Shipwrecked & Comatose

The first six weeks of Lean Eating are meant to be an induction phase, to slowly introduce you to following new habits and doing regular workouts.  Starting this week the workouts and the habits are going to be harder.  I'm both excited and scared. I'm down another pound this week. That's a total of three pounds in six weeks. Coach has assured us that weight loss is not expected in the first phase and that the most dramatic changes tend to be in the second half of the year.  Still, I'm glad I managed to accomplish a little something.  It makes these struggles feel a bit more worthwhile. I had to take pictures this week.  I'm not posting them because they don't show any differences.  I really don't see the point of asking us to do photos again this early in the program. Struggle is an interesting choice of words.  How often do I really struggle?  This week the lessons were all about fear and discomfort.  Just those words alone make me af...

What does freedom mean to you? I don't want your prizewinning essay from the 5th Grade Civics Fair.  I want a real, tangible, definition. The word freedom is bandied about quite a bit these days.  I am constantly being told that my freedom is at risk.  My freedom is being taken away.  If I'm not afraid, then certainly many other people are. Go onto Facebook on any given day and you'll see a posting, generally from someone with right-wing opinions, posting some meme regarding freedom that quotes the Founding Fathers - and quoting them out of context.  When I say they are quoting them out of context, I do not mean to insult the intelligence or the good intentions of the posters.  I simply mean that the context of the Founding Fathers has little to do with today. Freedom in the Revolutionary War era had a specific context.  The United States was a set of British colonies.  As British subjects, the colonies were working to enrich the empire....

You could hear me whooping it up all over the house this morning when I stepped on the scale and saw that I was down three pounds from last week.  I have gained weight in the past five weeks, so what I really have is a net loss of two pounds.  Still, that's pretty significant.   I've shrunk a tiny bit in my measurements too. What's amazing about Lean Eating is that so much of its focus is about how we eat and why we eat before we even begin to focus on what we eat. The latest habit is to eat until we are eighty percent full.  That is a tough one.  I'm terrible at math.  What is eighty percent full?  How do I judge eighty percent?  Also, eighty percent of how full?  Are we talking about stopping at twenty percent short of stuffed, or twenty percent short of nicely satiated?  I thought about how Weight Watchers suggests a hunger scale and where one is starving and ten is stu...

I finished my fourth week in Lean Eating and so far I've managed to gain and lose the same pound over and over.  It does feel frustrating at times.  I know my teammates and I are concerned and wondering if we're doing the right things.  It's weird to realize we are doing the right things.  I'm doing the workouts as they are given and taking on the habits (although some days are better than others with the eating slowly).  Now that I'm healthy again, my compliance scores are high.  My coach and the mentors are telling me all of the time that I'm doing fine and have accomplished much.  I still feel as if I'm missing something. The issue is that Lean Eating is so different from any other program.  So many of my teammates are like me.  We're gym rats who regularly pound out 90 minutes of hard work.  So many of us have tried other weight loss programs.  When you join Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, that first month is made of euphori...