Question of the Day for Thursday, June 30th:
Today we arrive at our final pavilion: The American Adventure! The only pavilion that is not just named after the country, but with a specific name. The American Adventure is the host pavilion, situated in the middle of World Showcase. It is also the name of the main attraction of the pavilion: A show featuring film and audio-animatronics that guides through the history of the United States the good parts, but also mentioning the not so good parts.
Here we have Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain on top of the torch of the Statute of Liberty discussing how far the USA has come and what will be in her future.
So, since it is the last day of the month, let's do the same with our journey through this month: What worked for you, what did not, are you happy with your results, what do you want to change?
I won't be able to report final progress until later in the day, but I'm pretty happy about this month. I made a goal switch to being active instead of weight loss because of vacation. Of course, weight was on my mind all month, but I liked the change. It was both challenging and attainable - where weight loss can be hit or miss. Speaking of weight loss, I lost another 3.1lbs this morning. So I am down to a 0.3lb gain over vacation. You don't lose 8.5lbs in two days unless it was bloating/water retention, so I'm sure that it was the cruise water. They obtain their fresh water supply by onboard desalinization and I've always said that that cruise water makes me blow up like a balloon, but everything you read reports that it's an old wives tale perpetuated by people who can't back away from the buffet and are unhappy with their post cruise weight! With this kind of weight loss, I beg to differ!!!
So - what worked: my goal definitely worked. I will not be at 100%, but I liked it. I also used some tips I learned from this group on my vacation that really helped - so THANK YOU everyone.
First tip -
at the cruise buffet, make your first plate very healthy. If you are still hungry when it's empty, only then consider less healthy food. This worked great. I had the same breakfast each day (melon chunks, yogurt, and two fried eggs for protein) and a salad for lunch each day. I was never legitimately hungry enough to go back for the waffles or cinnamon rolls in the morning. I will admit that as the week wore on, I would often have dessert with lunch, but better to have a cookie or two after a healthy salad than a cookie or two after a burger and fries.
Tip #2:
be good early in the day. This goes along with tip one, but was important enough to be its own tip. I always had a healthy breakfast, and most days (even at the theme parks) a healthy lunch too. That made me feel better about dinner, alcohol and dessert. I still tried to be reasonable at dinner - skipping the most unhealthy options, but because I had had a good first half of the day, I felt better about my treats.
What did not work: I thought it would be easy to meet my goal on vacation because at the parks I would be walking all day and on the cruise, I would have loads of free time. I was certainly active, but it was much harder than I thought to string together active minutes (fitbit only records active minutes after 10 minutes of consistent activity, so if you walk across the ship and it takes 9 minutes - you get 0 active minutes for that, same thing for the parks - despite being on your feet all day and moving, being in the lines decreases your activity level so that none of that counts as active minutes), so there were days that I couldn't reach my goal.