Not that I used to be abnormal or anything. I'm referring to my  BMI. It's been quite sometime since I blogged here, and not just because the home internet connection has been crazy. That's only the past two weeks.

I first calculated my BMI here, and I was overweight. A cousin from the States had scolded me for complaining I was fat at 142 because she was -- fatter. Way fatter, she said.

By the time I discovered Belletoday.com, I had managed to bring myself down to 136, but that was still way overweight for me.

I do my best to credit my present success to belletoday. I may not have been reporting my progress regularly..but actually that was because I couldn't get on a scale. Ours broke. The last time I got on a scale, it said I was 132. That was early this year. My friends have been complimenting me at how much slimmer I am now, walking around in snug-fitting tops and jeans. My neck looks longer again. The picture I have here was taken last week of April, and I was already getting compliments then.

Belletoday, thanks so much for the little tips you give that made healthy living a habit. One change a week was almost unbelievably simple, but it worked. A lot of the tips, I'd been doing for quite sometime, but the very first one, WATER, was what finally kicked it off for me. I do my best to live a more active lifestyle, or at least, one that's got more movement. I love doing yoga exercises, and I've remembered some exercises we taught to pregnant women to replace walking just in case the weather won't allow it. I forgot the real name for it, I just call it Flex & Point. I grab every opportunity I can to walk -- it helps to have the supermarket at walking distance from your house -- making sure I tuck -- suck! -- in my tummy as much as I can. I've called it Pilates walking. ^_^

And I've finally made it to normal. I still have a ways to go. Now that i've lost over ten pounds, I've got some extra jiggle I need to firm up, specially my thighs and triceps. And of course lower abs. But I'm not panicking. It's a big thing for me to see the results of healthier choices. I'm not aiming for a bikini competition (I think one-piece suits are sexier! hehe). My husband loves the change, and it's inspiring him to work on himself. He's actually slimmed down quite a bit, but his tummy has been slow to follow the rest of him so people think he's actually gotten fat!

Thanks, belletoday! You are God's answer to my prayers since 2002!

God bless you greatly!

Well, technically it wasn't the first because my twins are going on 9. But this was the first Mother's Day that they were very aware of it, and made plans for me.

Nope, no special breakfast in bed or stuff like that. They prepared a little drama for me.

All week long they'd been saying they wanted to give me a gift for happy mother's day, and i told them they had to talk to their daddy about it so it would be a surprise for me. I have caught them whispering, even telling other friends about it.

So Happy Mother's Day came. After breakfast, I sat at the computer to check on some stuff and I heard the whispering on the bed, and suddenly, the call:

"Mommy, we have a gift for you!!"

Lying on the bed was this big mountain wrapped in a flower-print sheet with an old gift ribbon on top. They had wrapped their daddy up.

"Why is my gift moving?" I asked.

Jodie leaned over to the "gift" and whispered, which caused the gift to shake harder. To stop the torture, I "unwrapped" the gift and gave my husband a hug, while the two princesses prepared two more "gifts" for me.

Yup, they wrapped one and then the other up in a flower-print sheet, this time their barbie belts arranged so that they look like a bow.

They may not have given me store-bought gifts, but they did have the right idea: THEY are my gifts, given from God's heart to my life, for which I am daily and eternally grateful. And I'm glad they know that that's how I feel about them.

All of them.

But what made my husband start laughing when I wondered why my gift was moving?

"Jodie told me," he said while they were wrapping themselves up:

"'Daddy, stop breathing!!'"

Happy Mother's Day to all of us moms! ^_^

It's been quite awhile since I last checked in here. Not that I pigged out during the holidays. Still, I managed to unlearn a lot of the new habits I'd been trying to form, that BelleToday has been helping me form.

So to get that message that they've reset the programs for the new year was a pleasant surprise. I was already going to try to figure out how I could reset my program myself, so it was a truly great New Year's gift to have had it done for me!

But more than the favor, it reminds me of forgiveness. A chance to start afresh after how you blew it. To be told that past is past, let's start over, it's okay.

That attitude was one of the things that helped me start getting my health back. When I first met Irl, I was a svelte 115 pounds. By the time we got married, I had bloated to 142. But a few months after that, I saw an old friend who is usually wider than me looking like a college teen!

She and her husband told us about the Zone diet by Dr. Barry Sears. Basically, it's a pretty mild version of Atkins. His point was simply that in trying to avoid fat, protein intake suffered, and carbohydrate consumption shot through the roof. The imbalance was just as deadly.

So basically, he advocated a balance of the macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein and fat). It worked so well for me, I dared Irl to try it. I told him to give it two weeks, and if it didn't work for him, I would buy him all the chocolates and chips he wanted.

I never did. Before the first week was over, he was already feeling great!

But what I really lked about Dr. Sears was when he said that if you make a mistake in one meal, just start over again on your next meal.

Too often when trying to stick to a diet, we get depressed when we fail, and then deal with it by: "Oh, crap! Oh well, might as well wolf the rest of this down, I've already broken my diet."

This "forgive yourself and start over" was what helped me stick to the diet. Incorporate it, in fact, into my life. I know that by the time I was found pregnant 10 months after I started, I was already down to 132. And I used the proportions he recommended for my pregnancy diet, with some adjustments.

I was back at 132 within a month of giving birth to our twins.

I've stopped doing New Year's resolutions after that. I just resolve to do it whenever I fall off the wagon, so to speak, which is really rather often. I have stopped choosing to feed my guilt, and instead I choose to take responsibility, then positive action.

I never expected a diet plan to help me stop being a perfectionist and become more at ease with myself, and more forgiving of myself and others. Sure, I know about what Jesus had done for me in Calvary, but that He would use a diet plan to explain forgiveness to me...

Whatever works. Thanks, Lord.^_^

And so, as i get into this new year, I have forgiven myself for the indulgence of Christmas. I will not regret feasting with friends I haven't seen for a long time, and family I don't see often enough. Or the dates Irl and I made up for because he had a ten-day break from work.

No way. I am grateful for all that! And I am grateful that i can start over, even here. Thanks, Belle Today. I really, truly appreciate the reset.

'Scuse me while I get some water...again.^_^

Has anyone else ever heard of this? It's a rather rare ocurence, specially in this day and age of processed foods and salty snacks.

I found the term in the Fasting: the Ultimate Diet book by Allan Cott, M.D. Basically, it happens when you have low levels of sodium (salt) in your system, so that you can't hold water. It can happen sometimes when someone goes on a fast, but it's not that common.

But then, we never really know which of us is common.

I was around nine when my mother was diagnosed to be hypertensive, and was told to go on a low-salt diet. Being my mom and in charge of our kitchen, she decided that we would all benefit from a low-salt diet.

So I have basically been on a low-salt diet since I was nine.

One thing it gave me was a rather sensitive palate. I learned to appreciate the different tastes and smells of food, and the wonderful way they combine. Whenever I try a new dish with a recommended condiment, I always try it out first by itself. I enjoy doing this specially with pizza, savoring how the vegetables, meat, cheeses, sauce, pasta crust combine for its unique taste. I would tell Irl that my palate is sensitive enough to find taste in foods others would find bland.

So if I say it's bland, it really must be bland!

But it does have a drawback. During my first pregnancy, we took Childbirth Preparation classes, and learned that  an expectant mom should have just the right level of salt. Too much would cause bloating.

And so would too little.

I would be crying as Irl forced me to add more salt to my meals. Believe it or not, our final compromise was chips, but even then it was still too much for me. But the therapy worked. My legs started to shrink back to normal. It wasn't a nice time for me, but the chips were actually the healthier option at the time.

But my real bout with hyponatremia happened several years later.

We had joined a church that encouraged fasting and prayer as a discipline, and every start of the year, we would have a church-wide fast for one week. It was on the third year that I spent one morning going to the bathroom almost every 20 minutes, unloading what felt like an extremely full bladder. And because I was "losing" that much water,I made sure I would drink after every bathroom trip.

But it was too uncomfortable and tiring and inconvenient -- and I'm already a stay-at-home mom! -- so I broke my water fast and ate a small meal. I also stopped drinking for the rest of the morning. I felt better, and the running to the toilet stopped so I was finally able to concentrate on praying.

It made me curious, but it was another year or so, after I'd found the book and read the term, that I understood what happened to me.

Hyponatremia.

I read somewhere that it was also referred to as water poisoning, but I think that's extreme. Because the real problem is not the water, but the low salt levels.

So I had to be watchful during my first week on belletoday's program. Good thing I realized that my water intake had been down, so the first few days, water was truly welcome. But then the day came when I felt the familiar bathroom urge from having had too much water than I had salt to hold it. I didn't want to give up the water -- I really needed it now -- but I had to make sure it wouldn't be in and out of my body too much.

So I heated up some corned beef from a can, fried an egg, and topped them in a bowl with about half a cup of rice. Then I washed it down with about two glasses of water.

This was a semi-regular part of my diet for the first week.

So imagine my surprise when I weighed in and found I had dropped the predicted one pound.

Wow!

I'm keeping my corned beef, egg and rice combo as a semi-regular meal now, because it's the only salty combination I really enjoy. For the most part, I eat canned tuna in oil and rice, which isn't as salty, but like i said, I've learned to appreciate subtle tastes. When I eat out, I have no problem with the salt content of the meals, but I'm a stay-at-home mom, so I need to be watchful. Irl actually has to remind me sometimes to add salt when I cook. Lately, though, I've been using the bouillion cubes for flavoring. It seems to work. I'm working on weaning myself from the habits my mom instilled in me, because I'm not hypertensive like she was.

The only thing I'm keeping is her adobo, which is a bit more on the vinegary than the salty side (my sister-in-law thought it was paksiw), which has won Irl's approval too. He actually LIKES it with more sourness!

I'm looking forward to losing more weight here. Maybe I'll get to my target weight in time to make the next kids...

I'm keeping in mind the tip we learned in childbirth class: salt to taste, water to thirst. And I've found that when you obey those urges, it's truly a healthy combination!

'scuse me while I have a drink...