Thursday, March 10, 2011

Could the day be any grosser? Vacuum tales and a weight loss moment

I woke up feeling relatively fresh despite only getting 6 hours of sleep (up making cinnamon rolls for my husband to take into work this morning). I felt good this morning, the scale was back down to 235.0 (actually, first reading was 234.6, but I stepped on three more times to get the correct reading). Everyone was up fairly early so we all had breakfast together. My little guy lost his first tooth while eating a cinnamon roll - he bit into it and POP! It flew out of his mouth. He was a bit traumatized, but soon got over it and is now all excited about it.  Then, I had to take the little guy to school. What a miserable, rainy, awful day... and I'm looking at the pools of water collecting outside house and I'm worried about water damage in the basement. We temporarily fixed our gutters, but they are still bent out of shape and just allowing the water to pour out over the top. Ugh.

So, so much for a nice start to the morning. Rainy and dreary AGAIN. Ugh!

But, I do have something kind of interesting/odd to share about yesterday in regards to feelings about weight loss. But, first I have to talk about my new vacuum a bit. I'm kind of in love with it. Yesterday I finally bought a new mini vacuum for the house. I've been looking into it for months, but I finally decided to just buy something before I went crazy with the broom and dustpan at home. Well, I bought the machine, put it together and used it. I fell in love. Seriously, why did I wait so long to get a machine? It did in 5 minutes with no hassle what usually takes me 30 minutes to do. I was a little worried initially with going with the small over the next size up machine as we have a big house, but the only difference is overall weight and size, cord length and the carpet head attachment is smaller (which we don't need as we have a large upright vac), and the dust bin/catcher is a lot smaller. The bigger one is the same price as the smaller one, but weighs 8 pounds more and has a much bigger footprint.

I vacuumed about 500 square feet, not needing to replug the machine and not needing to dump the dust catcher. It was definitely big enough for my needs. And light enough to not be a hassle to carry or to lug up and downstairs. Well, I lifted the unit by the handle and it felt lighter than 12 pounds to me (the weight stated on the box/website).  Then I figured, "Oh, it's 12 pounds for the whole unit - all attachements and everything." So, I got curious as to what the cannister and hose weighed with the main attachment we would normally use. It had to be less than 12 pounds. I first tried just putting the vacuum on the scale, but it wouldn't register. So, I grabbed it, stepped on the scale and weighed me along with the scale. And, I was shocked. I weighed, with heavy clothes, winter weight leather shoes and with the vacuum cleaner, 5 pounds less than I weighed 2 months ago first thing in the morning. It just made me realize how much 20 pounds really is. Then I weighed myself afterwards. 240.5 fully dressed with shoes and midday. So, the vacuum weighs 9 pounds. That's SWEET. And so is realizing that 20 pounds is nothing to sneeze at. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's a heavy drop in the bucket!

Back down to 235.0. So I get the 20 lbs. lost pizza pie again.

Stats for 3/10/11:

Beginning weight: 255.6  Now: 235.0
Exercise total hours: 61 hours
Walking totals: 198.5/1000 miles

2 comments:

  1. Re concreteness in seeing how much weight we've lost: One visualization my mother taught me as I lose weight was to visualize sticks of butter equaling the pounds I've lost. Four sticks per pound. Twenty pounds is eighty sticks of butter!

    I've gone beyond that being possible for me to visually picture now -- just too many sticks and they've lost their power. So I'm going to start at a new point and visualize those sticks of butter from here on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Even 80 sticks is hard to fathom. 20 boxes, ok. At some point, it will begin to feel unbelievable and hard to wrap my head around. I can hardly imagine in your case. You've dropped a ton of weight!

    ReplyDelete