Happy New Year!

It's the most ass-kicking time of the year, as long as the ass being kicked is one's own. People, be kind to yourselves. Do as my therapist once said: let your inner monologue be the kind of encouragement you'd give a beloved child, not the kind of beratement you'd give your worst enemy.

Okay? Okay.

So, Christmas was good. Weird beyond the telling of it, but good. Like at Thanksgiving, we ate what was there, leaning toward whatever had some smidgen of nutrition. I ducked the whole "here, have one of my delicious homemade cookies" issue, just barely. Mostly I was sick, laid up with a sinus infection, and that's the weird part: usually when I'm sick, I'm MORE prone to eating whatever the hell I want to, since I feel lousy and feel that the world owes me my treats. This time through, I had no appetite. I seriously didn't feel like eating anything, ever. It was really, really weird.

We had the week between Christmas and New Year's off, due to some skillful finageling of our remaining vacation days, and most of that was spent being sick. Both me and my Hub. Happy Holidays, yo. This unfortunately led to the dreaded both-sick-at-once issue of neither one of us having the oomph to cook, so there were a lot of sandwiches consumed in our household. And, I think it goes without saying, no exercise got accomplished.

New year, though: clean slate. Clean the house, clean the fridge, and right back we go to clean living.

My Hub is on a quest. He wants a gym membership. I'll give him this: he's an insanely diligent guy when he gets something in his head, and he tracked down several affordable gym options-- complete with pool, climbing wall, and yoga classes (all of which interest me)-- that I had never found back when I was checking stuff out. We're going to go visit some of the top contenders this weekend, I think.

Here's the difference between getting in shape all by myself and getting in shape with my Hub: with my Hub, things are skewing toward muscle-building. He got me a copy of The Body Sculpting Bible for Women for Christmas, and I gotta admit, it's good stuff. And, well, I do need more muscle. I know pretty well how things work when I lose weight without gaining muscle; besides the other physical side effects, the one that still annoys me is that at my lowest weight since early high school, I still didn't look too great in a bathing suit. Bah.

I concluded that if I'm ever going to do this, this is the year. Get the muscle mass on before getting pregnant, so I'll have things tilted in my favor for losing that pregnancy weight. Also, what the hell, it's another thing that I'll have to discuss with my Hub. It's good to share when it comes to types of exercise.

Incidentally, the Low-Key Healthy Eating And Exercise approach has officially made me drop 12 pounds since mid-September, most of which has been since going off sugar at the beginning of October. Averaging less than one pound per week, which is scary in the "oh my God how am I supposed to convince myself to stop screwing up if I don't see immediate bad results on the scale?" way, but which is very good in terms of being able to keep my sanity.

And now, I have to go to bed, because I can't keep my eyes open. Stupid sinus infection.