What is better than take out?

A giveaway!
HP Touchsmart Giveaway

Sorry if I trampled you during the stampede to sign up. Want one!

Mad props to McMamas MckGiveaway (through blog her) for sharing the opportunity.

Putting the "Loss" in Weight-loss

There was a death in the immediate family this week.
You know what that means? I mean, apart from the obvious um, someone is dead.

Debu Chan said, "Scalloped potatoes." Yes, scalloped potatoes, the token food of the funeral extravaganza. Funerary arrangements are a perilous pit for any unsuspecting bystander. As far as a dieter at a post-funeral luncheon? It's like watching lemmings flock to the edge of the cliff.
There are so many factors contributing to foods sent to the homes of grieving loved ones. Is it easy to make? Is it fairly portable? Will it feed a bunch of people? Will it keep for a few hours?

There is an extravaganza. Soups, stews, meatballs, salads, breads, pastas, and I swear those are just the appetizers. And then desserts? Cookies, breads, cakes, pies, you name it. It basically amounts to carb soup, fat casserole, pudge pie, etc., etc.

You never know what to expect. Anyone from anywhere could send anything. You might have no idea what is coming, but I would bet my next paycheck it will not be no-carb, non-fattening, non-dairy, non-diet-sabotaging food. It will be comfort food. And it won't be single serving. It will come in a vat with a bucket to use as a spoon.

Debu Chan said that it would be faster to just apply the scalloped potatoes directly to the thigh area. You've recognized that cellulite looks disturbingly similar to scalloped potatoes, right? Think about it. Frightening.

Part of the family stress I alluded to in an earlier post was the anticipation of this impending event. It wasn't unexpected and it wasn't necessarily tragic, but it takes an emotional toll nonetheless. Time and food and hunger take on different dimensions in the context of emotions. When grieving and coming into contact with people and relationships you may not have considered for a long time, emotions and memories and questions and regret come in relentless tidal waves. Time seems to slow down, you get disoriented. Are you hungry? Did you just eat? Your mother/father/uncle's-cousin is eating, that looks good; better get some dessert before its gone. Maybe you ate 8 hours ago and are starving. Maybe you just ate to the point of barfing 15 minutes ago, but here comes Aunt Helen with a pot of big beef stew and it is just too good to miss.

My point is, in the midst of a huge emotional event that you are likely sharing with others, natural rhythms like sleep, waking, work, eating are completely disrupted. You are faced with people and places you likely don't encounter every day and it only makes sense you will encounter food and dining situations you likely don't encounter every day.

I won't pretend I didn't overeat. The difference is, I overate at meals. I didn't overeat at meals, overeat at snack-time, get bored and overeat just because I was awake, overeat because I was going to bed, etc. Despite ready access to regular soda I opted for diet most of the time. (I won't pretend that compensates for the gross amount over-points I'm sure each spoonful was.)
I tried to eat a dinner plate, limit myself to a bowl with one 2nd helping of something irresistible, maybe dessert, and then clear my plate and silverware so I wouldn't be tempted to continue foraging to pass the time.

Case in point, last night at the place we were staying, we debated... beer? Pizza? Beer & pizza? Where would we get beer and pizza? It's late, will anyone bring it? Do we feel like going out? It's late, it's dark, etc., etc., etc.
We ended up not going anywhere and not ordering anything, and neither one of us perished from famine.
Even this morning, at breakfast we were debating on each having a breakfast sandwich in addition to what we had already eaten. Instead I made a breakfast sandwich and we split it.

I feel like gradually the eating decisions we made months ago have become permanent and even subconscious. As refreshing as it is to come to that realization, it occurs to me how very important those new habits will be in the coming days and weeks. The typical gluttony of the holiday season could easily be compounded by grief resulting in something horrible - something no one ever wants to see.

That's right. Scalloped potato thighs.



RIP X x x x. You are loved.

Do you know how much I weigh?

I don't. After jumping on our scale like it was a pogo stick for the last 3 months, it finally killed itself. The last time I got a legitimate reading from it, I weighed 177. A few days later it declared I weighed 162. Unsatisfied with that result, I boarded the scale again - it read 195. Evidently I insulted it.

My husband, aka the destroyer, is down to 294.4.

We are continuing to lose steadily. I am sort of dreading the holiday season, not so much for the days themselves but for the inevitable abundance of leftover comfort food.

I have started some form of physical activity - zumba. I'm not sure how long I will stick with it, but for now the entertainment value is worth it. There is nothing like seeing 60 year old ladies with buttcheeks hanging out gyrating and doing pelvic thrusts to hip hop music. I participated in classes last week by 2 different teachers and observed a vast difference in the impact level. I am going to try to stick with the higher impact because I don't see any sense in paying for something (and did I mention embarrassing myself?) if it has only limited value in terms of exercise benefits.

There is some family stress going on right now that has resulted in random fits of eating, not necessarily overeating but just snacking. I won't define last night's trip to the Pink Crawfish as 'eating healthy' but for the most part the trend of avoiding bread, eating normal and somewhat healthy food, and abandoning leaded soda has continued.

All of that being said, I still think it would be helpful to have a scale (a functional scale) to gauge the progress being made - or lack thereof. For now, I will just base my findings on the size of my waistline, which continues to diminish as evidenced by the jeans I fit into after almost a year of not being able to get them up over my thighs. I will continue to wage my war against my husband, the destroyer, in an attempt to continue as the reigning champion in highest percentage of body weight lost.

Happy Turkey day fellow fatties. If you need me, I will be the one face-first in the bowl of stuffing.

The Destroyer

As of my last post on October 31, I had lost 13.6 pounds. Now, 2 weeks later, the results?

Well I have lost .2 pounds. Yeah. That's it. That means .1 pound per week. Impressive, I know. I'll give you a minute to recover.

(And for those of you with the karmic calculator, this is indeed my punishment for having bragged last time about how I was so awesome. I am still awesome, for the record, I'm just not much skinnier.)

My husband, "The Destroyer," has lost another 2.7 pounds. At least, as of the last time he weighed himself. He continues not to exercise regularly. Not that I do . . .

What happened? I don't know. I am guessing I'm within my normal point range. I have gone out to eat with my dad a few times and over indulged in seafoody goodness. And of course normal Mountain Dew when we're at a restraunt. Part of the problem is my work schedule. I work 10-2, which means I eat breakfast and then I get home well after lunch time. By then I feel like I am within breaths of starving to death. I eat around 3 or 3:30, and then dinner time comes at 5 or 6. Within a two hour period I end up eating two large meals. After a giant meal, two or three hours later I start thinking I need to eat to prevent malnourishment. The cycle is vicious.

I have been good with not snacking and also with refraining from drinking non-diet soda, at least not at home. I am only successful in drinking water at work half of the time. One of my major long-term goals is to increase and maintain the amount of water I drink each day.

Earlier this week I met a woman who shared that she had recently lost 100 pounds. I would have never guessed. She was a normal sized person. Not a size 0, not a size 28, just an average sized person. After losing 100 pounds! Just by walking! She said she didn't do it much, just on breaks and lunch at work, etc. I am really thinking about it, there are nice sidewalks and parking lots where I could walk even in inclement weather. I keep kidding myself that I'll get on the treadmill at home, but I never seem to make it past the well-intention part.

I would be happy to see 175 at this point, and even happier to get down to 170 and hold. It sucks to be stalled at this point when I'm so close to having lost a total of 15 pounds.

Until then, looks like I'm losing to THE DESTROYER.

Trick or Treat, Eat Eat Eat, Ate So Much Can't See My Feet

Well, my husband and I are stepping up the competition. We decided to race to see who would achieve their "goal weight" first.
Neither one of us is eating particularly well, and neither one of us is exercising. I will give him credit - he did start lifting weights again and riding the recumbent bike, but of late he has lapsed from his exercise regimen.

He claims to have been on an eating spree and figured he had regained all of the weight he had lost. However, he weighed himself and he was surprised he was still under 300 pounds. He is now down to 296.7. Altogether he has lost 13.3 pounds. He says he's going to "destroy me." He has lost 4% of his body weight.

The scale now reports that I am down to 178.8 pounds.
Which means that I am at 13.6 pounds total weight loss.
Not only have I lost more poundage than my husband, but I've also lost more of a percentage of my body weight.
I have lost a fantastic 7% of my body weight.

Destroy? Bring it on.

PS - While on a trip to the store to get me some diet soda, he reported that the store was "all out of diet." He then allegedly checked the gas stations, all also allegedly "out of diet."
One week into the fat race and he is already trying to sabotage me.

170 Pounds, Here I come!

I stepped on my scale this morning and what to my eyes did appear but 181.4 lbs.
I stepped off the scale.
Back on.
Off.
Back on again.
I was down to 181 pounds! Fantastic!

I went to work for 4 hours and came home. Just for giggles I decided to hop on the scale this afternoon. It was a repeat performance of this morning. Off. On. Off. On.
This time it didn't say 181 pounds. It said 179.6 pounds! 179.6!!?!!! YEEHAW!

I just got some size 14 jeans and they fit.
179.6 pounds was correct! 170 pounds, here I come!!!!!!!!!

Sweet 16

On Monday the 12th I shared my discovery of an ultra heinous conspiracy by my scale to thwart my weight loss by discouraging me with unshakable fragments of pounds. Specifically, the attempt by my scale to prevent me from achieving 10lbs total weight loss.

Well. I have blown past the 10lb total down to 181.4lbs. That's right, I have lost 11lbs total since starting on August 30th (weighing in at 192.4lbs) . That picture is of the sweetest 16 you'll ever see - because they are too big for me now.

I've done basically nothing - not really exercising, not making drastic changes in the types of food I'm eating. I'm just not drinking regular Mt. Dew (ok, that's drastic) and I'm trying to limit the amount of food I eat and the number of times a day that I eat.

For you number nuts, here is the breakdown. The largest amount of weight I lost in a weeks time was four pounds, and that was in my first week. The least amount of weight I lost was during my 2nd week, where I actually gained .4lbs. The following week I lost another 3lbs. (I was serious when I was talking about mystery pounds). The average over 8 weeks works out to be 1.475 pounds per week. When I look back at the past few weeks I usually lose about 1.2lb per week. There is insane fluctuation, though. The first time I stepped on the scale and it said 181 (after reading 182 relentlessly for at least an eon) I could have died from shock. Then, the next day, it said 184 again and I figured the 181.blah was just a fluke. So I didn't weigh myself for a few more days.

I have gotten an job (part time) that requires a lot of standing and walking, so overall I'm sure my activity has increased although I wouldn't call it aerobic or strenuous. It also limits the time I am home and able to graze, but I am however tempted by the soda machine next door (completely stocked with regular, delicious, regularly delicious soda).

I wanted to say that I have lost weight regardless of my diet or monitoring of food/point calculating, but when I look back I'm not so sure. The first week I lost 4 pounds and the third week I lost 3 pounds. These last 2 weeks my weekly weight loss averages like 1.2 pounds. However - is that a reflection of my lack of religiously recording what I ate, or is it simply the natural plateau that begins to occur throughout the course of weight loss. Regardless, my continued success despite exerting no effort is likely to undermine the necessity to record everything.

BUT. I want it. I. Want. It. I am so close to being under 180lbs since approximately December of last year. Am I going to continue my lackadaisical dieting of late? Or will I crack down and start recording my food again in an effort (nay, a scientific study) to a) lose weight and b) determine whether or not recording intake actually improves my ability to lose weight.

I want to drop out of size 14 and into a 12. And then back into a 10. A 10? Outrageous. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, here, self. I would settle for a 12. As a matter of fact I'm afraid I'll be content with a 12 and stop. I don't want to let that happen - I am still not even remotely satisfied with my reflection. But - I am excited by my success thus far and am eager to continue.

Most importantly, if I continue with this and am successful in losing weight, my husband will finally be able to get this tattoo he wants:

Conspiracy Theory

I stepped on the scale today. I am right about my conspiracy theory

I am .2 pounds away from the 10-pounds-lost-mark.

.2!

C'mon scale. What did I ever do to you? I only bother you once a day.
Yeah you have to look at me naked, but my thighs are so fat you can't see anything above the knee. What do I have to do to bribe you? Take a day off? Keep on my undergarments?
There has to be something. Something?!

My excess hair has to weigh .2lbs. Maybe it's time for a haircut.

.2! Come ON!

.8 away

Few quick updates. I know I haven't posted in a while.

The bad news: this cold is clinging to me. That's ok because it can suck as much weight out of me as it wants!
The good news: I am .8 pounds away from having lost 10 whole pounds. That's right, I am down to 183.2 pounds - meaning I have lost 9.2 pounds.
I was considering posting last night because I was having a pity party about not being able to break the 184 pound mark. This morning, ta-da.

I am comfortably (ok, pseudo-comfortably) wearing size 14 pants. Which means I can wear them without unbuttoning them or causing my spine to collapse. Admittedly I haven't been monitoring my food intake by recording every morsel, but I have been continuing to eat in moderation and make healthier choices.

I am on twitter now: http://twitter.com/rubynesque This has nothing to do with me needing or wanting to be on twitter. It has everything to do with me wanting to help Drew Carey donate $1,000,000 to a fella with cancer. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6258857/Drew-Carey-bids-100000-for-drew-Twitter-account-in-cancer-auction.html

I hope you consider contributing to the cause, considering it's free.

Wish me luck with the last .8 pounds. My goal is to have it gone by the end of the week!!

Error ! Error !

Well, just to set the stage and maybe put some of my doctor-office-scale-anxiety in context, it's time for the retelling of the Error message story.

All of the events are true. Names have not been changed. No one is innocent. Viewer discretion is advised.

I've alluded to my weight change over the past year and over the past few years. Here is some graphic evidence:


Yes the pictures are grainy. The point is they are from my honest-to-god medical record. Just in case you can't read the numbers or you don't recall them from my previous posts, they go up, and up, and up, and then up some more.

In case you aren't capable of thinking in terms of graphs, here it is on a graph:

It's like my weight is on an airplane. And it's flying off the charts. So from August 2008, it was 153, to August 2009 it was 192.

As you can see, I do have a fancy-schmancy medical record. There are no paper charts, no flipping around and paper shuffling at my NASA doctor's office with its NASA scale. No no, everything is done on a computer. So from the second I check in until the second I check out, my medical information is all stuffed into a computer where it belches out charts and graphs and ratios.

In January, I was sick. I suffered for a few days, then decided I had tolerated enough nonsense and it was time for medical science to intervene. The last time I had been at the doctor's office before January was in October, 2008. In October, I weighed 163lbs.

When I enter the doctor's office, before I come near an examining room or a tongue depressor or a doctor or even a thermometer, I have to go directly to the scale. The scale is of course in the common area, where all the nurses and doctors or any other passerby can see me sweating and pooping my pants as I prepare to board the scale. I then have to stand there and await my sentence, watching the numbers roll higher and higher on the digital readout. The nurse, silent during this process, watches closely and scribbles down the result on a piece of scrap paper. I typically kill this time by taking off my shoes, dropping my purse and asking if the nurses accept bribes to skip this part or falsify the evidence. Some laugh.

Typically, this is the point at which the horror is over. It is brief and stabbing, not unlike an injection, and then it's over.

We then proceed to the thermometer (there seems to be only one per floor, must be HMO cost cuts), more scratch paper scribbling - this too is in the common area. It's like being a cow at a cattle auction, being paraded around and prodded before a bunch of spectators.
Finally we stop in the exam room. Before asking me why I'm there or making any small talk, the nurse typically takes my pulse and blood pressure (manually, impressive!).

Once all this is done, the nurse pokes a few buttons on the computer and my chart appears. She translates her scrap paper information into chart-ese, the computer beams it to a satellite, the satellite beams it to the international space station, the astronauts are amazed at my BMI, and then the information is beamed back to the computer.

Today was no different. The nurse was an older, heavily-set, no-nonsense woman who had seen a lot of whiny patients that day, for sure. Some are the small-talk type. This woman was not. We sat in silence as she poked at the keyboard transcribing her scribbles into something that a doctor could later read and decipher. She verified my name and birthdate, etc., etc., and continued clicking around and entering numbers.

I stare at the computer, willing my nose to stop leaking, as I see her sending my information to the space station.

Then the computer made a noise and an error message appeared.

In the years I have been going to the doctor, this had never happened. I was interested and leaned in closer to see.

The no-nonsense nurse either didn't care enough to say or took such pity on me that she didn't mention it, but the error message wasn't something wrong with the computer, or the program. Oh no.

The error message was about me. More specifically, my weight.

The astronauts had noticied a problem. The weight couldn't possibly be correct.

The error message read something like: "The amount you have entered is X % over the last amount entered. Please verify this is correct before continuing."

"The amount you have entered is X % over the last amount entered. Please verify this is correct before continuing."

THE COMPUTER JUST CALLED ME FAT!!!! I am so fat that it doesn't register! It is off the chart! My fat does not compute!!!

I was mortified. For the record, I weighed 182lbs then. I don't even know what the astronauts thought the last time I was there in August (and weighed in at 192). They are probably just lucky that my fat didn't cause the space station to come crashing back into earth.




If I go to the doctor's office on Friday and another error message is involved, that might be the end of my dieting adventures. It may well be the end of any adventures. You will probably see me on late night tv, holding the nurse hostage with an enema shoved in her ear, both of us standing next to a smoking heap of used-to-be-computer. The next segment will be the space station hurtling towards Cuba with astronauts trying to parachute to safety - their kittens life-jacketed in animal-carriers. Then there will be bits with people who knew me being interviewed saying, "We were afraid this would happen. None of us wanted to say...."

So there. Can you see why I'm a little concerned about going to the doctor's office?
Lives are at stake here. Astronauts lives. And even kittens.

If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen eating like a shop vac. Tune in later for more updates. Or, you'll see me on the news.

Russian Roulette

This Friday I will be making a trip into the doctor for a regularly scheduled checkup. Maybe I'll have testicular acne? What about unsightly nostril syndrome? I could be dying right now and not even know it.

You & I both know that the scariest part of the trip to the doctor's office is the scale. The doctor's scale isn't like your scale and my scale. It doesn't get pushed around on the floor and collect hairballs. It doesn't look at naked people jumping on and off of it like it's a pogo stick hoping for an exciting number to pop up.

Oh no. The scale at the doctor's office is a professional, top of the line model. No more of the weights and the slides and the tapping and the balancing. This is a developed-by-nasa, effective-to-one-bazillionth-of-a-pound modern marvel. It has a digital readout with decimal points and everything. It may tell you your weight in kilograms to try and insult your conversion skills. Stepping on that baby is even worse mental pressure than Russian roulette because you know there is a round in every chamber. And you know they have to be 100% accurate because if they are inaccurate even to 1/2 of a percentage and give an incorrect reading, a kitten is killed. No lie!

Truthfully, what are the chances that when I go there on Friday the scale will be broken? Hmm? That's what I thought.

Historically the scale at the doctor's office is about 2lbs over my home scale. And no, it's not because I have clothes on at the doctor's office and I'm butt nekkid at home. It just is that way.

In addition to the regular mind-f*ck of the doctor scale vs. the home scale, at my medical building there are 2 floors. Mmm hmm, you know what that means. One scale on each floor.


Are the upstairs and downstairs scales calibrated to read the exact same weight? Is there like a central processing unit that they're both hard-wired into so it's impossible to get a different weight. Would I be a freak if I asked to go step on the other scale on the way out? Wait, what if according to the upstairs scale I was 100lbs but according to the downstairs scale I'm 105lbs?! Shit! No, don't get on the other scale. Just one. But wait, the downstairs scale could say I'm skinnier! Wait, what if the upstairs scale thinks I'm heavier because there is more gravity upstairs? Aaaaa!!

Can you tell I'm already psych-ing myself out about this? I mean some of it is enhanced for theatrical purposes, but there is a real anxiety for the time when I have to go ditch the shoes and face the music on the digital readout. In August when I was there, I weighed 192lbs. In August of 2008, I was 153lbs. Boy it's hard to see that on a graph. In a period of 3 months I gained 20lbs. In a year, I gained 40.

Maybe tomorrow I can share the "error message" story with you. And unlike this story, the error message story is un-enhanced. It has not yet been rated. Viewer discretion will be advised.

Size 14!

So yesterday I wore a size 14 without crushing any of my vital organs! Sure, I don't quite look like a pinup, but it's a start. My total weight loss is 7.6 pounds in the month that I've been doing this. Of course, this week I have been miserably sick, but I will take poundage loss any way I can get it. I haven't been logging my intake, but it has been pitifully small so I don't have excessive guilt over that. I do vow to resume it once I don't feel like dying. All in all, not a bad result for a month's effort.

The only thing more lame than a fat blog....

The only thing more lame than a fat blog is a fat blog where nobody writes anything.
I had to include the picture of the muffin top because banana nut bread muffins were one of the few things I (over-)indulged in this weekend while I was working all day and all night. I also had 1 or 2 (ok, so I had 3) delicious ham egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches. Of course I consumed natural Mt. Dew all weekend and I didn't eat Special K for breakfast. Duh. That's what the breakfast sandwiches were for.

All told, I was probably over the designated point-age per meal, but at the end of the day the amount that I ate was relatively small especially compared to the number of hours I worked and the amount of physical activity in which I was engaged.

I'm wearing size 16's today and they are kind of loose. That is fantastic. I did gain back about a pound, but I think that's to be expected considering the lack of calculating and the amount of eating.

Confession time: All it takes is one day. Seriously. One day of not writing it down. Followed by another day or two of not writing it down. I didn't really do Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. I am starting again today. But I found myself thinking this morning, "I can really just keep an eye on what I eat and lay off the Mt. Dew and I will be fine." That, combined with having pizza on Friday and Saturday, breakfast sandwiches on Saturday and Sunday, regular soda all weekend and most of Monday, and spaghetti for pretty much every meal Monday and Tuesday, and I'll move up from muffin-topping my pants to more like cake-topping my pants. And I don't mean no single layer cake. I mean like 6 tier wedding cake, which is the look I'm trying to get away from.

So yeah. My overall goal, to put it in a cupcake foil, is this: to move from muffin-topping my mom jeans down to muffin-topping normal people jeans.

And people think I don't have aspirations?! This girl is going places.

Week 3 Wrap-up

This weekend will be insane, so I wanted to do a quick update as to my progress. I am down 6.6 pounds total from the weight I was when I started this adventure. There have been some challenges, like gyros, and constant cravings, like pastaaaaa, but for the most part I am not starving to death and I am pleased with my progress.

Who knows what this weekend will bring with the outing I'll be on, but I'll try to be as disciplined as I can under the circumstances and hopefully will be able to at least maintain my current weight. Ok, so hopefully I will lose more, but I'm trying to be realistic here. Have a good weekend!

Watch Out For the Wagon

Just a quick response to Witchy...
Yes I did lose some weight. No I am not off the wagon. (And if you know what that picture is, you are frigging OLD.)

Today (or maybe it was yesterday) I found some mystery pounds. I had some serious thoughts about pushing the wagon off the cliff, Oregon Trail style. But I continued to be careful with my points. (Ok I had regular Mt. Dew all day, but give a girl a break.)

The mystery pounds went away. I'm under my points today (even under my 'regular' point allottment).

As you can tell I'm not particularly collected now. I'm very tired. I have a big project that took all day today, and will take most of the day Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (and maybe some on Monday). So the good news is I will be occupied, I won't eat as much, and I will be physically working out doing heavy lifting and running around.
Oh, and I will make money which is fantastic because my ass is broke. Seriously. It should have more than one crack in it. Money-less cracks.

"YOU LOST SOME WEIGHT!!"

Just had to write a quick note that I was just at a meeting with some people I haven't seen for about a month. Immediately upon walking in the woman sitting next to me exclaimed "YOU LOST SOME WEIGHT."

Awesome. I feel super.

Put on a Happy Face

Here I am two weeks into this adventure, and I've lost 5 total pounds!

I don't have much to add apart from my pleasure at the amount lost. I haven't had real Mt. Dew at all today, so that's exciting. I'm not saying I'm off the stuff, but a day without it is a pretty significant event in my house.

I'm finding that there are things that don't taste so good to me anymore. For example, macaroni and cheese. This is something that I used to eat daily if not multiple times a day. Not for the pure deliciousness of it, but because my son eats it all the time. I ate it tonight after not having it since Tuesday or Wednesday and I found it unappealing. As a matter of fact, it was downright bad. Not something I will likely eat again soon. Yesterday for dinner we had soft tacos. I thought I was starving for them and overate, having two of them. Today I made myself one for dinner and thought, if I am desperate I will eat another one. As it turns out I had to almost force myself to finish the first one because it just tasted bad to me.

One thing I have noticed is the 10:30 itch. Round about 10:30 or so I think, hmm, maybe I'm hungry. Then I dismiss it and think, it's 10:30 at night. I don't need to eat now. We'll be going to bed in another hour or so. About 11 or 11:15 I decide that I will surely die if I don't eat. Then I ask my husband, thinking if he isn't hungry I am not hungry. He is without fail also hungry. This leads to a two-person discussion about what we are hungry for, what we should eat, what will take too long, how many points each thing is, etc. This hasn't necessarily led to an overage in points, but I think it's a dangerous habit. For example last night we decided we were starving at about 11:20. Then we fantasized about a pizza. Thankfully the pizza place was closed or I'm sure between the two of us we would have demolished a pizza.

With the loss in pounds I am down under 190. This means I lose a point off of my daily allowance. I'm not worried about that because I've been doing good with sticking to my limit pretty closely. The reduction/elimination of regular soda will definitely help with that too.

So I won't say I'm happy to step on the scale right now, but I'm not dreading it and I'm not completely disgusted and self-loathing when I do find out my weight in the morning. That's what I call progress.

Lost

I just wanted to make a note about head space. It doesn't take much to distract me, but I'm typically pretty decent about getting back on task. When something big hits, however, I find myself completely lost in my head. I may look productive like I'm moving around and doing things, but in reality I probably have no idea what I'm doing or why. I feel like I've spent a lot of time like that lately. People outside of my head look at the situation objectively and say, hey, don't worry about it. It doesn't matter, though, how many people say it or how many times people say it. I'm still lost.
And it doesn't take 2 or 3 hours to work me into a frenzy, it can happen in an instant. Sometimes it takes me hours to collect myself once that happens.

I think I'm lucky in that most of the time when that happens, I find something productive to do like vacuuming or washing dishes. Or smoke. A lot. I won't deny that there are times I end up snacking (or more accurately gorging), but for the majority of my lost-ness I spend my time moving or cleaning things. I completely understand how people can get stressed out and eat bags of potato chips and gallons of ice cream. And I'm sure when they get to gallon 1 or gallon 2, they finally have to stop because they are going to be sick. Truth be told I feel the same way once I figure out I am lost. I'll find myself vacuuming something and think, this is insane. I have to stop. I can't do this anymore. After a few forceful self-interventions I can usually snap out of it. That doesn't mean I won't feel like I've been jumping off the high dive head first onto an anvil, it just means I will stop climbing up the ladder and instead sit around holding my head.

Maybe the discipline it takes to change eating habits will help with some of the head games. I just had to use this picture because, a) it's a lady with a dog in her ass, b) the dog looks like my dog, and c) everyone else can see the dog, just not her. A & B are funny, and C relates pretty directly to me.

Can You Touch Your Toes? Grab Your Ankles?

I love everything about this picture (thanks for posing, Witchy). I love that she's on the scale, that she's grabbing her ankles, and that she has this expression on her face that looks like the scale was not telling her something she was expecting to see.

Mystery pounds are one of the most frustrating things about taking a close look at the scale and what you're consuming and how your diet is effecting your life. All of us have them. We are dieting, doing exercises, being conscientious about what we eat and when we eat it, and lo and behold the next trip on the scale shows mystery pounds that appear from nowhere.

Even when we're not actively dieting but we're not over-indulging, it seems impossible that the numbers on the scale creep up and up and up. I think those mystery pounds are more damaging to lifestyle changes because of their profound effect on the psyche. It takes discipline to limit intake, to make different food choices, and to make an active decision to exercise - even when you don't feel like it. The most instant gratification for doing this isn't, in my opinion, feeling better, having clothes become loose, or having a smaller appetite -it's seeing the cold hard proof on the scale.

I think there is something deeply ingrained in us by society that only the numbers count. When an actor or a model is told to lose weight, they aren't told to lose 3 inches or 2 dress sizes, they're told to drop 15 pounds or 30 pounds. The last I checked, they don't measure body mass index in dress sizes, it's determined by weight.
When you get on the scale after skipping the ice cream with the birthday cake, foregoing the regular soda or regular beer for diet or light alternatives, and then the scale slaps you with 2 or 3 mystery pounds, you want to get off the scale, go to the refrigerator, and flip off the universe by immersing your head in a gallon of ice cream. You want to look in the mirror and accept that you are destined to be fat and learn how to deal with it.

In the past week and a half I'm down 3.4 pounds total. I'm not complaining about this, and I do think this is significant weight loss. It's significant especially considering I am eating food - not ice-cubes - that I'm not really engaging in a huge amount of exercise over and above house work and yard work. But even with this weight loss I still suffer the effects of mystery pounds. They are temptation to drink regular soda, to overindulge in waffles, to eat until midnight. I think the most frustrating aspect of the mystery pounds is that you know, you really know - those pounds aren't permanent. They could disappear just as quickly, or grow into even more poundage. Even still, those tiny numbers still have enough of a psychological effect to potentially end a health or weight loss endeavor.

I think in the end the weight loss game has been called a lot of things - a "complete lifestyle change", a "committment to healthiness", etc etc. People work and cheat in all kinds of ways, with diet, fad diets, exercise, drugs, cleanses, enemas, and in the extreme binging and purging and severe eating disorders. In reality, weight loss is a mind game, one that's much easier to lose than to win. The mind game goes on long after the pounds have disappeared, the diet fad has changed, and the kegel-thigh-ab-sizer has been reduced to a late night joke. Every time you button your pants, look in a mirror, take off your clothes, or walk by a scale, the mind games and the mystery pounds are waiting for you.

Grab your ankles.

Victory Is Mine!

After week 1 of doing my bastardized weight watchers, I lost 4 pounds total.
It's a start. Of course I picked up 1 pound with the Chuck E. Cheese hog fest, but I am still at 3 pounds lost total.

I did really well yesterday and didn't exceed my total allotted points. I'm hoping today will be as much of a success. I think soda will continue to be my biggest challenge considering I'm at 18 points total just for soda this week.

Other than that I'm generally satisfied. For now. If I maintain this weight loss I will have to reduce the amount of points allowed. I'll wait a few days and see.

What is "easy" about staying this way?

"It's more stressful to continue being fat than to stop overeating."

This is a tip from the 100 Smartest Diet Tips Ever that Debu-chan so kindly shared with me. It really resonated with me. It's easy to be thoughtless about what you're eating. Meal time (or snack time) rolls around and I'm sure like many others, I go for what's already made or what takes a few seconds to make, and this is typically nothing that's got any nutritional value other than inches added to waistline. Most of my food has 3 ingredients: pasta, water to cook it, and some kind of seasoning packet. I consider anything with added milk or margarine or seasoning like Parmesan cheese to be "gourmet."

Dieting with a toddler running around is difficult. There is a constant supply of food, and most of it has nothing to do with food that is good for you. He usually eats 2 or 3 bites and then he is done. Most of the food isn't worth saving, and I hate to throw it away. Take 3-4 bites of his food at each meal (typically after I'm done eating my meal) and multiply that times 365 days a year and that makes a lot of extra food.

I don't have much more earth shattering things to share at this point. I'm starting the day off with raisin bran and diet Mt. Dew and hoping to stay on track. I'm going to rededicate myself to trying to stay on track all day rather than being careless most of the day and then stressing about limiting my nighttime eating to an unreasonably small amount. I think keeping track of my points throughout the day is helping me to be more mindful about my consumption as well.

Thirty-two of my points last week were regular Mt. Dew. If I hadn't had any of those I would have been under 200 points for the week. Just in the past two days I've already had sixteen points in regular soda. I need to get it under control. I'm working on it. I want to get a little better handle on what I'm eating and when. Then I intend to add some kind of exercise. I want to keep it mostly outdoor exercise because I've found that when I exercise indoors I tend to want to stop every 5-10 minutes and think about dying.

And I definitely want to thank those of you who have been commenting for your suggestions and support. Also, you lurkers, I know you're out there. Thank you lurkers for pointing and laughing. It's more incentive to keep going.

Worse Than The Pit

And you thought that the worst part of Chuck E. Cheese was the ball pit.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. I won't profess to know how to calculate the points, but we had one large pizza between 3 adults - and one of those pieces of pizza died on the floor. The death was ruled accidental.

A moment of silence for the pizza, please.

It could have easily been out of control, though, and I can see that. The menu offered sandwiches, all you can eat salad bar, pizza with greasy goodness for toppings, and of course dessert pizzas. After a rousing day of don't-let-any-freaks-abduct-my-child at Chuck E. Cheese, we went to a local amusement park. It too was a pit of temptation. Actually, not really given the amount of pizza we had consumed in a small time.

The deal today was $10 admission: all you can ride-eat-drink.
This isn't as tempting as it may sound considering the "all you can eat" part included hot dogs (uh, the only beef lips I come in contact with are connected to cows I kiss), hamburgers resembling rubber tire patches, and baked beans that I cannot confirm were actually baked or genuine beans.

We had a wonderful time and returned home after a long over-stimulating extravaganza of rides, token guzzling worthless kid machines, $2 and $5 stuffed toys that cost 1/2 a nickel to make in China, and questionably 'nutritious' food. I was calculating the points for today and was feeling pretty good about being in-range for points for the day despite the nutritional ball pits.

That is, until I looked at the pictures from our outing.

Je-sus-god-at-walmart. What is wrong with me? I look like I am pregnant with a new tub of Crisco. I can't say more than that because the pictures depress me so much and I don't want to share them with friends and family because I'm ashamed I look like this. I didn't look like this before I was pregnant, and I truthfully didn't look like this after I was pregnant. (I was much huge-er while I was pregnant, admittedly). There is no excuse to look like this. None. I can't give up. Maybe it's not a shock when people who see me regularly look at these pictures. But I stare at them like a train wreck and instantly want to crop myself out of all of them.

I know I make jokes and have a good laugh about the ironies of being fat and eating disgusting food. It's not funny. It's not. I am not laughing.

I can't say anymore. I just can't give up.

Don't Try to Sugar Coat It

The Harsh Reality of Numbers

I like words. I've been accused by my husband of "using big words" or "using too many small words together" to confuse him. (He didn't know what rubenesque meant and didn't appreciate the humor/irony of Ruby N. Esque.)

He prefers numbers. They are constant, they are predictable, they always turn out the same.

Of course, the down side of those numbers is that they don't give. Especially in the case of points.

Right now I'm getting the hairy eyeball because I had a few points leftover towards the end of the day and he didn't. While I ate manacotti and washed it down with Mt. Dew (again) he was stuck chomping on celery and carrots. We have some salad that's ready to eat, but he didn't want to eat it without some kind of dressing. I happen to be his point-recording secretary so not only do I have the upper hand when it comes to knowing how close I am to crossing the line, but I also have to bear the bad news of what value each food is and how close it's bringing him to the end of his daily allowance.

We differ on one point, however. I incorporate the "extra" points into my daily limit so I don't suffer under the delusion of "oh, hey, I'll take them out of the 'extra' at the end of the week," and then on Sunday decide I need to kill myself because I don't have any points left. It makes the effect of eating or overeating feel more immediate for me to have to account for the "extra" on a daily basis.

My husband doesn't want this done. He doesn't want to eat all of his daily allottment, let alone tap into his "extra" reserve. He doesn't want to use the extra. At all. No. No extra. Not at all. We went around and around about this tonight. NO EXTRA. Got it boss.

So tonight while I was completing my secretarial duties (the point ones, not the naughty secretary ones) he was hanging over my shoulder to see what each food was worth and how he was doing in terms of his daily total. We looked up manacotti before we ate (11 points), but I didn't take into account the meat (oops, meat, add 4 points). He ate 2 manacotti, which according to whatever screwed up source I was looking at was worth 15 points.
Put that together with the garlic bread and his dinner was about 27 points. I don't know if he was thinking that he would have lots of extra points because he was 14 points under yesterday, but he was pretty peeved when we figured out that he was at the limit.

I think we both have the same sort of eating styles, slightly overeating at meals (or massively overeating if it's a super-favorite food), and then grazing until the next mealtime. He, however, drinks a lot of 0-point coffee while I opt for sugary badness. I think he likes a bigger variety of food than I do (um, pickels are gross) and he is also exposed to different foods at his work (pizza, leftover lunch/banquet foods, 'bake off' desserts, etc.). His family members are all food-loving and comfort-eaters. I would call myself more of a bored-eater. Is that the same as a comfort-eater? I don't know. I don't consider myself a food lover. I have a couple of foods I like, but my overeating is really tied more to availability than it is to sheer love of food.

So, I'm not going to pat myself on the big ole back for being only 1 point over for the week, despite indulging in regular Mt. Dew or having a ridiculously over-pointed gyro (man that gyro was effing good). Oh, sweet delicious sinful regular Mt. Dew....
I'm hoping I'll do a little bit better next week, more water, less soda, and diet soda instead of regular Mt. Dew. Mmmm Mt. Dew.
We'll see.

How is 'fail' spelled?

It's spelled like this: G-Y-R-O*

And you thought spaghetti was going to be my problem.

For the most part, my diet (and by that I mean normal food selections) is pretty much the same week to week, month to month. Even if I go out to eat or get take-out, I get the same thing. Theoretically, that makes my whole point-food-counting-fat-loss-predicting process pretty easy. I like Mt. Dew, but I know I'll see faster results if I gag down the diet instead. I know I can't eat 16 plates of spaghetti and still stay under 5 points a meal. But what happens when I deviate from my normal fridge-foraging and venture out into the unknown world of foreign dineries?

Today I went out to lunch. I stared at the ridiculously large menu and narrowed my selection down to a few things: shrimp and wild rice, chicken salad wrap, or a gyro. Luckily we were still waiting on someone to join us so I had some time to really reflect on this decision. I ordered a cup of clam chowder (should have been called crappy chowder) and waited.

And when the waiter came back and waited on me, it was zero hour. Shrimp? Chicken? Gyro? Chicken? Shrimp? Wait, what about a BLT? Maybe a club sandwich? Should I just get an appetizer? I'm in an unusual restraunt! This is a huge menu! What do I really want?

A gyro. No fries.

A gyro is essentially healthy, it's kind of wrap-like, right? There is a meat and lettuce and tomato, there's not even any cheese.

Would it sound like I was rationalizing if I said it wasn't a gigantic-beach-sized-feed-a-family-of-Duggars gyro, it was a normal-person sized gyro??It was probably slightly excess on the portion side, but it was still normal-person sized. (And I spilled some of it on my lap. That is a surefire sign that I did lose some weight, food finally hit my lap again. Take that, lap. I'm pretty sure my boobs flipped off my lap when it happened.)

I didn't eat anything else until dinner time and then I started to figure out my points.

One thing I consulted said that a gyro is 12 points. Now that I look around, other things say that a gyro is worth many, many more points. That means with my crappy chowder and my drink, and my "12 point" (probably 3,000 point) gyro, my lunch was 19 points all by itself. With the rest of what I splurged on tonight, I ended up with 45 points (and the night isn't over yet).

If what I think I'm alloted is correct, I have 27 points a day. With the whole "extra points" for the week crap, I figure that to be 32 points a day. I don't have the time or the brain power to figure stuff out at the end of the week to see if I have any "extra" points leftover.
Either way you slice it, today was a massive failure.

It's not so much today that I'm worried about. Once I found out how much a gyro was, I was kind of like, "Eh, screw it." I had an extra glass of regular soda. Some toast for a midnight snack. Maybe another glass of soda. Then I started thinking, "you know what, screw this weekend. We're going away on Monday and I'm going to party then, no use in not partying in between. Tuesday I'll get back on the wagon."

I'm still going to try to post every day, you know, share the gory details with you innocent bystanders.

So, I don't know. If I really want a shock to my senses, I'll go jump on the scale. The last time I weighed myself I was 189.6 (down from 192.4). How much can one crappy day screw that up? Looks like I'm going to find out. Right now I feel somewhat guilty and stupid and I needed to write it down before I decided to pretend like it didn't happen.



*Man, that gyro was fucking good.


Cartoon from Cathy Thorne's Everyday People

Spaghetti Wednesday

To Eat or Not To Eat, That is the Question.

Today is moving along like every other day. I got up early (earlier than I wanted) with my kid, ate my bowl of Special K with yogurt boogers in it, and enjoyed some diet Mt. Dew while trying to look for jobs and become fully conscious.

I finally decided to get moving, washed the dishes and started to push-mow the grass. Activity, right? But then the mower ran out of gas. I occupied myself instead with vacuuming and straightening up a little bit. Starving, I opted for a ham and cheese wrap for lunch and reeeally enjoyed some regular Mt. Dew.

Now it's 3:40. I am hungry.

Well, I think I am hungry.

I'm drinking water trying to stave off hunger. Maybe I'm just thirsty.

We're having spaghetti for dinner tonight. I love spaghetti. Plates and plates and bowls of spaghetti.

I could eat now. But that would mean I will (should) eat less spaghetti. I am hungry. I am hungrier for spaghetti. SPAGHETTIIIIIIIIIIII. That's what it sounds like in my brain.

Losing weight really shouldn't be this mentally difficult. I'll have to confess my decision later.

Goodbye, V-neck

The name of this blog sums it up: Am I Still Fat?

I was sitting here trying to think of something witty to say for my very first blog post and kept coming up empty handed. Well, not exactly empty handed.

In one hand is the new Diet Mt. Dew Ultra Violet, 0 calories. In the other hand was a half-eaten piece of toast (white bread of course) drowning beneath apple butter. I was trying to type and google a picture to use for my profile picture and perhaps a witty picture for this first post, but I had to keep stopping what I was doing. Why? Because the crumbs kept falling down the front of my v-neck shirt.

If I was a normal-sized person this would not be an issue. I would have normal-sized boobs, minus the crevasse in the middle, and the crumbs would tumble down my shirt front and onto my lap. Had I saved all of the clothes I have gradually outgrown, I'm sure you would see the stains migrating from my lap-region to my stomach-boob area because my stomach-boob area is now so large that my lap is safe from falling nutrition.

I started this blog because I've been screwing around for way too long with losing weight. According to my doctor, I should ideally weigh 142lbs. I haven't been at that weight in 9 years. There have been other things happening in the meantime that are notorious for tipping the scale in the wrong direction. Married life, maybe 5-10 lbs. College, the notorious freshman 15 (which I actually didn't gain, at least not all of it). I crept up to 150ish and wavered up and down. Then I broke some toes and didn't exercise as much for a while. After college I started working full time and then an additional part time job. Of course then I had the obligatory baby and with it came the obligatory baby-fat. I was 158 when I found out I was pregnant. I weighed 181 the day my kid was born, most of which was water weight. I didn't really have time to stare at the scale while I was busy juggling a newborn, but I lost a pretty good amount of weight. Then things slowly started creeping up again.

My job was starting a weight loss competition and I stepped on the scale before December two years ago - I was up to 173. That is the most I had weighed in my non-pregnant life. I did lose a pound at that moment because I shit my pants. Slowly, in part with some medication that had weight-loss side effects and changing eating habits, I worked my way back down to 153.

Here it is about a year and a half later and I'm up. Up. UP. Into the 190s. More than when I was pregnant. More than when I was PREGNANT.

It's not for any reason in particular, but for a number of small reasons combined. I'm not working right now. I don't get out and about as much. I was on some medication notorious for instant, explosive weight gain (I'm guessing at least 25-30lbs in my case, in only 2 1/2 months). I don't eat a lot, but I eat constantly and not particularly well. And oh, Pepsi.

This isn't a quest to look like Laura Flynn-Boyle. This is a quest to be able to see my feet again without having to lean over. Perhaps a quest to lose one of the 2 or 3 Michelin-man-like-rings about my waist. I don't even want to say it's a mission to be healthier or more in-shape. I am uncomfortable in my body. I don't like it, and it doesn't like me back. I don't like my throat fat or my belly fat or any other fat for that matter. Don't even talk to me about armpit fat.

It's not that I hate fat. I hate it when fat gets together and turns my body into a conference center. And then into a massive cult compound. Where the fat never, never leaves.

On Monday I started keeping a food diary in anticipation of gradually changing the way I eat. I used some fat watchers point system (albeit bastardized) and have just minimally reduced my intake and tried to make some wiser choices. I think I've lost 2 pounds. Only 50-ish pounds to go.

Until then, goodbye V-neck.