Anyone Wanna Be My Buddy??

Monday marked the beginning of a new journey in our household thanks to Christopher Titus: Love Is Evol and his question about "Ask yourself, are you within 5% of your first date weight?" Thus far, I've been doing pretty good the past couple of days. Or at least I think so...

1. I have not had a single bowl of ice cream. That's a pretty monumental event for me. Ice cream is simply part of my nighttime routine. Get home, change, make dinner, homework, shower, tuck in... ICE CREAM! Even though we still have one of those gallon sized tubs screaming my name from the freezer, I have managed to ignore it.

2. I actually went out and bought some Lean Cuisine meals to take to work for lunch. I will say, there's nothing like a Lean Cuisine to make you suddenly start day dreaming about cookies (or ice cream), but I figure I can't really screw up the "healthier choice" factor if it's pre-made for me. Coincidentally, I also purchased some organic noodles, green pepper, and green onions to use when making last nights dinner. This may not seem foreign to some people, but believe me, Lena thinks I've been abducted by aliens right now.

3. I've started researching recipes (thank you Pinterest) that I can make that go outside my "normal" dinner menu. I'm a pretty big supporter of the chicken nuggets folks, but they will no longer be on the menu. I suspect the children will last about a week before they revolt and you see the missing person news broadcast.

I have yet to...

4. Start establishing a workout routine. My sister offered to add me to her gym membership, but getting to the gym still currently seems next to impossible. I don't get home until 6pm and by that time I have things that need to be accomplished (see #1 above, please exclude the ice cream). I do have the Wii and a couple workout games to go with it, but I haven't figured out how to pry the big TV away from James just yet.

5. Step on the scale. I probably need to do that to see what I'm starting with here. I know when I mentioned it back in October I started using the My Fitness Pal app for iPhone, but it could certainly use a bit of an update. If anyone is currently using the app, please leave me a comment with your username or add me on there so we can link up! Maybe getting some friends on there will help kick my ass into gear lend a little more encouragement. As you can see, I only have 4 friends on there right now and most of them haven't logged in anytime recently. They do say it works better with a buddy right?

Something else I've noticed though... James hasn't done anything yet. After his bedtime outburst that he's had enough and he'll be joining a gym this week (which I support) and his comment about how I used to look much better before, he hasn't made a single effort. I know for a fact that he's gotten off work on time the last 2 days (3:30) and that when I got home he was sitting comfortably on the couch watching TV. Part of me wanted to throw something at his head last night for it, but I know that I can't force him to do it if he really doesn't want to. Not to mention it would be like the pot calling the kettle black here, because I've said it plenty of times and done exactly that.

For now, I'll just be proud of me and continue to take it one day at a time. That's all I really can do and I'm okay with that.

Ask Yourself, Are You Within 5% of Your First Date Weight?

I'm sitting here eating my last few slices of left over pizza today that we'll be having for a while. Since James had surgery on his shoulder back in May he's been feeling extremely anxious about his body and the physical limitations that the surgery resulted in for him. He's always been a sports nut for as long as I've known him: baseball, racket ball, flag football, etc. Regardless of the season he's always been active in something. Since they literally had to cut away pieces of his muscle, the doctor told him it would be a year at least before he'll be able to be fully active again like he's used to.

In the beginning it was just annoying for him. Since he was still in pain for a while though, there wasn't this strong desire to run out and jump right back into something right away. As the months have passed by, the pain has gone away, the anxiety has started to build, and he's reached his breaking point. He talks constantly about how much he misses playing sports and that he's really unhappy with the amount of weight he's gained. Personally, I still think he looks great and he's certainly nowhere near fat. In fact, he's only about 5 pounds over ideal weight according to the physical he just had last month. For him though, it's a really big deal. He says he feels huge and he's tired of constantly being, well, tired.

We introduced Paige this weekend to Christopher Titus: Love Is Evol (which is by far the most hilarious comedy skit on the planet) and it evidently snapped the final straw for James. Christopher Titus asks the audience if things are not as "hot" as they used to be. Then he asks you to honestly ask yourself if you're within 5% of your first date weight. "Now, you can get mad at that OR you can get a treadmill. Up to you!"

If I'm being totally honest, things are not as hot as they used to be. We've been struggling for several months now because quit frankly, he has no sex drive and it's making me absolutely insane! Everything else in our relationship is great. We don't really fight, we have 3 happy healthy kids, and I'm still crazy in love with him. Probably more now than I was when I first fell for him. I've tried just about everything... Romantic candlelight room, sexy jammies, massage, hell, I even went and got him a testosterone booster from the Lion's Den... Nothing has improved. As we were going to bed after the skit, he mentioned that he's going to find a gym this week because he's done feeling like this. What it comes down to is that he doesn't feel sexy even though I think he is and that's killing it for him.

I fully support the idea of him doing some strength training to get his shoulder back where it needs to be. He's not really ready to be swinging a bat just yet, but I think he could handle slowly building up that muscle again without doing any damage. But this decision of course sparked another comment from him about my weight. I fully recognize that I'm not within that 5% mark of our first date weight this time around. I am however exactly the weight I was the first time we dated several years ago. This last time, when we'd first started dating I had just left 3 years working as an assistant manager at a Brazilian Steakhouse. I was the thinnest I'd ever been. Granted, I was also running on nothing besides salad, steak, and enough caffeine to power a small country. While I was thin, I constantly felt like garbage. Mostly due to severe sleep deprivation.

His comment though, was "Well, you did look better." Which went off like an atomic bomb in my head. He's been claiming for months that it's just the way he feels about himself as to why we're not as active as before. That one little comment however tells me that it's also that his attraction to me on a physical level has diminished. It stung like hell to hear, but if I'm being honest with myself, I can understand where the comment came from. I had posted back in October that there would be no more excuses, which by the way didn't happen. But if I learned anything this weekend, it's that I really need to stick to that and do something about it. I don't want to be his roommate, I want more than that, and if that's how we get back there then I'm all in!