Exactly one year ago today, I went to a wedding. I looked like this:
Last week, I went to another wedding. I looked like this:
Today, I tried on the dress from the wedding I went to last year. I looked like this:
I’m looking forward to trying on both again on the one-year anniversary of starting my weight-loss mission. I think I’ll look like this:
No, that title is not a math problem. Well, hopefully not.
My first-ever race, the 4.01K, is coming up in just under 3 weeks! Mind you, I have only JUST started running. When I signed up for this thing, I figured I would power-walk it rather than actually dare to jog it. The problem with that now is that I have revealed to myself that I actually am capable of jogging the whole thing — 4.01 kilometers is only 2.49 miles — and my superego is not letting me off the hook for that. So, I somehow find myself training for this silly little “race.”
I had always planned to switch from the elliptical to the treadmill at a certain point in my mission. I am NOT at that point, but my body doesn’t seem to give a shit. It’s all, “check me out, I’m healthy and limber and I can RUN now!” Show-off.
Well, it may think it’s ready for this jelly, but it actually hasn’t ever sustained a run outdoors of more than, oh, two minutes. Once. Five years ago.
Enter Couch to 5K.
I hatched this scheme at some point over the past 2 days that I could modify the popular C25K plan to my level and my very attainable goal, even in this compressed timeline. I can enter to the program at a more advanced step because I’ve trained up to a level of cardio that’s far above “couch,” so much to the pleasure of my over-achieving self, I fast-forwarded to week 4 (of 9), workout 3 (of 3). I successfully completed that workout tonight in my new gym (!):
Between now and October 4th, I have to knock out this series of workouts:
That’ll be SUPER easy, considering I’m about to enter into a week of travel, almost all of which will be gymless. I’ll be lucky if I even get all my steps in. Honestly, self, why do you?
The good news is that week 7 of the training program IS to run a 4.01K, so really, it’s getting through weeks 5 and 6 before I’m all of a sudden ready (in theory).
What. The. Hell.
In a past life, I actually attempted this program, but I never even made it to week 4. In fact, I think I quit just before getting there. How does this program expect a bona fide couch potato to just get up and be running a quarter mile in one go within 4 weeks? It doesn’t work that way. It’s a totally intimidating regimen if you haven’t actually been moving in some way for a while. Elliptical to 5K, sure. Couch to 5K, my ass.
That said, I think I might actually try to see this one through. After my “race,” I might as well continue the whole way through week 9 and complete a 5K run, right? Maybe I’ll even… do a 5K race.
WHO AM I?! (I’m Jean Valjean!)
By way of another mild update, I have somewhat returned to tracking. I’m not going to actually log my food every day, but I am using My Fitness Pal again to calculate the calories in my recipes for the week to help me plan my meals. There’s no sense in spending the time with entering in my food every day when it’s going to be the same thing every day until the next week, so as long as I know I’m in range heading into the week, I’m good. I am going to a wedding at the end of this week, hence the travel, so I’ll sort of be in vacation mode for a week, but I still feel like I’ve got this on the food front.
It’s the whole training for a weird public “race” I’m not as sure about.
Better get sure, huh??
Wish me luck!
I don’t really have enough content for a full blog post, but a lot of notable moments in my weight loss have happened just all of a sudden.
On August 30th, I signed up to run in a 4.01K (cute, huh?). This will be my first outdoor run event ever.
On September 2nd, I jogged on a treadmill for 5 minutes for the first time in 5 years.
On September 6th, I bought a shirt — that fits — in size L.
On Tuesday (September 8th), I wore a skirt to work.
Yesterday (September 9th), I jogged on a treadmill for a full mile without stopping (12 minutes) for the first time ever at that pace.
Today, I moved the closure of my ever-looser VivoFit band so that only one last notch is visible. After I make that final move, I’ll have to switch to the smaller band when this one becomes loose again.
All of these are HUGE milestones for me, and I have consistently surprised myself in the best possible ways as I’ve hit them. Oddly, the one I’m most stoked about is the VivoFit band. As I’ve mentioned several times, I am terrible at measuring myself. I do it once a month, and somehow, it doesn’t really reflect the changes I know are there through the losses on the scale, the way I look, the way I move, and the way my clothes (don’t) fit. One of the things I measure is my wrist, and since I started taking my measurements back when Vivo showed 4 notches, my incompetent measuring reflects only 1/4 inch lost. Clearly, that’s wrong; here’s the size the band was when I started:
Sooooo… not so much with the quarter inch. My ruler tells me the distance covered in the notches I moved over is actually close to 3/4 inch. My measuring tape tells me lies.
It’s nice to know that when I feel like my arms are slimming down, it’s because they are. Now, if only I had a VivoFit band for my calves, thighs, forearms, biceps, hips, waist, chest, butt, and neck.
Happy first day of football season to all, by the way! Can I interest you in one of the pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies I made and then brought to work like a good girl instead of devouring them all in the secrecy of my kitchen? 🙂
Cheers!
There’s an idea — and a law of physics — that time only moves in one direction: forward.
And yet, our clocks and watches reset every day. Each morning, we get a new set of hours containing hundreds of chances for change. If you’re reading this blog, the thing you’re trying to change is probably measured on the scale.
The scale, commonly thought of as the enemy, is actually a nifty little device. It can — and does! — move backwards. Oftentimes, its moves backwards can feel a hell of a lot like time travel.
As the needle has moved a little less to the right every week that I weigh myself, I’ve gone back to old clothes, old feelings, and old memories associated with the number the scale shows me. I’m fitting into things I haven’t dared to even try on since my first job, since college, or since high school. I have all kinds of associations with different garments, like remembering seeing something on me in an old picture and wondering what the friends in the photo with me are doing now, or recalling when I bought the item, but never actually wore it anywhere. Going back through my closet takes me back to moments in my life when I was younger and more optimistic, and it strangely conjures up not feelings of nostalgia, but feelings of hopefulness.
I started my weight-loss mission with the goal of running away. I was going to put as much distance as possible between me and that ugly, ugly number the scale showed me when I stepped on it at my heaviest. I never wanted to see the needle anywhere near it, ever again.
Now, a very comfortable number of pounds past my halfway point, I am running towards something: my goal weight. I find I’m not looking at the distance between the needle and the weight of shame anymore; I’m looking at the distance between the needle and the weight of victory.
My thought is that this process compares nicely to the perspective you have when driving a car. The rear view mirror is very important because it shows you where you’ve been and what might be coming from behind that may put you in danger. The side mirrors are important because they let you look around and take stock of what’s happening in your periphery as you process and react to the changes in your environment. But there’s a reason the windshield is the largest viewing surface, and the one the driver is oriented towards: life only moves in one direction. All of the different views inform your **cringe** journey, but none of that matters if you don’t know where you’re going.
That’s why I’ve stopped running in evasion and started running in pursuit.
I’ll remember where I came from, but forget the way back there.
I’ll look around, but I’ll keep moving.
Eyes on the horizon!
It can be really easy to lose sight of who you were once you’ve lost so much of yourself physically.
Sometimes, I’ll be in the middle of one of my hours-long cook-a-thons during meal prep for the week, and I’ll have a sudden flashback to what that was like when I first started. I would have to take a couple of breaks to sit down and give my muscles and joints a rest. If I stood in one position too long, my left leg would start to go a little numb around the knee area and I’d either have to walk it off for a bit or just deal with it until I was done. (I probably should have talked to my doctor about that, but it stopped after I lost about 30 pounds, so I assume it’s nothing I should worry about now.) After my few hours in the kitchen, I would be down for the count for the rest of the day, usually with swollen feet and sore hips. That’s just from standing there!
I also sometimes remember the feeling of first getting up in the morning, not really feeling rested, and the discomfort of those first few rigid steps after coaxing myself out of bed.
I remember my walk to the metro taking 8-10 minutes longer in the morning because I had to stop and catch my breath at the top of those stairs on my route, and because I moved so much more slowly in general.
I remember trying to hide being winded while walking down the hall with anyone at work, and avoiding walking any more than down a hall with someone at work because it was too hard to hide being winded.
I remember getting out of the car after even just a short time driving and having to take the first several steps very, very slowly.
I remember always sticking to the shower curtain because there was no way to be in the shower without a part of me touching it.
I remember never untying my shoes because it was too much effort to get into a position to retie them.
I remember hating going shopping because nothing fit except the most horrendously ugly articles of clothing ever created.
I remember getting irritated when people would stop and hold the door open for me if I wasn’t that close to the door, because it made me feel like I had to rush to get to there, which made me lose my breath and feel embarrassed.
I remember driving to the grocery store two blocks away because walking was too exhausting.
I remember not wanting to go out on weekends because I only owned one pair of pants that fit, and I washed them on weekends so I could wear them to work again all week.
I remember not taking pictures when I really wanted to, because I didn’t want to see myself in them.
I remember avoiding travel, which is something that makes me happy, because it was too uncomfortable to sit on a plane or train.
I remember not wanting to go to the movies with anyone because I NEEDED both arm rests unless I wanted to twist myself up and feel the pain for hours afterwards.
I remember coming up with excuses not to see my friends or family whom I don’t often see because I was too ashamed of the weight, even though it would have made me happy to see them.
I remember hiding from the world because I had failed and therefore didn’t deserve to be happy.
I remember feeling guilty for not being happy. I had everything set up right so I could be, and I ruined it.
I remember feeling hopeless, like someone looking back on a life she hadn’t even lived yet.
I remember I never wanted to die, but I didn’t want to live.
—
I’ve only been at this for shy of 6 months, and I’m sure there are already things in this vein that I’ve forgotten. After all, none of this was pleasant to experience; who would want to remember it? I can’t believe I got myself into a situation where the above was my daily experience of life. Of course I was miserable.
Now, I’m replacing the bad memories with good ones.
—
I remember the first time I felt my bath towel close the whole way around my body.
I remember the first time a pair of workout pants became loose, then entirely too big for me.
I remember the first time I cracked 3 miles on the weight loss setting of the elliptical.
I remember the first time I flipped my mattress and changed my sheets, and realized I hadn’t changed my breathing at all.
I remember the looks on various people’s faces when they saw me for the first time since before I started losing weight.
I remember the first time I painted my toenails without straining. They were bold blue.
I remember the first time I rocked a dress at work. It was bold yellow.
I remember the first time I donated BAGS of old fat-girl clothes to charity. And now, the second.
I remember the first time I was walking with a co-worker outside of the office to get coffee, and I had to slow down.
I remember the first time I up and jogged for 5 minutes.
I remember the first time I felt capable of participating in an outdoor race. So I signed up for one.
I remember the first time I recognized myself in the mirror after all this time.
I remember the person I always was who’s been desperate to come out.
I remember she’s worth it.
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.
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!
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.
I’m not even sorry for getting that song in your head.
At the end of March, I went for my first doctor’s appointment in about 12 years. I had already dropped about 15 pounds from my all-time heaviest weight in January, but this was obviously a drop in the bucket. I had put off visiting a GP for so long because of the overwhelming embarrassment and shame I felt at going in there and having my weight read, not to mention what other bad news may have been revealed. I was finally in the right mindset to go by then, though, and so my outward adult dragged my inner child in for a long-overdue check-up.
I spent the appointment fighting back tears while complaining of incredible stress, nerves, anxiety, fear, and sense of worthlessness. I expressed to the doctor that I knew my weight was the main source of all of these things, even if there were additional external contributors. She listened to everything I said, spoke with me as if she had all the time in the world, and provided support instead of lectures. Even though I still had the expected sense of shame for being my size, it felt good to actually unload all of that on someone who didn’t have an emotional stake in it (and therefore wouldn’t tell me things weren’t that bad), but who could still be sympathetic and easy to talk to. After the appointment, my doctor ordered a full blood panel for me. Not surprisingly, my numbers could have been better. My sugars were at pre-diabetic levels and my bad cholesterol was a little elevated. Immediately after sharing this information with me, my doctor suggested I work on my weight as we had discussed, and come back and see her in July.
This morning was the follow-up appointment. I have never, ever, ever, ever, in my entire life, smiled so much in a doctor’s office. That includes when I was little and used to get pretzel rods and lollipops for getting those shots I was never afraid of.
First, the nurse took me back to take my blood pressure. Then, it was scale time. I guess she was using my previous weight as a starting point, because she moved the 50-pound weight into a category I haven’t been in in a while. I almost told her that was too high, but figured it would be more fun to let her discover that on her own. (I’m a smug little thing sometimes.) Once the nurse notated my weight, we went back over to the exam table and she entered it into the computer, where she kind of froze in place.
“When you were here last time, we had you weighed in at XXX — is that RIGHT?!” she asked.
“Yup.” I said.
“GO ‘HEAD!” she exclaimed. She continued about how hard I must be working, that I was doing great, and keep up the good work. That was pretty cool.
Then, I was in the exam room alone and waiting for the doctor. Usually, I check my phone or read something while I’m waiting around, but this time, I just kept staring at things around the room. My hands. The extra expanse of lap I could see on the exam table compared to the last time I was there. The scale weights, which the nurse had left in place, reflecting my weight loss over the last 3.5 months. My reflection in the metal paper towel holder.
When my doctor came in, she greeted me, asked how I was doing, and whether I was experiencing any new pain since our last visit — she was in the process of pulling up my file on the computer screen as I answered her questions. Suddenly, she furrowed her brow and stared very seriously at the computer screen. Then, she murmured, “Wait…” and inched her face closer to the screen. I was actually worried, and said, “Oh no, what’s wrong?!” The doctor’s face immediately broke into a huge grin as she looked at me and asked, “Have you lost fifty-one pounds since your first visit?!”
The woman did not stop smiling the rest of the time she was in the room. Before she’d come in to see me, the nurse had told her I’d lost weight, and she was expecting it to be 10, maybe 15 pounds. She kept repeating how proud she was of me, how impressed she was, how I had made her day, how I was doing this the right way. She wanted to know what I was doing, if everything felt right while I was moving, what I was eating, how often I was working out, if all of the weight loss was intentional, how my anxiety and stress were, and how I felt overall. She kept nodding and smiling throughout the conversation. She asked what my goal weight was and approved of it. When we came to the point of the conversation about the purpose of this doctor’s visit, and she realized it was for follow-up blood work, she scoffed out loud and said, “Well, you’re not gonna be pre-diabetic now.” She said we could skip the blood draw unless I wanted to do it, and I said I actually did want to see the change in numbers, and she was even excited about THAT. At some point, she mentioned that their office is going to move to a big building where they’ll have a training center, a demonstration kitchen, seminars, support groups, etc., and said she would want to bring me around as show and tell for all her patients who insist they’re doing everything they can to lose weight, but she knows they’re not because “the numbers don’t lie.” She high-fived me early in the visit and hugged me at the end. It was like getting a report card full of As and being so excited to go home and hang it on the fridge tattoo it on my forehead. She wants to see me again in 6 months to see how I’m progressing. As soon as she finished saying that, she added in through her plastered-on smile, “I probably won’t even recognize you by then!”
The nurse who first escorted me to the exam room came back after the doctor left to do my blood work. I’ll have the results in 2-3 days. Even if the numbers aren’t in normal ranges or better, I will still be flying high from how fantastically that appointment went. I’ve had a spring in my step all day.
Guys, I know that a lot of the time, my posts sound really confident, positive, and dangerously close to obnoxious with self-congratulation. I’m sure it gets irritating, so I feel the need to explain that there’s a reason I let myself go on like that, and it’s beyond the simple “because it’s how I feel.” It’s because I haven’t always felt this way, and as I continue along my mission, the positive emotions may stop or become harder to reach. I’m allowing myself to talk to death about how accomplished and successful I feel for that girl in the doctor’s exam room 3½ months ago whose self-doubt and self-abandonment landed her there in the first place. I’m also doing it for the girl 3½ months from now whose weight is taking longer to come off and who is tired of working so hard all the time. I have to honor the past version of myself to keep me going in the present, and I have to bank my triumphs in the present to keep me going in the future.
Thanks for letting me do that.
Every time I see an article like this, I get a little self-congratulatory satisfaction. I kicked the sauce 15 years ago.
As you can tell from the link, I’m not talking about liquor. Luckily, I’ve never had much of a taste for most alcohol, so that hasn’t been a source of weight gain or an impediment to weight loss for me. What I’m talking about is the equally dangerous, harmful, and addictive substance known as the soft drink (which I will refer to primarily as pop, because I grew up in a part of the country that calls it that).
For background, let me go on record and say I used to drink a TON of Coke. We always had it in the house, and I would have 1-2 glasses with dinner every night as a kid. Over summer vacations when school was out, I would come in from outside and pour myself a refreshing glass of not water, not lemonade, but Coke. When my family would go to a restaurant for meals, I got endless refills of Coke. I never. Stopped. With. The. Coke. No one ever told me I should. So, for my entire childhood, it was Coke everywhere. Coke constantly. Always Coca-Cola.
I was one of those kids who really trusted everything authority figures told me, especially my parents and my teachers. Sadly, this means that if someone had told me when I was younger and impressionable that Coke was actually terribly bad for me — and probably if I hadn’t had such regular, easy access to it — I would not have been a pop guzzler during those development years. When I finally did get un-hooked, it was kind of a happy byproduct of a different lesson I learned from an adult.
In my mandatory 9th-grade health class, it was the first time a teacher explained the benefits behind the then-recommended 8 8-ounce glasses of water per day tenet. I decided I wanted to challenge myself to try and drink those 64 ounces of water a day, so I bought a 20-ounce bottle of Aquafina from the vending machine in the cafeteria one day and carried it around with me to classes. I refilled it during the day from the water fountains in the hallway and aimed for 3 bottles a day, figuring that 60 ounces was just as good as 64. I would make it through about 2 bottles in school and do the third bottle in the evening at home. Boy, did I pee a lot all of a sudden. I instantly became the girl asking for the hall pass in every period. And my pee was no longer yellow, but clear. I had never known that was a sign of good hydration.
When I first began that little experiment, I still went straight for the fridge for a glass of Coke when I got home from school. Pretty early on, though — about 2 weeks in — I discovered I actually wasn’t thirsty for Coke; I was thirsty for more water. (I now know that I was never thirsty for Coke; I was chemically craving it.) I gradually, unintentionally, eliminated Coke from my diet. Before long, I started learning how toxic pop is, and became intentional about my decision. I avoided Coke almost entirely and drank exclusively water. Not purely coincidentally, I was the only one of my friends who never had acne problems. I was also the only one of my friends who didn’t have stained teeth when my braces got removed. After a while, I didn’t even miss or think about Coke, even though it was still always in the fridge at home. My little experiment that was supposed to be a short-term thing has turned into a permanent life style practice that I have carried on throughout my entire adult life. In my early twenties, I graduated to a 32-ounce BPA-free bottle that I fill at least 4 times per day. I take it with me everywhere. I am never thirsty.
Almost everyone I know still drinks the fizz. There are some who think it’s cute to constantly refer to their Diet Pepsi addictions, as if they don’t believe that’s actually a thing while they trumpet their dependency on that shit. My friends, it ain’t cute. I know I kind of got off that crap by happenstance, but I am thankful to my teenage self for that every day. Giving up pop was the best thing I ever did for my health.
I’m not saying I’m better than anyone — I don’t believe that and I certainly don’t mean to imply it. What I am saying is, that stuff IS addictive, and that’s the goal of soft drink manufacturers. Our dependency on their product keeps them in business. I believe that the reason Coke’s recipe is locked away in a vault guarded by dragons and rabid dogs is not because the Coca-Cola company is afraid of replication or corporate espionage, but because if the full list of ingredients were ever revealed BY the company, they would be admitting to guilt of willful and knowing participation in contributing to a public health epidemic. If the series of links I shared at the beginning of this blog post didn’t illustrate the point finely enough, maybe this will: soda is extremely fucking bad for you. That these companies are able to profit from marketing poison to the masses in an age where we know how terribly unhealthy this product is, is unconscionable.
I really hope that in the future, we will look back on the days of Coke and Pepsi with as much horror and condemnation as we look at tobacco companies now. They’ll probably never go away completely, but they can be shamed and stigmatized into regulation the way cigarette companies largely have been. Just as tobacco products are only available for purchase by consenting adults and labeled with warnings reminding you that what you’re consuming is killing you, so should pop be. If that sounds extreme, I don’t care. That shit is unhealthy, addictive, unnatural, a body pollutant, a contributor to disease and obesity, and pure trash. Should that be in the bodies of children? Should that be in the body of anybody?
I guess I’m feeling a little angry today about this. I see people chugging carbonated sugar like it’s no big deal, and it worries me. Diet-branded drinks do not make it better; in fact, they are likely even worse. As I’ve mentioned previously, learning about food addiction has been a revelation for me. In that light, I see the beverage addiction even more harshly. I can’t believe we willingly put this stuff into our bodies.
That’s what this is all about, though, isn’t it? We have to have that set of realizations that make us say, “Hang on a sec — what am I doing to myself?” Whether that realization comes after a heart-to-heart with a loved one, through self-education, or by a complete accident, it has to come if you want to be healthy. You are the only one who can make these choices for yourself. You are in control. You decide what goes into your body. You. That’s what I’ve always heard, and what I finally understand.
Funny, for all my youthful reverence of adult authority figures, it’s grown-up me who learned from my teenage self. Seriously, high-school me: thank you.
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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