Tag Archives: changes

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DAY 146: I’ll double-take that

You know those Magic Eye images that were huge in the ’90s?  I could almost never see them.  If I did, it was because someone with the patience of a saint who had found the hidden picture 20 minutes prior wouldn’t give up sitting with me until I was able to see it, too.  I could certainly never find them on my own.  Just keep that in the back of your mind for now.  This is going somewhere, I promise.

I made it home from my beach trip just in time to weigh in for round 4 of my Transformer Diet Bet.  As of this evening, I am down some more weight AND a confirmed round winner!  That’s actually not the point of my post tonight, though.  It’s an answer to Day 94.

A little under 2 months ago, I got all bent out of shape because I saw a photo of me that did not seem to accurately reflect all the progress I’d made on my mission up to that point.  It crushed my morale for most of that day, and even though I rallied, it’s something I continue to think back to sometimes.  Why is it that you can feel so (comparatively) small and hear constantly how small you look, yet still not look the way you think you should in pictures?  It’s one of the most baffling parts of this whole thing.  I know that even if I were a skinny bitch, there would be certain photos of me that didn’t square with my version of reality, but come on.  This is like EVERY PICTURE.

Well, today, for the first time — in a weigh-in photo for DB, no less — I finally saw myself in a picture.  I mean, it probably helps that I’m all sun kissed and have flowy beach hair, but I actually look the size I feel in my submission picture from tonight.

The Magic Eye tactic that many tried to impart to me, but that I could never practice, was to relax my eyes and stop looking so hard.  If you refocus your vision and try to look at the real image instead of searching obsessively for the hidden one that you can’t even picture because you don’t know what it looks like, it’s much harder to find it.  That’s true here, too.  I keep thinking, madly, that I should look like I’ve lost 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 pounds, but I don’t.  I’ve only now realized that it’s not because I still look big, but because I’m getting into sizes I haven’t seen in years.  I don’t know what that looks like on me, so I don’t know what I’m looking for in pictures.

Tonight, I wasn’t looking for the secret image; I relaxed my eyes and saw the picture for what it was for the first time.  Not coincidentally, for the first time, I liked what I saw.

For those of you who read my ramblings regularly (smooches!), you might know this is a poignant message for me to suddenly grasp at this moment.  I immediately took the leap with this thought to my life in the dating desert.  I’m not going to be a totally passive Disney princess who sings “Someday My Prince Will Come” to her running shoes, but I’m also not going to be an aggressive dating ninja who pounces on every rare specimen seemingly worth the time on OKCupid.  Hell, I’m still learning to work these heels.  I can’t be falling too hard right now.

Sorry, boys.  I’m gonna keep my eyes intently focused on the hidden image of myself when it comes to you.  See ya in 6-8 months when the picture becomes clear.

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DAY 142: Sleeveless in Seattle

I got back from the West Coast late Monday night.  I had a WONDERFUL time making new friends and reconnecting with old ones, all while exploring a couple fantastic cities I had never seen before.  I made a concerted effort to get my steps in while I was out there to counteract the ridiculous food indulgence I participated in, and even though I fell short for 3 of 8 days and I only made it to the gym ONCE in the past 10 days, I’m labeling the trip a success in the weight-loss chronicles.

When I weighed myself Monday night, I fully expected to see my first weight gain since I started this mission in late March.  Instead, what I somehow saw was a two-pound loss.  (Thank you, surprise Seattle hills!)  I mean, I ate pretty well in terms of meals: most meat was salmon, I had a few salads, and I ate as close to normally as I could — with the exception of the bacon EVERY MORNING at breakfast.  It was the desserts, though.  What I REMEMBER is splitting a decadent piece of chocolatey something with 3 people, a Snickers ice cream bar, an Oreo ice cream bar, half a piece of tiramisu, half a serving of panna cotta, a piece of lemon coconut pie, gelato, more ice cream, a square of fudge, a Godiva chocolate bar, more ice cream, and whatever else I’m forgetting.  Of course, there were also the endless treks across Seattle, the seven flights of stairs, and that 3-mile hike up a proper mountain in British Columbia.  So, as with all the other components of the weight-loss experience, it all comes down to balance. This week, the scales definitely tipped more towards the consumption than the burn, but because that has not been the norm in the past 5 months, my body was like, “Relax, girl.  I got this.”

I love you, body.

Digression:  I also got a couple of affirmations during the work part of the trip.  Someone I only see at the conference I attended (read: annually) said when she saw me for the first time this year, “Every time I see you, you look different.  You’re thinner and you changed your hair.”  (It’s funny, everyone thinks I’ve gotten a hair cut because I’ve been wearing it down more.  No, guys; I haven’t had a hair cut since May.  If anything, it’s a hair growth.  Does a thinner face make your hair look shorter?  Life’s little mysteries.)  Someone I work with but haven’t seen since winter said when she saw me the first day of the conference, “You look so GOOD!  You’ve lost a ton of weight, right?!”  Then, she proceeded to ask me how and started telling me that she was going to try and lose some before her wedding next year.  She brought it up with me again later in the trip.  Since I’ve been back, two people have made a point of letting me know that they’ve noticed, too.  One has told me two days in a row, very pointedly so I’d know exactly what she meant by her comment, “You look good.  Really good.”  The other is a few months pregnant and said to me, “Are you disappearing, lady?” to which I responded, “I’m having a reverse pregnancy.”  That’s four people in a little over a week.  I guess the fat’s out of the bag.  (OHHHHH!)

Anyway, I also rocked a dress I bought online and was too tight to wear 3 weeks ago, but uh…

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Again: I love you, body.  My “work for it, and it will work for you” mantra is in full effect.  (And yes, that’s a bra on the floor behind me.  Whatevs.)

So, after a week where I was sure I was going to gain enough weight to knock me out of contention on my two pending 4-week DietBets, I’m now poised to win both.  I have a weigh-in for my Transformer bet (which I have to be careful not to disqualify myself from through losing too much) over this upcoming weekend, when I will be in Atlantic City.  At the top of my packing list?  Scale.  Oh, life on a mission.

I’ll have another rambly post tomorrow, or possibly the day after, about another pretty weird part of what life is like these days.  For now, it’s all good news.  I hope the same is true for you guys!

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DAY 132: Excess baggage

I’m writing this post at the airport, where I’m waiting for my flight to the West coast to board. It’s been a while since I filled a suitcase with so many pairs of shoes that it actually felt heavier to me than the 50-pound checked bag limit (or whatever it is now) – y’know, now that I can wear high heels. (This is a BFD.) My bag is also full of materials for this conference I’m staffing for work all week, so I really wasn’t sure if I had overloaded it past the restrictions. So, before I left for the airport, I decided to weigh it. First, I weighed myself, then weighed myself holding the suitcase.

Reaction #1: Holy cow, holding a suitcase made for checked baggage that’s filled with 8 days’ worth of crap is not as easy as it sounds while trying to read the scale.

Reaction #2: That summabitch is heavy.

Reaction #3: It weighed 44.4 pounds – that’s not that heavy! I do 3 sets of 12 reps with a barbell that weight every other day. Why did it feel like so much?

Reaction #4: I’ve lost 74 pounds exactly as of today’s weigh-in. I was holding over half of that amount in my arms for just a moment while trying to get the weight of my suitcase. How the hell was I walking around with all of that and more attached to my body in the form of fat? And I still have so much to lose!

Reaction #5: I’ve lost not that far from double the amount of my suitcase. I’ve lost a solid suitcase-point-7. I’ve never been so happy to say I have lost a suitcase. (Here’s hoping the airline doesn’t read this and get any ideas.)

This weight-loss experience has started to fade from exciting to just weird. It’s… otherworldly. I’m suddenly mirroring Biggest Loser contestants who have to put the weight back on in sand-bag form for a physical challenge, and feel so stunned that those pounds were ever part of their bodies. I’m all nice to strangers and fittin’ into airplane seats and paintin’ my toenails on the regular. And the high heels – I mentioned the high heels, right?

I’m a walking Picasso painting.  I don’t know what the hell’s going on anymore.

If surreality is the new reality, I guess I have no choice but to get on board. I think my well-clad feet and I can make our peace with that.

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DAY 122: Hello, me!

Sometimes, I just feel like the universe has my back.

Things have been really tough at work again this week, and even though I’ve been handling it well — not slipping back into old patterns, expressing frustration instead of eating it, etc. — it’s been trying.  Two days ago, at the end of a completely unproductive meeting where no one addressed anything of relevance, I kind of lost my shit and went on a 5-minute rant about the time we all just wasted and how if we want to stop being all talk, we need to discuss things that actually matter.  It turned into a singular focus on one particular example of my point, and I got a little bit in someone’s face for not being on top of what she needed to be on top of.  This person outranks me and this was in a group of about 16 people.  I mean, I wasn’t over the top or yelling or insubordinate, and I didn’t go out of my way to embarrass anyone, but I was firm, assertive, and unapologetic.  Since it was the end of the meeting, I wasn’t sure how that whole thing went over, and decided to just shrug it off — if it were terrible, I surely would have heard about it right away.

Yesterday, while heating up my lunch, one of the people who had been part of that meeting came into the room.  We greeted each other, and then she immediately got serious and said, “There’s something I need to say to you.”  Uh-oh.  I was pretty sure she was about to tell me I had behaved unprofessionally and crossed an unnecessary line in the meeting the day before.  Instead, she said, “You look GOOD.”

We then spent the next 10 minutes talking about my weight loss.  My co-worker’s affirmation really built me up after a string of crummy days.  She was effusive with her compliments and encouraging with her support.  To top it all off, we ended up talking about the previous day’s meeting at the end of the conversation when I confessed to her that’s where I thought she was going when she originally approached me, and she laughed.  She told me she was nodding at everything I was saying in the meeting and was glad someone finally stood up to hold people accountable!  Double affirmation!

I think — and I hope — the main source of the heightened stress at work is coming to an end today, so relief is in sight.  My horrendous January taught me never again to let the tension get the best of me, and this time around, I’ve learned to channel it into more productive avenues than overeating and sleep loss.  I haven’t strayed from my meals at all or lost a wink of sleep in the face of this, or my heel spur, or the last few days of unwelcome hip pain.

Also, my previous go-rounds with weight loss have taught me that being all touchy about it is immature and counterproductive.  You can’t simultaneously want to hide it from everyone, yet hope people comment on your progress.  I’m forcing myself to get comfortable with having conversations about it when people give me compliments, not only for my own accountability in the process, but also for my own personal growth.  It’s always been harder for me to accept praise than criticism, and that’s just stupid.  I want the recognition, and damn it, I deserve it.  I’m still having an easier time talking about it with strangers than with those closest to me, but progress is progress.  I’m working on it.

The universe is peppering my path with reassurance at very opportune times.  It’s reinforcing the lessons I’ve learned and helping me embrace new ones.  It’s incredible how all-encompassing the weight-loss adventure can be if you open yourself up to everything it offers.  I’m just in awe of that.  It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I’m getting more excited all the time about what life will be like at the end of this whole experience.  I know I’m already healthy, and I have full confidence that I can continue to become even healthier.  I’m starting to see enough changes in my body to imagine what the thin version of myself will look like, and that’s mind-blowing to me.  But most importantly, I’m really starting to discover my (new?) personality — it’s like meeting a new (schizophrenic) friend.  I’m starting to respect and appreciate myself in a way I don’t think I ever have.

I think I’m really going to like the girl waiting for me at the finish line.

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DAY 119: Drum roll, please…

The lab work is back.  I just got off the phone with my doctor, who read me the results.  Buckle up!

Total cholesterol:  dropped 29 points and into the goal range!
–>HDL (good cholesterol):  was in healthy range before, but could have been better — up 2 points
–>LDL (bad cholesterol):  dropped 17 points and below the goal!

Total triglycerides:  dropped 71 points and WAY below the goal!
–>A1C:  dropped 0.4 and below the target!
–>Fasting sugar:  dropped 23 points and below the target!

TL;DR version:  All the numbers went significantly the right way, and I am no longer anywhere near pre-diabetes.

I think I just got sustenance from that phone call.  Vegetarian week be damned.

**happy dance**

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DAY 104: Off track(ing)

For the past 2 weeks, I violated one of the Dieter’s Ten Commandments:  I abandoned tracking.

At first, it wasn’t intentional. I was out of town two weeks ago and not preparing my own meals, so it became impossible/too annoying to do my usual food logging on My Fitness Pal.  After I got back, I used it once to calculate if I would be within my calorie restrictions based on my meal ideas for that week, then didn’t touch it at all the rest of the week.  (I do the same exact meal plan every day over a 7-day period so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day, and so I can cook once a week and just reheat like a champ the other days.  This is definitely the way to go.)

This past week, I didn’t log a single thing.  I didn’t even nutritionally test drive my meal plan before the weekly cooking extravaganza like I usually do.

I don’t consider this falling off the wagon because, well, I didn’t fall off the wagon.  In fact, the second week was more of a conscious decision from the I-wonder voice in my head.  “I wonder if you could keep control of yourself without tracking every single thing you ingest this week,” it taunted me.  That voice has evicted the one that used to tell me I could eat whatever I wanted today because it was the end of the world; the diet would start on a tomorrow that never came.  The I-wonder voice challenges me with things like, “I wonder if you can make it 150 steps in the next 60 seconds” when I’m on the elliptical and “I wonder if you’re ready to add 5 pounds of weights to this machine now” when I’m lifting.  I always pass its little tests.  So, I accepted this challenge, too.

Here’s your full disclosure now:  I had a mini ice cream on Thursday night and I had 3 cookies at a rooftop fireworks viewing party yesterday evening.  I would have admitted this, anyway, just via tracking rather than in long form.  (Writing it out still took less time than tracking it on My Fitness Pal would have!)  The ice cream, I would have had, anyway.  I bought it 2 weeks ago and planned to have it on the 1st of the new month *if* I nailed my mileage goal for June.  I did, so I did.  Oh, and I have a second container waiting in my freezer for some future time when I feel like it.  The cookies, I had only planned on having one and I ate three instead.  Here’s how worried I am about that, by the way; the old me would have kept eating them until she couldn’t remember how many cookies there were.  Translation:  I trust myself, and I’mma swagger about it all over this blog post.

So, did I get too cocky?  Did I give myself too long a leash too soon?  Is this the beginning of a slippery slope?

Well, I lost a total of 6.6 pounds during those two weeks, so… no.  Another victory for the I-wonder voice!

That said, I am now returning to tracking.  I still trust myself, and I clearly still have an appalling amount of ego about it, but I actually kind of like tracking.  Besides, it’s another metric and another piece that fits into the overall process.  I like knowing what I’m taking in every day, and I especially like being able to look back at previous weeks where I had exceptionally high or low weight-loss numbers and being able to tell between food and exercise what contributed to that.  However, thanks to this little experiment, I have developed a new muscle, which is the mental muscle of being able to gauge what an appropriate portion is, approximately.

I plan to continue tracking to the bitter end of this “journey” (God, I hate that euphemism — I’m sure I’ll over-explain that in some future post), but at least I’ve proven to I-wonder that I can go without that crutch when necessary.  For this to be a success long after the losing process is over, that’s an important thing to know.  Yay!

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DAY 93: My villain beard

Now, if we’re talkin’ body, I’ve got an imperfect one.  Still, so far on this voyage down the scale, I’ve noticed a few changes in certain parts of it.  I can see the bones in my hands now.  I don’t have to contort myself to hit THE angle that hides my face fat in pictures.  My arms are slimming down.  My back — yes, my back, of all things — is getting super toned.  (And yes, I check this in mirrors.)  And I can’t really see it, but something is happening in the waist/hips area, because my underwear sag and my pants hang or fall off altogether.  But the most satisfying, captivating, exciting change so far?  My clavicles are back.

Yeah, that sounds super crazy, but there it is.  I am so excited to see the presence of bones between my shoulders, you’d think I’d just been told I’d be paid to sit around and breathe.  It gets even weirder, too:  I keep catching myself touching them.  It doesn’t matter if I’m completely alone or in the middle of a conversation with another person who can see me, I am CONSTANTLY running my fingers over my clavicles.  They’ve basically become my villain beard.  “Hmm…” she thought, stroking her newly prominent bones, “if I stop doing this with one of my hands, how long will it take me to blog about the fact that I do this now?”  **evil laugh**

Appropriately, the third person has officially noticed and said something to me this morning (probably mid-clavicle rub).  It was a co-worker of mine.  She kind of stood in the doorway of my office, seeming a little hesitant, and then finally blurted out, “Have you lost weight?”  And I said, “Yes.” She followed up with, “Like… 40 pounds?”  I smiled, probably touched my clavicles, and said, “Maybe a little more.”

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

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DAY 43: “It’ll fit one day…”

  • That pair of jeans you outgrew 3 years ago, but keep quixotically folded up in your dresser drawer.
  • That perfect dress that was a tad bit too tight when you tried it on at the store, but you bought it anyway.
  • That gorgeous top in JUST your color that you’ve had forever, but have never worn because it’s never actually fit you.

We all have at least one of these: either in the form of a remnant of your former, thinner self, or a symbol of hope for the future, thinner you.  Look in your closet, and it will tell you a whole story of what-ifs.

Personally, I’ve been one of these delusional clothing hoarders since high school.  I often bought things while out shopping with friends, too embarrassed to try anything on and show any of them, but even more embarrassed to not buy anything when everyone else was.  (No one ever asked why those clothes I bought when we were all out together never actually ended up on my body in public.)  Then, after I’d gotten too big for all the clothes I already owned, I never got rid of them, and I’ve kept that habit throughout my entire adult life.  Hell, just to add insult to injury (or insanity?), I’ve even done this with work-out clothes.  Between the things I’ve kept in vain and the things I’ve purchased in vain, I could clothe an entire army of overweight women, each slightly larger than the last.  And why do I do this?  It boils down to that simple little lie I’ve gotten so good at telling myself:  “It’ll fit one day.”

Oh, honey.

I did the foolishly optimistic purchase ritual as recently as this past Saturday.  I was out with a new friend after we got our hair cut and after I was such a good little big girl at dinner when I resisted the chips and salsa and ordered a salad instead of a pile of enchiladas.  In that “I’m so pretty and so well behaved!” mindset after being pampered and nutritiously fed, I ended up in a clothing store with my friend, who was all about the dresses.  I’ve never in my life been a dress person; even if I were skinny, my proportions are bonkers and I always look like someone who stumbled out of someone else’s closet when I try to wear a dress.  But, since this was a new friend, I figured I’d better find something to try on so she wouldn’t think know I was a totally neurotic spaz, so I grabbed an oh-honey top off a rack and dragged it into the dressing room with me.  Trying it on was like trying to squeeze myself into a tube of toothpaste.  So naturally, I bought it.

Oh, honey.

Well, this morning, I thought I should try on one of those oh-honey shirts from my semi-past:  January of this year, when I ordered a top online during a post-holidays sale for like $3.00.  When it arrived, I pulled it out of the box and put it directly into my closet, where it has hung untouched for the past 4 months… until today.  It’s so freaking humid all of a sudden that I couldn’t imagine spending any time outside with sleeves covering my now-somewhat-presentable arms, lest they immediately become drenched in sweat.  Suddenly, the red sleeveless top from January stood out amid all the other what-if crap in my closet.  It may as well have spoken to me:  “Try me on, you frivolous nutcase.”  So I did.

Ohhhhhhhhhh, honey!

It FITS!  I’m wearing it RIGHT NOW!

There’s a new reality, people.  I’m not a delusional dreamer anymore who’s just waiting for the weight to get up and walk off of me by itself one day.  I’m someone who is eating the right things and moving my ass every day to make that happen.  As a result, I’ve lost 35 pounds since I bought that top in January.  Of course I can wear it today.

And all of a sudden, buying that beautiful top over the weekend doesn’t seem like it was such a bad idea.

It’ll fit one day.