Widow/single working parent

@amedina323, I can not imagine what you've been through - losing a partner, when you've just had a child together would be so tough.

It's awesome that you have reached a point that where you want to look after yourself - you seem to think that you are restricted due to finding exercise hard to fit it. Exercise only plays a small part, and you can make massive changes just by focusing on your diet, and controlling your calorie intake.

That said, working out at home is completely possible, and you can likely find links on the forum or online to programs that incorporate bodyweight exercises or using simple equipment you can keep at home. Perhaps you can work out some fun things to do with your daughter that involve being active too?

amedina323 wrote: »

I lost 10lbs

\o/ \o/

i remember that the interim/initial period was really hard. after i 'deprived' myself of the denial that had been making it easy to live in my skin, but before i had lost very much. i think i remember sort of hunkering down mentally and thinking various things to myself like

- first off, this is a consequence and it just is what it is. so fussing about it won't help.
- second off, it is not going to last
- third off, it would be with you whether you were trying to change it or not.
- so what do you have to lose by hanging in with the trying to change? ain't like turning back's going to fix anything.

i think i had a feeling of, 'can't see/believe in where this is going, but there's no point turning back.' i'm good at the stoicism so for myself, i mostly leveraged that. other people probably have different strengths, but that one was mine.

i wish i did have some useful tips. to be honest, when i was in the same working-single-parent shoes i felt pretty handcuffed by the way there was literally no moment of any day where i wasn't 'owned'. either by work or my kid, so i never did much that was physical during that phase.

i can say that once i did get serious (a few years ago - my son's into his 20's now), i got through the 'trudge' part by playing a little-kid motivational game with myself. i was biking to work, so i made a seriously low-ball guess and started scooping one tablespoon of dry rice into a 1-litre container on every day that i rode. i had done the [very rough] calorie math and realised that one teaspoon of fat is about 40 cals, so it seemed pretty safe to assume that one tablespoon (120 cals) was not MORE than the volume of fat i had burned up with every ride. and then every time the container filled up, i would pour the rice back and just start it again.

it didn't have any genuine bearing on my own weightloss progress, because it didn't take into account what i might have eaten back on that day. still, there was just something about that for me. i got genuinely hooked on scooping my one tablespoon, and getting to the 'dump' point was like when a little kid's sticker chart is filled up.

so thanks to that, i rode a lot of commutes that i would otherwise have copped out and driven instead. like i say, it wasn' tlike a concrete promise that my body was actually losing/going to lose that specific volume of fat. but it was so grounding to have that concrete evidence in front of my nose that the little things DO have an effect and they DO all add up.

good luck, and i wish you all the kinds of well that there are.