Tag Archives: setbacks

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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 017: The foodstuffs dreams are made of

They’re baaaaaaa-aaaaaack:  the food dreams.  With a twist.

Last night, I don’t even remember what I was illicitly eating in my dream when I reached the level of semi-consciousness where I realized I was dreaming.  At that point, I immediately grabbed a bowl of whipped cream that appeared from nowhere and started eating it with a spoon.  I could take or leave whipped cream in real life, so that was a surprising splurge!  Haha.

This was the second night in a row of food dreams, but with different indulgences.  I always hit this point when I start a new health routine.  It’s not even just one point; it’s more like a starting point of what will be an intermittent pattern that continues indefinitely.  Oddly, it seems to happen at times when I’m not having any waking cravings and am actually feeling pretty secure in my food and exercise choices.  I usually feel insanely guilty when I wake up, before it hits me that the sinful eating I did in my dreams didn’t really happen.  The best is when, like this morning, I become aware that I’m dreaming and I can go hog wild with no consequences.

The weird part about last night’s dream was that, before the whipped-cream plot twist, I had an internal struggle about an indulgence of a different kind:  weighing myself.  It’s always a bit of a challenge not to weigh in between my usual Sunday night times, and I confess that I do usually give in around Thursday.  It’s been particularly challenging not to step on the scale this week, after annoyingly posting no weight loss at all last week.  My next scheduled weigh-in is still 4 days away, and I feel like my body has made it over the week-2 slump and has responded well to my consistency with diet and the introduction of regular exercise.  (I made it to the gym after work yesterday!)  I want to wait until Sunday to see the progress, and I’m so hopeful for a big number to offset the stall from last week, but I’m being diligent with myself not to.  If I can’t resist the damn scale, which should be an easy thing to resist because it’s THE ENEMY with a gremlin living inside it, how am I gonna say no to donuts and cookies and bowls of whipped cream?

Sooooo, I’m gonna ride it out.  In the meantime, I’m trying to prepare myself for a possibly disappointing number on Sunday.  I have to remember that the scale only tells me my relationship to gravity, not how I feel.

Unless it’s a big drop.  😉

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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 004: Wii did kinda start the fire

The snow bomb cyclone of terror and doom is upon us.

My area only got a light dusting of snow, but it’s FRIGID outside.  Like, wearing-three-pairs-of-pants frigid.  And windy AF.  Like, wearing-three-pairs-of-pants-and-still-getting-wind-burn-on-your-legs windfy AF.

Those factors + resolutioners overrunning my gym = interest in working out, tanked.  Unfortunately, that makes it pretty hard to reach my daily steps goal if I’m going to reach the 250,000 steps I want to hit this month.

Soooo, today, I had a brilliant idea:  work out at home with the ol’ Wii!  And I do mean old.  That piece is about to celebrate its 9th birthday.

This turned out to be quite the production.

I turned the console on with no problem.  When I finally found a remote control, I tried to use it, only to find it was unresponsive.  I opened the battery compartment to find… batteries that had oozed everywhere, who knows how long ago.  I pried them out of their slots, cleaned out the hardened residue, and replaced them with new ones.  I reset the control with the console, and SUCCESS!

Then, after I literally dusted cobwebs off of my Wii Fit board, I flipped it over to immediately check the batteries for the same issue as I had discovered in the remote — and there it was.  I removed the leaked, dead batteries and cleaned out the compartment, but I had no more extra batteries of the right size at home, so I had to trudge out into the bitter cold to buy some.  (Oh, I was serious about making this happen!)  Unfortunately, I had kind of mis-sequenced this whole venture; I should have checked for full Wii functionality before changing into my new Under Armour work-out pants that only cover me to mid-calf and removing my top entirely, leaving on only a bra.  But I didn’t.  And I didn’t feel like changing before dashing out to CVS, so I threw my winter coat on over my bare torso and subjected my bare legs to the biting temperatures.  I mean, I only walked to and from my car between my building and the CVS I drove to, but it was enough to feel the effects of my laziness.  Shit, I had to go when I was still revved up enough, or it would never happen!  Aaaaaanyway, I returned triumphantly with the batteries — great way to spend my Extra Bucks! — that I immediately inserted into the board, and… NOTHING.

I tried and tried to get the thing to work, but nothing I did made any difference.  RIP Wii Fit Board.  (And then I impulsively went on Amazon and ordered a replacement.  **shrugs**  YOLO.)

When my Wii was on and I had optimistically opened the Wii Fit menu, it greeted me with this:

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Yowza!!!  That’s 2.76 years.  Do better, self.

Oh wellsies.  At least I know I have a working console and a working remote, so when the new board arrives, I’ll be ready to go!  And I WILL use the crap out of my Wii if this polar spell keeps up the way it’s supposed to.

In the meantime, all that running around from room to room and from car to CVS got me to within 500 steps of my daily goal, which I know I will hit tonight by just walking around in circles if I have to.  Wii may not have helped me get a burn on tonight, but it did help re-light my fire and get those needed steps.

I weigh in for my second Kickstarter tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to seeing if I have had any changes since I weighed in for my first Kickstarter on Monday.  That momentum would really help me keep this little flame lit!

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Mean, not-so-lean 2017

For this entry only, I am ditching my usual format of numbering the days because, well, that saga is over.  To put it better, that chapter of the seemingly never-ending mission has closed.

I can’t believe that at this time in 2016, I was getting ready to weigh in at under 200 pounds for the first time since college.  I made it to that milestone, but lost my way in the middle of that year, and then, between a series of fits and starts and flirtations with getting back on the healthy track, I just surrendered at the end of last summer.  It was one too many punches in my ever-expanding gut, and I couldn’t be bothered.  Last year — OOOH, that feels good to put 2017 in the past! — pinned me to the mat and I quit trying to get up.

I steered into the skid so hard, I can’t believe what the scale told me when I forced myself to get on it today.  By rights, I really should have gained a metric fuck-ton of weight.  I devoured all the marked-down Halloween candy, all the yummy fall treats, enough Thanksgiving dinner and homemade treats while staying with family, and basically just kept going down that path until kingdom come.  It got worse when my grandfather somewhat expectedly and somewhat unexpectedly died the week before Christmas.  I went home to my family and we ate our feelings for a week, then I gorged myself on Christmas cookies and more discounted candy.  Once I came home to my empty house after all that emotional zig-zagging, I consciously continued the bender.  I truly don’t remember the last time I worked out, but I want to say it was… early October?  Ugh.

The night before my grandfather’s funeral, I got a punishing migraine.  I get them from time to time, but I thought I had identified the main cause of them — a too-tight hair tie around my wrist — and hadn’t had one since.  Well, turns out crying/fighting not to cry/not sleeping well/not eating right/getting no exercise/having crazy emotions can produce them, too… with a vengeance.  I was knocked off my feet in a cold, dark room for hours, finally throwing up so violently and forcefully I’m surprised it wasn’t coming out of my eyes and ears in addition to my mouth and nose.  That was only my third vomit-inducing migraine, and by far the worst.  I never want to feel like that again.

Yesterday, I decided the way I would end the year-long migraine that was 2017 was by fasting.  I just didn’t eat for 30 hours, from the time I went to bed on the 30th to the time I “woke up” this morning.  Why the air quotes?  Well, because fasting is — duh — a detox, and my body had a LOT to detoxify itself of.  (Yes, I am aware that I am not detoxified now after one day of not eating, but the process started.)  I got a nasty migraine again in the afternoon yesterday, and it didn’t fully dissipate until after I ate breakfast this morning, meaning I was essentially awake all night in mind-numbing pain, in spite of my perfectly lovely NYE plan of sleeping right through the stroke of midnight.  2017 just couldn’t let me go without one last kick in the head.  (At least I didn’t yak this time, although that at least would have provided some relief.)

Sooooo, when I got on the scale this afternoon (after 2 meals and 2 snacks), I was certain that I would see at least a 12-pound gain from my last weight check on December 3rd.  The proximal dehydration from my 30-hour fast, coupled with the month and a half of eating everything in sight and making zero effort to counteract any of that damage with physical activity, really should have ballooned my weight waaaaaay up.  And yet — don’t ask me how — I weigh 2 pounds less than I did on that date, and only 2 pounds more than I did when I weighed in for a Transformer DietBet on November 14th.

OK, body.  You came to play.

My meals for the week are prepped and portioned.  I stayed fully on my meal plan today and am on track with my water intake.  Yesterday was the reset.  Today is technically day 1.  Now let’s see about not stopping until the work is done.

And thanks, universe, for the solid of not making me 20 pounds heavier.  I’ll try to remember this when I’m working my ass off and the scale isn’t budging at all.  Mysterious ways, amirite?

Happy new year!

 

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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 731: Happy worth day, dear body

Two years ago today, I made The Change.

It was tentative at first, but it stuck… for a while.  For months and months, I gained steam and experienced a lot of successful changes physically, mentally, and emotionally.  After nearly a full year of hard work, I eagerly laced up my running shoes and went for my first-ever outdoor run in the refreshing spring air after work.

It was also my last outdoor run.

I spent the remainder of 2016 undoing most of the work I’d done from March 23rd, 2015, until that date.  I couldn’t even bring myself to post on my first worth day because I was too busy falling off the wagon, sabotaging myself, and feeling 360 degrees of shitty about it.  One little thing went wrong, and then I allowed every little thing to go wrong and nearly ruin my weight loss.  What a waste.

This year, I’m not at the size I thought I would be when I imagined myself two years out at my start date on this day in 2015.  I’m trying to claw my way back to the levels of health and happiness I had managed to reach previously, before I will really be able to believe I can attain my ultimate goals.  If I started out two years ago feeling tentative, that’s amped waaaaaaaaaay up this time around.

Shakiness aside, I am making sure to recognize my efforts today.  The path I’ve taken hasn’t been straight or without significant obstacles, but it’s started taking me back towards  where I’ve long wanted — and needed — to go.  As my mission enters its toddlerhood, I recommit to the girl who has always occupied, and will always occupy, this body:  I will be fearless.  I will work hard.  I will see to it that my last outdoor run was only my most recent outdoor run, not my final outdoor run.  I will one day stop being ashamed of this body and strive to not only accept it, but to see it as beautiful.

I am worth it.

Happy worth day, dear body.

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DAY 728: Timeline, shmimeline

the-whole30-timeline-ol6w5a

Well, it’s the start of Whole5, and  I’m still on track.  Thing is, my Whole30 Timeline experience is syncing up, um, in almost no way.

I read and re-read the timeline numerous times before starting Whole30, and many more again since.  I obviously expected and planned for some variation, and I’d say my days 1-3 were more or less in keeping with the timeline (What’s the Big Deal? and The Hangover), although the 3 days combined were more like a hybrid of the two phases merged into one.  Since I’d mostly been eating clean already, the only sign of detox I had was a daily headache, which I’ve concluded is caffeine withdrawal from kicking coffee completely rather than from Whole30, although I’m not a scientist or a doctor, so will concede that it could be a factor.  I’ve mostly been a little nonchalant and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On Saturday (day 3), I was watching a live show in a theater and suddenly started sneezing in a way I recognized as not allergies.  Over the course of the rest of the day, I became draggier and felt my nose and ears clogging.  By the time I got home at 11:00 PM, it felt like a full-on cold, complete with a sporadic wet cough.  Thanks to the congestion, I got my sleep in small increments that night and finally got out of bed yesterday morning feeling unrested.  I puttered around the house the rest of the day, canceling my Sunday plans and not even making it to the grocery store, let alone the gym.  I crawled back into bed around 4 in the afternoon and napped off and on, then got up around 7 to eat dinner, and got right back into bed as soon as my last dish hit the drying rack.  I slept even less last night, and the crap I’m coughing up has gotten more… non-nondescript.  I guess I’m officially sick, although certain sources on the web suggest this is a bodily reaction to the detox (which was my guess/hope) rather than a proper cold.  (The Whole30 website categorically rules out this possibility.)  I so rarely succumb to any type of illness that I’m always ready to attribute symptoms like this to something else.  Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s the detox, or maybe it’s some cruel joke of a joint effort of the two.  In any event, it’s fucking annoying to be getting even less sleep!

Here on day 5, I have to say I’m really not feeling the bloodlust that the timeline’s Kill All the Things phase portends (even in spite of the sleep deprivation).  I’m more in the I Just Want a Nap phase, which I’ve been in since before starting Whole30.  Haha.  I’ve been having food dreams again, which is characteristic of a later phase as well as something that happens to me anyway, but I have no cravings or desires to murder anyone.  I haven’t had another headache since Saturday, so The Hangover feels safely over.  Staying off the scale has been the true test of willpower so far.  I’m a bit incredulous about the effectiveness of this program right now, which is mostly because I’ve been so tethered to the scale as THE metric of results and I haven’t weighed myself since before I started this whole endeavor, and since right now, I feel markedly worse, not better.  I have no temptation to quit, though.

DISCLAIMER:  If I’m making Whole30 sound easy, don’t be fooled.  A lot of work goes into this in terms of planning and meal preparation, not to mention real-time adjustments.  (I did great on my day away from home all day Saturday!)  I was also already eating clean before starting this, so it wasn’t too much of a shock to my system to cut out the alcohol I wasn’t consuming, the grains I was eating in moderation, the added sugar I was restricting, the legumes I enjoy but scarcely eat, or the dairy I took nearly exclusively in the form of milk or cheese, nearly exclusively in the early part of the day.  Also, it is only day 5; that’s not enough time for any kind of thorough analysis of anything, especially not a drastic dietary modification.  That said, the scientific part of my brain is curious and eager to see how the full effects will bear out.  This detox flu/head cold needs to GTFO, though.

In the meantime, however, I can’t plot myself on the Whole30 Timeline.  I’m traveling without a guide, I guess.

Off the edge of the map, mate.  Here there be monsters.

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DAY 693: Warrant for a rest

For a long time, I’ve been feeling exponentially draggier.

When I first noticed it, it was during a particularly stressful, eventful, and fatiguing summer of seemingly non-stop madness.  A sampler platter:  attending a 9-day work conference out of town, buying a place while working at said conference, completing the closing and moving processes once I returned, traveling for more work and personal trips in July and August, and undergoing a massive professional realignment that threw my role at work into upheaval and added extra demand and uncertainty.  It was no wonder that I was feeling so tired; I was, and had every reason to be.

As fall came on, the stresses of murkiness at work and first-time homeownership snowballed into a larger mess that collected political and familial stress.  I had not only completely given up on exercising by that point, but I had also thrown into the mix eating anything and everything I could get my hands on.  I took the very mature route of ignorance to deal with it, refusing to acknowledge that I lived in a world where scales or mirrors existed.  When all of my clothes became tight again, I just doubled down deeper into my denial and told myself I’d have to wait to deal with it until things calmed down.

Well, things finally did calm down in mid-January — but a month on, I’m more exhausted than ever.  This is in spite of having successfully resumed and implemented clean eating and easing back into exercise with a moderate lift to start.  What’s up?

It could not be more simple; I’m tired because I’m tired.  I’ve been getting into bed at early times and maximizing how long I’ve spent there for as many hours as possible, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been getting quality sleep.  Every morning, I wake up feeling as if I’ve actually been awake all night, and feeling as if getting out from under the covers is physically impossible.  It’s not because of stress anymore, even if it’s true that it was likely a — or the — factor leading up to this point; it’s because my bed sucks.  Like, SUCKS.

My mattress is a teenager.  Most beds don’t make it into their tween years, let alone to driving or voting age, but that’s roughly the range mine has reached.  That’s TOO LONG to be sleeping on the same mattress night after night!  Of course I’m tired in the morning after a night of tossing and turning, but never getting comfortable.  I didn’t believe it when Jiminy would show an absolute maximum of 3 hours’ deep sleep, but typically more like 1-2 hours’.  As it turns out, that data seems to track.  It’s not worth feeling chronically drained and prone to muscle aches and all-day stiffness, to say nothing of the toll it’s taking on my mental sharpness or ability to live healthily.  Once I finally got real with myself about the culprit of my fatigue, I knew I had to bite the bullet and shell out for a new mattress set.

Can I just say, I realized in the shopping process that I’ve never actually paid for my own mattress before — I was a teenager myself when my parents bought me my now-teenage bed! — and even with the good sales going on this time of year, they are EXPENSIVE!  BUT, this isn’t a splurge; it’s a vital piece of my overall health puzzle.  I can’t do anything well if I’m not rested, and losing weight tops that list.  So, this weekend, I bought myself a new, incredibly comfortable mattress and box spring.  It won’t be delivered for another couple of weeks, but I’m already craving it more than I’ve craved even chocolate recently.  I can’t wait to catch up on some quality shut-eye so I can do the thing right.

Sleep is a VERY important part of this process.  I’ve always known that, but I didn’t realize the extent to which I have been inadvertently depriving myself of it until I stopped to truly think about it, even though the signs have been there for some time.  Now that my eyes have finally been opened, here’s hoping I can get them to stay closed all night in the very near future.

by

DAY 659: Thud.

Somewhere on the interwebs, there’s a statistic about the likelihood of incurring an injury more frequently in the home than anywhere else.  Yesterday morning, I became such a statistic.  I had successfully navigated the un-treated sidewalks while walking around in the snow the day before, mind you, but the two measly steps down to my living room proved too much for me.  I took one step in my 3-sock-layered feet, slipped spectacularly, and landed on my butt on the edge of the middle step.  Of course, I had too much momentum from the stumble to stay where I landed, so I was propelled off the step and onto the floor, where I smacked my back off the edge of the step that had failed to hold my booty, and also somehow whacked my arm off something (the wall?) in the process.

Now, this episode immediately registered as funny to me.  I sat on my rump in mild disbelief, trying to figure out how I’d gone from upright to ass-planted in a fraction of a second, and giggling a little bit to myself.  I did a mental inventory of body parts to make sure everything felt OK, and aside from some spots in my butt, back, and arm that had gotten the brunt of the impact, everything seemed fine.  I got up, turned around, and instinctively looked at the floor where I wound up to make sure it wasn’t broken.

No, really — I sincerely believed there was a possibility I could break my floor with the force of the fall of my body.

Which, right now, is funny and pretty ridiculous.

But also very sad.

When I had reached Onederland, those irrational, paranoid, fat-girl thoughts were far behind me.  I knew I had backtracked severely away from Onederland, but realizing how far I have backtracked mentally hit me with the force of a thousand of my bodies crashing to the floor.  THUD.

Well, I guess you know what they say:  Fall 9 times, get up 10.   So up I go.  My mental state will recover.

Don’t worry — I didn’t break it.