Keeping Going » Talking It Off

Good intentions, bad follow-through.

Giving up, Keeping Going, Starting Again Again 1 Response »

Jan 012010

Once again, it’s the day traditionally given over to resolutions. I make the same one every year–almost the same one. It started as a weight loss thing. Now, it’s more of a health issue. I’ve always felt younger than my age, physically as well as mentally and emotionally. This year, I feel older physically than I’d like. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood sugar numbers that have crossed the line into pre-diabetic, and a motorcycle accident that, while fairly minor, has left me with pain and stiffmess that I don’t like having to live with. So what can I do about these issues? And the other issues: poor self-esteem, lack of confidence, depression, seasonal affective disorder, blah blah blah. The answer to ALL of these issues is the same. Take better care of myself! This is NOT rocket science! Eat well, lose weight, exercise to strengthen my heart and build muscle, use my light box daily to be sure I don’t suffer from the lack of sun here in the winter, and end up feeling better all the way around. Nope, not rocket science. Yet, I struggle. I fail–repeatedly. What the f#$% is wrong with me? I can tell you what’s RIGHT with me–I NEVER give up. I’ve been fighting this battle since I was 14. I haven’t had a lot of success, but I haven’t given up, either. And I’m sure not going to now. I’m going to use the motivation of being Mother of the Bride next year as the carrot on the stick. But since I don’t want to find myself without motivation after that, it will be necessary to make the new behaviors permanent. Not just doing different things to lose weight for one occasion, but permanent behaviors to keep with me forever. That’s where WW comes in. That’s how they roll. And that’s how I’ll roll. With so much to live for, I cannot keep working on an early death! I must work on my follow-through, because all the tools and knowledge are in place. I just need to keep using them, day after day, one day at a time, for the rest of my life.

I Lied

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Dec 292009

Actually – I think I just failed but I’m not keen on failure.

The feasting stopped but something more insidious took its place: gluttony, greed, simply stuffing in food for no very good reason. In fact…confession approaching…..I ate the Christmas cake that I’d packed up for my mom. Where’s the blushing smilie when you need it?

I don’t feel great this morning and I’m sitting here remembering how good it feels to eat when I’m hungry.

And to move.

I don’t want to turn this into a daily diet blog – but I will if I have to. At least I can go back to basics and report every morning on how the previous day went.

Back to basics it is. I know I’ll be away for four days and eating out all those meals but I think that’s easier than sitting in a house full of food.

So here’s what’s coming:
Today – home and in control of what I can eat.
Tomorrow – the same
Thursday – off to town for new years eve. I will enjoy the evening meal because I will NOT have eaten mindlessly for the whole day leading up to it.
Friday – Saturday – Sunday – Three days of eating out and staying in a hotel.
Monday – back to my own space for a week alone.

When I’m in losing mode, it’s easier for me to eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch. I’ve got porridge and blueberries for the morning but lunch is harder here than back in England because I don’t have a blender for making soup. Maybe that’s something I can pick up in the sales and start making my cauliflower and potato soup which is filling and helps me get in all my vegetables.

Thinking out loud helps but it’s not the same as reality. But my own determination and the sense of accountability I get from knowing that people are reading this do help.

I will not gain weight over the next few days.

Till tomorrow.

Pizza v Pizza

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Dec 212009

The weekend was a lovely blur of socializing and Christmas shopping. We stayed at our favourite hotel – with the comfiest bed in the universe. Really. We had three dinners and one lunch with friends and caught up with fifteen people we hadn’t seen since summer. We shopped and I had a brainwave for the supposedly (but not really, come on, it’s Christmas!) adult children’s stockings. We even wrapped a pile of presents. And now I’m home.

But this is about pizza. View the following:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

After many years of living with a Pizza Express on every corner, Exhibit B is our “normal”, ubiquitous even, pizza. And we had completely forgotten the bad old days of deep dish cheese-fest pizza – until Saturday night. It was gastronomically overwhelming, and not having the greatest stomach these days, it was a struggle to eat even one piece.

The whole experience sure highlighted how it really is possible to completely change the way you think and feel about unhealthy, even favourite unhealthy, food. There was a time when the gooey nightmare would have been our take-out order of choice but that is now a distant and almost unbelievable memory. Really? We preferred that?

What’s even more bizarre is that the healthy looking rocket (arugula) pizza is now a rare treat because, let’s face it, it’s not a piece of fish and a pile of steamed vegetables. And I actually had a piece of fish and a pile of vegetables (not quite steamed) for dinner on Friday night.

I think I’m having an identity crisis. When did all this happen to me? When did I become a person who ordered a hunk of white fish for a dinner out? When did I stop treating every restaurant meal as my last? When did I stop craving and even start feeling queasy about a pound of melting ooze on a chewy bread base?

I guess the whole “this is a lifestyle, not a diet” rhetoric eventually actually becomes reality. You start off forcing yourself to stick to a plan, repeating that unconvincing phrase because it sure as hell feels like a diet! Then one day you wake up craving a thin crust, a few parmesan shavings and a pile of slightly bitter greens.

Weird but wonderful.

Reruns. Again. When will there be something new??

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Dec 152009

I wish I could go back. I miss it. I miss the excitement. I miss learning about what’s new. I miss the awesome feeling of starting out fresh and full of motivation. I miss the opportunity to find a new gadget or two just for kicks. I miss that first week of being on WW–the determination, the drive to succeed, the steadfast refusal to fail. Lately, it’s all about having done this before. Countless times. And failed. Countless times. It doesn’t seem like a new start these days, so much as unwelcome reruns of a bad sitcom. Everything is stale and old. It’s not exciting, it’s S.O.S.–the Same Old Sh!t. And that makes it very hard to make it work. I’ve been there, done that, over and over and over. And now I’m doing it again, because I haven’t gotten anywhere all the times I’ve done this before.

How can I make this new again? I know WW is the right program for me. It’s healthy, it’s simple, it’s sensible. But it’s not new. Why do I need it to be new? What is it about “new” that makes this seem easier? Maybe, like the first day of school, it’s because it’s all fresh and clean. It hasn’t been mucked up yet. And as a perfectionist, once it’s mucked up, it can never go back to fresh and clean. Why does that matter? What’s wrong with starting over after erasing mistakes and giving it another try, instead of just giving up? All through school, I would do just that–make a mistake, erase, and then end up berated for the less than stellar condition of my paper. Dirty mark from the eraser, maybe a hole in the paper, clearly not fresh and clean, like Kathy S.’s papers always were. So give up and don’t even try. Because you can’t do it right, perfectly right.

I’ve messed it up so many times that I just can’t start over one more time. What’s the point? I’LL TELL YOU WHAT THE FREAKIN’ POINT IS! It’s about taking care of myself, not about being perfect and neat and right. It’s about caring for myself as much as I care about others. It’s about being the best I can be, whether I’m sloppy or neat. Why does that get lost in the process? Why is that so hard to grasp? Because I learned right at the start that it has to be clean and neat and perfect, or they won’t like you and you’ll get yelled at. But it can’t be clean and neat and perfect, so why bother?

More on this later. This really isn’t where I expected this to go. I have to let this marinate between my ears for a while to see where else it takes me…

Tomayto/Tomawto

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Nov 302009

I’m off to where I can safely say tomayto and not get asked where I’m from. Until I say something like “half past two” – then they ask if I’m visiting and don’t believe I was born there. Never mind.

The next post will be from 5,000 miles and many time zones away.

And this post is simply a public declaration that, no matter how amusing I find airplane food – and I do! – I shall eat in moderation for the next day. But I will still love the idea of that cold bun with the solid butter that somehow tastes SO good. On reflection, maybe it tastes good in comparison to the re-heated chicken.

And I will not touch the coffee – not for weight loss reasons but because I’m pretty sure it can do permanent damage to one’s taste buds.

It’s good to see Mardee and Gracie around. Donna, where are you? And Tina?

And to everyone else, please say hello and tell us a bit of your story. Millie

What’s the Goal Here?

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Nov 282009

When I realised that I wanted to lose weight finally and forever, I had in my head the “goal” weight of 143lbs. I think it was based on the tricky scale-insanity based mathematical formula which states that the personal goal weight plus two pounds equals the WW goal weight which is equal to or lesser than a number ending in zero or five.

Not that I thought about it much or anything.

I also picked a weight which was well away from any “wall” like the infamous 140lbs of 2001. I remember going to WW week after week stuck at two pounds from goal and finally giving up and agreeing that I would never weigh less than 142. That number was on a gold card in my wallet until very recently.

Fast forward a few years and we have a new generation of goal-setters. Now, canny weight watchers set their goal at the highest possible healthy BMI so that they no longer have to pay for meetings once they’ve reached that number. So my new gold card is going to say 10 stone 9lbs. This is actually a pound less that my highest acceptable BMI because I have the psychological burden of being bi-cultural in the weight loss game and wanted to keep it below 150lbs.

Not that I thought about it much or anything.

So what’s my real goal -besides, obviously, getting some decent psychological help?

Last week I decided to head for 138, not because of any of the above but because my goal has been revised to include a health waist size. I’m guessing that I’m going to have to lose that much more weight to get there because, when I say waist size, I mean abdominal size – measured right around the navel. That’s different from my much smaller “technical waist” where my jeans used to sit in 1979.

Of course, back in the early 90′s, before the BMI Revolution, my upper goal weight was 139lbs. That was the weight I would have been aiming for all along. Now I KNOW that BMI is supposed to be about health, but at the top “healthy” weight of 150lbs, my waist size puts me at risk for all sorts of things – even though I can wear Gap size 8 jeans.

The point? The point is that I need to find a goal set by me for reasons that I can trust. I trust the waist measurement science more than I trust BMI science. So that’s where I’m headed. For now. Not that I’ve thought about it much or anything.

Oh yeah – the reason I started on this topic: I hit 143lbs this morning.

Making Adjustments

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Nov 262009

OK….big deep breath……I think I finally see the body changes.

I went into town today and tried on some wool trousers. As usual I took a size I knew would fit and a size I thought might fit. The little ones were almost too big.

I repeated the exercise in another shop with the same results.

At one point I muttered to myself, “You’re almost small.”

Doesn’t sound like much but it’s quite a big deal.

NOW…..here’s what usually happens when I get to this stage: I don’t take the time to look carefully at my smaller self and get used to what I look like. Instead, I get focused on the farcical idea that “the diet is over” and I start eating anything I want. Before I look in the mirror again, the moment is over. And six months down the line, I’m back to where I started.

So this time, it’s all going to happen SLOWWWWWWWLY.

I’m going to keep trying things on and remarking that I am almost small.

I am going to keep journalling what I’m eating.

I’m going to keep noticing until, well, I’m not sure until what. I’ll let you know when I get there.

Forgiving the Fat Child

Keeping Going, Thoughts on the Process 1 Response »

Nov 222009

Yesterday I wrote something positive on another site then felt bad all day. Surprisingly, I didn’t let that feeling lead to overeating but, on a different day, I might have. I see from other people that it’s pretty common to do some out-of-control eating after mentioning how well things are going. I also see that it’s common behaviour when things are not going so well.

Last week’s tiny loss after a perfect week felt awful and I had to fight the “what the hell?” feeling.

Yesterday’s loose jeans and cumulative loss felt great but talking about it left me with the same feeling.

I guess these are just learned responses over time. I’ve lost weight and put it back on so many times that I sabotage good results right away because, in my mind, it’s going to happen eventually anyway.

Because this is a lifelong battle, there is emotional junk related to being fat stuffed into all the corners of my inner self : playground insults, family teasing, horrible old ladies, and especially agonising teenage self-consciousness. I need to forgive all those versions of myself and let her know that the fat was really such a tiny part of who she really was. I need to forgive all those people – most of them were commenting because they wanted something better for me but didn’t know how to help. Except Sandra; she was just mean.

Seeing as it’s Sunday – I think I’ll get down to the business of forgiving right now. And I suppose Sandra should be top of the list.

NOTE: This isn’t where I thought this post was going. I thought it was going to be about learning to work hard whether I was happy or disappointed with whatever was going on with weight loss. I never know where this blogging thing will take me.

TO DO

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Nov 192009

I have lists on my Blackberry, lists on my laptop, lists in my brain and lists on paper.

Christmas list

Packing list

IMPORTANT for work list

This Week list (which is now over 3 weeks old)

Blog ideas list

Things to ask the doctor list

Meal planning list

Grocery list

If I didn’t have the lists, I probably wouldn’t sleep. However, having so many lists gives me pinball brain and that is never good.

And what does this have to do with weight? Everything. Pinball brain gives me pinball appetite. I bounce from cupboard to fridge to pantry looking for something to eat which will magically make the things on my list get done.

So I’m writing this down as a commitment to just do the things on the lists rather than eat the nervous energy caused by having so many things to do.

Since starting to write this, I’ve paused twice to make phone calls and send emails and already the “This Week” list has shrunk. So it works.

Oh – I forgot to put colour roots on the list.

Pinball.

Oh yeah – Hormone Week Day 3 went well – if a little overshadowed by feeling ill with a suspected ulcer. Life, eh?

Living with Hormones Day 2

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Nov 182009

I took another break from journalling yesterday and just ate according to what my body seemed to want. That included a piece of cheese mid-morning and peanut butter on crackers mid-afternoon. I would normally have eaten an orange or a banana at those times but I went with what I wanted rather than what I “should have”. Permission to not be perfect rules during hormone week.

This morning, I decided to journal it all in retrospect and found that, by listening to my body, I ate smaller portions more frequently and ended up eating just within the weight loss range. I ate only 78% of my 5-a-day fruit and veg but other than that I was really pleased with the outcome.

Now – if my house had had any junk food at all, the outcome would have been different. But I suppose that’s another measure of how far we’ve come in our family eating habits. There was a time when, after dinner, we’d get that wicked co-dependent glint in our eyes and someone would be on a junk food run before you could say “how many points in a giant Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar?” But it didn’t even cross our minds yesterday as we snuggled down on the sofa for the evening.

Oh dear – that’s kind of depressing. It reminds of my first ever Weight Watchers leaders. And I sort of hated them. But that’s another story.

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