New Year, New Resolve

A lot of things have changed since the last time I wrote, mostly for the better.

After four years, my boyfriend and I broke up. It was a destructive relationship, and I know I am much better off now that I am out of it. A lot of my bad eating habits, depression, lousy attitude, and sense of defeat were coming from that situation, and I'm relieved to live in a much healthier place now.

I moved twice, once with my boyfriend, and then back into my parents' house. They are paying for food and most of my living expenses now, which is definitely a regressive step, but also a very helpful one while I finish grad school.

I started exercising, first joining a pool and swimming several times a week. Currently I swim about 2000 meters five times a week. I also just added running to the mix. The first time I ran a breezy 2.5 miles, hobbled around for a few days and struggled through walking the same distance, then got up to 3 miles this week. I plan to continue both, as they are becoming important stress relievers.

Probably because I'm living at home again, I think a lot about my younger self, when I was athletic and health-conscious. I had a really nice body, and I was fitter than most people I knew. I realize that that body was not just built on youth, but on running, swimming, dance, and being generally active, and I'm encouraged that I can have that kind of health and fitness again if I just stick with what I'm doing.

As the new year approaches, I'm not really concentrating on losing weight, since I'm sure that will happen. I haven't weighed myself in a few days, but I've lost about 20 pounds since September and have reason to believe that number will keep going down as I exercise more. Instead, I am focusing on becoming fit, especially the discipline and self-possession that comes with an exercise regime.

I will check in more often with progress and notes on what works. I may also talk about some of the emotional stuff that I now realize was sabotaging everything I was doing.

No plan is a plan

When I was in high school, my father approached the subject of dating with quite a bit of trepidation. Having been a teenage boy himself, he knew the score, and when I would ask permission to go on vague nonspecific outings, he would insist that I provide more details: times, locations, who else would be there besides my boyfriend and myself, phone numbers to reach me if I came home late, etc. When I asked why he was being so unreasonably strict, in the way only a self-righteous teenager with thwarted plans could, he intoned "Because no plan is a plan."

I have found this sentiment to be true in all the aspects of my life which do not involve backseat necking as well. I've also heard it rephrased in terms of productivity as "If you fail to plan, you should plan to fail."

I've resisted choosing and committing to a new diet plan for months. I keep telling myself that any day now, I'll get the inspiration I need, but gazing down at my midsection I'm aware this is untrue.

Last night my boyfriend got home late, and I had neglected to go to the grocery before it closed at 10pm. Instinctively, I wanted to pick up the telephone or surf over to the Dominos website to order something.

I stopped myself, and I even said out loud that even though pizza or take-out would be satisfying and I really wanted it, I also want to be healthy and I don't want to be obese all my life. I went in search of a more sensible option, and I found a box of tri-color rotini and a jar of tomato sauce in the cupboard.

I thought I was being terribly clever, satisfying the craving for tomato and carbohydrates, but omitting the fatty cheese and the glut of pork-based products I typically add. It took less time to cook at home than even the speediest delivery guy could manage, and I knew the ingredients cost vastly less than a pizza, so I was pleased with myself all around.

The trouble is that after one bowl, I was not even remotely satisfied. I gave it some time to settle in my stomach, drinking a big glass of diet soda, thinking that at any moment I would feel full. But no, I was still actively, physically hungry, so I ate another heaping bowl.

As I was wrapping up the leftovers, I realized I'd eaten more than half a box of pasta, and I was still really dissatisfied. My mind flashed to nights of carbo-loading before high school athletic meets, and I realized I'd just inundated my system with carbohydrates and probably not much nutrition.

Since I ate the remainder of the pasta and sauce for lunch and an afternoon snack today, I couldn't stop the intonation in my brain, "I ate 12 ounces of pasta and 3 cups of sauce by myself in the past 24 hours."

I fished the pasta box and sauce jar out of the recycling bin and decided to find out just what kind of damage I had done.




(click to enlarge)

Well shoot. So much for being sensible.

From the sauce, I consumed 540 calories, 150 of which were fat. 18 grams of fat, 3 of which were saturated. 78 grams of carbohydrates, 60 of which were sugar and 18 of which contained dietary fiber, and 2820 mg of sodium.

From the pasta, I consumed 1260 calories, 60 of which were fat. 6 grams of fat, though no saturated or trans. 252 grams of carbohydrates, 12 of which were sugar and 12 dietary fiber, and 180 mg sodium.

My total for the past 24 hours, therefore, was:

Calories	1800
Calories from Fat	210
Fat	24 g
Saturated Fat	3
Carbohydrates	330 g
Sugar	72 g
Dietary Fiber	30 g
Sodium	3000 mg

Ugh. Well, I thought, it can't have been all bad. Perhaps I got some good nutrients in?

54 g protein, and of daily values, 60% Vitamin A, 36% Vitamin C, 12% calcium, 84% iron, 66% potassium, 180% thiamin, 60% Riboflavin, 90% Niacin, 150% Folate (folic acid).

Not exactly batting a thousand here.

The thing is... when left to my own devices, I usually make much worse choices than this, which include tons of trans fats, packaged and overly processed cookies and sweets, and fried abominations with even less redeeming value. I am quite certain I massively exceed 2000 calories a day, and I know a whopping percentage of them must be fat and sugar.

The real surprise isn't that I'm fat, rather that I'm not even fatter.

When I look at it as a simple numbers game, it seems really easy to balance the scales and drop pounds. I know myself, of course, and I know that hasn't proved true thus far, but I think that learning more about nutrition and actually paying attention to these things would help me in being a less brainless eater.

This is where conscientious dieting - learning why I'm doing what I'm doing - is the most powerful tool at my disposal. I do need to learn how to eat right in the long term, or I'm going to constantly battle my weight throughout life.

Of course, I've got all this fat now and I really want to drop it quickly. Sigh.

The Circle of Fat

A long time ago, I read a passage in a book by Joyce Vedral describing the "circle of fat" effect many women experience.

She posited that weight gain often starts for women in the lower abdomen, often as the particularly nefarious deep belly fat which seems at times impossible to lose. We continue to gain around the waist, hips, butt, thighs, upper arms, and so on, spreading in a circle from our navel outwards. When I read that, I found it startlingly accurate, as all my problem areas concentrated around my midsection.

If I remember correctly, Ms Vedral's solution combined diet and exercise focused on the core muscle groups (tons of ab work) to halt the spread, and eventually diminish the circle of fat.

I think that I ignore my increasing weight gain in part because it follows this pattern. If I've bought clothing for the largest part of me, then I have lots of room to grow along the perimeter of my circle of fat before it starts noticeably impacting fit. If I'm dressing to move emphasis away from that area anyway, it takes a while for encroaching gain to become really obvious. Evidently, I can gain more than 20 pounds and stay relatively comfortable in the same clothing size.

Underneath those clothes, I look several months pregnant and feel awful.

Another aspect of my neglect has been turning a blind eye to that which I don't want to see. I'm accustomed, when I look in a mirror - even the full-length one on the back of our bathroom door - to only look at my head from the neck up, legs from the knee down, and arms from the elbows down. I effectively ignore the majority of my body because I've hopelessly resigned that's just my circle of fat. If I can help it, I avoid turning around to see the ever-widening expanse of my back, the folds under my bra line, my frighteningly huge ass... I just assume it's terrible and try not to look.

I find myself lately wishing I could wear a big shapeless sack that only reveals the parts of me I like, and in the fall and winter it was almost possible to do this with voluminous skirts, sweaters, and so on. It's unrealistic, though, because as many pains as I may take to avoid dealing with my circle of fat, I know everyone else sees it becoming increasingly spherical, and more to the point, I know how much it is impacting my health.

My grandfather recently had his fourth bout with cancer in the past few years, and it was especially awful this time. When I asked my mother what she thought could be causing so many cancers at this stage in his life, I was expecting her to say drug or alcohol use or growing up in a part of the country sometimes called "Cancer Alley." Instead she said "Well he was seriously overweight most of his life, and now it's catching up to him."

I was flummoxed. Fat causes cancer?? I felt really dumb as my mother outlined the ways that excess abdominal fat squeezes organs, inhibits function, and demands resources that would ordinarily go toward maintenance. While I need to do more research, I did learn that she was spot-on, and there are numerous increased risks of cancer to do with being overweight.

So now my circle of fat is no longer a problem of vanity or a hindrance for swimsuit season, but a serious health problem which I must resolve as soon as I can.

And unfortunately, it is every bit as bad as I feared it would be:



I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Back and fatter

Well. I've been gone a long time, avoiding dieting effectively since last summer, and I've gotten dangerously close to the heaviest I've been again.

I will have to weigh myself tomorrow to confirm, but recent numbers were as high as 192. Shudder.

The most I've ever weighed in my life was 202 pounds, and I am suddenly within a stone's throw of that again. I worked for a few months to drop about 25 pounds at one point, and I even got down around 170 at the end of last summer. But once again I let stress, finances, and poor organization get me down, packing back on 20 pounds like it was nothing.

This isn't okay, and I really need to do something. My boyfriend and I are at a point where we talk about breaking up at least once a month, just so that we can get some control over our lives with regards to diet and exercise.

I have a lot of thoughts about all of this stuff, and I haven't been paying nearly enough attention to my health as I should.

This summer I'm going to work to get my act together, quit making excuses, and finally start on the healthy lifestyle I've been attempting for, well, years now.

Yikes

I came back to this site to look up a recipe, and I realized I'd left a very long, very personal entry at the top. I committed one of the cardinal sins of blogging and removed it. Even though I mostly consider this a journal for myself, there are some things that just don't need to be out in public.

I do have things I'd like to write about, and I would really like to get back on track with my health. Please expect more regular posting again soon.