Last Thursday I had an appointment with my doctor. It's been a year since I started Lexapro, and since I was only going to be on it for 12-18 months, it was time to go in and talk about discontinuing it. Thursday night I began tapering off my dose and by the beginning of next week I'll be completely off of it. The good news is that so far it has been pretty seemless. I was kind of out of it on Saturday morning but other than that, I've felt great.
On the other hand...when I went to see the doctor, my blood pressure was HIGH. After he noticed that, I was handed the chart you see in the picture above by my doctor and told to track my blood pressure at least twice a week, and if after a few weeks it was still trending over 140/90, to come back in and we'd start medication. So in my head, I thought, NO THANK YOU, I'll just work my tail off to get it under control. The number you see in the picture, 137/71, is much lower than it was on Thursday. I've been stressed out, but I can't blame it all on that. The fact is, I was eating way too much salt and getting far to little exercise. So all of those health-related improvements I saw about six months ago (more of them here, too)...well...I un-did at least one of them.
Let me be the example of what NOT to do on a journey to become healthy.
The doctor also asked what I've been doing for weight-loss and I kind of fumbled around for an answer. The truth is, I had a lot of great ideas but haven't been so good at implementing them. He suggested Weight Watchers. I kind of laughed since I am a Weight Watchers failure.
That night I set out to create my OWN plan, following the Fat 2 Fit Radio philosophies, and setting a target weight loss of two pounds per week. Slow and steady wins the race!
And how did it go? Well, I started last week at 258. This morning I was 256! That's a two pound weight loss! I did it! Yay! Go me!
Oh, and lest I forget: I upped the intensity on my 5k training this past week. I came to realize that since I did the C25k program last year, starting over from scratch was too easy for me. I had convinced myself that I needed to when I really didn't. It was a crutch. Last night, I set out to get a baseline completion time. I took my GPS outside with me and ran and walked (but mostly ran) until I hit 3.1 miles. And I did it in: 49:41! I was HOPING to get it done in 45:00 so I only went over by a couple of minutes...and I beat my last race time. In 2006 I "ran" a 5k in 1:07:43. (If you want to read about that debacle, including my pre-kid days of griping about waking up at 7am, click here.)
Next week I should see 254 on the scale. That's the plan. For now, it's off to work!
