Tag Archives: pain

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NEW DAY 244: The path

Months ago, I predicted that I would reach a point in my weight loss where the emotional dam would break, unleashing decades of emotions locked away behind body armor I’ve packed on as excess weight.

That time has come.

I have been going through it lately. I have cried every day since Saturday for one reason or another — or, more likely, for a nice big tangle of reasons knotted together by tenuous, anachronistic threads that barely make sense as part of the same weave.

Drastic weight loss? It’s… forgive me… heavy.

Seeing myself in the mirror feels like an elaborate prank. Sometimes I look so small, I can’t reconcile my reflection with the image of myself that lives in my mind. Other times, I still look so huge that the amount of work I have left to do seems nearly undoable.

Getting dressed is a gamble. If the pants fit my waist, will they be too tight in the calves and consequently spend the day being pulled down by the war between my limbs and my trunk? Will the underwear that sags in the ass still cling to my hips? If it clings to my hips, will my ass be too big for it? If the bra band is snug enough, are my boobs spilling out over the sides? If the neckline of my top looks right on the shoulders, will it still be too tight around my midsection when I sit down? If the dress hugs my curves, will it accentuate the bulge from my recently adjusted bra band and downsized tights squeezing my stomach? And don’t even get me started on the legs.

But the real mind fuck is the fucking mind.

I am approaching a size I have never been as an adult. The associations I have to that body are not positive. It was not a time when I felt safe, sure, or seen. I blame the grown people in my life for not helping me. I blame the people around me of all ages for not seeing what was going on. I blame society for normalizing the pressure on young girls such that the unhealthy ways they cope with it are easy to go undetected.

And I blame myself for letting things get so bad that it cost me.

It cost me my health. It cost me experiences. It cost me closeness. It cost me understanding of self-care and self-love. It cost me peace. It cost me good decisions. It cost me years of life I can’t change.

None of that resentment is productive. It might not even be entirely fair. But I feel it all the same. I feel it with the weight of decades and pounds of body fat that I did not put on consciously, but that I now am consciously taking off.
It padded me, but did not protect me.
It fucking hurts.

So I’m wandering around like an exposed nerve, hell bent on surrendering no ground on my half marathon training, because showing up matters to me. But today, after crying throughout therapy for the first time and wiping silent tears from my eyes for the rest of the afternoon in front of my work computer, I realized: this is not a knot I can untangle in an hour with a 7-mile run on the elliptical. Being low-key competitive with the people around me at the gym would not soothe this ache.

I needed to go outside.

It was nearly 60° today, and there was enough sunlight by late afternoon that it wound up being a great opportunity for my first trail walk of the year. It was treacherous; the foot+ of snow we got last month has not been cleared, leaving it to melt on its own. The freeze-thaw cycle and intermittent sun has created a soggy, muddy, slippery network of pathways that are clear in some places, frosted over in others, and wet everywhere else. The climb to the top of the trailhead was almost too much for my worn-in sneakers. With ankle concerns fresh on my mind, I nearly turned back; if the entire trail was going to be like this, it seemed imprudent to risk a fall.

But I thought, I’ll be careful. Maybe it’s not like this the whole way. Maybe it clears up later.

So I pressed on. I slid a little once or twice, but I was careful. It wasn’t like that the whole way. There were clear parts.

Then I got to this point.

And something about it struck me.

This was the thing:

Choose your metaphor.

The punctuation mark of this outdoor trek was at the very end. On my first venture to this part of the trail in the summer, I took a spill and did some damage to my knee — which also got infected. At that very same spot where I fell, there is now a 2.5′ x 4′ puddle of ankle-deep water from melted snow. The only way back to my car from there was either through that small lake, or all the way back up through the treacherous trail. I spent a fraction of a second verifying that there were no ways around the pool of melt, and then I trudged right through it. It was frigid and sloshy, but I didn’t care. A few minutes later, I was driving my soaked feet home to a warm shower, weighing the same amount yet unquantifiably lighter.

Emotional excavation is hard work. It requires a type of fortitude you don’t get by turning away from rough roads and uncomfortable obstacles on your path. It’s exhausting. It has no timeline. It fucking hurts. But if you keep going, carefully, it might not be like that the whole way. It might clear up later. You might even come out lighter.

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NEW DAY 242: Talking body

The past full week tested me.

I saw the scale dip below 200 lbs for the first time in 10 years. I did this mid-week weigh-in specifically because I had my August 11th – February 10th weigh-out to do, which is *the* exception to my Power 11 rule about only doing once weekly weight checks (on Sundays). I handily won that Transformer, going from 268.4 pounds in August to 202.8 pounds on February 11th1 — nearly 2.5 times more than what I needed to lose. Even better, it was the most I’ve ever raked in from a Transformer bet: $343.70! Conversely, it was the smallest group of people I’ve ever played with in a Transformer bet, and possibly any DB at all — so it was a VERY pleasant surprise to clean up like that! My theory is that people signed up for it in August and either lost track of it with the calendar busy-ness between start and end dates, or they fell victim to it: back to school, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all the functions, parties, events, and promotions that come along with all those occasions.


It’s always a great day to collect. And I felt pretty proud to review these 6 months of pretty fantastic effort and results.

But the good times ended there.

At the beginning of the week, I was contending with intense lower back pain that seemed to hit out of nowhere last Saturday when I woke up. It followed me into Sunday and Monday, and finally fucked off on Tuesday after some desperate interventions I made on Monday night that either paid off quickly or perfectly coincided with the natural ending of the pain. One of those was changing from sleeping on two pillows to sleeping on only one pillow. After losing 100 pounds, my shoulders are narrower, which means I don’t need a stack of pillows to properly support my neck as a side sleeper. I never thought about it until my back started complaining, but I made that adjustment and not only slept better, but woke up on Tuesday with no pain. I felt rejuvenated enough on Tuesday to hit a PBR on the elliptical in my workout that evening: 7.05 miles in one hour on the elliptical. Woohoo!

On Thursday, I had a bit of an emotional hangover from putting myself through some mental health processing work on Wednesday night. It was a positive development overall that came from that, but it did leave me wrung out on Thursday — which consequently felt like a VERY long day. Friday also kind of dragged, but it ended with dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since the end of June. Catching up with her was lovely and a much needed top-off of my social cup. (And yes, she was floored to see how different I look now!)

Yesterday was the roughest, though. I woke up with my period, which is a bit of a mixed-bag way to wake up. Now that my cycle has seemingly regulated itself, I feel this intense relief, joy, and gratitude when it shows up… and I also feel a bit of apprehension about it. Will it be debilitatingly heavy? Will the pain immobilize me? Then this spins out into feeling that I don’t even have the right to complain about any of the downsides, because I’m lucky to even be having a period now. (Yes, I have managed to emotionally complicate menstruation. Welcome to my mind.)

Anyway, I went for my haircut and lunch with a friend as planned, and everything was fine. Unfortunately, it all took a turn into death by a thousand cuts when I got to the gym for what was supposed to be my half-marathon training session where I’d be running 25 minutes straight for the first time, after multiple missed attempts at this since last week. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen again. I got on the treadmill to do the damn thing, and my ankle instantly started whining. I figured I’d try to run anyway; it’s about 50/50 whether the pain subsides or not when I give it a shot when this happens. In the final minute of my warm-up walk, someone decided that the machine beside mine was The One — out of all the unoccupied machines beside absolutely no one in the gym that afternoon — they needed to use. Um, no, ma’am. So I hopped off and changed to a different machine that was apparently not good enough for her. I started my run speed, and my ankle all but tea-kettle screamed at me. I tried a couple of minutes, a couple of foot placement changes, trying to see if it would loosen up… but it wouldn’t. So I had to stop.

I was pissed.

But I was at the gym, and the second half of my planned workout for the day was strength training. I was able to complete my circuit without event, but my earbuds did die two minutes into the first exercise. That’s annoying on its own, but I had JUST charged the suckers because this same nonsense happened earlier in the week. Between reps, I was rage-ordering a USB-C wired pair when I realized that not only was my ankle was still making its displeasure known, but my head had joined in. I suddenly felt the pain of a raging headache that was going precisely nowhere. I used to get headaches pretty regularly, but since I’ve started exercising every day, they’ve been a rare misery. When they hit, though… ugh. Right on cue, I moved to my next machine and felt violent cramps join the full-on assault my body was now waging against me.

This gym session was cursed.

That’s when I decided two things:
1) I was absolutely finishing this strength training, unless my limbs fell the entire fuck off; and
2) My evening plans were not happening.

I did finish the arm weights. With sincere apologies, I did cancel my dinner.

And then I went home, did the barest of minimums of prep work, ate what could passably be called dinner, dosed up on Excedrin PM, and promptly passed out on the couch with my ankle icing and propped up.

When I woke up some time later, my headache had not subsided at all. The recommended amount of time between doses had not passed, but I had no energy and no fucks left to give. I popped two more pills, crawled on top of the heating pad in my bed, and was asleep before 8 PM.

And there I stayed for the next 13 hours.

I woke up today feeling a million times better: no trace of a headache, an appeased ankle, and weaker cramps. I’ve been able to be as productive as I needed to be today to make up for the total unproductiveness of yesterday, and my whole list is now accomplished as of almost 6 PM: 2 loads of laundry, 3 meals prepped and snacks pre-portioned for the week, dishes cleaned and put away, and Power 11 Sunday tasks completed. I also went on a brief social call to atone for my last-minute jilt last night, got gas in my car, and transferred the contents of my work bag that broke this week (because of course!) into the replacement for it I ordered that arrived today.

After the weird week I’ve had, it’s no surprise that my total weight loss this week was 0.6 pounds. It’s frustrating, but not terribly; I am a walking skin sack of bloat, sleepiness, and emotional wear. I did the best I could at balancing my training against what my body told me it needed this week, and I can’t expect the scale to reflect that. And now, that week is over. I am letting this Sunday sunset with my yummy dinner, then taking my cramps to bed before they start biting again.

The most important thing I have learned over the past few months is that when my body talks, I need to listen. Feeling a little behind in my training is the price of admission for ensuring I don’t sideline myself for days or weeks because I was trying to prove the wrong point.

One positive thing I can say with full force is that even though this week tried my patience, disrupted my plans, and forced me into what feels like stalled progress, I have NOT fallen into past traps.
I didn’t get angry and storm out of the gym, costing myself any amount of movement altogether.
I didn’t push myself to keep plans — with myself or with others — that would have involved suffering for me.
Most importantly, I never once reached for comfort in the form of sugar-coated sabotage.

I’ve said it before, and I repeat it for a reason: that’s how I know I’ve changed. Unhealthy food doesn’t solve my problems. It is was my problems.

My body doesn’t want bad food that tastes good. My body wants care.

Some days go smoothly.
Some days go roughly.

All I can do is keep going safely.

I trust myself now. Nothing feels better than that.

  1. If you are reading this and noticing that 202.8 pounds is not below 200 lbs — yes. My below weigh-in at 198 was at 5:30 AM, after a pee, nothing new in my system, and buck-ass naked. This is not how I usually weigh in; my typical checks are between lunch and dinner, fully clothed. I have to submit photos for DietBet, so I follow their guidelines in my normal weigh-ins for consistency across my own records. Why the change, then? Because this milestone was important for me, and I wanted to do it this way. Enough said. ↩︎
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NEW DAY 236: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Well, I had a pretty duh moment day yesterday.

Somehow in the past 2 days or so, I managed to tweak my back. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it did inform my decision to take a rest day yesterday, opting instead to spend it and most of today laid up on top of my heating pad. After taking it easy today to not only treat my back, but also to bank on a crowdless gym during the Super Bowl when I went to complete my half-marathon running session as planned, I hit a snag: I failed to remember that the Sunday gym hours are shorter than on weekdays. By the time I got there, as the employee at the check-in desk informed me, they were 18 minutes from closing.

There went my planned 45-minute treadmill session and strength training circuit.

For a split second, I considered taking a second rest day in a row. What was the point of a 15-minute workout?

Consistency. Showing up for myself. That was the point. That’s the entire point of all of this.

So I dutifully took my place on a treadmill in the nearly empty gym, making it my purpose to log a mile. My treadmill pace has been a modest 4.3 mph; in under 15 minutes, I was not going to be able to pull off the distance I wanted, even with a truncated 1-minute walking warm-up. So my pace tonight — and from this moment until the next increase — was 4.5.

I got 1.02 miles in 14 minutes.

Seahawks. Patriots. Whatever.
After snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, I feel like the true champion of Super Bowl Sunday 😏

This coming week is going to be about some serious pushing of limits.

I can’t wait.

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NEW DAY 119: It’s all write

Sometimes when I have nothing to say, I end up saying the most.

I generally prefer to keep the parameters of this blog limited to weight loss, weight management, and physical fitness, with the occasional foray into related areas like mental health that directly connect to the experiences I have along my path. I’ll (perhaps annoyingly) refer, in vague terms, to parts of my personal life that have an impact on these things, simply because they inform my thoughts and/or feelings around a given topic — but without straying too far from the crux of Life Can’t Weight or revealing too much about myself. And to be completely honest, that can be really hard at times.

One lesson I have (re)learned this year for the gazillionth time is how absolutely essential it is for me to keep a good balance of systems in place that help in my overall picture of self care. Wellbeing is about the delicate, interconnected components of life and how they affect us as humans existing in our time and place. Precious little is within our control when you stop to think about it; how we manage our immediate environment is in many cases the extent of it for a given person.

My special combination that keeps me feeling in check is quality nourishment, meaningful socialization, productivity (through professional or personal work), creative output, physical activity, reflection-based expression, and sufficient sleep. When any of those things is absent or underrepresented for too long, the whole system breaks down. Lately, managing my physical health has been so overrepresented that it has dominated my schedule and, consequently, my thoughts. Although each day is still different, the routine and my thinking are more or less the same.

The effect this has is that it makes me less inclined to write here or anywhere else, and particularly when I have too much time between therapy sessions, my reflection-based expression time suffers. Because I’m not operationalizing that release valve, my sleep suffers. With less energy from a rest deficit, I have no interest in creative pursuits. Without a proper channel for my creative drive — on top of the lacking energy and sorted-out emotions — I feel ill-equipped to socialize; I’m less patient, more taciturn, and in the mindset that I’m poor company and should spare other people from that type of interaction.

You can see where this is going. One by one, the dominoes fall, and the whole structure topples. And that’s the state in which I currently find myself. I’m writing here right now because I have nothing to say — and that says it all.

There are so many thoughts constantly racing through my mind, it would stand to reason that I could simply grab a hold of one of them and use it as a writing topic, or a real-life conversation starter, or even an opportunity for creative expression. Instead, what happens is I fall through every mental trap door that leads to some tangential thought that spirals into something else entirely, and I get stuck in an endless web of overthinking that allows zero peace. The only time my brain is quiet is when I’m doing a challenging workout that requires my full focus. As much as that sucks when I’m not pushing myself through intense exercise, it’s such a gift that I can count on that time to convert the ceaseless frenetic nonsense into a physically healthy endeavor while also expelling it from myself, even if only for a brief period.

The story of this year has been just get through this. First, it was just get through this bad news. But before that could happen, it became just get through this loss. Concurrently for part of that, it was just get through this sickness and just get through this financial drought.
Just get through this uncertainty.
Just get through this horrendous job market.
Just get through this emotional pain.
Just get through this physical pain.
Just get through this relationship strain.
Just get through this boring book.
Just get through this unpleasant conversation.
Just get through this adjustment period.
Just get through this self-doubt.
Just get through this waiting for a response.
Just get through this waiting for an initiation.
Just get through this 75 Hard challenge.
Just get through this day.
Just get through this night.
Just get through this sentence.

Until what?

When does it get better? When is it enjoyable and not just an impediment on the way to something that is? More importantly, how do I activate enjoyment instead of just getting through waiting for it to happen?

There aren’t answers to these questions. As with many things, the only way out is through. I can decide one thing: whether to keep going or not. For now, I choose to keep going.

When I’m out of survival mode and my brain space frees up again, I can commit seriously to reclaiming my agency beyond that flimsy choice.

I have to just get through this first.

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NEW DAY 33: Just keep moving

My last two workouts have been tough.

Friday was a real struggle. Not even running as fast as I can/normally do, I started feeling almost queasy with 10 minutes left to go. I powered through it — it took every ounce of mental strength and focus that I had, and I kept going. I did it so I could say I did it, so: I DID IT. I’m proud of myself for getting through that, but it felt rough throughout and for a while after. It left me feeling so icky that I skipped a Sunday workout to try to respond to the message my body seemed to be sending me.

Yesterday, I decided I’d do a 60-minute treadmill walk rather than an elliptical run. At the 50-minute mark, I realized I had a massive blister forming on the ball of my right foot that already hurt and was a big enough bubble that it was making my steps weird, and that was causing discomfort in my hip. I had to stop myself 10 minutes shy of the time I’d wanted to hit. (Luckily, my at-home blister remedies have been effective and the thing is already flat and painless.)

In the interim, I discovered that the cut on my knee has gotten infected. Yay! (I’m treating it now, and I think it’s responding.)

But you know what? It’s not all bad news.

At dinner with a friend on Saturday night, he asked: “Are you losing weight?” I said yes, and I was surprised he could tell. He said it was noticeable in my face.

That’s step 1! Next up: neck and shoulders.

I signed up for a DietBet earlier this month. It was already a week underway when I decided to join, which means I had 25% less time to lose the same 4% of body weight that I would have had if I’d joined at the start date of the game. The weigh-out was today.

I won by 1/2 pound.

It’s working.

**exhale**

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DAY 031: Ya lose some, ya win some

It’s official!  The results of Kickstarter 1 of 3 are in, and I’m a winner!  It was a little closer than I would have preferred, but a win is a win and a loss is a loss, and I can’t complain about that.

I have two more Kickstarters ending soon, and round 1 of the million-dollar Transformer weighs out starting tomorrow.  The Transformer is in the bag, and I’m close on the other two.  It’s nice to not dread looking at the scale.  I forgot that was a possibility!

After these wins, though, it’s likely going to be time for a break from Kickstarters.

The ongoing saga that is my heel spur has reached a point where it’s interfering with my daily life and my ability to exercise.  I want to train for a 5K, but when I spend a lot of time on my feet, my heel swells and it feels like I’m walking on a water balloon.  Last weekend, I cooked for hours on end, and by the end of the day, I could only walk by erring to the outside of my foot because my heel was so swollen.  When it’s not flaring up, it’s a persistent nagging feeling in there that I’m always aware of.  I’m just done with it.

I saw my podiatrist today, and he talked through my options with me.  We’ve tried a number of things in the past 2+ years, and clearly, none of those has yielded any results.  Option 1:  cortisol shot right in the heel to alleviate some of the inflammation and pressure; may or may not have long-term results.  Option 2:  surgically stretch out the plantar ligament and saw away the bone spur; long-term solution with long recovery period that includes no working out for 2 months.

I have some travel coming up within the next month, so I couldn’t do the surgery now, anyway.  I got the injection in my heel before leaving the doctor’s office and I’ll have a follow-up with him when I get back from my trip.  At that time, if I’ve had some relief, we’ll do nothing and hope the problem is solved.  If there’s no discernible change, I’ll be going under the knife, foot-first.

It’ll make it kind of hard to lose weight without the ability to do any vigorous exercise, so I don’t want to set myself up for failure (and losing money) by signing up for more DietBets during recovery.  Of course, I may get lucky and have success with this shot, but I doubt it can eliminate the problem at all, let alone permanently.  I’m willing to try, though.  We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, I’ll keep moving.  Any weight I can get rid of will only help my foot.  I’ve got a lot of losing and winning to do!

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DAY 026: Tearing myself a new one

At some point last winter, I noticed a pain in my left bicep during certain normal movements.  Raising my arms in certain ways hurt, lifting certain things in certain ways hurt, and even certain light Zumba arm moves hurt.  It eventually became painful to sleep on my left side, which is my usual position.  The only thing I could conclude was that I had somehow torn a muscle.  Although I didn’t have any kind of scan done, my (new and less wonderful) doctor confirmed it when I saw her for the first time in May for a physical.

I’ve been doing independent weight training on my arms since I started this weight-loss party back in March 2015.  I have always been careful with controlling the motion of anything I lifted, taking it slow, and making sure the weight isn’t too much.  I somehow still managed to hurt myself pretty severely.  The best I can figure is that when I started doing arms again after enough of a hiatus to decrease my strength, I worked out as if I had never stopped and over-exerted my muscles when I should have ratcheted down the amount of weight I was lifting.  Muscles are built by a process of tearing and rebuilding, but when a tear comes from an injury, it’s not magically healed by a protein bar.  It needs to rest until it’s ready to work again.  You can’t rush it.

The doctor told me in May to stop with arms weights until my bicep was healed.  Foolishly, I gave it a week and then resumed my normal circuits in spite of the persistent pain.  The only reason I ended up stopping is because I abandoned health altogether when things got rough in the fall.

A year later, I’m finally healed.  I hit my arms circuit last night for the first time in several months.  I was a little tentative and ginger at the beginning of my workout, especially when it came to the exercises that really used to hurt when my muscle was damaged.  But you know what?  I feel good today.  I have the satisfying soreness from a good burn, but no pain.  Soreness is fine, but there should never be pain.  Got it.  No more being stupid.  But also… I forgive you, past self.

On Tuesday, I was chatting with a friend as we were leaving work together.  She asked, “Are you dieting?”  I said, “I’m eating right.”  She said, “Your face looks good.”

And that’s where it starts.

Hello, saddle.  It’s good to be back.

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DAY 007: Shaken, not stirred

Spoiler alert:  This has nothing to do with how I take my martinis.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to express how the last few months have been for me that led me to the point in my weight-loss mission where I find myself today.  In particular, the last 6 weeks of that have turned me into a raw, exposed nerve at times.  When I saw that today was #007 in my numbering scheme, a bit of an opportunity presented itself.  It’ll be a bit of a stretch, but hey, that’s been true for my pants of late; why should my writing be any different? 😉  So, let’s say I’ve been feeling existentially shaken, but somehow not stirred to action.  (It’s tortured, but whatever.  I’m sure I’ve done worse.)

Most of the year was pretty decent, just extra busy.  When things weren’t busy, I didn’t use my time the right way.  If I could go back to the summer and kick myself in the ass, let’s just say I would.  I did have an ankle sprain in there, but even still… I leaned hard into excuses that allowed me to stray from my healthy eating and abandon exercise altogether.

Zooming in on one cross-section of time, I take you to the period of late November through late December 2017, AKA the holiday season.  Call me over-analytical (and be correct), but a highly symbolic thing happened out of precisely nowhere.  The week leading up to Thanksgiving, the piercing I got to mark the halfway point in my mission got irritated.  It was slightly warm to the touch, and I could feel there was some sort of ball of nastiness between my earring and the hole in my ear.  I the area as best I could without taking the earring out, but after a few days of those attempts, there was no change.  I finally decided to do the obvious thing my body wanted me to do and remove the earring to give the hole a thorough cleaning.  The second the post left my ear, the nastiness ball got even larger and warmer, and the hole was imperceptible.  For the ensuing 2 weeks, it became a one-to-three-day cycle of cleancleanclean, scab slowly forms over site, scab falls off, repeat.  I haven’t been able to figure out what could have caused the sudden flare-up, but it was a week before I dared try getting an earring back in.  When I did, it was my sharp piercing stud from when I got my lobes pierced at age 11 — ohhhh, yeah, I still have those little pink studs in all their juvenile glory — and it hurt more than the original cartilage piercing did.  I’m pretty sure I partially re-pierced it.

That long-winded account is to say, I don’t view it as a coincidence that this happened at a moment in time where I’d solidly backtracked to the pre-halfway mark.  My piercing might as well have said, “You no longer have the right to this.  Come back when you’re serious.”

This saga is persisting even now, albeit to a lesser extent; but I am mostly leaving the earring out, periodically re-piercing the hole to drain it of blood (there’s a blood bubble that’s shrinking, but still present) and cleaning it.  I am not about to let that sucker permanently close.  At one point, I tried to insert the earring I got that hole pierced with, but my ear swelled up around it immediately and I had to take it right back out.  It was several days before I could do anything with it again.  I don’t know if I’ve developed a sudden allergy to sterling silver — is that a thing that can even happen?! — but it was wild.  I guess I’ll have to keep watching it.

Right after Thanksgiving, I had a minor car incident when a friend’s mom hit my car in her driveway.  No one was hurt, but it was enough that my car needed significant repairs, and I was without it, out of state, for over two weeks.  This meant a huge inconvenience at home; hours on the phone with insurance adjusters, rental car agents, and the auto body shop; and an unplanned trip back to my hometown that cost me 8 hours on the road and personal time off work to pick up my car when it was finally fixed.  It was an unwelcome bout of stress and annoyance.

Then, just before Christmas, my grandfather died.  I don’t think I need to expound on that.  Suffice it to say, I loved him very much and everything about letting him go was awful and painful, sometimes physically.

When I finally got back to my place after the unexpected, prolonged time at my parents’, I was drained.  I couldn’t get out of the terrible mental spiral of, What will they say about me when I die?  I need to quit my job and do something that matters.  Life’s too short.  I’m so unhappy.  Like a broken record, over and over again.  And I came damn close to doing something rash.  When I would re-pierce my ear during that period, I liked the pain.  I admit to doing it more than usual because I liked the pain.  The psychology attributed to cutters suddenly made sense to me:  giving myself this physical pain was a type of release valve for the internal pain I was feeling but didn’t know how to express, let alone work on solving.

I needed to get myself back into some semblance of control over the situation I was downward-spiraling myself further into.  That’s why I decided to do a fast to end the year.

After devouring breakfast on New Year’s Day, I signed up and weighed in for a new DietBet.  The pot is currently at $195,870 with 6,532 players.

This past week, I signed up for two additional DietBet games:  a Kickstarter that currently has 13,355 players and a pot of $400,650, and a Transformer that currently has a DietBet record (!) of 7,022 players and a pot of $932,400.  (Both are still open to new players — join me!)  These three new bets are in addition to the Transformer I joined in November that’s still in progress — and that I have lost both rounds of so far, but that I will come back and win!

Even after all the turbulence of the fall, I remained in a sort of helpless stupor where I knew what I needed to do, but I just couldn’t get myself there.  I’ve had to force myself back into meal prep and ratcheting up my give-a-shittitude, and the mental effort of babysitting myself has been tedious and exhausting.  It’s starting to take hold, though.  I’ve gone from being emotionally shaken to having finally shaken myself out of that rut.  I’ve gone from being emotionally not stirred to having finally stirred myself into taking charge.

I’ve already made some progress in spite of that, dropping 3.2 pounds since Monday night.  I’m definitely a long way from being all in, and I have yet to get a proper workout under my belt this time around, but it’s coming.  I’m going to get myself there.  There’s no alternative option.

Life’s too short for regret.

 

 

 

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DAY 743: To sleep, perchance to food-dream

OK.  It’s day 20, and I feel like I’m back tracking.

I have slept terribly the past two nights, in spite of taking melatonin on Sunday night.  Last night, after 2+ hours of trying and failing to fall asleep, I ultimately gave up and went to the kitchen to start preparing today’s lunch and tonight’s dinner.  Still not wound down from that, I went ahead and filed my taxes.  Finally, I trudged back upstairs around 2 AM where I lay awake for another hour before finally dozing off sometime after 3.  I also peed four times between when I first lay down and when I scraped myself off the mattress when my alarm went off for the 5th time this morning.  I usually only get up once or twice throughout the night.

I also had the worst headache yesterday that I’ve had since starting Whole30.  Two pills didn’t kill it during the day, and it clung on and on until I took another dosage before my first attempt at going to sleep at night.  It then took a while to dissipate, which at least it finally did.  As I sit here typing this, I can feel another one creeping on.

I continue to have inexplicable and frustrating stretches of constipation.  That just infuriates me.  In. fur. i. ates. Me.  Anti-bloat diet, my ass.

And to add injury to insult, I am all of a sudden having knee pain.  KNEE PAIN.  For the first time in my life, I have aching, stiff, sore knees through absolutely no strain or exertion.  I’ve been totally phoning it in on the physical activity, and what little I’ve gotten has been pretty non-strenuous.  Even at my heaviest weight of 303 pounds, my knees were fine.  I’m years and miles away from that point now, and partway through this healthy dietary tweak, I’m struck with it out of absolutely nowhere?  Not fair.  Also, not logical.

What the eff is going on here?!

This better be the death throes of toxins leaving my body or something.  I am SO irked about what I’m experiencing this far into the program.  The hardest shit is supposed to be over.  It’s been almost 3 weeks and I have experienced, mmm, approximately zero of the program’s touted health benefits.  For all the extra investment — and I do mean investment — of time and money to stick to the strident rules of Whole30, to experience nothing even close to “tiger blood” is outrageous.  Not only am I not feeling better, but I’m actually feeling worse.  I am so glad I’ve ignored the guideline about not weighing yourself; if it weren’t for my knowledge that I’ve dropped a lot of weight, it’s hard to imagine I could convince myself to stick out these last 10 days.

Oh, oh, oh!  But THEN!  I’m all skittish about stopping after day 30 because what if all the pounds that fell off were just water weight, and I instantly gain it all back during reintroduction?  I won’t fit into my MoH dress.  I’ll be miserable and inconsolable.  It will all have been an utter waste, in every possible sense.  Ugh, I can’t even let myself think about that, but the thought keeps popping into my head.

I’m exhausted.  What I wouldn’t give for a guilty food dream right now.

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DAY 739: Whoa, we’re halfway there!

BONJOVI-2

It’s day 16.  Do you know where your children are?

I posted this yesterday on DietBet, but it bears repeating:  I am SO. SICK. OF SALAD.

I’ve had a lot of late nights recently, resulting in needing to order food instead of eating the yummy, healthy, Whole30-compliant dinners I have waiting for me at home.  The only thing that seems safe to eat in those circumstances is a very basic build-your-own salad without dressing from a fresh salad joint.  And man, I am so over salad at this point.  I’m also over shelling out additional cash on pretentious salads — yeah, that’s a thing — on top of the substantial amount of money I’ve already spent to make the meals I’m neglecting in the first place.  GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE.  I’m looking mad forward to eating at home all weekend.

Yesterday, the halfway point, was a decent day.  I had a meeting that went on entirely too long, and when I emerged from the staircase afterwards on the way back to my office, two co-workers were chatting by the elevators.  One suddenly stopped herself mid-sentence and called out, “Is that… is that you?”  I turned around and said, “Yes, I’m me!”  She started saying she thought it was me, but she wasn’t sure; I looked so good, could I help her with losing weight?!  She must have said 3 or 4 times how different or good she thought I looked.  (I rarely see this person.)  That felt pretty nice.  (Thanks, super flowy, former oh-honey top I was wearing yesterday!)

Yesterday evening was a good-bye gathering for a colleague, and I was the designated cupcake picker-upper.  Not just any cupcakes, mind you.  They spent Wednesday night in my fridge, all day Thursday in my office, and Thursday evening staring at me while everyone else partook.  That fudgy chocolate frosting looked amazing, but was it?  I have only the word of other people — and foggy, fond memories — to go on.  Passing on those babies wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, actually; honestly, having them at home and in my office for nearly a full day was fine.  I didn’t think about them at all.  It was watching everyone else eat (and enjoy) them that gave me a pang.  I’m telling myself it was mostly FOMO while I remind myself what sugar does to my insides.  That shit looked sooooo yummy, though.  *single tear

The one thing that has started feeling like a sacrifice is coffee.  Go figure, right?  The one thing I gave up voluntarily, outside of the program’s guidelines, is the one that has started to hurt.  BUT, BUT, BUT!  Yesterday was the first time in over a week I did not get a headache!  I had several early on, then a few days without, and then straight headaches for about a week and a half.  They were more of the dull, nagging variety than the throbbing, painful variety; enough to be annoying and prevent clear thinking or ease in falling asleep, but not a light enough touch that I could avoid taking something to make it go away.  The night before last, I noticed the headache was a little lower in strength than the ones leading up to it, and I rolled the dice:  I went to bed without popping Excedrin, and the headache went away.  I slept normally all night and had no remnants of the headache when I woke up in the morning.  Then, no headache during the day, and I went to sleep pain free!  Magic!  It’s not exactly tiger blood, but I’ll take it.

You know, one thing  I have taken from this is that being open about my dietary restrictions has been very helpful, and not embarrassing.  This comes as a complete surprise to me, given how uncomfortable I have been all my life with letting people into this weight-loss stuff with me.  It feels like THE most personal thing I could share, no matter how limited the sharing is.  I feel appreciative and humbled by being proven dead wrong about this.  The implicit accountability, support, and encouragement from people has been incredible.  I’ve even intentionally told my parents I’m doing this, and they won’t even see me during these 30 days.  LIGHT BULB!  I don’t have to do everything alone.  A lesson decades in the making.

Sadly, I STILL have not made it to the gym.  It’s on the docket for tomorrow, right between SLEEP IN and PLAN NEXT WEEK’S MENUS.

Fifteen down, fifteen to go!