Easy, breezy, nauseous?

The plateau has been vanquished! I destroyed it by eating whatever I wanted last Friday. No, that is not a typo. It still seems very counter-intuitive to me. I wrote into Chris Powell from Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition (it's pretty cool...he writes back so much that I feel like we're pen pals or something) about my plateau, and he recommended trying to confuse my body. This could be accomplished by changing your work-out routine (which I had already previously tried) and having a high calorie day. He said plateaus are caused when your body gets used to what you have been doing. Confusing your body like that increases your metabolism and you lose more weight. At least in theory. I had high calorie days in the beginning of my journey and kind of sporadically as of late, because I just don't feel cravings for junk like I used to. I thought the point of the high calorie days was so you didn't feel deprived, and since I already didn't feel deprived, I saw no need for them. But I guess they actually serve to boost your metabolism too!

Anyway, I decided to try to eat double my normal calories (so 3000 calories) on Friday. Although, I also decided that I wouldn't just keep eating after I was full just to hit that number. I thought it would be a piece of cake. But as it turns out, my stomach has changed more than I thought. I've really been wanting bacon lately, so I made a bacon and egg English muffin for breakfast with Greek yogurt. I realize that's not super high calorie, but I wasn't going to go get a fast food breakfast just for the extra calories when I really enjoyed my lower calorie homemade version more. I went out for lunch with my mom and sister and I had a salad with real ranch, and a chicken parm sub. I ate all the salad and 3/4 of the sub. And I felt REALLY full, even though my mom commented that I didn't eat an unusual amount. And then I felt nauseous. I hated feeling sick, but at the same time, I felt happy that my body rejected those foods as foreign. Because it wasn't so long ago that my body would have have felt right at home with those foods. Anyway, I kept the food down, but was still so full that I couldn't tolerate an afternoon snack.  By dinner I was somewhat hungry, so I had some wings since I had been wanting those lately. I seemed to do better with those than lunch. I sat down to input my food log in the Bodybugg website and was shocked to see the total number of calories come up as only 2100!?! Seriously?  I felt like I had eaten 100,000! Pretty crazy. But I stayed true to my promise and ate what I wanted, not just a certain number of calories. And it totally worked! I will say that my heart was beating pretty fast when I weighed in this morning though.

In the interest of honesty here though, I will confess that I did not change up my workouts even more this week like I meant to. I was pretty busy and it was just easier to keep doing the same old thing. But hey...new record for a mile: 8:39! I'm pretty sure the old guy next to me at the gym thought I was crazy though because in order to hit that time I was alternating between mouthing the words to Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" and then silently repeating, "When your mind and body tell you that you can't, prove to yourself that you can." Because both my mind and body were at that point screaming, "Quit running, you crazy freak!"

I also entered a contest that Ellen DeGeneres was running to be a Covergirl. She wanted someone that exemplified strength, beauty, and independence. While I still had some occasional doubts over whether those particular adjectives applied to me, I felt proud enough of what I have done these past months to think that I should enter. So I wrote an essay about my story and did an inspirational/corny video that showcased my shrine to myself in my bathroom. Well, not really a shrine (sounds creepy), but I have a bunch of motivational stuff in there since that's where I go first thing in the morning after my 4:30 am alarm goes off and I really want to pull the covers over my head. I figured not just anyone has something like that in their bathroom, nor would they film a video in their bathroom period, so at the very least it would make me stand out. I also took all my pictures for the contest in work-out clothes because I said the gym is where I feel beautiful. I'm not sure if I can post the picture I ended up choosing, so here are a couple of the other top contenders:

The jumping pictures burned a fair amount of calories because I ended up running and then jumping around 20 times. And then, because I am not afraid to laugh at myself, here are a couple of the "fail" pictures:

Actually this last pic is me trying to demonstrate how difficult it is to keep both keep your eyes open and stick out your neck to avoid the dreaded double chin when jumping. Pretty difficult. Luckily, my mom had a weird knack for being able to get the pictures of me while I was in the air.

Update: I crushed my personal best for a mile this afternoon at the gym. I took 12 seconds off my previous time of 8:39. I'm now at 8:27!