35 points.
Day 901: Wordless Wednesday
Author Archives: theffkid
From the FFK Vault….
The FFK and the case of the Phantom Farter.
Day 894: Wordless Time!
Day 893: Weigh In Day
So this morning, I didn’t know what the scale was going to say. Sure I had tried to be on point with counting a stuff, but last night I overdid it a little at a reception. (If we weren’t suppose to eat cheese, then why was it created???) Anyway, I knew that whatever it said, I am in an awesome place with everything. I’m actually holding myself accountable again. Something I haven’t done in a long time. I’m just ready for a change. I’m ready to look different. For a Large to truly fit. For there to be a one in front of my weight and not a 2. It’s coming and it’s going to happen, but in order for it to, it’s be patient with my body while being proactive and disciplined. I’ve worked too hard to get to where I am now not to finish this journey I have started. Now I’m ready to start.
This morning, I was up .6 pounds. Big whoop. I’m at 233.8…but not for long.
Let’s rundown the menu for today shall we?
Breakfast: Eziekiel English muffin, 2 tbs of pb and a banana (8 points)
Lunch: Quinoa with black beans and corn (6 points)
Snack: Voskos greek yogurt with granola (3 points)
Snack: Four Wheat Thin flatbread crackers with a little chow-chow relish (2 points)
Dinner: Three tacos with black beans and ground turkey (11 points)
Exercise: (Which felt amazing!) Leg day, 15 minutes on the Stairmaster and 30 minutes on the ARC Trainer (Burned 631 calories)
So today I got to 30 points. 2 points over my 28 point limit (reminder: using an old system). With my exercise points, I’m good! Here’s to an awesome Wednesday! See ya tomorrow.
Day 891: WW Awesomeness
I forget how awesome Weight Watchers is.
I’m so happy to be back on the weight loss bandwagon. I think when I’m off any sort of a weight loss plan, I start to put way too much emphasis on food. I worry so much about where and what to eat. When I have that structure, I just feel better. SO GLAD TO BE BACK AT IT! WEIGHT LOSS TIME!
I’m going to keep this brief because I have a couple things I need to be doing. But in lieu of me talking…err…writing, check out my crazy product review of my Handana (be on the lookout for random Easter eggs inside the post!)
Here we go…
Breakfast: Sprouted Grain English Muffin with peanut butter: 7 points
Lunch: Quinoa with blacks beans and corn: 6 points
Snack: TCBY Rocky Road frozen yogurt (small): 7 points
Snack: Two flatbread crackers: 1 point
Dinner: Arroz Con Pollo: 9 points
Got to 30 points so I was two points over. Not too shabby eh? See ya tomorrow.
[PRODUCT REVIEW] Hanadas!!!
(I was trying to think of a clever title like “Raise Your Handana if You Like Handanas!” or something like that. Awe well.)
Like most of you know, I live in Florida. A hot, humid, and incredibly sunny, state that can make life miserable. While I did grow up in the furnace known as Texas, it was a dry and miserable heat, none of this “oh hey, let’s go live in a sauna from May to October” business. What I’m trying to say is…I sweat. A lot. Even though I have lost 125 pounds, I still profusely sweat like George Constanza eating Kung Po (George likes his chicken spicy!) What’s worse is that sometimes (well…all of the time) sweat gets in my eyes and it hurts so much that I have to stop exercising for a few minutes. This happened countless times on my long runs when I was training for my half marathon. IT SUCKED.
After this happened a couple times, I finally tried a few different things.
I wore a hat. Fail.
I wore a sweatband. Fail.
I wore a bandana. Fail.
I wore my hood up on my hoodie. Fail.
Nothing seemed to do the trick. Then, I found the Handana.
26 years ago, Katie Niemeyer suffered from a horrible disease called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome that caused her skin to blister out in to second and third degree burns all over her body. Unlike a lot of patients afflicted with this condition, Katie survived with minimal scarring and she wasn’t blinded from it, which is common. However, SJS did make her eyes very sensitive. So like me (except for the fact that I’m just a crybaby and Katie is a stud) when she was able to exercise again, getting sweat in her eyes was incredibly painful. Since she was training for an upcoming marathon, she needed a solution.
That is when she invented the Handana! A moisture-absorbing sweatband that wraps around your hand! The Handana is like a glove with a space for your thumb and your fingers. It’s soft. It’s durable. And man, does it mop up your sweat! I think the biggest advantage of the Handana is its mobility per se. You can absorb any sweat on your body that you can reach. Definitely awesome for me since I can’t stand having sweat on the front and on the back of my neck.
Product Testing Time!
You may not know this, but I’m a HUGE Cook’s Country and America’s Test Kitchen fan. One of the coolest things they do on the show is product testing. Since this is my first equipment review, I’ve taken their testing model to review the Handana. So, I tried the Handana in three sports that I regularly do: racquetball, spinning, and running.
I could wear it with my Polar watch with no problem too!
In racquetball, you sweat like a maniac. It’s useless to try to wipe the sweat off of your shirt…because it’s full of sweat too. I wore the Handana on my non-racquet hand, not because I was worried about gripping the racquet, but because I knew I would need it. It mopped up the sweat perfectly. A great thing about it is even if you’ve used all the places on the Handana, you can go over it again and it still feels dry. No gross sweat-on-sweat action here!
Spinning is another thing I used the Handana for. At first, I was a little worried about gripping the handlebars on the bike, but that wasn’t an issue at all! It perfect for a quick swipe here and there to feel human again.
Post-race photo.
Photo Credit to Andrea Wolf of Wolf Industries.
Finally, I used the Handana for running. Lots and lots of running. It was perfect for those times that I needed a quickly swipe the sweat on my forehead to prevent it from getting in my eyes. This kept me from having to stop which in turn kept my run times accurate. I used the Handana during the Tallahassee Half Marathon, which made sweat one less thing to worry about. That way, I could worry about other things…like my calves cramping or my toenails falling off.
Overall, I have been impressed with the Handana. If you think about it, it just makes sense! When I first read about it, I was worried that it would be a nuisance, but it feels like you’re wearing nothing at all! Nothing at all! Nothing at all! (Stupid sexy Flanders!) Frankly, my only complaint is that I needed a size smaller. I thought I would need an XL Handana, but in reality I needed a large. It wasn’t an issue, but it was just a little too loose for my liking.
So, now that you know all about Handana, go to www.myhandana.com and check them out! They are available in five sizes and a copious amount of color combinations from red and black (like mine) to burnt orange (ewww) and black. Also, be sure to like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter! Start your own Handana story today!
Note: I have received products from Handana. All thoughts and opinions are honest and are my own.
Day 886: Hello Weigh In Day!
Today was a new day.
A new start.
It felt refreshing and liberating.
I finally feel like myself again.
What an awesome feeling.
So I gained .8 this week, but that was an incredibly welcomed number. I’m finally back in the low 230’s after being close to the 240’s all week. It’s crazy how my body fluctuates.
Now, obviously a gain is a gain, but I have a big plan to change all that. Starting tomorrow, I am going back to counting Weight Watchers points. I figure that I should go back to what got me to where I am today. With that being said, I’m going to try to incorporate more of the Skinny Rules in to WW. More sprouted grains, little to no carbs after lunch and A LOT of Greek Yogurt. Sounds delicious to me.
Sorry to cut this short, but it has been an exhausting day, and I’m ready for some serious sleepage. See ya tomorrow.
Day 885: Back on Track Like a Boss
Last week was kind of nuts. We had made plans to prepare our food at the beginning of the week, but it just didn’t happen. Which resulted in eating out every night and making just bad decisions.
Then, we went to Disney World this weekend. While you walk a ton at Disney, you can also EAT a ton at Disney. I made an pseudo effort to make healthy choices, but sometimes something would pop up. For example, I posted on the FFK FB page about my healthy breakfast one morning: a massive bowl of fruit inside of a hollowed-out half of a pineapple and a bowl of oatmeal at Kona Cafe inside the Polynesian (we didn’t stay there, but we dreamed that we did by going there everyday because it’s our favorite. By the way, I’m a massive Disneyphile. Have I mentioned that before?) Anyway, so we were finishing up our delicious breakfast, and then they brought us out two of the most sinfully delicious chocolate cupcakes we have ever eaten. Yes…they brought them out…for breakfast. They were bringing them out since it was our sixth anniversary of us being together. The old-point-counting-sticking-to-his-healthy-guns Nathan wouldn’t have eaten it. Well, I did. Along with a lot of fantastic food that weekend because Disney is delicious. (I mean, I don’t really know if Cinderella’s Castle would taste good if you bit in to it, but I’m pretty certain it would be.) I know that some people think that vacation is a time to splurge and I can understand that. But for me, vacations have been my downfall for a long time. I’ll come back from a trip and have gained/retained like crazy. I am working on being better about that. I think it goes back to not surrounding what I do around when or what I eat, which is really easy to do on vacation. Time to work on that.
So during this what felt like a gorgefest of a weekend, I felt down on myself. I left for Orlando on Friday morning weighing almost 240, a number I haven’t seen in a long time. It started to scare me. I felt like I was losing my grip on my weight loss. I was worried that this was the point where things were going to start to unravel for me. That this whole weight loss thing was just a phase in my life. It scared me. It really scared me.
How did I handle it? Not really that well. I still ate pretty bad on the trip. The worst part was that at each meal, I felt a little guilty about what I was eating because I knew that I was making a wrong choice at every turn. This all lead up to Sunday when we were getting ready to leave the parks.
This is my Florida driver’s license photo. It was issued to me in August 2010.
Like I was saying, on Sunday I was still feeling pretty crummy about my weight. My jeans were a little tight, my shirt was pulling in certain ideas, I just felt fat. When I left the World of Disney store in Downtown Disney, that all changed. I was in line to pay for a pin lanyard (oh yeah, I collect Disney pins. Don’t hate.) but the line was painfully long, so I went to another register. I paid for the lanyard, and the lady asked to see my ID. She looked at the photo, looked at me, looked at the photo, and looked at me again. “You need a new photo!” she said. “You’ve lost some weight!” I thanked her and began to tell her my story. She told me that she always makes an effort to say something to people that look like they have lost weight from their photos. From them on, my view completely changed. Yeah, I’ve been far from perfect with my weight loss, but no one is expecting me to be. I shouldn’t get down on myself each time I make a bad decision. I need to move on and learn from it. I’ve come a long way from that photo, both physically and mentally. I know that I can keep on keepin’ on to reach my weight loss goal. It’s going to happen, it just might take some time. And you know what? It truly is the journey and not just the destination. See ya tomorrow.
Day 880: Wordless Wednesday Time
Day 873: Wordless Wednesday!
