Surprisingly on-track

I have actually gotten some form of exercise every day this past week. At the very least, I've done my 100 crunches or 100 VKRs each day. (So I've done 800 in 8 days. That's a lot of ab work by my standards!) Except for Thursday I did something else each day, though there's no new variety to it except for adding the one weight machine for my legs once in a while. I have been keeping track of my water, too, and though it rarely gets up where it should be it's definitely more than it has been. So that's good news.

It doesn't seem to be making any real difference, weight-wise; I'm still at 149 or 149.5 each morning, and tomorrow might be worse because tonight we're having pizza and wine to celebrate having Daniel back among the living after an intense proposal week. I do think my fitness is improving -- it could hardly do otherwise -- but I'm not eating any better, and based on my history it's how carefully I watch what I eat that makes the real difference for weight loss. Actually, the pattern seems to be that if I eat whatever I want and don't exercise, I gain; if I eat whatever I want and do exercise, I maintain; and if I watch what I eat and exercise I lose, though more slowly than I gain. I can lose briefly if I watch my eating and don't exercise but it doesn't go on for long, though I don't usually try that combination.

How long before someone invents the magic pill for weight loss and fitness? The one with no side effects and that's free and instantly effective? This is such a drag. We've been at this almost two years and I know it's something for our whole lives, but it feels so futile so much of the time.

Oh! Before I crawl away to mis-eat again, I wanted to mention that I've been tracking my own water and crunches and such on a site called Joe's Goals -- http://www.joesgoals.com/. It's simple to use and they do make little line charts you can export to sites like ours (or like our ticker site) but I wasn't all that thrilled with the little charts, so I've just been using it on my own. But it does motivate me to do the crunches because I hate to leave the box totally empty when it could have such a happy green check in it and it takes so little time to earn it. Isn't that silly? And the water box looks woefully empty with fewer than five checks because it doesn't start a second row until then, and water checks, again, take so little effort to earn. I use a log box for my exercise so for once I've been tracking the weights I do so I can tell if I'm making progress.