Surprised?

Well. 

This is like a Weeks 41,42,43,44,45… review, isn’t it?

So sorry, no excuse other than not feeling like sitting at my computer much these days. And now I’m left with a lot of ground to cover — because you wouldn’t want to miss out on all the details, now, would you?

• Perhaps I should to be surprised by this, but I’m not — measurements, while seesawing over the past weeks, have essentially settled back to where I was however many weeks it’s been since I last blogged. The upside is that I’m not any worse off, but the downside… well, that’s apparent, isn’t it.
• I’ve started and finished the Whole Life Challenge, which included a whole bunch of restricting myself from eating food that I wanted to stuff down my gullet. Of course, it also included pushing me into eating healthy stuff instead, working out regularly and doing good-for-me things like stretching and taking a supplement.  I found that while I can cut down on all my sugar, I haven’t been convinced that there’s a good reason to do so (within reason, of course).  And I like eating grains.  And some raw vegetables are my mortal enemy.  In summary: sugar = good and vegetables = bad. Math doesn’t lie, right?
• While measurements may not have moved much, the baseline workouts that I did for the WLC showed that I gained fitness, if nothing else.  My initial baseline mile run 8 weeks ago came in at a 9:20m/m pace, but this morning I was a veritable speed demon out there with a pace of 8:34m/m. I was hoping for a full minute of improvement, but I’ll take this. And with everything I’ve been doing, frankly, fitness is the most important measure to me.  If I can do everything I want to do while 30 pounds overweight, then I’ll still be quite happy.
• Lean Eating is still going on, but winding up.  The finalists for the $25,000 have been picked (spoiler: I’m not one of them) and we’ve got just a few weeks left before being sprung free from the monthly payments, weekly emails and daily lessons. I’ll definitely have some final thoughts to share on what my opinion was of the entire program.
• The WLC nutritional component kind of fell apart for me the last few weeks of the challenge. Through the first 5 weeks I rarely lost a point, but during the last 3, I was lucky to get 3 of 5, especially since I started back up my love affair with Diet Pepsi (oh, how I missed it!).
• My mountain biking weekend has come and gone and I had a BLAST. And was unceremoniously reminded that all this sort of stuff is much more fun when I’m in good enough shape to really enjoy it.  That said, I loved all the biking (and didn’t break any bones!) and the hanging out with the other ladies in our gorgeous cabin was totes awesome.
• And next up on the list is my week-long Canadian Rockies hiking trip.  Can’t wait! Of course, I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next 5 weeks to do as much as possible to prepare myself for it. I don’t want to be the doofus holding the rest of the group back, that’s for sure.