weight loss (or not) Archives | Page 1 of 3
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Tuesday, November 18, 2003
letter to myself
ooh, interesting one today from Diarist.net (it's actually a random one, not today's per se).
Pretend to be 20, 30, or 40 years older and write a letter to your present self.
Dear 28-year-old Me,First off, way to go on losing that weight. Good thing you did it at 28, because lemme tell you, at 58 you don't even want to try it, it's just too depressing. And while we're on the subject, would you quit griping about your looks already? For crying out loud, look at your skin! No wrinkles! Look at your hair, it's all there! (yep, you guessed it, those Flint thins-before-it-grays genes are just sitting there waiting for you. Sorry to break it to you.) You're worried about some stretch marks and that weird faint bumpy breakout you get and your teeny little mustache? I'm not even going to tell you what you have in store for you, just appreciate what you have while you've got it is all I'll say. And drink more water, and take your vitamins, for both our sakes.
And while we're on THAT topic -- appreciating what we have while we have it -- let's talk about those kids of ours. Yeah, I read where you whined about them not loving you enough. Girl, you do not know what you HAVE, did you not just carry that sleeping 4-year-old ballet princess to bed? And get a stuck-on kiss from the local Lego champion? They might be less attached to you than they were last year, but hon, they love you. They need you. They're there every single day for you to love on and influence and take care of. You want to see "don't love me enough," wait till they live an hour away with their own families and dogs and mortgages and kids and worries. Grandkids are fun, your parents (God rest their souls) are right about that, but it's just not the same. Quit looking at what you haven't got and enjoy what you have. And give them a big kiss for me while you're at it.
And woman, your priorities are screwed way up. Who cares if people read your goofball diaryland ramblings? Who cares if they leave comments? Did you really need to spend two hours today reading episode guides from "Little House on the Prairie" and "Saved by the Bell"? Not to mention the sneeze? OK, so maybe the sneeze was worth the time. But for the love of God, get away from that computer and do something! You're only young once.
See you in 30 years. Brace yourself, it's going to be rough at times.love and kisses,
58-year-old you
OK, so it's not L.M. Montgomery. ;-)
funny link for today:
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Friday, November 14, 2003
yum-o-rama
I was being so good on my diet. Then we went out to dinner tonight, at my favorite restaurant. This is the kind of restaurant where they serve really, really wonderfully good food, the kind of food you think you should be able to cook at home except it's way, way better than anything homemade. It doesn't seem fancy, but it tastes fancy. And they serve it on these huge plates. Plates the size of turkey platters. Plates with their own ZIP codes. Plates the size of minor unpronounceable Hawaiian islands. Plates loaded down with enough amazing food to make up for three or four days (at least) of eating exactly according to plan. But oh, so worth it. mmmm. I was determined to only eat one deck-of-cards-size serving of my steak, and take the rest home, but I arrived home, mysteriously enough, devoid of a takeout package, having consumed a serving more the size of a trade paperback novel than a deck of cards. In other words, the whole wonderful delicious mouth-watering steak, complete with mushrooms and sherry gravy. My excuse was that we'll be out all day tomorrow so the poor steak would feel all lonely and rejected in the fridge. Much better to put it out of its misery in the restaurant, n'est-ce pas?
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Thursday, November 13, 2003
kids' therapy
Those of you who are mothers (fathers? any fathers at diaryland?), you know those moments when you're doing something with your children and you look at them and just know exactly what they're going to say to their spouses (or perhaps their therapists) in twenty years about that very moment? Tonight I had one of those.
LT [TWENTY YEARS HENCE, LYING IN BED LATE AT NIGHT WITH HIS WIFE HAVING ONE OF THOSE PENSIVE MARRIED-PEOPLE TALKS]: Yeah, it was after an Awana club meeting. Mom and Dad had this idea that we'd go to a restaurant and get pie and cocoa for dessert, and of course we're kids so that sounded great even though I'd just had a candy bar AND a sucker at the meeting and my sister had had this little four-year-old's snack with crackers and peanut butter. It's pie and cocoa, right? And I'm sure Mom and Dad thought it would be this nice family bonding time. Except I was just too damn full, and feeling sick from all the chocolate I'd already had, and I ordered this chocolate cake and it came and it was almost ALL frosting and I just hated frosting. And my sister kept insisting the cocoa was too hot even though it wasn't, and she got her sleeve in her pie like four times. And Mom just had diet Coke, even though we had, like, hello, a refrigerator full of diet Coke at home, because she was on her perpetual diet, except she ended up eating most of my cake. Dad was trying not to be mad and Mom was sitting there begging him with her eyes not to get mad and it was just a mess. I felt bad for them, they meant it to be so much fun for us and it just ended up being stressful for everyone. Man.
Oh well. It could be worse, right?
Speaking of my perpetual diet, I was down two pounds today from last Thursday, woo hoo! I'm back down to my lowest weight so far -- 172, halfway to my goal. Of course that was before the cake tonight...
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Wednesday, November 05, 2003
starting my diet back at day 1
I haven't gained back the weight I'd lost, but after about a month of eating at a "maintain" level instead of a losing level, today is hell. I'm going back to my strict 1300-1400 calories/day plan, and OUCH, I am starving. It doesn't help that the kitchen is full of candy and chips, from the aforementioned heap-o-treats brought home by T. I keep seeing that box, with the Starbursts and Cheez-its on top, and it's taking every ounce of my willpower to avoid having "just one" -- or "just one at a time," which is more realistic. I am persevering, though. I'm trying to remember how great it felt to lose those 20 pounds, one day at a time, and also how it got to where it felt totally normal to eat more healthily. I have got to get those other 24 pounds off. I hope that by Christmas I'll have a good start on them.
Meanwhile I feel like I'm hollow inside. must not munch. must not munch.
* * * * * * *
update:
well, sigh, I sort of caved. C wanted some White Cheddar Cheez-its, and I opened them for her. I looked at the back of the package and saw that the whole package only had 220 calories, so I ate a small handful -- probably not even a fourth of the package. Gotta just move on and put that one behind me... and forget how blissful and salty and crunchy those darn things tasted...
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
fell off the diet wagon
Over the course of the last few weeks I totally fell off the diet wagon. Or, should I say, I jumped off with both feet. It is a full-out miracle that I didn't gain back everything I've lost to date. As it is, I did gain back two pounds (or else I can be like Cathy and assume that those two pounds were just water ;-). Nothing to do with the fact that I inhaled chocolate chip cookies as if they were calorie-free -- nothing to do with eating at restaurants two days in a row (Chinese for lunch on Sunday and then [insert heavenly choir clouds-opening chords here] The Red Fox last night for dinner. That one was T's idea, and bless him, it was fantastic. I love that place, it's my favorite restaurant, and everyone should eat there. But I had been so good all day until then...), nothing to do with the fact that the most brisk walking I've done since the end of September was about a block and a half total on Friday when I parked my car in the center of a triangle whose points were the post office, the grocery store, and our credit union. I did get a lot of exercise on Saturday, helping to paint my parents' house, but then I ate enough of my dad's barbecue to compensate fully for that. So I am still hanging around juuuuust under 174, a net loss of juuuuust over 20 lb. And of course I resolve to Change That.
Another thing about today that really bites is that for some reason my ISP's Internet connection works just great, but their website and email is down. waah! Not only am I having email withdrawal, but I can envision the piles and piles of mail backing up at the server, because I get a LOT of mail, and I know I should just set it downloading and then go, say, on an expedition to Mt. Everest, while I wait for it to download, when it finally functions again.
My 4-year-old daughter is singing "Happy Birthday" (to whom I do not know) in Ewok-ese. "Yub yub yub yub yub yub!" and so on. She is also playing tic-tac-toe with her Ewok Pez dispenser as an opponent. I just thought I would share a little bit of normal with you all. :)
We have been having a great time in school. We learned as much as we wanted to about Arthurian legends, and then LT wanted to move on to studying maps. So this week he's learning basics -- he already knows map directions and how to interpret most things on maps; he's learning where the continents and oceans are now. Then next week we'll start going continent-by-continent, studying countries on each one. I'm really looking forward to it, and so is he -- especially to the part when we find recipes from the various countries we study and make them. I am wondering what people eat in Africa, though. I suppose I'll find out. ;-).
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
strange day
My body perplexes me. Even more perplexing is the link (or lack thereof) between my body and my brain. I ate too much yesterday, in spite of all my resolutions, and yet today I have magically shed the three pounds that I had put back on over the weekend. This behavior definitely indicates water shifting around, right? But WHY? I am so befuddled by the whole thing. Anyway, I'm back at 175, where I was at the end of last week. I'm wearing the Too Small Jeans and a little t-shirt and feeling just OK about the way I look -- whereas, over the weekend, when I was carrying around three extra pounds according to our scale, I felt like the hottest thing on two legs. Like I said, perplexing. I'm sorry I haven't lost more, but I really can't blame anything but my lack of discipline for that, and I'm just glad I haven't gained. MUST WALK. MUST RESIST. Yesterday I was pretty well-behaved food-wise, until we went to the valley in the evening to buy a birthday present for a friend, and we took the kids to Baskin-Robbins. A curse on that place, that's all I can say. Any establishment that makes mint-chocolate-chip milkshakes should just be shut down by the Weight Police. At least I only got a small.
My sinus whatever thing has subsided into a vicious runny nose. No pain! No headache! No nasty about-to-die feelings, just a box-of-kleenex-a-day runny nose punctuated by occasional violent, extremely repetitious sneezing fits. So that's a positive change. I am wondering if I have allergies. I have resisted having allergies my whole life -- I am not one of those people who seemingly thrives emotionally on the weakness implied by having an immune system which reacts to the wrong things. But through this whole episode I've not had a touch of fever... so I'm wondering. My mother has "hay fever" to a staggering degree. I hope I'm not headed for that. [achoo!]
Meanwhile, as an undercurrent to this whole morning, there's a huge sadness. A woman I've known my whole life -- in typical small-town fashion, she is: the daughter of my grandmother's boss, the wife of a man on my husband's destruction derby team, the sister-in-law of one of T's work buddies and one of my friends, a member of a past "pregnancy club" when it seemed like every female I knew was pregnant including myself, and someone whose sister and brother I went to school with -- was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year. It spread, and last week she started having headaches; a scan yesterday showed tumors in her brain; last night she stopped breathing and now she is on life support, not expected to survive. It is really hard to see this happening. Watching someone face eternity is a hugely serious experience even when I have faith and confidence about the person's eternal state -- which is not the case here. And also, just as hard to deal with is the thought of this woman's daughter, who is a few months older than my middle daughter would have been had she lived, growing up without a mother. And not just as a little girl and a teenager -- I have only fully come to understand the importance of my mother as I've become an adult and a mother myself. My heart aches for the woman this little girl will become, having her own children and not having her mom there to experience the strengthened bond between the two of them that that brings. OK, now I'm getting all maudlin and teary... gonna stop and go sneeze some more. Hug your mom today.
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
my driver's license speaks the truth
Well, when I weighed myself this morning the scale said 175 (actually the needle was hovering juuust to the left of the 175 mark, can't let those two ounces or so go unrecognized ;-). That's a net loss of 19 pounds in about 8 weeks. This is a banner day because now, for the first time since I was in high school, my driver's license is not lying about my weight. I last renewed it in December of 1998, and I weighed more than 175 at the time but I did NOT want to put down my true weight, no sirree. Hopefully before long my license will be lying again; this is well-timed since I have to renew it in three months.
The odd thing about having lost is that I don't feel like I lost, I feel like I just gained back all 19 pounds I've lost so far (cripes, what a nightmare!). I'm wearing jeans that were tight when I started this whole thing, and they're loose when I stand up, but sitting down, well, maybe they're not exactly tight, but they don't feel loose. I'm sure that Bloat Week is altering my perception a bit. I was never so aware of the in-between times of my menstrual cycle before. I've never been prone to the over-emotional aspects of PMS -- maybe one day right beforehand where I get crabby more easily than ordinarily, but none of the sobby b!+¢hy cross-made-of-fingers-backing-away stuff that men like to joke about (I was a really pleasant pregnant person too). And before I lost weight, I never noticed the physical aspects either, but I am noticing them now. Yuck.
LT is having what I jokingly refer to as a Ritalin day. He's a very active, wired little boy, and I'm sure if he were in a public school environment he'd be bringing home a lot of teacher notes about getting him checked for ATD. Fortunately, in our homeschool, we can lovingly harness his energy, refocus him, and of course send him outside to run back and forth around the yard for a while to get rid of some of the excess energy before going on with schoolwork (when he's older he'll split wood). We are about to reach that point. He's practically vibrating. We could power our small town with his little dynamo of a body, I think, if we could just figure out how. And he hasn't even had any caffeine today.
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Sunday, September 14, 2003
weight, discouragement, and anticipation
This weekend my eating sucked. This will teach me to say it's easy! I slacked, and while I didn't eat quite like I used to, I certainly didn't count the calories and I know I was a bad, bad girl. Tomorrow is a new day (what a totally novel concept; I should trademark that, don't you think?) and I will be back to it. I am not terribly discouraged. I just scared myself a little because I saw how easy it might be to go back to my old ways. Until Friday night I had thought it would be actually difficult. Now I've learned my lesson and I'll really be on my guard.
My digestive system is not happy with me, either. Ever since my big dinner on Friday night I have been uncomfortable. Last night instead of dinner I bought a bag of dried apricots, which, let's just say, have always given me a fresh start in the past, intestinally speaking. Didn't work this time. I refuse to resort to prunes, I just won't; I hate the things. I'll just drink a lot of water and watch my fiber intake.
The good news is that the scale still said the same thing this morning that it said on Friday morning. I'll stop kidding around, anyone who reads this who knows me personally will just have to be polite and not bring it up, and what's it matter to the people who don't know me? My starting weight was 194. Now I'm at 176 and my goal weight is 150. As previously stated I am 5' 8 1/2" tall; according to standard weight charts I should weigh between 126 and 154 pounds. There, now you know, and the great thing is, I can't see you pointing your fingers and laughing, or hear your gasps of disgust, or whatever. So go ahead. You won't bother me.
I really don't have anything interesting going on except for my weight saga. I've been doing some web design work, a bit of reading, teaching, keeping house... nothing very interesting. Oh, and I've fallen in love with another piece of property. I hate when I do this. We are looking at buying/building our first house next year, except that with the financial stuff we're doing right now we could shift things around and do it now if the right place were available at the right price. For at least the three or four months I've been looking, there's been a listing on our local board of realtors' website for some bare land at a good price, and yesterday I drove out and looked at it, and I'm totally infatuated. A dirt road, which I love and other people hate, which works out well in a lot of ways. Not too many neighbors. Good location regarding T's work commute. Snow in winter but not too much snow. A road that is perfect for a morning or evening walk. Woods. Power not too far away. Now we are waiting to hear back from a realtor -- going to try to wrangle the truth out of him about why it's been on the market for a while at this excellent price. Is it just the dirt road and the brushing that needs to be done, or is there some deep dark secret, like, for example, you have to dig down 400 feet to hit water and then it's sulfurous? In all likelihood nothing will come of it. Which is why I'm kicking myself for getting so wrapped up in the idea of living there.
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Friday, September 12, 2003
mostly about weight loss
I weighed this morning and I was another pound down; I have reached -18. I have given up trying to predict what my body will do (after losing 11 pounds in two weeks and then taking the next four weeks to lose the next 6 pounds) but it is nice that the trend is overall downward. The funny thing is, I think maybe I was "starving" my system before, because on the day after I splurged a bit on a dinner out and probably ate 2200 calories that day instead of 1300-1400 like I usually aim for, that's when I broke through the plateau. But maybe the two things were totally unrelated. At any rate, I now feel a lot less bad if I'm at 1400 cals instead of 1300. Weighing what I do, and making it a point to get out for a good brisk walk at least a few times a week, I can do 1400 and still lose pretty well.
One thing that is totally different about this attempt to lose weight, from any of my previous attempts, is that I genuinely do not find it hard to make myself stay within my boundaries. If I plan a dinner out (having another tonight, on a date with T), I eat a little less early in the day, and I don't guilt myself as long as I am sensible and reasonable. And overall I'm not going around day to day wishing I could just eat what I want, and succumbing to temptation and ruining my motivation. I have times that I feel munchy, but I'm rarely very hungry; I'm satisfied on *far* less at mealtime than I used to be, and I don't feel hungry between meals either. At the risk of jinxing myself, I'll go ahead and say it -- the eating-less part is actually *easy*, which it's never been before when I've tried to lose; before I've always given up pretty early on. I don't know what the difference is but I like it.
Now I need to remind myself that exercise is important too. Last night's walk was the first one in a while. I really enjoy them while I'm doing them, and even the killer uphill at the end isn't ever as bad as I make it in my imagination. It just seems like the only time I have free to walk alone is generally when I am tired, or at any rate it seems more appealing to vege in front of the computer. sigh.
Yesterday I had a fat day. I told my husband this and he said that Kate Moss probably has fat days. I doubt that, but I understand his point. Then today is another "I'm slim, I'm svelte, sheesh, LOOK at yourself, woman, aren't you great?" kind of day. So far anyway. Which is funny because I'm not slim or svelte. I'm still "at an unhealthy weight, outside my healthy weight range" according my favorite online Healthy Body Calculator. but the contrast between how I was, and how I am now, is beginning to be visible. I'm toying with the idea of posting pictures in here of my progress. I'm a bit leery of it, not that it's likely that there would be any creepy negative repercussions, but in the unlikely event that there were any, they'd be pretty darn negative and creepy. I'm thinking about it.
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
Ducky and Tinkertoys and an ouchy
This afternoon was a big financial day for us. We "borrowed" from T's retirement to pay off a lot of various debts we'd had sitting around. We are paying much less interest, and the interest we're paying is to ourselves, and unless my T's boss doesn't know what he's talking about, this makes our credit report look better because the retirement account loan doesn't show up on it. Who knows. It can't make it look any worse, at any rate. Now we will accomplish a few things we've been needing to do (like get new glasses for me, and fix T's truck), and by Christmas we'll be socking away a substantial amount into a savings account to pay loan origination fees etc. when we buy a house next spring or summer. We've had debt to one degree or another for the entire nine and a half years we've been married. We've been working hard to pay it down for the past five years, and it feels good to finish it off.
I still managed to have a pretty stressful afternoon sorting out all the paperwork and details involved. I wanted nothing more than just to lay in bed and vege all evening but families, you know, darnit, they need to be FED, can you believe that? They all stand around like baby birds with their beaks wide open, cheeping, looking so pitiful and helpless. So I made dinner, and then I went for a long hard fast walk. I actually had an aerobic heart rate for at least 25 continuous minutes of this 45-minute walk, and I wasn't shuffling along for the other 20 either, it just wasn't uphill all the way like the second part. I am all gleeful thinking about my body going, "calories! calories! where ARE you, calories?" and finally resorting to burning up some nasty old fat cells that have been sitting around in my thighs since before my first pregnancy. ha! gotcha! However, I'm not as thrilled about how sore my legs will be tomorrow. Oh well, it's a good trade-off. :)
Speaking of baby birds (well, I was, up there ^ ), I must show you what my daughter made out of Tinkertoys today. I must preface this by explaining that since around the beginning of our engagement ten years ago, T has called me "Ducky" and variations thereon. This explains, by the way, the fuzzy duckling in the layout, in addition to the fact that it's just plain adorable). Don't ask me why the heck he thought of that one (I have always said that it was because I had a short little haircut at the time and my unruly hair wanted to flip up in the back like a little duck tail, but he says it wasn't that). We were just out for a walk, holding hands and being all cute and lovey-dovey, and he blurted it out: "Duck-y!" in this cute little voice. Nobody who knows my husband only, say, at work, or at the VFW, would believe that he can be this silly. But he is. This led to my being called Ducky, and Coin (pronounced "Kwaa" with that nasaly French n at the end; it's what the French claim ducks say), and Quacky, and every other duck-related name you can think of, and some you can't. It never wore off and consequently my children have been exposed to this for years and probably think that everyone's mom is named after poultry. Anyway. Today my daughter made me a ducky out of Tinkertoys. Generally her Tinkertoy creations to date have been the kind of thing where you believe it's what it is supposed to be, only because she says it's what it's supposed to be. This is her first really recognizable item. Here it is:
 Is that not the cutest? Can't you hear it quacking? |
I think we'll see if we can make it last all year and enter it in the fair next year. LT has also made some really neat creations, like his interlocking angled gear drive:
 I've no idea what is up with the green lines on the picture. My snappy unit is very old but why it should choose to freak out in the space of about five minutes between the last picture and this one is anyone's guess. At any rate, if you turn the crank on the horizontal wheel, its spines interlock with the vertical one and cause it to spin. He hasn't figured out a use for it yet -- just give him time. :) |
OK, I was just going to talk about how happy I am that the weather is beginning to cool down enough that the cooler is too cold at night, but as I stood up to turn it off, I stepped on a toy train that was lurking in the shadows and tore the bottom of my foot. Um, OUCH. There are a few things that make me wish I could just let loose with a string of profanity, and injuring the bottom of my foot is one of them. OUCH. Good thing I had just taken a shower, and it was after my walk. I asked LT to bring me the bandaids (after I told him as calmly as I could, which wasn't very calmly, what I thought of his train), and C hovered over me -- "Is it a bleed? Oh, let me see. Oh dear. Oh honey. Just hold still, honey." -- as I was doctoring myself. That is why I don't let loose with the string of profanity -- because the very next time my little 3-year-old mimic damaged herself, she'd do the very same thing. She has an amazing memory capacity for speech, and gets the inflections the same and everything. It's cute (and a little amazing) when it's whole scenes from Bambi or Monsters Inc. Wouldn't be so cute if it was the aforementioned string of profanity. :-/
While I wait for T to get finished working on his buddy's truck and get his shower, I'm going to work on ivillage's book list, another idea I'm stealing from Jenn and Emily. And I'm going to moan quietly about the pain in my foot, too. OUCH.
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