song of the road

Before coming to what’s on my mind today, let me sum up today. Foodwise it was about okay. Had protein shake as breakfast, chapatis and a couple of veg curries as lunch, pineapple and a couple of grilled sandwiches were dinner. had a diet coke somewhere in between. Workwise it was crazy again. Also I kept feeling blah. Lots of tension there. Nothing end-of-life but just gathering up. But then I am better than how I was last year. So chin up and hang on.

What I am trying to figure out is how to focus on weight loss. My main focus is work these days. I am doing reasonably well there. At least I am consistently and with discipline plugging on day after day. Hopefully intelligently too. But when it comes to an effort on weight loss, I keep losing steam every 3 days. On one hand, I think I am not too good in having two major focus areas at once. When I had to study hard to do well in a fiercely competitive entrance test to get in engineering college, I did nothing on the alternative study path I was trying to keep open. When I was in love a couple of times, I did neglect my work both times to a good extent. Now that I am working, looks like I can almost not diet and work out. But that is not how it should be. Everyone is taking care of family, their own self, work and then lose weight.

I am planning to use almost all free minutes this week to figure out how to do this. How do I bring the focus back? Do I do some kind of a remembering exercise every morning to set the tone? May be reading or reminding me of something on the way to work. Podcasts perhaps! Let me think. I need to stay on the path for a while for anything to happen. When I lost weight last time, the rapport I shared with my trainer was an anchor that kept me rooted. Need something else this time.

The ideas that occur to me top of the head

1. Listen to one fitness/weight loss podcast every morning

2. Read one fitness or weight loss article in the morning

3. Try to work out an eating and working out plan for a week or for a day?

4. Set up a screensaver at work laptop which can act as a reminder to my goal of weight loss

5. Break the bigger goal in to smaller sizable goals and plan accordingly

Anything else occurs to you? What has worked for you. Any help most welcome.

Planning to add one positive thing that happened on a day or in very recent past here. Anything that made me happier. This is a small part of a project to become generally more happy. Will be making the list of 100 things that make me happy with round.

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Positive note

Remember Mr. V. He is a peer who is a big competitor in the work place. He is joining my team now. I kept on having visions that my team members will be happier and more relieved to see him joining us. That did not seem to be the case when I announced this today. They were a bit curious and nothing more. It does sound a bit weird but I genuinely like everyone in my team (except one or two whom I like a little less) and am a bit jealous about their affection.

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Tired out of mind today. I somehow run out of steam periodically. Must be my health. Because hear people doing 70 hour weeks etc. I stayed at work for 13 hours today and add 2 more hours of travel and I am dead today. Also to add on, had a couple of important meetings today, about which I had been stressing for a while. So all done reasonably well. Have another meeting in a while. But decided to bunk. Will get my updates later. Just waiting for one piece of mail to come and I am out of here.

Eating has not been that well. Didn’t seem too bad either. It has been generally healthy but not very weight loss kind. I have gained 1 pound. But surprisingly enough have no energy to feel particularly downbeat about it. Will need to get in to working out. That seems to work for me. Will need more planning to eat cleaner.

Watched a couple of very different movies this weekend. One is Inglorious Basterds. Obvioulsy loved it. Quentin Tarantino and underdogs winning left a good taste in my mind. The other is a tamil movie. It’s an old one actually. It’s about a 9 year old girl who finds out she is adopted and then insists on searching for her mother. Her adoptive parents knew about her biological mother who was a refugee from Sri Lanka. Then they go to a war-torn Sri Lanka in search of her and eventually after almost not meeting her, the girl meets her. A few times in the search they get caught in the middle of blasts, bombings, evacuations, gunfire battles. The family runs really scared and a bit hopeless at times. The bio mom was a revolutionary who almost decides on not meeting her daughter. Where the two meet eventually is beautifully done too.

The movie is beautifully shot on a haunting backdrop of South India and Srilanka. There is one scene where the Srilankan refugees are shown literally standing in the middle of the sea, with their own country not safe and this one not welcoming them either. Anyways what particularly hit me is the kind of unconditional patience and love got extended by the adoptive parents to the small girl who did seem spolied quite a few times. Between both of them they almost ran ragged. What would I do? Sure that was perhaps an unusual situation. But still… don’t know. Remember an adoption forum mentioning that this movie has set back adoption by quite an amount. Could be too. The movie did seem reasonably okay, not particularly promoting any agenda or anything.

Anyways, my mail now has come now. So bye for now ladies. Hope you are faring better than me.

Already lost count of the days on the plan The plan to eat clean is chugging on. 3 out of 4 days last week were reasonably good. 1 day I ate noodles instead of customary fruits as my evening snack. Couldn’t eat dinner at work as planned. Was hungry later at night. Ate very badly then. Blame the start of TOM for this. Otherwise did quite well - chose cleaner food. Would need to work on the serving sizes specially over weekends. Let’s see when can get started with exercising.

Slept most of today. Working this evening. First thought out goals and to-do for 2010 - what I would do beyond the work of my reportees. Looks like this year I am still lucky. All that I am planning to do fall in this category anyway. As my reportees start progressing on, this will become harder. However listing all I need to do, is incresing my anxiety a bit. Would need major hard work, balancing, time management, cool head and confidence to pull all this off. Then have an one-to-one meeting next week with our new line-of-business head. Was planning out what I would need to say or may be asked. Will get more info from the team on Monday. Hope I have covered all grounds. Hope I will make a good impression. Now I need to start reading on actual work.

Hope you all doing very well in weight loss and in life. My best to each of you.

Eating still somewhat okay.

Breakfast - protein shake

mid-morning - one sweet (this time it would not have been difficult to avoid)

Lunch - 3 chapati + daal (thick lentil soup) + green papaya curry

Evening snacks - miss

Dinner - 3 chapati + cauliflower chilli (Should have eaten the tasteless sandwich, the cauliflower was oily. Will do better tomorrow. Wish could eat home cooked food instead of cafetaria stuff. But not sweating too much as once starting working out at night, won’t be there for dinner.)

2 cups of tea, 2 pieces of chewing gum, 1 liter of water

It was a crazy busy day today. I literally had meetings after meetings. Was feeling sleepy and tired from the morning anyway. Got so stressed by mid-morning, downed a couple of head ache tablets. I can at times feel the adrenalin rush in my head. Overall a productive day. Tons to do tomorrow. Ended the day with a team meeting. Thankfully the team meetings are fun and pretty stress-free for me and others (hopefully). After all announcements and action items, we started chatting about movies. One guy who was listening till then started taking notes. Got a good team going so far. Hope for the best. A girl’s marriage got fixed today. More sweets. I talked to my managers about changing my work timings. Both were cool about it. Let’s see how it goes.

Good that I didn’t eat too badly in the face of the stress. Also to be frank, just did not have time too. Hope trying to eat dinner more than 2 hours before sleeping time would help.

Lots of love and all the best.

Have eaten relatively well today. No exercise.

Breakfast - protein shake made with zero carb protein and milk

Lunch - 3 chapati + paneer curry + coriander chutney (all home made - not oil free)

snacks - a bowl of pineapple + about 15 roasted peanuts (so few because I took them from someone else)

Dinner - veg sandwich from cafetaria (not tasty - had butter and cheese) - improvement needed + 1 small candy (needless - didn’t have a craving too, only because it was a birthday sweet, couldn’t refuse)

apart from this - 3-4 sugarfree chewing gum, 4 cups of black tea, 2 liters of water.

(Late night update - it’s 3:15 am now. I am up with hunger.)

Please please let me be able to stay on track.

According to my scale - 170 lb (it is not accurate). However I can hopefully do relative measurement. The goal would need to be about 130 lb on this scale.

It was a holiday today. Lots of lazing around. Read Cujo by Stephen King. It is quite good. Not that scary. Or I will know later tonight.

Food-wise it was mixed. In the breakfast had south Indian pancakes (dosa) made of cream of wheat (I think), rice flour, wheat flour, plain yogurt, sprinkling of ginger and green chillies. Came out quite well actually. All of us had some. I had three. Lunch was rice and vegetables. Not terribly healthy. However all home cooked, so kind of okay. Had a bowl of pineapple, a small glass of orange juice, a small bowl of pro-biotic sugar-free ice cream (really bad taste) in the evening. Will have a couple more of these pancakes for dinner. Eating quite a lot actually.

I need to plan more. It’s just that I have such a rebellious attitude towards doing anything disciplined and good. Well - not anything. Seem to manage reasonably well at work. Even maintaining a time log at work to meticulously manage my time. However food and exercise seem to defeat me without a fight at all. I was looking at my progress page here. It almost makes me cry. It’s so much effort gone down the drain. I have gained so much more. I would now need to lose at least 22 kgs, whereas I was about 8 kgs away from the same goal. R is the excuse? But now? Time enough to get a hold on.

I do not really know. I seem to be doing some short burst efforts on and off. Unless I can change something basic in me, is it any good? I mean trouble and stress would always be there. Must I eat to relieve that stress always. Or I would need to plan in military precision to have only good things to eat around.

Perhaps I should go to a dietitian now. Nowadays the diets are quite balanced for most part. They should be do-able. And exercise. Should I take that break for a few weeks and clear my head a bit? I feel so tense and feel that time is running out so badly. Well it is and it is not. I need some kind of a sane sustainable approach which also lets me have my current lifestyle. Do-able?

Let’s see. Let me try a food plan for the week. Will be back later.

love,

iniya

Don’t know how I got in here today. Well, actually I was trying to go through the unread mails on my yahoo mailbox. Then I tried some more sorting and was moving mails to in to folders etc. And there was a huge bunch of mails/comments from here. Nostalgia hit like a big wave. I was suddenly so sad. I was sure my blog was gone. I just came to the site. Looked up Miss Ruby’s site and started reading some of her more recent posts. Staggered by how much has happened. Then while trying to leave a comment, I had to log in. And that led to resetting the password and the finding out that the blog is still there to take a post.

I plan to read a few more posts and look up some of my old friends.

I don’t know if I would actually write regularly again. Guess I should. Lately I was feeling the urge a bit again.

Just in case, any of you come this way and more for myself really, let’s try a re-cap of the last year. Life is a bit better. Definitely better than when I was falling apart over R. The new job is good. Very time consuming. My whole life is work. No work life balance. Conventionally speaking no life at all. Guess I am setting myself up for longer term unhappiness by spending my more productive years at work (did you manage to hear my mom here?). Well the lady has mellowed down a bit and has after a lot of trouble given up on getting me married. Life with brother and sis-in-law good.

Bro has stopped working at his regular job. Trying out trading from home. Poor guy is really working hard at it and would say have started with small successes. He does have it in him to be successful. So dad’s inheritance is building him another career. Much better than his last job and quite a few ones before that. Meanwhile we are running on my and SIL’s salaries. Things are a bit tight. They bought an SUV last year. The loan for that is on. Have a big rent to pay. SIL has responsibilities of her own parents. Must say she is being very sporty and supportive of it all. I need to still work on liking her more. I do like her. But she is yet to be a sister, I guess. Or maybe I am over-bothering. We get along well and never fight and I give both of them as much space as I can or at least I try very hard. I don’t think they lack privacy too badly. Mom runs the home for most part. That makes life easier for all of us. Still there is some rivalry going on between her and me, I guess. It is unnatural for me to be here. But that’s how it is and everyone is as happy as can be reasonably expected. My living separately will not help anyone much. Apart from the fact that the money I do make does help.

How I ramble on. So back to me. Gained back all the weight and much more. Had been going to a gym on and off for last year. It has been no use. The trainer was not a patch on S. I have gained weight. Had joined a new gym near home. That’s not working out too well either. The new plan is to start from home at 7. That would mean getting up at 6. Reach work by 8. The commute in Mumbai is a bit insane. Anyway work till 7 in the evening. Leave office at 7 no matter what, at least 3 days a week. Hit a gym near work. Should be done by 9. Reach home by 10:30 at the latest. Sounds bad? Round - if she reads it - would be wincing at the no-social-life plan. Do feel this can be done. This job is good and it feels perhaps I can have a career after all. I have lost a lot of years in work where I did gain some experience but not as much as I should have been because I was bogged down with personal problems. Now I want to make up for it. Also it does feel good to be able to see my confidence and capability grow. However health is not been doing so great. The last year been insanely busy at work.

Trying to eat well. Succeeding some and not. Food choices are mostly good. Eating some fruits. Some vegetables. Still eating late in the night. Not missing meals too much. The stress at work is quite high. Have gained quite an amount of grey hair. And a good haircut a couple of times now - one of many good things of living in Mumbai.

Still almost nothing done on my last personal plan - adopting a baby. I am plain scared of taking that step I suppose. The current excuse is that I want to have my career. Time is running out. I need to fit this in somewhere. Can’t see that happening soon.

So that is all. Need to work again on losing weight - more than ever. And did I mention that I am planning to start that by giving me a month’s break. Then I start fresh (hopefully). Working out is so hard. But I must - if not for weight loss at least for a modicum of good health.

It’s 2 am here. There is some strange noise outside. Mumbai is a bit of a strange city. It’s Holi tomorrow. A bank holiday. Holi is the Festival of Colours. It is celebrated by people throwing coloured powder and coloured water at each other. Bonfires are lit the day before. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi). The TV is full of programs and music celebrating this. Meanwhile there was a world cup hockey match (most probably 1st round or something equivalent) that India won. And I watched Sherlock Holmes today. I know I catch everything long afterwards. Liked it immensely.

Lots of love to all of you.

Thinking of you all… Been such a long time… life is going on…