I really did not like that taupe-y polish at all. I decided to take advantage of Sephora's generous return policy and switch it out for something brighter. I got "Alive," which is one of the limited-edition spring colors.

This color was a bit streaky, and it took me three tries to get a nice, even application. I like the color even though it is a bit more bubblegum than I thought it would be. I'm also not sure about the wearability of this polish, as the polish I applied yesterday had already chipped when I got to Sephora to ask for an exchange. I don't know if it's faulty application, or if this is just a regular nail polish dressed up with a fancy system. At least I like this color better.  I am definitely going to try subbing in one of my other polishes with the rest of the system and see if I get similar results. I have a couple of nice Essie colors that just never last, so maybe they will with a better topcoat.

Saturday: 30 minutes of running with 5 minutes warmup/cooldown walk, 12,072 steps
Sunday: 60 minutes of swim practice plus 9,032 steps (so far)

So, first I must confess that No-Buy February should be renamed to Less-Buy February.  I haven't done a great job of emphasizing using foods we already have over buying groceries, so I am spending just as much on marketing. I have also bought a few other things -- a cheap extra charger for my Jawbone UP, a new food scale to replace the one that stopped working, and today, with my husband out of town for the weekend, I decided it would be a good day to have fun with home manicures after reading a great review of the Formula X System on Beautygeeks. The Formula X System retails at Sephora for $32, and includes one color polish.

Unlike the self-styled Beautygeeks, I am not especially proficient in using nail polish, just average, and I thought that my experience would be a little more typical of what regular users can expect. Sephora has been doing more "system" packaging like the one above, where there are several steps pre-packaged, with a window for you to pop in the color of your choice.

I spent a lot of time choosing the color, painting the little plastic sheets supplied for that purpose with different "modern neutrals." I wanted something that would be professional and work-appropriate but also on trend. I have to say, I have a little buyer's remorse over the color I chose, "Brilliant." In the store, it seemed great, but I don't know if I love it on me. It is on trend, as these kinds of taupe-y neutrals seem to be everywhere. The color I really wanted, "Impeccable," seemed streaky.  I'd like to try "Intensity" next, or "Alive." Those clear peachy pinks are really fun for spring and I wish I had picked one.

Ignore the random shoe in this photo. Also, when did my hands start to look like my grandmother's?

The application process was really amazing. As I said, I'm not a phenomenal manicurist. I started by removing my polish with a cheap drugstore acetone remover and washing and drying them well (you can buy Formula X remover, but I noticed that it's also just acetone). I didn't do a lot of other prep work on my nails because I just had a manicure for Valentine's Day (another no-buy violation, maybe), so they still looked okay.

Then I started with the "Cleanse" step (clear blue), which removes oils from the nails to create a good base. There is a base coat (clear pink). I then used one coat of the color polish, which provided great, smooth coverage and dried very quickly with no streaks. Finally, I put on the clear topcoat. It all dried within minutes, unlike the half-hour or more for regular home manis. That alone made "The System" worth the price.

The finish reminds me of Vinylux, which is a sort of compromise between regular nail polish and Shellac.  It seems like it will wear well. And a comment by my hairstylist that the real magic in Vinylux is the topcoat makes me wonder -- could I get similar results using the Formula X system and a regular color nail polish? I have a lot of OPI and drugstore colors I could try that with.  I will report back when I have a chance to try it.

I think I will paint my own nails more often instead of shelling out money for manicures.  I still think that pedicures are worth paying someone else to do, though, unless I can be in a lounge chair by the pool.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In case you haven't been able to tell from my crabby posts, I have been in the baddest of bad moods lately.  I hated the weather, work, my body, my hair.  Not all the time, of course, but my default setting was stuck on hopeless.

Homemade dark-chocolate-covered berries for Valentine's Day

No, I'm not that excited about Valentine's Day -- it's a nice enough holiday, but we don't have huge plans, just a nice dinner at home.

I'm excited about February 14 because it will mean we have made it halfway through this horrible month.  And there are rumors of a thaw of sorts coming next week -- at this point, any temperature above 20 would be fine with me.  This snow and cold has me feeling very down.

I'm also teaching two four-hour evening classes a week through the end of the month, and it is really wearing me out.  That ends in March.  I can't wait. I have made no progress on my goals this month -- it is just hard with never being able to be at home, and being cold and tired all the time.  I'm struggling just to maintain at this point.

Our coach had us do a lot of sets of sprints tonight:

125 free warmup
2 x 75 stroke
3 x 25 sprint on :40
4 x 50 FAST
5 x 25 sprint  on :40 (we only did 4 so we would be on the side of the pool where all our stuff was)
6 x 50 pull, breathe on 3/5 by 50s
7 x 25 sprint on :40 (we did all of these)
6 x 50 double-turn
9 x 25 sprint on :40 (we only got in 6 before it was time to cool down)
... (the workout went on but we didn't have time for it)
100 choice cool down

I'm tired, but a good tired. Afterward, as we were getting changed in the locker room, somehow people started talking about body image. A couple people mentioned that they were in the best shape they had ever been, and as happy as they have ever been with their bodies.

That's why I need to lose the weight -- so I can say that and it can be true.

I feel pretty good, but not "I'm in the best shape of my life" good. Oddly, I don't have a lot of pictures of me at goal, but here's one:



I want to feel like that again.

I'm not very happy with my Biggest Loser finale post. I think it is so easy to forget when watching this show that the people we're commenting on are real people with feelings. So I feel bad about my snarky comments about David, and my commentary on Rachel.

I loved this group of contestants as I watched the show, and Rachel especially. I don't want to hurt anyone. Who can blame David for wanting to say that no matter who won, they had all been brave to try to make a change in their lives? Especially since all season he had been pigeonholed as the guy whose wife had died, no matter how much he tried to say that he was more than his sad story.

I hadn't realized that the "Rachel is TOO THIN!" hysteria had gotten so bad when I posted. I hadn't really read other commentaries before I wrote my own.  The difference between Rachel's weight and a healthy BMI is only 5 pounds.

Just how far did this go? I have pretty light blog traffic most days, and my page views suddenly spiked after the finale with people searching for "Rachel Biggest Loser height" and similar searches. It, of course, went right back down again.


My concern was more that she had worked so hard to become an athlete again, and that losing so much lean mass (when she was leaving the ranch, Dr. H had said she was only 4-5 pounds away from an "athletic" body composition) would hurt her in the future, since it is so hard to rebuild. But a lot of the shocking thinness comes from the fact that like fitness models and runway stars, these contestants purposely dehydrate themselves to look as lean as possible.  Maybe she looked fine the next day after she had some water and a normal breakfast.

If Rachel has really developed an eating disorder, as so many people have speculated, she would deserve sympathy and our best wishes for recovery, not vilification.

I do think that the show needs to learn from this and set a bottom limit for the contestants on their visits with Dr. H as they leave the ranch, based on their personal body composition. Those would have to be confidential, of course, so no contestant could use them to have an advantage, but it would be a way to keep things from going too far.

Or maybe the show has run its course and we don't need it anymore. The one thing this show has done in its 10 years on the air is to give people hope that it is possible to lose large amounts of weight without surgery.  But there are other outlets, like Half Size Me, that do that without the circus atmosphere of reality television. There is still the potential for The Biggest Loser to be something good, if the producers are willing to give up the sideshow elements and really let us see the contestants for the whole human beings that they are, and not a one-or-two note caricature.

If the show continues, and if I continue to blog about it, I am going to push myself to be better and more sensitive to the real people whose lives I'm chronicling, and I hope the show will do the same.

Unfortunately, the Biggest Loser finales have gotten a bit dull. In the early days, there used to be some footage of the contestants at home, struggling, trying to find a balance with their weight loss goals and their real lives.

Now, most of the clips are the same clips that we have seen over and over. David's story about his first wife's death. Rachel saying she is tired of being sad and alone.  There have to be so many other clips that they can use, but the producers choose to recycle the same ones again and again. I can understand this at the finale, where some people might be tuning in for the first time, but the way the clips are recycled for all the other episodes makes me think that they believe we get amnesia every week and forget everything we know about the contestants. This is probably my biggest pet peeve about the show.

There were some fun clips this time that we hadn't seen before: Jillian challenging Tumi to do 20 flights of stairs, and Tumi doing 32 instead.  Some Dr. H clips of the contestants getting their final health check-ins. I enjoyed these and would like to see more of that kind of thing throughout the season.

There were a lot of little attempts to inject some variety into the show as the contestants were brought on in groups of threes to weigh in.  Most contestants only got about one sentence in each.  Holley invited Bob to join her at the Olympics.  Ruben sang a song.  Jennifer's daughter got one last public commentary on her weight -- not cool. The kids from the last season stood up and waved from the audience, too, and will have to deal with public speculation on how much they may have regained. I'm just going to say that I think it would be better if kids were not a part of this show in the future, given the potential for harm.

Clothes: I thought that Allie's white dress was gorgeous and very slimming.  Jillian's leather dress was fun and much more flattering than some of her other finale wear. Dolvett looked handsome, as always (Yes, he has a strange personality, but he is a gorgeous man. Let's give him that). Bob looked like he was trying to look as strange as possible -- a hipster in a biker jacket.  Jillian had said in one of her podcasts that she thought Bob went out of his way to annoy the producers with his appearance, and this was probably a winning combo in that respect.

Most of the at-home contestants' clothes were nice.  I loved Jennifer's sequined purple dress.  Fernanda looked HOT in her pink dress.  Holley wore a normal lipstick color, and had shaved Olympic rings into the side of her hair, which I thought was clever. I was glad to see Marie's hair looking cute and chic and not styled into her swoopy makeover style. She fell down the stairs but wasn't hurt -- those stairs are a known hazard, so they had people there to catch anyone who gets a heel caught.

I'm sure a lot of people will say that Ruben and Holley didn't lose enough weight. But they have lost enough to make a difference in their lives, and they had their own goals. Ruben's size is part of his trademark, and Holley has to be careful to maintain her strength as she loses.  Even Hap, who hadn't lost much by Biggest Loser standards, lost more than 1/5 of his body weight. I hope he will continue to work at it on his own. He still qualifies as morbidly obese on the BMI scale.

Instead of giving the weigh-ins in the order that they weighed in on the show, I have them sorted here by percentage lost. The final three are highlighted. As you can see, Tumi would have been in second place if she had been in the finale, and the prize for second place is... ZERO! So she was much better off going home.  The top three at-home contestants were all on Jillian's team. As always, I appreciate the Biggest Loser wikipedia entry as a great source of this info:

Contestant	Age	Height	Starting BMI	Current BMI	Start	Most Recent	% Lost	Finale	% Lost
Rachel	24	5'4"	44.6	18	260	150	42.31%	105	59.62%
Tumi	41	5'8"	48.5	21.9	319	221	30.72%	144	54.86%
David	43	6'2"	52.5	24	409	243	40.59%	187	54.28%
Bobby	28	6'3"	44.7	21.2	358	231	35.47%	170	52.51%
Marie	30	5'6"	40.2	22.3	249	150	39.76%	138	44.58%
Craig	30	6'1"	50.8	29.4	385	307	20.26%	223	42.08%
Chelsea	28	5'6"	38.9	23.6	241	157	34.85%	146	39.42%
Jennifer	42	5'7"	41.7	25.4	266	182	31.58%	162	39.10%
Jay	38	5'10"	42.6	26.3	297	193	35.02%	183	38.38%
Matt	38	6'3"	45.7	27.9	356	263	26.12%	223	37.36%
Fernanda	32	5'7"	39.2	25.5	250	208	16.80%	163	34.80%
Tanya	40	5'7"	41	27.4	262	174	33.59%	175	33.21%
Holley	24	5'8"	53.4	37.7	351	277	21.08%	255	27.35%
Ruben	35	6'3"	57.7	42.9	462	377	18.40%	343	25.76%
Hap	26	6'5"	47.8	38.2	403	316	21.59%	322	20.10%

Gwynnie Bee (affiliate link, if this is your first time reading my blog and you don't know what GB is, you can read my earlier posts here) encourages subscribers to post pictures of themselves in their clothes, which I have done when I had an outfit I like. I posted the above picture and it got picked up this week in the "Members as Models" section of the blog and on Facebook.  I tagged myself in the Facebook picture, and suddenly dozens of my family and friends were "liking" my photo or commenting on it.

It's a little bit of a weird feeling. I still have a hard time getting over the "don't call attention to yourself" rule. Also, I know that some people will think I'm a loony to use a subscription for my clothes instead of just buying them like a normal person.

It's a weird feeling, but I will get used to it.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I feel like I have bought a lot of things lately. I got a new computer this summer, I got a new car in December, I recently bought two new purses, a new wallet, and I broke down and bought the jacket I liked. Plus I have Christmas presents and the clothes I bought for myself while shopping for other people...

It's making me feel selfish to buy so much stuff. Plus, I now have a new car payment to deal with.  I don't think it should be too challenging to stop buying things for a month, especially a month as short as February.

I will buy groceries. But I won't buy other stuff at the grocery store like skincare products, nail polishes, housewares, or the various other things that they stock at Kroger that have nothing to do with groceries (I saw an overstuffed chair for sale there today).  I will also try to use as much of the food we have in the pantry and freezer as we can before buying something new.

I figure a month off of spending will be good discipline for me and will help get our finances in order. I am looking forward to a tax refund this year that I plan to use to pay off some bills.

I'm sure this will be harder than it sounds, but it will also be good for me. Anyone want to join in?