouldn't wait until the new year. Do it now. Same with starting diets on Mondays. "Well, it's Thursday now, so I'm going to go ahead and order the onion rings because my diet doesn't start for 3 more days." We do it all the time.

This year, I'm taking a different approach. I do have some resolutions, but I'm trying not to associate them with the new year because of how that pattern goes. One is to stop swearing and the other is to lose weight. Both are out of control.

About 4.5 years ago I had some sort of endocrine FREAK OUT and in a couple of months time gained almost 100 lbs. It happened so fast I didn't even realize it. It was like one day I woke up, looked in the mirror, and went... "whoa, I'm fat!" I went from a size 10 to a size 20 but I didn't have time to buy any of the sizes in between because it really happened that fast. There are still imbalances in my body from the FREAK OUT, but things have in general worked themselves out. Now it's time to get this weight off. The only problem is, I've been faking myself out with negative thoughts like, "My body can't lose weight because I've been diagnosed with PCOS and dis-metabolic syndrome, and Syndrome X" Yes there really is a "Syndrome X". If you Google it, you'd think I couldn't lose weight either, but it's time for me to STOP letting the negative things doctors have been telling me all along affect my mindset. These negative thoughts I've had the last 5 years have been a toxic and enormous contributor to my maintaining this unhealthy state. I really have tried healthy ways of losing weight. But all the while, in the back of my head, I've wondered if they will work because of my Syndrome X. That shred of doubt is what failed me.

So time to poke a little hole in my mitote and start a new agreement with myself: I can lose weight. I have the same miracle human body as everyone else.

I'll tell you later about my weight loss plan, but for now, every Thursday at 11:30am is weigh-in time. Last Thursday my starting weight was 252. Today it is 247.9. That's 4.1 lbs in one week, people.

PS - Mitote is a "dream" or a haze we all have that makes up our perception of the world around us. Read about it in "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz. I love this book.