I'm Still Alive: A Photo Update!

So, after a 6 monthish hiatus from the blogosphere, I decided it's time to reconnect. So, lemme do an update post in semi-chronological order (or at least what my brain thinks is chronological) and then tomorrow we'll get down to business.

In December, I packed up my apartment in Grand Rapids to move everything into storage since a majority of my second semester was going to be spent in Africa. Packing is a bitch, but moving is a bigger bitch, just so you know.

All my shiz

I also rescued Bailey from an evil wall, where he spent a week desperately trying to stay in Grand Rapids.

Look carefully for a kitty in the wall (left corner)

At the end of December, I headed back to Uganda for one month of hospital work in Iganga (with weekends spent traveling with friends from home and Nasur) and one month of vacationing with Nasur.

Meet up in Jinja

In February, Nasur and I went on our first safari at Murchison National Park, where I fell in love with hippos. Apparently, they're responsible for the most animal-related deaths in Africa. In my opinion, they're incredibly misunderstood [obviously].

Murchison Falls 

Hippos are the best! And apparently, incredibly vicious

Elephants!

In February, Nasur and I went to Dubai to visit his best friend who moved there last year. It was his first time in an airplane ever.

First time waiting in an airport terminal

The Burj Khalifa is stupid tall

The Burj al Arab is stupid expensive

The desert is actually quite cool

We spent a week there, returned to Uganda briefly and then I headed back to the United States to do a one month ICU rotation and to find out where I matched for residency - St. John's Hospital in Detroit!

Then at the end of March, I headed back to Africa. I made a pit stop in Nairobi (before the University massacre) to see Nasur, who made the 15 hour bus trip for my 16 hour layover.

Nairobi from our hotel

Waiting in the Nairobi airport

I continued onwards to Malawi where I did a gynecology rotation for a month. I have some lovely photos of that, but I'm thinking many of you wouldn't appreciate them ;-)

Malawians carry a lot of stuff on their heads

Lake Malawi at Cape Maclear

Unfortunately, my mom called while in Malawi to let me know that this little guy had a kitty stroke while I was away and had to be put down. I miss his cuddles so much now that I'm living alone again.

Bailers will be missed

A week after losing Bailey, Nasur flew down to Malawi to join me at the end of my rotation and then we headed over to Zambia for our second safari.

Little elephant herd

Sleepy kittens

Best animal ever (a hippo, duh)

We also traveled down to Livingstone, Zambia to see Victoria Falls, the largest waterfalls in the world. It was ridiculous.

So loud

Sun setting over the falls

We headed back to Uganda briefly to visit with Nasur's family and my Ugandan family back in Iganga.

Nasur's niece, two nephews, sister, and father 

A town near where Nasur lives (Kajjansi)

I celebrated my 28th birthday in Uganda and Nasur bought me a lovely cake. My mom one upped him by buying me a cheesecake when I returned.

Noms

Then I graduated from medical school with some lovely ladies by my side.

The mom and me

Med school family (minus a few)

I spent the week after graduation trying to find a place to live and then my mom and I took off for Florida for a Disney vacation, which was the best.

The pool next to our room

Mickey and us (the "professional" photographer couldn't work my smartphone, hence the blurriness)

Gotta get a pic with the castle

Hogsmeade!

Butterbeer waiting for the Hogwarts Express

I had 5 of these that day...

So much good food!

Such a cute mom

Had to get a hippo picture (Nasur hates them as much as I love them)

Decent theming in the waiting line for the safari at Animal Kingdom

My mom bought me this

It was damn magical

Unfortunately, our Disney adventure had to come to an end. I was skeptical about doing Disney as an adult, but it was amazing. MUST RETURN ASAP. That being said, our puppies were glad we were home.

Big smile on the ride home

She wouldn't stop kissing my mom

Mayzie is super happy

And now, I've moved in to a new place (photos will be posted once I have my shit together unpacked) and I'm getting ready to start orientation/working as a real doctor in about 10 days. WHAT?!

As for healthy living, uh, it hasn't been so healthy lately, but tomorrow those things will be changing and I'll be posting about it all.

Day one of my one week challenge

Today was day one of the new challenge I set for myself yesterday. So far, so good. But day one is usually always a good day because you're usually willing to stick to your guns. I know if I want to, I can keep it up.

So I turned off all alarms last night so I could just sleep until whenever but Bailey decided to thwart my plans to sleep in and came in around 7 a.m. and kept meowing. I recall his food bowl being on the low side last night and immediately regretted forgetting to refill it last night. He's usually pretty good about leaving me alone in the morning until my alarm goes off, but since it was past the normal alarm time and I wasn't up yet, he let me know that he was hungry. So I stumbled out of bed, filled up his food, and fell back into bed. I laid there and fought with myself about whether or not I should be sleeping or starting my day, but I opted to go back to sleep until 9:30ish.

Upon getting up, I set to work on my week challenge. I weighed in (photo below) and then made some breakfast, hit up the farmer's market, hit the gym, and then came home to hurriedly pack up my dirty laundry, shower, and eat lunch before heading to Kalamazoo to see my sister, do laundry, and work on my residency applications.

Latest weigh in (check out my weigh-in page)

I want to talk about this morning before moving on. First of all, it took a bit of convincing to tell myself that if I was tired, I deserved to go back to bed. Sometimes rest is just as important as exercise in weight loss. Then, I purposely ate breakfast before the farmer's market because an empty stomach makes me way more likely to buy more. I kept it pretty light - I got some celery, lettuce, San Francisco sourdough bread (sandwich style), apples, and blueberries. Then I headed straight to the gym where I ran into Krista, a fellow healthy lifestyle blogger. I met Krista for lunch once before as we were both going to school in Grand Rapids and she recently moved back. I stumbled upon her first blog via SparkPeople and she has definitely been one of my biggest influences in the blogging part of my weight loss. It was through her blog that I learned what a huge blog community there is. Anywho, we chatted for a bit and she gave me the deets about spinning at the Y before I hit up the elliptical for the day.

While I'm on the elliptical, I like to be doing something else: reading or watching TV. I couldn't decide if I wanted to read or watch the season premiere of Biggest Loser. I opted for Biggest Loser and I'm certainly glad I did! Watching that show while working out really made me push myself harder to keep my heart rate up. I mean, I'm currently heavier than some of the contestants on this new season! I also love their new trainers, Jen and Jessie. Some of the things Jen said really resonated with me. She talks about how you can operate from a place of fear or a place of love and that it's operating from a place of love that really allows you to accomplish your goals. I was just talking about that when I blogged about how I needed to believe in myself and how I need to love myself a bit more! And she's so right. During my year off between undergrad and med school, I totally loved myself and treated myself like I was worth it. Now that I'm in medicine (where you can never know it all), I feel inadequate a lot of the time and those feelings of inadequacy and fear have become so commonplace that it's definitely my normal operating mode. I'm working on breaking out of that and I'm hoping this challenge and publishing all of my recorded weigh-ins will help me work towards positivity again. And I recruited my friend Lisa to help me with this challenge and get me off to the right foot. You can follow her challenge on her blog!

Spending the afternoon with my sister was also a positive thing for me. She just started PA school (she's studying to become a physician assistant) and she's learning the basics. It totally reminded me of first semester of med school where I was completely overwhelmed almost all the time. I cried at least once a week for probably the first semester. And though I know it definitely doesn't feel like it, I realized that things do get easier and that you learn to work with what you've got. Starting anything new is going to be difficult. But it's worth it. And that's keeping me motivated with these residency applications. I'm applying EVERYWHERE and it's terrifying to think that I'll be starting something new, but it's also exciting. It'll probably suck major at the start (like my sister's realizing now), but it'll be okay.

Since I spent the afternoon with my sister, I packed snacks and made us a steak dinner. Unfortunately, I forgot the camera, so you only get photos from this morning.

Breakfast with sad-tasting grapes

Snack before heading out for the morning

Lunch with my delicious sourdough bread!

My goal for this one-week challenge is to get the scale down to 239.8 next week. I know that seems like a lot in a week (6.2 pounds), but breaking into the 230s again would totally boost my confidence. I'm going to achieve this goal by adhering to my challenge pretty strictly: working out, counting calories, packing food, and not weighing in until next Saturday. The first week of getting back on track usually leads to a pretty big change on the scale for me, so I'm hoping that's the case this time! I'm also going to stay hydrated as much as possible. I'd also like to set the goal of being in the low 220s by the end of this calendar year (220-225). I think 26 pounds is a lot, but if you think about it, I have half of September, all of October, all of November, and all of December to bust my butt to get there - that's 15 weeks that I need to lose 1.5-2 pounds per week and I think that's reasonable.

Today's positive: making awesome strides on day one of the challenge and setting some lofty goals that are totally attainable if I treat my mind and body positively. Also, my other positive for today was motivating Lisa to make some changes too!

Tests and menstruation: a post with TMI

I am so ready to be done with two things: this test and menstrual cycles. As of today, I have one legit study day left and I'm so, so, so tired of studying. I'm doing fine on my question sets and I just don't want to study anymore. I'm over it. O. V. E. R. it. Last year when I was prepping for Step 1 (the first board exam on your way to be a doctor), I was freaking out all the time, crying, not sleeping, stressing to the max, and so on. This time around, I'm more chill. Why? Because I won't fail. I've studied a lot. I've put the things I'm being tested on into practice and can actually recall things because I've done them. So, we'll see how it goes. Also, Step 1 is basic science (read: basically useless) and this is practical stuff.

Also, today marked the first day of my period. Not cool. Kinda my fault though. I'm usually on a birth control pill (OCP). Why? Because it makes my periods 1000% better. I get diarrhea really bad the first day or two, cramp a bit, and bleed a lot. With OCPs, all these things disappear. But, I'd been noticing a bit of breakthrough bleeding with the last few cycles, so I wanted to do a reset and what better time than my month off, right? Wrong. Now I'm going to be bleeding during my 9 hour exam on Thursday (I just looked up how long it was going to be - I thought it was only going to be 8. Womp, womp). Awesome. So that means most of my break time will be spent rushing to the bathroom to make sure I'm not bleeding errwhere. Major bummer.

And it totally ruined my workout today. I was going to crank it up a notch (a.k.a. add 8 minutes to my normal elliptical routine), but after a half hour, I had to call it. I was cramping up like nobody's business and once I got home, my bum exploded. So, staying at the gym would have been a mistake.

In other news, taking ibuprofen for my cramps made my ankle feel better. So, that's an intelligent thing that I should have expected. Also, in other news, I made zucchini bread today because I really, really wanted something sweet. I'd been toying with the idea of making it but was afraid I'd binge and eat the whole loaf. So, I decided I'd head to the farmer's market to pick up some beans and then grab a cinnamon roll from Heaven/the Amish. The farmer's market was a bit bare today, likely due to impending thunder storms and the fact that it was Tuesday. Thus, no Amish. Thus, no baked goods for me. And I really effing wanted a cinnamon roll. So, instead, I came home and whipped up some zucchini bread. While it cooled, I hit the gym and was abused by my uterus and so I had a bit after my stomach calmed the eff down.

That's it. I gotta get back to hating my life/being bored forever studying. 

Photos for today:

Breakfast

Morning snack

Lunch - didn't want a sandwich, just the meat

Baking makes a mess

But then you get zucchini bread!

Dinner?

More salt for stomach settling

Another slice o' bread cuz it was gooooood

Bread for stomach settling

This is how we blog every night. Me in the lazy boy with my lazy boy

Today's positive: Listening to my body even though I wanted to keep going because I wanted a longer break and wanted to get a better workout in. Also, not eating the whole loaf of zucchini bread/not bingeing!