Forcing myself to get back in shape

I have two forces working against me.  We just got through the holidays and I didn't hold back on my eating.  If it was in front of me and looked good, I ate it.  I'm also in a very happy relationship.  I'm comfortable and when I'm comfortable, I like to eat a little bit more than when I was single.  Cooking is easier when cooking for 2 AND it's not always me who has to do the cooking.  We love to cook and enjoy good food.  I'd rather have a good meal at home or at a restaurant than go to a movie.

I will say, I try not to completely indulge in bad foods.  I watch how much I eat and I eat a lot of salad for lunch.  We don't have boxes of cookies or baked good sitting around the house and we don't drink sugary drinks.  We rarely order desserts when when we go out to dinner.  I think we're smart eaters, but we eat a lot.

I was doing so great with staying fit when I was training for the Peachtree Road Race, that's all gone away now.  I'm not sure I could run 6 miles today if I had to.  This weekend was the first step to getting back into shape.  We are going to run the Peachtree together this July, and I'm seriously considering signing up for a half marathon.

Sunday morning the weather wasn't bad (the only nice part of the weekend) and we hit the road with Mabel and we took a 90 minute walk around the neighborhood and around Grand Park.  I loved it.  It was time that Stephen and I had together Mabel had the best day of her life (since she really only remembers a day at a time) and we exercised.  We're going to slowly build from walking to running almost everyday.

Being from Florida, running outside in the cold is really hard for me.  My ears and lungs burn after breathing the cold air for 10 minutes and I'm miserable.  I'm trying to find a gym that's convenient to me so I can still work out when it's too cold to run outside.

I don't have a weight loss goal.  I don't have clothes that I'm not fitting.  I just want to feel better about myself and confident when it comes time to start shopping for a bathing suit again.  Operation get fit has begun.

This picture has nothing to do with working out - but I wanted to share.  Saturday morning we woke up to a pretty serious thunder storm and this is what the rain did to our street.  We are lucky and we're up on a hill so we didn't have any standing water anywhere around our house or cars.  I've always loved falling asleep to rain and thunder, waking up to it was new, and awesome.  The storm was pretty bad and obviously dropped a lot of water pretty quickly.  We got a lot of hail, too, so we were a little worried about a tornado.  No tornado and the rain let up after the picture was taken and we were able to enjoy a delicious breakfast together.