Oh honeys ... I did say I'd get caught up.

The not smoking is excellent!
The eating is not, nor is the exercising ...
I'm having a challenge with my lower back/hip/butt cheek.

I am however very happy with the Ontario Health Care System. Other than being on a wait list for a CT (which I'm not sure is necessary anyway) I've been well attended even when the first medications did not help ... and my Doc is on holidays.

I walk a little, take the odd medically induced nap. I'm almost done our income taxes.

So I'm perfectly fine just reading you folks.

AquaWalock, that curry sounds amazing - please do post the recipe! I wish my work had a contest like that, though I guess it wouldn't really make sense since we all travel all the time and I'm one of the few people here who cook. Would just make it easier to win :)

Allison, happy birthday! Hope you are having a super day.

Dagmar, the workout room sounds exciting, though I know how it feels to have something great but not want to do the prep for it. Anytime I have to go on a trip (even if it's a fabulous vacation that I'm really excited about), the thought of packing just makes me not want to go. Just have to push through to get the reward!

I finally came up with an idea for a non-food reward today that will hopefully keep me on plan. I want this set of luggage. It's black and perfectly appropriate for my business travel, but has enough pink that it's feminine and cute :)

Lately I've been attempting some challenges to test my willpower - I got the idea from the Beck Diet Solution. I purposely put more on my plate than I want, and see if I can resist the temptation to eat it. I've been tracking my success in a spreadsheet, and am giving myself a nickel for each calorie I can resist. That means if I can lose 2 pounds (a HUGE feat for me while traveling and eating out all day and night), I can get the luggage. I'll keep you ladies posted on my progress!

Scenestealer: That is a way cute set of luggage. And the pink makes it just distinctive enough that it will be easy to recognize on the luggage carousel and other people aren't likely to mistake it for their own. And, if the airlines lose it, it will be easier for them to find it because it will stick out from the masses of plain black luggage.

I'm still waffling on whether or not I want to bump my calories up to a maintenance level. On the one hand, I don't really need to be any thinner and I don't know why I'm killing myself to try to get to such a difficult goal. But on the other hand, I do have this stomach bulge that I know would get just a little flatter if I lost just a few more lbs. And then I also feel like such a failure if I give up on my goal. But on the other hand again (or, I guess, now I'm onto feet), it's a real struggle to come in at 1200 calories a day--in fact, I had to up my calories to 1300 a couple of days this past week because I just couldn't do it. But if I don't lose anymore weight, I don't have any room for mistakes. Anything I gain, I'm going to have to lose again.

This morning the scale hit 115 so I guess if I keep waffling for a few more weeks, I may be at goal anyway.

alinnell: Happy Birthday! :celebrate: Do you have anything special planned?

We are actually planning on going out to dinner tonight (even tho the birthday was St. Patricks). DD has a concert, so we'll go to my favorite southwestern restaurant for dinner before the concert. That's why I plan on being back on plan tomorrow!

Over in maintainers I mentioned that sleep is inherently important to weight loss. When DH's friend showed up at 10 PM and we stayed up until after midnight talking and then I got less than 5 hours of sleep (and probably less than 4 hours because I couldn't fall asleep) it made the next day's eating just horrible. I just couldn't satiate my appetite. I ate and ate and ate and the scale shows it today. Ugh.

allison, happy b-day and enjoy your dinner!:woo:
i also believe sleep is quite important for weightloss, which is why i've been trying to get my body back on schedule.... i've just been some kind of mess since we switched our clocks.

scenestealer, nice idea for the luggage as a reward! i like the "nickel for each calorie" method, sounds like it might work better than just saying when you lose 2 lbs, you can have the luggage. calories add up quickly!

susan, horray for not smoking!! stay strong with that! :)

i'm feeling quite lazy today but i need to get to the gym and make some soup or something for the rest of the week. i'm also trying to think of something for my bf... we've been together for a year now. anyway neither of us are into celebrating anniversaries or anything, but i would like to do something nice for him.

Sleep is so important for weight loss. If I don't sleep enough, my weight is up in the morning, even if my eating has been on plan. Sometimes if I have to get up really early, I skip my morning weigh-in because I know it will be high. Plus it's dark and I can't read the scale (I can't turn the light on because the scale is in the bedroom where my SO is sleeping and I don't want to temporarily move the scale because scales are fragile things, you know :lol:).

It never occurred to me that not getting enough sleep could also throw off my eating patterns, but now that you mention it, alinnell, I think you are right. :doh:

Susan- glad you are ok... the back thing - is that sciatica?

Allison - I soooo agree about the sleep being tied to healthy eating and everything else. It's one of my problems... I actually finally am having a sleep study - next month. We shall see what they find out.

More later...

Well Claire, so far everyone is tippytoeing around the 's' word.
I have some arthritic changes in my SI joints and just now have a little pull thing where my hamstring attaches to my pelvis.

Hey folks .... this thread is bothering me
http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/show...hreadid=137528
Wanna have a look and see what you think? I might be off tho'.

Lack of sleep & eating
 

:dizzy: Well DUUUHHH!! Thank you all!!! It's so obvious when someone else points things out. I feel like a big dum-dum for not seeing this myself.

I have days (today was one) where I just cannot stop eating and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

I have a generally high level of anxiety and this manifests itself in insomnia of the type where I wake up at 3 a.m. in a panic and can't get back to sleep.

Last night I got 5 hours sleep. I'm an eating machine today. On Monday night I got 4 hours sleep and was an eating machine yesterday. I also find if I overeat I tend to sleep poorly so that just compounds the problem. Then I drink more caffeine to stay alert when out with the dogs, again adding to the problem.

Less sleep = more eating = less sleep = more caffeine = less sleep :dizzy:

Now all I have to do to break the cycle is win ten million dollars and all of my anxiety will be gone ;)

Dagmar aka Lardmar

Hello everyone :wave:

:celebrate: Happy Birthday Allison! And I hear you with sleep making a difference with weight loss :faint:. Everytime I don't get enough sleep it seems like I want to eat everything in sight. Anyway, have a great B-Day dinner. Tomorrow is another day ;).

Hope you feel better soon Susan B. There must be something in the air. DH threw his back out a few weeks and is still in pain.

Dagmar - I'm sure you'll get back on track soon :hug:.

Barbara and Scenestealer - You both, IMHO, seem that for your height and weight that you both are in a good place. I think that if you want to just maintain for awhile, what's the harm. Take a break and see how it goes.

Well, I got on the scale this morning and dropped another pound :goodscale. I can't believe how that fast food was apparently keeping the weight on me. Hope I can keep this up.

Hello to everyone I missed and I'll check in later.

Susan: I think I agree with everyone on that thread that the woman with the 15% body fat (assuming the trainer's estimate is right) has some body image issues. I'm not willing to diagnose her with BDD or anything without ever having met her (and not be qualified to diagnose anyone with anything anyway :lol:). What did you think was off about it?

Thanks for the feedback, Abbyin. I'm still not sure what I want to do (I'm such a waffler), but I appreciate your thoughts.

Susan
It strikes me as strange that people would be so quick to judge a woman as having BDD, however I feel like they were trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. You know, reassure the OP that the "lean" woman wasn't out to make fun of her...What didn't sit well with you in the thread?

Sometimes I face this with my family. I may look lean but I do have considerable flab that I'm trying to tone up...but am usually met with, "you are starting to have a problem" stares when they find out that I still eat lean and workout and have recently added weights to that!

I think that the people on the lower end of the losing weight totem pole have it a little tough...most people (in my experience) dismiss the gravity of losing the last few...*shurgs*

All this talk of sleep....Big Brother be da*ned....That's what DVR is for. Off to la la land I go. Be well...and dream happy!

In regards to that thread... I can look back at points in my life when I was quite the skinny minny, but I didn't see it - I saw softness, flab, fat. Looking back now with age and experience and just more time being comfortable in my skin, I can see how thin I was at points in my life... and yes, I admit I must've had a bit of BDD... sounds like the gal at the gym has that going on too... I agree with Lekhika that a larger person will look at someone at - say 130 lbs (for example) - and not think the person needs to lose when the person actually can safely still tone up and lose a few more lbs. But on the other hand, I do see something to the BDD argument too because I have seen and experienced that too.

I just went out to eat with my girlfriends.. .it's 10:30 and I'm TIRED... probably why my post doesn't make much sense.

There were definitely points in my life where I thought I looked a lot heavier than I actually did. Even now, sometimes I look in the mirror and all I can see are the flaws. But I don't think I've ever cornered a perfect stranger and gone on and on about how fat I was. Sure, I sometimes make the occasional comment to a close friend, but never to stranger, and never at such length. Granted I'm a private person (although you'd never know it from my participation in the forum :blah:), but it was that behavior in combination with the estimate that the woman was at 15% body fat (which is really extreme--up to 12% of body fat is essential for a woman--at 15% body fat, you probably no longer get your TOM and you may begin experiencing other problems, such difficulty regulating your body temperature--I'm at the very low end of my BMI and my body fat is at 23%) that makes me think she has some issues.

I have a friend who is really insecure and she is always putting herself down (she's fat, she's a terrible mother, she drinks too much, she's stupid). She is desparately trying to find reassurance that she isn't any of those things. Unfortunately, no matter how much we reassure her, it is never enough because, in the end, the only opinion that counts is our own. To me, that's what it sounded like the woman in the gym was doing--seeking reassurance that she isn't overweight. It really sounded like a cry for help, but unfortunately, she's not asking the right person.

We are not fat!
 

Sorry I'm not quite up to speed on the woman with 15% body fat but I'd like to comment on the whole body image issue and the use of the word "fat".

Now none of us is "fat". We have some extra weight to lose and maybe some toning to do but we're not fat. I think the people on the rest of this site occasionally are offended when we call ourselves "fat". Some of them are several hundred lbs overweight and are endangering their health or already have health problems associated with their weight. We use the term in a joking sense ie "lardmar" or "I feel fat today" but we really know that we're basically fine.

But body image is such a "mental" component of ourselves that, even if we dramatically alter our body, sometimes our minds just can't seem to grasp that we are now slim.

I don't know about the rest of you but I really like my body. But there are days when I think I look bad and days when I think I look great.

I think there are some people who, no matter how perfect their bodies become, look in the mirror and can't see that. There is something else so awful in their lives that they are taking it all out on their poor bodies in order to avoid dealing with their other issues. Maybe that is the case for this woman with the 15% body fat.

This is just IMHO. I'm no expert.

Dagmar