Overweight Mermaids

   I love how I think of such random titles, even if later I go back and wonder, "What the heck was this blog post about?!" However, this one has to do with a hilarious picture I was shown on Saturday of a picture of Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) photoshopped to look super obese with her stomach hanging over that rock with the waves splashing behind her with a caption of "Me this summer if I don't get my $h!+ together". Yep, all the posts from now on are going to be about me losing weight through July and then being skinny for the rest of my life!!!
   Today I weighed 124 and was ecstatic about it since four days ago I was 126. I've never lost two pounds in four days without being sick, so I was very pleased. However, I have Vanessa Hudgens to thank for that. I read on Saturday that she has been doing Intermittent Fasting, (she claims it was more for the energy and not so much for the weight loss) so I gave it a try and it was surprisingly not as difficult as I thought it would be. Today is my third day on the 16:8 schedule. That means 16 hours of fasting, most of it being while I'm sleeping, and 8 hours of eating. I picked 10am-6pm and that has been working well for me. Today was easier because I have the day off so I didn't have to get up until 8am compared to 5:20am on work days.
   Lately I have been hitting over 10,000 steps on the day I work, but on my days off and I have to stay inside with Emma until Michael gets home, (except on January 31st when it was 60 degrees we walked a bunch of loops around the neighborhood) so I only get to walk from about 5:45-7pm, but I don't stop walking until I hit at least 10,000. Last week my total was 102,032 because of the Wekiva Springs day and I got the most steps in our group, so Carlos is supposed to owe me lunch now! Today I walked to the library and back since I needed to drop off some of Emma's books. Boy, was it steamy out- in the middle of February!! Anyway, here are all my "skinny mermaid" related pictures from the past few weeks:

When I got an hour massage at the end of January (with a gift card)!!

Eating well even when I was sick with a cold/congestion & cough for a week!

For my morning smoothies with almond milk, peanut butter & chocolate.

The book I'm reading & some nasty veggie burger boats. I didn't eat them all. 

Chicken that Michael made & then his dinner below.

What they had at work VS what I ate!! :D

  I also want to talk about the great deals I got on some clothes the last weekend I was off. I call that "financial health". I was excited because it doesn't happen often that I get a bunch of outfits that I like- and that fit and look good on me when trying them on. I remember in October 2013 I hit the jackpot at Ross in California and think I came home with 17 items?! But this time I got an email saying Clothes Mentor was having a clearance sale and everything that day was only $2. I ended up getting four items, including one sweater shirt, an Old Navy top, plus a pair of black star pants and a black and brown sweater, both which were pretty tight on me at the time, but I know will fit great when I'm back around 115! Then I went to Platos Closet and got three more items, two for $5 and one for $6 that still had the mall tag on it saying that sweater shirt was originally being sold for $68!! That gets me excited. So much savings and since it still had the old tag, that makes it seem like it was never even worn before. :)

Wekiwa Springs III

   The Wekiwa Springs I post was from 2012 when I went with Sana from work (and actually jumped into the water), and Wekiwa Springs II was when I went with Michael in August 2014. We also went again in May 1, 2016 (and hiked 9.12 miles, according to my Instagram post that day), but I didn't blog about that. Here's my one photo, but, of course, I know I took more:

   Yesterday I hiked with Alex, another friend from work. The original plan was to have about 6 of us hiking, (the whole group of our Steps Challenge) but everyone else was out of town or unable to go, so it was just me and her.  We got along super well at work, we have similar humor and interests, so I was excited to get some one-on-one time with her outside of Teletype. She met me there at 8:45am and we hiked until 1:30!! We were both pretty tired after that, but she noted that we seemed to be walking faster on the way back to the car- haha. It was only $4 for our entry fee (each) since there was only one person in the car. I guess when there are at least 2 people in the car, it's $6.

 The two pictures above are the same, I just edited them differently. I like them both!!

   It should be noted that I saved Alex from two snakes yesterday! TWO!! She said she didn't see the first shimmery green, kind of "cute" one because she wasn't looking down, and the second one (the huge one that Michael says is a water moccasin or cottonmouth) Alex didn't see because she on her phone. She was texting Tabitha, another friend from work, to see if she could meet us at Panera for lunch. Luckily, she was the brave one who nudged both of them out of the way with her long spider web stick. The super poisonous one took more nudging. I definitely stepped back with that one!

   Also here is a funny conversation we had that I am still laughing about ~
When we got to Big Buck Camp, a site towards the very North end of the park, we sat down at the benches near where a tent and hammock were set up. She was seeing which trail would be the fastest to get back.
A: It's only 2.1 miles. Wait, it says 7 minutes? Oh, that's driving.
R: Just call an Uber. (sarcastic)
A: He shows up on a bear. *laughing*
R: An U-bear. *more laughing*

These bars from Publix seem a lot healthier than my Dollar Tree granola bars. 100 calories each!

 I was wondering if someone was in that tent since the fire was still smoking as if someone had recently been cooking and just covered the fire not long before we got there.

  That is the Hey Band (?) that I got from Jackie at work. She has two better/ newer/ fancier ones so she gave me this one for free a couple weeks ago. Here I am showing off my 22,716 steps!! And then I made my goal 25,000 for the day. But then I became obsessed with actually going over 30,000- and I did. The Hey Band said I got to about 30,323, but my phone said I reached over 31,000. So that's the number that I'm using for the day. My feet and calves definitely hurt today. I don't know how Brittany Burgunder did it at the end of high school and beginning of college, walking sooo much each day and also going to the gm several times. I don't want to be obsessed every day, but do wonder how quickly I could get down to 105 if I walked 30,000 steps every day! That's not realistic though.
   *Note: I did not take the park sign photo. That's from Google. & Alex took the selfie of us, as well as the snake photos. But I did edit the coloring a little bit.