No, I didn’t meet the President or anything today, but I did torch a crapton of calories in racquetball. That’s pretty cool too!

Alright, so as some of you know I’m a huge Biggest Loser fan. I’ve been watching the show off and on for about six years and I wanted to be a contestant for a long time… that is until I just lost the weight with no show needed :). Anyway, this week, amongst all the annoying drama that has been added this season to make the show more soap opera-ish, the theme of this week was “No Excuses: I Can’t Lose Weight On My Own.” One team had to work out on their own without their trainer and overall they did pretty well. While I see where they were going with it, I think it misses the bigger picture. For me, even though I have a ton of support on multiple levels, I’m losing this weight on my own.

I’m the one who decides whether to work out when I’m tired

I’m the one who is deciding whether or not to eat that extra piece of cake

I’m the one who said “it’s time to lose weight”

Obviously it is helpful and important to have your friends and family’s support, but that can only get you so far. They only need to be a source of support, not a crutch for your excuses. Granted, this is a harder path, but it will make you all the more stronger in the long run. Once YOU make yourself a priority, everything will fall in to place. You got this yo!

Alright. Where was I?

Breakfast: I had two eggs over hard and two pieces of toast. I always dread making eggs until I just do it and it takes like a total of three minutes. It’s a super filling breakfast!

Lunch: We decided to go to Monk’s for lunch since it was nice outside and they have a really cool outdoor area. We split the artichoke dip and I had the vegan burger with jalapenos, onions, creamy havarti and a hot BBQ sauce. It was the best custom burger I have ever made there. I ate all of my fries and half of the burger. While Monk’s is really good, it’s pricey and the service is hit and miss. I’m kind of ready to just eat at home for a while. It’s usually way less calories (and less sodium) and it’s way cheaper.

SAWS!: Last week, my friend Andrew (the one that kind of looks like Edward Cullen) told me he wanted to play racquetball this week so we set up a time and our other friend Alex joined in on the monotony. We played for a little more than an hour and after five or six games of cut throat, we were all pretty beat. While I love singles, cut throat is more entertaining to me because it’s 2 on 1 so the game gets pretty intense (not to mention there are three uncoordinated out of shape grad students flailing around a small room with racquets attached to their wrists.) Anyway, I burned almost 700 calories (694 to be exact) in a little more than an hour which is an awesome burn.

I still want to do Insanity, but honestly I’m a little scared of the second phase of Insanity. I need to at least give it a try because the results have been epic (it seriously reduced my love handles in a few days) and it’s not that long of a work out. But running and racquetball are so much more fun (he said like a 5 year old while complaining to his mom). I’ll see what mood I’m in tomorrow morning and go from there. Any words of encouragement out there?

Dinner: So after that craziness, I came home hungry. The danger for me when I work out in the afternoon I want to come home and eat dinner but it might night be quite time for dinner so I’ll graze. Today, I took a few bites of the rest of my burger and that was about it (but it’s usually worse.) Anyway, Megan made this awesome skillet of spaghetti so we had that with some bread and an awesome salad with honey mustard. I only ate a serving or so of spaghetti, but I kept creeping in to the kitchen to snag a few fork fulls. That is definitely the worst habit that I have yet to break. I would be much better off just to have another serving. I really need to work on that because those are just pointless calories.

So today was good-ish. I ate too much bread for dinner (and the worst part was it wasn’t really that good. Again, pointless calories.) but overall it was okay. I need to drink more water and less soda and I need to eat out less which is hard because this is the semester for both of us. Between Megan working on her thesis and my teaching, going to class and working, making meals at home isn’t always a top priority. We are both committing to work on that so we can save some money and lose some weight in the process. I have some big goals for myself (like being at least in the 210’s by graduation on April 28th) so each cookie, that extra sprinkle of cheese or that extra helping of spaghetti is going to make a difference. Time to blitzkrieg some calories. See ya tomorrow.