Procrastination

I just read this somewhere else.  I think it had to do with budgeting or something, but as the author stated, it’s certainly a multipurpose issue.

When you commit to something — exercising more, eating better, saving money — it is challenging to stick with it.  Whole forests have been felled in the name of books meant to help us stick to self-improvement promises.

Every time I want to procrastinate about something, I shall now say to myself, “You’re killing a tree.”

I’m not necessarily the biggest tree-hugger that ever lived, but guilt?  Guilt, I can do.

Taking note

Okay, so I’ve not been the most dedicated of people to my fitness regimen in the last … well okay – ever.

I have been keeping with some regular attempts in the last couple of weeks though, so go me.  I haven’t gone nuts, hasn’t been daily or even every other day.  I have, though, tried for a solid 80% of the time to pay better attention to the food and drink that I’ve been putting in my body, drinking more water, not eating as late (well, maybe I should say “as close to when I go to sleep”) – along those lines.

It also has to be noted though that I’ve also taken to sucking down nigh a bottle of wine per week for each of those weeks.  Granted, it’s some great wine, but still – a bit out of my norm for alcohol consumption since, uh, freshman year of college?

So imagine my giggle today to see that I’d dropped 8 pounds in the last 2 weeks between doctor’s visits?

Apparently I need more wine, more chair dancing, less stress, good food, and more FUN in my life.  Who knew?  🙂  It’s a small victory, but today, it felt bloody fantastic.  Not only was a due a little victory, but it was an affirmation of just trying to be better to myself, to actually care for myself, and seeing that pay off.

Go me.  🙂

 

Wake up!

As I sat here finding myself sliding down in my chair (again), my eyelids gaining weight faster than the rest of me (oh, har!), I thought for some reason about one of my favorite movies, “Over the Hedge.”  I’m on a ‘fun’ kick recently, so I’m not all that surprised that this one popped up from the memory banks.

A few clicks later and then repeated clicks to keep going, I was chair dancing – of a variety that absolutely qualifies for aerobic activity; I will be sore later, lol.  Those in cubicle-ville probably can’t do what I just did, but if not, maybe it would be a fun one for some of you (*cough* ladies) to add to your playlists or just to dance around the house to when you feel the need.

In my case, let’s hear it for working at home, and finally, my vastly uneven basement floor finds some usefulness!

Happy Tuesday to You!

(Not for nothing here, but do y’all realize that I just added “Fun” as a category here?  Hmm.  Maybe we need a collective mental adjustment…?)

You Gotta Have Goals

So, what are your workout goals?

1. Not being embarrassed to work out in my actual workout clothes.
2. Not being out of breath by the time I get in place/set up/ready to work out.
3. To actually work out?
4. Not requiring 12 days of rest in between workouts.
5. Not requiring a doctor’s visit, ice, heat, bandage, splint, ultrasound, or physical therapy after a workout.
6. To whine a collective total of not more than 1 hour per workout.
7. To actually work out more than once?
8. To stop swearing at the television screen.
9. To really consider the value of a swear jar before I truly commit to #8.
10. To make this list sound at least slightly more funny than true.

I know:  It’s scary how high I’m aiming here.  I know they all warn against being unrealistic, but I wasn’t sure how to go lower and still have them count as goals!

 

No Equipment Needed

Speaking of discipline…

I am a total exercise (and apparently blogging) slacker, as my lack of posting here will attest.  I tripped over this one today though, and I like it.  Part of why I like it is that there is no equipment required and it could basically be done with the television on in the background, some music, whatever.  My kid can interrupt me (or do it with me), my dog will be thrilled that I’m down on the floor, which will hopefully be more of a pro than a con.

The biggest reason I like these though is that a lot of lower body work tends to put tremendous pressure on the knees, and my knees are shot:  genetics, cheerleading, years of jobs where I stood for 14 hours a day, and, frankly, obesity have all taken a major toll.  Those noises that you hear people’s joints making sometimes?  The crunchy noises?  Those are called crepitations or “joint mice.”  My knees don’t have mice; there’s a 3-ring circus of Rodents Of Unusual Size in there.  So, it’s a very important thing to me to avoid all those damn lunges that are apparently required in virtually every lower body/butt workout ever made.  But not this one!

Find a good wall and check this one out:  No Equipment Needed

Awareness

Laura’s recent post (and our seconding of her post) reminded me of just what a difference a little awareness can make.  We talked about eating our food in a bowl or on a plate rather than out of the bag or box, and Shari mentioned the handful-size bowl.  These ideas are key not just because they keep the rest of the bag or box away from us but also because they make us more aware by actually:

(1) making a choice about what our serving size will be,
(2) actually seeing the sum total of what we will be eating at once.

As Laura said, sometimes it’s the most obvious things that we really need to have us slap in the face so that we will see them.

Daily Goals

Oh yes, I did start it!  Sha-zam!

Dys:

Water: Yes.  Which is an improvement.
Calories/Nutrition: Brunch – choc soy milk (sorry, I like it) and Jimmy Dean D-Lights turkey sausage breakfast sandwich, which is good, btw.  Yes, I have no compunction about my processed food.  My afternoon snacks are planned as carrots unless I get crazy and wash a red pepper, which I might do.  I’m a junkie for peppers.  I’ll also have a spoonful of reduced fat Jif creamy peanut butter around 4 p.m. because I will be *dying* for protein by that point.  Dinner – We’re probably/possibly going out somewhere on our last kid-free night.
Worst Thing Today: It’s our last kid-free night, and the week has been FILLED with work for me, more so than usual; that bites.
Best Thing Today: It’s our last kid-free night.  🙂  I miss the little bugger — ya know, sorta.  So far, I haven’t wanted to bitchslap anyone who works for me.  This is a major improvement in the week.  Hopefully we’ll have a nice night too 🙂
Notes: I am now 2.5 days without a single swig of Pepsi.  Actually did great the first 36 hours or so, didn’t even want it.  At this moment, I’m biting my lip just thinking about it.  Deep breath, reminder of how much better I feel without all that sugar in my body.

Emotional eating

In a recent post, Shari asked us how we stave off emotional eating.  As a 17th-degree rainbow-belt Master of Emotional Eating (which means I’ve done it a lot and have also kicked its ass a lot), I had a big ol’ long answer that I thought was better as a post, so I re-routed it here.

While the answer discusses children, having kids of your own is not required to put it into practice:  any child that you know and love works well, spouse is okay but they are usually independent enough that it doesn’t carry the same weight in your mind.  A younger sibling might work or even imagining that you have a chance to teach your younger self.

I have a hard answer that sounds all righteous or something, and SO isn’t, but honest to God, it’s the thing that works best for me (when something works):

The Naked Truth

No, Calvin, there will not be pictures, and frankly, you’re going to thank me for that.

Unlike the my best buds Laura and Kim, I’m not overweight.  What?  What was that?  If I’m not overweight, why am I here?  I’m here because overweight was a very long time ago; actually, overweight was the rest of my life prior to the last, say, 14 years.  I’m not overweight; I’m obese.  By the charts and the figures and those little statistical maps of how much I “should” weigh (we’ll come back to that), I’m actually morbidly obese.

You want a moment you can’t get back, people?  Try the one where someone writes down that you are morbidly obese.  On paper.  In print.  To be there for eternity.  Yeah, I cried.

I always joke that I cried like hell the first time I hit 190 pounds — and I’d cry like hell if I were ever to see it again, but for an entirely different reason.

Maybe a little background while you get over the shellshock.  First of all, I’m a tall girl.  Long ago (and far, far away), I was 5’9-1/2″.  Whether by age, menopause, or the weight of my ass pulling me down, I’m now down to 5’9″.  I remember hating being tall as a kid; I mean, those years when the girls grow faster than the boys?  The guys had to flip a coin about whether they wanted to dance with me at school dances because while their faces would be in the perfect range of my breasts, their pride would take a beating at being a solid foot shorter than I was.  (Just for the record, pride usually won out.)

I was just over 9 pounds when I was born.  I had a milk allergy that would mean that I had to be fed with a glucose formula as a baby and then would spend my formative years keeping Hi-C in business.  I wonder how much those things contributed to the insulin-resistance that would find me later in life, which is one of the things that I will be documenting in the future on this blog.  I was always bigger than the other kids, though I was an active kid and didn’t overeat before I was a teenager (ahhh, hormones).  If you could see pictures of my great-grandmothers, you’d understand a bit more about my body size and type.  Basically, I was built to (a) give birth and (b) keep a wagon train moving across the Ohio Valley.  Unfortunately (a) gave way to my mother’s genes and left me surgically menopausal early on, with 1 child, and there just isn’t a lot of call for (b) anymore.  So I was always ‘a big girl’ in a little girl’s world.  Except for the summer I turned 17.

That summer I decided that was it.  Like Laura and Kim, I had my heartbroken, though earlier that year.  It just wasn’t until June that he was no longer in my face every single day and that I could ignore everything else, as only those who are children can, and throw myself head-long into an exercise obsession.  I say that like it was unhealthy, and looking back, okay, in some ways it was.  But, it was also the best I’d ever felt in my entire life.  Those endorphins were the best drugs ever made.  I lost more than 30 pounds in about 90 days.  I’d learn later from my husband and then my mother that I’d lost TOO much and was entirely too thin.  I can see it now looking at those pictures.  I looked like bloody hell – gaunt, spindly, eww.  Frankly, I have a big head, big shoulders, big hands — I looked dumb.  As I say about the super skinny girls now, I needed a sandwich, stat.  By the by, I weighed 158 pounds.  I felt fantastic, and I did NOT take it for granted.  By God, it was the first time in my life that I’d been anything approaching skinny!  I was living it up!  All new clothes-barely there clothes, going new places, meeting new people, doing new things.  A whole new world was open to me.  But I had my head on straight and knew that new attention from old people had nothing to do with who I was, but with what I looked like.  And that made their attention worthless to me, which caused mixed feelings — it was what I’d always wanted in so many ways, but now that I had it, I didn’t want it because it didn’t mean anything.  A catch-22.  The ultimate show of that would come when a family friend would notice me as a ‘woman’ for the first time because I was skinny, and then he would get drunk and rape me.  I slowly gained the weight back over the next year and then added to it as I finished my freshman year of college.

From there, my weight would bounce around for a while, usually based on my work life and my activity level, which would always dip drastically in the winter — from the Midwest and not a winter sports kind of girl.  My next major breakup would again bring major weight loss (and a whoooole lot of smoking – so much harder to stick food in your mouth when you’re puffing your lungs into their grave), and that’s when I would meet my husband, who thought I was gorgeous at 218 pounds.

Not sure what it is about love settling in that causes such weight gain.  It isn’t that immediate head-over-heels love; no, during that, I think you’re so high that even if you do eat like you’re solely responsible for the nutrition intake for all of China, the endorphins vaporize those calories or something.  It’s the settling in, the getting comfortable, that helps pack it back on.  We were also very introverted and didn’t get nearly enough exercise; we tried at times but never regularly enough.  By the time we got married, we were both much heavier than when we met.

Unlike most women, I actually lost weight during my pregnancy, but since I had it to lose, the doctor said that as long as the baby was growing, no harm/no foul.  Once the urge to throw myself over a cliff from the nausea finally abated, I felt FANTASTIC between the hormones and the lost weight.  I’d gain again in the last trimester as the baby grew and I lost all ability to stand up out of a chair, but I still gave birth weighing less than I did when I got pregnant.  And then?  Then I fell into such a deep depression that if eating myself to death was an option, that was okay with me.

It was several years later that I’d finally seek help for my depression and start on an antidepressant that made me stop wanting to hurl myself into traffic, as well as finding a great counselor to get some much needed therapy.  We talked about the rape and whether it has kept me from wanting to be thin again.  Honestly, I don’t have an answer to that question.  I don’t recall having a problem with being the size that I was when I met my husband, which was thin-ish for me; actually, in typing that it makes me wonder, as I do seem to recall being a bit nervous at times, but that could also be that I’d thrown out my live-in bf and was now a single girl with no family around, no friends who lived close by, and living in not the nicest part of town.  I guess maybe there’s something to the “thin” thing, though I never, ever want to be as thin as I was.  Do I have a complex about being thin and being noticed by people who would never notice me now?  I’m not sure.  Do I feel “safer” looking like I do?  Brutal honesty?  Yes, in some ways I do; rapists aren’t normally known for picking the fat chick.  At the same time though, I’ve always been the prepared type, so it is not lost on me that I couldn’t run away from anyone who wanted to hurt me.  I digress.

The most recent bit of the story comes from surgery to remove my gallbladder, which left my body a mess with irritable bowel syndrome, lactose-intolerance, and having to learn a whole new way of eating to deal with those things.  A couple years later, I would have a 4-month long pneumonia that would be immediately followed by emergency surgery that would leave me menopausal in my 30s and with a 2-month inactive recovery (coupled with the previous pneumonia) that would leave my lungs still challenged and my body a disaster.  Ladies, if I can teach you ANYTHING in reading this blog, please let it be this:  It is imperative that you have good control of the rest of your body before you reach menopause, because at that moment, everything goes to hell in a handbasket and you are NOT at the wheel. Just a little something to look forward to, sorry, but I’d rather you heard it hear first.  I’ve gained weight in places that I never gained weight before.  Things have pulled and moved and changed… it isn’t pretty.  Do something.  Do it now.

So, why am I here?  What are my goals?

I want to feel better.  I want to be healthier.  This insulin-resistance thing has to be taken seriously because the next step is diabetes, and there is no going back from that one.  I want to be able to run and play with my kid and my dog.  I want to enjoy my life, my sex life, my life after my kid grows up and moves out and gets his own life (you have your dreams, I have mine).  I want to have energy.  I want to have a new wardrobe in my old clothes.  I’d love to be 190 pounds again, though at this point, I also worry that surgery would be involved to fix things that don’t shift back into place, and I’m not sure it’s worth that for an extra 20-30 pounds.  Cart before the horse though; I’ll cross that bridge when I get within 20 miles of it.

I have no interest in marathons or running.  You won’t see me doing Jillian’s 30-day Shred; she shreds me merely by looking at me like that from the box, though I will cheer on my comrades and totally enjoy their whining success!  I’ll be starting by trying to exercise every day, in some form, even if it’s only for 10 minutes at a time.  (An extra challenge today after having a fever of 102 last night.)  I’ve been doing some adjusting of my diet but need to do some more.  My nutritionist says I need to keep a food journal, and since that worked for me in the past, I’m going to do it again (nothing keeps you from having those chips or cookies like knowing you have to write them down and break your limit for the day).  I’m also going to try to increase my water every day, which again works well with keeping a journal so I can keep track.

I don’t own a scale that works, and I probably won’t be buying one; therefore, I won’t be posting my weight either.  I will probably do my measurements because I want to see how muscle changes things.  I may take pictures.  I may not.  Either way, y’all won’t be seeing them, mostly because I relish my anonymity too much.  If I reach my goal weight, maaaaybe…  but just because it might be too cool a thing not to share at that point.