Wife Like Me

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Spring Break was a time of renewal and introspection for me.  I do some of my best self-evaluating on road trips, and on our drive home from Texas I worked on some plans for improving myself.  So, for the rest of the week Colin and I worked to hone my ideas into a written vision, measurable goals, and a plan for rewarding at appropriate milestones.

One of my unforseen blessings and challenges as a stay-at-home mom is that I have a weird combination of unpredictability and personal choice in the way my schedule plays out.  I never know if I’ll be able to sleep through the night, and I always have to be flexible with my activities so that I can give my kids attention when they need it.  There is no time during the day when I can say that I’m sure I won’t be interrupted.  At the same time, I have a lot of choices of what to do with my time within that unpredictable framework.  Do I make dinner, read a book, blog, play ring-around-the-rosies, go for a walk with the kids, watch TV or a movie, call my sister, or color with crayons?  Any, and possibly all, of those things may happen during a given day, but to try to PLAN all those things into one day would be madness. For one coming straight out of the class-break-class-lunch-class-study-break-class world to the work-break-work-lunch-work-break-work-home world to this unpredictable-but-lots-of-choices world, it’s been an oddly tough adjustment.  It was easier in a lot of ways to have the external structure of school or work telling me what to do nearly every minute of the day than to have to create my own structure, and then be extremely flexible about it.

That said, I’ve been trying to give myself structure while building into my schedule and goals the ability to adapt to my kids’ needs.  With Colin’s help and support, I’ve made goals in the following categories: health, spiritual, home, family, and financial.  My health-related goals are the most drastic changes for me, so I’ll tell you about them for the added feeling of accountability and since the process I’m going through may help someone else.

I started with a vision statement–where I imagine I’d like to eventually be.  Here it is:

I feel “thin and healthy” and don’t need to worry about gestational diabetes. I have energy and strength to climb mountains, run long distances, and carry babies. My clothes fit and I feel pretty. I weigh under 135 pounds and my fat percentage is less than 25.

Just FYI, I had gestational diabetes with my last pregnancy, and there’s a high risk of having it again next time I get pregnant.  It was pretty miserable in some ways to deal with it last time, so it’s a stressor for me that I may get it again.  The weight and fat percentage I chose are based on conservatively “normal”  and “healthy” ranges for my height and build.  The rest is pretty self-explanatory, I think.

From there, I came up with the following goals:

1. I will exercise for 30 minutes, Monday through Saturday
2. Drink more than 1/2 gallon of water daily (>64 oz)
3. No fast food within any metropolitan statistical area
4. Buy nothing with sugar in the first three listed ingredients
5. 30-30-45-30-60-30
6. Update my spreadsheet

I tried to choose realistic, measurable goals that I could directly control.  That means no “lose 10 pounds in 3 months” since I don’t have direct control over how much weight I lose.  Each of these probably requires some explanation, so here goes.

1. I’ve found that if I try to do something “three times a week” I procrastinate till the end, and then I come up with some excuse to not do it at all.  On the other hand, if it’s something I do every day I kind of get into a positive version of a rut and just do it without thinking about it.  I gave myself a lot of flexibility in the kind of exercise and things like the number of calories, since I want to be able to do this whether I’m healthy, sick, pregnant, traveling, home-bound, gym-bound, car-less, or whatever.  I can break it up into smaller amounts of time if my body or my kids protest, too.  I’ve actually gotten up and done it the last three non-Sunday days and it feels so good to move!

2. If I have a goal to drink water, I do it with no problem.  If not, I forget.  64 ounces is the minimum recommended amount, and I’ve often done around a gallon a day, so I figured that anything over 64 was both doable and healthy.

3. Colin lost a lot of weight (and we saved some money, too!) a while ago by following a “no fast food” rule.  To me, anything with a drive-thru is fast food.  We decided to make an exception for road trips by adding the metropolitan area clause.

4.  The sugar rule is to help me avoid sweets and junk food, but not make friends we visit uncomfortable with my dietary restrictions.  “Sugar” includes obvious sugary things like corn syrup and brown sugar.  I can still have a bit of a brownie that someone else makes at a Relief Society activity or a candy bar my sister hands me when I’m visiting if it fits into the rest of my plan, but I don’t buy and keep such things in my house.  Couldn’t I just bake cookies if I want them?  Yes, but Colin pointed out that I’ll run out of sugary ingredients…

5.  What do all those numbers mean?  It’s my gestational diabetes carbohydrate diet.  When I was pregnant, the doctors gave me a diet to keep my blood sugar levels even without getting low and without losing weight.  I was amazed when I actually had to work hard to keep from losing weight on this diet, and I thought at the time that if I ever wanted to lose weight after having the baby, I’d know what to do.  Each of the numbers in the sequence stands for the number of grams of carbohydrates I can have at each sitting.  I’m supposed to eat about every 2-3 hours.  So, breakfast I get 30 grams of carbs, then a 30 carb snack a couple hours later, then a 45 carb lunch, 30 carb snack, 60 carb dinner, and 30 carb bedtime snack.  They actually had to increase my bedtime snack to 45 carbs so that I would quit losing weight when I was pregnant, but I figure that since I’m neither pregnant nor nursing I’ll be fine to stick with the final 30.  This diet keeps me from getting hungry because I’m eating all the time.  And it doesn’t tell me what I can or can’t eat–just that I have to choose between foods to get the right numbers.  It was especially hard when I was pregnant and had so many other food issues (naseau, heartburn, etc.), but I think that since I’ve done it before I’ll be able to do it again.  And Colin will help me with counting carbs and it may help him with his diabetes diet, too.

6.  Updating records of my progress is another goal.  I’m recording my weight, fat percentage, ketones (you can get test strips at your local pharmacy), water intake, and my success at sticking to my carb plan daily.  Both Colin and I like to keep charts and graphs quantifying our lives, and it will hopefully offer some motivation to keep going as I’m accountable to a chart.

Rewards and recognition help motivate me to long-term action.  Here are the rewards Colin and I decided would work for me:

1. A sticker every day for each goal completed
2. Each Saturday, if I have achieved all goals during the last week, I get a bouquet of flowers.
3. Each time I hit 30 days straight of accomplishing all goals, I get $50 to spend on clothing.
4. After six months of 90% goals achieved, I get a weekend away at the place of my choice.
5. After a year of 90% goals achieved, we get to go to Disneyland!
6. When I weigh less than 155 lbs, I will hire someone else to clean the house and do the laundry for a day while I get a manicure, pedicure, and massage.

If you’re wondering about reward #6 because it doesn’t fit the pattern, 155 lbs is the amount I weighed in college and when we got married.  Breaking that weight level will be a cause for extra celebration for me, and although I can’t directly control when or whether that happens, I wanted to build a reward for it into my system in case it does happen.

Oh, and Sundays are a free day for exercise since I don’t feel like exercising on Sunday is keeping the Sabbath for me.

So, that’s my plan.  It may change sooner or later as I get into the routine, but I feel like I’ve made reachable goals and I’m excited to improve my health.