I met my downfall in a bag of Baked Cheetos

It's been a little while since my last entry! For that, I have no excuse other than pure laziness and also I couldn't get in the writing zone. This was often the case for me  in college as well when writing papers, and usually resulted in me staying up all night to get them done and then having gigantic blue circles under my eyes. Luckily, I have an odd gift for cranking out papers fast and always made good grades, which just made me do the exact same thing the next time. But my procrastination habit is another entry entirely. For your random enjoyment, here is a picture of my aforementioned under-eye circles during college:

 

Disturbing, yes? Also, that is indeed a inflatable playground thing for children that I am sitting on. Long story. Anyway, the past couple weeks have been kind of a roller coaster. I've had good things. I've had bad things. I've had everything in between.

We'll start with the bad and get it over with (it makes me unhappy that I ended the previous sentence with a preposition, but it's the only way I can think of to get my point across right now; I've fallen in the grammar pit!). My eating has been a struggle lately. If you look at my calorie intake, it would seem like everything was okay. It's just mainly that when I say it has been a struggle, I really mean it! I have been seriously struggling to make good decisions lately. Usually, I can honestly say that I've gotten to the point where good decisions come easily. I don't agonize over forgoing higher calorie foods anymore. But lately, temptations seem to be all around me. I am proud to have resisted most of them, but I hate that it seems so much more difficult  to resist them as of late. Case in point: I bought a bag of Baked Cheetos on Saturday. Calories weren't bad, they seemed innocuous enough. But the thing is that I knew Baked Cheetos were hard for me to stop eating. There are not many foods that I say I can never have, but things like Baked Cheetos are one of them because I cannot seem to be reasonable about them. But I bought them anyway, and sure enough, by Monday 3/4 of the bag was gone! And seriously, who wants to say they met their downfall in a bag of Baked Cheetos? Your downfall should at least be something completely awesome like key lime pie or a filet mignon. Not unnaturally orange pieces of processed crap. However, I believe my lesson is now learned. This week is going much better than last week.

Onto the good things! I, Kristen Kinney, am now regularly consuming a breakfast smoothie with SPINACH in it! To be completely honest, it looks absolutely disgusting, but you really cannot taste the spinach. The smoothie is my go-to low carb breakfast. I love it because you just throw in vanilla Greek yogurt, strawberries, blueberries, spinach, and a little water in the blender and you're in business! Oh yeah, I also put in some flaxseed partly because of the health benefits, and partly because it makes me feel like a hardcore health nut. The spinach does that too.

I also started doing high intensity interval training (HIIT) at the beginning of this week. Now I am slapping myself (mentally) for not starting this earlier. I had heard that you burn way more calories doing HIIT than moderate cardio, but I kind of regarded it as something that probably wouldn't be very pleasant, but that I should do for the health benefits. Pretty much comparable to spinach in my breakfast smoothie. Anyway, I tried it for the first time on Monday and I think I am now addicted! I LOVE IT! For those of you that don't know what it involves, you basically start out at a moderate pace on the elliptical or treadmill (in my case for 2 minutes, but this can be adjusted for your fitness level), then for a minute afterwards you go, pardon my expression, balls to the walls! You go as fast as humanly possible for 60 full seconds. Then I repeated that sequence 19 more times, for a total time of 60 minutes. I think it satisfies my need for extremes. I'm not extreme in my weight loss methods anymore, but that part of me is not just erased. This provides a safe and healthy outlet for me to indulge this part of myself. There is just something exhilarating to me about going full-out like that.

And finally, we come to my recent pants purchase. I bought, brace yourself for this one, size 10 white pants!  I have never, ever worn a size 10 before (well okay, I suppose I have to have worn them as a child at some point, but never in my memory). And actually, I cannot remember the last time I bought white pants (besides baggy scrubs) because it's just usually a poor fashion choice for heavy people. But I love how white pants look in the summer. However, that was just another thing that I saw as forbidden to me because of my weight. Happily, not anymore! I've had requests for pictures of me in the pants, but I really want to save those pictures for my 1 year anniversary at the end of next month. So stay tuned for that!