A 30 Something’s Weight Loss Journey

Have you ever tried to figure out how much time you spend on a daily basis trolling the internet?  It’s astounding.  I read somewhere that the average American spends around 30 hours a month online.  I’m not sure where that figure came from, but it doesn’t sound quite right.  That’s only an hour a day.  I wish that was really the case.

Just today, I can honestly tell you that I’ve already spent about 3 hours trolling.  Reading the news. the weather, Whitney Houston’s death, reading blogs, checking Facebook, Linkedin and my bank account.  And I’m not done!  That’s really the sad part.

I feel like I’ve lost part of my day because of the big black hole we call the internet.  I could have been doing something physical like walking the dog, laundry, buying groceries and so on but no….  Instead I wasted hours absorbing useless information about people and things I shouldn’t care about.

Twenty years ago this would not have happened.  No wonder I was thinner.  I need to remember to move more…

Filed under: Uncategorized on February 13th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I am writing this because I can’t sleep.

I can’t sleep because I quit my job today.  I finally got a new job.

I should be excited about my new job but HR made my exit so nerve wracking that I didn’t even enjoy telling them goodbye.

If you’ve read my posts over the last several months, you know that the company that I work for is not the most fun place in the world.  It’s a downright emotional hell.  Work should not be this way!

Well, I finally found a new job through an old friend who left the company just 6 months ago.  I called him and asked him for a job.  He got me an interview with a hiring manager at his new company and I was in.  Sweet.

Well, yesterday I worked up the courage to give my notice.  I first talked to my direct manager, who I love working with.  I should say that he has been equally as miserable.  He was thrilled when I gave my notice!  He is happy that I was able to escape and find a new opportunity.  Now that’s a nice person.

The kicker of it was that when I approached him and resigned, he said, ‘it’s funny you should say that, I just resigned a few minutes ago myself’.  HOLY CRAP!  What luck!  When I tell you people at my place have been miserable, I’m not kidding.  He’s not as lucky as me though, he’s actually not leaving for another job.  He needs to take some time off to recover from this place.

Miserable I tell you….

Anyhow, I then make it to HR’s office and have to break the news to him.  This was much less fun.  First he tries to coerce me into telling him where I’m going.  I didn’t want to say but I panicked.  I’m not good in the high stress manipulative situations that this guy puts people in.  I must have talked about the HR manager before.  He’s a piece of work.  But I digress….

He starts asking who has recruited me ‘because we have a non-solicit agreement and if this person left less than a year ago they’re going to get a call’.  I repeated that I didn’t have to tell anyone where I was working next.  Somehow he came up with a name of a friend that I’ll call ‘mom’ and thinks that’s where I’m going to work (It’s not) but I didn’t disagree.  I feel like I lied but oh well.  It’s none of their business really.

Now I’m freaking out because my former employer is a huge company compared to the new one.  I’m afraid if they find out where I’m going it could cost me my new job.  When you leave my former employer you have to sign a one year non-solicit agreement that you won’t recruit anyone from the company to work for you.  My friend left 6 months ago.  It looks really fishy that I’m going to work at his company.

I know that non-solicits are really hard to enforce but the HR manager put me on edge.  My friend didn’t really recruit me, I asked him for a job.  But how can you prove that?

I’m pissed.  I should be thrilled, but HR took the fun out of everything.  Now I feel like I have to watch my back for the next few months.

My dinner last night was chocolate cake because that’s what I felt like I needed.  Oh and milk….

I thank my lucky stars that I’m leaving though, I may be able to stop paying for therapy soon….

Filed under: Uncategorized on February 8th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I feel downright unmotivated to work anymore.  I have spent 9 years with a company that has severely scarred me emotionally.  I’m not sure that I can take it another minute.

I’ve been looking for another job on and off for a while now.  I’m getting desperate. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to function at a new company.  How do people treat each other at work anymore?  I have no idea.

Let me tell you a little bit about my company. We were a small niche software company that was fairly profitable.  The ‘old boys network’ of management grew the company by hiring very smart inexperienced managers cheaply. They hired women, but only very young women and definitely no women into senior management roles. And diversity, bwah!  The one black guy we had working for us was so alienated by the ‘old boys network’ of software developers, that he went running at the first sign of a new job.

I originally took the job because of promised quarterly bonuses and stock options and because they made me a manager at the ripe old age of 26.  What a joke.

I will never forget the day of the company’s 20th anniversary celebration. We had dinner and a cake.  After his speech and after he handed out a bunch of awards, the CEO actually said, ‘ladies’ will you please cut the cake.  The nerve.  I am thankful that one of my male European colleagues actually got up and did it himself.

Over the last 9 years I have been beaten and emotionally bruised by management and by our clients!  I’m writing this after just getting off of several hours of marathon sessions with an unhappy client.  Not because of anything that I did, but basically because our method of software development and delivery just plain sucks.  I CANNOT take it anymore.  I want to walk in tomorrow and say, I QUIT!

I wish I had the guts.

Why did I stay so long you ask?  Well, because of SOME of the people.  There were a few people that I became really close to.  It’s hard to leave a place when you get to work with your friends.  But now, they’ve started to leave too.

I’m working very hard to try to find a new job, but it’s been tough.  I hadn’t been on the interview train for almost a decade.  It’s much harder to find senior level positions than junior ones.  The whole process of job hunting just plain sucks.

Anyhow, I just needed to rant. I’m sure you can picture the steam coming out of my ears.  I’m trying to type instead of eat, so that they can’t take my diet away from me too.

Filed under: Uncategorized on January 23rd, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Well, I’ve been gone for a while.  I fell off the wagon. Then the holiday’s came and I fell off the wagon some more.  So I’m almost back where I started in September.  That’s life I suppose.

The good thing that’s happened is that I found myself falling in love with yoga.  That’s where my focus has been for the last few months.  I used to take bikram yoga classes about 5 years ago, but fell away from it when I got involved in other activities.  I had stopped doing it all together for years, until a few months ago.

For a couple of years now, I’ve had some trouble with my upper back.  I have a muscle imbalance in my upper back that I developed from years of rowing.  It’s been downright awful for a couple of years.

I have tried everything for the last 2 years; massage, stretching, doing nothing and even physical therapy.  None of those things had really helped all that much.  Sometime last October, a friend of mine mentioned that he had some herniated disks in his upper back, but after doing bikram for some time, the pain was easier to manage.

So I went back to bikram for my first class a few months ago.  Wow, what can happen in 5 years.  I’m so inflexible!  Anyhow, I started doing that back in October a couple of times a week.  I have also supplemented it with yoga at home through various videos that I’ve purchased.  I’ve managed to be dedicated to my practice for 3 months.

I have to say that my back feels 1000% better.  I do have days when I have pain, but those are much much fewer than before, which is such a relief.

I need to get back on the wagon though, so i started writing down what I’ve been eating over the last week.  I also need to incorporate other exercise.  Yoga is great, but I feel like I need the cardio and weight lifting too, just to be well rounded.

We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under: Uncategorized on January 18th, 2012 | 1 Comment »

So I had the most interesting day at work.  I wish I could just push the rewind button and not step into the HR manager’s office. Sigh.

Anyway, I work for a company that outsources some of our staff to various countries around the world; one being India.  I don’t like outsourcing and never will.  I believe the whole thing is about corporate greed and saving money to line corporate officers pockets.  But I digress.

Anyhow we have one site in India that we stopped negotiating with about 4 years ago because we found that they were doing bad things behind our backs.  We stopped taking new contracts with them and only kept the ones we had.  In any case, some of the contractors at this site are still part of my group.

These guys recently approached me as a team and told me about their unhappiness in their current office situation.  Basically it amounts to no raises, no growth opportunity and a sad work environment.

I have worked with these guys for the past several years so I know them all well.  They are in fact my top performers out of all my sites worldwide.  I have known what their situation is and thought that I could try to do something about it.  Basically I would like to negotiate a new contract for these few guys at one of our other India sites so they can get out of their current office.

So I tell my boss and he came up with the idea to approach our company to hire them directly in India since we have sites there.  And so he told me to discuss it with the HR manager.

Bad idea.

The HR manager flips and basically threatens to fire me if I try to get these guys jobs at our company.  I seriously couldn’t believe it.  Then he goes on to say we’re going to shut this India site down and get rid of my people first.  WTF.

I told my manager and he said he would fight this tooth and nail because we can’t afford to lose these people since we have so many years invested in them and they are on our most lucrative projects.

I don’t know what to do at this point.  I’m not sure what will happen.  I wish I could hit rewind.

I don’t think I was cut out to be a manager because I can’t separate a business decision from my feelings.  It’s hard to work with people for so long and see stuff like this happen to good people.

I hate outsourcing as much as the next guy, but these folks are people too.  I have always felt that our offshore contractors are treated like cattle. It’s just not fair.

I am planning to leave my company within the next 8 months. You can rest assured that when I leave I will not take a position where I have to manage anyone especially if it involves off-shoring.  I honestly don’t have the heart for it.

And what’s the point of my babble?  All of this just makes me want to eat…..

Filed under: Uncategorized on October 17th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

So a few weeks ago I started out really well on my diet plan.  I lost about 8 pounds.  Everything was going great until last Thursday. I wound up going to one of the fall fairs in the area and well, I fell off the wagon, big time.  It all started with an apple cider doughnut.  Things when down hill from there!

I thought I’d be able to get right back on plan the next day.  But it has been a few days and I’ve been eating like crap!  I’m trying not to be to hard on myself, because things like this do happen.

I hope the workday tomorrow will get me back in the swing of things.  I feel like when I stay home, it’s harder for me to stay on plan.  I’m trying to keep my eye on the mini-prize, which is to get into the 160’s by the end of this year. We’ll see how it goes!

Filed under: Uncategorized on October 9th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

In the recent months, I have been shocked to discover this about myself. Apparently, making a list of tasks and then checking them off as I do them, is very satisfying for me; to the point where I fear that I am becoming obsessed with task lists.

I started the practice at work because I was having a hard time motivating myself to get stuff done; just because I was loathing my job so much.  So I started making a hand-written list.  It started off small at first.  I would add the most important things I needed to get done that day.  But soon enough I started getting carried away I think.  I would add things like ‘read e-mail’ as a task to my list and then check it off when I was done.

Sounds crazy right?  But it was so darn satisfying let me tell you.  Now I’m creating lists for everything.  Chores, exercise, even the food I should eat (which I should be writing down anyway).  Crossing things off lists is so satisfying, but I’m starting to feel a little like a nut.  However, the side effect is that it has been motivating me to get stuff done instead of being lazy and putting things off.

Now if only I could find something to motivate me to actually eat the carrots instead of the brownie!

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 27th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Yeah.  I knew it would come someday.  I found out from a mutual acquaintance of ours that he’s getting married on October 1st to the woman he had the affair with.

He left first, came back, then left again.  I ultimately ended the relationship in 2008 because if I hadn’t, he would have kept pussy footing around; it had taken a horrible mental and emotional toll on me.  I had had enough.

Our divorce was final in early 2009.  He went further and got the married annulled in the Catholic church.  Don’t ask me how a 7 year marriage, never happened, but according to the church, that’s the case.

I really thought I’d be more upset than I am.  I didn’t even cry.  Usually something like this would make me want to eat too!  Ruining my diet.  But nothing.  My mother is way more upset than I am!

Anyway, I’m hoping that somehow subconsciously I’m not upset.  Because you know, that can happen.  I hope the crazy doesn’t come out and somehow it results in eating half a cake!

Anyway, I am lucky enough today to be with a new wonderful man.  I have no regrets in leaving my marriage in the end.  For my sanity, it was the best thing to do.

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 23rd, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Yeah, so a week or so ago I started doing the 5 day home delivery plan with eDiets.  I guess the food is ok, but somehow I feel hungrier than when I make my own snacks and eat the lean cuisines. Why is that?

I checked the calorie content and compared it to the food products that I had been eating, and it’s about the same.  So today, I am very hungry, and I’ve already eaten my breakfast, lunch and morning and afternoon snack!  What’s a girl to do?

And then there’s all this packaging and stuff that comes with the delivered food.  It kind of bothers me.  I feel like I am already polluting the environment enough when I buy frozen meals at the grocery store.  What do I do with it (the strofoam cooler and frozen gel packs) after the week is over?

I will try this for another week.  But I think I was doing just fine buying stuff at the grocery store.  I’m not saying eDiets is terrible, just that I don’t think that I needed to do the meal delivery in the first place. 

I feel like as long as you’re counting your calories, it’s going to turn out the same.  I happen to like the packaged foods because you know exactly how many calories you’re eating without having to measure.  I think it’s a good way to get started, but eventually I’m going to have to start eating ‘real’ food.  Won’t that be fun….

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 21st, 2011 | No Comments »

Earlier today I had my book club meeting at my home.  It’s great, except when I’m on a diet.  Let’s face it, most people don’t create book clubs to read books.  It’s about the socializing… and food… and wine.  And so that was my afternoon.  Trying not to binge over all of the delicious foods these ladies brought to my house.

Anyhow, I didn’t eat breakfast because I knew what was coming.  I know that I went over my calorie limit, but it wasn’t too bad.  I also went for a long walk with the dog, so I new that wouldn’t counteract some of the bad stuff.  I’m not going to beat myself up about it.  Tomorrow is a new day.

Oh yeah, the book we read was a Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris.  We all thought it was a fun book.  I recommend reading it’s predecessor first, which was Chocolat;also a fun book.

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 18th, 2011 | No Comments »