Little Victories

In the past several days since my last post, I've been a little dumbfounded as to what to write about next! By all stretches of the imagination, I live a fairly normal, average daily life, and nobody really wants to hear about that, now do they? I mean, compared to most healthy living bloggers, I'm downright boring. I'm not making a new, healthy recipe every day, nor do I even get a chance to work out every day! I have an active 9 month old daughter, I work three days a week, and I eat a lot of leftovers. I work out when I can, and even then I'd much rather do a whole lot of things instead of working out.

All that left me a little short on blogging words. What can I say about this "journey" when it's only just begun? I've gone over my goals, and I don't really want to post a blog every day that's just like the day before. "I drank 8 cups of water today! Yay!" that's all well and good, but it doesn't feel like enough.

Then this morning (walking out of the restroom, since we all know the best thinking happens in there), it hit me: little victories. I think it's something that SparkPeople.com promotes, celebrating those little "healthy streaks" and small victories along the greater journey. So today I will celebrate a little victory: tracking!

I have tracked my food intake, to a T (or as close as possible) for at least the last 5 days, and for me, that's a huge deal! I have a tendency to track only my good days, conveniently forgetting all those extra calories consumed on the side. I was brutally honest on Friday, tracking every last thing that I ate at my in-laws, and lo and behold, I consumed 1,000 more calories than my budget allows. Once in a while, that's okay, but every week? That's a lot of extra calories, especially if it happens more than once. As a result of having tracked all of this information, I was able to use my handy-dandy loseit.com app to see what my week looked like overall.  With a bit of compensating (and a well-placed, killer Jillian Michael's workout on Saturday), I found that over the course of the entire week, I had only gone 100 calories above my weekly caloric budget!

I guess you could say this encompasses two "little victories" for me: the first being my consistent tracking, and the second being that I only overate by 100 calories.  I've been a pretty big overeater the last few months, so it's a nice "you can do this!" reminder for me.  The other good thing that comes out of this knowledge is that I've been much less likely to "throw it away."  In the past, I would have looked at those extra 1,000 calories I ate on Friday (Pizza Hut pizza and breadsticks, by the way), and considered the weekend/my diet a complete wash.  Saturday would have been filled with lots of snacky, cookie-food, I would have felt like a failure, and it would have been that much harder to get back on the wagon.  Instead, I can look at my entire week and see that though I threw on an extra 1,000 calories on Friday, overall I only consumed an extra 100 above my budget.  That's much better news, in my opinion!  I was able to balance it out between exercise, and the days when I ate a little bit under the budget.

So hurray for victories like these!  When people say "it's the little things," they're pretty much always right.  What will I do now?  I'm going to take these newfound victories and run with them.  It's like something clicked when I realized all of this, and all of a sudden I realized that I am much more in control of my calories than I thought.  It's easy to feel out of control, between having Amy, working, keeping the apartment "clean" (HA!) and dealing with various other issues.  It's nice to be reminded that it is within my power (and with the help of God!) to reach these goals.  Thank goodness!

Happy Tuesday!