Tag Archives: setbacks

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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.

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DAY 626: No, darlin’.

This… this blog!  It’s alive!  IT’S ALIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!

Sooooooo, as you may have guessed, it’s been a wretched several months.  Work?  Bad.  Love life?  Bad.  Family situation?  Bad.  Friendships?  Bad.  World events?  Bad.  Things have been varying degrees of bad at different times since (and during) the last time I updated this dusty old thing, but the general trend has been just bad.

Some of that will probably come out in greater detail over the next span of entries, but the bottom line is, I haven’t been handling any of it like the baller I was around this time last year.  It’s been uber stressful and I’ve been letting it get to me.  I regained a fuck-ton of weight and I feel like shit about it:  I’m disappointed in myself and ashamed of what I’ve done to negate all my hard work.  Also, man, what a luxury it was to have been so much lighter.  I had forgotten how sucky and embarrassing it is to get winded from walking up a flight and a half of steps.

But ya know, as much as losing weight is secretly a community effort when it’s all going right — you know what I’m talking about if you’re a fellow fatty who gets life from the affirming compliments, helpful online (or even in-person) communities, and essential readings/watchings along the way — it’s equally so when it’s all going wrong.

In the midst of a series of crises at work a couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague about what a mess we were dealing with.  This particular colleague and I typically have conversations that remind me of what it looks like if you draw a flower in the air with your finger:  they start at a central point, then they swing far out from what we were discussing before making their way back to the central issue, only to curve out to something totally different again before veering sharply back to center, and so on and so on until all the petals are drawn.  They’re unpredictable discussions that are simultaneously about 14 different things that somehow all relate in some delicate way.  The conversation we had a few weeks back was no exception.  My colleague had just finished verbally drawing a petal about what she likes to do on weekends before unexpectedly bringing it back to our work situation thusly:  “I say this to you as a woman who has struggled with her own weight:  your face is looking fuller.  That’s stress.  No, darlin’.”

Her delivery was gentle, yet direct, and her message was clear:  Don’t let this place take any more from you.

Those words have been ringing in the back of my head since that conversation, and even though I didn’t successfully put a course correction into place until several weeks later, what she said to me has been helping to stoke the embers of my fading mission back into a fire ever since.

I have wanted to make a new blog post for the longest time, but I couldn’t imagine seeing my failure splashed across a webpage that I wrote with my own hands.  I didn’t want to accept how bad things have gotten.  All the while, I was knowingly avoiding this space to my detriment, because I know that not expressing upsetting things doesn’t make them untrue, and I also know that writing about this whole experience — the good and the bad — is part of what was helping me succeed before.  So, enough time has now passed, and enough healthy weeks have gone by that I feel less-ashamed enough to make a post.

I still care.  I still want to live my best life.  I still have goals, and I still want to achieve them.

I will not let anyone stand in my way.  Including me.

No, darlin’.

 

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DAY 460: Feeling some kind of weigh

That’s right… I’m still here.  And I’ve been feeling some kind of way.

Without wasting your time or mine with a long, detailed essay about how I’ve been busy and fighting off lack of motivation when my free time is constantly being compromised by some circumstances within my control (I’m buying a place!) and some that aren’t (my job owns me lately), suffice it to say, there have been too many distractions from my mission.

Over the past few weeks of my regrettable absence from my blog and from DietBet, I’ve had inconsistent focus.  I don’t want to say this, but for accountability purposes, I’m going to:  I gained.  I gained enough to get me pretty far back over the wrong side of 200.  It cost me the possibility of winning in my third Transformer bet, which would have been a very nice pot had I made it to the final round.  Failing is not fun.

BUT, I have learned that wallowing in shame and avoiding talking about it is what got me to over 300 14 months ago, and I won’t let that experience be for nothing.  I have to get back at it.  So, this is me, crawling out from under my embarrassment rock and trying to fix things.

I don’t have any insightful reflections I feel up to sharing at the moment.  It’s just being busy and having trouble carving time into my days when I can do an hour of cardio at the gym, and/or that 30 minutes of strength training.  Mostly, I’m frustrated with myself.  It’s no good when I don’t get along with me.

Enter Ira Glass.  The June 17th episode of “This American Life” was previewed at the end of the previous week’s podcast — this is one of the many podcasts I listen to avidly — so I knew it was coming.  I had eagerness and anxiety in anticipation once I saw it in my iTunes downloads last weekend, and I put off listening to it until yesterday.  Now that I’ve heard it, I want to recommend it to anyone who hasn’t heard it yet.  Go check out episode 589:  “Tell Me I’m Fat.”  It’s a bit longer than the length of a typical TAL episode by about 10 minutes, but such a worthwhile listen.

As expected, I had a complicated reaction to listening to those stories.  I think I’ll have to explain that in a future post — that gives anyone reading this the chance to hear the episode before I spoil it, too –but it was interesting.  A lot of it resonated strongly with me.  More importantly, though, it was the last push I needed to snap out of my fog.

More entries to follow soon!

 

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DAY 409: Change of a dress

The crime:  overindulging and under-exercising for several weeks.

The punishment:  sizing out of a garment in the wrong direction.

Welp, that’s done.  I won’t be wearing the dress I had bought for the wedding this weekend, to the wedding this weekend.

I guess I’ll have to find some other occasion, because damn it, I will rock that dress.  I will wear it somewhere fabulous with the hot-pink heels that sass it up even more.  Then I will post (faceless) photos of it and everyone will be like, “OOOOOH, I get it now.”

…Probably.

Anyway, I have been doing well with making up lost ground ever since I snapped out of my awful lapse on my mission, and I’ve already undone a significant amount of the damage.  I won’t feel over it until I’m under where I had been, but I am very pleased with the progress.  It’s never a bad time to remind yourself that you’re awesome.

I’m awesome.  Awesome and fearless.

And I’m coming for you, sexy dress.  I can’t wait to get inside you.  #clothesporn

*drops mic*

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DAY 408: Wake up and smell the regret

I think I got a total of 45 minutes of sleep last night.

Why?  Because I went on an epic binge before bed.

Why?  No idea.

What I do know is, it wasn’t worth it.

However, I can say that for the first time ever, I was at the gym at 4:58 in the morning with the early risers.  I got my pick of the machines without needing to wait for the meatheads to get out of the way.  I even, for the first time in a while, got on an elliptical for the long haul.  It was awesome, but frankly, very gassy.  Every time I started up a “hill” on the work-out setting, I was like that thing your car does when it’s low on fuel:  putputput pfffft.  With only 12 minutes left of my hour, I had to jump off of the machine and succumb to runner’s trots and last night’s mistakes.  (Listen, I know it’s not lady like to talk about farting and pooping, but I am not a lady at the gym.  I’m barely human.  I’m a freaking red-faced, sweat-drenched animal.)  You’re welcome for this story.

I’m not really a morning person; my VivoFit shows I get my deepest sleep in the hours before my alarm goes off at 7 AM.  Maybe I’m pampered, but I really bank on my 8-9 hours of sleep, and in order to get up early enough in the morning to work out, shower, and get ready for work, would require me to go to bed at like 9 PM in order to get enough rest.  But, given how much less stressful it actually was to work out because the gym was virtually empty, and how much quicker I was able to get through my weights circuit for the same reason, it may be worth trying a change in routine for a week to see how it goes.  It may also shake up my body’s rhythm enough to spark a drop in weight.

Walking home afterwards, “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus came on my iPod.  I downloaded it last year as an unlikely weight-loss song I would listen to on long walks around my neighborhood in the cool evenings after hot days in the summer.  It’s a kind of sappy song from the days in Miley’s career before she came in like a wrecking ball and started dancing with Molly.  Cheesy though it may be, it does ring true:

There’s always gonna be another mountain


I’m always gonna wanna make it move

Always gonna be an uphill battle

Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose

Ain’t about how fast I get there

Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side

It’s the climb

So, I’m gonna put the terrible choices of last night and rumspringa and everything else behind me where they belong, and keep on climbing.  It’s hard, but it’s the good type of hard.  I think I’m finally feeling in control again.

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DAY 395: The Skinny on Obesity

One of my tried-and-true tricks for helping myself refocus when I need a reminder of why losing weight is THE priority, is to watch some of the videos that helped positively reinforce my mindset at the very beginning.  I’ve mentioned this before in specific reference to the British series “Fat Doctor” and the role it played in shaping my work early on.  (I still recommend that one, particularly the episode I’ve linked to in my 12/1/15 entry.)  My current rut is the first time I’ve gained back a great deal of weight, and it feels the worst because of the milestone(s) I undid by allowing that to happen.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of self-cheerleading to recreate my positive attitude and remind myself that I’ve done it before, therefore, I can do it again.

Several weeks ago, I discovered a series of documentary-style videos by the University of California called The Skinny on Obesity.  I watched the whole set in the dead of winter when it was hard to convince myself that going outside was really necessary, and the motivation I got out of it was enough to last me a few weeks.  Not only was it interesting and informative, but it was presented in a very clear and matter-of-fact way that was easy to follow.  I learned a lot from these videos and have already returned to them many times for more inspiration and education.  Altogether, the entire suite takes just about an hour to watch, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  However, if I had to recommend only one video, it would be this one.  More than anything I’ve ever read, watched, or heard, this presents information in such a clear way that it made me feel like I understand food at a basic level for the first time in all of my years on Earth.  Watching this video in particular, it was like a series of light bulbs going off.  Just eye-opening stuff.

Soooo, partially in thanks to the lessons these shorts have re-taught me, I’m on a vegetarian diet this week.  I’ve done this a few times since beginning my mission over a year ago, and it’s consistently yielded good results.  I’m not totally after just a drop on the scale this time, though; I’m in a position where I actually need to re-detox — which I remember the symptoms of and can feel happening — and reset the way I think about and consume food.  My plan of attack in the gym this week is light:  just arm weights and maybe a mile here or there on the elliptical if the mood takes me, or in the unlikely event that I don’t make my steps on a given day.  Next week, I intend to ramp it up.

One reason I’m letting myself off the hook physically is that I don’t want to overwhelm myself with so many readjustments that I’m setting myself up for further frustrations when I fall short, which is bound to happen when you try to change every single thing in one fell swoop.  Unfortunately, though, the self-hook-letting-off is primarily out of responsibility:  I have a knee injury.  I say that without knowing what it actually is; I just know I have some occasional shooting pain and there’s a lot of cracking and sustained soreness going on.  I want to get below the lowest weight I had hit and see if that’s enough to alleviate it, but without overexerting it in the process.  So, elliptical only so it doesn’t put too much pressure on my joints, and not until next week once I’ve got the food part on lock.  Also, I’m in a really shitty mood this week, so it’s just not the time to be forcing myself into stuff I know I’ll be too petulant to actually do, which will only create disappointment in myself.  (Ahh, self-awareness.)

Something that was reinforced to me through this whole lost month I just had is that all the pieces I had delicately set up to keep myself on track are very important.  It’s not just the big, obvious parts, like meal planning and working out; it’s also the small forms of positive reinforcement through podcasts, articles, videos, and writing in this blog.  It all matters, so it all needs to happen.  Lesson re-learned.

On that note, I hope you’ll watch the videos I plugged and find some motivation in them for yourself.  If nothing else, the educational value is incredible, so share far and wide!

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DAY 393: Rumspringa

I gave myself a choice tonight:  I could either go to the gym or I could update my blog for the first time in over a month.  I already had all my steps in for today, so I opted for the latter.

I’ve put off writing this post for so long because I don’t wanna talk about it.  I don’t wanna talk about what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been eating, how I’ve been sleeping, the exercises I’ve been doing, how I’ve been feeling, or any of it.  More to the point, I don’t want to talk about how I basically took a break for several weeks and ended up back over 200.

That’s it.  That’s as much as I’m saying.  That’s as much talking about it as I’m gonna do.

Maybe I’ll make up for some of the lost entries, like my one-year anniversary, at some point.  For now, I’m just going to write that I’m alive, I’m back to work, and I’m choosing to go back to the community instead of getting myself forever shunned.

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DAY 358: Fat week

It snowed on March 4th and reached 80 degrees on March 8th.  Springtime appeared practically over night.  I was so giddy from the sudden delightful weather last week that I decided to lose my damn mind and run OUTSIDE.  It was just the square block around my apartment (about a half mile), but damn it, I was gonna do it.  I was gonna run, outdoors, in plain sight, among the people.

And I did it.  It felt spectacular.

Until it didn’t.

A thousand knives in my lungs.  Pins and needles in my throat and ears.  It was like I was allergic to running!

Oh, wait…

I am allergic.  To spring.

Every year, the same thing happens:  the world comes back to life, and I spend a week in a hay-fever fog of insufferable misery.  That sounds dramatic, but if you don’t deal with seasonal allergies, you can’t possibly understand how bad it is.  I’d rather have the flu for a month.  I really would.  Seriously, sign me up.

Even though the same thing happens every year, I never seem to be prepared for it.  We’ve had a few fluke days of sudden temperature spikes since winter really set in, so my mind wasn’t geared towards real springtime yet.  So, like a fool, I took a run through the active pollen of everything my body hates, inhaled it deeply during my aerobic exercise, and then slept with a nose, lungs, hair, skin, eyes, ears, and god knows what else full of what may as well be poison.  I did all of that with zero antihistamines in my system.  Needless to say, I woke up the next day in ROUGH shape.

And so fat week began.

No gym — can’t breathe.

Almost no sleep — can’t breathe.

Daily steps goals unmet — can’t breathe and too tired.

Lots of ice cream — because no gym plus no sleep equals perpetual temper tantrum.

I’m too irritable to even give much of a fuck about any of that.  That’s how bad this shit is.  I hate it.  Hate it, hate it, hate it.  I’ve scarcely logged in to DietBet and haven’t weighed myself at all this week.  I haven’t met my steps goals since the night of my ill-advised outdoor run.  The best night of sleep I got was on Thursday night, on the heels of a night of 3 hours’ rest, when I had ice cream for dinner and chased it with a cocktail of two Rx allergy pills (drowsy kind), 2 NyQuil, and 2 melatonin.  It worked so well, I did that shit again last night after a shitty weekend of sleeplessness.  I had hell getting up this morning, but it was worth it to have slept.

The week of torment is almost over.  I can feel my internal armor of antihistamines reaching their optimum level, and even though my nasty cough would suggest otherwise, I’m finally starting to feel some relief.  My energy and strength are returning, too.  I may even be up for some light strength training at the gym tomorrow.  I’ll definitely be getting my steps in no matter what.

In case it was unclear, I’ve hated this week.  Not only was it physically painful, but it’s reminded me what life was like before my thintervention.  My sleep quality was lousy, I was always out of breath, and I was just generally ragged.  I felt constantly frustrated and irascible.  That person was so unhappy for so many reasons, and even more unhealthy.  This week, between reliving some of that experience and eating like a maniac, the idea that I could slide back into being that way was too real.  Ain’t gonna happen.  If tests of willpower, snow storms, and work stress didn’t break me, I’ll be damned if allergies do.  They came the closest, but they’re not gonna win.

My symptoms are worse every year, so my allergist is starting me on injections this month.  (HOLLA for good insurance!)  With any luck, 2017 me will be at her ideal size and experiencing no spring allergies.

Future me:  when you read this, remember how easily you could’ve blown this all up for yourself, but you chose not to.  Don’t ever be the reason you fail again.  Ever.

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DAY 349: Dem bones, dem bones

Collar bones, hand bones, ribs, foot bones, cheek bones… it never gets old being able to see bits of my skeleton peaking out at me from beneath my skin!

Today, am I pleased to welcome the latest newcomer to the bone party:  the thumb bones.  Did everyone but me know that if you look at your hand from the side, with your pinky facing outwards, there are two narrow, visible bones that run parallel to each other, from your bottom thumb knuckle to the side of your wrist??  Well, I didn’t!  I mean, I should have known about these secret bones because they’re just like the ones attached to all my other fingers, but I have never seen them before and never wondered whether they might be there.  When I discovered this anatomical breakthrough yesterday, I proceeded to spend at least 5 minutes bending my thumb up and down so that those bones were essentially waving at me.  (There’s a possibility I’m regressing into childhood, but one problem at a time.)  I can’t believe how exciting it is to see new bones.  Really, any normal/always-been-thin person reading this right now probably has one eyebrow involuntarily raised, the way I might if I were reading someone’s blog about the wonder that is the human toe nail:  who cares?  I CARE.  MY BONES ARE COMING OUT OF HIDING.  Fat, be gone!

Also from the same neighborhood, I found I can now enclose my wrist between the thumb and forefinger of my opposite hand, whereas I previously couldn’t even fit my thumb and middle fingers around my wrist.  I guess I lost weight from my wrists/hands last time.  Ha!  The Where Did I Lose From game, such a party classic.

I’m also seeing ribs.  RIBS.  My ribs.  I can also feel other ones that haven’t popped out.  I kind of hope my ribs will keep some of the mystery alive forever; I don’t really want to see all of them, as they kind of freak me out for some reason and I just start laughing when I catch a glimpse of the ones I can see.  BUT, evidence that my midsection is finally starting to go away?  Yeah, that works.  I’ll happily accept.  😀

Buuuuut…

The lower part of my body is a bit of a wet blanket on the bone party that the upper part is throwing.

My right knee is doing this strange clicking when I go down stairs (NOT up).  It’s actually been doing that for about 5 months.  It doesn’t hurt, but it is unsettling, and I’m wondering whether it might be worth a trip to the doctor.  I don’t want to end up with damage that makes exercise painful or difficult.  Does anyone else have experience with this?  I’d love your recommendations.

The second bummer is that damn heel spur I found out about over the summer.  It’s still there, and over recent days, it has breached the barrier between annoying and painful for the first time.  It’s started to hurt.  When I originally saw my podiatrist about it back in July, he said that if I could live with the annoyance, we shouldn’t worry about it as long as it wasn’t interfering with my normal routine or causing pain.  I’m gonna need to go back and see him, I think.  From what I remember from my first visit, the intermediate step towards a solution was a cortisol shot or shots in my foot.  (I just felt you cringe, but don’t worry, I have a superhuman lack of discomfort with  or fear of needles.)  If that doesn’t solve the problem, there may need to be a surgical intervention.  Because my heel is one of the bones I can’t see, I have no idea what’s going on in there or how bad it is.  It doesn’t seem extreme enough to require surgery, so I’m hoping to be able to avoid that, but I’m trying to lay a mental groundwork of acceptance of that for myself so I can plan around it and not get derailed from my weight-loss plans if that is the way things end up going.  At any rate, my doctor said all those months ago that he had a reasonable expectation that it would resolve itself naturally within a year.  Up until now, it seemed like that’s what it was doing, but this feels to me like a decisive turn for the worse.  Ugh.  The irony is, I’ve actually been doing lower-intensity cardio the last several weeks, AND I’m smaller than I’ve ever been, so there should be LESS strain on my heel.  Yet that has coincided with the uncomfortable sensation.  Heel spur, you’re drunk.

Anyway, that’s what’s up with my skeleton.  Glad we had this talk.

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DAY 343: The longest shortest month

Leap Day, you reeeeeeeally had to prolong this cruel month?  Well, thanks a fuck-ton.

Silver lining:  at least all the mess will live within the confines of the same month and not spill over into March.  My work drama is, for all intents and purposes, resolved as of today.  (Phew!)

Tarnished edge around the silver lining:  that’s one more day of making all my steps that I was calendar strong-armed into.  Maybe I’ll keep the streak alive just to break my own VivoFit PBR.

It looked like I wasn’t going to hit my 4% goal in the kickstarter Diet Bet I did this month.  I was dropping a piddly average per week in the first 3 weeks of February, thanks in part to my lackadaisical performance in the gym all month, and thanks in part to the stupid, stupid stress I’ve been putting up with.  My food choices were still almost entirely clean, it was just the sustained level of nerves messing with my peace of mind, which showed up in hits to my sleeping and to my hormonal balance.

Then somehow, mercifully, the scale coughed up 4.2 pounds last week.  That’s my best week’s worth of results since my October 11th weigh-in (-4.4 pounds).  And that’s another Diet Bet win all sewn up.

I believe I have changed enough that I would have been proud of having lost any weight at all under these circumstances instead of surrendering to the pressure this month, even if I had not hit my DB goal.  I gotta say, though, that somehow pulling out a victory in the face of all that was a pretty sweet surprise (and reward) for making it through without falling apart.

If this were a video game, I would have just leveled up in mental toughness.  Skill unlocked: crisis management.

Now, on to the next BFD: my impending one-year anniversary on my mission.  I have big plans for March.

I have big senioritis for February.  Good riddance, ya little jerk.