Day 23: Home stretch

I only have a week left of my sugar-free challenge!  When I started this, I thought I'd be dying for soy ice cream or something else super sweet.  I saw that soy ice cream buried in the back of my freezer last night, and I wasn't even tempted.  I thought I'd be desperately counting the days until the end...but I'm not! 

I have been feeling pretty good so far this week.  My sweet husband informed me last week that I was incredibly grumpy, and I took a look at why, as nothing was really wrong.  But I was feeling really down about not being able to eat what was "easy," and also down on myself because of the constant scale-monitoring.  After my husband hid the scale, I felt a lot better and am able to focus more on how I'm feeling rather than on what that number is doing.  I'm a complete perfectionist, and I am not a patient person, and those two things combined can make something that's supposed to be gradual, like bettering your health and/or weight loss, quite difficult.  Being able to treat myself to yummy chocolate peanut butter cups also took away that "I'm so deprived!" feeling.

I am also trying to focus on getting 8 hours of sleep every night.  As a working mother of a young child, this is not always possible, but I am the sort of person who needs sleep or I start to feel a little desperate.  I'll be taking my first graduate-level course starting the end of next month so I need to get into this habit now. 

I had a really great workout yesterday!  I'm going longer and faster and I'll be moving up to the next intensity level next time.  I finally had some music (can't find my iPod, loaded music onto my phone only to find out I had to get special headphones, and listening to people grunt next to me on the elliptical while watching closed-captioned Wheel of Fortune just wasn't getting my motor running) and I was bustin' out.  My husband got me these really nice sport earbuds.  They don't hurt my ears (I have small ears and normal earbuds are too large) and they have these things that hook over the backs of your ears to keep the earbuds in place.

I must be off, but next post I'll tell you all about my replacement for the aforementioned ice cream.