Talking It Off

This is my third evening without TV, and my second officially back on WW. So far, it feels good. I cooked tonight, chicken/peppers/bulgur w/ EVOO & caramelized balsamic, and made enough for 4 meals. That’s in the fridge. Last night, I made a huge kettle of my favorite soup. I like it enough that I eat it for lunch all summer long, in my air conditioned office. That’ll be in my freezer shortly. I’ve gotten into the habit of walking at lunchtime. I love to do that, as long as it’s not too hot. No worries today, it was 44 degrees and breezy. I wisely left my jacket behind, as I knew I would be plenty warm enough walking in the sun without it. It feels good to be making such a big change by ditching TV at the same time I start WW. I find that  I need some kind of novelty to help get me going. Usually it’s a WW toy of some kind–and I did get a WW cookbook. The TV thing is really big for me though. Hopefully that big a change will really shake up my routine which is just what I need. I was spending too much time plopped on the couch. Ok, I’m plopped on the couch right now, but I’ve cooked, eaten, cleaned, and taken care of some household stuff. And I didn’t plop down here until 8: 30. Progress.

Now what? Now I do what I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do. Follow a plan to lose weight, work out regularly, plan ahead, be mindful of the choices I make. (More on mindfullness when I get farther into the book I’m reading. Seems to be helping so far!) One of the things I’ve done the past two days is eat “real” food. Not diet stuff, but real cereal, regular ol’ grocery store stuff. In the long run, that’s what I want to be eating anyway, so I might as well make it a habit. I can no longer do the frozen entrees. Blech. I do keep a couple of Healthy Choice soups in my office just in case, but that’s the extent of it. I also eat the sandwich thins that are all the rage these days, but because I like them, not because they are lower in points or calories. No more diet dressing on salad, I use EVOO & balsamic. It doesn’t feel like a diet now. And that is just what I need!

The Doc called me while I was having lunch with the husband in the pub. Apparently he took my case to his group of cronies and they think it’s all benign so we’ll just watch and scan once in a while. I can live with that for now though I still might get a second opinion.

Now I’ve got to think about getting off these last few pounds. Back to the battle – but first a big long airplane ride.

I’ve been thinking of various ways to describe a crazy person and my favourite by far is the beautifully British,

mad as a box of frogs.

Pretty descriptive of my past few days.  I’m only writing today because I seem to have found myself in a period of calm.  I’m glad that I have an iota of self-knowledge – mostly that worrying about anything makes that thing and everything else a hundred times worse.  If I don’t check that anxiety, I head right into mad frog box mode.

In saner times I assume that aches, pains and other weird symptoms are either hormonal or stress related – or both- and to be ignored till they go away, which they almost always do.  But on box of frog days, all aches, pains and weird symptoms are something to be noted, analysed for intensity and, much worse, Googled!  Oh dear.

So for today,  Google is banished and I am assuming that the new twinges and pangs are related to this most hormonal of weeks.

Meanwhile, the husband has declared it my birthday because the real one rolls around while I’m out of the country. The fake birthday comes complete with friends over for a special dinner and the cake of my choice – which is, of course, the only cake that the husband knows how to bake.  Luckily it’s the one I really want. I’m also not allowed to clean the house  – a treat that I frequently bestow on myself anyway, but I appreciate the sentiment.

Tomorrow I will give the specialist one last call before I fly away just to see if he’s made his mind up yet.  The more I talk to people about my current experience, the more I realise I’m just very unlucky with this particular doctor.

OK – so I’ve eaten without really thinking for the past few days and my weight has come back up.  It’s very odd to find this a happy event but it is.  When I lost 2lbs in the course of all the Easter Feasting, I panicked a little that I was really sick.

In the absence of an answer, I have a tendency to fill in the blanks with bad news.  (I’m guessing most people do that.)

But today the sun is shining again and my weight is where it should be so I’m going to be positive on that basis alone.

I’ve also decided to believe what little information my specialist has given me.  After all, just because he’s not great with patients doesn’t mean he’s not a good doctor.  I’ll still get a second opinion but, in the mean time, unless I want to be properly crazy, I’ll believe that I’m not in any imminent danger.

So on with the show.  And today I’m going to eat carefully – mostly because my stressed out stomach doesn’t respond well to too much food.

I read an article recently on CNN that talked about how binge eating can be overcome by self-help techniques. The article discussed how a group of people used techniques in a book called Overcoming Binge Eating by Dr. Christopher G. Fairburn to help lose the weight they wanted and stop their bad eating habits.

So I figured, what the heck?  I bought it on Amazon and am now working my way through the book.  I’ll keep you all posted, but one segment caught my eye in the meantime.  It was a quote by a participant at the beginning of a section called “Why Change?”.

As I grow into middle age I realize with great sadness how much energy I have directed toward controlling my weight and eating and the misery of the regular and consequent binges. I could be doing something productive with my energy–building relationships, reading, writing. I don’t know what I might do, but I don’t want my epitaph to be “Jane wished she was thin.”  It was this, in the end, that made me decide to change.

Sad but true–I think we’ve all been there…

So I went back to the specialist and it was the most frustrating appointment of my life.  He hadn’t yet read the results of my mri.  The appointment was for the sole purpose of getting the results of my mri.

He did a rather bad job of NOT telling me what they said as he read bits out loud and told me there was probably nothing too serious but he’d have to talk about it with his colleagues.  So we know for sure that the ultrasound was correct and there’s a complex cyst on my liver and there is also one more cyst though I don’t have any more information about that one.

We also know that I will need more appointments but I don’t know for what, with whom or when.  I will apparently know more next Monday after he has spoken to colleagues at a departmental panel.

After a couple of days I calmed down enough to write a comprehensive list of questions that I want answered.

And what effect has all this had on my eating?  Well I’ve just been eating and staying off the scale so I’m assuming that my weight will be up when I finally get around to it.  Of course, it’s also been a weekend of Easter feasting which has been lovely and full of laughs and sunshine – just what I’ve been needing.

I thought I was going to have a good post here but the more I type, the more I realise that I’m not in the right space to be doing this.  I’m going to have to think hard about what I’m going to do to keep the weight off through the next stage of this stuff.  Sigh.  I really really just wanted answers.