Fighting the Dark Cloud of pudge!!

Hey, at least it is sunny out. A pretty stressful day.  BUT I did not, as I soooo badly wanted to do, get a chocolate royale milkeshake at BaskinRobbins.  I really wanted one but instead had a few rice chips and a chocolate 2pt bar from WW.  In   all honesty, it didn’t make me feel as good as I thought it would to control my urges.  Perhaps I felt better than I would have AFTER the milkshake and most definitely I am not feeling as good as I would feel if I was actually consuming the milk shake. *sigh*

Now I just have a headache.  :(  But I suspect it is not from lack of milkshake but more likely from too much work at work.  It is a stressful time. I met with 25 kids todays (individual meetings) to go over their year and look at what they are doing next year.  25 is a lot of meetings.  have you ever had 25 meetings in one day??  I don’t recommend it.  AND tomorrow, I get to do it all over again….eight straight days of individual meetings with kids.  Now you know why I was driven to milkshakes!  We’ll see if I am as strong tomorrow.

Cheers

Shari

I have just been watching the Al Gore documentary, Inconvenient Truth, as I plan to show it to my grade 9 geography class.  Pretty powerful and somewhat scary stuff.  Not sure if my kdis have the vocabulary to get it all, but he has certainly taken a potentially dry piece of information and presented it with graphs, film footage and animation that makes it easier to follow. 

Makes me glad I have been switching to more environmentally friendly cleansers and organic foods.

Makes me think how small and insignificant my weight issue is when facing global issues of this size.

Makes me go hmmmmmmmmmm…………

Must admit that I am feeling depressed.  Possibily it is PMS, perimenopause, my Dad passing in mid-January (Memorial next weekend) or maybe it really is my life.  Sometimes I wonder if we see the world as it really is when we are PMS.  How frightening is that??

 But I do have one somewhat amusing story. On Friday I went to visit Jenny Craig to see what it is all about and how much it costs.  I was weighed, height measured and the very nice woman looked at my allergies. 

I have a slight wheat allergy- not celiac, but if I eat too much of it I develop a rash on my hands.  Perhaps there are other side effects, but this one I noticed.  After a couple of specialists, and more cortisone cream than I care to remember, it wouldn’t permanently leave and I was told to live with it.  Can you imagine??  Living with raw red hands?  I looked like a reptile!  Anyway, I digress.  Eventually I decided to try a naturopath and in two months the rash was gone gone gone.  Seems my body has a slight problem digesting or breaking down wheat.

 Back to the Jenny Craig story…  Ok, so it seems that 75% or 85% of their food has wheat in it!  Soooo, they refuse to sign you up if you have a wheat allergy.  Goodbye, Kristie Alley. Goodbye Valerie Bertinelli.  I was quite deflated at first as I had figured in my overly stressed life I could use a no-brainer “they already measure the food for you” diet. C’est la vie!  right?

The one-on-one consultation was quite good, I must admit.  And the friendly woman, Victoria, told me to come back if I have any diet questions!  But alas, I must live with the fact that I am a Jenny Craig reject.

Even in depression, there is some humour. 

Now, although the sun is shining outside my somewhat dirty window, I must do the work I have put off for a week!

 Cheers!
Shari

I MUST have an addictive personality as it does not seem right not to write something here. 

We had an awards dinner tonight. Actually not too bad fatty foodwise.  The salad was saturated in dressing and salt but the penne had a tomato sauce and the chicken was grilled.  A crepe with ice cream and berries for dessert.  No wine as there were kids there.  I sooooo wanted a chocolate martini or even wine.

I had bought new pants.  Size 16.  Up one from last time.  In parts they fit well, in parts too big.  I had trouble doing up the button - not beause of weight but because of the way the hole is configured.  Well, the sliding thingy fastener I was using (I am supposed to use both I guess)actually popped right off the pants when I got into the car!  Luckily it was chilly so I had a jacket on!  I did fix the situation when I got to the store so the “tighter” button had to be figured out and used.

 I am thinking of checking out Jenny Craig.  In the past I lost 19 pounds with WW but unless I go with a friend, it doesn’t seem to work for me.  The last time I went after 4 months I had not lost an ounce (between losing and gaining).  Maybe I need the no brainer food provided approach!

 Cheers!
Shari

I had a BAD day at work.  Schedulig for the next teaching year is out in draft form and as dept head I can say the dept schedules were changed dramatically causing mega problems for next year.  AND the gods of job postings screwed up the posting for my dept by giving it the same job number as another posting.  So, instead of fixing it, they withdrew my posting and will fill it with someone they find!  No interview.  Just parachuted in.  Do you think I should trust people who screwed up the numbering of a job posting with choosing my staff????

 So, I have set the backdrop to the embrace of chocolate that I experience today! In a feeble attempt to make amends I walked over 1/2 of the way home.  Hey, we had  a staff meeting and it was late so I took the transit home the rest of the way.  But I did walk part of the way to work- which I did to try to justify the cafe au lait I bought at Starbucks,.  (actually called Misto!)

 I have added website for Ideal Bite to my blogroll.  I did so because they have small but workable ideas on how to fix or help improve the environment.  Today they had natural things to do to help lose weight like add cayenne pepper to food (I knew that), eat grapefruit (sort of knew that) and consuming sea weed (new one on me).  Sometimes you get ideas in the strangest places.

Peace (rather than reeses piece!)

Shari

Today I walked home from work.  That is 5km (or 3 miles).  I did it in good time.  I ate less than I usually do (ok not A LOT less, but less) yet I feel bloated.  How can this be possible?  Time of month? I am perimenopausal so that is whenever the little devil decides to show…tomorrow…tonight…next week…next month.

 I find when I feel yucky like this I take a hydroxycut pill.  Yes, they are a weight loss pill, but, in all honesty, I never lost an ounce taking them.  But I think they have an upper in them!!

 Can you remember back to when the concept of dieting first entered your life? I was thinking about that the other day.  Aside from my sadistic family dr who told me to lose 5 pounds when I was 8 (with no guidelines that I am aware of as to how to do that) my first real exposure to dieting was my music teacher in elementary school.  Choristers ( a select group from the choir) met twice a week at lunch to rehearse.  Poor Miss Matthews , our teacher, was HUGE .  (I bet looking back that she weighed less than I do now *sigh*).  And I know we all watched to see what she ate.  All I remember her having was yogurt- which was THE diet food back then.  I knew that because they said so on Laugh-in!  Noting that she never seemed to lose any weight I should have figured out that dieting didn’t really work.

 Of course that does not help me now…or does it?  Oprah’s Jan issue of her magazine talked about rewiring our brains to lose weight.  From my recollection it was how we eat, when we eat, what we eat and why we eat.  Maybe it is time to fish that magazine out.  I actually kept that issue as it made sense at the time.

Other than that, I have to go and shorten my new pants.  I had to bite the bullet and get size 16.  Another *sigh*

What is this power chocolate has over me?  If you actually stopped and looked at my diet (as some have) it is really good, except for the chocolate.  I actually prefer salad without dressing!  But I cannot seem to give up chocolate.  Why is that?  Surely seratonin is not that powerful.  Maybe it is.  Sometimes chocolate even gives me indigestion…and I suspect mood swings, but still …

 One of my co-workers hates chocolate.  I asked her if she was an alien.  She explained that she loves chips.  She brought me ALL of her Easter chocolate.  OY…just when I was being good.  AND, of course, I am too ashamed to say I am on a diet.  Crazy really, as I am not ashamed to have a muffin top!

 I have no idea how to break this cycle.  Any suggestions?

The dark cloud still hovers!  I joined friends for a buffet brunch. Perhaps not the best idea, but I was quite good.  I did have a dessert waffle (with whipped cream and chocolate sauce) but I also had sliced of fruit!  For my meal I skipped the pasta salads et al and ate quite healthy.

 For dinner I am off to a local pub for its roast beef dinner which includes bread pudding…amazing bread pudding!  On a brighter note I skip the yorkshire pudding and gravy because quite frankly, I don’t like them!

I saw an ad for Jenny Craig.  Valerie Bertinelli is joining Kristie Allen,  Maybe I should look into it.   I have never tried Jenny Craig and perhaps I need to learn portion control more than anything else.  Does anyone know how much the food costs??

 And why do I keep avoiding doing the work I have to do????  Just thought someone might be able to answer it.  Funny that we never lose that skill we had in high school. Back then it was “study for an exam?? My record collection needs to be alphatized!!”  Now it is whatever else we can find.  Some things never change.  If only waist lines were like that!

Logically speaking, I have had the “dark cloud of pudge” over my head for  about 30 years!  Granted the first 10 - 15 were plain stupid, I can say in retrospect, although it was very real to me at the time.

If someone complained to me for 20 or so years that they hated their boss, I would tell them (possible yell at them) to get a new job.  So, how could I have done so little for myself with this regard?  Not that I complained daily about this to my poor family and friends about my weight, but in a way, I did complain daily to myself, beating myself about it.

So, I have now decided I MUST, for my own sanity (which is probably hanging by a thread), face the pudge and eliminate it.  Hand me my light sabre, young Luke!

I started with this yesterday and did lose a pound.  Ok, it was probably a fake pound as that pound had only appeared that morning.  (need I again go into fake pounds and real pounds??  Fake pounds come off much much faster…but if left to hang around is easily swayed and influenced by the real pounds to join their gang!)

Have a great day, without a pudge cloud in the sky!

There are just some days when I think I will never be able to lose weight- no matter what I do or want to do.  Then I think is being fat such a bad thing?  I mean how did it get such a bad rap.  We don’t hurt other people.  We are not suicide bombers.  Why do we get such a bad rap??

 Today is one of those days.  Maybe it is a PMS bloating kind of thing.  Maybe I am too hard on myself.  Weight loss is not a linear experience.  Still, I am a smart woman.  I should be able to overcome this, shouldn’t I?  And on another note, why is it so hard to open those plastic baggies in the produce section??  It is almost like they mock us!  They scream out…if you want to lose weight you have to work for it.  If you want to eat healthy, you have to spend 5 minutes feeling like an idiot trying to open a plastic bag.  Buy chocolate.  It has a wrapping you can understand!!!

Just my question for the day!