Disaster averted

Quote du jour
Captain Sheridan: Are you trying to cheer me up?
Susan Ivanova: No sir, wouldn't dream of it.
Captain Sheridan: Good, I hate being cheered up. It's depressing.
Susan Ivanova: In that case we're all going to die horrible, painful, lingering deaths.
Captain Sheridan: Thank you, I feel so much better now.
- Babylon 5


Sunday afternoons flat out stink.

The combination of a weekend ending and having to face the thought of going back to work is hard to take. Especially on winter afternoons, when it gets dark so early. For some reason, that makes it seem like Monday's coming all that much sooner.

Anyway, that's my only explanation for the sudden impulse I gave in to:


I don't even like frozen pizza. It's as if the imp of bad eating simply wanted me to buy something bad, anything. It was sick of me being good.

Funny thing is, I bought the stuff and took it home, then realized that I didn't want to actually eat it. The eyes and the taste buds conspired to convince me that they really, really needed this stuff. The stomach said "Hell no!"

So disaster averted. Maybe just the act of buying the stuff was enough to satiate the impulse, some kind of shopping therapy? I have no idea, but I'm not complaining about the money I spent. It's cheaper than a therapist.

Next time, snazzy shoes

Quote du jour:


This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.


- George Bernard Shaw





Goal of the month: Still going strong with the vegetarian stuff. Oddly enough, I don't miss what I'm not eating. Doesn't seem to be slowing down the exercise either. (Dear Lord, please don't let that become one of the self-fulfilling prophecies.)



Imaginary Internet People & Fun

Another goal that I haven't blogged much about is the goal to get out, to stop being such a home-bound hermit. Thanks to Julie and Glynis, I got to fraternize with Imaginary Internet Friends. It was great fun. Talked for hours, and the time went by quickly.

The only thing is... next time, I'm wearing snazzier shoes.

Guess which shoe is mine?

The perils that lurk in the heart of a restaurant salad

Doesn't the name Apple Cranberry Chicken Salad sound good? Healthy?

When I met up with the I.I.F.s at a restaurant, I thought I'd just order a vegetarian salad. Would you believe they didn't have one? It wasn't a big deal for me to remove the chicken, though I was surprised that the salad didn't just include chicken; chicken took up about half the salad, six or seven ounces. (In which case it should qualify as a Chicken Apple Cranberry salad, but I digress.)

What caught me by surprise were the glazed pecans. I always thought of a glaze as something that was found on the surface, but these nuts had been saturated in butter and brown sugar to the point where the plain nut had been turned into pure candy. I'd worry about a diabetic eating this salad.

Exercise du jour: 2.5 miles jogging. Slightly less mileage this time, so perchance will be a slightly faster pace? The goal is to slug-jog fast enough that I could actually pass a little old lady with a walker.
Well, sorta. The jury's out on whether this deserves a star or not. No, I didn't jog. It was too cold, and I knew what would happen if I tried. I did, however, walk 4 miles instead. So maybe I should put up half a star.

Photo of paragliding in Slovakia courtesy of lietac.

Weight Loss through Brain Washing

Depressing: to come across a spreadsheet from last year and recall that I'd lost weight then too. And then gained it back again. I let myself get fat when I wasn't looking.

Well, screw that. I'll just let myself get thin while I'm paying attention to other things, like the exercise du jour.

Anti-depressing: to realize that before the March Madness work overload, I went below the lowest low of last year. Maybe I'm getting better with practice. Sure hope so.

I look at the posts from January and February, and I marvel at how focused I was on exercising and eating right. That Merry was in many ways a different person from the one typing these words. A thinner one, for instance.

The first step now is to get my mind back into the Do Good mindset. I'm going to go back and read all those diet&nutrition books that I read before. My taste buds are currently on the fast&fattening setting. Taste bud settings can be influenced by the brain. Eventually.

If I read book after book after book about how good vegetables are for me, the mind will get the picture, and pass the message along to the taste buds. Not quickly, but it will happen. Eventually.

Exercise du jour: I promised a friend that I'd return her Billy What's-his-name Tae Bo DVD on Monday. Which means I need to try it out.

Note: Picture originally published on CrankyFitness.com. Used by permission. (Well, I gave myself permission to use it 'cause I made it in the first place. But anyone else should check with Crabby McSlacker first.)

Isn't that Good Enough?

The unexamined life is not worth living. -Socrates

I've been analyzing what I'm doing wrong with my general lose-weight, take-over-the-world plan. I think the fundamental mistake I tend to make is to follow the "Good Enough" philosophy.

I mean, I went jogging yesterday. That's good enough to cause me to lose weight, yes? I don't have to worry about watching my caloric intake or drinking enough water. I exercised.

Or my other favorite way to practice this philosophy: on a good day, I make a point of eating at least 5 servings of those green leafy things. And hey, if I eat right I don't have to worry about exercising as well, do I? No sense overdoing things.

NO MARY, YOU HAVE TO DO BOTH.

Sheesh.

Also, since I started the running program, I've been slacking way off on the other forms of exercise. I'm only running 3x a week. I've still been operating on this unexamined assumption that running is going to help me lose weight all on its own.Because the experts all said that I need to recover from running on alternate days, I somehow got the idea that I should not exercise at all on non-running days. Nice try. Still need to do other forms of exercise on the alternate days.

Sigh.

I really do know better. The trouble is that I can't concentrate on every aspect of the weight loss plan at one time. I think I've identified the major key points that I need to focus on:

1 - Taking the time once a week to buy and prepare enough vegetable-based meals for the week. I know myself well enough that I won't even try to cook every day. It's not going to happen. But I can roast/saute/stir-fry enough vegetables to last me from Sunday to Friday. If the food's there, I'm much more likely to eat it than if I have to get up and prepare it, or think about it, or anything tiresome like that.

2 - Making exercise the first thing I do. 90% of the time, that will take care of the need to move my body every day. In case something unexpected derails this schedule, I've still got lunch or dinnertime to fit the exercise session into the day. If I wait until after dinner, momentum is completely lost, motivation has drained away, and I'm doomed to couch potato-hood.

Looking at both of these, the focus seems to be on taking conscious charge of how I spend my time. Drifting and daydreaming are fine -- after I take care of these two priorities.

Couldn't resist using the picture of Alexander Godunov. When in doubt, go for the pun.

Progress: wrestling with discouragement

And so we go on.

I meant to post a status report. I've been putting it off, since it's not that encouraging. But Scale Junkie just wrote a post about how to keep going even when things haven't been going well, so I thought maybe I should come clean about things. (Odd expression. Is lying dirty, and therefore telling the truth is seen as clean? Mary, stop dithering and go confess what you came here to confess.)

Inner Slug: You've been trying to eat healthy stuff and work out since July. I don't see any results on the scale. Why not give up?

Me: Whaddya mean no results? I've lost over fifteen pounds.

Inner Slug: Yeah, from stopping that medication. You're at the weight you were before you started taking the stuff.

Me: So I haven't gained any weight. Probably I've gained muscle.

Inner Slug: C'mon. This is the weight you are supposed to be. Accept it.

Brief, not pretty, struggle of a woman wrestling with her inner slug. Finally the slug is subdued with the use of metaphorical duct tape.

It's a good thing I'm so stubborn.

This month (the past ten days, actually) I've gained back six pounds and only lost two of them again. I'm tempted to blame this on the thyroid, simply because gaining six pounds in a single week is very hard to attribute to an increase in fat or muscle. I know I should go get blood tests done, see what my TSH level is at. Sigh. I'd rather go jogging.

Good news: I invested in a watch/heart monitor. (I could not persuade anyone at REI that watches exist with two different timers so you can run two different times.) I've learned a lot from the heart monitor already. All my video workouts? Not getting the heart rate above 50% or so. No wonder I've been getting bored with them lately. I was still raising a sweat, and I'd always feel good afterwards, but perhaps I'm getting too used to them. One thing I love about running (never thought I'd use that phrase) is that it gets my heart rate up there. Sometimes too high, but that's something I can control.

Also, the NOVA program on marathon running made a good point. If you want to lose weight, you have to diet. Exercise is good for maintaining, making sure you keep the muscles while you lose, but diet is crucial for the actual loss. I need to focus more on being Good.

I have great faith that using the heart monitor will show some good results on the scale this month. And I'm putting that statement out here so that I will feel held to it.

This month:

- I will make sure when I work out, I'm really getting a work out.
- I will concentrate on eating them green leafy things before I walk into the kitchen at work, so the sight of all those cupcakes and brownies will not make me hungry. The next eight weeks are going to be dangerous.

Me and Scarlett O'Hara

As God is my witness, I'll never be fat or hungry again.
- What Scarlett O'Hara would have said if she'd been writing this blog.

Been having a rotten couple of weeks: family issues and a frankly insane work schedule has led to me being short of sleep and not doing well diet wise. The first week, I packed a lunch each day, but I didn't have time to eat it. The daily walks have been abandoned for the last week, while I work through lunch and am usually too tired to eat much dinner.

Friday, I thought the crunch time was over. I've been coming home too tired to exercise, so I made sure I took the time to do an aerobics video before I went in to work. Besides, I reasoned, I was damn well going to take a walk at lunch.

Except that when I arrived at my cubicle there were three people waiting for me, there was a crisis, millions of Euros riding on a deal and the extremely convoluted installation instructions had to be rewritten at the last minute. Walk? Ha. Healthy food? It is to laugh. Grab a doughnut as you pass the kitchen.

Two weeks of this and all my good habits have apparently taken a walk without me. And they haven't come back. This is starting to turn into a blog tracking my failure, not my success. Well, screw that.

I have made progress. I am closer to make eating vegetables and exercising daily a habit, something that I can do without thinking. I do good, then something always causing me to fall back into fast food and sloth. Too much pressure at work, lack of organization or motivation, something. So really the one habit I'm getting ingrained into my psyche is the one of getting back up and getting back into it again. Do good, fall down, get up and do good. It's automatic now. I'm not going to be deterred. I Have Spoken. (You'll have to picture me standing against a dramatic sunset, one fist raised defiantly to Heaven, "As God is my witness...")

Two things I am going to concentrate on:
1 - Make a point of taking some time off on the weekends, just to regroup. Working every weekend is stupid, no matter how Important the job. I can't function that way. I need to prepare vegetable food-stuffs on the weekend, since I don't have the time during the week.
2 - Make a point of shutting off work and stress and going to bed. I can't do everything. I can't make things better by stressing about what I can't do.

Frankly, my dear, I can't give a damn. - What Rhett Butler would have said if he'd been in this position.

(Oh come on. I had to say it.)

It's weird, but it feels better to write this. Usually anything that sounds too whiny makes me cringe. It was hard to write the thyroid post, because it felt too self-pitying. But I feel better acknowledging that I haven't done what I set out to do -- yet -- and that I have lost some ground in this battle.

And what the hell. Tomorrow is another day.

Math is a four-letter word, actually

Don't believe those trouser labels that say 'one size fits all.' After the third or fourth person, you can't fit any more people in.

I've been spending time surfing the net diligently researching fitness and weight-loss blogs. Mostly interesting, and a good source of motivation. Apparently Blogland is filled with hard-working people trying to change their lives. It's not all about pr0n.

Once you read past the blog post itself and get into Commentland, however, the tone often changes. Someone will write about their difficulties losing weight, another commenter will weigh in (no pun intended) with advice or sympathy, a third will offer a different method to try.

And there will always be someone who logs in to tell the rest of the commenters that they are making the subject of weight loss far too difficult. What's wrong with them? It's simple. Math. Calories in < Calories out = Weight Loss. No big mystery. Just go do it.

Yeah, well some of us were English majors, buddy. Math is a mystery. For that matter, I find human physiology a mystery, even though I did take several classes in college on the subject. (Or maybe because...) Expecting a series of complex biochemical reactions to result in a simple straightforward weight-loss line on the chart is simplistic to the point of... takes a couple of deep, calming breaths. Just don't tell me it's simple.

Case in point. Last summer, I was in fairly good shape. Spent three or four months cycling 50 miles a week (commuting 10 miles a day to work). Extended my regime to include longer weekend rides and followed a fairly healthy diet plan. Had some pretty strong leg muscles, not to brag. (Well, not to brag too much.)

In addition, I:

• Weighed my food, measuring the portions, figuring out how many calories, writing it all down on a computer program to know exactly what my caloric intake was.


• Invested in an odometer for my bicycle, which told me the distance and rate of my workouts. Calculated the amount of calories burned for someone my age/weight.

One weekend, I did two bike rides, 30 and 20 miles respectively.
I calculated all the food I ingested that weekend. (Keeping within my calorie requirement, not undereating or overeating.)
According to MATH, I had a calorie deficit each day of 500 calories. A total of 1,000 little calories were burned off that weekend. Granted it takes 3500 calories to equal a pound of fat, but I was feeling pretty darn good about myself Sunday night when I went to bed. Got on the scale Monday morning with a smile on my lips.

Only to find that I had gained two pounds.

Since it is unlikely that the food I was eating suddenly acquired more calories just because I was the person doing the eating, I strongly suspect that the amount of calories burned is the point where the equation falls down. Yes, I do have a whacked-out thyroid thanks for asking. Quite probably I do burn fewer calories than the "average person of my age/weight" will burn. That doesn't mean I can't lose weight, but it does mean I'll have to research how much more I'll need to do to lose weight. (Life is unfair. Wah. Okay, let's go on.)

My point is that it is not always simple. One math formula does not fit all, because people burn calories at different rates. And if you have thyroid issues, insulin resistance, or a highly stressful life, you might have to try different approaches to weight loss before finding one that works.

If what you're doing isn't working, try something different. Example: currently I bicycle 40 miles a week commuting to work. My muscles don't ever feel tired from this exercise. A couple weeks ago, I decided to take a walk at lunch. Walked a couple of miles, not pushing myself by any means, just enjoying a beautiful afternoon. Damn, but when I got back to work I could actually feel it in my legs. They weren't sore, but they definitely felt the change. I started walked every afternoon, just for a couple of miles. And I lost two pounds that week! Doing something different, surprising my body with new exercise, is a trick that worked for me.

I have known a lot of people who tried a little exercise, or a little dieting, only to give up saying it didn't work. I don't believe that. I don't believe there are people who cannot ever lose weight. I do believe there are people who don't think they can find the time to exercise enough or follow a diet that's mostly vegetable-based. But if you give up, nothing will change. If you keep trying, you can find a method that gives good results. You can still do one thing today that will improve your situation. Pretend the elevator is broken, and climb the stairs at work. Eat a cup of carrots before you let yourself have that slice of pizza. Make it a game.

Might as well have fun, if you can manage it, while you're at it.