What I see working in a Walmart/Covid-19 world

I’ve worked for my retail company for 28 years. I’ve seen so many crazy situations. If you think about it, 28 Black Fridays can change you. I had a conversation yesterday with a customer that brought my mood down and I almost cried on the sales floor. It came down to missing my mom. You see, this man needed rubbing alcohol since we had no hand sanitizer. So I showed him where it was on the bottom shelf and told him that he could only buy one due to limitations on key items since people hoard and would wipe out the shelf if they could. He said he would like 2 since he wanted one for himself as well. The first one was for his mom. We got into a conversation about how hard this whole self-isolation is when it comes to staying away from the elderly so we don’t infect them. He was excited because he hadn’t seen his mom in a week and was going to go see her that morning and get a hug from her. I told him that I hadn’t seen mine in over 2 weeks because I’m exposed to so many people. My mom had a stroke in the past, is diabetic, has asthma and her immune system is not the best. I would hate myself if I was responsible for giving her the corona virus. She’s a strong woman but I don’t want to take my chances. I told him that it’s been hard not being able to go and just hang out and see her and get that hug at the end of our visit. He and I talked some more and said our goodbyes. I walked back to where I was working and realized I wanted to cry because, at 51 years old, I really missed my mom and just wanted a hug from her.

I don’t let the media scare me. I realize that they sell fear. Fear sells. Not just in media but in stores too. Look at how this hoarding has created bad situations for families. I’ve seen parents cry because there is no formula, baby wipes for their kids. There is no milk, no flour, no rice. You know, the staples. I’ve had to lead people over to the cloth diapers and tell them how to use them, clean them (oh and there is no bleach either). I’ve gone online to major retailers to see who is selling what online so I can suggest to people other ways of getting basic necessities.

I have a sister in law who knows viruses and bacteria. She went to college for this and does this for a living. She is my go to guru. She has kept me informed and calm. I constantly wash my hands. I go about my day doing my job but also have multiple conversations with coworkers, trying to calm their fears. We have families that we go home to every night and we pray that we didn’t catch something at work and just expose our families to it. We speak with customers and try to make things seem as normal as possible. Sometimes though, we come off the sales floor and sit in the breakroom just emotionally drained from the conversations, as I did with that man.

I try to get through all this with humor. Laughter is an amazing thing. It can lighten a mood so easily but it gets hard sometimes. I have told my kids many times that this is something totally new to me. I never would have imagined that this would be a reality. We’ve read history books, heard stories about wartime when rationing was a thing and couldn’t imagine living in a world where you can’t get basic necessities. Yet here we are. Trying to get by and not get this virus. I’m pretty confident that we could survive it if we caught it. There is talk that this has been around since November of 2019. I’m pretty sure we caught this bug a few months back. So many of us were sick and we’d go to the dr and it wasn’t the flu. They weren’t sure what it was but it was viral. They knew that. We kept on working because we didn’t feel sick, like runny nose, throwing up kind of sick. It was more like being really fatigued. I would go home and sleep for 10 hrs straight. We had this weird cough and felt hot. But other than that, we felt ok. It was a weird sickness. Part of me hopes it was corona and that it creates an immunity to catching it again but right now so much info about that is up in the air.

In the end, stay home. Connect with people through video chat. I video chatted with my parents last night because we realized that I couldn’t go over and fill her scheduled medication boxes. I do that every 2 weeks where I sort her meds so she knows what to take everyday. So for the 1st time, she did her own meds and I watched on my laptop to make sure she did it right. She was so excited that she was able to do it on her own so something good came out of this!

If you must go out to the store, go by yourself if you can. Have a list. Go in and get out quickly. Do not stay in the store for hours. We have people that just hang out to get out of the house. You’re exposing yourself to potential viruses. We’re trying to minimize that.

But above all, be kind. I have seen such kindness from others. People offering to give supplies to strangers. Coworkers dropping off toilet paper to other coworkers who don’t have any. This is what should be coming out of this horrible situtation. The kindness and support of the human race.

6 months later….

I just realized it’s been 6 months since I last did a blog. So much has changed. It’s now the year 2020 and frankly, I’m disappointed. I had this amazing expectation of 2020 and the closest thing to my vision is the Roomba vacuum. The Jetsons totally ruined my view of the future.

However, I am so happy to be alive and well in 2020. It seemed to so far away and I figured I would be “old”. I’m 51 now and I don’t really consider myself old. My 51 year old self is so much younger than the 50 year old adults I knew back in the 80’s. I joke and say that I owe it all to moisturizer. There’s some truth to that so…moisturize.

I haven’t really made a YouTube video in ages. I keep meaning to but I need to find that creative part of me that NEEDS to do it. Lately my creative part is into making houses on Sims 4. Yup, the gamer in me wins every time. I really do enjoy making and decorating the houses. The downside is that time goes by to fast while doing it. Before I know it, 5 hrs have passed.

Keto is still a part of my life. Not going to lie, I have been having a hard time getting my mindset right. My husband is doing AMAZING!! I keep falling off the wagon but I can go for awhile before I mess up. I do have a new reason to do better now. I got a job promotion and I need to be as healthy as I can be because the job uses a lot of my mental power and being on keto helps keep the brain fog away and keeps my mind sharp!

Plus being healthy is a good thing with Coronavirus going around. I don’t know what to even think about this. I have gone through Zika, Hantavirus, the flu, Rotovirus, Mers, Sars, Ebola, West Nile and so many others. We’ve seen this happen way too many times and, while I do think taking precautionary action is a good thing, I’m amazed at how the media blows it up. Wash your hands. Eat healthy. Don’t spread germs . That’s the basic rules we are taught as kids. I work at a store and am amazed at how sanitizer, alcohol, toilet paper, water and other staples are sold out…and how fast it sold out. Part of me thinks this is big corporation taking advantage and using the fear to boost sales for them. I don’t even want to know how much hand sanitizer is going for on Amazon.

One thing that has kept me away from here and YouTube are my podcasts. I love podcasts. I’m into the True Crime genre. Oh and history. I’ve learned so much from my podcasts. My one guilty pleasure is Trashy Divorces podcast, so much so that I joined Patreon so support them. They pretty much post everyday on Patreon so you really get some great and interesting content on there. They tell stories of famous trashy divorces. Alicia does series on the divorces. It was Trashy Tudors and the divorces/beheadings of King Henry and his wives. Now it’s Frank Sinatra and his love life. They have other series too depending if you support them on Patreon and at what level. Go check them out where ever you listen to Podcasts. I personally like PocketCast, it’s easy to use and works for me.

Here’s the link to Trashy Divorces online: https://www.trashydivorces.com/

Hope it doesn’t take another 6 months to post again. I think I will start a series on my YouTube about different Podcast. Maybe…

Please stand by…..

Please stand by…..we are experiencing difficulties….

Yea… life got crazy and as I have told my friends “I fell off the wagon and got dragged by it… HARDCORE!!!”. But the good thing is that I learned some lessons. Important lessons and finally accepted a new reality.

So please stand by… A new ME is going to make her debut. Because isn’t life about evolving into a better, stronger version of ourselves?

Today I learned…

…that I was led to believe that I was “fat” and that I was robbed of feeling good about myself.

I turn 50 in 10 days. So much change has gone on in my life but one constant thing I thought about myself was my “bad” self perception of my body. I was not the “skinny” body type that was displayed in magazines, on TV and every type of media. I was what I would call athletic. I had a butt. I had thighs and calves from years of being active. I had arms that, in my youth, would crack many wooden bats.

I never considered myself overweight until my late 30’s. Kids. They can do that to you sometimes. But I was “solid” in my teens and 20’s. Solid, however, was not skinny and so I developed a hatred of my body. My stomach wasn’t flat enough, I wasn’t tall enough. I wasn’t enough. I used to have a friend who always told me that I didn’t know what “fat” was. I get it now. Once I got into the 200’s, I prayed for the days of 150. I laugh because at one point, I thought 150 was “HUGE”.

So what brought this on? Today we found a vacuum sealed bag with some old, old, OLD favorite pieces of clothing. I had been wanting to find this because my daughter is 15 and I know she would LOVE these clothes. She’s such a fan of the 80’s style so this would be EPIC for her. I found skirts, dresses, trench coat, a bridesmaid dress and a few cardigans. But the best thing that came out of it was pulling those clothes out and realizing that I fit in them (except for 1 skirt). I’ve lost so much weight that I can fit into clothes from my teens/20’s. My daughter put on that one skirt I couldn’t fit into and it was kind of a struggle for her. She turned to me and said “how skinny where you?!”.

And that’s when I realized that I WAS skinny. I wasn’t “fat” or “chunky”. I was so convinced by society that I was and that led me down a dangerous road. A life time battle with myself.

So here I am. For the first time in my adult life, I am actually happy with my perception of my body. I came to that realization about a year ago, today just reinforced it.

So be happy with yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. If someone isn’t happy with your body, that is their issue. You are the only opinion that matters. Don’t wait until you’re almost 50 to figure that out.

What the heck is a podcast? Oh, my new obsession.

I love to read. All my life I’ve been a reader and lover of the written word. A good book will help me escape and throw me into an amazing adventure. A good book will motivate me to tackle the world. A good book will teach me some amazing skills. (Like how to break a car window so there’s not glass everywhere. Thanks Dean Koontz!)

However, life gets really busy and we get so overwhelmed with work and family that sometimes we put certain things on the back burner. In this case, I stopped reading. I have always had a book in the bathroom, on my bedside table, in my purse, etc. But life is so busy that I never finished them. I would just add it to the growing pile of “To be read later” books. I would look lovingly at the expanding pile and think “some day I’ll get to them”, knowing that unless something happened to free up a good chunk of time, that it never would happen.

I realized a few months ago that I really missed reading. I got for Christmas the new Michelle Obama book that I started reading. Unfortunately, I find time in little chunks so this is going to take a while. I will get through it though.

I follow a fellow YouTuber by the name of Samantha Maria and she is so into podcasts. She’s always talking about them and I was intrigued. Then I read an article about a true crime story and it had a link to a podcast, Cold. It’s about the disappearance of Susan Powell and how they thought her husband had killed her but they had no proof. He ultimately ended up killing their 2 young sons and himself by setting the house on fire with all 3 of them in it. It’s an ongoing podcast and if you’d like to hear it, click here to hear it.

So I listen to my podcast on Spotify and had caught up with all the Cold podcasts that they had done to that point. So I decided to check out some other podcasts. I tried some inspirational ones, some comedic ones but the one genre that I fell in love with was the true crime ones. I love True Crime. Ever since I was a little girl, I wondered what drove people to their actions. How could they get to a place, mentally, to be able to act like that? The fact that I was a psych major in college just added more fuel to that inquisitive fire.

The one true crime podcast channel that I have become addicted to is Crime Junkie. Hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawalt, they make a great team in telling these stories. They’re childhood friends and you can tell by how easily they talk with one another. It really is like sitting down with a friend and having her tell you an interesting story. They do their research and present it extremely well. It doesn’t have all this added fluff that some other podcasts have.

I listen to my podcast during my commute to work. Depending on the day, it’s a 30-50 minute commute. These podcasts make the time fly so fast. I’ve only been listening to Crime Junkie for about a month and I’m already caught up, as of today. When I filmed the following video, about 2 wks ago, I was halfway though. I went through about 30 episodes in 2 weeks! I’m so hooked that I’ve decided to join their Patreaon just so I can get bonus episodes. I also have my daughter listening to them. My husband has been in the car listening to a few and he makes me go back days later to that specific episode so he can hear the ending of it.

So check out my video on my current book/podcast obsession. Crime Junkie is riveting, interesting and will get you so involved in the story that you can’t just listen to one podcast.

Thanksgiving is temptation taken to a whole new level… Did I go into a Carb Coma?

So it’s been awhile since I did a keto monthly update. So much has happened. It’s been almost 2 whole months. It seems so much longer, honestly. So let’s recap on what’s been going on and how did I do with the ultimate Carb holiday: Thanksgiving. Which also happens to be my favorite holiday.

I hadn’t planned on setting a specific weight goal for myself. Instead I was going to try to go down from 190’s to the 180’s and maintain that. Then I was going to go to the 170’s and maintain that. Did it happen? Nope. But there was a weird thing that happened. I’m in the 180’s but my clothing is fitting so much better than ever. That happens every now and then. I tell my husband, who’s also doing keto, not to go by the scale because it will destroy you when the scale goes up. Especially if you feel like you’ve been doing so GOOD! I tell him to go by his clothes. Eventually the scale will catch up. He didn’t believe me until after about a month of being “stuck” at a certain weight. His clothes fit better, he looked amazing. So many people were commenting on his weight loss but that dang scale was still stuck and he was so defeated. Then..WHOOSH… the scale recorded a 15 lb weigh loss. Just like that. That mind game the scale likes to play is vicious. But it encouraged him to keep at it. So I’m not discouraged by the scale not really moving, as long as my clothes fit better, I know I’m on the right track. I know my “WHOOSH” is coming.

I may have or may not have touched on my stress eating. There is something in my life that is setting off my stress eating. Not really going to go into details here because it’s not my story to tell, but one of the most important people in my life is fighting a battle. I’m the support system but her life is my life in a way.  I’m trying to stay strong and not give into temptation but it’s hard. Carbs soothe the soul, in a way.

Which brings me to Thanksgiving. I was pretty good leading up to it. I work retail so it throws off the holiday for me. We celebrate it the weekend after everyone else. I had a very small portion of mashed potatoes, stuffing and pie. Unfortunately, I had 4 slices of bread. Have I mentioned that gluten makes me sick? Yup, an hour after we ate, I was soooo sick. I haven’t been that sick in ages and it motivated me to get my gluten intolerant butt back up on that wagon. I haven’t cheated since. So at least something good came out of that horrible experience.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I linked the YouTube video talking about my December Keto update. Check it out. I also have a whole keto series on it included a new series (within a series) called “Can I Keto Cook It?”. Subscribe and you can be notified when I upload new videos.

If you’re also on this keto journey, how did you do? Comment and say a little prayer that we get through this holiday season.

Can I Keto Cook It? New series on Keto Cooking!!

…so I’ve been wanting to start a new series (yes within a series) on my YouTube channel regarding my keto journey. I see all these recipes for keto meals and thought “are they actually good?”.  Because, as we all know, it’s not always true just because it’s up on the internet. I have made quite a few things only to realize that it tastes horrible.

So I am using myself and my family as guinea pigs. I’m going to try out the recipes and review them. Hopefully I’ll find some good ones!! I’m also going to try keto foods that I find in the stores. I already did one about keto snack bars but I see there’s a bunch of new frozen foods options in regular grocery stores. I’m currently editing one about frozen pizza so don’t forget to subscribe to my channel so you can see when it goes live.

I’m not really going to be doing the sweet stuff like cookies/cakes/etc. Those have the fake sugars and my body hates that stuff. So unless it can be sweetened another way, I’m going to keep those videos to a minimum.

So the first one I made was a version of Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits. It only had an ingredient list, no instructions. However, just throwing everything together worked! And let me tell you….YUM!! My kids really like them so big success. Check out my video and leave a comment on what you’d like to see me try out next time.

And don’t forget to subscribe/like/share. You know the routine. Thanks for the support!!

NSV: Non Scale Victory

NSV. I see these posted all the time on the Keto FB page I belong to. Non Scale Victories. Whenever we do something that we couldn’t do while overweight, but now can because of the weight loss, we celebrate it and share our NSV. One of the first ones was bending over and tying my shoe without feeling like I was going to pass out. No, really, that was a huge one for me because you do feel like passing out while doing a simple thing like tying your shoe.

So onto today’s NSV. I ran. I ran so fast and hard.

Backstory: I used to love to run. I was a really fast runner. Loved short distance running. Then I blew out my knees, gained weight and running became something I didn’t do anymore. I didn’t even attempt it anymore. Why? Well, my legs would hurt. Sometimes the muscles would hurt so much that it would take days to recover. I actually pulled both my calf muscles once while trying to run. But the worst part was the “lonja”. That’s Spanish for the stomach fat. You know, when you’re so overweight that your stomach hangs. The “overhang” is what I’ve heard it’s also called. So when you’re so fat, when you try to run, the “lonja” slaps against you. First time I felt that, it was so mortifying. Embarrassing. As a former athlete, I was like “what did I do to myself?!”. So I didn’t run anymore. If for some reason, I had to run, I would hold onto my lonja so it would be supported and wouldn’t slap against me. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence out. But yes, it was a reality…an ugly reality.

So today I realized something at work and took off in a mad sprint to stop someone from doing something. I was down the hall and around the corner when it hit me: OMG I’m running. I felt like Forrest Gump. “And I was RUNNING!”. It was great. I haven’t run that fast in ages! And then it hit me….no lonja hitting against the top of my thighs. Oh wow. I got to my destination and was so dang proud of myself.  I ran. Fast. And while I was winded (hey I hauled butt!), I wasn’t overly winded and I wasn’t in pain.

So there’s my NSV. I actually enjoyed it so much that I’m thinking of taking up running again. Last time I remember running for enjoyment, I was pushing my son in a stroller while jogging. My son is now 21 so it’s definitely been a while…actually a couple of decades, when I think about it.

Wonder what NSV I’ll have next?

Excuses, excuses aka lying to myself…

For years, I lied to myself. I convinced myself that I was happy with the way I was. I was ok with being overweight. I was big boned. I was busy. I was….(fill in the blank). Now that I’ve lost so much weight, I realize that I was just making excuses and lying to myself.

And that was an eyeopening moment for myself. I hear people telling themselves the same thing and I have to bite my tongue to not go off on them. I want to say “there is a better way! Invest in yourself and you can do it!” .  But we all have to get to that point ourselves. I just tell them that when they’re ready, that I’m here for them and will help them get started on their own journey. Ultimately, it’s our OWN journey.

Here’s my excuses…well, a small list of my excuses. It could go on for days if you get me talking.

How did I do Keto-wise in August?

Well…. good…and not good. The beginning was hard but it got better after my fall off the keto wagon. Pick myself up, dust off the carbs and back at it!!!

So no more actual pound goal. Now I have a weight area to hit. Check out my update to hear about it. Any tips for me if you have been doing keto long term?