Angel Food (lowfat)

I think I only have one reader (Hi Ruby Jean!), but she’s the equivalent of at least 1000 wonderful readers, so I thought I’d give her and you an update. The last few weeks have been some of the busiest in my life. After a blissful few days visiting my sweetie and watching him receive his pilot’s wings, I came back home going full steam ahead to wrap things up at my job. After a maddening 60 hour week and some extra work this weekend, including staying up to 2am last night writing one last grant proposal, I was able to say good bye to my colleagues today in good conscience. It feels good to be able to focus on Project Wedding and Project Move now. We are nearly in the single digit countdown to getting hitched. Then I’m off to my Hawaiian honeymoon, followed by a month living out of a military hotel at a training base, and then (hopefully) buying a home and moving to Vegas. This will be quite a summer!!

All this to say… among the many changes I’m working on is starting a new blog, hopefully one with good design and photographs (with the sweet new camera we’ve gotten for a wedding present!), one that’s more focused on my passions (cooking, for starters), one that better reflects who I am. I’ll not have it up and going before mid-June at the earliest, so I plan to post here a few more times. My plan is to say farewell to this nice little account by mid-July. Stay tuned!

Weight Loss Postscript: I’ve discovered a sweet little app for the iPhone (which was a nice wedding gift from my sweet man) - it’s called “Lose It” and is a free food diary application. It will track your weight loss progress, your calories, and various nutrients; its list of foods is fairly robust, and you have the option of creating new foods, adding recipes, etc. I’ll never have to pay for WW Online again with this app!

Aaaah. What a stressful week. However, I made it through my annual event of doom at work - the huge donor luncheon that is a complete pain in the rear to pull off. But, pull it off I did, and I rewarded myself tonight with a glass of wine and some quality RockBand time with a 7 year old. Fun stuff, but I’m still feeling pretty wound up.

I’m going to take a deep breath a regroup tomorrow, as I’ve not been paying attention to my diet this week. I’m going to use the technique I talked about in my last post and pull out the food journal tomorrow. No doubt, it will get me on track and refocus my efforts to be below 150 by May.

Big joy moment of the week - I put my wedding invitations in the mail today - yay! I couldn’t stop smiling as the man at the post office helped me hand cancel the envelopes. I’m sure that I looked like a complete goofball.

I’ve been out of town visiting my fiance for a few days, and now it is back to my sad little reality. I’m snuggling up to no one this evening, and then it’s back to my yawn-inspiring job tomorrow morning. Sigh. We’ve only about two more months of our long distance romance, then it’s the wedding, Hawaii, and life together. Woohoo!

These few days have been hit or miss with watching what I eat, which is better than I was doing last year when I went to visit the boy. I used to chow down, matching him nearly bite for bite. Although my choices weren’t always the best this past week, I did pretty well at portion management. I’m not looking forward to the Monday weigh-in, but I am also not completely dreading returning to my food journal. I think it’ll be a good week.

Tonight, I had a very hard conversation with my nephew. My “sweet nephew”, as I’ve always thought of him, is driving my entire family to the brink. After a month of keeping quiet, I finally called him. Ostensibly, I just wanted to tell him that I love him and miss him and that I hope he’s finding his way. I did that, but also wound up chewing him a new one in the process. Is it fair to tell an eighteen year old how stupid they’re being? How do you just let go and let them live and make terrible mistakes? Tonight, my relationship has changed with my nephew, and I’m so sad. I’m temporarily giving up on him, and I am so bereft.

I have a blog post around here somewhere. Somewhere, in the midst of crumpled tissues, discarded thermometer covers, and (finally!) a couple different prescriptions, there is a magazine renewal card nearby with a scribbled blog entry on it. I just have no idea where I put it. I wrote the entry in the wee hours of Saturday night when I was awake with fever, coughing up a lung, and hurting from the goo in my sinuses.

I don’t remember exactly what my notes were, so this is what you’re getting - random musings about the weekend.

I left my house in a tizzy on Saturday morning when the weather man said that a tornado was heading toward my neighborhood. (Disclaimer: you’re supposed to go hide in a basement when there’s a tornado coming, not jump in your car to drive away from it.) I drove to my mom’s house because my dad was out of town, and she was alone and scared. Also, I was sick, and Mom promised to take care of me. She made me soup and encouraged me to nap. Even the family cat let me steal a few cuddles. It was a good day, fever and hacking and pain be darned.

On Sunday, rare snow flurries (a once in a decade occurrence where I live) cheered me for a little while, but the warm fuzzies of being taken care of were starting to wear off. Somehow, in the midst of a perfectly normal conversation with my parents, I began mumbling words I didn’t even understand. Then, I burst into tears (the ugly, sobby kind) and begged my mom to take me to the doctor.

She sweetly did and only abandoned the waiting room twice to escape the 2 year old kid who kept screaming and punching his parents. Every one in the waiting room seemed to have some version of what I have. We were a sad, sniveling lot, indeed. I’m sure the fine folks who invented the Z-pak are making a fortune this week. Thank God for them!

Postscript: The upside of having no appetite - I’m at my lowest weight in about a year and my size 12 jeans are falling off of me. Yippee!

In the last few days, I’ve been remembering this old blog of mine, and I have been thinking about shutting down this little 3fc account. I am dismal about writing regularly. But, when I do (and, when I read others’ entries), I usually feel heartened and re-energized to keep plugging away at living healthfully. Imagine my surprise when, today, someone actually remembered me. That’s heavenly timing, if you ask me - a little urge for me not to shut down the blog and all the inspiration I need to start writing again.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent for Christians, and the day I’m supposed to start my Lenten discipline. Ha! Such ironic timing. My Lenten discipline was going to be fitting in some sort of exercise daily, yet today I am home from work with a nasty, feverish cold. The undisciplined part of me just wants to scrap today’s exercise, but that would defeat the entire purpose of the season for me. So, I’m off to do some gentle yoga, followed by a devotional. Then, it’s back to curling up in bed in my pjs.

At the urging of a friend of mine, I’m changing my weigh in day from Mondays to Thursdays. Thursday was my original WW weigh in day, and I usually was quite happy to step on the scale then. Thursday seemed to be the perfect amount of time to allow me to get back on track and readjust after any weekend excesses. Thursday is also close enough to the weekend to help me remember my weight loss progress and inspire me to eat a little more virtuously come Saturday. In a perfect world, there would be no weekend excesses. But, who am I kidding? I’m just not perfect. So, in an effort to revisit the strategies that made me successful in weight loss to start with - there is no weigh in result today. Oh darn.

Bonus: If you’re looking for a killer lower calorie chicken parm recipe. Check out this Light Chicken Parmesan from Everyday Food. I substitued Panko (I have a monster sized bag of it) for the whole wheat bread crumbs. The dish is simple but terrific for dinner and makes great leftovers for lunch. Your coworkers will be jealous!   

Wow, this old blog sure is dusty. My weight loss has more than stalled, it has reversed. I put on 5 lbs nearly overnight in September. I’ve only sort of halfway been counting points, only mostly faithful with my food diary, and only occasionally hitting the gym. Honestly, my heart hasn’t been in my weight loss lately. Honestly, my heart hasn’t been into anything much lately.

Three weeks ago I helped my fiance move halfway across the U.S., and I’ve been trying not to think about how much I’m missing him. We’ve been doing the long distance thing for a long time, longer than we actually dated in the same city. But, when he was down in Florida, he was a fun five hour drive away. I’d hop in the car, find some baseball game to listen to on my XM, and then settle in for the jaunt through the backwoods of the South. Now, he is a whopping sixteen hours drive away from me. I won’t be seeing him again until Thanksgiving. And, I’m totally oscillating between (1) feeling like this is a wonderful opportunity for me to take advantage of this time to work on me and plan our wedding AND (2) feeling overwhelmed by the planning, the loneliness, the fear of all the changes that are taking place in my life. I’ve been having restless dreams that can only be defined as loopy. I’m trying to put on a very brave phone voice when I talk to my fiance who has his own problems out in Oklahoma.

So, I give up. I’m gonna stop trying to be so brave and hiding how I feel, which is morphing into added stress, which morphs into added foodstuffs finding their way on my plate (or napkin, or just straight from bag to mouth). Instead, here I am again, back writing in all my strange glory.

And, as an added dose of irony, I’m off to a wedding cake tasting with about 10 points left in my day. Here’s to cake for dinner…

I’ve been keeping my food diary very faithfully now for a few weeks, and that is the only way I can remember what I’ve been eating. I’m in a bit of a funk, and my sustenance has been of either the feast or the famine sort. Case in point: two nights ago, I chowed down on macaroni and cheese (at least I worked out that afternoon); last night, I just didn’t eat. The hunger in my stomach feels somehow more appropriate to my mood, and I’ve no desire to feel full. I know skipping meals is unhealthy, so I basically forced myself to have breakfast and lunch today. I’m supposed to bring dinner to my grandmother this evening, yet absolutely nothing sounds good to me. I usually love food - eating it, cooking it, talking about it, reading about it - so I’m disturbed by this total lack of desire to eat.

It’s very rare for me to go through an experience like this. The last time I can remember feeling the way I feel now was when I was trying to get over a heartbreak. I’m not heartbroken now; I have a very lovely man who pledges always to be in my life. Yet, we are in a period of transition as he prepares to move across the country and we prepare to get married. Can someone experience grief over ending a chapter in her life? That’s what I feel I’m going through now.  I’m closing the chapter on an old, deeply rooted set of hopes and dreams, yet the new chapter hasn’t quite started. I’m foundering in this uncertainty but recognize that I can’t continue with the emotional achy-ness that I’ve become immersed in for the past few days.

There are a lot of things I don’t have control over in my life these days, but I refuse to lose control of my own happiness. Ignoring my friends, eating boxed meals, and climbing into bed at 8:30pm certainly aren’t good remedies for staying happy, are they? I need better remedies. I need to be with friends right now. I need to rest. I need to cook. I need to eat. No one else is going to take care of me, as much as I’d like them to, so I need to be sure that I’m taking care of myself as I close one chapter and start working on another.

Things are changing with me, and I’m so exhausted. My emotions have been so jumbled, so bittersweet lately. Not only am I getting married soon, but so is my brother. My nephew will be graduating from high school at the end of this school year. I’ll be changing jobs and moving halfway across the country in a few months. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so difficult if my family were as disconnected as we once were. But, in the past 5 years or so, we’ve worked really hard to tighten the threads of the family quilt, to be stronger and more closely knit. With all the changes taking place in the coming year, I can feel the threads unraveling again. I’ve been feeling nearly overwhelmed with sadness during what are, by all accounts, happy, happy times for my family. I’m watching my mom become more and more disapproving and rigid in her attitude with my brother, catching me in the middle of their disputes. My sister is withdrawing at a frightening pace. I’m torn between wanting to get the heck out of dodge to be with Andy, and never wanting to leave so I won’t disrupt the family further.

My heart is overfull, and I want to eat any number of good things and replace all the difficult emotions with pasta, ice cream, and cashews. Nearly every day for the past three weeks has been a struggle for me to keep my emotions in check, my eating in check. Thank God I’ve identified that I’m an emotional eater, so I can limit myself to just a third of a pint of Haagen Dazs at a time. Still, I miss those days when life was more boring and green beans and other healthy things could fill the hollow spot in my gut.