Good grief! I post just as Krampus heads out into a thunderstorm, on foot, halfway around the globe. Be safe; let us know that you arrive.

Big deal for me is that I turned down some cake that wasn't on plan. It's kinda nice to remember that I know how to do that. Before this journey, I turned down nothing. If food was available, I just ate it.

We're still having pleasantly cool evenings around here. My notion of Eden is warm days and cool nights, so I'm a happy camper.

Happy Monday (that's probably an oxymoron for most folks).

I am still sitting on my red line, which is better than being above it. I think we are in for some really steamy humid weather this week so my appetite will really diminish and I will drop below the red line.

Good job with turning down the cake Bill. Like you I never turned down any food that was offered. I did refuse seconds and I'm now hardly ever tempted to eat more than one serving at a meal. We make our own habits, good or bad.

I am cultivating the habit of not watching more than one hour of TV a night. It's hard as DH has the thing going all evening. He even watches during the day, which is something I never have done (except if I was deathly ill). And he gets offended if I leave him to it and go read in the bedroom.

I thnk DH is starting to really worry about the impact his weight is having on his health - GOOD! This summer is the first time he's had difficulty even keeping up on a walk. We went out for an hour yesterday and he was sweating profusely and almost didn't make it back up the hill at the end. It was moderate pace all the way - I checked myself several times as I surged ahead at my "regular" pace.

The sleep clinic people were concerned about his heart. Now DH is concerned too. And so am I. I think I lulled myself into believing that he could be so overweight in his late 40's and not have any serious health consequences. So now we're looking at his hernia, joint problems, sleep problems, and heart problems. Is this enough to get him to diet? Or will it take a heart attack?

I can't do anything except lead by example. So I will.

Good day all!

Dagmar

Phew! Back from a night jog. Kept a pretty good pace, 37 minutes running and about 5 walking, much hillier course than usual. Now to make myself do some pushups and core stuff...

Bill - I made it back just in time to watch lightning strike the mountains in the distance from the safety of my living room. Beat the heavy rain by about five minutes, too! Truly a charmed life.

Mudpie - I hope your DH becomes the positive change that will make his life better! Setting a good example is the best thing anyone can do.

Happy Monday! (I don't exactly love Mondays, but I figure a good attitude helps me endure them )

Krampus - Did you make it home with no lightning strikes? Also, what were you doing on a computer in the middle of a thunderstorm that severe? Of course, I've done the same thing.

Michele - I think I was pretty much at my highest weight (probably around 210) when I was 20 and in college. School just adds the pounds like crazy: fast food, pizza/Chinese/ice cream delivery (yikes!), soda, late nights, alcohol . . . it's an insane time. If it makes you feel any better - and it may not - when I look back at those days I don't generally think at all about my weight issues, I think about how much FUN college was and how great my friendships were. I loved college, and developed some very good friends who didn't care at all about my weight. There's something to be said for friends who accept you however you are. I know that there are health concerns, and sure, I would have loved to have been "normal" weight in school. But, on the other hand, being overweight - yes, even obese - didn't make make me miserable. Hopefully your DD is the same way, and she'll be able to tackle the weight when she's ready.

Bill - I also use a lot of Beck tools in my weight loss, and the idea of "No choice" in turning down food that isn't on my plan for the day is one of the BEST things that ever happened to me. It was, paradoxically, freeing to know that my answer to all food offers would be "No, thank you." It takes a lot less mental effort. Way to go on turning down the cake!

Dagmar - It's funny how we can all lull ourselves into a sense of complacency with weight and health. Hopefully this will be the wake up call your DH needs.

As for me, essays to grade and classes to teach. I woke up this morning dying to go for a run, but (because of my kidney issues) am sticking with my original plan to wait a couple of more weeks. The pain has lessened but is still there and I don't want to push it. But man oh man, I miss being active!

Our weather is drying out and cooling off! We're looking for double digits this week which is so much better than 107 and humid!

I haven't been tempted by desserts, but they don't often tempt me. Cheese and crackers are harder for me to turn down. DH is learning to control his portions. And he's learning that he doesn't have to take seconds just because they are there. He's learning to stop when he feels full, or before if possible. Alas, that's easier said than done with some of my cooking!

I'm making Monte Cristo sandwiches for dinner tonight. Not exactly diet food, but these are much lighter than what you'd normally think when you think of these. I'll have to add up the calories and such as I'm making them just to see where they end up. I'll serve them with some fresh melon on the side--sounds refreshing.

Glad your kidney issue is resolving, Jen, but probably best to wait it out a bit more. You wouldn't want to re-injure yourself.

Good morning! Busy weekend leading into a busy week. I realized this morning that I failed to wash any laundry this weekend, and I'm almost at that 'no comfortable, clean underwear' point. I hate that.

Bill - good job on the cake! I find I have a harder time now turning down sweets than I ever have.

Krampus - glad you survived the storm, and even got a run in!

Dagmar - sorry that Laffie doesn't have the get up and go of your old car. I myself drive a mom car, too (Honda CRV). It isn't my first SUV type car, so it wasn't as hard for me as it could have been. DH drove one for a while too, but is now back in a Mustang.

Jen - if you have to be down and not able to run for a little while this looks like a good week to do it. Insanely hot temperatures and intermittent thunderstorms are all over the forecast this week.

Allison - I struggled with the seconds thing, too. Now I'm working on the fact that I don't have to eat everything on my plate if I'm not hungry just because I measured it all out to a specific calorie and protein target. Glad you guys are going to get a little cooler this week!

Michele - be safe on your travels back home!

Andrea - when is your Paris trip?

Good day everyone!

It's going to be hot & humid today in New York.

I'm wearing a sleeveless top to the office today for the first time in, well, ever. (Thank you, P90X arms & shoulders routine.) This is the first & only piece of clothing I've ever bought at Le Target. I need to go back there more often but we don't have a lot of them down here, so I tend to visit them when on vacation.

http://cgi.ebay.com/LIBERTY-LONDON-P...item2565839c9f

I'm feeling good after a week off & from listening to Eckhart Tolle while driving to work today. Trying not to live in anticipatory anxiety.

Great top, Saef!

Hi folks! I feel extremely behind on this thread and it's just started. Probably because there were a lot of weekend posts on last week's thread!

I am just over my red line this morning. I blame restaurant food last night (= salt, salt, and more salt). Also TOM coming up. In any case I am not calorie counting this week. After about 4 weeks of counting, I need a break. Next week I will be going back to the rheumatologist and hopefully he will take me off the Lyrica and that may help a little bit. He will also hopefully put me on something that actually works so I can get back to real exercise.

Shannon, thanks for the post about the hip openers. I sent it to DH who has issues with his hips as well which cause problems for him in running.

Michele & Allison & others with overweight college-aged daughters - from my experience, it is extremely difficult to near impossible to lose weight while you are in college. I was at my highest weight ever when I graduated from college. It is much easier to lose weight once you are out in the real world and have a more static schedule and more strict responsibilities. All you can do is set a good example. From my experience being a fat daughter, talking to her about her weight will just make her upset and won't accomplish anything except possibly triggering some emotional eating, which doesn't help anything. Let her take care of the issue on her own, in her own time. It will probably not happen until she's out of school.

Dagmar, have fun with your doggie bus. I have never personally cared about the performance of my car -- my primary concerns have always been safety and reliability. I <3 my Subaru Forester. It's not a race car and it's not sleek and sexy looking, but it does the job and doesn't break down. And when that deer ran into the side of it a couple years ago, we barely felt the impact. And it has a handy rubber mat in the "trunk" section which is great when I have an unexpectedly wet and muddy dog to tote home in it.

One time when my car was being fixed at the shop (from the deer hitting it, actually), they gave me a rental car to drive in the meantime. It was a Cadillac and was supposed to be some kind of luxury car. I felt like I was driving a pickup truck in it since it was so huge! So I guess I do care about performance a little bit. My Subaru drives like a sedan rather than like a truck, which is nice.

Hi Jen, Krampus, Saef, Bill!

We had a great haul at the farmer's market this weekend. Now I have a pile of veggies that need cooking this week. I am thinking of basically making a giant pasta sauce full of zucchini, yellow squash, and kale. Made chili beef skewers (recipe in the recipes thread) with bison sirloin from the market too, and had it with the first corn of the season and a cucumber salad Saturday night. Yum! Our backyard garden is starting to produce zucchini and beans as well. This morning I picked a big fat tomato horn worm off the tomatillo plant. DH killed it by poking it with a stick. Ew!

Also, since this always turns into the thread where we talk about our pets, I have a question . . . Non-dog people, feel free to skip this post. It is about dog poop.

So, Carter has always had slightly different eating habits in the summer. Most of the year, he would eat breakfast as soon as we gave it to him, then go outside and do #1 and #2. Then in the afternoon when we got home from work, he'd eat dinner, then go outside and do #1 and #2 again. During the summer, when it gets hot, he would often not eat his breakfast until the afternoon, and then want his dinner right away (so eating one time per day instead of twice). But he always used to go out and do #2 once in the morning and once in the evening.

So after his surgery, when he was suffering from various complications, the vet had to give him an enema. Whether it was related to that or just to the surgery, he has been a little different in the #2 department since then. This is probably going to be way TMI, but before his surgery, he used to have these really squeaky farts all the time. In the morning he'd get up, shake off, sit down, and then squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak. He hasn't been squeaky since his surgery. Also, since his surgery, there have been three incidents where we came home and found that he had pooped in the house. All three times he was very upset about it and afraid to even go near the room that he pooped in.

So in any case what I've been doing is trying to make sure that he poops in the morning before we leave for work, since I think the deal is just that he is not able to hold it all day like he used to. This is kind of a pain because I have to go outside with him and encourage him to walk around the yard until he finally poops. If I don't go out with him, he will often just stand on the deck and paw at the door to be let back in. This, combined with the fact that he is now in summer mode and doesn't eat his food in the morning, makes me wonder what his poop schedule is really supposed to be. Since he eats at different times will he have to poop at different times? Is there a good way to make sure he poops every morning before we leave without me walking him around the yard trying to get him to do it?

He never used to have a problem with this and was always very regular so it's kind of hard to adapt. We don't want him to poop in the house, and he doesn't want to poop in the house, but he doesn't seem to realize that that means he absolutely must go before we leave for the day. Any suggestions?

Sorry, Jessica, but I have no suggestions unless you want to install a doggy door so that he can go out when he feels the need. But I think your "solution" of walking out there with him in the morning, although time consuming, is probably the best.

Good morning (or afternoon) everyone.

I am back from seeing dd. I am up a couple of pounds but they will hopefully come off once I'm back to my normal routines.

I know that I need to be patient with dd but I know she is horribly upset about her weight. She has only had one boyfriend and he was a true jerk. Since then, she hasn't dated anyone (that I know of). She is shy and only has a few close friends. Since she is going into teaching, the next school year will be spent student teaching. The year after that will be grad school. She is very concerned about fitting into appropriate clothes for student teaching. It breaks my heart because she works so hard in school and work-- she doesn't drink at all. She also has Tourette's Syndrome and that causes her a lot of pain (from her tics) and anxiety. The weight coupled with the Tourette's are a lot to deal with. I asked her if she is truly happy and she said yes. She has so much going for her. She seems to have to work so hard just to lose anything. Sigh....

Hi to everyone else! I'll catch up more later. I need to unpack, grocery shop, etc.

I was one allergy pill short and took one of dd's yesterday. It gave me insomnia and I didn't sleep at all last night so I'm probably going to have to succumb to a nap later or I'll never make it through the day.

Jessica Carter's temporary paralysis probably permanently affected the nerves controlling his bowel function. You might want to leave one pile of poop outside to remind him of why he's there but what you're doing in the morning sounds right.

saef pretty top! Love the print and the aqua colour.

Allison What is a Monte Cristo sandwich? (I know I should just google it but I'm lazy). And how do you make yours lower cal?

krampus lightning striking the mountains sounds gorgeous! Glad your view of it was from your living room.

I had a good first day with Laffie. He is doing what he's supposed to do (carry cargo in the form of dogs) and I loved the AC (humid and 32 degrees C) and the keyless entry! I do have to do something in the way of seat covers as Laffie's upholstery is a very slippery nylon type of thing and all the dog towels kept falling down from the seat backs.

The new puppy made his debut today too. Not on the bus but in my schedule. Vargas is a cute little guy and very different from his housemate Javi. V. is very loud and forward whereas Javi was quite timid and totally meek as a pup. And V. hated going back into his crate and made sure the entire neighbourhood knew about it.

Javi had some serious pouting going on today. He regarded me as his "exclusive handler" and now he has to share me with the newbie. A bit of my lunch sandwich smoothed things over.

DH and I have a one-hour TV watch planned, snacking on cherries, and then I'm taking him for a walk. After that he's on his own but we were talking about diet during dinner. He starts his formal job search at the end of this month and wants to be in better shape for it. I agree!

Dagmar

Hearing you mothers worrying for your fat daughters is making me sad & bringing back difficult memories, as I was the fat blue-eyed teenage daughter of a brunette beauty with an hourglass figure & a resemblance to Ava Gardner. My mother had a tendency to be heavy as well, but for a good 20 years there I wore bigger sizes than her. MUCH bigger sizes than her.

But, you see, it's hard to draw an analogy because she wasn't as educated about the science & theory of weight loss as you ladies are. She doesn't care for reading. She doesn't have good retention. She still couldn't give a rough calorie count for anything or say what the ideal calories for a day would be or identify a carb-heavy food with any certainty. She just does not know that stuff. So when I was struggling, there was a lot of unhelpful stuff like, "You better start cutting back." Her heart was in the right place, but she had no idea what one did except eat less, snack on breadsticks, have cottage cheese & canned fruit for lunch, just a grapefruit at breakfast with maybe Special K & skimmed milk ... You get the idea.

It wasn't until I took on my own weight loss like a serious work project -- which began with reading, reading, reading -- that anything happened for me.

What I know in my heart is, for us, the mother/daughter relationship is far too fraught & weight has an almost symbolic significance tying into a mother's hopes for her daughter & for herself. There's nearly a conflation of the two, as there isn't with a father & a daughter. The mother wants to see the daughter succeed as a woman in the womanly things which weight seems to symbolize.

And I felt I had to assert myself regarding my body all the time, to remind her it wasn't hers. Nothing made me furious faster than anything that came close to a discussion of my body & weight.

But things are different now, though not quite easy between us. Unfortunately it took a disaster to change it. Years ago, my eating disorder & obvious unhealthiness, when I got down to 107 & wanted to go lower & basically wouldn't eat anything -- witnessing that scared my mother badly. (I got pretty low before she acknowledged that there was anything wrong.) So now she won't talk about my body or weight at all, except to say she wants me to be happy. She's afraid she'll tilt me toward craziness again. Her great fear is that I try to lose even more, the way I did years ago. She's always watching for signs of overrestriction.

Meanwhile, she herself is wearing a 2X & has never been heavier. I feed her healthily when she visits, and cook for her when I stay at her house, but she likes to go off & get a gigantic chocolate bar or half-gallons of ice cream or plastic tubs of candy. She will eat very little during the day, then binge all evening in front of the TV. What am I to do? Nearly nothing, other than to cook healthy meals & talk about why something was cooked or prepared a certain way. And to offer to talk, if she wants. Which she doesn't.

So I have the same concerns as you do, only for my mother. And no solution for any of us. Modeling & being open & offering periodically. That's what I'm left with, which feels like nothing at all.

Jessica~a Monte Cristo sandwich is ham and turkey with Swiss cheese, then dipped in egg batter and fried. Afterward it is dusted in powdered sugar and served with jam (raspberry, I think). I did mine lower cal/fat by using Trader Joe's premade, frozen French toast (110 cals per slice). A little Dijon mustard and NF mayo, one slice each of ham, turkey and Swiss (although the recipe said two slices of cheese) and then no butter--just a little Pam on each side of the French toast so it didn't stick to the pan. Very good. Came in at about 500 calories per sandwich which isn't terrible for dinner. I served it with melon.

Geez, Saef, I didn't know you'd gone so far "the other way" as well as being heavy. But, I can understand having a Mother who didn't ever need to diet. However, mine didn't binge. I don't think I ever saw her take seconds. Breakfast was minimal (fruit, toast, coffee, juice). A light lunch. Cheese and crackers with her martini in the late afternoon. And then a pretty healthy dinner. But she loved her ice cream! In fact, she loved cream in general. Never put it in her coffee, but would have a bowl of fresh cream with fruit if the fruit was fresh. That was probably her biggest downfall as she had such high cholesterol.