Tag Archives: frustration

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DAY 185: Oy vey-cation

I got back yesterday from a week-long trip to the highest, driest places in America:  northern Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah.  It was a lot of fun seeing friends, dancing at a wedding and not caring that I am an abysmal dancer, and exploring new places.  Along the way, I managed to not only hit the gym 3 times (which is hard to do when traveling with a friend!), but also to complete two different hikes.  One hike was 3.4 miles, and the other was 1.3.  At that altitude, I was really not sure of my comfort level with the activity, both in terms of huffing and puffing in front of other people and actual ability to complete the trails.  I surprised myself on hike #1 (the longer one, which was 2 days before the other):  not only was I NOT the slowest of the group, but I found I am in a lot better shape than I thought.  The few times we stopped as a group to collect ourselves, I caught my breath pretty quickly compared to the others, and I wasn’t ready to stop as soon as they were.  I couldn’t believe it; I was easily the largest person hiking, but still among the fittest.  Riddle me that.

The second hike was just a friend and me, and she’s an avid and frequent hiker and rock climber, so she kindly adapted to my slower, less conditioned pace.  Regardless, I was still happy with my showing on that endeavor.  I should also add that I was doing both hikes essentially one-handed because I was carrying water and my camera.  Totally worth it.  Plus, I felt like a boss the rest of the day on both days.  It’s so empowering to realize that 6 months ago, I would have barely been able to do this, and it would have been entirely out of the question at this time last year.

Between the Colorado and Utah adventures, I snuck up to Wyoming for a few hours to meet up with my brother, who happened to be there in the midst of his cross-country move to California with his girlfriend and dog.  It took a lot of juggling, coordinating, and rearranging of itineraries to pull off that get-together — who meets up in Wyoming?! — but it was really important for me to see him.  I don’t know how long they’ll be living on the West coast, but I know I have no money after all these trips (and one coming up next month), so it will be a long time before I’ll have the chance to see that part of my family again.  I’m also strangely obsessed with my dog-niece and she’s super into me, too; I think my brother may have left questioning my motives for making him drive off course to see me, cuz the pup and I exchanged more hugs and kisses than any of the humans did.  Anyway, the purpose of this aside is to share that when his girlfriend was away from the table at brunch, my brother just looked at me and abruptly asked, “So, you’ve lost a lot of weight, right?” I was a little taken aback by his directness, since, as I’ve said before, most guys beat around the bush and awkwardly tap dance around the subject.  Also, my brother and I aren’t particularly close (though we have been getting better in the past year or so), so I didn’t expect him to bring it up.  I managed to return his directness with a smile, a nod, and a “yeah.”  He immediately followed up with, “How much?”  Yeah, I abandoned the directness at that point and told him frankly that I didn’t feel comfortable announcing my number, but maybe I’d tell him in a few months, when it’s all (hopefully) over.  He appreciated that and then asked a question no one else has ever asked me throughout this entire mission:  “How do you feel?”

Only someone who really cares about me would ask that question, and I had no answer prepared for this question as I do for the standard battery of them that I usually get in this type of exchange.  Of all the questions that the gamut of close friends to inconsequential co-workers have asked me over the past 6 months (!), not a single one has ever asked me that question.  I myself never even realized it should be part of the package!  How do I feel?  I feel happy to have been asked that by someone who has always been healthy, and therefore knows this is less about the question I didn’t answer and more about the one no one ever asks.  Guys, I think my brother loves me.  That 60 seconds of conversation alone was worth the trip.  😉

Now, for the stumper.  In spite of keeping my eating in check and logging some respectable physical activity that included hitting my miles EVERY DAY but one while I was away, the scale in Colorado showed that I had mysteriously gained six pounds since my last weigh-in, and the one in Utah showed a gain of four!  What dark magic is this?!  I thought that if anything, the high altitude would fudge the number in the other direction.  I’m not sure whether it’s related somehow to the altitude (which I did research briefly, and showed that my original theory was actually the more likely scenario, so that’s not it) or water retention in an arid climate when my body is acclimated to the polar opposite of that, or something entirely different that I’m not thinking of.  Of course, I also spent almost 4 days constipated (sorry, I don’t believe in TMI, so deal with it like a grown-up), so that is a likely factor.  I was also running a massive sleep deficit from the go-go-go nature of my travels, and sleep is an inviolable tenet of my phil-LOSS-ophy.

No matter the cause(s), that freak “gain” was super frustrating, and it made me not want to weigh myself at all at home.  I did in spite of myself, though, and in a fashion that breaks my rule of only checking once a week:  I have weighed myself 4 times in the past 24 hours since being back, and the weight has steadily been dropping from the Western numbers.  As of last weigh-in, I was only 1.6 pounds over the weight I recorded just before leaving, so I’m relieved that the inflated numbers weren’t reflecting an actual gain.  With any luck, I’ll even manage to post a loss by my regular Sunday weigh-in.  I’d still like to understand what that was all about, though.  Have any of you ever experienced this, or do you have any insight into that strange, unsettling phenomenon?  Please enlighten me!

My C25K training has hit a bit of a snag.  In Colorado, I did complete one of the week 5 workouts, but the next one was something ridiculous like “do a 5-minute warm-up, then go ahead and jog 2 miles.”  I managed 1.3 before throwing in the towel.  If I’m honest, yes, I could have kept going, but I don’t know for how much longer.  I’m thinking/hoping the tougher haul had more to do with the toll of the altitude and my exhaustion than with my ability, but I’ll find out during tomorrow’s workout, I guess.  I may have to invent my own workout as a stepping stone to that part of the C25K curriculum.  If I could just jog 2 miles straight, I wouldn’t need a training program.  (This is why this program is so frustrating!  I like realistic goals, not ones like Day 1: jog for 60 seconds and then walk for 20 minutes; Day 2: run a marathon.)

On that note, I’m gonna hit the sheets.  I have a series of 10-mile days ahead of me, so I need my delicious, delicious sleep.  Whew!

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DAY 161: Ready for fall

We had a lovely teaser of fall weather last week:  low humidity, bright sunshine, comfortable temps, and general pleasantness.  I took a few extra walks outside, opened all the windows in my apartment, hit the pool, traveled home the long way from work, ate on patios, and rotated through almost my entire robust collection of sunglasses.  It was pretty much perfect.

Now, it’s all gross and humid again, and it’s like… I JUST WANT IT TO BE OVER.

Which is kind of how I’m starting to feel about this whole losing weight thing.

My progress has been excruciatingly slow these last 3 weeks.  I always knew that would happen — I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner — so I’ve been braced for it for months, actually.  I’m also a little skeptical that this is the slow-down; I think it’s a fake-out.

  • The week of 8/10 was my first week back from Seattle, and I was dragging ass like whoa.  I didn’t hit the gym at all, so no wonder I dropped under 2 pounds.  I’m lucky I dropped anything.
  • The week of 8/17, I picked my gym routine back up, but it was also restaurant week, and I indulged.  Three times.  Again, no wonder I dropped under 2 pounds.  (Really, it’s kind of surprising I lost any weight either of those weeks.)
  • This past week, I again lost a modest amount of weight, even though I can’t account for why.  (Then again, this process makes sense less often than it doesn’t, so I’m not twisting my brain into a pretzel trying to figure it out.)  I was in the gym exactly as planned, 5 of 7 days, and exceeded my steps by a lot every single day.  It’s probably just my body readjusting to this pace of exercise, or that I wasn’t eating enough on the fruit/veggies/fiber fronts.  I’ve tweaked my meals for this week to account for that in hopes of upping my game a bit.

So, to recap, I have lost exactly the same amount of weight each week for the past 3:  1.8 pounds.  The three-week grand total is 5.4 pounds, which I dropped in a single week early on.  Thinking about it that way is frustrating (which is why I haven’t thought about it that way until typing this), but a loss is a loss is a loss.  I’m not going to complain for having lost 1.8 pounds, especially considering the fact that for 2 of those 3 weeks, it came at very little cost of effort.

AND YET…

I just want it to be over.

The lifting and the ellipticaling and the treadmilling and the perfect food balancing and the OBSESSIVE step monitoring and the weight checking and the pushing through the foot paining and the UGH.  Make it STOP.  I’m TIRED.

I have valued this experience in ways I haven’t shared.  I have learned so much about myself, about other people, about health, and about life from my little self-overhaul, and I never imagined the volume of profound lessons I would learn simply by going all in on losing weight.  I am a better person for it in every way, and I know that.  I’m also not done in any sense.  I’m not done on the scale, I’m not done mentally, and I’m not losing focus or otherwise checking out.  If anything, I’m more committed to this mission every week than I was the week before.  So, still going strong?  Well, yeah.  No plans to change that.

The thing I think I’m really grappling with is, now that I’m entering territory I haven’t seen in many years, am I going to be able to master the post-weight loss?  I was getting in the shower after a long day outside, which included a lot of exercises inside and outside of the gym, and I just thought to myself, “I never want to do this again.”  Not the work I’d done that particular day, but this process.  This process whose infinite value I just raved about.  Don’t want to repeat it.  Ever.

It’s great and it’s rewarding and it can even be fun, but for the love of EVERYTHING, it is TEDIOUS.  It is TAXING.  It is PERSONAL.  It is HARD WORK.  It rewires your thinking to put yourself first, and it makes you feel conflicted for being selfish while knowing you’re doing the right thing.  It takes SO MUCH TIME away from the other parts of your life because there’s the getting to the gym, and the working out at the gym, and the getting home from the gym, and the meal planning, and the meal prepping, and the meal eating, and the BLAHBLAHBLAH.

And, while I’m actually enjoying myself in real time, I’m starting to get a little bit nervous about what happens next.  Am I going to have to give up all of my free time for the rest of my life, just to maintain health and fitness?  Am I going to be so focused and obsessed with that that there’s no room for anything or anyone else?  I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but this whole process has only worked BECAUSE I’ve gotten ahead of myself.  So, the question is:  How the hell do you prepare for thin life when all you’ve ever known is fat or working on it??

I guess it’s like anything else and you just figure it out.  So I will.  But ugh.

Is it fall yet?

P.S.  I’m hosting my first Diet Bet game!  As a group, we’re pooling our daily miles to travel around an exotic part of the world together.  This is the second in our series of as many DBs as it takes to “see” everything we want to see in the world.  If you’re getting a little restless like me and need more community support than you do monetary motivation, this is the group for you — it’s just a $10 bet.  We start tomorrow!  Join We Run the World here!

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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 143: Not ready, Freddy

I have a cousin who’s very special to me.  He’s actually my dad’s second cousin and he is my dad’s age, but they two of them are very similar and pretty close with each other, so I’ve always had more of a niece-uncle relationship with this cousin ever since I can remember.  I look forward to long talks with him at our family reunion every year, and he’s the person I’m always most eager to see.  When we were saying good-bye at the end of the reunion last month, he looked at me very seriously and with a genuinely confounded expression on his face, and he asked me, “How have you not been snapped up yet?”

I ask myself that sometimes, but it’s never a thing I have to wonder about very long.  Every reason I can think of, in the end, ties back to the weight.  I don’t feel attractive, hence I don’t put myself out there in the first place, hence I am alone.  I actually am not attractive, hence no one is attracted to me, hence I am alone.  I spend all my free time in the gym, hence I don’t make time to meet or go out with anyone, hence I am alone.  I have not felt like my true self in a long time, hence I can’t represent who I really am to a stranger, hence I am alone.  The list goes on and on.

Of course, when you are uncomfortable enough with the real issues, you become a master deflector.  You don’t want to think about it, hence you distance yourself from it, hence you answer such heartfelt questions with something like, “I don’t know, man.  You need to have a talk with your gender on my behalf.”

Fifty-three pounds ago, I went on my first OKCupid date.  I had no business being on a dating site in the first place, but I figured there was no harm in looking.  Well, sure enough, I stumbled upon Perfect on Paper Guy.  We had some astronomically high compatibility rating, a lot of similar interests, and a good amount of similarity in character.  Before long, PPG and I progressed from in-app messaging to text messaging for hours.  A week into this pattern, I got a message from him that said “OK, we have to meet, because you are too good to be real.”  That was like a heart flutter and a heart attack at the same time.  I knew I was too good to be real; he was surely envisioning some 120-pound girl, and he was about to meet an obese chick.  I should have told him, or I should have had it on my profile that I was overweight, but I conveniently never mentioned it or completed that particular field on my profile.  I put the in-person meeting off for a few days, but eventually, it was time to pull the trigger.

The amount of psyching myself up to go through with it was Herculean.  I probably lost a full pound that day just from having an elevated heart rate from nerves.  Before it was time to meet, I took myself to the roof of my office building and tried to calm myself the fuck down by writing on the back of an ATM receipt — the only paper I had on me — in order to keep some perspective.  I still have it, taped inside my real diary:

“NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS,
You’re doing great.
You’ve lost weight.
You’ll continue to.
It’s not too late.
You’re proud of yourself.
You know who you are.
You deserve the best you can get from life.
Another person’s feelings about you don’t change or matter more than your own.”

On the other side, I wrote:
“BREATHE EASY.
He’s just a person.”

I stared at that piece of paper for 20 solid minutes before heading over to meet him.

Predictably, it did not go fantastically.  His face registered visible disappointment when he saw me and realized he’d been sold a bill of goods and this fat-ass was the person he was now obligated to spend the next interminable window of time with out of politeness.  To top it off, we had ZERO chemistry in person, likely because of my lie by omission.  (Honestly, though, I have the sense that he just doesn’t have much of a personality when he’s not communicating via text.  It wasn’t a loss for me, in the end.)  We suffered through 45 minutes in each other’s tortured company, then endured a painful metro ride in the same direction, until he mercifully got off at his stop.  I texted him a thank-you on my walk home, he said you’re welcome, and that was it.

I figured the little experiment bought me another 40-50 pounds before subjecting myself to another such ordeal.

I recently heard somewhere that women’s biggest fear when meeting a man from online for the first time is violence.  Men’s biggest fear when meeting a woman from online for the first time is that she’ll be fat.  There’s ample evidence that supports this.  Having had the experience I unwisely set myself up for in the spring, and then hearing about that, and then stumbling upon Bye Felipe right before my ill-advised second OKCupid date tonight was quite unfortunate.

This one went wrong for all the OPPOSITE reasons.  First off, I initiated things with him.  I was all stupid and giddy and high on Seattle and just went for it.  It went the same way it started with PPG, and we texted round the clock for an entire week.  I accepted a date like 3 days in.  Stupid.  Then, I told someone about it.  Double stupid — but she did hold me accountable and make sure I didn’t punk out and not go.  That was a feat within itself, because unlike last time, I wasn’t nervous.  I wasn’t even excited; I was annoyed that I was losing out on yet another night of my sacred and much-needed gym time, and mad at myself for so quickly forgetting the self-inflicted awkwardness of the last date.

BUT, I met him tonight, and it was fine.  I even had fun… but like, fun I would have with my girlfriends.  I really didn’t feel it with him.  Unfortunately, he clearly felt it for me, which is a situation I have been in… uh… once, ever.  I have never done so much tap dancing to avoid being kissed.  I have also never gotten so much positive attention and been told I’m cute and attractive and blah blah blah.  I am SO. UNCOMFORTABLE.  The whole time, I was annoyed because my pants were falling off and my top was sliding off my shoulders, which probably looked like an intentional sexy move, but is actually because nothing I own fucking fits anymore.  (I know, I know, first-world problems.  Just saying, it made me self-conscious.)  I was able to be myself, which I guess is the good thing I can take away from the experience, but I am 100% not ready to be taking steps towards finding a relationship.  I’m still way too squirmy for that.

So, I am indefinitely swearing off dating.  I’ll have to figure out a way to tell this guy I want to be friends, which I mean, without making it sound like a brush-off or revealing that I’m an obsessive RFG (Recovering Fat Girl) and I ain’t got no time fo’ alllll dat right now.

Leave it to me to overcome the Bye Felipe obstacle and skirt the showing up fat and being rebuffed risk, only to turn into the rebuffer.  Sigh.  I’m a damn mess.  I should be locked in an isolation chamber until I’m thin.

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DAY 94: Delusions of non-grandeur

Damn all the cameras.

I took a co-worker to lunch for her birthday today, and she was all giddy and wanted to commemorate the day with a photo.  Sure — now that photos are less embarrassing to take, I was entirely on board.  I even thought it might actually be kinda cool to see myself in a picture after such a long evasion of anything with a photographic lens that could be pointed at me like a weapon.

Well, cool it wasn’t.

So much weight lost, and I still look like shit.

Have I been imagining all the changes?  Or is it just that they’re so subtle, only I can notice?  I mean, who the hell else is gonna notice my fingers are smaller?  Ugh, and I had been walking around all, “I feel pretty!”  God.  No wonder only 3 people have realized I’ve lost any weight.  It’s not like I’ve moved the needle from fat to thin; I’ve only moved it from fat to marginally less fat.  Looking at that picture was such a deflating moment.  It made me feel hopeless.  And crazy.  And stupid.  Still fat, and now hopeless and crazy and stupid to boot.  Needless to say, I hid that cursed photo from my wall when the birthday girl posted it on Facebook.  I’m not quite ready for prime time, I guess.

I felt a little draggy the rest of the day.  I ended up staying late at work, so late that it derailed my normal routine of going straight to the gym after my commute, then coming home for dinner.  Somehow, I convinced myself to walk a mile to the gym after dinner, do a mile and a half on the treadmill, and walk back home.  (Getting my miles in has become a dissociated obsession at this point, so I was going to do that regardless of my never-ending fatness.)

During the treadmill slog, something magical happened:  I looked in the mirror, and it was not what I had seen in the photo.  All I could see of myself that wasn’t obstructed by the actual machine was my chest and points north.  I realized I was staring at the way my shoulders were moving with my swinging arms.  I snapped out of it and kind of forced myself to look myself in the eye.  I was wearing an expression I’ve never seen on my face before:  defiant determination.

Fuck that photo.  It does not define me.  What I do in reaction to it does.

Did I have a diva moment where I didn’t want anyone to see that picture of myself?  Sure.
Did I slip into a negative space and allow myself to feel defeated for several hours?  No doubt.
Did I throw my hands up, pick up a pint of ice cream on my way home from work, and spend my night crying into it on the couch?  Hell no, I didn’t.  My defiantly determined ass walked itself to the gym and kept moving right along.

That chick I saw in the mirror at the gym?  I want to always be her.  Her narrower shoulders were high with confidence, her slimmer neck was strong, and her single chin was up.  No one else in the gym knew it, but that chick is a bad-ass.  It took the treadmill to literally block out the “bad” parts so I could focus on the positive progress I’ve made.  It’s NOT all in my head.  It’s so easy to lose that focus if you let yourself.

Thirty-six miles to go to reach 200 miles for June.  I think I’ll focus on that instead.

…And maybe no more pictures for a while.