From Lynne to Lean

Making Molehills Out of Mountains

2007-11-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

I went hiking yet again this weekend. It was awesome! We did a six-mile loop, activity level strenuous, in about three hours. My legs were jelly and the last mile and a half was uphill; for a while I felt like I wouldn’t make it. But I did and I’m really proud of that. Next weekend, two days after Thanksgiving, we’re going camping. I figure that’s a good way to avoid eating myself into a coma with holiday leftovers and that going out to do some really awesome hikes will be enough to undo Thanksgiving damage and to get me right back on track with my weight loss efforts. I’ve been thinking about what a hard time I had this year weight loss wise. I got side tracked around the holidays last year and just never really got this back on to my list of priorities. It was high on my wants and needs list but hardly ever featured on my actively doing list. So many other things just came up and got in the way. And I guess that’s ok in the sense that I’ve really accomplished a lot for myself school-wise and career-wise and I’m glad I made the investment. But getting my weight and fitness back to a level that I’m more comfortable with is really something that I need to turn a lot of attention to. I’m sick of being aware of how uncomfortable I am but continuously delaying doing something about it. I just feel that now that I’ve finally got my focus back I’m dealing with the mother of all weight loss de-railers: The Holidays. I want to survive the next few months with a semblance of normality. I want to thoroughly enjoy the season and the festivities without letting go of my long term goals. I want the ultimate achievement: partake in the merriment AND still lose weight. Is this even possible? I don’t know if it is. In times past I was able to do that but losing weight was simpler for me. I had more to lose and along with that more room to error. But now that I’ve gotten into the battle of these last fifteen or so pounds, everything is important. Every little thing counts. A couple of years ago I could slip up a few days, gain a few pounds, but three or four days of being back on plan would undo the gain. But now it seems that one slip undoes weeks worth of work and I can’t have enough “good” days in a row to get further than breaking even. In fact when I look back over the past half year I see that most of my work has been weight maintenance even though I was putting in weight loss effort. It’s very discouraging and weighs heavy on the morale after a while. Regardless of that I’m still determined to do this even if I just have to accept that part of this process is the natural fact that it gets harder and harder the closer you get and so you have to be prepared for frustrations and feeling discouraged. Anyways, so that’s where I’m at with things right now: experimenting with the fierce kick-ass wilderness chick inside of me and trying to balance her needs with the fierce grumpy couch-potato chick that’s also inside me!

It Doesn’t Take Much

2007-11-05T15:02:00.000-08:00

This Saturday I went hiking with my husband and our little dog. This is probably the first real exercise I’ve had in months. I felt like a newbie out there, I was out of breath walking on the flat part of the trail before we even hit the first hill. My husband had no problem with it and even my five pound little dog was way ahead of me, looking back every once in a while with a, “Come on! Pick up the pace!” expression on his face. But I stumbled my way all the way up and down that trail and oh did it feel good! I forgot how it’s an oddly pleasing feeling when it seems like your legs are burning and rubbery. I also forgot how good it feels when you’re out on a cool day and your body is warm because of the exertion but you can feel that cool, crisp air in your lungs. I just love that feeling! We only hiked two miles total but it was enough to wear me out. I so needed it, it reminded me of how good it feels to be using your body and pushing it to its limits. I’ve spent the last few months so focused on my mind that I forgot how good it feels to get up and use every muscle you’ve got. Lately it’s like my body has been an after thought or mostly it’s working against me not for me. But I know that this is what I needed. It didn’t take much, but just reaching for my tennis shoes instead of the Chinese take out menu felt good and has put me in a whole different frame of mind.

Weigh To Go! Part 21

2007-11-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9

August's Weigh-In: 144.3

September's Weigh-In: 145.2

October's Weigh-In: 147.8

Ok, I didn’t mean to skip out on the entire month of October. I’ve been studying since September for a major comprehensive exam that I need to pass in order to get my degree and so for the last month all I’ve done is study in every spare moment I’ve gotten. Thankfully over the weekend I took the exam and now I’m just sitting around waiting to hear if I passed it. As you can see by the numbers, things just have kind of been steady. And when I say steady I mean a steady increase in the direction of up. It’s terrible folks. When my life gets busy like it has lately everything goes on the back burner. And when I get stressed out, like I did over this exam that is testing the knowledge I’ve spent three year accumulating, I throw everything out the window and focus solely on what needs to be done and eating goes out of control and is sometimes used as comfort or a de-stressor. The biggest problem with this is that after the dust has settled and I survive whatever stressful challenge I’ve been dealing with, I have to face whatever damage I’ve done poundage-wise. And that’s where I’m at now. I’m flirting with the 150 mark; something I haven’t done since May/June of 2006 but during that time it was a downward trend. I can’t believe that around this time last year I only weighed 134. I really don’t want to undo all the hard work that I put in. I keep saying this and now it’s time to really make an effort to do something about it. So, where to begin…

Ok, So I Should Actually Have A Plan, Right?

2007-09-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

So last week I was talking about how I’ve developed the habit of being “good” on weekdays and then just totally pigging out on weekends and I want to stop doing that. The problem is, how? I need to not think of the weekends as a crazy free for all. But I also need to give myself some room to be human. I think I’m so rigid in my thinking that there needs to be room in my plan for doing what other people do and being able to go out to dinner with friends or family without feeling like it’s the end of the world and an excuse to eat like there’s no tomorrow. Take for instance this weekend. Tomorrow night I’m going to dinner with my friends and then on Saturday the husband wants to go to lunch at a certain restaurant known for its ridiculously oversized portions and whose approach seems to be that you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten a burger the size of your head. I should still be able to go to these places, right? You can live a normal life without becoming a hermit and shunning all social occasions while losing weight, right? Well unfortunately the first thing that my little brain jumps to is, “Fuck it. I’ll be eating like shit tomorrow and Saturday, why not just start now and begin anew on Monday?” As I am typing this right now, the guys are outside my office door eating pizzas that they had delivered along with a huge flat sheet cake. It’s not even anyone’s birthday; this is honest to goodness a typical Thursday lunch for them. And I’m just sitting here thinking, “What to do? What to do?” because I have not yet learned the art of moderation. I’m either super in control or completely without it when it comes to food. So I need to change my mindset and I need a plan to live like a “normal” person but still accomplish the goals I have. And honestly, right now I’m at a loss as to how to go about doing this.

The Biggest Hurdle

2007-09-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

The hardest thing for me lately has been weekends. I used to actually get my best exercise workouts in on the weekends but that hasn’t happened for a few months. I think it’s because I’m so busy during the week that come Friday night, Saturday and Sunday I just want to lay on my couch and do nothing. Also, where I live it is as hot as the surface of the sun and I really don’t want to do anything but find ways to stay cool and avoid heat stroke. (Yeah, that’s one of my many excuses.) The worst part though is my weekend eating habits. I eat really healthy and balanced all week. It actually has proved to be pretty easy because I’m so busy with work, my internship, and classes that I plan meals for the day, take those items with me, and stay so busy that I don’t have time for additional snacking. But sometime this summer I picked up the habit of staying on target during the weekdays and then going crazy on the weekends. I think it started because it seems like there’s something big going on every weekend that’s food related whether it’s dinner with the family, a birthday, a get together with friends, or a vacation. And I often use that excuse, “Well I’ll be eating like crap on (fill in the day) so I might as well eat like crap this whole weekend and start anew on Monday.” And I’ve been using that excuse every weekend since around June to justify eating well for four days and then binge-eating for three. This is also part of my “I’m so busy, I deserve a little break. I’m going to treat myself to (fill in the blank with whatever fast food I’m craving at the moment)." And obviously this is the reason why my weight has pretty much stayed the same over the last few months. But more than that, this is an unhealthy habit and I don’t want to have it anymore. This is related to my whole “good” food / “bad” food mindset and after thinking about it, I’ve decided that it’s time to tackle it because it’s not doing me any good. In fact, it’s brought me to a standstill and just makes me plain unhappy.

Weigh To Go! Part 20

2007-09-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 July’s Weigh-In: 139.8 August’s Weigh-In: 144.3 Umm, hi. I feel like I’m crawling back here with my head down after having disappeared for so long. I know that it’s been almost a month since I posted and here I’m barely getting around to posting a weigh-in for August. I just don’t know where the time goes guys! I’m into my absolute last class of my degree, working my regular job, and putting in thirty or so hours at my internship site. It has been just madness but I’m starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s September already and I only have to make it the next four months to December and I will be able to graduate and get my career going. Very exciting, very time consuming all of this, but I’m afraid my poor little blog has suffered because of my limited time and I’m really afraid that there isn’t anyone even reading this anymore. Hi and I’m sorry I’ve been MIA if you’re still here! I’ve really missed you all and I’m hoping that from now on I’ll be around more often. Getting to “talk” to you guys and keep up on your journeys helps me stay focused and when I don’t get to do it, as you can see by the above numbers, things often start to go south. All eating and no exercise makes Lynne a fat girl. So I’m making a big effort to get back into things. I really hate to feel so bad about myself and uncomfortable in my own body. It really sucks that when I get swamped or overwhelmed one of the first things to go is my consciousness about my health and habits. I think I just have to remember that no matter how many things I’m juggling at once I can’t drop the ball on this, so to speak.

Apparently, Smug Goes Before A Fall

2007-08-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

So the past few days kicked my ass unfortunately. It started out harmlessly enough, we went to a friend’s birthday party on Saturday night and it was catered with awesome Chinese food. So I ate. Then Sunday we went to dinner with friends at the Olive Garden. And I ate some more. It wasn’t that bad, it’s not like I think that actively trying to lose weight means that I’m never allowed to just eat a regular meal without worrying about it’s calorie content. The problem is that I have the tendency when I spend two days eating for pleasure to find myself on day three fantasizing about what wonderful possibilities there are to eat that day and maybe the next and so on and so forth. And this is why yesterday I had brownies for breakfast, a huge order of pad thai for lunch, jack in the box for dinner, and a hot fudge sundae for dessert. Just because. I had no other reason other than I felt like it. Luckily today I felt like getting back on plan. Eating like that makes me uncomfortable, bloated, lethargic, you name it. So today I once again have all my healthy goodies. I’m more of a slight bitch than a smug one but I’m climbing my way back up the self-satisfied ladder!

Yep, Still A Smug Bitch

2007-08-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here at work about to eat a bowl of cherries and I'm still all pleased with myself about all the good food choices that I've been making. In my lunch bag I brought more fruit, soup, oatmeal, some almonds, and a 100 calorie bag of popcorn. And not only am I sitting here gloating over my healthy goodies but I'm sitting here in a pair of pants that I have never worn before because I jumped on the buffet train the week I bought them and so have not fit into them all summer. Until today. Yay!

Smug Bitch

2007-08-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

Ha ha! Yes, I am a smug bitch sometimes. So far this morning I’ve had a large fuji apple (they’re my favorite and they’re absolutely delicious!), a big bowl of strawberries, and a light yogurt. And I’ve got all kinds of little goodies in my lunch bag to last me until tonight; I’ve got lots more fruit and yogurt, a cup of soup, a 100-calorie snack pack and some oatmeal, some almonds, and a nice salad. It’s awesome. And it’s funny, because I crack myself up at how pleased with myself I get when I’m eating like this and actually enjoying it. I totally have a little smirk on my face! And that's what's funny. I can be all down on myself like I was feeling over the past few posts but when I do a couple of things that feel right and like they're in line with my goals, I just bounce right back. And that's good. It shows me what I constantly forget: just when I think I've given my all and I'm ready to give up, I find that I still have more fight in me.

Weigh To Go! Part 19

2007-07-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 139.9 Yesterday’s Weigh-In: 139.8 Oh that frustrates me to no end! One month and I didn’t lose anything. But actually this doesn’t show the whole story because I spent the whole month of July gaining weight, and I know that at some point during the month I had blown past the 145 mark. At least I managed to lose enough to bring me back down to where I started. I’m not sure where to go from here. I see how far I’ve come and that there’s not that far for me to go but I honestly feel like I can’t do it. I don’t know, I’ll have to blog later in the week to tell you all where my head is at.

Still Hanging In There

2007-07-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

I’m still trying to hang in there and do my best. Last week I had one pair of jeans that fit and I was feeling pretty depressed and kind of freaking out about what I should do next. I actually ended up doing something that I’ve only joked about doing; I called into work Fat. Ok, so I told them that I wasn’t feeling well and I needed to take a day off, which was sort of true since I was feeling so rundown after finals week, but really my biggest motivator for taking time off was the fact that I didn’t want to show up to work naked. So on Tuesday I called in fat and then I got through Wednesday and Thursday by wearing my only pair of jeans again. Screw it, I thought, everyone's in training this week (luckily) so no one is around to notice anyways. That got me safely to the weekend where I could kind of regroup my thoughts and focus on what to do about this whole situation. I’m happy to say that things are starting to look up a little. What I didn’t realize last week is that I was bloated from eating badly and PMS. Once I started exercising, eating right, and getting more sleep I managed to get myself back down to where I was pre-finals. So now I have clothes that “fit” again, although “fit” is in the eyes of the beholder, or more accurately in the comfort level of the wearer. So what to do next? I think Jen and Melissa are right; I need to go buy some stuff that I can actually wear comfortably just to get myself through this. I’m so stubborn though, I guess rebuying this stuff feels a little like admitting defeat and that’s why I’ve been so reluctant to actually do it. It’s just funny to me (funny ironic, definitely not funny ha ha), a few months ago I was somewhere around three pounds from my goal. At one point I was that close to hitting it. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not about saying that I hit that one number that one time. No, I need to figure out how to not lose sight of the bigger picture. No matter how much I logically tell myself that this is about long term life changes, it’s about health and not appearance, I still get into this mindset that this is a problem that has an end result, a quick solution. I don’t know, I’m a pretty smart cookie but it never ceases to amaze me how I can be hit over the head with this point, think that I’ve finally got it figured out, and then be surprised when I revert back to that short-term, surface goal kind of thinking. Either way, like I said, I’m still here and I’m still trying. I think the important thing is that I’m not giving up. I still believe in myself and I still think that I’m worth it.

Hitting Rock Bottom

2007-07-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

I have no choice but to really get serious and figure out what to do about my weight. I’ve basically been fucking around this entire year and I’m really paying for it now. Back in early December I was on a nice downward trend, the exercising was going well, and my size 4 pants and skirts were sitting a little loosely. I think it was around this time that I took all the clothes in my closet that were too big and I donated them. I also bought a lot of stuff to replace those things. Well, this morning I had a low moment. See, within the last few weeks I’ve become increasingly limited in what I can wear and it sucks because I’ve been down to a handful of items that I just keep rotating. I think those few items represent less than 10% of all the stuff in my closet and it’s annoying to stand in front of racks of clothes and know that you still have nothing to wear. Things have just been too tight and really uncomfortable and I’ve been miserable at work and school sitting for hours in clothes that barely fit. Well, I found something even worse than that. As of today, I have one pair of pants that fit. I donated all the stuff that I had in my current size because I didn’t want or think that I’d be right back here and all the stuff that I bought since then are a good couple of sizes too small. I am now down to one pair of dark wash jeans and a couple of ill-fitting blouses that are made for Fall or Spring weather. Just lovely, especially considering that it’s been hitting a hundred and fucking fifteen degrees everyday around here. I honestly don’t know what to do right now. Last week I worked on Monday and Tuesday and then we had Wednesday off for the fourth of July holiday. I took the rest of the week off as I had finals for school. Finals were incredibly stressful, I don’t think I’ve had this many big projects due at once for a while and I even skipped sleeping on Thursday. In the middle of trying to get through all of that I basically just sat around in sweat pants and ate without focus, without thinking. Big mistake and I knew it at the time but I just couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to stop myself. All I wanted to do was focus on school and nothing else and for some reason I always have this sick, twisted idea that eating what I want, when I want is being nice to me. So then this morning I go to put on professional clothes for work and they just no longer fit. What was I thinking? I knew that I was already teetering at the edge of fitting into this stuff and I just went ahead and jumped off that cliff without thinking. So I’m sitting here wearing jeans. I’m supposed to be wearing dress pants and instead I’m sitting here in denim jeans. Luckily my job is never super uptight about the dress code and I’m going to do some filing and office cleaning which justifies the choice to wear jeans but that’s only going to fool everybody for today. But what the hell am I going to do tomorrow? Ok guys, I'm seriously freaking out right now.

Weigh To Go! Part 18

2007-06-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 144.8 Today’s Weigh-In: 139.9 Yay! I'm back (just barely) in the 130's again! I've been working out a couple times a week and I've been really good about the eating thing. I finally stopped those crazy weekend binges, they were killing all the good work that I was doing Monday through Friday. I think 136 is a magic number for me. I'd like to be lower but any higher than that and I'm very uncomfortable in my own body. I'm only four pounds away from that and feeling like myself again!

Aww, A Nice Pick Me Up For When I’m Down

2007-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

The lovely and I must say talented Jeni nominated me as a Thinking Blogger! That is so sweet and needed because sometimes I think, “Is there anybody out there who enjoys reading this shit or are they humoring me by occasionally stopping by?” So it’s nice to know that I don’t stink! There are a lot of bloggers out there who I could tag with this award but I think the majority of the blogs I read have already been tagged. All I know is that the blogs that I read and comment on regularly deserve an award for what they do. I am constantly amazed by these incredible women who make me think everyday and I find you all so inspiring and wonderful. I think I could just go on and on about all of you. And speaking of “Thinking” I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. Mainly, why am I such a Negative Nancy and why have I only been able to put in mixed efforts into my weight loss instead of committing to it completely like I’ve done in the past. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there’s so much craziness in my life right now. I’ve been keeping a really hectic work, school, and internship schedule. Right now I average more than 50 hours a week. It’s really hard to balance things like family and homework and job requirements when you’re just running on empty. Hell, it’s hard for me to find time to do laundry or check the mail! But one of the biggest things weighing on me (pun intended) is my internship. Without going too much into things the internship site has really not kept up their end of things for us students and it has put us in a situation where we’re worried about fulfilling the requirements for our degree. Somehow I’ve become the unofficial spokesperson for us and have been working with our department and site to rectify things. It’s been extremely stressful and uncertain and I think that when I feel that way about a really important thing it leaks into other areas of my life. I’m stressed, I eat. I’m tired, I eat. I feel bad for eating so much, I eat some more. Vicious cycle! But I’m trying to fix it guys, really I am. I have to remind myself that taking care of me doesn’t mean self-soothing myself with hot fudge sundaes. In the end I’m not really helping me at all, in fact I’m just digging a hole for myself. There just isn’t any quick solution or fast fix to some of this stuff and I need to learn to be ok with that. To sum it all up: Twinkies do not equal Solutions!

Argghh! (That's The Sound Of Complete Frustration)

2007-06-06T17:35:00.000-07:00

So, so frustrated right now. I'll get to that in a minute though because first I want to update you all on how the Birthday weekend went. It was so nice, I really do love to celebrate birthdays! I totally dragged it out over the past few days too. You just have to milk it for all it's worth! I ate a little too much but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. And then I woke up this morning and exercised and got right back on track, so overall I'm doing well and I really can say that I had a fantastic weekend. It was all worth it! Ok, now I have to talk about why I'm so upset. I just got back from dinner with a friend. Her and I have known each other for only about two years but we're very close. She's a great friend; we have so much fun, we get along really well and we've been through a hell of a degree program that you just can't help but bond over. And maybe because of all that, what we talked about really got to me. She was telling me that she couldn't understand why people who have problems with their weight struggle so much. She said that she realized that what she was saying was really bad but she really just doesn't understand why fat people don't just stick to a diet and exercise given that if you just persevere it will totally work. And I appreciate the fact that she was being dead honest, that she knew what she was saying was insensitive but that she was admitting that she really didn't get it. But it doesn't change the fact that I was so hurt and insulted. See, the thing is that she doesn't think I'm fat, she thinks I'm average, and so she's talking about people who have problems with food, who lack willpower, blah, blah, blah and not realizing that she's completely dismissing every struggle, every problem that I have in regards to food, body image, and perception of self and others, etc. She had no idea that everything that she was saying about "those people" applied to me. I am one of those people! I really didn't know what to say, I think I said a few things just to kind of point out some things that she wasn't taking into consideration and then I just changed the subject. I honestly didn't want to talk about it at all. A small part of me was angry and wanted to set her straight about a few things but really all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I think I was so hurt and embarrassed that I didn't even notice that I was angry too. I don't know, I just feel sick about it. She's very, very petite. I know that sometimes even a size 0 petite is a little too big for her. She eats whatever she wants and she doesn't have that food obsessed mentality that I have. Food is just a non-issue for her, weight is a non-issue, and so she's so far removed from knowing what this is like, she can't even put herself in the shoes of someone who isn't as lucky as she is when it comes to this stuff. And maybe that's why I felt so horrible, I don't think she can understand. I think this stuff is so different from what her reality is that she'll never get it. She has never grown up a chubby little girl. She has never heard someone make a fat comment behind her back or dealt with those wonderfully ignorant people who say it straight to you. Like fat people don't have feelings or deserve to hear that shit. I just realize that this thing, this Fat has always played some huge (and at times horrible) role in my childhood and adulthood. That it is a big part of my history, sometimes feels like it overwhelms my present, and threatens my future. She just won't likely ever get that and I don't even feel like helping her "get it". That's not my fucking job. Ok, so I know I just wrote this all in the heat of the moment. I hope it makes sense, I hope there's not too many typos, and I hope that I didn't just emotionally dump all over you all. I'm just pissed and hurt and well, Frustrated!

Weigh To Go! Part 17

2007-05-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 132 Yesterday’s Weigh-In: 144.8 That's a gain of 12.8 pounds and it's about what I expected. I'm at that point where I'm anxious to get it off. I'm so uncomfortable in my clothes and as the weather keeps heating up (we hit triple digits last week) I really want to just get back on track. I did kinda okay over the holiday weekend, I didn't do great but I did manage to refrain from eating my house. Man, I can't believe that one crappy month can cause so much damage. I guess I just have to take it for what it is and get back at it.

One Step At A Time

2007-05-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

Well, I’ve tentatively been back at it for two days now. I feel better already just having some semblance of routine back and not feeling like I’m spiraling out of control anymore. I peeked at the scale this morning to see what the damage is. I usually only weigh in once a month officially but after a spectacular binge like the one I’m recovering from I always have a morbid curiosity to see just how much carnage has ensued from my little excursions into bingeland. The numbers aren’t pretty, people: 145 pounds. Now I’m hoping that some of that is bloat or water retention or basically anything but actual gained fat. Here’s why I’ve got my fingers crossed: Over the last three weeks I just couldn’t seem to keep my shit together, I’d go a couple days of being sensible and then lose it for a couple of days in a row. So if the 145 is an accurate number and I gained about 15 pounds, then according to my food journal I gained a pound for each day spent off the wagon. A pound for each day? That just doesn’t seem right or maybe what I mean is that it doesn’t seem fair! Either way, I’m trying to get back into it. I’m trying to take each day at a time and not worry about upcoming things. If I think about how over the next two and a half weeks I have multiple dinner get-togethers with friends and family, a holiday weekend full of all you can eat barbecues, or my birthday weekend at the beginning of June (in which the festivities usually stretch out over a four day or more period) then I’d get discouraged knowing that these are all times that I need to find some kind of balance and moderation. If anything I have to not think about any of that and only concentrate on each day as it comes. It reminds me of when you’re jogging and you see how far you have to go and it feels like you’ll never make it. Whenever that happens I sometimes find it easier to just put my head down and concentrate on each step, just putting one foot in front of the other. Then before you know it, you look up and the distance has gotten way smaller and you feel like you’ll make it to the end of that mile after all. I think I’ll use this same method with my eating over the next few weeks. I know I can do it but it’s just hard given my tendency to completely go off the deep-end anytime you say cake.

Starting Over Yet Again

2007-05-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

Well, I’m back at day one again. It started harmlessly enough. I went out to dinner with a friend and decided to order an entrée that is a favorite that I haven’t had in a long time because it’s more calories than is allotted in a day. Sure, I could have eaten half and then taken the rest home. I could have ordered a water with lemon instead of a regular coke. I could have said no thanks when my friend suggested that we order dessert. Hell, I could have suggested we share the dessert instead of us both ordering two different things just so we could try them both. But I didn’t and that’s how it innocently started. Then the next day I woke up and I kept going. My husband came home from being out of town for a week and I was excited to see him so I decided to celebrate with a huge meal and lots and lots of ice cream. Then the next day one of my really good friends came back into town and we decided to all get together for a girls lunch, and I thought hell I’d already blown it the last few days so I’ll order something that I really, really want and I’ll eat it all. And I did. And it didn’t stop after I left them and I got back home and that’s how I ended up eating homemade cookie dough all the way up until bedtime last night. Oh guys, even my big jeans are way too tight! Things are just not looking good.

I’m Such a Poseur

2007-05-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

So I got my act together Monday and today is day three of being back to normal. Boy was Monday rough! After ten days of eating like a maniac it was so hard to go back to eating sensibly. And that really bothers me, I eat very well everyday and I’ve been at it for a long time. But it’s still not my true, natural way of eating. When left to my own devices I still overeat, snack way too much, and make bad choices. Co-workers, friends, family members always comment on what a healthy eater I am. I feel like that’s all a lie. I’m a fat girl pretending to eat well for weeks or even months at a time but deep down inside my eating habits aren’t really any different. I don’t know if that will ever change. I always read other bloggers who have really embraced eating healthy and exercising. They do it just for the sheer joy of doing it. But I don’t, I still exercise and eat healthy as a means to an end. I do it for the benefits only and I’d stop doing it tomorrow if weight loss and health were possible without it. I don’t know, maybe this is all just the detox talking! Either way, it doesn’t mean I’m going to give up. I’ll still find my way. And I know that everyday back to normal gets just a little bit easier.

Rebel Without A Cause (To Stop Eating)

2007-05-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

I need to stop eating. This is just ridiculous. I just got back from spending a week in Southern Utah and in addition to enjoying the weather and the views, I ate way, way too much. I don’t know if it was the rustic cabin in the woods setting or what but the meals I ate were fit for a mountain man. I guess no tv, no internet, no telephone equals eating for entertainment. So now I’m home and I still can’t stop. My husband left to be out of town for another week today and I’ve spent the day eating ice cream, chips, drinking real coke (as opposed to diet) and my dinner consisted of a double bacon cheeseburger and large curly fries meal. To be honest, I’m eating cookie dough as we speak. And I know I shouldn’t be but I just want to and I can’t seem to scrape up enough desire to stop doing it right now. I know that some of you have written about sneak eating. I rarely ever do it anymore but as long as I can remember there have been times where I would binge eat when I’m alone. I used to love to be by myself, just me and my favorite food friends. Some people when they were teenagers would have big parties while their parents were out of town. My rebellion was inviting the $1 value menu home when I had the house to myself. I honestly can tell you that I have no idea why I do it. Growing up, my parents never monitored my eating habits or restricted what or when I could or couldn’t eat. My eating habits and food preferences were really a non-issue. Yet despite this, I have always loved to sneak eat by myself. Maybe it’s if no one sees it then it really didn’t happen? I don't know who I think I'm fooling because if I continue on like this, both my wallet and jeans will tell on me.

Weigh To Go! Part 16

2007-05-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 132.2 Yesterday’s Weigh-In: 132 First of all, thanks guys for all your kind comments on the last post. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one walking through the stores thinking, “WTF?!” So with all my bitching and moaning I forgot to post my weight for April. 132 isn’t bad. Like I had mentioned a few posts ago, I really feel like I keep losing and gaining the same five pounds. I start around the low 130’s at the beginning of the month, gain a couple of pounds and then take them off just in time for end of the month weigh in. It’s a little bit frustrating but at least I’m maintaining in a sense. The only problem is that it’s unintentional maintenance. I’m actively trying to lose weight and yet at the end of the month all I have to show for it is breaking even. How is it in a 30 day month I can have 28 “good” days and then two bad ones and those 28 days seem to count for nothing? Ok, ok, I bitched and whined last post. I won’t do that again with this one! It’s not about numbers, right? This is worth so much more than that, I know. But sometimes you seriously think to yourself, WTF?! Hmm, that seems to be a recurring theme in my life lately…

Warning: I Am About To Be “Negative Nancy” All Over This Place

2007-05-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hi. Ok, I know a fat blog is about weight loss and all its ups and downs and not just a place to bitch and gripe but I really need to be a big, whiny baby right now. Please indulge me. So yesterday was my second year anniversary and it started off wonderfully. We both had the day off and had slept late and were just sitting around watching tv. I should have just kept on doing that. But instead I decided that my husband and I should take a trip to the mall. He had given me a gift certificate so I thought it would be really nice to stroll around the shops to burn a few calories before our big fancy dinner and maybe I’d even find something pretty to buy to wear that night. Well, after a couple of hours I just wanted to get the hell out of there before I burst into tears. What is with the new styles of clothing this season? All that shit looks the same and I can’t wear any of it. Everything seems to have that high empire waist and then a ton of material billowing out from it. I look pregnant in that crap! Everything is also way too long. It hits me right at my saddlebag thighs and makes my hips, thighs, and ass look huge. It draws so much attention to that area of my body that I am only one step away from pointing arrows and blinking lights strung around my ass. Then the sleeves are very short and full of elastic. The stuff I was trying on made my arms look like sausages in a tourniquet. You couldn’t design a more unflattering fit for my specific body type if you tried. I don’t know what I did to piss off the fashion industry but I’m thinking that the new trends are some kind of cruel personal shot at me. Yes, a few hours in a mall have made me paranoid. So I tried not to get too down after we left the mall empty handed. I was determined to go and have a nice, romantic dinner at this really beautiful restaurant. The view was incredible, the service was awesome, and the food was so, so good. Until towards the end of the meal I felt like I was going to vomit. Tell me if this has happened to any of you but I’d say within the last two years I’ve eaten more healthy than I ever have before and it’s actually affected my ability to eat rich, fried, heavy food. I have had a handful of times where I have actually gotten sick and been throwing up because the food was just too heavy for me. We actually had to rush the check and then drive home as fast as possible because I was afraid I was going to be sick like I have in previous times. I made it home but all our plans for that evening were ruined as I lay in my room in the dark trying not to throw up. Guys, I was (and am) just so disappointed with yesterday. Evidentially, according to store standards, I am too fat to fit into today’s new trends. I am supposedly so oddly shaped that they don’t even make clothes for girls that look like me. Yet because I have done so much to get healthy like eating only natural foods and 70 to 80 percent of my diet being fresh veggies and fruit, and trying to eat only whole grains, nuts, and cutting out all oil, fat, butter, etc. my body can’t handle something that’s been deep fried and covered in a sugar-based sauce. I get sick when I eat too many carbohydrates mixed with sugar and oil. There’s something about that mixture that is poison to my system. That’s some ironic shit: too fat for trendy clothes, too healthy for crap food.

Hey! April Hasn't Been A Total Wash!

2007-04-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

It’s already April 26th! Where has the month gone? Well, the ongoing saga of our broken laptop computer continues. It came back earlier in the week only to freak out again and so back to the shop it went. Supposedly, it’s coming home on Saturday for good. I’ll believe it when it happens. So where do I begin to catch you up on how April has gone? Well, I’ve been frantically working on a paper over the past month and that’s been chewing up most of my free time. This is the first draft of what will eventually be my thesis so I’ve put every spare moment into it. Luckily all the previous work that I had been doing on it was recovered off the laptop so thankfully I was able to finish it by this week’s deadline. I couldn’t justify posting on this blog or surfing other blogs when I had a quiet moment because I knew that I had to dedicate that time to my paper. But I finished it today and so now I’m ready to get back into Fatblogland. I have missed you all! As far as exercise goes, I’ve been actually doing pretty well. I exercise in the morning a few days a week before work. I can’t believe that I’ve actually stuck to that given how I feel about early rising. Some days I’ve just been too tired and I’ll sleep in but I always set my alarm early and make the best effort I have to get up and get at it. I’ve also started jogging at a track at a park near my house on the weekends. I still want to participate in my city’s marathon in December so that’s been helping in just giving me a way to judge how many miles I can actually run instead of guesstimating like I’ve always done in the past. So big gold star for me there! As far as the eating goes, it’s going alright too. My pattern seems to be that I am fine on “normal” weeks but get screwed up every time we have a little blip in the schedule. Like I was doing well and then we went on vacation to San Diego and I had to spend a few weeks taking off those extra pounds. Then I started losing and along came Easter and another week or so of taking of that weight. And now Monday is my wedding anniversary (Yay! Two years! I can’t believe how fast it goes by!) and there will definitely be some eating complete with dessert at our favorite restaurant. Then the second week of May we’re going to spend a week at a cabin in Utah. I always have the best of intentions but I have yet to make it through a vacation without losing my mind and eating everything in sight. It’s just hard to keep losing and gaining the same three to five pounds over and over again. I just feel like all this hard work of exercising and really making sure I eat right is just damage control between holidays and vacations. Oh well, it is what it is and I just have to keep at it. Either way, it’s good to be back. I can’t wait to see what you all have been doing. Like I said before, I have really missed you guys!

I’m Not MIA

2007-04-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

I’m not MIA, but the hard drive to my computer is. We’ve been waiting for a few weeks now for them to finish retrieving all the important information on it (I swear it’s like my life is in that computer, from school work to important papers to all my favorite blog links, the list goes on and on) and then they’ll do whatever fancy computer tech stuff they have to do to hopefully ensure this never happens again and return it to us. So I’m stealthily blogging at work. I know that makes me a bad employee but I had to steal a moment just to say hi to you all. I didn’t want you to worry that I had finally eaten myself into some kind of chocolate coma or something!

Weigh To Go! Part 15

2007-03-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 134.4 Yesterday’s Weigh-In: 132.2 Yay! Boy it feels good to post a lost again. 2.2 pounds, I'll take that! And it's a good 2.2 pounds if you know what I mean. There have been times where the numbers didn't really change but I'm struggling to pull on my jeans and I know that I've probably gained weight and lost muscle. Well it's nice that right now I'm sitting opposite of that. My clothes are finally starting to fit right again and I'm feeling just really good about my body. It's so nice to have the little happy moments like this!

Cookies And Other Ramblings

2007-03-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

I think one of the things that I’ve always tended to do is to assume that good efforts, no matter how small, will produce extraordinary results just by virtue of how difficult losing weight is. I also tend to “forget” that excessive sloppy eating combined with lack of exercise outweighs (pardon the pun) those small efforts. Let me explain- if I resist eating that bastard of a cookie* that my husband so carelessly bought then I expect that the kind of willpower I showed should be rewarded by an instant loss of fat. If I open the fridge, see that little sucker taunting me, and then through herculean efforts manage to shut the fridge door without inhaling said cookie, then I should walk away from the fridge at least a pound lighter just as a reward for resisting. I mean fighting temptation burns calories, right? So I get frustrated when my body feels the same and my clothes fit the same and I don’t seem to be losing anything. But I’ve conveniently forgotten that last week in San Diego I ate. I ate like eating was my job and I was working towards employee of the month. Here’s an example of exactly what I’ll think to myself: “At the zoo in San Diego I walked all over that place! There were hills; we walked for almost six hours! That had to burn something!” What I forget: I had four churros at the zoo, a burger and fries for lunch and a large cherry icee. And that was just before 3 in the afternoon, dinner and dessert is where it really got out of hand. Along these same lines, I started something new this week. In the mornings before work I wake up early and spend 20 minutes with Steely Dan. I did it Monday, I did it Tuesday, and I did it Wednesday. Now a little back-story, I am not a morning person. And really that’s putting it lightly. In fact I have a notorious reputation for being very grumpy in the mornings and no matter how much sleep I have had, getting out of the bed feels damn near impossible. Friends and family have stories about times when they have woken me up and the ensuing wrath that followed. These incidents have lead to me being at times referred to as The Lynne Monster. As in, “shh, the Lynne Monster is sleeping! Do NOT wake her up!” Basically, one of my ultimate favorite things to do in life is to sleep. I often have insomnia and am a light sleeper so if I do actually manage to get into a real good sleep then the worst thing in the world for me is to be woken up. Ok, I think you all get the picture! So this whole thing with me waking up early is monumental. Really, I’m surprised it’s not in the papers yet. I have actually called people to tell them about it because I knew they would not believe it even if it were actually in the morning headlines. And because getting up early is such a big deal to me I’ll have to make sure that I don’t get frustrated if pounds don’t just start magically melting away. I mean, it’s only 20 minutes and it’s only been three days. It will have it’s benefits but they’re going to be long term and only if I keep this and other things that I’ve been doing up. Patience grasshopper, patience. *Oh those girl scouts! It’s like their cookies are crack and they are totally my dealers. On a side note, the other night I went to the grocery store to buy grapes, apples, lettuce, etc., and they were standing outside selling boxes of the good stuff. They had signs that read, “Get them while they’re here! Girl Scout cookies will only be available for three more days and then they’re gone until next year!” Now they know that a sign like that totally messes with people’s heads and triggers the primitive part of our brain that is guilty of impulsive cookie buying. Freud called it the id and it lives on caramel delights and thin mints.

Ahhh, Vacation!

2007-03-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

Hey guys! I just got back late last night from a week long vacation. It was one of those last minute decisions where we literally decided at 8 pm at night to wake up the next morning and spend a week at the beach. What a great idea and I needed a break from school/work/life like you wouldn't believe! We drove down to San Diego and crammed as many activities into the days as we could. Some activities were hectic like running all over the zoo and visiting museums in Balboa park, and others were just solely peaceful and beautiful like whale watching or sitting on the beach as the sun set. Sometimes you just have to go and look at the ocean and be amazed at its vastness and eternal beauty. Sometimes you just have to stand at its edge and appreciate it, and to feel how small and insignificant standing near it can make you feel. Ahhh, this vacation was worth it! Even the supposed 8 pound gain the scale showed this morning. When I left the scale said I was 133 pounds and today I weighed 141. I'm sure that's bloat that will go away after a few days (I hope!). I didn't watch what I ate, I just wasn't in the mood, and I guess it was enough to do some damage. If I wanted ice cream, I ate ice cream. If I wanted a burger and fries, I ate a burger and fries. Oh and there was a margarita with my chips and salsa at the Mexican restaurant in old town. And as I think about it, the list of "bad" food choices goes on and on. I feel fat right now but those meals are a part of some nice memories! I ate the burger and fries overlooking the sun setting at the beach, my husband and I snuggled together while we ate the ice cream, and we laughed about how sunburned our faces and tired our feet were as we sat and enjoyed that dinner in old town. So yeah, it was definitely worth it! Incidentally, my husband weighed himself this morning also and he gained all of 2 pounds. I think he actually ate worse than I did too. Eight pounds versus two, how does that happen?!

Because Sometimes It Feels Like There Are Two Worlds

2007-03-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I've felt like there are two worlds: the fat world and the non-fat world. Every once in a while I make the mistake of saying something "weight-ish or fat-ish talk" in front of someone from the non-fat world and I get reminded of why I keep these things separate in my life. Last night I went to dinner with two of my friends. I know these girls from school and we've gotten really close over the past two years. Because I'm so close to them and therefore comfortable around them, I forgot that sometimes people who have never had a weight problem don't get what it's like to have a history with fighting the Fat. They honestly just can't relate and in turn, because I have had such a long history with weight and weight loss, I have a hard time imagining what things are like without having had these issues. Here's what pretty much happened: Right after we ordered, my friend "Amy" was saying how hungry she was because she had forgotten to eat since early in the morning (it was after 8:30 pm at this point). My other friend "Jane" (who is very petite, she's only about 5'2" and 100 pounds) started saying how she too forgets to eat. She then said that she sometimes wished that eating wasn't necessary because sometimes she's just too busy or would rather be doing something else than making and eating a meal. Amy completely agreed with her and said that sometimes she'll eat junk food because it's hard to entice her to make time for food and that sometimes she forgets to eat because she doesn't have anything "exciting" enough for her to stop what she's doing and eat. Jane said that she did the same thing too. This just really struck me. I spend so much of my day thinking about what I'm eating and how food fits into my life. Then I told them that for me it was the opposite of that. Sometimes (most of the time) the first coherent thought I have in the morning is, "What am I going to eat?" I told them how I love deciding what I'm going to eat and how much I enjoy the process of eating. That I get excited about food and actually have to be very aware of what I eat because I have the tendency at times to eat when I'm bored or for fun. That to be honest, food is something that I spend a lot of energy and time on. They both looked at me strangely with that "Wow. Really? Why?" look. It just instantly gave me that feeling like there's something wrong with me that I am so wrapped up in food and eating and "good choices" and "bad choices" and "on the wagon days" and "off the wagon days" and everything else that I spend so much of my waking hours dwelling on. I just feel glad when I talk to you all about this kind of stuff and I feel like you support me and completely understand what I'm talking about. If that didn't happen I think that moments like last night would really get to me more often. It's just hard to realize sometimes that for some people food is just food and not FOOD. It's nice to know that I'm not always alone when it comes to this stuff.

Weigh To Go! Part 14

2007-03-01T19:22:00.000-08:00

Weigh To Go! Part 14 December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 133.2 Yesterday’s Weigh-In: 134.4 Hey guys! I’m still here! I’ve been trying to find a free minute to post for the last few weeks now and this is pretty much the first chance I’ve gotten. I didn’t mean to go MIA the way I did, it’s just that things got super busy and then super, unbelievably busy and then just plain ridiculous busy! It's funny how a few days turn into weeks which turns into a whole month. I switched over to a new division in our department and got a new very messy office, a new boss, and a ton of new work that had been piling up for months waiting for me to inherit it. I also have been so busy with school and practicum and every time I had a spare, quiet moment to write I knew I should be working on my research paper and I couldn’t in good conscience spend that time blogging, no matter how much I wanted to. But I’ve been missing you and missing posting and now that things are finally settling down a bit I’m hoping that I’ll be back to my regular schedule. Sheesh! Can you believe it’s March already? Where does the time go? So, where to begin. Well, as you can see by the numbers I’m still kind of sort of maintaining. And I think I should use the word “maintaining” loosely because it implies that I’ve been moderate and reasonable in keeping up the good habits that I’ve learned along the way and that really hasn’t been happening. In actuality, I’ve spent weekdays dieting and weekends feeding myself like there’s no tomorrow. I’m basically eating like a yo-yo dieter but instead of a pattern over months I’m doing it over a few days and it’s not healthy. I actually start the week heavier, lose a few during the week and then bloat back up over the weekend due to my Friday, Saturday and Sunday buffet style eating. Really, that’s just not good. I’m working on getting that squared away because eating like that isn’t going to help me in the long run. I also haven’t done a lick of exercise for a while. I did a Pilates work out and took two walks. For the whole month of February. And I really think it shows. At 134 I look worse in my clothes than I did when I was well in the 140's and it just goes to show that this whole weight loss thing really isn’t about just the numbers. So again, another thing that really needs to be remedied. That’s where things are right now, still plodding along even if I was silent for a while. But hey, it’s good to be back!

That's Right, One Day At A Time

2007-02-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

Ok, so far this week things are going well. I changed up the types of things I've been eating just to give me some variety and I've just been taking it one day at a time, no pressure. I'm feeling really good lately and it's helped me get back on track. Which reminds me that I didn't give you guys any update on my doctor's appointment. So all the tests came back normal and the doctor suggested that the next step would be using a sleeping aid to see if that was the real culprit in causing the fatigue and unfocused feelings I've had for awhile now. Let me just tell you that I didn't realize how long it's been since I've had a good night sleep! I have frequent insomnia a few times a week, and have trouble staying asleep and often wake up three or four times a night without reason. I think I've been having trouble with sleeping since starting grad school which means that it's been going on for almost two years. I go to work during the day and then school and practicum at night often pulling 50 to 55 hour weeks. It's not unusual for me to get home around 10:30 at night and on some of those nights I stay up studying or doing homework. Which means that my brain has trouble "shutting off" at the end of the day. But the past week and a half has shown me what good solid rest can do for me during the daytime. I'm setting up a bedtime routine to keep myself on this new sleep schedule so that after the prescription runs out I'll have good sleeping patterns set in place. It seems I am very thick headed because it took me two years and a trip to the doctor for blood work to find out that I need more sleep than intermittent napping can provide. So I hope all of you are having a wonderful week too, and good luck for the weekend! (I'm still pretending that I don't remember that Super Bowl Sunday is this weekend. I ususally spend the majority of the game glued to the chips and dip bowl and I still haven't come up with a surefire plan for avoiding this trap!)

Weigh To Go! Part 13

2007-01-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 133.0 Today’s Weigh-In: 133.2 Umm, yeah. So I posted a small gain this month, it’s actually the first time that I posted one. I also didn’t make it one full week with clean eating. I did good all week long and then it was downhill Friday afternoon. I got to get it together, soon.

Déjà vu

2007-01-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

Man, I ate entirely way too much this weekend. And while part of the reason is the fact that it’s hard to stay on track when you’re staying with people who eat in a completely different way than you, the truest reason why I stuffed myself silly is because I can’t seem to get over this feeling of wanting to graze and eat to a point of uncomfortable fullness. It’s not like I didn’t have better options. I took up some nice healthy snacks with me only to bring them back home in full. It’s like my enjoyment of shoving down food (and food that is not good for me either nutritionally or caloric wise) with reckless abandon outweighs the consequences that I know will result from that kind of behavior. After looking over the past month of my food journal I’m determined to have one on track week. So I’m back here starting day 1. Hmm, this feels familiar, somehow like I’ve been here before...

Still Doing Well, So Far...

2007-01-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

I have done well this week and have been back to normal as far as food and working out goes. Tomorrow the weekend starts and that will be the real test. Weekends lately have consisted of me completely falling off the wagon and acting like Saturday and Sunday are all you can eat buffet days. We're supposed to go stay with some friends this weekend and that's another hurdle for me, I get off track when my routine is interrupted and especially when my brain and stomach think they're in vacation mode. I'm going to do my best though so wish me luck! On another note, I really like this whole Pilates thing. Now it's only been a week of beginner's workouts but I think it's something that I will definitely enjoy enough to stick with. Not to mention that my current level of ability is Suck so it would be great to improve to Not Sucking As Bad. Really though, it's funny how whatever workouts I was doing before have obviously not prepared me for the types of moves this requires. Who knew that I was so unflexible? I have a hard time getting my legs straight, reaching my ankles, keeping my movements fluid, yada yada. Overall it's been fun to try something that's so different from what I've been doing. Oh and I went to the doctor yesterday concerning my lack of energy. They're going to run some blood tests and other such sorts. They should get the results back by Monday. It felt strange, this is the first time that I've ever been to the doctor's without already having an idea of what was wrong with me. It's easy to go in and tell them that I have a cold or a sore throat or a cough, etc. It's harder to try to explain vague symptoms like headaches and lethargy mixed with bouts of insomnia. So who knows, we'll see. On one hand I obviously don't want something to be wrong with me but on the other hand it would be nice to know that the way I've been feeling isn't all in my head and even better is something that can be corrected.

Back With A Roar, Or At Least With Better Than A Whimper

2007-01-16T20:01:00.000-08:00

Today, for the fifty millionth time since Christmas, I made an effort to get back at it. The day went well but I was so tired when I got home this afternoon that I ended up taking a two hour nap. Ha! I love how getting back on track saps my energy! But after I woke up I did the introductory workout on my new pilates dvd. It was actually pretty cool. I also suck so bad at it, that it should be fun to see how much I can improve myself. Seriously, I have no balance, no flexibility, and no endurance. So here's to improvement. On a different, more random note... Every once in a blue moon I wonder if I should have my thyroid checked. I'm always so tired (no matter how much sleep I get) and often feel lethargic and unfocused. I also notice that I get cold easily. I've heard that these are symptoms of low thyroid and I do know that there is a slight family history of it (one of my aunts has hypothyroidism.) Yet in the end, I think that the doctor would say that I'm fine. Maybe I just think it would be easier if I had some valid medical excuse for the fact that I often feel completely unmotivated, spacey, and given the choice I would do, in the great words of Peter from the movie Office Space, Nothing. I would feel kind of silly if I did go and get it tested and in the end it will turn out that I'm just lazy and need to wear a sweater.

A Case Of The Blahs

2007-01-12T00:31:00.000-08:00

I'm struggling. I'll get back on track for a few days and then spend a few days eating like there's no stop. I'm not sure why I'm having so much trouble; here the holidays are over and now I'm having problems with the over eating? I've definitely put on a few pounds and it doesn't help that I've done zero exercise. I'm just feeling blah about everything and I hope it goes away soon. I mean, a couple more weeks of this and I'll have to scratch all my resolutions from the last post and just put down, "Stop gaining weight!" I guess I figured that after the new year I'd be all gung ho and ready to go and well... I'm not.

I Resolve To Make My Resolutions

2007-01-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

First, I want to make sure I say thanks to you all for your kind words and encouragement, you guys are the best! This week I’ve finally gotten myself completely back on track. I had a little trouble after Christmas (a little too much chocolate and fast food then I should have had!) It’s like I had held out so long in the days leading up to Christmas, that my willpower was just shot. But getting back into things this week seems to already have taken off the holiday poundage. So I’ve been thinking long and hard about resolutions for this year. I’m definitely a resolutions type of girl; I like having a goal to work towards and the official feeling of making a commitment to change. I always have the standard “Be a better person/wife/daughter/sister” resolution at the top of my list so here are the ones that are more physical or fitness related. 1. Hit my 125 pounds goal. This is the first time that my new year’s resolution is to lose less than five pounds. Usually the number is something closer to 50 or 60 pounds. It will feel really good to see that number on the scale and give me a sense of achieving a goal that I’ve been working more than a year on. 2. Give up caffeine. I’ve wanted to do this for a while now. I seem to be really sensitive to caffeine and I drink entirely way too much of it. I’ve already tapered off drinking anything with caffeine in it after 3 in the afternoon because I notice that it gives me a lot of trouble with sleeping. I think this will be really good for me (if I can get through the withdrawals) and will help me to drink more water. 3. Be more comfortable as the person I am, balance it with the person I want to be. This is an overall goal bigger than just physical/fitness but I think a huge part of achieving it is learning to embrace and enjoy the body that God gave me and not to be so critical of it. I’m very good about looking towards the future and knowing what I want but I think that it makes me a little less able to just live in the moment and appreciate what I am or what I have right now. I think I might try to accomplish this by taking a few minutes at the end of the day to reflect and think about my life and how blessed and happy I am. I don’t ever do this enough right now. 4. Take up Pilates. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time too but just never made a decision to do it. I think it will be something new and exciting to do. Do you guys have any experience with it? Do you find it enjoyable? Can someone with two left feet have a hope of succeeding in it? 5. Ok, everyone. This is the big one and I really can’t even believe I’m typing it out for all to see. Here goes… I want to run in my city’s annual marathon. Every December they hold a marathon and half marathon and next year I’d like to be a part of it in some way. I don’t know if I could ever really work myself up to something like this. (Right now it feels as possible as if my resolution were to sprout wings and fly.) But I really want to try for this. I’ve even told a few of the people close to me that I want to do this and I’m committed to trying even if I can’t guarantee success. I guess it’s just hard to state this one out loud because it will be pretty embarrassing if I have to come back and tell everyone that I suck and that there’s no way that I made it near this goal. Oh well, I figure I’ll reach for something that seems impossible because imagine my surprise if I actually succeed! So there they are and I’m excited to start. Are you guys all gung ho to begin the new year too? I hope so! Good luck everybody and may 2007 be our best year yet!

Weigh To Go! Part 12 ( One Year Later)

2006-12-28T14:30:00.000-08:00

December 2005 Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 132.2 Pre-Christmas Eating Weigh-In: 127.2 Today’s Weigh-In: 133.0 Ok, I’m reporting those numbers but I absolutely refuse to believe them. That’s actually the first time I posted a gain but I’m pretty sure that today’s particular number has more to do with left over holiday bloat than actual fat gained back. If that weigh in was accurate then it means that I would have gained six pounds from Christmas eating (I was only 127.2 about four days ago). According to my food journal and the whole 3500 extra calories not burned off equals a pound theory, then I should only have put on less than 2 pounds. Crap. So today is the one year anniversary of From Lynne To Lean and while I was a few shy of my goal weight, I have to say that I am pretty surprised by what I accomplished this year. I remember this day a year ago. I was uncomfortable from all the Christmas eating I had done, unhappy with my weight and feeling like it was near impossible to ever get it off. I wanted to get back to where I am now so much but I don’t think I really believed it to be within my reach. I don’t think at the time I realized just how much keeping this blog could make a difference. I just wanted to make sure I said to you all who have been here throughout the year, thank you so much! You guys really are the best and I mean that from the bottom of my heart!

Happy Holidays And Seasons Eatings

2006-12-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody! So are you surviving the holidays so far? I did good until late night Christmas Eve eve where I had a few too many cookies; nothing too bad but not exactly on target. Then I woke up on Christmas Eve and it just broke loose from there. Sunday, Christmas day, and yesterday were just a blur of chocolate goodies, huge meals, and constant snacking. It’s been insane. So today I’m back on track and not a moment too soon, either. I can’t stand feeling so bloated and sick from constant eating. It seems that my body is now so sensitive to anything that’s really sugary, processed or oversized in portion and I notice that eating like this absolutely kills my energy levels, makes me feel sick and interrupts my sleep. It’s funny though because last night I thought to myself, “I’m so glad I’m back to normal tomorrow. I don’t want to eat anymore of this junk because I feel like crap.” I even figured it would be almost easy because none of that stuff seemed even appealing anymore, I was so sick and full. But come this morning, my binge-y appetite was still here and it’s hungry. The hardest thing about getting back into the zone is getting started! I can create a habit of normal eating for months and then a day or two of bad eating awakens all my old bad tendencies. I kind of feel like I have a monster within and it lays dormant but never actually goes away. He’s always waiting there, hoping that I’m going to slip up so he can take over and go back to his overeating ways. Normally when I see food or snacks I instantly think to myself, “Do I want that? Am I hungry or am I bored? Is this a good choice or are there better options for me to eat?” and then I make a decision based on the answers to those questions. But when I go off like this just eating whatever I feel like, I notice that I just mindlessly eat. If it’s there I’ll put it in my mouth, regardless if I’m hungry or not. And even if I only do this for a few days, I have to break this habit all over again. Already this morning I’ve caught myself wanting to just dig into the candy bowl without thinking. I see something and I want to eat it just to eat it and it is absolutely exhausting not to just dive into a full on binge. There’s this little voice in the back of my mind saying, “Go ahead and just eat it all, there’s always tomorrow. You can start fresh then.” But I know that tomorrow turns into next week and next week becomes months and months. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been down that road before. It scares me because when that happens I don’t gain a few pounds back, I have always gained all of it back. I have to say that it’s very weird to be afraid of yourself and really that’s the best way I can describe it. I’m actually afraid of the part of me that feels like it would undo all my hard work; I know there’s a part of me that’s capable of that and I know that it will always be sitting there ready to rear it’s head at the first sign of weakness. It totally sucks right now. So tomorrow is weigh day. I’m sure I did a lot of damage over the holiday weekend so I weighed myself on the 23rd just to see where I was at. 127.2 pounds and only two pounds away from my goal weight. I had wanted to hit goal before 2007 and I actually almost made it. Crap, you would have thought those numbers would have been enough to keep me eating within reason but I guess it didn’t work out that way.

Sick In The Head

2006-12-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

So there’s never a good time to get sick but some times are worse than others! I have so much to do and of course that’s when my body gets invaded by the germies! I was home from work yesterday with a pretty bad head cold. I’ve been fighting it for about a week but yesterday I knew I needed to take some time off to rest or it was going to get really ugly. So I slept, woke up and ate chocolate, slept some more, had more chocolate, snoozed in bed and then got up and had a hot bubble bath because the chocolate started calling my name again. I swear, my husband’s family probably think I’m a clean freak considering how often I end up soaking in the tub. They don’t know I’m avoiding food, they think I’m just really into hot baths! So I’m back at work this morning which even though it was hard to muster the strength to get up and go, is better for me than laying around and feeding my cold with chocolate bars. Last night when my sister in law came home she brought with her two pumpkin rolls, a loaf of banana nut bread, homemade fudge, snickerdoodles, and apricot sugar cookies. This, folks, is what I’m up against and when I say that they eat almost non-stop, I’m not exaggerating. It probably has to do with the fact that I have a cold so I feel worn down but I actually felt like crying. I started to get this woe is me attitude as I watched them all dig in and enjoy. My husband’s mother probably weighs 100 pounds soaking wet and she eats like that all the time. Sometimes you see thin people and they don’t eat that much and you think to yourself, “well that’s why they’re so thin.” But every once in awhile you meet one of those naturally thin people who eat constantly and never have to think about what they eat and that really just freaks you out. It just doesn’t seem fair, does it? It was about that time that I headed for the bathtub and my favorite Jane Austen book. I needed something to distract me because I get angry with myself for getting so worked up over food. I mean, I’m happy, healthy, and blessed with a life and family that I feel grateful for everyday and I want to shed tears over a couple of cookies? I think there are a lot of people in this world who wish their problems were as simple as mine. I have to shake myself out of that kind of thinking and remember to put things in perspective because if I don’t then I get depressed, and then I get discouraged and then I say screw it, and I end up inhaling crap ass food that in the end doesn’t make me feel any better and actually makes me feel even worse in the long run. I just keep focusing on the fact that I’m actually doing good even though things feel crazy. I have not gone over my target calories food-wise. Yes, I have been eating really crappy food but at least I can say that I enjoyed some of the holiday treats that only come around once a year and I did it without abandoning my plan. I even managed to clock in a few miles over the weekend so exercise isn’t completely non-existent. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m on track so far, I have a plan and it’s working and most of all I need to remember that I am more than capable of doing this. Maybe that’s the problem, I still don’t trust in myself completely and I keep looking for me to blow it. I have to change that outlook and believe that I have the ability to totally do this!

And So It Continues…

2006-12-18T14:09:00.000-08:00

I am surviving. Barely. The past few days I have eaten nothing but junk. I stayed within my calorie range too, which means that I didn’t eat the kind of things I should eat and instead splurged on things like white chocolate covered popcorn (yum!) and Loft house cookies (those suckers are addictive) instead of having actual meals. Yesterday morning I had half a chocolate bar for breakfast. That’s not healthy. I’m surprised I haven’t succumbed to a sugar overdose. Seriously, I just got a paper cut right now and I think frosting came out. This is really, really difficult guys. It seems like my husband’s family are constantly in the kitchen eating something, too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen people continuously graze like this, from first thing in the morning until well after midnight. Cake, pie, chocolates, pizza; the list goes on and on. I’ve had to resort to things like locking myself in my bedroom and folding laundry. Or like yesterday morning when I used the candy bar high to fuel a scrubbing down of my entire bathroom. I also have started taking long bubble baths with a good book, anything to avoid being in the kitchen with all that crap. I figure if all else fails, I can just go find a corner, curl up into the fetal position, and whimper my way through this madness. Please, cross your fingers for me!

And So It Begins…

2006-12-12T13:36:00.000-08:00

My husband’s family is staying with us for the next few weeks. When I got home last night they were all sitting around eating KFC. A few hours later they made a run to the closest Star buck. Already there are bars of chocolate and candy in the pantry, ice cream in the freezer, and fast food leftovers in the fridge. Help! They eat like this on a regular basis and even if it wasn’t their normal way of eating I couldn’t say anything because I can’t impose my weird food issues on others. They can control themselves around crap food, I can’t, and everyone can’t suffer because of my lack of willpower. On top of it all, my exercise room is now being used as a guest bedroom so I don’t know when I’ll be able to get in there and use Steely Dan. Between the colder weather and the days getting dark early, I can’t go running anymore so he’s been my usual means of working out. We’ll see how I can swing things because I know that I need to get exercise in right now more than ever.

A Great Holiday Workout

2006-12-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across a great way to get a workout without meaning to: Christmas Decorating. You start by insisting on buying a ten foot tree (because you’re ambitious and full of the Christmas spirit) and then help your husband get the sucker off the top of the car and into the house. Your arms will get that awesome burning sensation as you feebly try to hold the tree up as your husband unties the forty knots that lassoed it to the roof of your SUV. Then you get to do some hardcore squats as you continue to hold up your end as you and the husband drag the tree up the front walkway and into the house. (If your husband really loves you, he’ll remember to unlock the door before you guys reach that front step and then you won’t have to continue holding up your end as he fumbles for the keys.) Next of course is getting that big beautiful tree into the tree stand and more specifically, getting that big beautiful tree into the tree stand straight. There’s nothing like minute upon minute of balancing that tree as your husband tries to screw the stand into the trunk. Don’t worry, the fear of dropping that tree on top of yourself, your coffee table and your curious puppy dog (who has now placed himself underfoot) is enough to get you through the muscle cramps! Next order of business is stringing the tree with lights. So many lights actually, that you’re afraid it may have an effect on your power bill. This of course is where you bust out the ladder because after all, you did insist on having a ten foot tree. Don’t fall off the ladder! Just contract every muscle in your body to hold your balance as you try to drape the lights perfectly. Get down and make sure that you’re happy with the distribution and then climb back up and adjust as necessary. Repeat this like forty or fifty times. Once all the lights are on, do this same procedure for the ribbon and all the ornaments. Now that the tree is done, you have to of course move on to the rest of the house. And of course your favorite decoration is the lighted garland that is strung above the kitchen cabinets, the ten foot tall entertainment center, and the entrance to your master bedroom. And yes, you will have to keep that ladder out to do this. Once you have gotten all the garland up (ignore the fact that your legs feel like rubber) embellish the garland. I mean, any true home decorating goddess wouldn’t simply settle for the store bought garland. No, you have to accent it with poinsettias and stems of holly berries. Yes, you have to accent all the garland (again, you’re ambitious and full of the Christmas spirit, right?) After about four hours you’ll be finished so sit back and admire your work. Take aspirin for the pain. You have to begin recovering as soon as possible because the whole thing will be repeated in reverse in a few weeks when all the decorations have to come down.

A Post For Donna

2006-12-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

Hey thanks for the advice guys, and I think I am going to go the gift card route for some people this year. In particular, Star bucks, because I seem to have friends who are fancy coffee junkies. Oh, and yes Donna, my mall does have corn dogs! It’s from the famous “On a stick” place and they are so good! They’re what a lot of my childhood memories are made of. My mom used to haul my sister and I around the mall when we were really little. We just absolutely hated being dragged around from department store to department store, dressing room to dressing room, as my mother scoured high and low over what seemed like every clothing rack the stores had to offer. At the time it felt like hour after miserable hour that my sister and I would wait patiently, knowing that when it was all over, we’d pay a visit to those silly-hatted, lemonade churning girls and it would all be worth it. To this day, whenever I’m in a mall there’s always this chance that I’ll revert back to a six-year kid who can only be appeased by a corn dog and fresh lemonade! So yep, Donna, there are most definitely corn dogs and their siren call reaches as far as their deep-fried honey batter smell! And speaking of the lovely Donna, here’s a link to her Christmas project, check it out if you haven’t already. I can never say enough things about that lady but she really does have a heart of gold. (And kitties that you just can’t get enough of!)

Still Here

2006-12-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

Hey all! How are you guys doing? I’m fine, still over here plugging away. Trying not to die in a sea of homework, papers, practicum and finals. But next week is the last week of the semester and then it’s four weeks off! Woo hoo! Then I can finally get around to my Christmas shopping. I’ve been kind of stressed out about that. There are a few people that I have no idea what to get for them, and I’m sure I’ll be wandering the stores in a panic trying to find that perfect gift. I think anytime you have to buy for someone who you know well enough to buy a gift for but still not well enough to be exactly sure of what they’d like, you end up in this dilemma. For example, I’m having this difficulty buying for a girl that I got for Secret Santa at work. It’s hard because she’s one of “the girls” (there are 5 of us) so I know her but I don’t really know her outside of our little group lunches that we go on every month or so. I’m not quite sure what she would like or what I should buy her so, I’ll have to work on that. I also have two friends from school that I’m buying a gift for the first time. These girls I know pretty well but I’m not sure what to get them yet. I’ll have to think back to what I know about them and what they like so that I have an idea what I’m doing for them. And I have to do that before Tuesday because that’s probably the last time I’ll see them before Christmas. Ok, sorry for making you read my boring, random thoughts that pretty much have organized themselves as a rambling to do list. Just think of me as I’m trying to get this all done and wish me luck that I figure out the perfect gifts for everyone on my list before I hit the mall. Because if I’m not extra prepared then I’ll probably find myself wandering the food court, cinnabon in one hand and corn dog in the other, having caved from all the holiday stress.

So Explain To Me Again, When Exactly Does This Get Easy?

2006-12-01T23:02:00.000-08:00

Goals, hmm. The lovely jeni asked about how close I was to reaching goal. To which I say good question! I don’t know now! A few months ago I had said 125 would be my goal, it was a number that WW had set for me when I tried that program many years ago, so that sounded about right. But I honestly would be happy at any number if my body looked and felt like it was at goal. I just want to feel comfortable and in tune with my body and that feeling doesn’t come from a scale. Yet as much as I don’t really think that a number can signify that achievement, I love, love, love milestones and markers. I am one of those people who loves birthdays and anniversaries and making a big deal about special occurrences or significant occasions. I mean for goodness sakes’, I’m having a party for my pup’s first birthday on Sunday; I’ll find any excuse to make a day “special”. So I need to be able to reach some kind of point where I celebrate having finished at least one part of this never-ending journey. I need a day where I can make a big hoopla over myself and get all egocentric about my victory over the fat monster. There’s also another big thing that’s interfering with defining my goals and it has been slowly creeping in over the last month or so. Mainly, I’m not quite sure how much my body can be improved given what it’s been through. I can see the toll that being in various stages of weight loss/ weight gain throughout my life has taken on my body and I know there’s a limit to what the end result of all this is going to be. The thing I want to avoid most is having unrealistic expectations (it’s what screwed me the last time around) so I might just have to come to terms with accepting myself and my body as is. I don’t know, sometimes this journey is almost easier when you’re far away from goal because you can pretend that there’s some kind of perfect, ideal reward at the end for all your hard work. As I get closer, that is turning out to not be the case. Which yeah, duh! We all know there’s never an end to this but it’s still easier when you can pretend that this journey is finite at some point. So here I am sitting seven pounds away from my scale goal and I have no idea what I want, anticipate, or accept. Ahhh, I guess it’s time for a little soul searching and some reflection.

Weigh To Go! Part 11

2006-11-28T13:44:00.000-08:00

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 134.8 Today’s Weigh-In: 132.2 That’s 2.6 pounds lost for the month of November and a total of 46.7 gone since December. Not bad, eh? I survived Thanksgiving and all its leftovers; I can tell that it added a few pounds back on there at the end of this month (I have a feeling that I may have actually been about 130 for most of November) but overall I’m very happy with things. I had my fun, enjoyed my food and family and then shifted back to eating sensibly and exercising. There have been many times in the past where my Thanksgiving eating habits weren’t that much different from my everyday eating habits so I’m feeling all proud of myself for having so far survived two holidays that have proved my undoing in the past!

The Workload Can Get A Little Heavy But It's Ok Because I've Been Lifting Weights

2006-11-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

Boy this time of year gets hectic, doesn’t it? I’ve been out of fatblogland for the past week due to the fact that life finally caught up with me and tackled me to the ground. Sure, exercise has built up my endurance but there’s only so far you can run before life’s big To Do list gets a hold of you and pins you into submission. Other than that though, I’ve been doing really good. My eating is great and well balanced, my exercising is consistent, and in fact today I’m having a skinny day. Have you ever had one of those? You wake up in the morning and you just feel like you lost a pound or two. And it’s not because of dehydration, it’s not that you were bloated and now it’s finally gone away, instead it feels like a sudden but very real loss. And you wonder, what brought that on? In general, for me, weight loss is a consistent process, small variations but generally slow and steady. Then every once in awhile I’ll have a week where all of a sudden a couple of pounds are gone. And it really is enough to be noticeable, I’ll wake up and I can tell that my stomach feels smaller and then I’ll get dressed and my clothes will fit looser and I wonder, what happened over night? I’m going along doing what I always do (as far as I can tell) and then there will just be a random big loss. I don’t know if maybe I did something different without knowing it, or if it’s just a natural process or whatever but either way, I’ll take it! Oh and also, pictures. Ok, so I was thinking maybe a flickr account would be good but I have no understanding of such things and so I need to look into it. I need something private that can only be viewed with my permission, which I imagine is possible?

More But Not As Lengthy Inane Blatherings By Me About Troubles In Covering My Ass

2006-11-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

Hey, so I did get some jeans! I’ve been on such a mission to buy some new pairs because the day that I cleaned out my closet I gave away all of my jeans except for one pair. The pair that I kept fit but they’re “summer jeans” because the length of the leg is shorter in order to show off cute summer sandals. The only pair of “winter jeans” that I had I decided to throw in the pile at the last minute. I wanted to keep them because they’re the only pair long enough to wear with boots but they were so big that I had to cinch them in with a belt and then make sure my shirt was long enough to cover the bulky puckering of too much fabric at the top so in the end I put them on the pile. I bought two new pairs. I got these ones in a size 4 and these ones in a size 2. Now I assume that the dk’s must not be sized by American sizes because an American 2 is super small but these fit right. In fact, they’re the best fitting pair of jeans I’ve owned! The fabric is so soft and they fit my hip to waist ratio better than most other pairs of jeans I’ve had. They look so good with a stiletto black boot, fitted sweater and this coat, my favorite new purchase (I bought it in an XS, guys!) The ol'navy jeans are not soft (contrary to what they may say on the website) and I’m going through the whole breaking them in period. With them I’m running into the same problem I have with all other jeans, they are so tight and unforgiving across the thighs, too baggy at the waist and constantly being pulled down by the constant rubbing together of my thighs. No wonder why I always blow out the seams of my pants, that’s a lot of friction!

Warning: Lengthy, Inane Blathering By Me About Troubles In Covering My Ass

2006-11-14T14:36:00.000-08:00

You know, just making the decision to commit to doing an exercise plan has made all the difference in my attitude. I’m feeling all back to my normal self and I’m working on kicking out all the negative thoughts. And thanks for all the support guys, what would I do without you all? Ok, so I try not to bitch and whine too much and yet somehow I’m always doing that here. And I’m about to do it some more. I apologize in advance. So when I was getting all down on myself on Friday a lot of it had to do with the fact that while I was running around doing errands, I was also out jeans shopping. Boo! Jeans Shopping! Why is it that it doesn’t matter if I’m size 14 or 4, jeans do not fit me right? Can someone please explain that to me because I don’t get it. Here’s the problem, no jeans have ever really fit me right and it has to do with the shape of my body. I think I’ve tried on every style and brand of jeans in my local mall and while some are better than others, I still have the basic problem of none of them being quite right. Here’s what’s going on: First: My waist is small and my lower legs (slightly above the knee and down) have really slimmed out but I have some booty (a good thing) and saddlebags (not good). So my jeans have the tendency to feel like they’re always riding down probably because the widest part of my body, my inner thighs, rub together and cause the fabric to be pulled down. So my jeans never fit tightly at the waist and instead always move down and want to rest on the largest part of my lower body, my thighs/saddlebags. Is this a good enough of a description to give you all a visual image? Basically my pants want to ride low and no matter what size I am or what pair I’m wearing, I always have to pull them up after walking any distance. Second: Although I have a large derriere, I’m short waisted, so I have trouble finding a rise that works. Ultra low rise and even some low rise jeans are not enough to cover my rump; I just need more fabric than that. Just below the waists are what normally work but again when walking they end up being pulled down too low. But anything that hits at the waist is just too much fabric around the pockets and crotch area. I really don’t need a pouch right there. Also another thing, I think generally what happens is that the way I sit stretches out the waist, which I don’t need because the waist is already too big anyways. And this is a problem in general, for some weird reason my fat has magical powers when I sit and it will alter the shape of any pair of pants, no matter how tight, so that they look baggy across the waist and lap when I’m standing. If only I could harness this power for good! Third: I assume that 5’6” is a pretty average height but I notice that pants are either too short or too long. I often have my pants tailored. Some I have taken up so that they don’t drag on the ground when I wear tennis shoes. Others I buy too long and then have taken up so that they can be worn with boots. Depending on the shoe I’m wearing, the perfect pant length is either 31 ½ or 33 ½ inches. Anything else either looks a little too short or becomes frayed along the back hem. That’s just a basic list of what I’m up against; I won’t even go into detail about how picky I am about color, amount of stitch detail, degree of distressing (just know that in general I shy away from the whisker around the crotch look, no needed emphasis there but thanks anyways), and type of denim. Oh and skinny jeans? They really don’t do me any favors. But the hunt is on and I’m on the prowl for a new pair of jeans. I figure that exercise is going to help me change the parts of my body that are making a nice fitting pair of jeans so hard to find and I’d rather make changes by exercising instead of crying over my chili dogs about it like I did on Friday! I’ll let you know how it all goes!

Amateur Hour

2006-11-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

Today the husband, pup and I went for a run. Boy it doesn’t take long to lose your level of fitness, does it? It was rookie ball out there! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done any real exercise and it showed. I was out of breath within minutes, I had no pacing, no rhythm, and I felt so out of it. We were going to run about a mile and a half but I ended up having to walk some of it. But I’m so glad I went out! It showed me how much I love exercise. While I may not really love it in the sense that I love chocolate or long naps, I love it for what it does for my peace of mind. As I alluded to in my previous post, I got kind of frustrated and down on myself on Friday. I’ve kind of hit this point where I’m not sure where to go with my weight loss. I feel like I’m the size that I want to be and the actual number on the scale is healthy but still I’m afraid of something. Doesn’t that sound silly? But something about this actually scares me. I think it’s the fact that I’m so close to the end (I should actually say goal because this journey doesn’t have a real “end”) and I’m afraid of what the last few pounds are going to take. I definitely believe that whole thing about how the last ten are the hardest. When I was thirty pounds away from goal I was frustrated at being far away but in some ways it was easier to put my head back down and keep trudging along. Now that I’m so close all these things keep popping up into the back of my mind. Things like, “Will I actually be able to make it?” and “Do I have what it takes to get there?” and “Oh my gosh, if I actually do make it, am I going to stay there?” I was going over all this stuff on Friday and it kind of got to me; I kind of felt like the answer to those questions was a big fat no. But today as I was out dragging myself around the jogging trail I felt a renewed sense of “I can do this”. Exercise gives you hope. It makes you feel like so much of this is within your control if you just really put yourself into it. While the past few weeks’ break from exercise was nice and probably something I needed, it made me feel like I was putting everything on keeping my eating perfect. Well as you can see from the last few posts, that didn’t work out so well. My eating actually got worse and who knows if somehow it’s connected to putting too much focus on the food, so much that it actually backfired. Either way, starting this week I’m back to regular workouts. Even though exercise isn’t my absolute favorite thing to do, it does so much for me in so many ways.

Chili Dog? More Like Chili Hog, Round 2

2006-11-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

I’ve always thought myself to be a smart cookie (I’d say I’m probably a chocolate chip kind) but there are occasions where I must get hit over the head with a lesson a few times before I finally am ready to be clued in. For instance, last night we were going to go to our University’s basketball game. I had woke up late and then spent the day running errands so I hadn’t had anything to eat except a 130 calorie bowl of oatmeal. My husband and I wanted to eat before the game so he was going to run to a drive thru as I stayed at home getting ready. When he asked me to make a choice as to where and what I wanted to eat, I could have gone for something decent or at least reasonable, right? Nope. I had gotten kind of stressed out and down on myself yesterday (I’ll go ahead and write a separate post about all of that at another time) and I just wanted to stuff myself on something fatty and filling. In my moment of weakness I decided that Tuesday’s chili dog and fries fest had tasted so good that I wanted the same thing again. Only this time I had lots of calories leftover to splurge so I made that two chili dogs along with the chili cheese fries. Now I know that this is too much food and it’s crap food at that. All the wonderful comments and advice from you all on the previous chili dog post should have popped into my head to remind me of the bigger picture. But I sometimes have to get a significant wake up call before I learn a lesson. So I sucked all that food down within minutes. Technically it’s a binge; even if I was within my target calorie range, it was still gorging on food to make me feel better and it was eating past the point of fullness. I of all people know that emotional eating doesn’t solve problems and doesn’t make me feel better. In fact it does the opposite of both of these things in the long run but sometimes I fall back on old “quick fix” habits. Well, I paid the price for this one this time. I was so miserable at the game. I felt like I had a ball of lead in my stomach and I couldn’t sit comfortably. It was literally a painful reminder of why eating in a healthy balanced way is about more than just trying to lose a couple of pounds. It’s about being in touch with my body and my mind and it’s about handling stuff without turning to food as a fix all. The good thing is that I feel like this might be what I needed to get my eating back on track because I feel like I've gotten that urge to uncontrollably eat finally out of my system (hopefully it will last awhile). Who knew that wisdom can come from a trip to wienerschnitżel.

Chili Dog? More Like Chili Hog

2006-11-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Last night I was craving chili cheese fries and a chili dog so badly. I didn’t get home until almost 10 o’clock and by then I was so hungry that I was no longer thinking straight. So off my husband and I went to the drive-thru to get our fix. It was so good and it totally hit the spot but it made me feel guilty afterwards as it set me 250 calories over my target range. Sometimes when you eat like crap you know exactly why you did it and then there are other times where after the haze clears you’re left wondering what just happened. You went all day with intentions of being good and doing the right thing and then in what seems like a matter of moments you find yourself on the other side of an empty fast food container, plastic fork still in hand, confused as to why you did what you just did. I don’t know if it’s the time of year, the change in weather, the chaos of my schedule or all of the above plus more but it seems like this happens more often lately than it used to. I hate when I think I've gotten a handle on something only to see that it's still there, lurking under the surface! I figure I must be learning something though, my husband asked if I wanted to split one of the extra chili dogs he had ordered and I said no. That’s a small victory considering that in the past I would have taken him up on that offer in a heartbeat. Yep, small steps, guys.

They’re Held Up By Fabric And Elastic, Not Magic!

2006-11-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

I wore a pencil skirt yesterday. This one, in fact. Size 2, thank you very much! I really love that all the newer fashions come down to the knee as opposed to in previous years when the mini skirt was all the rage. I’m pretty self-conscious about my legs but in a knee length skirt you’re only showing a little calf and ankle, so nothing too risqué! The thing I found out though is that fourteen hours is a long time to be in a skirt, especially if you haven’t worn a skirt in over fifteen years. I haven’t yet mastered the ability to get in and out of my car without giving any standers by a free show. And I wore thigh high pantyhose, which I will never do again. I need pantyhose because they really smooth out the look of my legs, hide some of the small veins I have on the inside of my knee, and give me a healthier color because the natural color of my legs is an ugly shade of anemic due to the fact that they haven’t seen the sun since the early 90’s. But I really hate to wear a full-length pantyhose and I get really tired of trying to keep them on straight after my fortieth trip to the potty. With dress pants I always wear knee highs and they work out just fine so I thought that thigh highs would work the same. I was wrong. Maybe because I have lots of fat on my upper thighs, they refused to stay up smoothly. Instead they just cut into my leg fat and then annoyingly tried to roll themselves down. Poor pantyhose, there’s only so much they could do when faced with clinging to my leg fat for fourteen hours! By the end of the day my friend and I got into my car to drive to our practicum center. Before getting back out of the car I pulled the suckers up and told my friend, “I feel like an old granny whose hose won’t stay up! Thigh highs are not sexy!” to which she replied, “They’re sexy, Lynne, but they’re probably only good for the bedroom.” And yes while she's correct that they're probably best suited to the bedroom I'd like to add the caveat that they're for skinny people in the bedroom because the look I was rocking was not sexy. The closest it came to anything bedroom games related was resembling bondage gone horribly awry. So next time I’m out I’ll make sure I pick up a pair of full on, old fashioned, control top pantyhose. They might not be comfortable but they sure work a lot better than nylons that look like they’re strapped on with tourniquets and who left to their natural course, will roll down to your ankles.

Oooh, Irony: Finding Motivation By Taking A Break

2006-11-05T17:01:00.000-08:00

More on Operation: Get My Head Back In The Game. I’ve managed to reign the extra eating back in but I’m still struggling with the exercise. I will find any excuse to not workout, from cleaning house to visiting with friends and family. I think the bad thing is that I’ve gotten so much more done lately because I’ve been so motivated to avoid exercising! My laundry gets done, my homework gets finished, my car is clean, etc. and all of these things are not good incentive for getting back on to the exercise horse. I am just so busy that I really only have so much time for so many things to get done. I tend to give up about an hour to an hour and a half to exercising plus I have to really plan my day around a workout. I have to plan what I eat and when I eat so that I have energy and then I have to make sure that I have enough time to shower and get ready afterwards so that I can move on to the next tasks that need to be done. I know that in the long run it’s not doing me any good to not exercise but I think I need a break so I can play a little catch up with all the other pressing things going on in my life right now. I’ve only done two half-hour workouts with Steely Dan this weekend when usually I would have clocked up at least 6 to 8 miles by now. I’m not sure how long I’ll take this little work out break, maybe only a few weeks, but I’m going to just concentrate on working out only when I feel like it and only for as long as I want to and most importantly I’m not going to guilt myself into a workout anymore. Hopefully this will put me back into looking at exercise as fun and not as just one more thing on my huge to do list.

Getting Back In The Game By Not Playing Pretend

2006-11-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

This weekend I cleaned out my closet, one of many parts to Operation: Get My Head Back In The Game. I took everything out and tried it on and then each item either went back on a hanger into the closet, in a donate pile, or was fit only for the trash can. Honestly guys, only about half or even a little less than half of my stuff survived. I decided to do the clean out because I noticed that it was taking me forever to find something to wear in the morning yet my closet was stuffed full of things. Once all the unwearable items were out I could see why I couldn’t find anything to wear. I just don’t have that many things that actually fit me. I have a hard time getting rid of clothes that I don’t fit into anymore because there’s always this “what if I need it?” thought in the back of my mind. This thinking applies both to things too big and things too small to be worn. I’m always hoping that I’ll get back down to a size that will allow me to wear some favorite shirt or I’m secretly afraid of ballooning up to a size and I’ll need pants that can accommodate the gain. There were things in there that I thought I was saving because they were still too small yet when I tried them on, they were already too large to be worn. That sucks because there have been times in the past few months where I really needed clothes and could have used them! Alternatively, there were things that were way too big and I hope that I’ll never wear again. For some reason, these were the hardest things to get rid of. Getting rid of all the larger sized clothes was like saying that I’m not that person anymore and am committing to never being her again. After they were all piled up on my living room floor I looked at them and wasn’t sure how I actually felt. I think I hit the nail on the head though when I told my husband, “There goes my safety net.” Keeping all that stuff was like insurance for my binge eating ways. I remember last Thanksgiving I was so uncomfortable; I had started with Halloween candy and then just never stopped eating. By end of November I was wearing baggier shirts and my jeans had become way too tight. My way of dealing with it was to go into my closet and get the next size up pants. That allowed me to go back to living in denial about my weight gain. At the time, it was just easier to go on eating and pretend that I hadn’t gained back all my weight. I’m pretty good at that kind of pretending considering that I went from a size 5 all the way back to a size 13/14 before I admitted to myself that it was time to do something. And I think that’s typical me, some people freak out when they gain five pounds, I don’t freak out until I’ve hit the forty or fifty pound mark. It takes that much for me to realize that the weight gain has gotten out of control. Maybe that’s why I’ve always had a weight problem, sometimes I can’t see past the food and what it symbolizes to me. Sometimes the food is even worth the sacrifice of what it does to my body and I have to be so miserable and unhappy in it that I can’t go on pretending that the weight isn’t there any longer. The first step then is getting rid of that safety net, or what it more accurately is, that crutch that I’ve depended on: There are no bigger sizes in my closet to fall back on, no bigger clothes to play pretend in.

You All Are Sweeter Than Halloween Candy!

2006-10-31T12:03:00.000-08:00

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what would I do without you guys? Thanks for all your nice comments and support! It’s come at a time when I really need it (seeing as I’m still feeling at a standstill) and it’s just nice to know that others can understand what this whole weight battle is like. It’s strange; I have wonderful, supportive people in my “real” life but no one that I can truly relate to when it comes to this whole fat/body image/food issues thing. There are times when I’m working everyday (sometimes it feels like every moment) on this weight loss journey and I feel like it’s such a private, invisible thing that’s mainly going on within me. It occupies so much of my time and mental energy and yet it’s something that I don’t ever really talk about and nobody knows how much of me is just consumed by it. In a way, it’s almost lonely sometimes! So my point is, thank you for being there everyone! Tonight I’ll be going with my family to watch my nephew trick or treat. He’s 2 ½ so old enough to tell me “No!” if I start to eat his candy!

Weigh To Go! Part 10

2006-10-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 137.4 Today’s Weigh-In: 134.8 That’s 2.6 pounds lost for the month of October and a total of 44.1 gone since December. I figure that 2.6 pounds is not too bad of a loss considering the case of the blahs I’ve had the last few weeks. And I’m especially excited that this puts me at less than 10 pounds left to go! I had originally set 125 pounds as my goal; I chose it because this is what WW had set as my goal a few years ago and I think that somewhere in the back of my mind I couldn’t imagine getting down that low so it seemed as good a number as any! Now it seems weird to be so close (weird but also exciting!) and I hope that being this close will give me the much needed motivation that I’ve been lacking lately. I just keep remembering when I was thirty-something pounds away from goal and it felt like I would never get to the 134 that I am right now, let alone 125. There have been so many times along the way that I thought that this was an impossible thing to do and I felt like giving up. But now I’m so close and I’m going to push myself. I started this weight loss journey almost a year ago in December. I’d like to see myself at goal by the end of this year. I think I can take off nine more pounds before the end of 2006 and if anything, knowing I’m so close and going for this last nine may be what I need to face the holiday madness that is quickly approaching!

Warning: I’m Still Being A Big Whiny Baby

2006-10-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

Today I survived a work lunch at an Italian restaurant. It’s hard to be good in a place that serves garlic knots smothered in butter along with their fresh baked bread! So another challenge out of the way and the count down continues. After I got home I decided to go for my Thursday run. I’ve been looking forward to it because of how crappy my exercising has been and I was gung ho to get back on track. Normally I have three days off (Monday through Wednesday) and then four days on where I run everyday (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). It’s only been two weeks since I went for a run but I felt all out of sorts and tired and I ended up not having a good run today. Right from the start it started out wrong; usually as I leave my doorstep I feel happy anticipating the feeling of moving my body and being out in nature. But when I went out today I felt awkward and unmotivated. I went out of the gate of my neighborhood and went to run on the main road that runs through the master planned community that I live in which is my usual route. Our community is nice, the homes are new and the streets and sidewalks are landscaped and clean. But recently a whole bunch of new housing has been opened so now there’s way too much traffic on the main street because it’s the only way in and out of the community for hundreds of houses (it really sucks that the city didn’t plan out the streets better for this area). It felt like I was jogging along the main highway or something! For being early afternoon there was a constant flow of cars and trucks coming by, including all the big construction trucks, and it was just kind of unnerving. It’s actually gotten so busy out there that I’ve stopped walking my dog on that street because the speeding traffic just makes me nervous. In addition to all the traffic the school buses let the kids out in one spot on this main road because that road isn’t a through street and if the buses go any further down then they won’t be able to turn back around. Because of this there are a ton of kids walking down the sidewalk path and in the street. I happened to go out right when all the high school kids were walking home and ended up trying to jog around groups of teenagers. Most of the kids were fine but there was a group of about ten 16 year olds who thought it was funny to purposely block the sidewalk so that I couldn’t jog around. I’ve seen these same kids out kicking rocks into the street as cars pass by trying to time it right so that it will actually hit the cars and I hate to say it but I’m so old now that I get really pissed off when I see punk kids acting up. When I finally got around them I heard even over the blasting of my ipod some of the cracks they were making about me and it just amazes me that kids really have no respect for adults. Ok, that sentence really shows I’m old! I guess the next step is me sitting out on my front porch waving my fist and yelling, “Keep off my lawn, punk kids!” as children pass by. By the end of my run I just wanted to get home but of course that wasn’t going to be possible until I had to deal with the hooting and hollering from the construction workers and then pass the jerk off kids again. Oh yeah, that was pretty much the perfect horrible ending to about the worst run I’ve had ever! The last few blocks I didn’t even have the energy or heart for anything but a mild walking pace. To be honest, the whole thing really bothered me today. It’s silly that it actually got to me that badly but it’s because those runs are usually where I go to clear my mind and find a little peace in my stressful life. If anything, I felt worse for wear when I got home and it's killed my desire to go running tomorrow. Instead I'll probably spend some time with Steely Dan. And I realize what I had begun to think the last time I was out jogging, it’s time for me to find a new route; preferably one where I don’t have to dodge traffic, asshole kids or catcalls.

No Motivation For Anything Except Eating

2006-10-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Arrgh! This week has been just a little blah. I’m not doing horribly (I’ve seen me do much worse!) but I feel myself slipping in motivation a little bit. In addition to my not having properly exercised for almost two weeks, I can’t seem to stay on target food wise. I’ve gone over my calorie range every day this last week. One day 20 calories over, the next 580 calories over, the next 50 calories over and so on and so on. Maybe it’s the weather change because I have been so hungry lately, even after TOM went away and was no longer there to blame. Weigh in is three days away and it will be interesting to see what the scales say. Hopefully this feeling of blah-ness will clear up soon. I feel like I need to do as well as possible right now because this time of year always kicks my ass!

1 Challenge Down, 5,647,364 More To Go

2006-10-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

Today I ate at cheesecake factory, yum! I did ok, maybe just a little more butter and bread than I intended but other than that I ate reasonably well. For my meal I ordered a chicken/avocado/flatbread sandwich like thing. I only ate about half of it and half of the fries that came with it, the other half of the sandwich was dinner and it was just as good as it was at lunch. This weekend has actually been one of the yuckier weekends food and exercise wise that I’ve had in a long time. Like I said, today wasn’t bad, and yesterday I was about three hundred calories over target. That only becomes a problem because I knew that today was going to be a big eating day and so that makes two days of lax eating. Which again wouldn’t be that bad except that I also haven’t done any exercise this whole weekend. I ran about a mile and a half on Thursday night and I really struggled the whole time. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I spent either studying for school, sitting on my ass or napping. I usually look forward to my workouts, they serve as stress relievers and I find them pretty enjoyable, but this weekend I couldn’t even talk myself into thinking about any exercise. I was worried that maybe the reason I was so tired and unmotivated was a sign of me coming down with something. But then as happens every month, I did the math and realized that TOM was coming. I swear I could post this paragraph every 28 days! It sucks to know that every four weeks I’ll feel tired and bitchy, I’ll be all pissy because my clothes don’t seem to fit right and I’ll be ravenously hungry no matter how much I eat. And for some reason I forget that I feel like this every month and I wind up thinking, “Have I lost my motivation?” So this week was so-so, it could have been better but I also know it could have been a lot worse! I’m looking forward to Thursday when I’ll be feeling better and I’ll be back to my normal exercise schedule.

Putting My "Hiking" Shoes On

2006-10-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

For a while during the summer it seemed that there was something going on every week that involved social occasions and food. Whether it was dinner with friends or family, visiting guests who we stocked the house full of snacks for, or week long birthday celebrations, it felt like I was constantly navigating an obstacle course of late night munching, favorite restaurant free-for-alls, and constant opportunities to eat cake to the point of nausea. Then things settled down and I did great; there weren’t too many big temptations and the small ones didn’t seem so difficult and I handled it all like a champ. But things are picking up again and the next few months are full of parties, birthdays, and of course the big bad mamas of weight loss hurdles, the holidays! In particular I realized that I’ll be eating out several times at some of my favorite restaurants over the next few weeks. Restaurant food is still my greatest nemesis and there are some places in particular that I really have trouble being reasonable at. A lot of it has to do with my perception of responsibility. If I can find the nutritional information of a restaurant online then I feel committed (maybe even obligated) to make a healthier choice. But if I don’t know the info for a restaurant then I feel like it’s all beyond my control and so it’s understandable that I fall victim to the lure of eating enough for a family of four at one sitting. It’s not my fault that I didn’t have any calorie information to reference before making my choice! And really that’s just me making an excuse. I know that if it’s smothered in cheese, smeared with mayonnaise, covered in butter, or making huge puddles of fat and oil on its plate then it’s probably not a great choice for me. I know what I should be looking for when I’m ordering but when faced with a menu I convince myself that it’s probably all really bad for me so I should just say screw it and get anything and everything I want. The next two weeks will be a challenge but I keep reminding myself that I still have to journal everything I eat (part of my “if you eat it, you write it” rule) and even if I don’t know exact numbers, I still have to do my best and estimate. If I eat like a madwoman I can’t pretend it didn’t happen just because I didn’t jot it down. Hopefully this will keep me aware of my long term wants and not my short term desires. So many people have said that losing weight is an uphill battle and they aren't joking! If we're going with this metaphor then I figure that I didn’t come this far only to turn around and go back to where I started. I want to see the view from the top of the mountain!

The Boots, Round 2

2006-10-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

So over the weekend I decided that I was going to find something that matched those damn boots or I would take them back. Either I’d wear them with a really awesome outfit that would make me feel cute and sexy or I’d just go get my money back. I put the boots in the trunk of my car (just in case) and went through the mall on a mission. I ended up leaving with an awesome pencil skirt and Capri dress pants that look really cute with the boots so I’ve decided that they have earned a place in my closet after all. I hope you guys are not bored into a coma due to reading two posts in a row about whether or not I’m going to keep a pair of shoes but I think I’m dwelling on this because it’s become about more than just the boots. It’s about me being ok with breaking out of my comfort zone. It’s about me feeling like a person who is confident and with it. I’ve always seen other girls wear a certain style or fashion that’s popular and I’ve always thought they look great doing it. Key word being “they”. Clothes like that were for them but not someone like me. I was too fat or too gawky or too fill in the blank with some other self-criticism. I remember when I was a young girl my mom would go shopping. When she got home she would try on what she had bought and sometimes there were things she would take back. She’d say that she had liked it in the store but now she wasn’t so sure. I remember she’d try things on and look at herself in the mirror with a look of exasperation and indecision on her face. I don’t know if when she was doing that she was experiencing the same feelings that I feel now, she never talked about it, but I think I recognized that same look on my own face in the mirror the night I brought those boots home and tried them on. My mom always says that she spent too much of her young adult life worrying about things that didn’t really matter. I think I’m getting to an age where I can understand that.

These Boots Are Made For Walking And Maybe I'm More Of A Sitting Down Quietly Kind Of Girl

2006-10-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after work I had some unexpected free time so I thought I’d swing by the mall and buy me something nice. I feel like everything I buy is always very practical and multi-purpose, and it was time to just buy something that was a want and not a need. I’ve been wanting a pair of knee high boots for awhile, they seem to be really popular this season and I always look at them every time I’m out shopping. In the past whenever I’ve tried them on my legs were always too fat for them to zip up all the way but I thought maybe this time would be different. There are a ton of styles of knee high boots out right now and I tried on a few different pairs and for some of them my legs were still too fat but some of them did fit. I ended up buying a pair in chocolate brown with a stiletto heel and a pointed toe box. Then I figured that I should go buy a skirt or outfit to wear with them because nothing I own fits those shoes. I never wear skirts or anything that shows my legs, in fact I never even try skirts on, so I didn’t even know what styles fit me. Well after a few frustrating laps across the mall, stopping in too many stores and countless disappointing trips to the changing room, I left the mall with just the boots. I just couldn’t find anything that fits me right and matches my style and taste. I was really disappointed because I thought to myself that now that I’m more than forty pounds lighter finding clothes should be that much easier. But it just didn’t work out that way and it seems that finding clothes that fit is almost as difficult now as it was then. I still have the same problem finding stuff that fits both my waist and hips and things that are too small to be buttoned across my chest and arms still fit way too baggy on my torso. It was just so frustrating and depressing for me. When I got home last night I started to have doubts about the boots. Right now I don’t even have anything to wear with them and even if I can find an outfit I hate to own a pair of shoes that can’t mix and match with the rest of my closet. On top of all that, I’m not even sure I can pull these boots off. I’m afraid that instead of wearing the boots, the boots will be wearing me. I’m a shy person and I tend to dress in a way that’s more about blending in then sticking out and I think that’s residual from always feeling uncomfortable about my body. I know it sounds silly to worry so much about a pair of boots but it’s more than being just about the shoes now; it’s about still being afraid of being outside my comfort zone. Right now I’m just debating on taking them back. The whole point of buying them was to make me feel good and so far the whole thing has just kind of been a let down.

Doing What Works For Me

2006-10-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Things have been very busy and stressful but I’m doing relatively well with my eating. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are fourteen hour days. On those days it’s best for me to keep to a predictable, even if mundane, routine: Oatmeal for breakfast, cup of soup for lunch, low cal snack pack in the afternoon and then because school and practicum take up a lot of time, I don’t eat again until around 10. I know that I should probably be eating more times throughout such a long day and distributing my calories more evenly but I enjoy having that nice big dinner to look forward to. I don’t mind (much) the bowls of Halloween candy or morning box of doughnuts lying around the office if I know that at dinner time I can eat a big meal that will fill me up and satisfy me. I’ve always been a night time eater and the thing that trips me up most is if I spend all my calories during the day and then have to scale back dinner to a small meal. That’s how I often find myself starving at 10 o’clock at night and deciding to say, “Screw it!” and I end up face down in a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. Even on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays when I eat smaller portions and more meals throughout the day, I am starving late in the evening and I feel like looking for something, anything to munch on. I just think it’s funny that for so long I tried to fight that late night eater tendency that I’ve always had and that by actually sensibly accommodating it, I’ve had an easier time on keeping myself on track.

It's The Xtra Small Things That Count

2006-10-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

I went to target last weekend to buy a few new blouses to wear for practicum. All the tops that I’ve been wearing are size large and they look funny on me when I wear my size six pants with them. The pants fit right but all the shirts fit in a way that is strongly reminiscent of a potato sack. Not sexy! So I bought five tops (I love when things are all on sale) and I bought everything in a size extra small. Now I’m not sure how the manufacturers call these shirts size extra small because it seems like everything runs big (these are probably closer to small/medium in other stores) but boy does it feel nice to buy the teeniest tiniest size that they offer! All the sweaters are kind of stretch knits so they expand to fit me now but will still fit nicely when I get down to my goal weight. Right now they are very snug and I’m burning extra calories because I’m working so hard to keep my tummy sucked in! But hey, this means that I haven’t wasted money on new outfits that will be unwearably big within a month or so. That’s one of my personal pet peeves, spending money on a great shirt that I like, only to not be able to wear it in a few months time because my weight has either fluctuated drastically high or low. I guess it’s the result of never having been able to maintain a stable weight my entire adult life and therefore my closet is filled with clothes that are not wearable for whatever reason. It’s like throwing money at a problem that never goes away and in the end I still don’t have anything to wear! But buying in the extra small sizes, I won’t have that problem unless I gain the weight back and I don’t plan on doing that!

Undercover Lynne, Round 2

2006-10-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

I put together another round of progress pictures for anyone interested. I'm too paranoid about just putting them out there for all the world to see and running the risk of non-fatblogland coming across them. Instead, what works for me is if you would like to see them, e-mail me at lynne2lean@yahoo.com and I'll send them off to you! In other news (I know my posting has been few and far between, life is just horribly busy right now) my temporary job has turned into a permanent position! So what a big relief that has been. Half of the stress that I've been experiencing has come from worrying about finding a job that would accomodate my crazy grad program schedule. This job will do that plus the people are great and the actual work is non-stressful, easy stuff. I need something right now that doesn't require a lot of mental energy because work has become the place where I go to relax from the rest of my life!

Weigh To Go! Part 9

2006-09-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 142.2 Today’s Weigh-In: 137.4 That’s 4.8 pounds lost for the month of September and a total of 41.5 gone since December. I am so happy about those numbers that I don’t even know where to begin. Seeing over forty pounds gone really makes me proud and I think it’s really starting to hit me how much I’ve accomplished. For the longest time no matter how well I was doing or how on top of things I felt, I still somewhere thought that it was all a fluke or about to reverse it’s course at any time. But nine months of steady loss, well that’s no piddly effort or breeze of good luck, that’s consistent hard work and commitment. I’m only about a pound heavier than I was on my wedding day a year and a half ago. I feel healthier now too; for my wedding I was on a restrictive diet to ensure fitting into my dress. This time around, I’m exercising and eating balanced meals, drinking lots of water and taking my vitamins. I have so much energy and I’m really feeling comfortable in my body. I have to tell you guys, it feels really nice right now.

My Five Things

2006-09-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

Hey! Sorry I’ve been MIA this week. I was being held hostage by work/ school/ practicum/ life and I’ve finally just escaped. The lovely and talented Patl tagged me with a "5 things to eat before you die" meme. So many great things to list and only five spots available but I think I can do it. 1. French fries. I love french fries and they’re probably what I’d call my favorite food. I prefer soggy as opposed to the crispier versions. Sometimes if my husband or I pull out a particularly oily and soggy one we’ll show it to the other person all, “Oooh, look. That’s a good one!” And sometimes if it’s a really good one then my husband will give it to me. It’s the little things that keep a marriage strong, you know. 2. Hot Fudge Sundaes. This is my absolute favorite dessert. I love them with hot fudge, tons of warm caramel, whipped cream, light on the nuts, and about ten maraschino cherries. I actually think that making them at home is the best way because then they can be customized to each person’s preference. 3. Reese’s peanut butter cups. Miniatures, King size, or out of a bag on Halloween, they can’t be beat. I love how they come in shapes for the holidays. My mom and I agree that for some reason the Easter egg shaped ones are by far the best way to enjoy Reese’s. We also agree that we’re crazy that we’ve had the discussion of which way tastes the best and that we actually agree on that same shape. I’m sure that they probably all taste the same and the imagined difference probably has psychological roots similar to my “eat all the red and blue M&M’s first” habit. You only think there’s a difference. 4. House Chicken from Pick Up Sticks. I just love the stuff but a cup of it is like 1000 cals or so per serving. It’s been awhile since I’ve had it but I love it served over beef fried rice. Yum! 5. Garlic & butter mashed potatoes. Again, another food from my friend the potato. I am totally a mashed potato conoiseur and I can be very picky about my mashies. Heavy on the cream and butter and whipped as light and fluffy as possible. There should be no lumps! Unless of course it’s mashed potatoes that include little red potatoes and their skins then they’re allowed to have a more rustic texture. I also am a big fan of gravy with my mashed potatoes but again I’m extremely picky about the gravy. A nice thick brown beef gravy is my ultimate favorite. It has to be as savory as possible and it can’t be too thin or watery. If worrying about calories and nutrition were no longer necessary and I could eat anything I want then these would probably be my staples. I know! I too realize that it’s nothing but a list of craptastic junk food. Not one redeemable food on that list. But you know, this is a sort of “what I would eat if I were to splurge” list but there was a time where I ate off this list on a very regular basis. It’s nice that these foods have finally found the place they’re supposed to inhabit in my personal food pyramid.

Choices At Ruby Tuesday's That Won't Haunt Me The Rest Of The Week

2006-09-15T21:16:00.000-07:00

I went to lunch with my friend yesterday at Ruby Tuesday’s because we’d never been there before. As is my custom before I ever go out to eat, I looked up the restaurant’s website on the internet to see if they listed the nutritional content of the food on their menu. I love to do this anytime I’m going out to eat. I love that I can get on and plan a meal, log it into my food journal and stay on target; it’s saved my ass from falling off the wagon many a times. When I know the nutritional information for food at a restaurant then I’ll make as healthy choice as possible and rearrange my eating for the rest of the day to keep myself on plan. If I don’t know how many calories are in something I’ll eat a meal that’s really bad for me, figure that I’ve probably screwed up and then start planning the closest route between the restaurant and my house that will take me by a Dairy queen. Because I know I have those kinds of tendencies, being able to know how many calories are in an entrée has become very important to me. So anyways, before I left work I looked up the menu for Ruby Tuesday’s and picked out one or two options off of their Smart Eating menu. But when we went to order the waitress told me that the restaurant no longer offered any of the options I had picked out and that the chain was phasing out some of the healthier choice meals. I was really surprised! Most restaurants are making the move towards offering more “lighter choice” meals and it’s something I’m sure that I’m not alone in appreciating. Actually, just the fact that places are willing to make the nutritional makeup of their foods available is great. There are some days where I want to eat a meal that is calorically crap and that’s fine; at least make that information available to me so I can make that choice. So I ordered a steak and a side dish that I knew the calorie content for (they were some of the few items listed on the Smart Eating menu that hadn’t been phased out.) But I didn’t realize that the meal came with garlic bread and a gigantic baked potato drowning in butter and sour cream. I ate the steak and I ate the side dish and felt satisfied. But because I still have issues with leaving food on my plate (I just feel guilty wasting food) I had to resist the urge to finish the rest. In the end I gave the garlic bread and baked potato to my friend, I didn’t really want or need it and I wasn’t going to eat it simply because it was there. I ate what I wanted and not just to clean my plate. That’s a big achievement for me.

More Fun With Numbers

2006-09-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

So the other day I wrote a post about fitting into size seven jeans. Very exciting stuff! Well, today I went and bought some dress slacks for practicum because all my other dress pants are size 10 or bigger. Can you believe I bought pants in a size 6 stretch from Old Navy? Size 6 sounds teeny tiny to me! I’m just a little full of myself tonight over that. So here’s the weird thing. I bought a pair of pants in gray and a pair in brown. They are the same brand/cut/fabric type/pattern/style/everything. Only difference is their color. At the store I tried on the grays and they looked really good so on the way out I just picked up the brown ones. When I got home I tried on the brown pants and they are way tighter! I checked the labels and supposedly they’re the same but the difference when they’re on seems like almost a whole size. I figure I’ll call myself a size 6 (because that feels good to say!) and I’ll use the brown pants to judge changes in my body. It’ll be nice to see that they fit super tight now but every week they’ll hopefully fit just a little looser.

Lots Of Body Image Stuff (Sorry It’s Kind Of Long)

2006-09-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

The other week, the lovely Nicole wrote a post about “ass issues”. Well I had to make mention of the subject myself because I also have a history of the booty to write about. Growing up, back in the day, I absolutely hated my ass. In fact, I have always been excessively self-conscious about my lower body. Even when I was very young I had what could be referred to as childbearing hips which now, as a woman in my twenties, I’ve come to accept and embrace. But I started getting my hourglass figure before the age of ten and back then I was only aware that my lower body was way bigger than any of my friends’ bodies. I didn’t have the benefit of twenty years of living to know that every body is different and that our curves fit our height/frame/body type naturally. At the time, for me, bigger equaled Fat. I also think I didn’t realize the concept of “developing into a woman” and that for me the boobs and the butt came a little early. In my adolescent mind, all I saw was that I was way bigger than my peers. And of course during this time trading clothes with your friends was the in thing to do; you had to, it established and confirmed the sacred bonds of sisterhood. When we traded clothes I was able to exchange shirts but I was too big to trade bottoms. When you’re young, that can sometimes stick with you and bother you. As I grew older I never had a problem with the ta tas (I actually was pretty proud of my first training bra) but I really hated my butt. I thought it was big and wide and that it stuck out too much. I remember that I hated and feared to be called up to write on the blackboard at school because then everyone would be staring at my “gigantic” ass. It was around this time as a young teen that I started to refuse to wear shorts or skirts and instead tried to camouflage my lower body with dark jeans and pants and hoped that my top half would take the focus off the bottom. To this day, that’s still something that I tend to do. Now here’s the part that makes me laugh but at the same time I say it in all seriousness. The song by Sir-Mix-A lot, “Baby Got Back” actually did me a lot of good. I remember when this song came out it was the first time that I thought that it was possible that boys might like a body shaped like mine. Until that song, I had thought that a big butt was ugly. Then came a song that not only said that a big butt was not ugly but was in fact sexy and desirable. As silly as it seems, that actually meant something to me. I think that today it is probably tougher for young girls to have a healthy body image when you have role models like Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan splashed all over the cover of Teen magazine. But I also like the fact that J. Lo (whatever may be the opinion about her as an actress/singer/dancer/person) is able to be a big time celebrity who is appreciated for her trunk full of junk. Yes she’s a body type that is still difficult to live up to but at least body shapes that aren’t a strict size 0 are getting positive attention. I think that this new appreciation for a larger derriere is something that you can find more examples of today then could be found back in the early 90’s. Now I don’t want to even start to touch how this is just the same old unhealthy focus on women’s bodies dressed up in new clothes. That whether the focus is on freakishly thin or cartoonishly buxom, the larger problem is a deeper issue about the objectification of women and the double standard of society and media’s over-scrutinizing of women’s bodies. (Don’t even get me going on that soapbox) My point is that albeit wrong that there is this huge focus on the female form, I’m glad to see that there is a place somewhere in this world for a woman who has a generous sized badunka dunk dunk. I think it’s funny now that when I exercise I do squats and donkey kicks hoping to develop some seriously nice muscles in the booty. I don’t know when it happened but somewhere in my life I really started liking my rear end and even though I want to lose weight now, I no longer want to lose the butt. I think it’s a bigger reflection on my whole state of mind and approach to my body image. I still talk about fat and fatness (it’s something that’s been with me a long time and I have plenty to say on the subject) but I think that there’s a theme of health and healthiness that’s starting to creep into my mindset. Well, I hope this post makes sense; it’s a little disjointed and doesn’t even begin to cover all the things I could say about having a big booty. I didn’t even get into the problem with buying pants that fit both your butt and waist, a topic that is a whole other post within itself. I really think that to accurately express myself on this topic I would probably need to write an entire book. All I know is that with age comes the blessing of self-acceptance. Thankfully, I have come to the point where I love my curves. I guess to sum it all up, part of growing up is being able to turn around in the mirror to say hooray for the bootay!

Assumptions

2006-09-08T23:58:00.000-07:00

So my boy is out of town for work next week and my friend from school was talking about coming over one day to hang out and keep me company. Because I have turned into a major exercise addict (read: running dork) I asked if she would be interested in going for a run when she comes over. She laughed and said, “Well, that would be cool but I don’t know if I could keep up with you. I haven’t worked out for a long time and I’m sure that you’ll run circles around me.” That totally surprised me because I had just assumed that because she’s a size two and has a great shape that she would be the one running circles around me. I also thought it was pretty cool that she assumed that I might actually be in good enough shape to outrun her. I still think of myself as this couch potato who gets winded walking to the mailbox. But I guess I totally am not that anymore! Today I ran a mile and three quarters and would have gone further but my ipod battery kicked the bucket about halfway through. I definitely need music to run to. I charged the little sucker up today so I won’t be caught unawares again! Who knows how far I’ll go tomorrow now that I have my badass theme music ready to go?

Size 7, WooHoo!

2006-09-05T21:14:00.000-07:00

I had one of those “WTF was I thinking!?” moments today. I tried on a pair of stretch denim L.E.I. jeans this morning. They’re a size 7 and they’ve been hanging in my closet since my pre-wedding days. I got them up and buttoned and while they’re very, very tight, they technically fit! The jeans that I’m currently wearing have gotten too big and so I decided to wear the size sevens today because I figured it would be nice to wear a pair of pants that aren’t completely falling down for once. I was feeling good until I got to work and then I totally wondered what the hell I was thinking! Those jeans were so tight and I almost in a sense felt naked just because they really show the shape of my lower body, both the good aspects and the bad. Later on I started thinking that they’re not really that bad, it’s just that I’m so used to my clothes feeling baggy and on top of that I’ve spent a long time hiding my figure and so wearing something that really shows it was almost scary! I don’t know exactly what size jeans I’m shooting for as my goal size but I figure 7 has to be pretty darn close. I think right now it’s more about wearing those jeans but changing my body to fit them in a way that I think looks both healthy and flattering. So, yeah it's not really about the numbers (but still woo hoo! about the 7's!)

I Just Need To Vent!

2006-09-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have been so stressed out lately. School started this week and it looks like this may be the busiest semester yet. With classes, doing practicum hours, and having to do intake hours, I can sometimes spend 20 or more hours at school. That’s like having a part time job! And speaking of jobs, I’m also job hunting and I’ve had no luck so far; I’m pretty choosy about what I’m applying for because it has to be complimentary to my school, hence the slow returns. I’m willing to wait to find the perfect job but it can be kind of nerve wracking to be in transition. My life is always so busy so I try to keep things as reliable as possible and it seems like lately all things, both big and small, have been up in the air. Ok, that’s the end of my bitch session. There’s just so much going on right now that I don’t want to waste your time about. Are you still there? I hope I didn’t bore you into a coma with my whining! But really, all this stress is starting to get to me. I’ve been having trouble sleeping and my face is breaking out. I also think that’s why it’s been three days and I’ve had barely any appetite. That’s extremely unusual! Whenever I’m stressed I usually eat anything that isn’t nailed down! But I’ve just been walking around here feeling like there’s so much on my mind and that if I eat, I’ll feel sick. Ok, sorry, I snuck a little more bitching and whining in there again, didn’t I? Well, here’s what I did today to kind of combat some of this Stress! I put on my ipod and ran for two and a half miles and then walked at a quick pace back home for another half mile. It felt so good! When I started running I just listened to the music and cleared my mind. Then after I got into my groove I kind of just mulled things over and maybe because my body was in motion and using up so much energy, things began to seem more manageable. When I got home, I took a nice long hot bath. So, I’m more relaxed. I didn’t solve any things but I did definitely change my attitude towards all these stressors. I just keep telling myself that things will settle down soon; stuff in life always seems to work itself out in the end anyway, doesn’t it? I figure I can worry a ton about things and stuff will fall into place or I can take everything in stride and it will all still fall into place. Option B sounds a little more appetizing, don’t you think?

Not The Norm

2006-09-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

So a kind of weird thing happened today. I woke up and had oatmeal for breakfast around 9. (That’s not the weird thing.) I then went and ran about a million errands because I had today off and I wanted to get things done before the big three day weekend starts. Well because the day was so busy, I didn’t get to eat throughout the day like I usually do and found myself at 4:00 running on the 130 calories I’d had at breakfast. I went to dinner with my parents and even after eating until I was full, I’d only taken in 630 calories for the day. I even ran two miles today so I expected to be extra hungry. It’s now 9:00 at night and I’m still full from dinner and while it’s not good that I’ve eaten so little today, I don’t want to force myself to eat when I’m not really hungry. I very rarely find myself on the underside of my calorie target. I’m going to snack some grapes and honeydew as a small dessert but I think I’m done for the night. So yeah, that was weird. Would you guys go with what your appetite is telling you or by the knowledge that you should give your body enough calories to avoid slowing down your metabolism? I mean, should I add a few extra calories to tomorrow’s meals?

Yet Another Post Where I Toot My Own Horn

2006-08-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

So I didn’t even get to tell you all about my camping trip! As I mentioned in my earlier post, I did awesome. Seriously, I’m the shit! Friday night before we left I had asked my husband to buy food for the trip (snacks for him and healthy things for me) and effectively avoided the opportunity of ravaging the grocery store like a feral animal. I knew that I just had to avoid the store altogether because things would have just gone downhill from there. (Especially because I was still dealing with all those crazy cravings. Thankfully, those have subsided this week!) He was sweet enough to bring snacks that he knew wouldn’t present much of a temptation to me and this way he wouldn’t be deprived of all the goodies that he loves to munch on. So that took care of the craziness that usually grabs a hold of me when I’m on vacation. Because really, it’s the car rides that always get me. In fact, once we got there I had a hard time eating enough calories to meet my target. We spent the days out hiking or sight seeing starting early in the morning all the way until sundown and most of the time I was just thinking, “Water!” and felt too tired and hot to eat. I also have to tell you guys, I think I might possibly be in the best shape I’ve ever been in. Not only did I manage to do all the hiking and walks that I wanted but I enjoyed every minute of it. I haven’t been camping in years and years and so it was amazing to really get an idea of how much I’ve changed in attitude towards things like physical activity. I know on previous trips where we went hiking on some trail I was always thinking, “I’m so tired, how much further?” This time I just enjoyed the feeling of being outdoors, of my body doing exactly what I asked of it and not fighting me the whole way. It was just amazing, you guys! I think I’ve also gotten used to the idea of sweating. I know in the past I’ve been very prissy and hated to sweat, even while camping! Now on a hike I don’t think it’s challenging enough unless I’m drenched. I’m just amazed at how I’m still the same person, I’m still me at the core, but I’m discovering all kinds of things about myself that I didn’t know existed under the surface. It’s just fantastic to think about what kinds of things I’m really capable of.

Weigh To Go! Part 8

2006-08-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 145.2 Today’s Weigh-In: 142.2 Ok, that’s 3 pounds down this month. I’m happy that I’m losing but I can’t help but feel a bit of frustration because it seems like it is taking forever to move this fat! On a post back in the beginning of June I was talking about my expectation of hitting the low forties then. Now almost three months later I’m finally here. I guess I didn’t think it would take this long. And I really kicked some butt this month, too! I fought off the cravings monster like a champ. I started running (which I’m still enjoying). I actually went camping and stayed on target where as in the past I’d have eaten enough s’mores to put me into a sugar coma. Basically I had a month that I can be really proud of, that I can say that I gave a fantastic effort to, but with only a small return. So that’s why I’m being all pissy about the three pounds. All my clothing fits the same, my body doesn’t look much different and it’s leading to impatience. But here’s what I’m thinking, I’m losing around a half a pound a week, which is still a good steady loss. In the past I’ve never lost weight slowly and steadily. I’ve never done this the “healthy” way by eating balanced, nutritious meals, by drinking lots of water, by taking vitamins and by doing regular exercise. I’ve always gone on crazy crash diets that involved deprivation and overly restrictive behavior. I’ve always expected weight loss to be hell; to be painful but quick. So this experience is all new for me. I guess this is what real change is like; I may be going slow but I’m building new behaviors on a rock foundation and leaving the slippery slopes of crash dieting behind me. So I’m now at 36.7 pounds gone and about 17 more to go. Either way I’m committed, no matter how much longer it takes!

You Shouldn't Buy Trail Mix Just To Eat The M&M’s

2006-08-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

So tomorrow afternoon the husband, pup and I are leaving for a weekend camping trip; I’m very excited (and just a little bit nervous.) Nervous because see this can pretty much go two ways. Scenario one: We’ll stop at the grocery store on our way up and I’ll buy all kinds of fruits and veggies and healthy stuff for grilling and snacking. Combine that with a lot of beautiful scenic hiking and this weekend could shape up to be a cleverly-disguised-as-fun chance to burn some fat. Scenario two goes a little more like this: We stop at the grocery store and I lose my ever-loving mind and when the haze clears I find myself on a three-hour car ride with a few Family sized bags of chips, some Twinkies, and a sack full of more candy then you can shake a slim jim beef jerky stick at. (Scenario two is pretty much how all my vacations end up so you can understand why I’m a little nervous.) With all these crazy cravings I’ve been having lately, things are looking particularly uphill for me. I'm counting on the fact that weigh day is on Monday. I think the fear of throwing off those numbers might be enough to insulate me from doing too much damage. Arrgh! Ok, how many days has it been now since I’ve become a hungry, bitchy blogger? Oh well, this too shall pass. And hey, I guess we’ll see what happens come Monday!

Urges, Cravings, And Impulses

2006-08-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

Hey, I survived The Dentist! My teeth are finally squared away and good to go for another six months. So by Dentist’s orders I’m supposed to be eating soup, or oatmeal, or j-ello or some other food that resembles more of a liquid state than a solid. Of course I want none of the above and I’m starving; I’m actually in the mood for Panda’s orange chicken and fried rice. I think my appetite has the maturity level of a five year old. You tell it, “No you can’t have that” and I instantly crave whatever food is off limits. Actually, for some reason I’ve been having cravings for not so healthy foods for the past couple of days. I’ll be sitting at my desk working and then all of a sudden I’ll think about pancakes with butter and maple syrup. What the hell is that? Does that happen to everybody? Where a picture of food pops into your head and you almost can smell and taste it? It’s been happening a lot lately and I can’t even blame TOM for these cravings. Arrgh! I hate when I get like this; I never know what to do. Should I ignore the cravings or is that going to set me up for a binge? Should I eat a small amount to satisfy the craving or will one bite turn into a week of crap eating? I notice that the cravings are centered around comfort food: mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken fried steak, Burger King croissan’wiches. If it’s battered, deep fried, filled with sugar or made of white flour then I’ve been fantasizing about it. And it’s not just the food itself but it’s also the urge to just eat anything I want without thinking about its nutritional value. I feel like just eating until I’m stuffed and not thinking about how many calories I put away. I don’t know, I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and that’s probably where it’s all stemming from. Ok, I’m going to go ahead and post this now. Funny, it never fails that as soon as I’m done writing I already begin to feel better! I’m just hoping that the urge to eat like hell goes away soon. At the rate I’ve been thinking about crappy food I’ll probably end up breaking down and finding myself at an IHOP at 3 am, face down in a stack of golden flapjacks.

My Teeth Are Rebelling!

2006-08-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

One way to lose weight? Have ongoing issues with your teeth! A couple of weeks ago I had some fillings done. For the past few weeks I noticed that one of the teeth that had been filled felt extremely sensitive; it’s gotten to the point where I’m not chewing on the right side of my mouth. So tomorrow I’m yet again facing my biggest nemesis; The Dentist. The filling is loose and will have to be corrected so that means another goofy pill and another day of liquids only to make sure that this time the filling sets!

I Have No Shame (And Pretty Laughable Taste In Music)

2006-08-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

I had a fantastic run today. I put my ipod on and clocked up a mile and a half and then came home to lift weights. It felt fantastic! So I have to tell you, I had that new J. Timberl@ke song, “Sexy Back”, on repeat. I absolutely love that song and I don’t even have the decency to be properly embarrassed of that guilty pleasure. It’s funny; there are actually many songs on my ipod list that fall into that category. It’s like a 12 year old girl broke into my house and programmed my ipod with boy band and pop princess music. But it helps me kick ass when I’m working out so instead of denying my affinity for teen bubble gum pop music, I’m proudly declaring it here!

I Heart You All! (And Admire You For Putting Up With Me!)

2006-08-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

What would I do without you guys? I notice in my posting that I’ll go along just fine, enjoying the fact that I’m totally kicking ass at losing weight and then all of a sudden (and often for no real reason) I have a little freak out and I climb up the crazy tree. As soon as I post though, I notice that it seems to set me right again and I climb back down to normal. My last post is a prime example; just a few days ago I declared myself an official bad ass and then yesterday I panicked because I got scared that maybe all these changes that I’m making are a passing phase. I completely agree with xena, I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think I’m just so happy that things are going my way that it makes me all the more worried that it will somehow suddenly end. As it turns out, there’s no need for me to worry. I had a great run today and I’m planning on having a great run tomorrow. And if there are days where I’m not in the running mood then oh well, and I’ll do something different. The thing that counts is that I’m making real progress and getting real results and I’ll remember that on days when I’m having a mini-crisis or a TOM-induced pity party. Really I think my whole blog is like that, ups and downs, highs and lows, achievements and disappointments. I think that as manic as it seems, these fluctuations are just part of the journey. I think we pretty much all seem to bounce around like that as we face new challenges and conquer old demons. It makes me think, what did I do before I was able to reach out and connect with all you lovely people? All those feelings and emotions bouncing around and no outlet! Which makes me want to say thanks guys for being there and sorry for all the ping-ponging emotions! It’s just a byproduct of me getting my shit together!

Not Magic, Just Hardwork

2006-08-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

Hey! I can run two miles! Yep, two miles and that’s after the mile that I do on Steely Dan. I found out tonight that I've worked myself up to clocking that kind of distance! Who knew? Certainly not me! Today my husband asked if I wanted to go for a run. He’s started to run with me and it’s been really great to get out there together. I told him yes and then I noticed that I felt a little hesitant for like a second and a half as an afterthought. What is that?, I thought. Why do I feel hesitant? For lack of a better word, it almost resembled a little bit of fear. So what am I afraid of? I’m afraid that this whole running thing is a fluke. That right now I’m enjoying it but any day now I’m going to find I’ve lost my passion and dedication for these big workouts. It’s only been a week that I’ve started running outdoors seriously; is the novelty about to wear off? Have you ever had the experience of starting an exercise regimen and you’re going along fine for awhile and then you find that you start to have off days and bad days where you can’t even finish your normal workout? You start to make good excuses and obvious excuses for why you can't exercise. So you think that maybe you need to change it up but then you realize that it’s your motivation that’s gone? This has happened to me so often in the past. I’ll get into a routine for weeks, months even, and then for whatever reason unknown to me, I’ll lose my momentum. I think this is what I’m afraid of. I’m scared that one of these days I’m going to get dressed, tie my shoes up, and walk out of my front door and instead of feeling the “I can do this!” attitude that accompanies me now, it will be replaced with a “I don’t want to do this” feeling. It’s so funny how I always seem to be waiting for something to go wrong along this weight loss journey. It’s almost like things are going along so good that I get scared that it’s going to end all of a sudden. Maybe because I’ve had so many experiences where I did good and started to lose weight only to get sidetracked and gain everything back. It’s happened so many times that it affects how I feel about weight loss in general. I think that I just have to stop and look back up at the first paragraph of this post. Two miles is real, guys! That’s something that I’ve actually done and it’s not just going to magically disappear over night. At least not unless I let it happen.

Why Walk A Mile When You Can Run It?

2006-08-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Every muscle in my body is sore! Not only did I manage to do a bad ass workout on Thursday but I pulled it off everyday this weekend. I realize that sometimes I underestimate myself. If someone a week ago had asked me to run a mile after lifting weights and completing a hill course on Steely Dan I would have told them that I’m not in good enough shape to do that. But Thursday after I looked up the distance I ran I realized that I had done a mile and I felt like I probably could have gone further. So today on my run I went a little further and actually clocked up a mile and a half. And still, I think I probably could have gone further. I only turned around because I knew I had things to do and only had so much time allotted. This is the first time that I’ve ever tried to track distance for my workouts; even with Steely Dan I use the time and course features without paying attention to the distance that I clock up. I guess it just goes to show that I am doing better than I ever would have given myself credit for.

I Am One Of Those People I Admire

2006-08-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

Yep, I’m one of those people that I admire. At least I was for like an hour and a half. Today I started with lifting weights, followed by an ab workout and then I did a course of hill climbing on Steely Dan. I then rounded out my workout with a twenty minute one-mile run in my neighborhood. I was out there at 5:00 in the afternoon, running in 105 degree temperatures with the full sun beating down on me. Whenever I’m out driving somewhere and I pass someone running in this crazy summer heat, drenched in sweat, but focused and going the distance I am totally impressed. I always think, “Wow. That person is really hardcore! I wish I had that kind of dedication.” And that’s when I realized that hey, I was totally that person! Let’s make it official: I am a bad ass!

Recipe For Disaster

2006-08-09T18:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been a good cook. I love food, I love to eat and I have an unhealthy obsession with Food TV but it never translates over to me actually getting into the kitchen. Seriously, my idea of cooking involves a can opener and a microwave. (Maybe that’s why I love salads so much? I’m in my element with bagged lettuce and peel and eat veggies.) And let’s not even talk about baking; there’s a better chance that I’d burn the house down than actually bake something that’s edible. My husband laughs because I buy ready-to-bake cookies and then just eat the dough without bothering to use the stove. My husband on the other hand is an amazing cook. I could go on and on about how good some of the meals he comes up with are. Plus he’s consistent. Every time he cooks a meal it comes out beautiful, it smells wonderful and it tastes great every time. He actually enjoys making food so maybe it’s the “love” that makes it taste so good! (If you’re a fan of “Everybody Loves Raymond” you’ll get that reference.) Anyways, I realize that the reason I’m not a good cook is because in the end, I just don’t really enjoy cooking and I have no patience for it. For example, even though I very rarely eat any red meat I’ve been having such a craving for meatloaf lately that I thought I’d try my hand at making some. I figured I could make it with 4% fat beef, lots of oatmeal, and plenty of fresh herbs, onions and garlic. Yum! I also decided that I would make it in a muffin pan so that way I could guarantee serving size and calorie content. Sounds easy enough, right? Yeah. First, because I know nothing about cooking and do it so little, I didn’t come up with an adequate plan before I started cooking. I portioned out the raw beef and was ready to start mixing individual muffins and then realized that I hadn’t opened the canister of oatmeal or sliced up the veggie stuff. So I washed my hands, opened the oatmeal and sliced the veggies, picked up the meat to start mixing and then realized that I hadn’t got any of the spices out of their shakers and I didn’t want to touch them with my dirty hands. (I’m very militant about raw meat and bacteria and was trying my best not to touch anything, anywhere.) So of course I stopped and got all the spices ready and as I started getting about halfway through the meatloaf muffins I realized that I had forgotten the tomato sauce. So yet again I had to stop, wash up, open the can of sauce and remix all the muffins I had already made. About halfway through I was tired of this cooking project! I didn’t even feel like finishing, much less having to go through all the clean up still waiting ahead of me! And also another thing, why is it that a stray wisp hair will fall out of my barrette and into my eye or mouth right when I can’t swipe it away? Or why will I have an unbearable itch on my face while my hands are bowl-deep in raw meat and I’ll have to sit there and try to itch myself with my own shoulder? But I digress… In the end, they actually came out really good and totally satisfied my craving. Maybe I could have my own Food TV show after all? People could tune in week after week just out of morbid curiosity to watch the train wreck that is Lynne in the kitchen. People would probably just watch the show, confused, and wonder “Is this girl ever going to get it? For the fortieth time, how hard can cooking meatloaf be?!”

Obsess Much?

2006-08-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

I've been over thinking things just too much lately. For example, here’s what will run through my mind: Less than twenty pounds to go; I could do that by Halloween. Boy, Halloween, that’s the start of the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas always add a couple of pounds. I need to make sure that I don’t gain all this weight back during the holidays. It wouldn’t be the first time I did something like that. I need to start preparing now. Then I realize it’s only the beginning of August. And that I seriously need to chill out and quit worrying so much. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; it’s hard to take everyday one step at a time while at the same time trying to make long-term changes. That is a hard balance to keep up without driving yourself crazy!

The Two Day Buffet (Otherwise Known As The Weekend)

2006-08-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

Why is there something going on every weekend that involves food? It seems like I do good all week long; I eat right and exercise and drink my water and take my vitamins and everything moves along splendidly. Then Friday night, Saturday and Sunday come along and it feels like I’m at risk for undoing all the good that I’ve done Monday through Friday afternoon. My husband and I were talking about how tired we are lately and how we feel like by the time Monday morning comes along, we’ve had no rest. But then we realized that every weekend over the past few months has either been someone’s birthday/house/backyard barbecue party, or guests visiting, or dinner with friends and family or other event. For me, these events always pose themselves as big scary hurdles to jump. I’m always wondering if I’m going to make good choices. Will there be something at this party for me to eat or will I be shoveling spinach dip and cheesecake into my mouth for the next four hours? And if I eat sparingly, is someone going to ask me why I’m not eating more? Are they going to ask if I’m on a diet? Am I going to have to decide whether to tell them yes or make up some lie about how I already ate and I’m not that hungry? And if I do indulge myself and eat a boatload of crap, will I wake up and work out tomorrow or will I continue into a couple of days of binge eating? When I look at my food journals I see that in general I’m handling weekend eating relatively well, but I feel like it’s requiring too much mental and emotional energy. I also think that as I get closer to goal I'm going to have to be more strict. In the past I knew that I could fudge a little more on the weekends when I had fifty pounds to lose. I won't have that same leeway when I start to get down to those last ten or fifteen. At some point it won't be enough to do well for four days and then half-ass it for three. I don't know where I'm going with this and I'm sure I'll keep plodding along. It's just that sometimes I wish I could just show up to some social event and not care about how much mayonnaise is in the potato salad.

I'm Sensitive, Please Don't Hurt My Fillings

2006-08-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

I had to have some fillings done today. I first have to start off by explaining that I have an irrational fear of the dentist. I have very sensitive teeth in general; heat, cold and sweets can sometimes bother my teeth. In addition to extreme sensitivity, in the past when I’ve had fillings I have always been able to feel the drill no matter how numbed up they try to get me. My dad has the same problem as I do (funnily enough, when we both smile you can tell that him and I have the exact same teeth. Genetics are so interesting.) I’ve also had a couple of crappy dentists over the years, which has only increased my fears. My last dentist told me that I was just nervous and that all I was feeling was pressure from the drill. I tried to tell him that the pressure isn’t what bothers me, I’m fine with the pressure, it’s the incessant pain of drilling into my half-numbed tooth that was irksome. Every time they used the little water spout or the air blower thingy (sorry, I don’t know the technical terms) it was like having ice cold shot directly on to the nerve. So when I told him that I felt it he looked at me puzzled and said, “You shouldn’t be feeling that.” Which of course made me want to tell him, “Yeah, no shit.” But as he was the one holding the drill, I thought I’d keep that last comment to myself. Anyways, this experience is pretty much what most of my experiences with dentists have been like and that has led to me religiously brushing and flossing in the hopes that I will never have to suffer through anything more than twice a year check-ups. ”Preventative measures” is my motto when it comes to my teeth! But last Monday at my check up with my new dentist they found a cavity. They said “Well, we’ll have you back in on Thursday for a filling.” Which to my little fearful brain sounds like, “Well, we’ll have you back in on Thursday for unbearably cruel and traumatizing torture.” Luckily, this new dentist was very accommodating to my fears and he prescribed me a heavy duty sedative before the procedure. First, let me say, that there was one time where I vaguely felt the drill but I was so loopy it wasn’t even an issue. I mean I was really that out of it. My husband drove me there and after the filling was done drove me home where I proceeded to sleep for four hours. Yep, that was some heavy duty stuff. So later on I woke up and my husband was getting ready to leave. I asked him if he would take my car and fill it up with gas to which he cracked up laughing and reminded me that we stopped for gas after the filling. Me: No we didn’t! Him: (Laughing) Yes, we did! Me: I don’t really remember that… Him: Yes, we stopped at the gas station near the dentist’s office. It was next to the Panda Express. Don’t you remember telling me how much you loved Panda Express and how you wished there was one closer to the house and then you told me how many calories are in the orange chicken? Me: (Shocked) I do kind of remember that! I was going on about how unfair that Panda is so high in calories and that I sure would love to take some home right now! So evidently, even half-drugged and fresh out of a dental procedure, I still am thinking about food! I may not remember where I am but I can tell you the calorie content of fried rice per serving!

The Universe At Work

2006-08-02T21:15:00.000-07:00

Today I didn’t feel like working out and I had no other excuse other than that I felt like lazing on the couch. I argued back and forth with myself and finally decided I would just keep on lying there. I told myself that there’s always tomorrow. Even though I hadn’t worked out yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. And um, the day before that one… So, after making my decision to spend the night like a sofa pillow, I was lying comfortably on the couch watching Food TV when the cable went out. I was like, “Fine! I get the hint, Universe!” and figured that I would take that as a sign to put a workout dvd in and get my ass in gear. There is something about having a great workout and really pushing yourself after slacking off for a few days. I felt really good afterwards and I had to wonder (just like I always do) why don’t I just do that from the beginning? 99% of the time I really enjoy working out as soon as I start. It seems so easy, right? But I’m sure I’ll conveniently forget this fact the next time I’m glued to my couch.

100th Post

2006-08-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, lucky number 100! As I love nice round milestones and markers, I thought I’d take a minute to pause at this entry and reflect a little. I’ve written 100 posts over the last seven months. There have been so many ups and downs! It seems the further along I go the more swings my thoughts and emotions can take. I think it's because I'm starting to really explore things and consequently to get more in touch with how I feel about things. Take this weekend for example. After feeling like a big fat girl I spent the weekend doing nothing but eating fast food and avoiding exercise and generally feeling bad about myself. Not good, but just for the moment I let myself kind of really explore all those negative emotions instead of trying to distract myself from them. I really let myself sit in it and stew for a while. I let my mind run over all my supposed weaknesses and flaws. I even let myself do the “I can’t do this. I’ll never be able to keep this up.” thoughts. Then after getting that out of my system I stopped and then rationally asked myself, “If you can’t do this and it’s impossible, why go on?” And it’s funny because I have such a reaction to a thought like that. I can’t imagine not going on. When you get down to it, I really do believe in myself, my abilities, and I care enough about myself to do this. In the end, I’m a tough cookie who means business. This kind of self-indulgence isn’t something that I would let myself do often but it was something that kind of helped me move past this little emotional slump that’s been creeping in over the past few weeks. To paraphrase Patl, long-term wallowing is not good but sometimes acknowledging feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction can help you to really understand what it is that you need or are striving for in life. I figure that these negative self-doubts I have aren’t bad if I’m channeling them into more constructive path ways. I believe growth and change are painful by nature. Being outside of your comfort zone or forcing yourself to examine just who you really are as a person is going to feel uncomfortable but I’m trying to find a welcome place for it along this crazy journey. So yes I'm feeling better and just like that, I was down in the dumps and then bouncing right back up into the "I can do this!" mode. Thanks to everyone who commented that it’s normal to worry about what other people think about you. It’s nice to know that others do it too. I just for some reason felt well, I guess the best word for it would be vulnerable at that party. Too often I forget that mine is a struggle that so many others quietly experience too and I’m not really alone. So I figure I should end this 100th post with some kind of “What I’ve learned while blogging” statement. But really, there’s so much I’ve learned that it’s difficult to condense into a few nice, neat little sentences (but hey, I’ll try): It doesn’t matter how many times you trip, stumble or fall down flat on your face. What matters is that each time it happens you pick yourself up and keep going again. When it comes down to it, that’s what you do because that’s what it takes. Also, the great thing is that in Fatblogland a hand stretched out to help you back up is never far away!

You Gotta Fight For Your Right To (Pity) Party

2006-07-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to a going away party for a friend of my husband. I’d actually been kind of reluctant to go because the last time I had seen many of the people at this party I weighed twenty pounds less than I do now. Why is that the first thing I ever think about when a social event comes up? Anytime social events arise, the first thing I think about is how much weight I’ve gained. I really hate that I think like this; it makes me angry with myself. Why is it important to me? Why do I care what people may think of me? I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it and I think that it’s more than just worrying about what other people think. It’s more like it reminds me of just how out of hand I let things get. Since I last saw these people, I gained like forty pounds and even with the weight I’ve taken off, I’m still sitting twenty pounds heavier than what I was. Why this matters to me so much, I really don’t know. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m so overly sensitive or narcissistic to think that my weight matters to others around me but it’s a true feeling that I experience so I won’t hold back from telling you all that I do indeed feel it. I know it’s silly and I know it’s unhealthy but as I was putting on my makeup last night I couldn’t help feeling bad about myself and thinking that no amount of mascara was going to hide what I’ve done to my poor body over the last year. I don’t know, my poor body deserves better. It deserves to be filled with good food, receive exercise and sleep and rest. It doesn’t need to be force fed crap, stretched out of shape by emotional eating and it certainly doesn’t need me beating it up mentally yet these are things that I have repeatedly done to it for years now. Grrr. Sorry, I’m yucky today. I’ll try to wake up tomorrow my happy, positive self but for some reason this weekend I have been rolling around in my own self-loathing. Maybe what I need is a nice hot bath to try and wash some of it off!

Weigh To Go! Part 7

2006-07-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

December’s Starting Weight: 178.9 Last Month’s Weigh-In: 148.6 Today’s Weigh-In: 145.2 Total Lost To Date: 33.7 This month I’m down 3.4 pounds. I didn’t lose the 5 pounds I was aiming for but that’s ok. I find that if I set myself a goal, I just naturally try harder. I need something to strive towards; if I don’t make it, that’s ok because at least I know I was giving it my best. Last post I was worried that I had hit a plateau. But I looked back at my food journal and weigh-ins and realized that I really got down to business and started logging in all my calories and carbs at the end of April. Since then, I’ve been losing about 4 pounds a month on average so really I’m right where I should be with the 3.4 loss this month. I also started doing some weight lifting the last few weeks. I’ve always stuck to jogging/walking/running and now I’m doing all kinds of new exercises using free weights and resistance bands. I build muscle easily and so I think that feeling like my body is stuck might be more of a result of building muscle. I’m the type of person who gets discouraged if my pants feel tight and ignores the fact that my legs are getting smoother and more toned. It’s just a leftover fear that big equals Fat. So what if my pants aren’t feeling as loose as I’d like them to feel? I’m totally ignoring the fact that I’m replacing fat with muscle. I need to remember that this is long-term and in a few more weeks I’ll really be able to see the benefits. I also wanted to make sure I said thank you for all your supportive comments last post. Every once in awhile I have these little freak out moments where I think I can’t do this and it’s so nice to feel your support. It makes me feel like yes I can do this! I also think that I’ll take your advice and see if I can mix up my food program too. It’s something that I really like the idea of. I’m going grocery shopping tonight and I think I want to buy more fresh veggies and fruits. I tend to eat very pre-packaged, easy to carry meals during the day because it fits into my busy schedule. But that doesn’t mean that when I get home I need to eat that way too. So I figure that at night I’m going to really try to eat more balanced dinners with lots of fresh vegetables, lean protein and fruits for dessert. So July is gone already! Can you believe it? I had vowed to kick its ass this month and all things considered, I’m going to say I at least managed to slap it around some. Ok, August, here I come!

Stuck!

2006-07-25T16:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry I’ve been absent all week, I have been so tired and busy lately that everything finally caught up with me. I started this month out vowing to kick July’s ass. Little did I know that it was my ass that was going to receive the kicking. This time I made it three weeks with exercising everyday before I fell on my figurative face. I pretty much crashed and burned Thursday night. I went to bed early and as I had Friday off, ended up sleeping most of Friday away. Then I never really got going for the rest of the weekend. I’m just so tired; I’ve kept up a crazy pace for the past few months and it finally caught up with me. I did absolutely nothing over Saturday and Sunday. I slept until the late afternoon and after dragging myself on to the couch in front of the tv, I only got up to dig around in the kitchen for something to eat. I stayed on target calorie-wise but I still feel bloated and yucky just because I lazed around so much. So weigh-in is in three days and I know that I’m going to fall short of my 5-pound challenge. I actually would be surprised if I lost anything this month. My body feels pretty much the same and I kind of feel like I’m hitting a plateau right now. I refuse to lower my calorie intake anymore than it is, I can’t function on less food than I’m taking in right now. I know from past experience that if I go too low I end up feeling run down and then I fall off the diet wagon because I can’t keep to such a rigid plan. The other alternative would be to bump up my exercise but as this weekend proved, I don’t have that much more to give energy wise. I feel a little stuck right now. I’ve lost over thirty pounds and I have less than twenty to go to get to goal. I keep thinking that maybe I need a break but then I think about how close I am and I don’t want to stop now. I keep telling myself that in a few months I could be at goal; I don’t want a moment’s delay. But I realize that right now requires more effort just when I feel like there’s not enough fight in me.

Because Lynne Cannot Live On Soda Alone

2006-07-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

All my life I really have struggled to drink water. In the old days I used to drink nothing but sodas and rarely would drink water straight up. I used to hate the fact that it had no taste and would barely choke it down before finding my way to the closest vending machine. But over the past few months I have developed a love for my former enemy. It still is a shock to me that I drink it now because I enjoy the fresh clean feeling of water and I drink a ton of it nowadays, just like a good girl should! I easily drink at least eight to ten bottles a day and I always have a nice big glass of the clear stuff next to me at all times. At work we have bottled water but today we ran out. I only had the one bottle that I had brought with me and that was gone within the first twenty minutes. By 10 o’clock I noticed a slight headache but ignored it. By 3:00 my head was pounding. After I got home I couldn’t drink enough but the headache persisted the rest of this evening. It’s after 10 and now I’m finally feeling better! It just makes me think, how did I never drink water before? How come my little kidneys didn’t protest and give up? My poor body, it must have been scared that Water Days was over and so the headache was a warning that we weren’t going back to our former soda drinking ways! Isn’t it funny how we can spend years feeding our body crap food and depriving it of healthy things but then after we make changes for the better, our bodies become more sensitive to any slip back into old behaviors that used to be the norm?

Déjà Vu

2006-07-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Lately it seems that I’m experiencing déjà vu of my first big weight loss experience. For instance, today at work my co-workers were discussing weight loss. One of the girls said that while she understands how easy it is to gain a little weight, she couldn’t understand how people can be to the point where they are 100 pounds or more overweight. The other girls nodded their heads in that “I couldn’t imagine that either” sort of way. I didn’t know what to say. Because I can totally understand how that happens! This co-worker has really only seen me at the weight I am right now or less. I don’t know if she realizes that in the past I lost 68 pounds, gained some back, lost 30, gained it back plus more, and now am once again making my way down the scales. I figure that when I’m done with this latest weight loss adventure I’ll have probably lost nearly 50 this time around. It was kind of like this, “Hey! I am one of those people that you’re talking about!” Here’s what I’ve realized, on a good day in a great outfit, I don’t look like a big fat girl. I look slightly chubby to downright normal depending on the observer’s standards. Also, I don’t ever talk about fat or dieting in my “real” life (only with you lovely people do I feel comfortable) so people don’t know my long history with fat and fatness and therefore feel free to say whatever they really feel in front of me. But underneath, I’m still heavy. I have cellulite and fat rolls and many other little indicators of fighting the fat war. Let’s not even talk about the psychological fat because I still have a ton of that poundage to move! The whole conversation made me feel so weird. It made me feel like a fraud; like a fat girl who has somehow managed to listen in on the skinny world’s conversations. Like I’ve had the chance to hear what they really say about people like me when we’re not around. And here’s something else that I think about: I realize that there have been so many times where I’ve tried to lose weight and then failed miserably. Then there happened to be this one magical time where everything clicked and I lost a lot. But what if that one time hadn’t been successful? Wonder if I had continued on the same path that I was on? I know I would have continued to gain and gain and gain. 100 pounds or more? Oh yes, that could have easily been me, in a heartbeat. It’s just weird to think how easily I could be the very person they’re having difficulty imagining. I mean I pretty much was, 68 is not that much less than 100 and at the time the scales were quickly sliding that way. I know that weight loss takes a lot of hard work but I’ve always thought that it could have easily worked out a totally different way for me. I sometimes feel like it was by a stroke of luck that my weight loss efforts went the way of success. Imagine that same conversation if I hadn’t lost weight, they would have had the same opinions but would have never said them in front of me. I don’t know, every once in awhile I realize how there are only certain people who can understand what this is really like. Being part of Fatblogland is fantastic; you connect with people who understand something that you thought nobody could relate to. Then you realize what the outside world can be like and even though you know how things are, they still kind of catch you off guard.

Feats Of Strength

2006-07-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to add some weights and strength training into my exercise routine. I’m very comfortable with walking/jogging/Steely Dan workout routines but the world of muscle toning is relatively new to me. I think for so long I labored under the delusion that lifting any kind of weight would make me bulky. Nowadays though there’s so much information out there about how great weight training is for women to burn fat and shape their bodies. I think I’m getting near the point where I need to start thinking about smoothing and toning my muscles more. I think that not only will it make me healthier and stronger but also it will probably give me the body shape I’m looking for. So I’ve been using resistance bands (for some weird reason I totally get a kick out of them) and I’ve been trying to use a weighted rubber ball that my husband owns. I have no idea what the ball is called but again, for some weird reason, I get a kick out of using it which means that I’ll use it more than I would a regular dumbbell. The funny thing is, when I take the ball out to use, the pup totally freaks out. It’s like this gigantic blue ball that’s bigger than him and try as he might, he just can’t get it to budge. So when he sees me lifting it over my head he gets totally excited. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I think maybe he’s impressed by my strength?

Yes, You Don’t Need PMS To Have Mood Swings But Then Sometimes It Totally Is The PMS Causing The Mood Swings

2006-07-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

So today I just felt off. I was tired, grumpy and feeling blah, like I just wanted to crawl under the covers and nap the day away. I was not in the mood to work out but I knew that I would feel better if I did so I got dressed to spend a little time with Steely Dan. Usually once I start I feel better and I end up getting into the workout. But today my heart just wasn’t in it and it took everything for me not to quit halfway through. This “icky” feeling continued all day until it occurred to me to get the calendar out. After counting the days I figured out that it’s just TOM getting ready to show up. A total “duh!” moment. You’d think that considering this happens every month that one of these times I’d figure it out!

One Plate, One Fork, One Glass Equals Easy To Clean

2006-07-10T20:12:00.000-07:00

My husband is a big snacker; he can eat a huge meal and then a little more than an hour later end up back in the kitchen eating a mini-meal. (His idea of a snack is what I’d call a dinner-size portion!) When he sits down on the couch next to me with a big bowl of ice cream, I’m often inspired to dig around in the kitchen too before realizing that I’m not really that hungry and that I'm just eating to eat. So with him out of town this week for work, I’m planning on a ton of exercise to pass the time and some light and healthful eating. It’s funny though because being left to my own devices doesn’t always result in a week of on-plan behavior. Actually, I usually do either really good with eating or really bad with eating when he’s gone, with no in-between. In previous times I’ve spent a week doing the best gym routines of my life and there’s also been those times when Burger King, Home of The Whopper became Burger King, Home of Lynne. Sometimes when I'm by myself I really get into cooking for one and sometimes I love the fact that all I have to do is hit the drive-thru and the cooking is done for me. Luckily, I had a great day today and don’t foresee any problems with the rest of this week (knock on wood!) I think the lack of temptation is from that 5-pound challenge dangling before me. I realize that as silly as it sounds, small mini-goals totally bring out the hard core competitor in me!

You Don't Need PMS To Have Mood Swings

2006-07-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

I dislike this once a week posting pattern I’ve gotten into but it seems lately that I’m short on time for even basic things like sleeping and showering and so as a courtesy to my family, friends, and coworkers, I’ve been foregoing the posting in order to ensure that I don’t turn into an unkempt, sleep deprived bitch. There are lots of things I’ve been meaning to write about, little ramblings and musings, that I’m going to try to start making more of an effort to get down. Maybe I’ll bore you, maybe I won’t, but I find that each part of this weight loss journey brings on so many different emotions and ways of thinking about myself and I feel like sharing them with you. I think the biggest thing going on is that it’s hard trying to keep an accurate mental image of what I look like while my body is in a slow but constant state of change. I’ve always had “fat” days and “skinny” days but I’ve noticed that more than usual I seem to be filled with fluctuating perceptions of my body. Sometimes I look at myself and think, “Wow. There’s a big difference compared to December.” Then not more than a few hours later I’ll see my reflection and think, “For thirty pounds lost, it looks more like less than ten.” All that I can think to explain these differences is that while overall I’ve lost a lot, I’ve done it at a very slow, consistent pace so it’s effects are skewed; noticeable over a long period of time but less drastic on a day to day basis. I think that the times that I feel “fat” are due to expecting too much of my body. I think it’s just me running out of patience and wanting instant results from a process that is slow and steady by nature. I’m sure the moments of feeling “skinny” have the same origins. Suddenly feeling like I’m thinner than I am comes from the sudden realization of how far I’ve come. It’s like I’ll realize that a lot of my body, a part of me that I’ve carried around everyday, is now gone. I’ll get so tickled with how much I’ve lost that I’ll temporarily forget how much is still left to go. Then I’ll notice the other part waiting to be tackled and instantly bump right back up into feeling fat. It seems like I bounce around like this several times everyday and I think it has to do with being at this particular weight; I’m no longer fat but I’m not quite yet thin. I seem to sway between congratulating myself for what I’ve accomplished and berating myself to keep me from growing complacent.