This is the little person for whom I’m learning to knit, and, if you read way down to the bottom of this post which is where I originally intended to insert this photo, is meant to illustrate the first person I’m thinking of if I’m making a list of things to be grateful for each day.

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I began to write this post on Tuesday, April 5th, after two weeks of over-eating and one week after I wrote a blog about changing habits. For my next blog -  this one - I was planning to write about pratical things I’m planning to do, or am already doing to start training myself out of the habit of feeling sad all the time. What a bland, bald sentence I just wrote! It trivialises all those Dark Nights of the Soul I’ve lived through for more than 40 years. What will I do without all that internal drama? So be it. I think I’m done.

So, yes, I started to write about my activites, and found myself being glib. In the interests of honesty, I had to stop. Here it is four days later, and maybe I’ll get it right this time.

I’m noticing how often my writing gilds and glides over the truth. I’m glib because I assume it sounds better. I do not trust glibness, not in my own writing, and not in others. Since I sincerely want this blog to be helpful to me, and since honestly recording my thoughts is how I think it’s going to work, I’m going to have to work hard on the sentences I compose. They may be short and jerky at first, since this is hard and new to me.

I know this much is true: that my sadness has held me back from succeeding at weight loss, and from many other things that I’d like to have done or would like to feel and do. I’ve struggled with it since I was 8 years old. When I blogged here from 2007-2010, I wrote a lot about the things in my life and in my family’s life that I thought were causes of this lifelong struggle. I wrote about my desire not to have to rely on medication. I got stuck there, digging and delving and trying to figure it all out, all the while having insights into how many things have been really good, and realizing (but not quite getting there) that life could be pretty wonderful sometimes and, well, good most times. Here it is, almost a year later. Maybe all those thoughts had to marinate. Nothing has changed about the way I think about my past, and I wouldn’t want it to have changed. What has changed is how I am beginning to think about my future. And, how I am beginning to feel a sense of acceptance about all those bumpy years, and how I think I’m ready to just acknowledge that they happened and move on.

Now then….About those practical things I’m doing to get my mind off of all that self-indulgent sadness:

I’m investing in myself…
I had my nails done with gel. No French. Not the square shovels. Just a natural pink cover over my relatively short nails. Cuticles are neatly pushed back and for a change, I feel that my hands look “groomed”.  My fingers have thickened because they have worked hard over the last 30 years, aforementioned cleaning being the main problem, and then all the cooking, since I do it with zeal and no gloves. I’ve never gone in for manicures. For another thing, they never last, and for another, they’re expensive! I’ve never felt good about spending that kind of money on myself. We’ve always been on a tight budget and even if we weren’t, it seems to be such an extravagant thing to do, that I feel a little uncomfortable about it. For now, I’m trying it out. 

I bought myself some new clothes!! As big as I feel, you’d think I’d want to wait until I could buy smaller things. I have a theory - if you look nice, you’ll want to continue to look nice and it gives you hope. So I bought a dress and a shirt with a belt and some pretty pyjamas. I haven’t bought myself a dress in at least five years. I am planning to get a hat for Easter!

I signed up, paid for and actually attended a class I saw in a community bulletin. Perhaps a little counterproductive to my goal of losing weight, it was a pie class, “Pies Pies Pies”. Only two sessions, the first one was last Tuesday night. I want to write about it later. It was nothing like I expected, but I did find it absurdly amusing. I have a desire to master pie dough, and I will, but it won’t be from this class!

I’m blogging again.

I went away to a flower show in early March with some friends from church. I actually bought new clothes for that, too. We stayed overnight in Philadelphia and I loved it. I didn’t chicken out and not go, which has been my usual m.o..

I think I’m going to join the garden club that meets once a month in my town.

I’m knitting a sweater for my baby granddaughter. I do not know much about knitting, this is a learn-as-you-go-along project. I have made some knitting friends because I’ll accost anyone who knits and ask for help. So far I have learned the long-tail method of casting on, how to decrease, bind off, save stitches to work later and right now, I am STRUGGLING with button holes. But it’s fun.

I bought a new bedspread and pillow shams for my bedroom and picked out paint and my husband and I are going to make our bedroom look like a bedroom again, instead of the family’s utility-closet-dumping ground.

I’m going to buy the movie “The King’s Speech” for my mom and have an “evening” movie showing. I’ll make English treats (with dough! sausage rolls!) and invite a few friends who don’t mind closed-captions and don’t mind seeing the movie again.

I opened a savings account. It could be to save up so that we have an emergency fund. It could be for a car. It could be for a house. It could be for a vacation. We need all of those things. I need the security.

I’m taking a multi vitamin and fish oil at night (and making my husband take them, too).

I’m following a TV series with my husband. Well, a couple. I haven’t watched TV in years, just movies. It’s not the TV time that I want to increase, it’s the sense of rhythm and the companionship. I try to knit while we do this.

I’m going to try to remember to think of five things that I’m grateful for each night before I go to sleep.
That won’t be hard.

It’s 11:48. 12 minutes to go until it’s officially my lunch time, and I’m sitting here at my desk, tummy growling, thinking about food.

This morning, my lovely eldest daughter, who is home visiting until Sunday, was kind enough to prepare a lunch for me while I was rushing to get ready for work. I adore this kid. Well, I love all my children, but you know how it goes. Sometimes you’ll get a rush of love for one of them and it just has to be said. Earlier this morning, thinking to steal something from my lunch because I never ate breakfast, I happened to look at the ziplock bag that she used to pack to food in. She’s put in a greek yoghurt, a sandwich (on whole grain bread) and two oatmeal raisin “health” cookies. Ooooh, a cookie! Perfect with coffee! But then I saw her note:

 ”Mom’s Lunch. be sure to eat your sandwich before your cookies!”

It’s a shame I am so preoccupied with food. I do believe that in the last 20 years, I have trained myself to be this way. I take a great interest in food; where it comes from, its quality, how it is prepared and presented and, of course, how it tastes and when and where my next meal will be. Food is the highlight of my day. I didn’t always know this about myself, but I recently began to understand this has been a part of my nature since I was a very little person. I clearly rememember incidents going back to my earliest childhood when I watched, with absolute fascination, someone enjoy food and found myself wanting to taste what that person was having. I am known to inhale my food instead of savoring it. (Note to self for later: Explore that whole start of food obsession! And by the way, it’s not necessarily going to be something I want to obliterate!) It was only in my late twenties, though, that it dawned on me that I liked, really really liked, to create deliciousness in the kitchen, and I began to take a much more active interest in cooking and creating it.

Luckily, my definition of deliciousness does not begin or end with the usual foods that are the dieter’s downfall. Cake, cookies, patries and sweets are nice, but not my weakness. I am interested in nutrition and health. I love cooking with fresh vegetables, whole grains, fresh meat or poultry. I love old fashioned food like the kind my grandmother and mother and aunties made and still make, based on Dutch/English farm cooking (and yes, there is such a thing as good Dutch/English food). I am devoted to the Food Network and I collect cookery books and recipes like others collect novels, and I read them for fun. So what’s the problem?

Well, I think it’s this: if you think about food as much as I do, you’re always ready to eat. Your senses, particularly your tastebuds, are probably overstimulated. You may think, as I have, that your love of nutrition and healthful eating and your stellar efforts at creating wholesome food will save you. That is not necessarily true. You eat and drink more than you think you’re eating and drinking.

After many false starts and attempts at shortcuts, I have only recently actually used the Weight Watcher’s tracking system after being one of their members off and on for more than ten years. I now SEE that I eat a lot. My apetite is enormous!

My sister, who has always had a reputation for being a good cook, seems to have an almost non-existent  apetite. I have never been able to fathom this, considering her professed enjoyment of cooking. In fact, I have sometimes doubted that she really loved cooking as much as she said. Ah, but who knows? I probably just don’t “get” it. I still believe her tiny apetite is something she trained into herself because, for her, being thin was more important than anything. Thirty some years ago, she went through a very short-lived phase in her life where she was maybe slightly plump. She’s a small woman, and very pretty, and as soon as she could manage it (out from under our mother’s watchful eye) she cut out all food except Pro-Vita crackers, Diet 7-Up or black tea (I forget which), and biltong (a South African version of jerky). After she lost her weight, she never allowed it to come back. I’ve always envied her control, but most of me has no intention of going the route of eating like a sparrow.

I’m four inches taller than my sister, and did not carry extra weight until I hit my 30’s. That was right around when I discovered I liked to cook and also when I realized that I was always very sad on the inside. 

I think what I have to change the most in order to be successful is the sadness.  I don’t generally walk around bemoaning my life, but there has always been a big hollow place inside of me, in spite of having being given SO MANY blessings in this life.  It’s time to address that. I am not sure how I will do this - but like I trained my stomach to always be ready for food, I think I have also allowed myself to stay sad on the inside. I’m thinking it is possible to train myself to approach food differently and to feel differently.

I’m tracking with Weight Watchers to relearn how to moderate my apetite, and the next blog will be about how to unlearn a lifelong pattern of being sad.

A familiar place, this square one. I feel like I am back at square one every day of my life, and you and I and everybody else in the room know that it is all due to the choices I’m making.

I weighed myself on Sunday, and the scale said 211 lbs. Wow, that’s my all time high. I think I was 206 at WW last Saturday, having lost 1.6 lbs over the last two weeks. The weight loss, though meagre, was a surprise, since I committed many indescretions over the last 14 days. I’m not surprised that these indescretions are showing up on the scale.

This whole healthy living, weight loss, lifestyle changes thing is much much harder for me than I ever imagined it would be. I want to eat my cake and have it, too. I want to be able to go home and cook a nice meal and have a couple of glasses of wine and maybe end off with something sweet, and it’s just not working for me. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I haven’t blogged here in ages, thinking that I would stretch my wings and fly off into the cybersphere with a witty and inspiring blog NOT about weight loss, only nothing witty or inspiring has occurred to me no matter how much I try. Maybe this is where I am meant to be. I’m going to think about setting some very small goals for myself for the rest of this week, and I’ll write them down tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I might actually get to square two.

Lunch time approaches. I am waiting for a collegue to come back from the health food store with an expensive “organic” tuna salad sandwich and an orange. It’s time to go - I want to see if I can find my old blog friends….

Coward that I am, I didn’t look at my weight when I joined WW at work the other day. I decided that I would only look after the first weigh in, figuring that even if I only lost 1 lb, it would soften the blow and I’d feel better about myself. Oh the games….

I have dutifully tried to prepare food that is healthy and within points values (from memory) - like most others in my group I have 29 points to work with per day. I know that the points values for food have increased, so I’m “adding” or being conservative with my calculations. One great thing with the new plan is that almost all fruit has a 0 point value. This is to encourage you to make healthier choices. For example, if a Twizzler is 2 points and an Orange is 2 points, many people would have picked the Twizzler (I was just pulling those points values out of thin air, I don’t know what they actually were on the old plan, and I don’t even like Twizzlers). You get the idea. That doesn’t mean you should eat three bananas in one go.  I have not had a single moment during the week to even log in to the WW website to fish around for the points values for the things I made. Basically, folks (true to form with me) I’ve winged it.

The oatmeal in the morning, the salad with lowfat dressing and tuna for lunch, the tilapia for dinner and lots of water would all fall within the points values.

I did snack on quite a few things, which I know probably threw my points over…for example, ravenous while preparing dinner the other night, I ate bites of my youngest daughter’s Chinese food leftovers - little boneless pieces of sparerib - terribly fatty. Must be like eating three or four pieces of bacon. My bad.

But, the main thing for me is at the moment, I’m conscious about what’s going into my mouth, and how much, and I’m motivated to make good choices. I consider this to be my success for the week.

I am in Arlington Virginia this week-end, on a visit to my eldest daughter. I have brought my 80 year old mom with me. Had I been alone, my daughter and I might have gone out for Thai food for dinner last night. I truly love the vegetarian Pad King, which is very lightly sauteed vegetables with a ginger/scallion sauce. I have to look up the points value. Pad Thai is really high, but I think the dish I like will be lower. Sushi is also pretty low in points, and we like that too. However, my mom has an English stomach, and you have to find a place that can serve grilled cheese. We ended up at the IHOP last night, Terrible Thought, you must be thinking! But, actually, I did okay. They had an entree listed at 490 calories, which consisted of about 2 or 3 oz of sauteed chicken breast with a sauteed tomato/onion/mushroom topping to which a little balsamic vinegar has been added.   I asked the cook when we left, how he made the dish, and he said that this is one of their special “low cal” dishes and he only uses a tiny bit of oil, and the sauteeing of the tomato/onion/mushroom is similar to how I do my fish dish. I never thought of adding balsamic vinegar to that combination, but I will say that it was very nice.

My daughter ordered a hamburger and french fries, and I ate some of her fries. You see what I mean about the not sticking withing the plan? But, like I said, i was aware of what I was doing, when normally I would have first of all not ordered the healthier option, and secondly, would have gobbled all of my food down and still blythely gobbled any extra fries. So I consider this progress.

This morning we are having room service (!), this is a big deal for me! My mom and daughter are having the farmers breakfast, I am having oatmeal and fruit.  The big challenge will be to go back and try to figure out all these points!

We were thinking of going to the Smithsonian - the American History museum. My mom seems like she wants to go shopping. Oh well, we’ll see.

I didn’t think day one of my new blog and Weight Watchers effort would begin quite so early. As I start to type, the clock reads 3:34 am. I went to bed at 11:30, late for me, and never did manage to fall into any sort of sleep. I finally gave up a few minutes ago when my husband started to snore and I realized - it ain’t gonna happen.

Yesterday, with 14 of my colleagues at work, I started again with Weight Watchers. We begin with their latest program. I have never really liked figuring out point values for food, I waaaay preferred the program they did in the late 90’s where you just had to keep track of the number of servings of carbs, proteins, fats, fruit and veggies and so on. I got the hang of it quickly and was successful in losing over 30 lbs. I kept that off for a long time, but started to gain again in  2004, and my excuse was stress. I aim to give this points thing an honest try.

I felt/feel permanently stressed at work and at home, and I don’t handle it well. Perhaps to people who know me, I look perfectly fine and often and have been told that I come across as cheerful and calm and that I seem to manage well with a full plate (interesting metaphor for a diet blog). On the inside, nope, that’s not the case. The stress exhausts me, which is my excuse for not exercising. The stress makes me tense, and I don’t sleep well, which is my excuse for having wine most nights to relax and help me to sleep. It seems to be unrelenting, it is my enemy and I feel sorry for myself. Guess where this leads? Nowhere but Up. 45 lbs.

Okay, that was the brutal honesty part. I really hate admitting that stuff.

In 2007 I stumbled across the 3 Fat Chicks web site and was instantly charmed. I signed up to write a blog. I found that the blog enabled me to stay focused on the weight loss effort, although I shied away from calling it that. I wrote then that I prefer to think of it as ”getting healthy”. I still like that idea, and if weight loss is a result, what a happy thing! But really, this time I want to lose weight, and, if getting healthy is a result, what a happy thing!  

Unfortunately, the truism ”old habits die hard”, is, well, true. From late 2008, my stressors ratcheted up 62 notches, and while I had managed to hold steady with my “get healthy” plan, I gradually began to exercise less, sleep less, eat more, have more wine than is good for me and gain it all back plus 15 extra pounds. I couldn’t face my blog anymore, it felt like there was nothing left to say, all my words had dried up, and all that wonderful enthusiam just drained away.

Luckily, the truism “you’re never too old to learn”, is, Surprise! also true.

Down in the dumps I’ve been, but most days I make a conscious choice to ”fake it”. There are days when all I want to do is stay under the covers and just get the day past by sleeping through it, but most times I do show up for my life. And, here’s what I started to notice: if you show up, eventually your broken machinery starts to run a little more smoothly. I’ve read this, heard this, heck, sung it (”smile, when your heart is breaking”) (corny), but somehow never really ingested the idea. Ah, another choice metaphor, did you notice?

So. Here it is, 4:08. I am stressed, I didn’t sleep. In two hours I will make breakfast, prepare lunch, and jump into the shower. I have planned what I’m going to wear to work. I may be a big woman, but I still like and want to look put together. I will show up at my office, smile brightly, dig in and no one will ever know that I contemplated mutiny. When I get home tonight, I’ll have figured out what to cook for dinner and how many points it’s worth. I may walk the dog. I’ll play with my granddaughter and be patient with my mom. I promise to remember how precious this family is.

Plan for today:

Breakfast: Oatmeal (1/2 cup), maaaaybe with sugar substitute. I’ll dig around for fruit (there were some frozen strawberries or blueberries in the freezer).

Recipe: Put 1/2 cup ordinary slow cooking oats into a microwave safe cereal bowl - a deep-ish one. Add a dash of salt (you can skip this, but it makes a big difference). Add any cut up fruit and even some cinnamon. Pour water over the oats so that is just covers them. Cook on high in the microwave for 2 minutes. The reason I said use a deep-ish bowl is that sometimes the oats will cook over the edge of the bowl. You could also put the bowl on a plate. Who wants to clean up a gooey, gluey microwave before work?

What can I have to drink? I think I read in the new WW book that juice uses up a lot of points. Have to check that out. I’m really thirsty, could do with some ice cold apple juice.

Work: Coffee with (gasp) half & half & maaaaybe with sugar substitute. I’ll see how I feel. I do have sugar cubes. If I can’t sweeten the coffee, then I won’t put half & half in either. I can try to get used to black coffee. I’m prepared to entertain the idea of sacrificing a few points there because I only have that one cup a day. Jury is out on that one.

Snack: However much you’re supposed to have to a serving (have to look this up too). I have some lowfat strawberry yoghurt.

Lunch: Pea soup (my mom made this last night - I see she put other vegetables in it such as carrots and potato, but I think that’s okay). There’s also ham in there. I can’t think of what else to take, so maybe for today, I will take a slice of wholewheat bread and a piece of cheese, or wait, no, I have two small cans of Cento Italian tuna packed in olive oil. I could take that with some celery and balsamic vinegar and make a tuna sandwich. Must remember to buy different bread and try lowfat cheese.

Supper: I’m thinking of purchasing either some tilapia or chicken breasts. I have brown rice for the starch and we have some nice frozen beans from Trader Joes.

Recipe for the tilapia:
2/3 biggish pieces of fresh tilapia (about 2 lbs). Rinse it in cold water and pat it dry before you cook it.
4 plum tomatoes coarsely chopped (you can skin them by immersing them in boiling water for a minute, but I hardly ever do this)
1 medium onion coarsely chopped
2 cloves of fresh garlic - I like to mince it or press it through that little garlic do-whickey
about 1 pint or punnet or whatever you call it of mushrooms - white or baby bella, chopped
1 rounded tblsp. flour
1 rounded tsp Coleman’s dry mustard (or any kind really, Dijon is nice, it doesn’t have to be dry - Colemans is an English mustard and has a nice bite to it)
1 tbsp Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper (freshly ground - on my grinder about 12 grinds)
1 tbsp light olive oil (but truly, it doesn’t matter, light, extra virgin, even canola or vegetable)

Preheat your oven to 350 (you could also finish this dish off in the microwave)

In a 5 qt dutch oven, saute the onion & garlic in the olive oil over a medium heat (don’t set the heat so high that the garlic burns and gets bitter)
Add the flour, it’ll get crumbly and lumpy and sticky but don’t worry
Add the mustard, Worcestershire Sauce, salt, pepper & thyme
Add the mushrooms and let them cook for 5 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon and incorporating the flour/onion mixture. As the mushrooms release their liquid the sticky flour will start to dissolve
Add the tomatoes and cook for 7 minutes (I’m being precise here but really, I never measure the time, just look at the sauce you’re making and when things look cooked, they’re done)

If finishing in the oven, place your tilapia in the suace and put the whole pot in the oven, covered, for 30 minutes
If finishing in the microwave, put your sauce in a 3 quart microwave dish and push the tilapia into the sauce. Cover and cook on high for 8 minutes. If the fish is no longer opaque, it’s cooked, otherwise cook for a minute more and check again. Keep doing this until done. Whether or not you have to do this will depend on the wattage of the oven.

This will feed at least four to five people. I will check out the points. I believe it will be low - about 5 per serving.

Serve with rice and a beautiful green salad.

I will also attempt to consume 8 glasses of water. I should look around for a nice tea to take to work. Something refreshing.

Exercise: Hard part. I could take a walk at lunch time, but it has to be a slow one. Among all the things I complained about related to stress, I didn’t mention that I hurt my lower back somehow - I think walking with at work with someone much faster and fitter than me. Gotta take this part slowly.

I will think about how I want to use this blog. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll think of one small goal to set that I know I can achieve.

And, that brings me to 5:11 am.
I feel good. Like I’ve had a nice chat with an old friend.

May anyone who reads this have a blessed day and try not to be too hard on yourself.