Losing 40 lbs without Losing Myself

I said I was going to write a blog a couple of weeks ago when I hit my 40 lb weight loss mark, but never got around to it until now (a.k.a. 5 lbs lighter for 45 lbs total weight loss so far).  It's actually fitting, because this is kind of a metaphor for my weight loss journey over the last three months.  Dedicated, but not distracted by progress.

Like many others, I have battled shifting weights all through my twenties.  At my biggest I was 206 lbs in maternity clothes.  At my smallest, I was a size 2 and sick as a dog.  I would get on an exercise/diet kick and drop big numbers.  Then I'd have one week of plateauing, and go running to food for comfort.

Actually, I'd go walking to food.  Slowly.  Running would have been too much like exercise.

This would result in rapidly gaining it all back.  I also went through a period where I was so depressed, anxiety ridden, and just essentially anti-me that I couldn't eat.  I didn't deserve to eat.  This resulted in me being the smallest I've ever been in my adult life, while simultaneously the unhappiest.

Whether I was big or small, the times when I focused on weight loss were the times that I was the least....Ann.

Three months ago that all changed with the birth of my miracle baby, Emma.  Since that is a blog unto itself, I will just say that something clicked, and I knew that I had to get my health under control.

Not weight.
Not pant size.
Not body shape.

Health.

For me, being thin is all about being somebody else.  Being HEALTHY is all about being ME.

So even though I had a lot of weight to lose, I committed to myself that this was not about losing weight.  It was about committing to a healthy lifestyle, whether that ever meant losing a pound or not.

What is the point of losing weight if you are miserable before, during, and after?  What was the point of being a size 2 when I was riddled with panic attacks and could barely get out of bed in the morning?

This time, I was going to lose weight, but not if it meant losing myself.

I'm proud to say I am 45 lbs lighter than I was 3 months ago.  Everyone asks me what I'm doing to lose weight. Weight Watchers? Lifting weights? Walking? Atkins?

I'd love to say I found a fabulous program, but the truth is I just accepted cold hard facts.  The way you get healthy is to eat less and move more.  Now, obviously I am not naive enough to think that this is easy or simple or looks the same to everyone. 

So, I'll only speak for myself.

Eating less calories overall and making the calories I do eat count has worked for me.  Exercising 3-4 days a week has worked for me.  Creating calorie deficits through cutting back on the overall amount I eat has helped me lose pounds.  Exercise has ensured that those pounds are fat and not lean muscle.

Plain and simple.

No muss, no fuss.

I realize this probably comes as a disappointment to a lot of people, who want to see a big transformation, but still eat the same way and not have to exert much effort. Believe me.  I GET IT.  I was right there with you.  Blood type diets, converting every morsel of food into a point system, books, DVDs, cut carbs, eat TONS of carbs, no meat, only meat, no preservatives, protein shakes, supplements, phen phen.  We get messages all the time that tell us, "YOU are different. YOU can't lose weight through diet and exercise. YOU need to stand on your head, eat a handful of pistachios, and recite the Tao of Bob Harper backwards while listening to endangered Bengal tigers swat at a gong.  The pounds will FALL off and you won't have to lift a finger or give up eating pie for breakfast."

This just wasn't the case for me.  Before I piss too many people off, I know PLENTY of people who have lost weight doing various programs.  Weight Watchers, in particular, has been a miracle for several people I know, and even I lost the most weight of any program I've ever done doing Weight Watchers.

For me though it was all temporary.  "When I hit my target weight, I'll [cancel my Weight Watchers subscription, reincorporate carbohydrates, find a good home for the Bengal tiger, etc.]"

Then the weight would just come back.

So, again, this time I've switched my focus to just accepting that living a healthy lifestyle has to be a lifelong commitment.  Yes, it means sacrificing some food indulgences and making myself physically uncomfortable for 4-5 hours a week.

But it also means more years on this earth with my precious babies.  Or, at least, what remaining years I have left with my babies better spent.

What kind of a blogger would I be, though, if I didn't at least reveal a few tips/tricks that have helped me lose the first 45 lbs.  Here is what is in my arsenal:

1.  MyFitnessPal

With 2 kids, it's all about streamlining and making every process more efficient.  It's also about making things more cost efficient.  I do not have the time or inclination to find the nutritional facts on the food I am eating and then convert those facts into an arbitrary point system.  I'd rather just stop after the first step.  PLUS, I don't have the money to join Weight Watchers.  So I found MyFitnessPal, which works just like WeightWatchers.com, but is free and just goes by the nutritional data and not by a point system.  This is all I am doing in terms of "dieting".  MyFitnessPal calculates what my calorie needs are based on the amount of weight I want to lose a week (1-2 lbs) and tracks everything for me.  Could not be easier, AND I have a lot of friends using it, so we can support each other.


2.  Running for Mortals: A Commonsense Plan for Changing Your Life With Running

This book changed my life.  I have caught the running bug in a big way, and that makes the fitness component of my new healthy lifestyle FUN instead of a CHORE.  This book has the best advice and tips and can turn ANYONE into a runner.  Even if you still aren't convinced after reading it that you can run, the training tips and information about how your body develops through exercise are applicable to any sport.



3. Timex Ironman Road Trainer Heart Rate Monitor Watch

I am a person who responds to numeric feedback.  If I am going to go out and bust my butt jogging around the neighborhood, I want to see EXACTLY how my effort paid off.  Furthermore, I want to see how my effort pays off differently when I run up hill for half my run versus picking the easy flat routes.  So I use a heart rate monitor watch.  It tracks my splits and all my heart rate information and tells me exactly how many calories I burned based on my min heart rate, max heart rate, and weight. This is a perfect example of where being fat pays off.  I burn way more calories than my in shape counterparts running the same distance and speed, because I am not just doing cardio, I am doing resistance training!

The resistance being heaving my fat ass off the pavement.

This watch gives me the numbers to prove it.

4.  Motorola S10-HD Bluetooth Stereo Headphones

You will never see me working out without headphones. Ever. Running is very mental. No, not just crazy. Mental in that you are inside your head, and every little thing about your environment weighs in on your run. So when I can hear myself breathing heavily, I start to think crazy thoughts.

"I am breathing really heavy....is this too heavy??...what is that wheezing noise?....are my lungs about to collapse?....what if I died....it is dark out here....how long before someone found me...or worse...what if a hobo under that overpass starts chasing me...he'll have the advantage, because he's not out of breath...he's just been chillin' under an overpass...listen to me...I am hobo bait..."

I like these Motorola bluetooth headphones. Who needs an ear bud cord flopping around their face when they're running from a crazy overpass hobo?

5. My Two Running Apps: Nike+ GPS and Dailymile

I use Nike+ GPS to record my running routes and give me real time information about my distance and pace during my runs.  It also let's me get cheered on by my Facebook friends, while I am running.  (FYI, if you see me post I've started a run on my Facebook Profile click "Like".  I'll here applause in my bluetooth headphones.)  It has a lot of other cool features as well, like a dynamic screen saver that posts an avatar of yourself and all your current running stats.  Talk about motivation at work when I am sitting all day.  Every time my screen saver clicks on, I'm reminded of how far I've come.  Dailymile is another great app that let's me log my workouts and connect with other runners in my community.  Tracking my weight loss and fitness progress online is HUGE accountability.  Everyone is watching...

So that's how I lost 40 lbs.  Instead of looking to solutions that are in complete antithesis to who I am as a person, I found solutions that let me be become a better version of who I already was.  I love social media, I love connecting with new people, I love engaging with niche communities, I love blogging, and I love seeing measurable results, so I found fitness and nutrition tools that fit that bill.

I am now 20 lbs away from being in the "healthy" weight range for my height and 35 lbs away from my ultimate goal weight.  That's a great feeling, but I'm not getting too hung up on it.  On those weeks when I don't see the scale move, I can honestly say to myself that I wouldn't have done anything different the prior week.  It just wasn't a weight loss week.  Period.  I'm also finding that finishing a 5k race is 10X more rewarding than seeing the scale move 1 or 2 lbs every week.

If I never lose another pound, I am still happy with where I am, and that is something I've never felt before.

Feels good.

Created by MyFitnessPal - Free Calorie Counter

Nearly Breaking My Ass and Lessons Learned

Once upon a time (an hour ago) in a magical treehouse (the office), I went to do some filing. What I didn't know was that this mundane task would result in 10 seconds of intense fear, followed by 15 seconds of intense relief, then followed by 5 minutes of giggling.

It bears illustration.

My filing cabinet sits in the corner of my office, next to my arm chair.

This is the perfect place for it. Not only does it allow me to pretend to be listening to people sitting in it when I'm really staring out the window, but it is situated thus so my ass can gently rest on the arm of it while I do my filing.

Today, however, my chair was not situated thusly. It had been moved. Blame is not important to the story, but suffice it to say a marketing department meeting was had following today's incident. The point is, the chair had been moved so that the right arm of the chair was against the wall and the chair itself was facing the front of the filing cabinet.

I am not a person who notices minor changes to my environment, because I am not a visual person. I am more of a tactile learner. Muscle memory is far more important to my navigation of daily life than visual cues. This is important for the reader to understand, because certainly the first question one will ask upon hearing this tale is "If you face that chair all day, how did you not notice it had been moved?" It doesn't matter why I did not notice the chair had been moved, it only matters that I didn't. So try to focus.

I went to gently rest my ass on the arm of the chair as I would on any other day I go to put away or retrieve files.

As aforementioned, in my mind, all was right with the world and my chair was facing in the proper direction.

I would say that upon being within a milometer of the normal chair arm zone my ass sensed danger.

It was at this point that my mind concluded the chair no longer existed.  Being a sleep deprived mother, time slowed down enough that I was able to appreciate a number of things about being human and in the midst of falling. Number one, it doesn't matter how far you are actually falling. It could be three inches or three thousand feet. The fear is the same:

I am about to die.

Number two, when you are falling, your mind is suddenly capable of having approximately 957 thoughts per second.

Naturally, I let out a blood curdling scream. 

One of my assistants came to check on me (in no hurry, mind you, as he is quite accustomed to my blood curdling screams) and found me sitting comfortably in the chair, horror stricken.

Despite having to explain to a subordinate why I was screaming in the armchair, this tale has a happy ending. My ass was not gently resting where it thought it would be, but was gently resting nonetheless. The moral of the story is don't jump to the worst conclusions, before a situation has totally played itself out. Also, cut back on the caffeine after the first pot of coffee.

The End

5 Reasons to Never Let Your IT Company Host Your Website

Finding a web hosting company is kind of like going on an Easter poop hunt.

You don't know what you're going to find or where you're going to find it, but you know that it's going to stink.

For the last several years, I've had my company's family of sites hosted with Hosting.com. As our company's websites grew in complexity, Hosting.com met our needs by transitioning our sites from a shared hosting environment to a VPS hosting environment. They managed all of the server security patches, maintenance, and updates, as well as troubleshooting all server issues. We had total access to the server and IIS, which met our minimal needs for server control. This was the perfect situation at a tidy $89/month.

Then they tripled the price, without any enhancements to the hosting package.

Bye Bye, Lover.

Hello, Easter Poop Hunt.

This price increase happened to coincide with our company hiring a new IT company. Understand that my company is headquartered in Cleveland, with locations throughout Ohio. I am, however, kept locked away in a tower (we call it The Treehouse) here in Lexington, KY where I can't cause too much trouble or be distracted by the day to day operations. Plus, as the marketing department, we are entirely staffed by geeks and really don't need a lot of help from IT as a general rule. If anything, we just end up working around the IT screw-ups and fixing their abundant mistakes. That said, I know they have a thankless job, deal with a level of user stupidity rivaled by no other profession, and for the most part are some of the most patient people on the face of the earth.

That is the last nice thing you will hear me say about our IT company.

Our IT company jumped all over the opportunity to take over our web hosting.

"$300/month for web hosting! That's OUTRAGEOUS!!! We can handle your web hosting for WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY less than that."

I would be a liar if I didn't say my instincts told me immediately this was a bad idea. I use to be the project manager for an IT company in Frankfort. I worked for a completely diabolical moron (see The Turd), who also offered "web hosting" to our IT clients.

It was seriously a couple of old servers sitting in what amounted to a broom closet. No one really had web server knowledge, and we just learned as we went. We also never took on large web hosting clients for that reason.

I was hopeful that our new IT company was ACTUALLY qualified to host our sites. After all, they had access to our sites via the interwebs, and could see that clearly there was a lot of dynamic coding going on. We provided them with all of our user names and passwords for our SQL server and VPS server. They had all of the information they needed to thoroughly research the sites and devise a smooth transition plan....

I am now 9 days into the biggest web cluster fuck I have ever seen in my life. I have been gang raped by IT pirates and cannot regain control of my websites or database. Please send help.

Here are 5 reasons to never let your IT company host your website:

5. It's not what they do.

I don't believe that our IT company is stupid. At everything. They have knowledge of networking protocols that I could never understand in my wildest geek dreams. They know the ins and outs of Microsoft like little PC ninjas. They manage that god forsaken Exchange Server like champs.

But web hosting....it's not what they do. In my experience, IT guys like to think that because they understand one aspect of technology that they understand them all. Here's a quote from one of the MANY AGONIZING conversations I've had in the last two weeks:

"You have to understand that some companies websites are only two files. Your all's website is considerably bigger than that, and we didn't know until we had already gone live with it."

Seriously?

Two files?

File 1. File 2.

If placing 2 files onto a server and having a domain name resolve to that server's IP Address is what your IT company considers "web hosting" then RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

4. Nerds make the most dangerous terrorists.

I refuse to classify these guys as geeks. Geeks are obsessive perfectionists who refuse to be defeated. They attack issues with the intensity of a Eurasian Griffon performing a Tibetan sky burial. A geek wouldn't let a website be down for more than five minutes before they'd have that DNS pointing back to a functional backup on a redundant server sitting in a room being cooled by the frosty tears of Steve Jobs himself.

Nerds would rather be playing World of Warcraft.

That's what makes them so dangerous to people who are trying to make money. They come in and hijack as much technology in your company as possible, blow it the frack up, take a giant dump on the pile of shrapnel, and then guard that precious shrapnel poop mound with phrases like "security issue" and "no remote access". Regaining control and technological sanity becomes a delicate hostage situation where the hostage is bleeding like a stuck pig and the captor has cheeto fingers and lives with his mother.

3. As my assistant would say..."They can't math"

My old IT boss, The Turd, hired me on a profit sharing basis. So imagine my surprise come paycheck time, when there was no profit shares on it. This culminated in me finding out that The Turd thought profit was this:

(Billable Hours * Hourly Rate) - (Quoted Hours * Hourly Rate) = Profit

Um.....NOOOOOOOOOO, YOU IDIOT.

(Billable Hours * Hourly Rate) - (Quoted Hours * Hourly Rate) = Profit Quote Accuracy

The only, and I mean, the ONLY formula that matters in business is this one:

Revenue - Cost = Profit

If you don't understand this formula, then pat yourself on the back. You are officially a volunteer working for a charitable organization. Also you should invest in some candles and matches, because you're about to not have electricity or running water.

IT Companies are very concerned with quote accuracy, often at the expense of a fundamental understanding of how that impacts profit. So it's no wonder they don't give a rat's ass about how the quality of the services they are providing impacts YOUR profit.

If my website makes $4.12 every minute (and it does), and it is not functional for 4 days (5760 minutes for those of you who also "can't math") then my revenue for those 4 days was -$23,731.20. If I paid you $20 to host my website for those 4 days (I am ballparking here) then my profit would look like this.

-$23,731.20 - $20 = -$23,751.20

If you're keeping up, that profit is, how do you say, not good.

Another fun math formula I did showed me that I could have stayed with our old hosting company for like FIVE YEARS before I would have spent what I lost this past week with our site being down.

Maths are good stuff.

IT companies don't get it/don't care.  In fact, this IT company actually had the stugots to say, "We're putting in a lot of hours on fixing this that we can't bill for."

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. So you've been doing me a favor this whole week while my site has been down?  Why didn't you say so????  This whole time I've been worried about how I've been losing money, when really I should have been focused on how YOU are losing money.  You should have said something sooner!  I could have thrown you a Star Wars themed Have-You-Lost-Your-Frackin'-Mind party!

2. Time ceases to exist inside a server room

The first day I pulled up on the job working for The Turd, two of the other IT employees were out in the parking lot with a dissected computer monitor, some wiring, and a stack of copy paper. When I got out of my car, I walked up and introduced myself and asked what the hell they were doing.

"Making ionic wind."

Met with my vacant stare, they explained to me that computer monitors run high voltage and with the proper configuring can actually produce ionic wind, suspending objects in mid air....

Met with possibly an even more vacant stare they told me to "Just watch."

Powering up their contraption with a terrifying humming noise, they gently placed a sheet of copy paper above it. Sure enough it floated above the monitor.

Then it burst into flame.

I am 100% confident that our IT company's time theft they've been perpetrating against us for the last 9 days was spent on nothing nearly as awesome as creating ionic wind. When I asked them on day 4 of this debacle why the hell they hadn't just pointed the DNS back to the functional website on the old server their answer was, "Because DNS can take 72 hours to propogate."

Stunned silence.

4 X 24 = 96

96 - 72 = 24

24 * 60 = 1440

1440 * 4.12 = $5,932.80

Hint: that last number is the only one that matters.

1. Nothing will ever be their fault...even when you stab them (i.e. Federal prison is no joke)

IT guys are "actually" people.  "Actually" people meet every fact or opinion with "Actually....blah di blah blah yak yak poot".

Example 1

"Hey, did you notice the sun came up to day?"

IT guy, "Accccctually, the sun didn't really come 'up', because we are revolving 'around' it, so really if you look at the Microsoft protocols for intergalactic directional relativity the sun came 'around' today."

Example 2

"Hey, the website is down."

IT guy, "Accccctually it is working fine on my end."

"I'm seriously looking at it right now.  It's throwing up a server error.  A server error the user isn't even supposed to see, because custom error handling should be turned on."

IT guy, "Um....acccccctually.... I think that's a problem with the way you coded the stored procedures..."

"Really? Because the site was working fine on the old server and no changes have been made to the TWO THOUSAND stored procedures running our website."

IT guy, "Oh..well..accccccctually.... you guys WERE on a 2005 server and we moved you to a 2008 server.  So on a 2008 server, those stored procedures don't match the correct naming convention."

"Why would you move us to a new version of a database server without doing a global replace of the stored procedure calls, or at least tell us so we could update the code?"

"Well, accccccctually...um....yeah.....blah di blah blah yak yak poot"

Only when I finally stopped being polite and started getting real (<--- read homicidal) did the IT company FINALLY apologize. The most they will admit to, however, is that the transition "could have gone smoother". Which brings me to the only two questions I really need answered. 1) In a scenario where I stab the IT guy to death and plead guilty (because I am SO making a speech to explain EXACTLY WHY I DID IT and EXACTLY WHY I WOULD DO IT AGAIN), would I probably get "medium" or "close" security prison time? and 2) Do we think I would do better in the "close" security environment where I spend very little time with other people, or the "medium" security environment where I have to work more?