I learned something very important about myself this holiday season: I have an inability to say no. For those of you that don't know me "in real life," I have always been considered a bit of a bitch. I'm the person who can be firm (or as SC condescendingly calls it, "mean") when the situation calls for it. If I don't want to do something, I won't (or wouldn't, I should say) do it (not counting work). I will say what needs to be said no matter how unpleasant because I am honest (again, SC would say that I'm "mean," though how mean can it be to say the cruel truths to someone when they NEED to hear them?).

The Story

This holiday season, I was over at my a family member's house on a Friday night (I can't remember why for the life of me) with my fiance. There were a bunch of people there (friends and family alike) and everyone was drinking (I wasn't- not out of morals, but because I just didn't want to that night) and being, well, rambunctious like we always are. To make a long story short, I really wanted to leave at around 11pm because I needed to get up early to take care of some stuff around the apartment and run some errands.

But, whenever I tried to leave, everyone kept putting me down. "Do you NEED to leave? It's not like to need to go to work or doing anything important! Stay!" and just belittling me and the things that I needed to do (such as going running). My drunken fiance was no help at all because he ignored me and wanted to stay too. I had worked all day, it had been a long week from hell, and I get really tired after 11pm nowadays because I am a fucking responsible adult and go to bed at a decent hour because I work early on weekdays. Sorry that I grew up.

I ended up staying until well past midnight, maybe even 1am, and not enjoying myself at all. I was not happy that my fiance had been drinking a LOT even though I had asked him not to so that he could drive home (I get road hypnosis pretty badly and it gets worse when I'm tired) and so that he wouldn't be an annoying ass. When I finally had enough and said that I wanted to leave, people were STILL calling me names while we were packing up and heading out the door. They were calling me an old lady and other stuff and I was just sick of it and exhausted. I also ended up driving home while fighting waves of exhaustion. 

Guess what? I ended up waking around noon because I was so tired and didn't get anything I needed to do done.

Do I sound a pissy? It's because I am. I am pissed that they kept doing that to me (it doesn't help that I get a new lecture every time I come over there lately). However, upon further angry reflection (I've made progress, but I can still hold grudges), I should have just flipped them all the bird and said no (maybe not that first part), so they're not entirely to blame.

The Realization

I started to think more about it and I realized something that, to me, is kind of awful: I CAN'T SAY NO ANYMORE. I use to be this headstrong person (or I thought that I was), but if something isn't major, I'll just keep saying yes to my own detriment. 

It's not just other people: I CAN'T SAY NO TO MYSELF AND NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO. I felt like someone punched me in the stomach when I came to that realization. A chunk of my debt is because I couldn't say no to something I didn't need or couldn't afford. My weight is because I couldn't say no to offered food or food that I wanted. I can't say no when I think it's at all rude to do so. Yes, there are outside circumstances that made things worse (lay offs, hours cut, crappy childhood where food and shopping became comforts, blah blah blah) but those are just EXCUSES. I have a stable job and life now, I have no excuse! NONE!

A Promise

So I am making a promise to myself and to you, dear reader. I am going to start saying NO. I am going to stand up for myself, even when it's against myself. I am going to say no to myself when I want to over-indulge or want to skip something that I need to do. I am going to say no to offered food if I don't really want it or am not that hungry. I am going to say no when people try to get me to do something I don't want to (like stay over late). I have always been considered an assertive person, maybe it's time that I start to act like one.

JUST. SAY. NO.

<3 - CFC

HI EVERYONE!

I'm back! I have internet again and am starting to get settled into my new apartment. I still have quite a bit of moving left to do and am currently delaying going out to my boyfriend's truck to unload it.

It has been one HELL of a ride. I am soooo tired and did a whole lot of emotional eating without ANY exercise. I haven't danced or anything in well over a month. I feel icky because I was use to at least dancing once a week. I also feel icky because I'm sick, so that's not helping.

In light of weighing about 195-196lbs now (which means I've gained some weight), I want to get back on track. I know my last weigh-in says 186lbs, but that number only showed up during that weigh-in (which was cool). I consistently weighed 190lbs. So far, it's hard getting back on track because 1- I've moved three times or so this month and 2- my boyfriend keeps eating tasty, fatty food and I've been extremely emotional lately (LOOONG story).

I was going to TRY to get up early to go running or SOMETHING, so naturally once I decided to do that, I got a head cold which is making it hard for me to breathe. Instead, I'm about to eat a slice of pizza. Go me. XD

I've decided to take a FAT CHICK CHALLENGE. I am going to try to take up belly dancing. When looking into classes, here's what I encountered on the home page:

HOLY. CRAP.

I am so much fatter and paler than that. Here's a side by side comparison:

Yeah. I don't look like that.

However, I have challenged myself. I want to get fit, I want to get healthy, and I want to work on getting a better self-image. So why not challenge myself to do something out of my comfort zone? SO CHALLENGE I SHALL. :3

I will be blogging about my adventure. If I'm feeling better on Saturday, I'm going to do it.

I, CFC, will put my fat ass on display in a "sexy" display of pale awesomeness.

BEHOLD MY PALE, NOT FULLY-CLOTHED GLORY!

<3 - CFC

Hi all! As some of you may have seen on my Facebook page, I recently reached the ten pound mark. I credit a lot of my success to 1) the encouragement and support that I get from my awesome readers, Facebook fans, and friends and 2) my own personal motivation and determination. You can get all the support in the world towards succeeding in any endeavor, but none of that means anything if you can't motivate yourself. So today I want to blog about some things that I do to motivate myself.

I'll start out with my thought processes. So much of the battle towards improving ANYTHING is purely mental and  I'll be the first to admit that I don't always win.  For me, it's a new lifestyle and not a crash course diet so I don't let the days when I lose get me down. "Oops. I skipped the gym." Oh well, what's done is done and it's time to move on. I'll make up for it. "Oops. I ate a bunch of cookies or ate more than I intended to." Better not make that a habit and get over it.

When I work out and start to lag, I remind myself over and over why I'm doing this. I tell myself that I am not the kind of person to give up and that I fight on. I ask myself if I NEED something before I buy it or eat it (in the case of junk food).

You have to accept who you are and what you've done every single day. You are the only you out there and it's a waste of time to hate yourself or bring yourself down if you mess up. I've been in a state of self-loathing most of my life and I know firsthand how hard it is to change that mindset. But if you want to change anything, you first have to change how you think. The minute you hear that bastard voice in your head telling you that you're not good enough or you're too fat or ANYTHING negative, stop it. Just don't listen to it. Start telling yourself all the reasons why you're amazing. Look in the mirror every day and tell yourself: "I accept myself right now, unconditionally" (I got that from the "Hungry for Change" documentary I watched). Why would you want to improve anything in your life if you hate yourself? No one ever wants to work for someone they hate. The first step is to learn to love yourself and to love the life you've been given.

Another thing that I like to do is to surround myself with positive things. I like to remind myself to love myself and I like to remind myself what I'm working towards. Part of that is setting goals and part of that is positive reinforcement. I've posted some pictures of the things that I have around my apartment that encourage me. 

I always have quotes on this mirror, though right now I have a countdown for when my BF comes home from his deployment. I also keep a list of goals in the upper left hand corner of the mirror, though that one's a bit old. Yes, those are ponies.

This is on the top of my full body mirror because I AM AWESOME. ;) 
Yes, that's another pony.

This is a new one. It's on the mirror above my sink that I use everyday (why do I have so many mirrors???).

These are my rad positivity bracelets by Alexa's Angels. :D I wear them every single day. I wanted them FOREVER and had to wait for them to go on clearance. :)

These are my jars to track my weight progress. The left one is for the pounds that I have left to lose and when I lose weight, I transfer the gems to the right jar. The star beads are for each goal weight and the disco ball is for my ultimate goal weight.

Yes, MORE PONIES. Deal with it.

For every ten pounds I lose/milestone I reach, I'm buying myself a present. I lost ten pounds total so I bought myself new stickers.

This is my sexy scale. The heart says: My World, My Body, My Life, My Mind, My Heart, My Spirit, Myself, and My World in it for all the things that I love about me. :) It makes stepping on the scale more pleasant. A lot of people are afraid of this inanimate object, whereas I now love mine.

Feel free to steal or modify any of these ideas to help motivate you for whatever goals you have! :D It's a lot of fun. What do you do to motivate yourself?

<3 - CFC

Hi everyone, hope you all had a good holiday season!

Today, I would like to talk about a fat "relapse." I can't think of a word other than relapse to describe it (though fatty/sugary foods ARE addictive. So it kind of works?) and I absolutely hate the phrase "falling off the wagon" because when the hell did I get on a wagon and who is driving (I'm sick and sleep deprived right now, prepare for weird phrases)?

I (ironically) wrote an article a little while ago about getting through the holidays. I pretty much ignored my own advice and did everything I promised myself I wouldn't do. I haven't been to the gym in two weeks because I was so busy with the holidays (I did manage a few, short work outs, a lot of walking, and some dancing), I ate a crap ton (and now feel like crap), and I even managed to go on a few shopping sprees (...I still don't feel bad about this last one). If I wasn't so out of it right now, I would be mad at myself.

Just a few days can tear down months of work when you're trying to make a change. I'm trying very hard right now to become a better person all around- better with money, healthier, a better roommate, etc. Completely losing all self control is not how I do that. I didn't even log calories or anything. What the hell have I been eating? (Answer: ALL OF THE COOKIES)

So I'm going to take my own advice (for once) and just let it go. I've said this many times, and I'll say it again: a lot of people stay stuck in a lifestyle they don't really want anymore (or totally fail at getting healthier/getting fit/losing weight) because they let one bad day (or a bad week or two, as in my case) discourage them. They don't want to put in the hard work to start up again so they quit. I went back to my old vices- so what? Does that somehow make me a bad person? Am I any less sexy because of it? NO. I might have put back on a pound or two (F-U scale, I'm not checking), but who the heck cares?! This is a journey, not some crash course diet. I'm trying to get healthier and lead a better lifestyle while still embracing my curves. This blog may come off as me trying to lose weight to become a skinny chick but it's not. I'm trying to get healthier and part of that is learning self control.

I'm going to take these last few weeks as a lesson and start over. I haven't failed at what I'm doing, I merely made a mistake.

I haven't failed so long as I haven't given up.

<3 - CFC

I stepped on the scale yesterday morning.
It was a spontaneous decision and I was really apprehensive because it was RIGHT after Thanksgiving and I hadn't been able to make it to the gym. I put the scale down on the bathroom floor and, with a grimace, I stepped onto that little square of pain.

I LOST FOUR POUNDS. I did a small victory dance and loudly proclaimed, "YES!"

It was AWESOME.

I'd had a few not so good days (I won't call them bad days, they were just not-as-good days) and like I said before, I hadn't been able to make it to the gym much because of the holidays. I HAD compensated by eating slightly fewer calories, but I wasn't expecting any form of loss.

I AM SO EXCITED. :D There is nothing like progress to motivate a person. I still have no idea how I'm going to make it to the gym four times a week now that I'm working overtime AND doing Christmas stuff, but I'll make it work because IT'S WORKING. Look at all that caps lock; I must be excited.

Tthe moral of this story is that even small progress can really help motivate you. Celebrate all of your victories- big or small. :)

<3 - CFC

I'm pretty sure that I will never, ever get enough vitamins and what not from my diet. Ever.

It's just not going to happen.

As many of you know, I've been tracking my caloric intake via a calorie counting app. That app allows me to see how many calories I've consumed versus how many I've burned. It tracks my water intake, weight, sodium, and gives me a pie chard of carbs/proteins/fat. It also tells me whether I've gotten enough vitamins and minerals.

And folks, according to this app, I'm probably going to die because I never, ever do.

I am seriously considering taking a multivitamin supplement because it just isn't going to happen. Seriously, just look at all of the things that vitamins and minerals do! That's some important stuff right there. Just look at the deficiencies if you don't get enough! I also like this site for info. :)

I suppose I SHOULD try to increase my intake via whole foods first. That's generally considered the healthiest way to go about it. However, I highly doubt that I'm going to start adding tons of leafy greens to my diet since they upset my everything. So I've been considering a multivitamin, most likely of the gummy or Flintstone variety because that is the only way to make me eat them.

Blah, this getting healthy stuff is complicated.

Also, why did I start this before the holidays? My Thanksgiving made me feel bad about my "diet" even though I ate less than I usually do. Ah, well, bad days happen like I've said before. But what am I going to do with all these leftovers? Simple. I will eat them sparingly and in moderation. Except for the stuffing. I'm just going to eat all of that one and get it out of the way.

<3 - CFC

I love junk food. Who doesn't?

Trying to end my relationship with junk food (and I tried to tell it that we can't "just be friends" but I keep trying to go back to it anyways) has been hard. It's like trying to end a bad relationship that you just can't get enough of (at least I assume it is. I've never really been in that situation).

It's not that the occasional bit of junk food is going to kill you and make you weigh 500 pounds, it's when you can't or won't stop eating it. I'm sorry Cookie Monster, cookies are a sometimes food .

If you've read my blog post about my relationship with food, you know that food and I have an interesting history. For me, junk food is kind of like a drug. Once I start eating it, I can't stop easily. Just one hit can lead to a binge and then I feel terrible about myself. I haven't really had that recently, thankfully, but it has happened and I don't want to let it happen again.

Yesterday I was quite proud of myself. My two best friends and I went out to a movie and I didn't get any snack food or pop. Pop makes me kind of sick anyways, so that was easy to cut out of my diet. I also learned yesterday that my chocolate intolerance/allergy is just as bad, if not worse, than it was awhile ago. SC opened a thing of chocolate and the smell was so bad I thought I was going to throw up and my stomach was on fire. So chocolate was really easy to cut out too. Without chocolate, there's really not a lot of sweets that I want. It's mostly the greasy food that I'm fighting now.

I think just saying no is the best route to take if you're like me. Whenever I become junk-food-abstinent (I just wanted to use that word), my cravings and desire for junk food goes down.

Hopefully if I keep saying no, it'll just become automatic. Maybe I'll only eat it every now and again in the future. But until I reach that level of control, I'm just going to keep fighting to say no.

Just say no to drugs.

<3 - CFC

Yesterday was a bad day.

Maybe not BAAAAD per say, but certainly not good. It was bad diet day, a bad exercise day, and just a bad day in general.

It started out waking up dead tired. On Fridays I work 4am-Noon and got about three hours of sleep. My body isn't use to working out yet, so lately I've been needing more sleep and three hours was claearly not enough.

The crap morning got even better when I went to work and was slammed all morning, making me even more tired. I had to run down to one of our stores to grab something and when I got out to my car, I noticed that someone keyed the crap out of it.

That picture doesn't even capture how shit this is. So I ended up buying a sandwich at the store.

Even the sandwich sucked, but I ate it.

I went home and passed out after work, my calories and sodium intake already pretty high. I forgot to turn the wifi on on my phone so I missed the call from my boyfriend who's overseas. I slept so long that I didn't have time to go to the gym before I said I'd be at my friend's house to watch a movie. While there they made epic nachos covered in cheese and beef and veggies and I was so hungry and had had such a crap day that I ate a bunch of the delicious and wonderful nachos. I have no idea how many calories I ate yesterday and I didn't end up going to the gym because I was just so violently tired.

So the moral of this story is that bad days happen, in life and when trying to be healthier. Or both. Don't let the bad days define you and don't let one day of bad behaviors make you feel like you failed. I didn't fail, I had a bad day. So I'll try to make today a better day and just do better. I can't really make up for the lost gym time or the fact that I are more than I should have (especially with Thanksgiving next week and the gym will be closed), but I'm not going to worry about that because it was one day. This isn't a diet, this is changing a lifestyle so bad days will happen because you can't stop life from happening.

<3 - CFC

Hi everyone! :D

So today I'm going to start taking control of my life! I think my eating habits stem from 1) habit and 2) lack of self control. The second one is kind of duh. The first is that I was raised in TV dinners, take out, and other bad for me food. I was also in a crap situation, so I was depressed and (lucky me) I'm an emotional eater. One good thing about developing my sexy chocolate intolerance is that I can't eat it anymore so I don't have a lot of comfort foods to choose from.

So I'm planning a few things for today and the rest of this week.

1. I'm gonna clean my damn room. It's an out of control pigsty since my BF left and if I want to take control, it's a good place to start.
2. I'm going to go look at some gyms. I use to go a lot until I got hurt. If I have a gym to go to, I'll probably go to it. I'm looking at Gold's because my old gym was a Gold's and I loved the Women Only area. I'm also looking at an Anytime Fitness. I heard that working where I work can get me discounts, so I'm going to go see.
3. Put my damn credit card in the freezer! If I control my spending, I tend to control other parts of my life. I keep a register for my checking account to stop myself from frivolously spending (which works).

You'll note that I didn't say control my food intake. That's because that's the hardest thing for me. So I'm going to take control of other parts which will help me become more disciplined. Getting healthy isn't an overnight thing. It takes time, work, and effort. So here I go, taking a stab at it.

On a slightly less related note, I got on the scale today. At the Dr. I was 207 and the scale said 205 despite my fears. XD I guess all my dancing is helping me at least maintain my weight.

Well, I forgot what I was going to say next. So I'm done for now. I'll probably post about the gym stuff later today or tomorrow.

<3 - CFC

EDIT: I think I found a gym!!! I went to three total and the cheapest one I found is my favorite. It has SO much cardio and weight lifting equipment! I have a week long pass so I'm going to try to give it a try tomorrow! :D

Hello people of the interwebz! :D

So trying to make myself move 10min a day isn't really my thing. I don't like working out at home, for some reason.

I use to go to the gym several times a week. (I also use to be like, 30 pounds lighter and thought I was so huge.) I hurt my foot while running on a treadmill one day and stopped going. It took two months for it to heal and the doctor had no idea what was wrong with it. I stopped going because cardio was my favorite part and I didn't feel motivated to go to just do weights.

The point is, I think I'm going to join a gym again. I'm trying to find one that doesn't require an annual contract (I was trapped after I got hurt) and one that's preferably 24 hours (because I want full time access).

So yeah. :) That's my next step. :D I still have all the stuff I need (gym bag, shoes, sports bra, etc) so now all I need is a place to work out!

Wish me luck!

<3 - CFC