Update-A-Rama

August 8, 2010 @ 08:55 am

So I haven't blogged in about three months. Why? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Did I fall off the wagon again? 

It's been a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I had a ton of travel at the beginning of the summer, a lot of work, and very little time or energy left to concentrate on the Journey or the blog. Then when I finally got home and was ready to get back into the swing of things, I fell on the subway stairs and sprained my ankle. Not just a twist, a full on nasty sprain complete with the wickedest, weirdest bruises you've ever seen (one was in the shape of a star). I couldn't walk for a few days and then just hobbled around for a couple weeks. It's best not to push it with a sprain or it'll never heal correctly, so I was stuck.

Then I just got lazy. It's been stupidly, wickedly hot and humid in NYC this summer, and that's left us not wanting to do very much or go out at all. I've been to the gym off and on for the last 4-6 weeks or so since I could start walking again.

I don't think I completely fell off the wagon. I certainly haven't been doing well, and in the last few weeks we've been eating take-out and other crappy food. Towards the end of July I felt myself starting to spiral with food addiction, eating a little crazily anything I could get my hands on. It's been a clear connection between stress and food, lately, with my stress increasing from worries about money and work and having to pay for a wedding and a bunch of other expensive stuff next year. Work's been frustrating. And so I spiral.

But this time we went on vacation. We just got back from an annual family vacation - this time to the Smoky Mountains. The break from day to day life in the city was just right, at just the right timing. The vacation itself was actually rather stressful, but it was still good to break from the monotony of the city and daily life and work (in a total lack of cell service, too). I fell rather rested, and ready to realign and continue on my Journey as I should.

This little break from the Journey is different, too. In ages past I would work out, lose a little weight, but quit and gain it all back until I feel so bloated and gross and my clothes get tight and I can barely get up from the couch. This time I know I've put on a little weight again, but not to those extremes. My aunt thinks I lost some weight (compared to the winter which was SUPER high stress time, I'm sure). The Beau thinks I'm generally lighter than before, too. So maybe, just maybe, my body has adapted to a lighter weight (albeit just a bit lighter) and works to maintain that instead of the 320 it used to.

I won't know until I weigh in, and I won't weigh-in this week. The Beau keeps hammering at me to weigh myself but I've been in that space before - where I convince myself I'm lighter, and I'm actually heavier, and its demoralizing. So I'm going to spend this week getting back on track and we'll go from there.

As far as the blog goes, I'm just really too busy to update a lot. I'm going to keep updating, but I'm not going to stick to any sort of schedule. This is my journal. I'm never going to be one of those bloggers that everyone goes to and reads. If people want to read along, comment and join me on the road, then rock on. But I feel less a need to try to force those connections.  I'll continue to twitter, and blog, and create goals, and publish my weights, and all of that. But my job is not to blog, my job is to get fit.

2 comments | Topics: laziness, mistakes, travel

The Fourth Great Attempt: Week 13

April 10, 2010 @ 12:09 pm

Well this was a bipolar kind of week. I knew I had to finally weigh-in after going a long time avoiding the scale. I was feeling kind of good about it; I'd been working out hard, even extra hard on Tuesday before my weigh-in, and I felt surely that had been making up for nutritional indiscretions over the previous weeks. But clearly I'd wandered way off the ranch. Perhaps if I'd weighed in sooner, even if it was bad news, I would have readjusted my course. Instead what I thought would be an "okay" result was utterly demoralizing.

It's like stepping into a really bright room. At first I was blinded by the reality that my weight had ballooned again in spite of my gym efforts, and in spite of feeling good. Then as my eyes and brain adjusted I saw more clearly just how felonious I've been in the last few weeks.

• Eating whole pints of ice cream
• Cooking a lot more pasta than two of us need and going back for seconds.
• Cheese, glorious cheese. And lots of it
• Routinely 1/2 to 3/4 bottle of wine a day
• Snacking, snacking, snacking ... heavily between dinner and bedtime. Snack packs, cheese, cookies, peanut butter, anything especially refined breads and processed foods.
• Not drinking nearly enough water. Eating too little during the day so I binge at night. 
• Not taking my vitamins and supplements, not eating enough real foods like veggies, flax, or nuts.

I've been moving the line. I've been getting 12-inch Subway sandwiches when a 6 inch is fine if I eat it slowly. I've been having just a little more and a little more.

Well that stopped on Wednesday. I've started analyzing more closely what I'm eating to understand better what's going into my body. I'm reeducating my brain on what proper nutrition feels like. I'm hungry at times, but I have fruit, nuts or veggies. I drink a lot of water ... I pee every 10 minutes (well it feels like that). I've calculated my basal metabolic rate, the number of calories I need to eat and burn each week. Over the last three days I've not eaten a lot of calories, actually, about 1300 - 1600 total not including exercise (which reduces net calories), and it's been fine. I've been satiated.

And most importantly I stopped eating after dinner. There were times after dinner where I would think "I'm peckish" but then I realized, no, I wasn't, and I didn't need to eat. I drank water, I had a glass of wine, and maybe a bite of ice cream if I was getting some for The Beau but otherwise, I've cut out eating so late at night. And by the by, my dreams haven't been as crazy either as a result.

So progress this week? I've done well over the last month of kicking my ass into the gym but eating has again been my Achilles' heal. That's changing again and I'm now focusing on training my mind as much as I have been training my body.

0 comments | Topics: food and eating, mistakes, progress

Well, F*ck.

April 7, 2010 @ 09:32 am

It's been six and a half weeks since my last weigh in. Today's weight:

306.2 lbs.

That ... is not what I was expecting.  Not even close.  I thought maybe I'd maintained around 297. I thought maybe I'd even lost a little bit more. I've been hitting the gym really hard - so hard I've frequently had to take quick naps afterwords just to see straight again. I feel better, even if my clothes aren't as loose as I'd like ... I guess that should've been a bigger clue.

Sigh. I'm not happy this morning; not at all. I'm shamed. I'm confused.

And clearly I've been eating way too much and all-wrong. I've known this. I've known I've been drinking too much, eating the wrong things, and most egregiously I've been eating a lot late at night, whether I'm hungry or not. I can go all day and not feel a bit of hunger and forget to drink water and then I just binge come nighttime. I eat, and eat, and eat.  I eat a bowlful of ice cream or a whole pint of Ben & Jerry's.  I raid the fridge for leftover meat, cheese, and bread. I scarf down 100 calorie packs in a single gulp (well, almost) and then go back for more. I have a glass of wine, and then another, and then probably another.

I'm doing great at the gym, it's my routine, I feel good. But good exercise cannot make up for poor nutrition, and this morning I was hit upside the head with the fact my nutrition has been for shit.

Dingaling, time to wake up. Time to be tracking my food with the @LWDFoodLog twitter account again. Time to stop eating after dinner just because I'm bored or have a craving. Time to cut back on the alcohol for the forseeable future. Time to guzzle 3-4 litres of water a day. Time to be taking my vitamins and supplements like I'm supposed to. Time to get back on track with meditation and stress-relieving visualization.

Basically, it's time to do the things I know I'm supposed to - beyond just going to the gym.

(Interestingly, the scale says my body fat percentage was unchanged ... maybe some of the weight is muscle, but then, body fat percentage is a difficult thing to track accurately so I always take it with a grain of salt.)

2 comments | Topics: exercise, food and eating, mistakes, progress, shame

The Fourth Great Attempt: Week 5

February 14, 2010 @ 03:56 pm

This week kinda sucked. The whole "not-going-to-let-travel-screw-me-up" thing was a bust. I didn't make it to the gym at the hotel. I drank way too much. Ate too much. Ate the wrong things. It generally was a busy, high-stress, not-good experience. I didn't really enjoy the trip or the project - things were just not going right - and now I have to go back. On the plus side I could have gotten stranded there this whole weekend. But now it's uncertain when I'm going to have to return and it's generally just annoying.

Oh well.  I should get back on the horse and take this one positive day at a time. But I think I'm just enjoying my weekend home with The Beau and not worrying too much about anything else. Plus I tripped while I was on-site at the client and sprained both ankles and pulled my thigh muscle. So I feel a little like a mess. But tomorrow I'll get back into the gym and get back to my routine and all will be right with the world.

I don't know if i"m ever going to lose weight. My weigh-in on Tuesday - a day early because I was flying out of town that day - was the same weight as the week previous. This week I'm certain my weight will be higher again - maybe even above 300. But that's okay. This coming week, in addition to work and working out and eating right and all that good stuff, I'm going to try to spend some time working on this whole meditation and emotional healing thing. I'll probably update and blog a little about that - it's a long journey. This whole thing is a long journey. And I just have to keep remembering that.

I'm kind of in a weird state today. Slightly bored and unmotivated. May go on a Valentine's Day walk to Barnes & Noble with The Beau. Seeing as it's after 4pm I should figure out something :)    

0 comments | Topics: evalutation, mistakes, progress, travel

Slipping on Sipping

January 19, 2010 @ 12:30 pm

So last night we had a friend over for some board games. It was a good time. We laughed, we played, I made dinner. Dinner, by the way, was a delicious pasta sauce made from scratch (and pasta too, duh, but the sauce ... oh! the sauce!). It's pretty much just canned skinned tomatoes and butter, simmered for 45-60 minutes with an opinion. Good god it's good. Of course it's a lot of butter, but still. Tasty! I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

Anyway that's not the point. While playing our games I had me a glass of wine. Nothing new there, I love wine. As alcohols, I much prefer red wine to almost anything but scotch. I've never really liked sugary frou-frou drinks let alone their crazy calorie counts. And while I do enjoy a good stout, beer doesn't do much for me or give me that same happy buzzed elitist (who'm I kidding?) feeling that red wine does. Plus beer just metabolizes to a potent nasty sugar so its no good.

The benefits of red wine are generally well documented and it's not all that detrimental to weight loss. So I like to have a glass or two with or after dinner. But last night I slipped as I sipped and poured another glass. And another glass. Normally even that's okay. Friends, socializing, I can accept being a bit buzzed. The real problem was that after our friend had gone home and we were relaxing before bed, I got the munchies. And I gave in to them.

I promptly ate a slice of bread with butter, a plate of cold macaroni with parmesan (sauce was long gone ... oh! the sauce!), then two more pieces of bread with butter, and then about 3/4 of a pint of Ben & Jerry's just to add insult to injury.

Good god, what the hell happened there? I'd been doing so well not eating late at night and just grazing on the fatty calories, and I have 1 or 2 glasses of extra wine and I'm like Homer Simpson in a donut factory. le sigh. Thinking about it, getting buzzed routinely leads to the munchies for me, so that's something I need to be aware of moving forward.

With a weigh-in tomorrow, I'm being extra careful today to drink water, eat judiciously, and not be insane. Again.

0 comments | Topics: alcohol, mistakes