I am terrible on weekends.

I suppose the silver lining here is that what I consider terrible now I would have considered not so bad- possibly good, even- 4 months ago before I started this journey.

Saturday we went up to Bellingham to see Jas' best friend from his growing up years. We made an exchange with friends who are there right now (she's going to grad school at Western Wash. U)- I returned her veil and tiara that she let me use for my wedding, and she gave us a (free!**) laptop. Then we stopped in to see the grandparents on the way down.

So the deal is that we went out to lunch with the old friends. It was Billy McHales, and I haven't had a burger since I can't even remember when, and the pulled pork sandwich sounded amazing. So Jas and I split the two and each had half. I gave him about 1/3 of my fries, and then I ate about 1/3 of the onion loaf. We shared a milkshake, only I spilled over half of it on the table (the friends have a 2-ish year old daughter who seemed quite thrilled that she wasn't the one who spill thick milkshake all over the table) so I actually only had about 1/4 of it. Overall, not great, but also not so bad.

Then we went out do dinner with the grandparents. It was... snap... Johnny Carinos (how I remembered that I don't know... but interesting that we ate at two places named after people with sort-of similar feeling names syllable-wise). The good news is that I had a super healthy pasta, Angel Hair with Artichokes (if you click the link there, it's the second from the bottom.) I only ate like 1/6 of it because we had a late lunch, but I did eat my soup (garlic roasted potato or something like that... SO good!) and I did a good job of not having seconds on bread. I will admit that by the time we got home, around 10, I did eat a few more bites, because by then I was hungry, but still only about 1/3 of it overall. Jas and I actually shared our leftovers (his was a panini) for lunch yesterday.

Eating really wasn't horrible considering we ate out. In retrospect, since we knew we'd likely go out to dinner with his grandparents, we should have just shared one entree at lunch, but I just wasn't thinking about it! I did ok. I had enjoyable food without overindulging. The bad news is that I didn't work out AT ALL. Seriously- I only worked out on Wednesday last week. That's it. The week before I did a solid 3 or 4, each lasting 1.5 hours, but last week was Wednesday and Wednesday alone. Oy. I have a personal training appointment tonight, where I have to confess to him that I promised to work on my abs every day until we met again, and I only did it twice- in 10 days (we had to cancel last week's appt). I'm not looking forward to that.

The good news here is that I was tempted to just sort of not tell him... even lie. Which is utterly wrong. I need to be honest with him- and myself- or I'll never change. I felt that sort of helplessness yesterday, like "Here we go... here's the point where you give up and give in and quit. Here's the end of the journey". That was because I ate this chocolate mix that I tried to make that wasn't even good, and then I ate probably 500 calories worth. I suddenly just had to choose to STOP- I took the rest of it and ran hot water over it until it was all melted away down the garbage disposal. Still... I hate the work. Screw progress! I just want to wake up 200 pounds lighter, snap on my running shoes, and go for a 5 mile run in the morning... without having to make the baby steps of incremental progress it takes to get there. That, or I just want to give up and eat fatty foods and quit feeling the tug on my heart to surrender to Jesus.

And that, my friends, is why this blog is about the battle, the fight, the war. Old habits want to take over and I can't let them. It's amazing how just writing it on here- unsure who, if anyone, will read it- is so freeing and so inspiring at the same time.

Thus, I battle on.


**[For those who want the laptop story, the internet didn't work on hers and she got a new one from her parents for her birthday last year. She didn't use the old one, but told Jas that he could have it but that he'd probably have to either forgo internet, or have to work to figure it out. We turned it on Saturday night and... voila! It connected to a[n idiot neighbor who doesn't password protect their] wireless router in our building. That sentence didn't really work with the parenthetical phrase but I don't care. Nonetheless, it's a little older and a wee bit slow, but it works and it was free, so we're not whining!]