I got up at 5 am, or as I like to call it, “5 asleep time”! I was planning to leave straight away, but I realized that I did not prepare everything as I should have done the night before. To my credit, I did pack my bag the night before, just not got everything, like shower stuff.

I finally trip out the door and make the train station at 5:30 am….15 to 20 minutes behind schedule

It was a strange experience on the train. Everyone looked like they were in a bloodless version of a zombie movie, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. It was a stark difference to the rush “get out of my freaking way” hour.

After changing trains, I have to walk half a mile to get to the gym. I could take the bus, but then that’s like ordering a super sized burger meal and insisting your getting a diet coke, cause you’re on a diet. If I power walked it, maybe I could consider it part of my workout, but what I do in the gym is what I am told to do and if there is something extra I do, then that is only a bonus…not a replacement.

Climbing the stairs to the third freaking floor, I notice it’s 6 am and I am in trouble. Two hours of workout and then getting changed into my gear, then out again, shower and then that half mile to the station, only to get another train! I am not going to make it to work on time. To top it all off, I get to the floor and the door is shut. Oh crap, the door is closed…They are closed! All this for nothing. Well, silly me forgot that my gym is a 24 hour gym and there is a slot for my membership card.

I get on with my workout. Focused on the task at hand and no messing around. I struggle with the stretching, though. It’s the move where you take one foot with your hand (bent at the knee) and then push your knee back and your foot up high to your butt. It looks like a move from a MC Hammer dance. Anyways, my calves are quite beefy (I like to walk), but my upper leg to my thigh is like a sack of potatos under my skin. I thus can’t bend my leg enough to grab my foot with my hand.

To be honest, I am fine with all the workout maneuvers, except all these stretches I have to do for ten minutes. All the weight machines are even at the lowest weight and I am struggling, yet I don’t feel embarrassed. Maybe it’s because I am protected by a clump of metal. Maybe it’s because people around me are struggling, too. Or maybe it’s because the stretching is a physical sign that I am grossly overweight.

Needless to say, the gym was empty, because I am the only silly sod that had the smart idea to go in a 6 am! By the time I get to my final 45 minutes burn, people do start to shuffle in, looking just as unhappy as I did when I got in. But you guys got at least one more hour of sleep than I did!

I leave for the shower and it’s gotten a little more busy, but I am happy with my workout and the fact that there were not so many people to witness my beached whale on a bike action. I proceeded to fly like the wind to get to work on time.

8:30 am is when I get into work. I did not rush the workout that much, was 20 minutes behind and still I get into work half an hour early. Well, better early than late!

The rest of the day I was strangely in a good mood and upbeat. I felt better about myself and I felt like I had more energy, even though I expelled a lot of it with two hours of pain!

I’ll be off to the gym again on Friday. Tomorrow morning! Let’s see how this goes now…

Will I be just as happy, will I maybe start to manage the stretches better, or will I be eaten by the bloodless zombies on the train?

What happens when you take a wrist watch, a vacuum cleaner and an alien interdimensional time machine… My spare time is getting sucked away from me.

So it has come to this. After 3 months of not going to the gym (but still paying for it), it has now finally got to stop. Tomorrow morining I am going to the gym….At 5 am.

My spare time or really Munchkin time has to exsist. I can’t just go to the gym after work and then get home about 9 pm, when Munchkin is asleep and I won’t be able to interact with her. It’s bad enough that I get home at 7 pm to begin with.

I normally leave home at 8:15 am to go to work, which gives me dead on 45 minutes to get to work (starting at 9 am). If we work backwards, I need 2 hours at the gym in my workout. So, not including travel, I would need to leave at 6:15 am. I will need to then add the changing time of 20 minutes (in and out), so I am at 5:55 am.

It takes 45 minutes to get to my work, as I said before, so I have a margin of 10 minutes. That’s 10 stinking minutes to get my ass out of bed and off to the gym. Also, remember that I in fact have to get to the gym, but since its “almost” on my way to work and the trains are pretty good from there, I don’t think I need to worry too much.

I do feel sorry for the alarm clock, though. It’s going to take the most of my morning sleepy RAGE!

Oh, I can see it now. Laddie up…Laddie mad…Laddie must work out! Laddie must work….Laddie eat food… Laddie sleep! All said in the finest Hulk impression.

Laddie go and kiss woman

I’ll give you guys an update of things tomorrow.

It’s time to face the facts. I’m still struggling to get into a daily routine with our Munchkin, but I really need to see where I’m at in terms of weight, getting healthy and all that jazz.

I started blogging about my weight loss journey at a weight of about 139 kg/309 lbs and 5′9”, if I remember correctly. I actually dropped a few kilos before I got pregnant. When I did find out I was going to be a mommy, I stopped recording my weight on a regular basis, because I did not want to pressure myself in that area while I was helping our little Munchkin grow. A few days ago then, I weighed in at 118 kg/ 260 lbs. I am surprised, pleased and scared at this number. While I absolutely love that I am a ‘mere’ 18 kg/40 lbs away from the double digits at the moment, I am not comfortable with the fact that I did absolutely nothing healthy to arrive at this weight. I ate what I wanted during the pregnancy, never paid any attention to calories or fat content, really. When I wanted something, I ate it. Obviously I did not eat anything that was strictly off limits - stuff that could potentially harm our Munchkin -, but other than that, nothing was monitored.

To be honest, I think I will gain all this weight back in a flash once I stop breastfeeding. Right now, my eating habits are really erratic at best. Whenever I nurse our fella, I get intense cravings. Really, really intense cravings. More often than not, I still eat what I want when I want it. However, since I am seemingly burning a hell of a lot of calories through breastfeeding alone, I am managing to maintain my weight at the moment. All this lost weight and effortless maintaing scares me - I really do think it’s extremely unnatural, it just can’t last.

That said, starting tomorrow, I will pay better attention to my food intake. I do know my biggest problem is and always has been chocolate. I’ve been trying to gradually switch to darker chocolate - I’ve even tried 70% cocoa solids, but that’s not for me just yet. I am comfortable at 56% right now, slowly inching my way up. I do believe that darker chocolate is healthier than milk chocolate and I also can’t eat as much of it. Tricking myself, so to speak. Also, I am trying to pay attention to the quality of the chocolate I consume. Other than that, I now try to stay away from other sweets as much as I can, thereby reducing my sugar intake considerably. Proper meals are a totally different story, but I have to do this step by step - when I look at the big picture, at what I really need to change or adjust, I do feel slightly overwhelmed. So, making my preferred chocolate darker it is.

As for exercise, well…I will probably forever have a problem with that. At least I am going for daily walks with Munchkin now, which is a big improvement and makes us both feel good. I will have to think about what else I can do soon. But…baby steps, Lassie, baby steps. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

Anyway, I am officially back in the healthy living and eating business, if not necessarily back to the extremely strict weight loss program yet - after all, I am still nursing and diets are not recommended. So I will focus on healthier choices for now.

I hope you’re all doing great out there!

Inspired by Dietgirl’s ‘8 Things To Do Before You Die’, I thought I would do my own 5 things I would expect to change when I am thin.

1. Be able to keep up with my child.

I would say run a marathon, but then it would be nothing that would interest me. The amount of time that has to go into a project like that is staggering and I am not talking about it coming from a “being fat” point of view. When you’re thin, you still have to keep to a peak physical fitness, which is something I don’t want to do - for a race! No, if I have to keep at a peak level, I want it to be for something close to my heart. Keeping up with my daughter when she is older is a perfect example. Good health of course is assumed at this point, which is something I want to have.

2. Be more alert and awake (without medical intervention).

If you have been keeping up with the posts, you know I have a sleep apnea condition, where I stop breathing during the night. When I wake up, it feels like I have run a marathon without all the cool weight loss stuff. It’s because my body needs to fight to keep me breathing that makes me expell a lot of energy. Well, I wear a mask for this at nights, but it does not always help. The ultimate downside to this is that I fall asleep on a dime. Honestly, even with the baby in my arms I have to fight to stay awake, if I am not constantly engaged.

3. Run up two flights of stairs without breaking into a sweat or dying of a heart attack.

The stairs in question are two flights of stairs in the train station where I have to change trains while going to work. These stairs I have to climb quickly in order to make my next train on time. It’s always easier to go down them, damn gravity!

4. Water ski again.

Not that I really water skied properly before. It was more like being dragged along the water face first, but it was fun. I want to be able to go out in a wetsuit without people staring at me, or some kids mistaking me for a sea lion out on the water…On that note, I do a mean impression - saving that for a rainy blog day

5. Have more stamina.

Well…the Lassie would not mind…

So I FINALLY fixed the avatars and the author crap in the post header bar…Look above to the title and you might see what I mean. I have honestly no idea why I forgot to set that up!

Anyway, a small update *breathing in*

Still not going to the gym. I have a no time issue, better known as ‘I’ll do it tomorrow syndrome’. Honestly, I am needing to get my arse in gear for that, as it’s been super hot here and I have taken to running around the house in my shorts with no shirt and…it’s not a pretty sight. Especially when your sweat and your belly can make your baby girl stick to you. Yes, I said stick to me!

While talking about arses, I had a super smart arse comment today that made me feel warm inside and I wanted to share. I was recovering data from The Lassie’s laptop (I forget its pet name…I’ts a laptop!) and the process takes very close to an ice age to complete. Cue dialogue:

Lassie : How long is it now?

Laddie : It’s hitting 1/3 now.

Lassie : You said it was 1/4 20 minutes ago?

Laddie : Yeah angel, 1/3 is more than 1/4!

I said I was sorry afterwards.

On that note: The laptop. If you have ever owned a Mac you might be wondering what devil’s work is going on here, as Macs “normally” never fail. Well The Lassie’s iBook did…sorta. She was deleting some photos that were blurry from the iPhoto album. Things you just don’t keep! Then she put the iBook on standby (closing the screen) and we had dinner. Later, I get a raised “get in here” command from the Lassie and she informs me that all the data in iPhoto is lost…ALL OF IT! Sure enough all the images in iPhoto had gone. To let you know how important it was to us, it was the first two months and a little more worth of photos and videos of our little Munchkin - all gone! So I have been trying to ‘undelete’ the data by using Data Recovery 2 software. So far, I got the images back, and although they are all messed up in some strange order, we have them. Only the movies are still unaccounted for. Hoping I will find them soon.

I think I will leave it like that for now.

I am hoping that soon I will be able to fix the rest of the site!

At the risk of getting all doom and gloom at this, I would like to say: I am working on it.

After joining McFit I was totally into it and went there every possible day that was scheduled. When the baby came, all that changed. Of course my priorities changed and I stopped going.

Now that I have started a new job and thus am on new working hours, it seems almost impossible to get the time to go to the gym. The gym that I am paying for, regardless of whether I am going or not.

One thing I keep reminding myself of is that if something is important and worth doing, you have to make the time for it. So somehow I will try and get back into the gym and back on track with losing.

Also, another issue that has cropped up is that the cost of living is a little too big for us right now and we are having to pull in the belts a little, or what was the saying…”cut the cloth to suit your means”. I digress, we need to start saving on food stuffs and not have anything expensive, which quite a lot of the time are the healthier things in our diet. We often feel like you need a credit rating just to go to the local supermarket.

Are any of you guys feeling a similar “crunch”?

Weighing myself this morning (more out of curiosity than anything else), I realized I am now roughly 20  kg/ 44 lbs lighter than before the pregnancy! I have absolutely no idea how that’s possible and it scares me - I now weigh 116 kg/ 255 lbs. I am confident my weight will go back up quickly after I stop nursing my little girl, but for now that’s what it is. I don’t want to lose weight this fast and unexpectedly, as I know it just won’t last.

Anyway, must work on healthier eating and exercise - unfortunately both of these things are almost impossible for me to do these days, as I am still getting used to dealing with my baby all day. Also, Munchkin will only sleep on my belly at the moment, which effectively leaves me no room or time to do anything, really.

Sorry to be so short, but once more, I gotta run. :)

This week, I have the first pregnancy-related weight gain to report: 0.8 kg/1.76 lbs over the last two weeks. I knew it would happen at some point, but it’s still kinda sad for me to see the number go up again. I just need to remind myself that I should be happy if I manage to get through the remaining weeks without going over my start weight of about 135 kg/297 lbs. I am at 126.5/279 lbs right now, so I am not quite there yet. Next weigh in will be in two weeks.

Other than that, I am seriously craving fruits and greens right now. Unfortunately, most stuff I want is not yet in season, so I am impatiently awaiting the arrival of strawberries and asparagus. There’s another yummy dish I would LOVE to eat right now, but can’t really get in Berlin (it’s a very popular dish in Hessen, where I grew up. Goethe’s favorite meal): Grüne Sosse (green sauce). It’s basically a sauce consisting of either yogurt, schmand, quark or cream (or rather a combination of them), a load of very finely chopped herbs, hard-boiled eggs and a bit of seasoning. You eat the sauce cold, along with boiled potoatoes. There’s no taste quite like this and it is so, so, so lovely in spring and summer. Must. Have. It. I’ll maybe try to get the individual herbs here, so I can make it and be merry.