Gettin’ Fine in 2009

As I drove home from work tonight, it occurred to me that I should remember how very TIGHT the elastic waistband on my black (as usual) pants was today.  They’re size 18W, a LARGE 18W (because I have other 18Ws I can’t even think about wearing right now), and the 1.5-inch wide elastic was just binding into my waist so hard that there was a mark all the way around, and I couldn’t wait to get home and get them off.

My waist measurement as of today is 41″, and my abdomen is an unbelievable 51.5″.

I wanted to record this so that someday when these measurements are better, I can come back and celebrate how far I’ve come.

I also want to remember the day when Size 18W pants with a stretch waist nearly cut me in half, to remind me when I get smaller that I do NOT want to ever get to this place again!

I just posted this in a forum on a website I belong to.  It seemed I might as well post it here, too, to have a record of how [crappy] I’m feeling/doing today.

I feel extremely negative today. I can’t seem to get hold of myself.

My husband weighs 140 lbs; I weigh close to 220. Even though he rarely says anything about my weight, unless I ask him outright how he feels about something, I feel like my weight is causing distance between us. That feeling of guilt (which I realize is a completely useless, destructive emotion) makes me feel every day like there’s tremendous pressure on me to lose, in addition to all the normal stresses of life, such as a difficult job and elderly parents–and thus, I eat.

I just realized what a “sneak eater” I’ve become. Two nights ago, I got out of bed after my husband went to sleep and got the half-gallon of Rocky Road out of the freezer. I took it and a spoon INTO MY BED and finished it (it was about 2/3 gone, but still …), then threw the container away in my bedroom wastebasket.

Then today I got up thinking ok, today I will “start” again … and after my husband left for church, I made a box of those Jiffy Mix corn muffins and ate all 6 of them, heavily buttered. Worse, though, I made sure the egg shell was under all the other trash in the wastebasket, so he wouldn’t know I’d cooked, and I did all my dishes and swept up the crumbs to get rid of all the evidence!

I don’t understand this behavior on my own part. I’m not fooling anyone, especially myself. It’s not like my husband can’t see that I’m still fat. I guess I feel like eating this stuff in front of him is like a slap in his face, so maybe that’s why I hide. (Oh — and one morning this week I was in Dunkin Donuts ordering TWO muffins and TWO donuts, just for breakfast, and who walked up behind me? — my husband!! He was there to get coffee. Thank God my order had already been bagged so he didn’t see how much I got. He’s so kind/trusting that he didn’t even ask, or mention it, or make any comment about me being there — he just reminded me not to leave my purse on the seat in the car where people can see it.

I’m not sure what my point is. I just feel SO hopeless and so afraid that I won’t be able to find it within myself to “start” again. I’ve started over SO many times… I always make great progress for about two weeks, and then it becomes just too hard, and I abandon my efforts.

I’m sure there are many people out there who feel the exact same way.

If you’re someone who “started” many times before you actually made it all the way to where you wanted to be, can you tell me what your turning point was? How did you FINALLY get yourself to be consistent long enough to reach your goals? What changed the last time around?

Joaney’s recent comment reminded me that I haven’t blogged much lately, so here I am, even though I have nothing great to report.

I did start out all gung-ho at the new gym 3 weeks ago.  I did four good hard (HARD!) workouts, then this past week, which would have been my 5th and 6th workouts — I canceled both of them.  I just didn’t have it in me.  My knees have been hurting this past week, and I felt so tired … I think it is a combination of stress and not eating right and the feelings guilt associated with that.

Last Saturday was my sister’s 50th birthday, and we had a party for her.  I ate too much that day and that was the start of another whole unhealthy week.  You know — potato salad, macaroni salad, chips, cake, M&M’s … sigh.  I ate it all, then asked myself why.

Then during the week I found out that my mom, with whom I am extremely close, has a spot on her kidney that could be cancer.  And my job changed, from a nice comfy programming job where I could just sit alone in my cube all day and get stuff done, to project-managing all my company’s legacy products while the rest of the team starts rewriting everything on a new platform.  This means doing all the stuff I dread — going to meetings, making schedules, overseeing “offshore” developers’ work, answering customer complaints, etc.  I actually almost panicked in the meeting when my manager gave me this news — my eyes started to well up.  They seem to think I can do it, and I probably can, but I do NOT enjoy this type of work, so it’s all just additional stress.

One day this week, somebody said “angel hair”, and after that, that’s all I could think of.  So off to the grocery store I went, to get a box of angel hair pasta and a nice bag of sweet dinner rolls to go with it.  I made my pasta and had one normal plate.  Then, I went back again — and again.  Three plates, and not small ones, along with 6 of the rolls.  ALL IN ONE NIGHT.  No wonder I canceled my gym appointment the next day!!  And the next night, I finished off the rest of the angel hair and the other 6 rolls.

It gets so old after awhile, telling you all this — people must get sick of reading it.  It occurs to me that my eating patterns are the very definition of insanity, according to 12-step groups:  “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  I get so angry with myself that I can’t be more disciplined, and then the cycle begins again.  Will TODAY be the day I can get hold of myself?  Or will the fridge/fast food joints win out again?

I weighed 213.5 this morning.  At least that’s lower than the 219 where I started the month, but it barely feels like movement, since I’ve lost that same 5-6 pounds several hundred times.  I have lots to do today, all physical labor (like scrubbing floors and stacking hay), and it’s going to be 90 degrees out, so maybe I’ll be too hot to eat.  (Yeah, right — like that’s ever happened.  It just makes me feel justified in eating ice cream.)

I’m sorry I’m not very inspirational.  I guess the fact that I’m still here and still hopeful in spite of myself is something I should give myself a little credit for.

The year’s not over — we still have time to make progress toward gettin’ fine, right?

Today I started at a new gym but with the same wonderful trainer I had last year when I was doing so well.  She worked me hard today (although I must admit, 5 minutes into it I was pretty worn out, since I’ve let myself slide SOOOOOO far back downhill).  But we did 45 minutes of good, hard strength training.

So yay me!  This will help me get the food back under control, cuz like I’ve said before, who wants to eat like a pig after you’ve worked out like a dog? 

Today’s weight was a lovely 219.5.  Good grief.  Could barely stuff the girls into my sports bra tonight; I’m getting back to the gym just in the nick of time.

I’ve been absolutely hating myself lately.  I just hate that I can’t find the motivation inside myself to do what I need to do to get this weight off.  When we know that so much in our lives would be better/easier/healthier if we could just take off some pounds, WHY IS IT SO HARD???

I know that hating myself is not helping.  We’re supposed to love ourselves and care for ourselves as we would care for others.  But I just don’t.

I proposed to one of my sisters a week or so ago that we “diet for each other” — in other words, I would eat what I knew would give the results I  would want HER to experience, and she’d do the same for me.  She didn’t really get it, I don’t think, and I don’t know if it was weird, but I totally thought it would work.  I am just better at doing for others than I am for myself.  Well, the hard things, anyway.

So I’ve been bingeing again this week, feeling desperate because summer is almost here and I still have barely any clothes I can fit into and breathe in, and everything I have to wear to work is hideously ugly, and I feel like my husband is losing faith in me because I’ve started and stopped yet again.  It all just adds up to constant pressure — self-induced, but pressure nonetheless — and maybe self-induced pressure is the worst kind, because you can’t escape from it.

I watched Helen, the 48-yr-old, become The Biggest Loser on Tuesday night, while I sat and ate out of a half-gallon of maple walnut ice cream.  One of my friends says that it seems dumb to her to watch a show about losing weight; she thinks it’d be like her watching a show about smoking (she quit smoking recently).  I laughed when I heard that, thinking “Nah, it MOTIVATES me!” — but this week I was eating ice cream while watching, and a couple of weeks ago it was those 2 loaves of bread.  Maybe she has a point after all.

I’m casting about for ways I can re-motivate for the new week that starts tomorrow (<–gee, there’s a common diet trap, right?  Why not “start” right NOW?)  Should I just stop thinking about losing weight completely for awhile?  No, because I tried that last week and all I did was eat.  Should I do something drastic, like start taking the Alli I bought?  I don’t think that will do anything for me, because I don’t believe all fat (in food) is bad.  Should I spend big dollars on starting with my personal trainer again?  Spending big dollars on anything hasn’t seemed to inspire me much in the past … I’ve tried that plenty of times, too.  Treadmills, personal trainers, gym memberships, every piece of home exercise equipment ever sold on an infomercial–I’ve pretty much tried it all.

So where do I go from here?  My head knows that it’s not how many times we fall that counts–it’s how many times we get back up.  But I’m just so weary of trying.

What I ‘ve come up with for this week is this:  Before I eat ANY crap at all (Domino’s cheesy bread, bags of Dove chocolate squares, creemees, whatever–I will first drink an entire glass of either water or V8 juice.  Then if I still want the crap, I can have it.

I’m also going to try to get out for some walks this week.  What worries me about that, though, is that walking bores me silly.  I haven’t mastered getting songs onto an MP3 player yet without a lot of hassle, so I just go with no music, and it’s just boring.

That tells me that this might not be my best approach to getting more physical activity in.

Maybe I’ll just worry about getting the food back under control for a bit first.  Maybe I take on too much by trying to reform my eating habits AND my activity habits all at once (in addition to dealing with the stress of my job and all the other usual daily stuff).

If only it weren’t such a constant, seemingly overwhelming struggle.

I just re-read some of my earlier posts today, since it’s been 4 months since I started writing. I saw that at one time I’d said I had an idea for something that might motivate me more than just the scale. The title of this post says it all:

BURN THOSE BLEEPIN’ BIG BLACK PANTS!

I cannot WAIT for the day I can do that. It’s all I wear, ever — black pants. Corduroy, velvet, denim (stretch, of course), linen, or my personal most-hated type: “PDK” — polyester double knit. UGH. They’re so horrible. I can only imagine how my co-workers might describe me to a new employee — “She’s The Woman in The Black Pants.” That’s what my work wardrobe consists of. Black pants (because nobody can tell we’re fat when we wear black pants, right?) and an assortment of knit mock turtlenecks, all the exact same style but different colors, in winter, and an assortment of plain, solid-color tee shirts, all the exact same style but different colors, in summer. I never wear skirts, ever — look at the earlier post with the photo of my legs, where I said the hosiery industry was after me to be a model, and you’ll understand.

So pants it is.

Last weekend, just before my latest “gotta do something about myself” moment, I realized with horror while searching the piles of clothes in my room that I had not one thing that I could put on that Monday AND STILL BREATHE IN for the ~10 hours/day that I’m dressed for work. The Jaclyn Smith 2X, made-upside-down black velvet stretch pants (the nap of the fabric runs the wrong way, so you can’t smooth them down; you gotta smooth them up) from KMart that I’d been LIVING in since our office Christmas party last year (when I realized how very comfy size 2XL elastic-waist pants can be even after a nice buffet!) were practically threadbare from being worn nearly every day for 4 months, plus they’d gotten so short from all the washing that I had to take the hems out; I was actually wearing them with the raw edge at the bottom, hoping nobody would notice. Plus a co-worker with whom I regularly commiserate commented last week “you’re going to have to make those pants into velvet shorts soon”, since it was about 80 degrees that day!

The combination of those 2 things shocked me into a run to the mall for some pants I could breathe in, “style” be damned (which was a real switch, as you can tell I’d been a real slave to fashion up until this point).

And what did I end up with as a result of that trip? Two pairs of size 20W Alfred Dunner black polyester stretch pants with elastic waists — freakin’ ALFRED DUNNER!!! You know, that awful section in J.C. Penney where all the “Women’s” polyester tops with the giant flowers and tacky sequined appliques live.  THAT’s where I’m shopping now. (Although I must admit, I was relieved that they were at least “only” size 20W, since I’ve been up to a 24W at times in the past.)

So now I’m living for the day when I can make a huge bonfire; invite all my friends; toss on all the Big Black Pants; and watch ‘em BURN!!!

I knew it’d been awhile since I last posted, but … nearly 3 months?!?  Sheesh.

I have not done well.  I went very crazy, in fact, with the eating.  One Tuesday night  a couple of weeks ago, I sat on my couch watching The Biggest Loser.  Before the show was over, I had consumed not one, but TWO ENTIRE LOAVES of bread!  I’m not kidding.  One loaf of raisin bread - plain, cold, right out of the bag - and one loaf of “Portuguese bread” - that heavy, soft blob of doughy goodness that they bake right in the grocery store, so the smell assails you when you walk in the door.  

That’s a good reminder of why one should never enter a grocery store hungry.

I don’t know how I did it.  I just kept eating and eating and eating, way past the point of comfort.  And this while I watched other people sweating their brains out and being weighed in front of the whole world?!?  Geez.  Sometimes I amaze even myself.

Anyway, last time I posted, I threatened to post a photo, but I never got around to it.  So tonight, I took a brand new one. 
Brace yourself.

(I named the photo “Holy Cow” for a reason.)   Yup, that’s me, in all my sports-bra glory.  

I hit a high of 222 early in April — I was so horrified that I took a picture of the scale with me on it at that weight:
 

But things are looking up again. I’ve just completed my first 5 days (ANOTHER first 5 days) of “clean eating”. I started this week at 217.  Today I was down to 211.  So I’m back on the wagon. 

I had gotten SO desperate that I needed something extreme to force myself to stop with the destructive behavior.  My knees, hip, and back were absolutely killing me, and the scale wouldn’t stop climbing.  So I came up with something kind of shocking - I actually swore on a beloved family member’s life that I would not eat any junk food, sugar, or white flour, for a minimum of 7 full days.  I still have to do it through this entire weekend.

That sounds terrible, but boy, did it work!  I was afraid to even have a cup of coffee!  My husband bought a beautiful box of strawberries, but before I could say anything, he had sliced them up and put sugar on them - so I had none.  I ate lots of salad this week with good stuff in it like black beans, avocado pieces, peach chunks, and chicken breasts.  (That new grilled chicken from KFC is GOOD!) Fruit was my dessert, and mixed nuts were the “junk food” I allowed myself.  All us experienced dieters know that nuts are MUFAs, and MUFAs help eliminate belly fat, so even those are a healthy choice. 

I got to the gym twice in the past 5 days, and tonight DH and I went for a bike ride after work.  (His chain kept falling off, so we didn’t go far, but we did a couple of miles.)  I can tell he’s trying to be supportive.  He made a couple of nice salads for me this week, too.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. 

I’m reading a pretty interesting book–The Body Fat Solution, by Tom Venuto.  He talks about how to program your subconscious mind to help you meet your goals.  I’m going to try some of his ideas.  I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

Thanks for staying with me.  Now that we got “the BIG reveal” out of the way (lol), I look forward to the day when I can post a fabulous AFTER photo.  I have a whole *bunch* of Befores … this time I want to make it all the way to After!

Again, it’s very late, but that’s partly because I WENT TO THE GYM AGAIN TONIGHT!  Oh, thank goodness–and I’m feeling better already, honest to goodness.  I can tell the difference.  Getting started truly IS the hardest part.  When I was on the treadmill on Tuesday night, I realized how much I really enjoy having that quiet half hour to read — it makes the time go SO fast.  (Some people disagree with reading on the treadmill, but I keep the speed up and the incline up and feel it doesn’t hamper me at all–especially at this point when I’m still getting back into the swing.)

Before my walk, when I was on the circuit training machines, I imagined Jillian from The Biggest Loser screaming at me when I felt like I was done, to make myself squeeze out a few more reps of whatever I was doing.  

Whatever works, right?  (I think I would have to flatten Jillian if she was actually there hollering at me the way she does on the show, ha ha.)

I think this weekend I’ll post my biggest-loser-style photo.  Might as well let it all hang out.

It’s too late to write much, but just had to say I made it to the gym today — yay!!!  I’ve just gotten to the point where I feel SO awful physically that one more day without “moving it” would have been unthinkable.  I could only manage 18 minutes at 2.9 mph on the treadmill, NO incline because my knees hurt so much, and then 10 minutes on the machines.

But I WENT, and for now, that’s what counts.  Also did well on my eating today — no bread & no sugar!  Probably didn’t eat enough calories, but I don’t care — I had 2 red peppers with hummus, broccoli, a banana, and a hard-boiled egg.  I was satisfied and didn’t feel guilty, and that’s what it’s all about right now. 

Progress — not perfection. 

Well, so far, not so good.  I still haven’t gotten to the gym — not even once.  And now the entire month is gone.  I actually drove BY my usual parking spot there twice this month, but both times it was incredibly packed.  That gave me just the excuse I needed to keep right on driving.

It’s funny; I’m finding myself in the same state of mind I was in LAST year at this time, as my 50th birthday approached.  I had vowed to start working out early in the year, so there’d be no pressure, and by the time I hit 50, I’d just happen to be FABulous.  Then the days started ticking away.  Just like last year, I keep recalculating how much weight I could lose by such-and-such-a-date if I start right NOW.  (Did I mention I weighed 221.5 pounds this morning?  That’s UP from where I started the year.  My eating is still completely, utterly, and ridiculously out of control.)

Anyway, right now I figure there are 6 full months to my 51st birthday.  That’s about 25 weeks — at 2 lbs a week (which is about what I tend to lose averaged over time when I’m making an effort), I can STILL be down 50 lbs by then, to about 170 — and that would be less than I weighed on my wedding day in 1997, so that’d be great.  And then by Christmas I could lose another 20, which would put me at about 150, which would be AMAZING compared to what I am now.  So I feel like it’s “still ok”; I’m not out of time yet.

Then I chastise myself for calculating dates and weights, weights and dates.  What is the point?  What’s with the focus on dates?  I’m not supposed to be “dieting” anyway — I want to make permanent lifestyle changes — those don’t END.  So I keep having to catch myself doing that “stinkin thinkin”.

I need to get down to the business of just making those small changes, and keeping on doing them, dates be damned.

God, I’m boring even myself.  Usually when I sit down to write, it’s because have some stuff I think is interesting in mind to write about.  But once I start, everything gets all jumbled together in my mind, and I go off on tangents. 

I started this blog just to track my state of mind, how I was eating, and how I was exercising as I went through the process, which I assume will be long.  But I forget that sometimes, too; I find myself trying to write for an audience instead of just for myself.  Maybe that won’t work.

Maybe I’m feeling jumbled because it’s Friday night, after another lonnnnnnnnnnng week at work, and heaps more family stress.  I’ve finally realized there’s a strong correlation between how stressed I feel and how much junk food I want to eat.  I have an alcoholic brother, and I’ve seen recently realized how much we’re alike.  He’s supposed to go into rehab tomorrow, so he’s been binge-drinking all week — just like I do my “last suppers”.  When he’s stressed, he runs to booze; I run to carbs.  We all comfort ourselves in our own ways.  And the results of both hurt us, though maybe in different ways.

On a different note, I have a new idea for a goal I can shoot for, that might be more motivating than just “I have to get to the gym regularly”.  I’ll write about that next time.