A Good Week

I've had a really good week!  Started abstaining from sugar and (most) white flour a week ago and have kept it up.  It's hard but it does make me feel much better.  Will be continuing in this manner, and eventually weight loss should begin.  However, I am going to try to lose very slowly.  I still have some skin elasticity and I'm thinking that if I lose slowly, I'll avoid getting too saggy (except for the lower abdomen, it's completely shot after three babies and two caesareans).

Good/bad news:  got a sibling pair of kittens, they are still not permanently named (so far they have been Rosie and William, Merida and Fergus, Lola and Charlie Brown, and a few other pairs of names) and they are great, but unfortunately, Boy Kitten developed an upper respiratory infection after I'd had him for three days and is now so sick, and Girl Kitten is following suit.  I'm treating them with the medicine that the vet gave me, but I'm not seeing any improvement yet.  I really want them to get better soon because 1) they feel terrible and 2) they are snuggly and sweet and will be great pets.  I haven't had a loving, friendly cat in YEARS. 

Not much else to report. Work is busy. Six-year-old lost a second tooth.  New car fever continues unabated.  My latest obsession is (was) the Volkswagen CC, a fantastically good-looking car, but after a test drive in one yesterday (funny story--brought along oldest daughter who became carsick, not to the point of throwing up but close, during the test drive--that shut the car salesman up FAST--he couldn't wait to get us out of there--keep that one in mind for future test drives) I determined that the back seat is really too small for my booster-seat requiring 6-year-old so I sadly crossed the CC off my list.  The one I test drove was $34K new, which the car payment calculator told me would be 6 hundred and something a month for 5 years, way, way too much.  I could get a 2009 for about $20K, but its still not the right car for us.  The 2009 Subaru Legacy station wagon was also crossed off the list when I saw one in real life and saw how incredibly teeny the cargo area was.  Nothing beats seeing the car in person!  Right now the Buick is still probably the best car for us, but because it's quite similar to what I already have, there doesn't seem to be much point in getting it.

Wish me luck in keeping this up!  I almost lost it Wednesday night when I had a plumbing emergency but thanks to one of my meeting friends, I held it together and got through without overeating. 
Thanks!

A Change of Scene

Not much to report.  Not doing well in the weight loss realm.  However, an interesting thing happened.  We went up to Silver City over the weekend to see an old and dear friend who lives there.  She treats us like royalty when we visit.  Dinner out, taking care of our 6-year-old so my husband and I could take a long walk, shopping and sauntering down the scenic main drag, a delicious lunch out with an absolutely delicious German beer that I can’t find locally—it was heavenly.   I slept like a log on her soft guest room bed with cool air conditioning, and woke up refreshed. 

And I didn’t feel the need to overeat.  I was relaxed.  I felt taken care of.  The food was delicious, and it was enough.  Just getting out of my normal stressful, noisy, cluttered and uncomfortable environment was enough. 

I’m just like any other working mother.  There is never enough time.  The house is always a sty.  My attentions are divided.  I feel guilty if I sit down for a little while to read.  There is no time for contemplation, meditation, spirituality.  No time for creativity, projects, things I enjoy.   Exercise is rushed on my lunch hour, just a box to check off.  Everything is a task.  I do at least two things at once most of the time.  I love my work but it’s hard and I need to devote more time to it.  If I’m doing well at one thing, something else slips.  Never, never enough time unless I want to be an automaton that does nothing but chores from the time I get home from work until I drop into bed.  When I was a younger working mom, I used to be able to do that. 

But I’m not young now.  And I need time to regroup and just breathe, but the time is never there.

I’m frazzled, and the enjoyment I get from a chocolate bar or some ice cream gives me enough nurturing, just enough, to where the pain of being fat is just barely outweighed by the comfort the eating brings me. 

Not in a good place.  Does it show? 

Graveyard Spiral

Not doing well.  Spiraling into a bad cycle.  Went to a meeting last night.  Some new folks were there and I realized I had absolutely nothing to offer them.  No abstinence, no recovery.  No hope.

Something is wrong.  Keep thinking about getting a car which I DON'T NEED.  It must be some sort of avoidance/bored/something-to-do issue.  Even though I swore cold turkey off the used car web sites, while out and about today I saw a really neat-looking car, which turned out to be a Volkswagen CC, and I was looking them up on-line to see if they were affordable, and somehow found my way to the green Subaru station wagon I almost bought last week (it's still available!) . . . completely nuts.  Like I need a new car to drive two miles to work.  I could theoretically get away with having NO car.  NO car!  STOP!

I did share at last night's meeting, albeit briefly.  I talked about a song that I hear on the radio that has a refrain contains the line " . . . in  a world of human wreckage . . .".  That line always sticks with me.  We are all wrecked in one way or another.  We are all traumatized, scarred and dealing with some sort of pain.  Even those who look like they are completely together and have it all are broken in some way.  You never know what other people are going through.  And it's no wonder we all have various coping mechanisms to deal with them.

Must stop this graveyard spiral . . . not sure if I can right now.  I can feel the cloud descending.  Heading into instrument conditions with no ground reference on a VFR flight plan  . . . the nose is pointing down and the turn is getting tighter . . . heading down . . . silly dramatic analogy . . .

As an aside, did you know the average life span of a VFR-only pilot who enters IFR conditions is 178 seconds?  Just a little over three minutes?  The spatial disorientation is just too great to overcome  We are not naturally creatures of flight.  I have a friend who has been a pilot all  his life and the way he has stayed safe is to always remember what his grandfather, also a pilot, told him:  "we have no business being up there." 

And we really don't.

Interesting.

For whatever it's worth.

The Referee

Things haven't been going so well on the eating front.  I kept "off the sauce" (avoiding white sugar, white flour and massive snacking after dinner) for a few days but lost my resolve.  I'm not doing too badly but I'm certainly not in a realistic weight-loss mode.  I did graze a bullet last night.  I was going to drive to Baskin Robbins and purchase tubs of both Jamocha Almond Fudge and Rocky Road, but I turned the other way and just bought some minor chocolate at Walgreen's instead.  Calorie-wise I did myself a big favor but I still went out and bought food--not good.  However, while I dodged the Baskin-Robbins bullet, it did manage to "graze" me.

If the forest fire in my dad's favorite area wasn't bad enough, now there is one raging in my favorite place ever, the White Mountain Wilderness.  Not only are areas of breathtaking beauty being burned, people who live near there are being evacuated and homes are threatened.  Not good.  Too bad our very conservative congressional representative is turning these fires into a political issue, blaming the environmentalists for the fires by not allowing "forest management" in the wilderness areas.  I don't see how lightning striking a tree has anything to do with politics, but I guess it does.

Well, my six-year-old has a friend over.  Slim friend pickings have led to her having over the friend that she cannot play with for more than a few minutes without arguing, so I've temporarily given up my proposal reading because their play requires frequent intervention as one or the other becomes mortally offended to the point of tears.  It's really too bad because this little girl is frequently available for play, but they just can't get along.  Friend just this second came in to report that my daughter had pulled a ribbon out of her hand.  The horror!  Now they are negotiating the potential use of said ribbon.  I can hear the pitch of the voices degenerating into whines . . .

I'm 50 years old refereeing the fights of six-year-olds . . . no wonder I eat!  <kidding>

More to come . . .

Activation

A hard evening.  Want to do nothing more than eat sweets.  Exhausted, I am literally staggering around the house doing my chores.  My six-year-old had a nightmare and (as usual) couldn 't go back to sleep so I was up for a couple of hours with her in the middle of the night.  (I grew up with test patterns after midnight, so having a full range of children's programming on at 3 am still seems weird to me).  Weary.

I have this great book called Fight Fat after Forty, which contains a very sensible approach to weight loss (but does not address any emotional aspects of eating), and the author notes that many middle-aged women overeat in the evening purely for what she calls "activation", which essentially means keeping yourself awake.  Those of us who work full time, have children, houses, pets, etc., do go around in sort of a state of stressed-out exhaustion much of the time.  I kow I have stuffed food in my mouth just to keep going in the evenings, plenty of times.  I think tonight is one of those nights.  I'm still struggling, but I got myself a small bowl of raisins and for now, that seems to be enough.

New Car Craziness continues.  I had a car dealership in Virginia ready to load a 2009 Subaru Legacy station wagon onto a truck today and ship it to Albuquerque so I could buy it.  It was really nice, it was a fantastic price, low miles, lots of safety features, AWD, cargo area, etc.  But I don't need it.  My car is FINE.  We could get by with one car if we had to.  It's ridiculous. 

I think what is happening is that for years, I said I would buy a car I really wanted for my 50th birthday, and the 50th birthday is drawing near so I'm fixated on getting a car.  However, I have apologized to my husband (who has been mercilessly jerked around throughout this whole car craziness) and I have vowed to stop looking at used car websites immediately.  Cold turkey!

Gobble, gobble, gobble . . .

Don't

Busy day at work.  Went to a meeting, still not sure it's the correct approach for me.  After reading my last post with the shorts, my dad called me and offered to act as my motivational coach during my dangerous after-dinner time.  It's when I really, really want to eat.  Tonight has been bad.  A whirlwind day of meetings, child duties, chores, and it's hot.  Want nothing more than to zone with a sugary food item.  Called my dad (as per his instructions) and his advice, when I told him I wanted to eat ice cream, was very simple:

"Don't."

I found some more pictures.  Here is a picture of me at my cousin's wedding two years ago.  I'm wearing a great size 8 dress bought just for the wedding.  It's a great dress.  Last time I tried to wear it, alas, it wouldn't even begin to zip.  It's a little young for me, but a good choice for certain occasions. I miss being able to wear it.

Maybe there is hope.  I have additional sage advice (no irony here) to add to "Get it back".

"Don't."

Shorts, Then and Now

Well, I haven't been doing so well on the eating front and I'm hoping for some magic bullet to instill motivation in me.  Yes, I completely understand that it all has to come from me, but sometimes something happens that tips the scale in the motivated direction and things sort of fall into place, eating-wise.

I took this nice picture a few days ago of Shorts, Then and Now. The pair on the right are the ones I was wearing two summers ago.  They are a fine-wale, lightweight corduroy and they are the best shorts I've ever owned and I've had them for years.  They are wearing out, actually.  I realize they are very short, but I actually have quite short legs so the shorter shorts work best on me.  Well, they do when I'm normal weight.

The shorts on the left are the ones I'm wearing now.  They are made of a stretchy cotton polyester blend and reach almost to my knees.  They are of course elastic-waisted.  They used to be sort of a joke pair of shorts just for the fact that they were so hideously and stereotypically awful, ones that I might wear for exercise, but now I've gained to the point where I actually have to wear them.  Like out in the world.  When my daughter's friend's mother came to pick her up yesterday, I had to stand there and talk to her wearing these shorts.  What was disheartening was how little I cared. 

I know people are often in denial about their weight, but I do think something odd is going on.  Perhaps I'm entering menopause or have a thyroid condition or my metabolism has ground to a halt, but I have never in my life put on weight so quickly.  It's like there is no margin for error.  I can struggle to take off the weight, but a few slip-ups and it's BACK, immediately.  There is no grace period.  It's weird, and it's never been this way before.

I actually had my thyroid levels done a few months ago and they were "normal" and my doctor sternly told me that she was NOT going to put me on thyroid medicine to lose weight.  So there.  She always rags on me about my weight, but graciously deigned to give me a pass this time because my husband had a heart attack in August so I guess she saw my weight gain as "justified".  Strange.  I guess she "gets" stress eating, but my husband's heart attack actually has had little to do with this because I was well on my way to gaining way before that particular event.  She wanted to see me again in only 6 months instead of a year because she was concerned about my weight gain and that I "couldn't get to 180".  Well, the 180 train has already left the station!  UGH. 

Well, wish me luck.  This is hard, way hard, and I'm teetering on the edge of just giving up. 

GET IT BACK!

A Slip (but not of epic proportions)

Had a moderately bad slip last night after minor tiff with husband about the pool.

Pool :  noun    \’pül\  :   large hole in ground filled with water requiring frequent application of costly chemicals and daily testing of water with toxic reagents and repeated tedious maintenance activities involving the manipulation of awkwardly long poles, heavy coiled hoses and the use of cumbersome suction devices to remove dirt and debris from the bottom and sides. 

Occasionally somewhat enjoyable, when all above-referenced activities have been satisfactorily performed and the various expensive filtering and pumping devices required for proper operation of pool are in correct operating mode.  Can be source of contention between spousal units who may differ in their interpretation of the necessary frequency of aforementioned maintenance-related tasks, as failure to perform said tasks can result in uncontrollable algae growth, improper pH, cloudy water and other unpleasant conditions rendering pool unuseable and requiring large applications of very costly chemicals and even more frequent maintenance  to remediate.

I won’t go into the details of this moderately bad slip but as I’m still in detox phase and pretty fragile with regards to eating, this could push me right back “on the sauce” as I call it. I’m going to hope for the best and see how today goes. Had a bad night’s sleep and feel on the verge of getting sick, so I’m not expecting much. Having to attend an employee’s retirement luncheon today with the expected array of delicious treats isn’t going to help. And for some reason, my poor face is breaking out like a teenager's. Really.


Ouch. 

At least I don’t do drugs.  Or drink.  Or smoke.