December 1, Day 1

I figured December 1st is just as arbitrary a date to start a new resolve toward fitness as January 1st, and while it doesn't have the same cache as kicking off the New Year with a new lifestyle, I'll have a four-week head start on it. Maybe this time it will finally take.

Today started with a roughly 3.5 mile hike with my parents and the dogs. My mother and I challenged each other on the start of One Hundred Pushups, and while my initial number is pathetic, it's a start.

The plan for this afternoon is a bicycle ride around town. I'm concerned that my father may dawdle enough that we don't get to go, so I'll have to push him.

My challenge this week will be making time for exercise every day and not eating atrociously, but it will be difficult because I have a date Tuesday, plans with friends Wednesday, tickets to the symphony Thursday etc. I will have to get good at sneaking in quick workouts when I get home and making better menu choices than "all the pasta and sausage and cream you can fit on a plate."

Sorting Out the Mornings

I did not accomplish all that I intended over my recent staycation, but I got one big thing under control: my mornings. 

I had fallen into a lousy cycle of oversleeping, dressing hastily, eating garbage, and showing up substantially late to work every day. It set the wrong tone for the whole day, making me unnecessarily stressed, cranky, and uncomfortable.

Every day this week I woke up with enough time to prepare a green smoothie, pop it in the freezer while I showered and dressed, then take my time getting ready. Temperature, it seems, plays a critical role in how palatable these smoothies become, and drinking them slowly over my commute has been working out reasonably well.

Five days of green smoothies, being on time, and dressing carefully felt like a good start. My lunch choices were approaching  sensible, and almost every day I ate half the lunch portion at work and the other half for dinner, so the damage from poor choices was slightly mitigated.

I also started keeping a food diary, including a column with notes about the way I felt. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first week I got on track with smoothies, I had gastrointestinal pyrotechnics and discomfort most days. I am trying to tell myself it's just my system adjusting from carb-laden garbage to the nutritional assault of raw vegetables and yogurt, but yikes, I hope it gets sorted out soon.

I am also confronted by the not at all surprising discrepancy between the way I think I eat and the way I actually eat. There were an awful lot of handfuls of chocolate-covered things and chips and salsa for someone pretending at eating healthier. And when I am giving myself permission to indulge, I'm really going way off the deep end. It reads like I'm actively trying to gain weight, instead of the exact opposite.

So, I know the issues and I need to work on them. I flopped on exercise besides my daily 4-5 miles (way too hot this week), I ate with abandon on Friday and Saturday, but I made substantial progress on improving my morning routine. And I dutifully drank my green smoothies every day this week. It may be only a glimmer of improvement, but I'll take it. 

Our Own Obsessions

Even by my standards, this is a really long post. I've got about a year's worth of obsessing to catch up on though, so I'm gonna leave it be.

Like most people who are unhappy with their bodies (or maybe most women?) I have particular areas that are more troubling than others, namely my upper arms and midsection. And like anyone who is troubled by a particular body part, I take great pains to hide mine.

I say that I find sleeveless blouses inappropriate for professional settings (I actually believe this) or that I need to wear sweaters because the air conditioning in my office is so cold (this is also true), but I also know I would be mortified if my coworkers or boss saw my bare arms.

My closet is full of little sweaters and shrugs to wear over sleeveless or cap-sleeve dresses in the spring and summer. And yet I found myself reluctant even to wear the shorter-sleeved ones because the fat above my elbow so clearly draws the eye to the flab of the rest. I found myself going to a doctor's appointment the other day, wearing a long-sleeved button-up blouse cuffed to 3/4 length and jeans, despite temperatures in the 90s. That's an October outfit, not something to wear in a summer heatwave.

So I was idly Googling for clothing styles that minimize upper arms (as one does?) and found myself taken aback by the simplicity of a comment, which wasn't at all mean-spirited, but blunt.

I lost track of the page, so allow me to paraphrase:

You need to stop obsessing about your arms. No one but you sees them. People just see big girls, which they either find beautiful or not. They don't care about how and where they're big - that's your own obsession.

I blushed a little, feeling silly and delusional, as if the right length or cut of sleeve could transform my appearance from dramatically overweight to svelte. Whether I'm wearing a long-sleeved cardigan or not, the overall shape of my body is still far too large and far too round.

And yet, I don't want to put my particular obsessions on display. I don't wear form-fitting sheath dresses because they accentuate the largeness of my midsection where they are too tight. I'm shying away from clingy and solid-colored jersey or knit dresses in favor of prints and a bit more structure. I don't tuck things in because that draws attention to the bulge below my waist. So why should I wear tops that hang my upper arms out and invite observations of just how fat my arms may be?

Dysmorphic Denial

Periodically I put my height and weight into Model My Diet and gawk at the Current and Goal versions of myself.

(The 3/4 side view always gets me.)

I think about how dramatically the facial shape changes, to say nothing of the thighs. I think about how much I would enjoy being my Goal weight, and then I start getting denial-y.

"My legs are much more muscular and less fat than these," I think defensively, "but I guess the arms are about right." I try to tell myself that my hips aren't quite so wide, feel quietly grateful that the virtual model doesn't show cellulite, but continue to believe that no, that's not really the size I am.

The same thing happens when I see other women who wear the same clothing size as me. Currently (and for a while now) I've been a 14, though size 16 bottoms are fitting more comfortably than I'd like lately. Tops are usually size L, but if they're particularly fitted or have buttons that I worry will gap across the bust, I go up to an XL. That's about as big as fits in "standard" sizing (which is to say not specifically plus size) off the rack clothing. The few times a year I find myself in stores, there are almost always groups of women going in the dressing room with me, and because they're not obsessive like me, they're really open about the sizes they're trying on and don't act paranoid about who overhears. Seemingly without fail, there will be a woman who seems much larger than me saying that the size 14 is just too big. Or that she should go down to a medium in this top, even though I would have imagined her wearing a 2 or 3X. Maybe we're wearing totally different styles. Maybe they're talking about 14Ws, which I are a different cut. More likely, I am in utter denial about just what size I am and what that looks like.

Weirdly, though, this dysmorphic denial is supported by a lot of evidence and corroboration. As long as I can remember, my mother and I have pointed out strangers and asked, "Am I that size? Bigger or smaller?" etc. to try to get a clearer idea of just how fat we look (this is a delicate and admittedly very warped dance we do). Sometimes it can be cruel, with whispers more like, "I'm not that big, am I??" My mother is always kind and tries to be objective, but when I point out women who really do seem close to my size, she acts like I'm being ridiculous, saying no they're much bigger in these places, they're not as toned etc.

My best friend, who is quite tall and naturally thin (think runway model and you're pretty close) insists that I am average sized (no, I don't ask her crazy questions or talk obsessively about my weight with her). When I chide myself for lack of exercise or guiltily indulge in dessert with her, she says kind things, "You're not fat, I don't know why you always say such awful things about yourself," and even things that are so sweet they strain credulity, "You really don't have any idea how naturally beautiful you are, do you?"

So then I turn where every obsessive woman my age surely turns when she needs to pick on herself and compare herself to her friends: Facebook photos. Shockingly, I don't stand out in a crowd as "the big girl." I don't even look much larger than my best friend, even though we have half a foot height difference and I outweigh her by at least 60 pounds. Friends who I would definitely say are thinner than me in person actually appear larger than me in photos. Sometimes, I even look small and almost delicate.

And yet, the numbers and measurements don't lie. I may be a proportionate, hourglass kind of fat, but I am without question overweight, teetering dangerously close to obese again. I know that I do have muscles (despite my recent lack of athleticism), but these pounds are packed on somewhere.

Do I just hide it well?

What I'm doing about things

Reality or dysmorphia, I know that I need to lose weight and get fitter. I want to be healthier.

This past fall I inherited a small bit of money from a relative who had struggled with weight her whole life. A few years ago she had gastric bypass surgery, which I suspect resulted in malnutrition and never really resolved the issues she had with food and her body.

It was a very sad and sudden loss that I'm still a mess about. To honor her memory, I decided to use some of the money she left me to purchase an elliptical machine, which I am treating as an investment in a healthier lifestyle.

It's a beautiful machine, set up on a soundproof mat in my bedroom, more or less at the foot of my bed and looking out the window. The plan is that I can work out rain or shine, I'm not limited by the hours of the fitness center in my apartment complex or a gym, and gosh, it couldn't be more convenient, could it?

But I think the amount of times I've used it is still in the single digits, which makes me deeply disappointed and ashamed. I have a plethora of excuses about what's been going on in the rest of my life (I had recurring bronchitis all winter, I had massive job stress and depression issues, my apartment is a mess, I'm constantly exhausted, etc. etc.) but the reality is that I just haven't worked it into my daily routine yet. That seriously needs to become a priority.

My family also took on the health and fitness initiative theme for my birthday and Christmas gifts this past year. We tend to give each other gifts in themes, and this year my family gave me things that made me feel feminine and pretty while out in the world (leather gloves, jewelry, a new winter coat) and helped me pursue health and fitness at home (a Fitbit, a 15 pound kettle bell, a blender to make breakfast smoothies).

Wearing my Fitbit every day, I confirmed that my average commute is still 4-5 miles walking with an average of 20-30 flights of stairs, but analyzing the data, I can really see just how much of my day is utterly sedentary. One day I forgot to turn the Fitbit off of sleep tracking, and it said that while I was at my desk at work, I was "sleeping" with 89% efficiency. Oops.

My mother sent me an ebook of kettle bell exercises, which I skimmed and failed to internalize. I know the kettle bell is an excellent workout, but I need to make space in my apartment to use it, along with the weighted hula hoop, hand weights, and yoga mat.

What I'm saying is that I have all the tools I need, and I just have to use them.

And diet, that too...

The sicker I got this fall, the more garbage I ate. My default meals were pizza and Chinese (even though I've sworn off takeaway as many times as I can remember) and I got in the habit of picking up treats every time I was out.

The combination of weeks and weeks of bronchitis, codeine inertia, taking the bus instead of walking, and eating despicably resulted in 20 more pounds packed on rapidly between the summer and winter. More than 6 months later, I haven't lost any of it.

I'm trying to overcome one of my biggest food challenges by ordering organic food, mostly fruits and vegetables, from Fresh Direct. While New York City has an abundance of farmer's markets and groceries, none of them are a reasonable distance from me, or their hours don't work with my schedule. The grocery that is close enough and reasonably priced enough has a dearth of fresh produce - everything is half-rotten, picked over, and forget about organic (it's half a shelf, and it's dreadful). The "produce market" that is walking distance (if I'm feeling ambitious) has almost no organic produce, and what it does have is way overpriced.

I made the decision that I'm either going to pay upfront, a little extra for hormone-free organic milk, or I'll be paying down the line for cancer treatment, heart disease medication, etc. I've watched too many food industry documentaries, read too much Michael Pollan, studied too much biochemistry, and generally become convinced that our food system is as broken as it is corrupt. I realize this topic is super politicized and people are as vehement about our food choices now as we've been about religion in centuries past.

But the bottom line is that, as much as I can help it, I don't want to consume pesticides, antibiotics, or hormones. I would like to eat minimally processed real food, which mostly translates to meals I prepare myself, predominated by organic vegetables, whole grains, and free-range grass-fed beef, venison, or pole-caught fish (my brother and father respectively provide as much venison and fish as I request). I'm not all sanctimonious about it when I go out for meals (which is frequently) and don't ask friends or family about the ingredient sources in food they prepare. But for the food that I control, I'm trying to make better daily choices - that's where Fresh Direct has been a godsend.

The other sticking point with food has been at work, where we have a uniquely generous arrangement that the president buys everyone lunch, if we order in and eat at our desks. The lunch portions from most restaurants are usually large enough to split in two, to take the second half home for dinner. The trouble comes when I pick something unhealthy for lunch and then have the leftovers for dinner - it becomes two bad choices.

Two of my coworkers (a very thin woman about my age and an athletic guy in his late 20s) decided they would eat healthy lunches starting in the new year. (The guy used to request things like fried chicken or Mongolian barbecue and complain when I suggested somewhere that sounded too healthy.) My third coworker always wants deep fried food, barbecue, or Asian skillet things, which are not notoriously healthy. I get stuck in the middle trying to mitigate between another day of "Oh, I'd just like salad" and "How about Chinese?" It's not pleasant, and I am frequently so busy that I don't have time to eat until late in the afternoon, or I eat my lunch for dinner (nothing like a salad on my commute home at 9pm).

Increasingly, I've been going vegetarian for lunch, unless the meats are advertised as organic, grass-fed etc. (it's NYC - I actually saw one menu that kept listing Grass-Fed Cheese and it took me several times to get how that made sense). I don't kid myself that a curry made with fried tofu is much healthier than a curry with chicken, but I am trying to avoid the hormones and antibiotics in unknown meats. I also find that I am a champion at turning a healthy idea fattening - how about some cheese and avocado in that salad? Not the best choices.

As I've said, I haven't lost any weight yet, but I've stopped gaining and I feel considerably better. Replacing processed foods, sugars, and questionable meats with mostly organic vegetables and whole grains is making my system happier and more functional.

Now if only I can get up to speed on water.

The Most Important Meal of the Day

Breakfast is still a big challenge for me. My go-to is a bagel with cream cheese and a Diet Dr. Pepper. It's not healthy, and it costs about $4 each day.

I had all intentions of becoming a breakfast smoothie convert, using an adaptation of my brother's green smoothie recipe (loads of baby spinach, a banana, a glop of almond or peanut butter, chocolate whey powder, some yogurt, and some milk or chocolate soy milk). They're usually tasty and filling enough (I've been keeping a stash of raw almonds at my desk if I find myself famished and unable to get to lunch) and I can certainly see the health benefits. The trouble is, they're time consuming to prepare (my mornings have become seriously disorganized and hectic) and so easy to skip. A few days I gulped the smoothie down before getting in the shower and felt grossly overfull all morning, so I've learned to pack it in an aluminum bottle and sip it gradually through the morning.

It's too easy to skip a few days in a row and find myself with gooey spinach and nearly rotten bananas. "I'm just blending it all up anyway," I'll think to myself, then end up with something vile-tasting and stomach-churning, which puts me off the whole endeavor for the rest of the week.

In short, the smoothies are a chore, both to make and to consume. Maybe I need to start making them in the evenings and refrigerating them. Maybe I need to tweak my recipe. Maybe I just need to suck it up and deal with a nutritious breakfast, even if it's easier and more enjoyable to eat a bagel on the subway.

The Common Thread

It may not be immediately obvious, but what I see in writing all this out is that one of the biggest obstacles to a healthier lifestyle is actually my apartment. It's been ridiculously cluttered for months now, with tons of laundry, half-packed and half-unpacked boxes, piles of papers I need to go through and shred, closets that I've started to empty out and hastily refilled the wrong way, and things generally out of place everywhere.

The kitchen counter that would be most comfortable for chopping vegetables and preparing food is covered over with things I took out of cabinets and didn't finish reorganizing. I have a lot of dishes to wash and laundry to do. I can't exercise when my living room feels like a hoarder moved in (it's actually just the contents of my closets strewn around impractically), and it's difficult to focus on the elliptical when I know that I am neglecting so many things I should be tidying.

I've never been neat, and I know it's unhealthy to live in such a mess, but it's more nefarious than a stack of shoeboxes that I should get around to taking to the recycling room or a suitcase I didn't finish unpacking taking up a bunch of space in my bedroom. These little clusters of clutter and laziness (or depression or whatever you would call it) are inhibiting my ability to function. And that's really not okay.

Something I didn't really talk about (maybe not at all?) was the relationship I was in from last February through October-ish. It was a pleasant enough relationship that made me happy while I was in it and sad when I chose to end it. He was a lovely man, but we want different things in life, and we had insurmountable cultural differences and incompatible beliefs in the end.

Why I mention it is that just before we started dating, I spent a weekend cleaning my apartment from top to bottom, going all out until every nook and cranny was spotless. Almost all of the time my boyfriend and I spent together was in my apartment (another reason it didn't work out), and for several months I kept things in a constant state of ready-for-company clean. Around the same time our relationship started to fall apart, I stopped taking care of my apartment, leaving the kitchen a mess after I cooked dinner, reverting to old habits of not doing laundry for months at a time (I have a serious overabundance of clothing), starting projects and leaving all the supplies wherever I abandoned them, and by the time I ended our relationship for good, my apartment was well and truly on its way to becoming a disaster again.

I think back on those months fondly, not just with the rose-colored glasses of a relationship when it was good, but of how comfortable and relaxed I was in my own home. When my apartment was clean, my mornings were pleasant and efficient. I was early to work every day (for months now, I've been routinely late). I enjoyed cooking meals because my kitchen was always clean and ready to use. I could enjoy all my little artistic and crafty hobbies without guilt.

The messier my apartment got, the more I would recede. Eventually, it got to where I would change from work clothes into pajamas, eat whatever I could microwave for dinner in bed, and fall asleep watching half a television show on the computer, waking up a few hours later exhausted, the lights still on, and feeling like all I did with my life was go to work and back.

I know that if I had come home to a clean and inviting apartment, I would have been encouraged to cook and eat a real dinner, I would have spent some time relaxing and doing something interesting instead of laying down to watch TV, and hey, I could even have the motivation to exercise if it didn't involve moving a bunch of boxes first.

So I can see plain as day that I need to get my apartment back in order, for my own health and happiness.

TL;DR Summary

• Most people don't see the specific ways I'm fat, they just see that I'm fat. Still, I'm not going to hang my arms out or accentuate the fat if I can help it.
• I am in total denial about how fat I am but I recognize how much I need to address this problem.
• I bought an elliptical machine and have a bunch of exercise stuff that goes shamefully underused.
• I've been changing my diet, not "dieting," and lunch at work is challenging.
• I have to sort out breakfast.
• My apartment is both symbolic of and a major contributing factor to most of my health and fitness challenges lately. I need to get it together.

I hope to have some positive progress to report soon.

One day at a time

This is not a grand reemergence into a thoroughly documented pursuit of a healthier lifestyle (yet). This is the beginning of the things I am doing to get my life on track.

1) Fridge stocked with all organic food, mostly vegetables. I have a solid meal plan for the week.

2) 45 min on the elliptical machine. Properly red-faced and sweaty. Now I just need to do that every day.

3) Washing some particularly gross clothes and dishes. Because my apartment makes me feel distraught when it's not clean.

Plan to spend the rest of the night cleaning, cooking, and grooming, so I can do more tomorrow.

January and I'm on my way

Hooray Sleep!

I realize how busy my past semester became that I didn't even post between October and now. Since then I've turned 30 (I'm surprisingly happy about that?), went through a lot of stress, and hit my breaking point.

An irregular sleep cycle and sleep deprivation was causing more damage than I even realized. I knew it was generally "bad" for me, but I hadn't pinpointed just what poor sleep does to the mind and body. It exacerbates anxiety, erodes attention and focus, contributes to feelings of distraction and intrusive thoughts, and more than anything, messes up the metabolism to the point of hopelessness. Somewhere around final exams, I decided enough was enough. I wasn't going to pull all-nighters anymore, and I resolved to make a regular, healthy sleep schedule one of my most serious priorities.

The first few days of my semester break, I slept like it was my job. Gradually, while visiting my family, I started waking up early and going to bed fairly early in the evening. I was trying my hardest to get on a solid sleep-wake cycle to put my best foot forward (for once in my life). I'm encouraged that since this semester started, I've gone to bed at a reasonable hour and woken up feeling unusually refreshed and energized most days. Several days, I woke up before my alarm, feeling terrific. It is my sincerest hope that I'm able to manage my time and my coursework so that I can maintain this schedule, augmented with even more exercise.

Speaking of Exercise

I also took a serious look at my course load and daily schedule, plotting out times during the week that I would go to the gym at school. The semester started January 18th, and it's probably not surprising that I've skipped more of those intended times than I've made. I tried to make up for the missed workouts by doing double sessions at the next one, but I could see quickly that I needed to find another time and place to exercise.

This afternoon after skipping the scheduled long session to go grocery shopping and clean my kitchen (because I have been living on takeout since the semester started too), I decided to pay the fee to use the gym room in my apartment complex. I had kind of forgotten that I had a gym on the premises because when I moved here, I didn't believe I'd ever find myself happy on an elliptical machine or treadmill, and I'm delighted to see how wrong I was about that. The gym room is open from 6am to 11pm, so it is conceivable to exercise before class (most mornings I have to get in the shower by 8 am and leave by 9), as well as in the evenings. This alleviates the time crunch I was experiencing in the middle of the day, when I might have had barely enough time to exercise, but not enough time to shower and dress again afterwards. Or, more commonly, I found I needed the breaks between classes to finish up homework or make progress on projects, and it does seem more sensible to focus on doing well in my classes.

I will probably still try to use the gym at school, especially for some of the weight machines that my small apartment gym is lacking. I just have to be certain that if I decide to come home and workout here, I'll actually do it, instead of getting settled into my warm, comfortable apartment and blowing the gym off entirely.

Another major advantage of the gym here is that I'm now much more inclined to exercise on the weekends. My general pattern of activity is strong Monday through Thursday, and then I become completely sedentary for the three days that I work on assignments and take care of errands. While I love my commute, I'm probably never going to make it just to use the gym at school, nor would I invent occasion to be on campus on the weekend. But if I only have to put clothes on and walk across the courtyard... well, that seems much more feasible.

In addition to actual at-the-gym exercise (which I hope will become much more vigorous and lengthy soon), I've continued walking, averaging 4-5 miles 4 days or more a week. The clip on my pedometer recently broke, which is giving me a headache, but in reviewing my January data, I see that I've walked (and sometimes hiked) a total of 52.99 miles, for an estimated 5087 calories burned.

January Pedometer Readings

Week 1 (Jan 1-7)
17,674 steps, 1805 of which were at a moderate pace (16 min), estimated 533 kcal and 5.96 miles

Week 2 (Jan 8-14)
26,013 steps, 12,102 of which were at a moderate pace (99 min), estimated 986 kcal, 10.23 miles

Week 3 (Jan 15-21)
52,395 steps, 31,219 of which were at a moderate pace (258 min), estimated 2158 kcal, 22.15 miles

Week 4 (Jan 22-28)
38,796 steps, 13,868 of which were at a moderate pace (119 min), estimated 1410 kcal, 14.65 miles

I'm going back and forth on whether to rig together some repair to this pedometer, to buy a replacement of the same kind, or to upgrade to something more exacting, like one of those combination pedometer/heart rate monitors. Most likely, the lower tech and lower cost, the better for me, since I'm not exactly doing extreme exercise yet. Emphasis on yet.

Another big change is simply one of attitude. I made myself the promise, in the middle of yet another end-of-semester nervous breakdown, "I will not stress out about school anymore." I mean, I know that I have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time, and that it's difficult work. I knew that when I chose to do this degree, and nothing has changed. So why stress out all the time? It is entirely within my capacity to stay on top of my work and make it that I don't need to sacrifice sleep, exercise, or my mental health for the sake of academia ever again.

God I hope I'm right about that.

Restored motivation

When I was registering for this fall's classes last spring, I was mainly stressing about the difficulty and time demands of the lab classes I'm taking, so I added in a 2-credit Wellness and Physical Fitness class to round out my schedule. This seemingly blow-off decision has turned out to be a highly fortuitous one because I am finally, finally getting on track with my fitness and weight loss goals.

As it turns out, school is one of the few things I prioritize appropriately, so making my fitness part of a course requirement actually forces me to pay attention to what I'm doing, to treat workout sessions as assignments I must complete, and to take my reflection essays and progress seriously. Thank goodness!

A guiding philosophy

One of the best components of this class is its balanced and well-rounded approach. I had assumed, like many students, that the class would solely consist of working out in the gym once a week (since that is what most college fitness classes are), and I was feeling a little foolish for spending tuition credit on an essentially extremely overpriced gym membership. It turns out, though, that this class is structured around the ideas laid out in Dr Irwin Schwartz's The Awesome Foursome, a book I highly recommend.

The four components of wellness and fitness are addressed in tandem: sensible eating, cardiovascular exercise, stretching, and weight training. It seems dumb, but prior to reading this book, I didn't realize the connection, for example, between flexibility and toning - the more of your muscles you are able to use, the more effectively you can tone them throughout, and as a consequence, the shapelier you can become. Duh, right? And yet, I've gone almost 30 years without recognizing this relationship.

My class has so far introduced a new component each week and integrated them with the others. It was particularly eye-opening to keep a three-day food journal and perform a nutritional analysis on my caloric intake (I'll write much more about that in a separate entry). I'm glad that both the professor and this book don't embrace dieting or any gimmicky weight-loss system (I can't count the amount of fitness-minded people who have blathered on about carbs, and even this summer, I was seriously considering the Dukan Diet to try to drop weight quickly). Instead, the emphasis is on developing a balanced, sensible eating lifestyle, which has been one of my long-term goals around here for a while.

And wow, I love exercise...?

In addition to eating well and living mindfully, the major work in this pursuit is exercise, whose benefits I have long known and yet long avoided. Maybe it's just showing up at the gym in workout clothes, or having the requirement that I can't skip class and don't want to lie on my workout journals. Whatever accountability I needed, I finally have it, and I'm feeling it in my own motivation.

For example, no one will ever know about my deal with myself to take the stairs all the time, even if my class is on the sixth floor or I'm really tired and want to just get on the ferry to go home. But I know, and I've stopped accepting my own excuses. I can finally say, "You spent all that time on a treadmill and you can't walk up 20 or 30 stairs??" and by the time I've finished arguing with myself, it's done.

This week's assignment included developing a workout schedule to fit the aerobic activities, strength/endurance training, and stretching into my daily routine. I will admit: this is a task I've been meaning to do for literally years and came up with so many excuses and contingencies it's absurd. I finally sat down for about twenty minutes, armed with the schedule to a pool and the knowledge of feasibility in using the gym at my school, and I mapped out minimally six times a week that I can work out. Some were blindingly simple: stay for a half hour to 45 min after class to get in an extra workout; others required a bit of planning (go to the afternoon swimming session so I have the evening free for homework and errands). Now that I have my schedule, I need to put it on my calendar and treat it like class or a social commitment I don't want to miss - for whatever reason, if something makes it to my calendar, I'm 95% more likely to do it than if I just "mean to."

My personal challenge will be in maintaining the discipline to actually get to the pool and swim at all my scheduled times, since obviously it would be easier to nap on my couch or knit and watch TV on the internet during that same time. All my distractions and procrastinatory tasks will still be there after swimming, and I have to remember these workouts are something I'm doing for myself because I like myself and I want to be fitter.

Most of all, positivity

The most helpful thing about this class and about this particular approach to weight loss and fitness has been positivity, which I believe stems from a gradual introduction of lifestyle changes and brutal honesty with myself. In the past, I've been quickly discouraged by trying to take on too many changes at once, then abandoning them all as soon as I get stressed out. This time, I can accept that I won't get it all right and I'm bound to slip up and make mistakes, but at least for this whole semester, I am committed to sticking with it, to continuing to show up and talk about what progress I've made and what more I'm attempting.

I am able to tell myself, in almost all cases, "Hey, it's okay. You're working on it," and finally, it's the truth.

Attaining lifelong sensible eating habits and physical fitness is not something that happens overnight or in two weeks if I just start some crash diet and exercise. Yes, I want to drop a significant amount of weight, and yes, it would be terrific if it would happen quickly. But the real reward would be developing the habits of going to the gym, maintaining a schedule that includes exercise and time to take care of my body, and learning how to adjust my eating habits to a healthy but manageable "non-diet" that fits in my real life. Becoming accustomed to muscle soreness and fatigue, as a reminder of the hard work I did at the gym that day, is a real treat and something I've desperately missed since my years as an athlete.

I finally have regained the faith that slowly, eventually, and gently, I will transform myself into the fitter, healthier person I've missed so dearly, and by doing it carefully and kindly, it will become a lasting lifestyle change. I can't even begin to describe the way I am filled with happiness and enthusiasm about it.

The mind/body connection, depression, and a lengthy discussion of gastrointestinal health

Scintillating title, no? I have a lot to talk about, since I've had a lot of time to think, on account of being sick for what feels like the hundredth time this year, with another sinus infection and bronchitis (we'll talk more about that in a bit).

My Kitchen: A picture of depression

I'm spending a lot of this weekend doing massive spring cleaning. It's been slow going, both because I am sick and because I have a really lot of cleaning to do.

Looking around my apartment, I could see piles of unattended laundry, papers I've been too overwhelmed to sort, and most prominently, a disaster area of a kitchen. To put it plainly, it had become a repository for recycling and garbage. When I get very deeply depressed or consumed with anxiety, I tend not to take out the recycling, for God knows what reason, and it's... a lot right now. (Fortunately it is all bagged up and ready to bring to the recycling room in the morning, when I am not in a problematically revealing nightgown.)

The thing I realized, though, is that this kitchen (and my apartment) is literally a visualization of a depressed mind at work. When I first moved into this apartment, I was so optimistic about cooking my own meals again, chopping vegetables and using my nice pots and pans, taking pleasure in the rituals of preparing food. For the first few weeks I lived here, I made tea in the morning and sipped it out of teacups with saucers, then delighted in putting them in the dishwasher (I've never had a dishwasher in an apartment before). I cooked breakfasts, prepared lunches, and always took great care to wipe the counters and sink clean before going to bed. I have absolutely no idea when or how my life got so out of control and I lost that, but I suspect it was during the first big depression I had in October/November, which feels like a thick fog in my memory now.

A few times while cleaning the kitchen, I had the thought that I hated spending time in there. I wondered if it was because the window is jammed shut by a repair that was done to the windowsill (have been meaning to call maintenance since moving in) or that the last time I used my oven it set off the carbon monoxide detector (ditto on calling maintenance), or if it was some feng shui issue with the narrowness of the space in proportion to the ceiling height or what have you. But really, I don't think it was any of these things (at least not entirely). I didn't like experiencing a physical space where I'd let myself down, abandoned my good intentions and replaced home-cooked meals with takeout and pizza boxes. I didn't like standing around in the evidence of my mind giving up and checking out.

So tomorrow's first item on my to do list is to finish cleaning my kitchen, this time including the hands-and-knees floor scrubbing, bleaching every surface variety of cleaning. I want to get it back to the pristine, well-organized, and charming space I first set up, and I want to use it the way I did in the first month or so I lived here, as my nice adult sanctuary that let me feel in control of my life each morning and evening.

Anxiety and sickness... and am I a hostile person?

I watched another great episode of Scientific American Frontiers called Worried Sick, where Alan Alda hosts a fascinating exploration of the impact of stress, including emotional and social anxiety, on wellness.

It was startling to hear researchers confirm and explain exactly what I've known all along: the stress response halts other biological functions, including fighting infection and healing. Literally, the more stressed out you are, the less healthy you will be. It is no coincidence whatsoever that when I become utterly stressed out with exams or personal stuff, I get a terrible cold or digestive malady. While I should be a reasonably healthy person, I'm physically unable to fight off cold germs, and where my body should be able to stop things at a mild sinus infection, I more typically get terrible bronchitis and lately, borderline or full-blown pneumonia. That ain't right, and it's all me, neglecting my health, pushing my body too hard, and stressing out the whole time so it is unable to function the way it's supposed to.

The program also discussed the role personality, especially one's level of hostility, plays in the extent to which stress is experienced. I would more or less consider myself a kind, warm person, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that yeah, I can be incredibly hostile. When I am in the midst of a funk, usually brought on by some trivial emotional thing and compounded by stress from school, I become intensely misanthropic, with a short temper and feeling constantly annoyed. I try not to lash out too much at people in my daily life because obviously it's not their fault that I'm angry with a friend, but bottling it up and seething still has the same internal effect, if not worse because I'm not learning to express myself in a healthy way.

I realized that I am prone to fits of rage at people, provoked or not, if I think about them while I am in the wrong mood. When I'm not stressed out or depressed, I'm mostly fine with everyone in my life, or if I'm not, it's with a distant and fleeting sort of disinterest, as if there were a bad smell on an otherwise lovely day. When I'm down, though, everything a person has said or done is subject to mulling over and becoming a source of intense annoyance or fury. I go from basically not caring to absolute, all-consuming anger. Because I know my feelings toward people can be so mercurial, I rarely do anything active to confront others for hurtful things they've said or done, but instead decide that I am completely done with them and want no further contact ever. It's alarming how quickly and effortlessly I've cut people out of my life, and it's usually so sudden and seemingly unprovoked that most people don't notice anyway. I really don't like this about myself, and I need to figure out a more mature, healthy way to address conflict that doesn't result in the psychological equivalent of "F you, get out of my life."

Further, this tendency toward incredible and sudden anger and abandonment wrecks havoc on my system. A friend who said something carelessly unkind in February has no idea that in March I was near tears with how overwhelmingly furious I became at her for it. My stomach twisted in knots, my sleep got all messed up, and within a few days, I was in bed sick with one of a series of awful cold/flu things that I contracted this winter. Meanwhile, I never said anything to her, didn't respond to her notes that she hadn't heard from me in a while, and I wrote her out of my life. That's cruel to her and to me, and my body punished me like hell for all the stress I had over it.

Colon health and the immune response

Now, for the lengthy discussion of gastrointestinal health, which I will attempt to keep as clinical, if not entirely nonspecific, as possible. Fair warning, if you're not looking for discussions of colons and the things they do, I'd suggest skipping ahead to the next section.

I have more or less been diagnosed with colitis, which is a tricky diagnosis because it describes a number of multi-symptomatic digestive issues. I say more or less because I was hospitalized in 2006 for a massive intestinal infection, which at the time was described as colitis in the sense that my large intestine was terribly swollen and there was... blood... coming out of places it wasn't supposed to (an excruciating pain I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy). After a few nights in the hospital on IV antibiotics and a liquid diet, the infection cleared up and I was released, but I had to reintroduce foods timidly, finding that things that had never upset my stomach before suddenly did. When I talked with my doctor later, she said that colitis was most commonly caused by stress, and that while the infection may have been the instigating event, colitis could become a chronic, incredibly painful and frustrating condition. At the time I was in a really ugly, intensely stressful relationship, so her orders to relax and remove stress from my life weren't met until two years later, during which time I had all kinds of discomforts ranging from bloating or gas to full on can't-leave-the-house illness.

I also saw an alarming uptick in the frequency and duration of colds that I got during this time, which was also explained by my doctor as related to the situation with my digestive system. As I reckon everyone has learned from the marketing of probiotic yogurts and diet supplements, a significant amount of the immune system is housed in the intestines and includes the natural flora and fauna. My time in the hospital and the IV antibiotics flushed out everything good in my system, and subsequent episodes of umm, extensive involuntary purging, further assaulted the slowly remerging balance of bacteria and such.

As with many people who experience colitis or colitis-like conditions, I found that digestive sensitivity increased in direct correlation with stress levels, and I could more or less count on my system falling to pieces when I most needed to be at my best. My digestive health in shambles, it's a matter of days before I get some infectious disease that renders me incapable of functioning at all, and I retreat to the health center for orders of fluids, bed rest, and powerful antibiotics... which... you guessed it, further wreck my digestive tract.

Seeing this as a cyclical problem and knowing that the general public isn't going to stop coughing or sneezing on me no matter how much I sanitize my hands or hold my breath, I need to find a way to fix my gastrointestinal situation before it a) becomes truly chronic and b) leaves me with essentially no immune system or ability to fight disease.

I started by taking bacteria supplements about a year ago, which sounds disgusting, but actually makes a good deal of sense when you consider that the problem is all the good bacteria getting killed by antibiotics or flushed out: take a pill full of good bacteria and uhh, repopulate one's intestines, right? I also tried to eat yogurt and lots of fruits and vegetables, and for a few months, things were looking alright. Then I had a devastating romantic situation fall to pieces, fell into a lengthy, terrible depression, and predictably my digestive system fell apart again. I didn't really recover by the time I started school in the fall, and moving to a city full of sick people has made everything much worse.

Now that I am once again on a course of antibiotics (two weeks of Biaxin, ugh), my system has responded by bailing on everything, and I mean everything, to the point where I lost three pounds in one morning. I am slowly getting over the sinus infection and bronchitis, but I know that the antibiotics will leave me defenseless and sensitive. So this time I am eating probiotic yogurt and cottage cheese, and once I am off the antibiotics, I'm going to start the bacteria supplements again (that still sounds so gross). I'm going to eat tons of vegetables, drink the proper amount of water, and focus on colon health as a means to prevent sickness.

My goal is that by this time next year, I have little to no symptoms of colitis and I can regain normal digestive functioning. I have no idea if this is a reasonable goal or not because my insurance changed, I had to switch doctors, and the new one won't even talk to me about what I can do until I get a colonoscopy and see a GI specialist (which the insurance doesn't cover). I do intend to get the stupid colonoscopy to rule out cancer or any other conditions, and I will have to see a GI specialist to do so, but I want to try to get the symptoms under control on my own first. Essential to success in this is, of course, managing my stress, since, as we initially established, colitis is a stress-related condition.

And to come completely full circle, to stop stressing my body, I have to stop stressing my mind.

Natural anti-depressants

This past year has taught me two important lessons:
1) that I am emotionally still very immature, with poor coping mechanisms.
2) I really do not have my depression or mood cycling under control at all.

If you asked my mother, she would say that the second is a direct result of the first, which may be true, but I sincerely believe there is an organic component to what's going on in my brain that goes well beyond my rational control. My mom has not dealt with any type of mental illness, so she perceives depressive people as wallowing and those with mood disorders as having no impulse control. I've tried to explain to her that it's not just a decision you make one morning, that you're going to feel sorry for yourself for a while and that whenever you want, you can "snap out of it," as she believes. It feels much more like coming down with the flu, where your brain becomes a foggy and unrecognizably grim version of itself, your body becomes hopelessly exhausted and achey, the things that gave you incredible joy just days before don't even register, and you can't control your thoughts, which become increasingly morbid, angry, distraught, overwhelmed, and in the milder times listless.

I hate myself when I'm depressed, and I can never determine whether depression sets in because something bad or stressful happens in my life, or if I experience life events as terrible because my brain is cycling into depression. When I think about what I would have considered "triggering episodes" in the past, many of them seem utterly inconsequential, but it was the most important thing in the world at the moment. My brain spiraled around itself in endless rumination, and I was mentally shouting at myself to just shut up, quit obsessing, and be happy again. It feels like a fist in my chest, this tight inability to breathe or relax, and as unexpectedly as it comes on, it dissipates, usually a few weeks later. My mood comes around, I smile at something small or notice some bit of beauty, and I start to feel okay about things again. I wouldn't say the thing I smiled about got me out of the depression, so it doesn't entirely make sense to say the first thing that got me down was what caused it either.

What I do know is that while my moods will fluctuate, maybe more rapidly and inexplicably than others', I need them to not get so extreme for such long periods. Being full-on clinically depressed for two months straight is just not okay, and I need some way to pull myself out of it before it effects my health, academics, social life, and so on more than it already has.

My insurance only covers five therapy sessions per year, and I haven't found therapy helpful for treating depression in the past anyway. When I was on Zoloft, my therapy sessions became terse discussions of my sleep/wake cycle, making sure I wasn't suicidal (I would never do that), and then nagging me to talk to the receptionist about my insurance again (she was a terrible psychiatrist, I see in hindsight). I kept trying to talk to her about changes I could make to my diet to stave off the sudden weight gain (10 pounds a month for 6 months) or if maybe melatonin would be better for insomnia than the crazy coma-inducing pills she prescribed, but yeah, nothing doing. I stopped taking Zoloft without weaning myself off properly, and I've been really leery to go for any pharmaceuticals since.

I've tried a combination of St John's wort, gingko, and ginseng in the past, but I've never stuck with it enough to have a lasting long-term effect. I'm not sure if it's because I was taking too many pills at a time or if it just wasn't working, but I want to try an herbal approach again when I am done with this round of antibiotics.

The biggest and most important anti-depressant I need to implement is exercise. I know, and have always known, that exercise plays a powerful role in regulating moods, promoting healthy sleep and digestive functioning, and contributing to overall health and well-being, but in spite of all this, I avoid it like the plague. I am at something of a crossroads where I have to decide if I hate running more than I hate being depressed and having colitis all my life, and I think it's pretty easy to say no, nothing is worse than that fate, even if it's hot and I hate it and I want to cry through it.

One form of exercise that I may not find as odious as I found jogging in the winter is walking on the beach. As it is, I walk around 4-5 miles 4 times a week for my commute to school, but that's evidently not sufficient for either stress reduction or weight loss. I recently discovered that I live pretty close to a huge beach, and though I am going to be very busy taking intensive classes this summer, I want to make time to walk on the beach, preferably at a brisk pace, so I get some sunshine and exercise.

I've also found that I quite enjoy hiking, and I want to start working my way up through day hikes. Tentatively, I can make Sunday my hiking day, which means I must manage my schoolwork and personal life to keep this day available. It's a sticky wicket, but I think it will be a good reward for living my life in balance (that accomplishment alone will have to help all other matters).

Coming soon: Austerity Measures

I've started to chart out what I'm calling my Austerity Measures for the rest of the summer. Motivated equally by the desire to eat healthier and stop pissing money away on garbage food I can't afford, I'm making myself something of an un-diet plan, where I decide on certain foods that I'll eat for regular meals and sort out how to prepare them efficiently and economically.

I will confess that while getting textbooks on Amazon, I also bought a new diet book, but for the first time in my life, I'm going to read the book and think about it before half-assedly launching into the diet. The appeal of this particular diet is that people seem to lose weight on it very quickly, but it avoids the pitfalls of similar diets, particularly in regards to gastrointestinal health. I will give it a thorough read and make a decision if that's what I'm going to do, but in the meantime, I'll be charting out my Austerity Measures.

I'm going to use the end of my antibiotics course as the day when I start my un-diet in earnest. That is to say, I'm not going to buy cookies or cupcakes or junk anymore, and I will not order takeout or pizza no matter what. I'm starting to segue into it, with meals at regular times and lots of water, and over the next 10 days or so (I've lost count) I'd like to ramp up to the full plan.

I know that realistic and thorough planning will be essential to success, and I have to keep going about this with the right attitude: I am not punishing or depriving myself - I am being kind to myself and doing right by my body. I am not beating myself up to try to lose weight - I am eating right and exercising to improve my health and well-being.

I think really good things are about to come.

Mind Over Fatter: Attitudes Toward Weight

As the stress of this semester is mounting relentlessly, I realize that I have slipped back into atrocious habits and predictably, my weight is creeping back up. I am always somewhere between 180-184, and 185 is my mental cut-off for when I seriously have to get back on track, but it bothers me that I'm eating in such an unhealthy way that I can walk several miles and burn 400 or more calories 5 times or more per week, yet still not lose weight.

I watched a great episode of Scientific American Frontiers from 2003 (worth it for the nostalgia alone) called "Losing It," where Alan Alda joins a small group of New Englanders trying to lose weight and keep it off through a variety of methods. As they were clear to point out, following dieters for 6 months cannot comprise a scientific study, but by having the subjects keep video diaries and discuss their struggles, they hoped to gain some insight into the psychological process of the weight loss challenge.



(I've embedded it above, and you can watch it on Hulu here.)

This program was made before The Biggest Loser or the host of weight-loss reality shows that cropped up in the years since, and I liked that it followed normal people in their everyday lives. They still had to go to work, pay for the food themselves, wear their own dumpy clothes instead of getting celebrity makeovers, and so on. It had a level of authenticity that I found much more relatable, since most people trying to lose weight don't have eight hour blocks of time to go to the gym every day between filming confessionals and endorsing sponsored products with debatable subtlety.

I also enjoyed examining the different weight-gain scenarios that had gotten the participants to this place in their lives and the different diet and exercise options they attempted. I was amused, for example, by a woman scrolling through eDiets and saying that no, peanut butter and jelly probably wouldn't go over well with her family for dinner, having had that exact struggle when I lived with a resistant boyfriend. I got to see what Weight Watchers meetings might be like and consider if the communal aspect was a good one, and I also saw people who followed more generalized diet plans, like eating Mediterranean style foods or pursuing a modified Atkins (does this sound familiar?).

Alda and the filmmakers explored some of the science behind weight gain, hunger, and the struggle for weight loss, and they revisited some of the discoveries I've made along the way, such as the myth of low-fat foods. They didn't tread any particularly revolutionary ground for me, but in addition to being entertaining, it gave me a good opportunity to think about what I've been doing and why.


A problem well-stated...

One of my favorite (and probably overused) expressions is, "A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved." So often we are able to identify what is wrong or what we'd like to change, but until we pinpoint why and how this problem came to be, the course of action to solve it remains vague and tenuous.

In my case, I am keenly aware of my bad habits, and one would think all I'd have to do is list them out, then put a big "STOP" before each one et voilà, problems half-solved.

Obviously it's a bit more complex, so I've started to consider more specifically why I have the bad habits that I do.

The behaviors behind the bad habits

• Ordering Take-Out or Eating Convenience Foods - This is by far one of my most egregious diet sabotage maneuvers, as no matter how terrible I know it is for my health, I find myself ordering pizza or Chinese take-out way too frequently. I don't even want it, often, or enjoy it once I get it, but it's more about avoiding cooking or going to the store than craving that particular type of food. When I do go to the store, I am full of ambition and make healthy choices, but then I find most of the vegetables rot in my fridge and I only eat the prepackaged, unhealthy convenience foods.
  
  Why am I so loathe to cook? It's actually embarrassingly simple. My kitchen is usually incredibly messy. The less I cook, the worse it gets, until that whole room becomes little more than a repository for pizza boxes and take-out trash. I seem to fall behind on dishwashing way too easily, even with a dishwasher, and especially since I made an effort to reduce the amount of pots and pans and kitchen stuff I have, it feels like I never have anything clean to cook in. I can't count the amount of times I've wiped out and reused the same crepe pan to make grilled cheese sandwiches, rather than take the few minutes to properly wash my cutting boards and pots to prepare the more balanced dishes I planned.
  
  I would say, in truth, that the messy kitchen is probably one of my biggest healthy eating deterrents at this point, and I need to commit a window of time where I get my whole apartment in order so I can live more productively here.



• Not Drinking Enough Water - I know that my health will vastly improve if I replace the crazy amount of Diet Coke I drink with water. The truth is, I hate drinking water, but when I start, I tend to gulp it down by the liter because my body is so dehydrated. My system responds problematically to water initially, with a bloated, excessively full and sloshy feeling, and then of course, I have to pee thirty five thousand times an hour, which is usually what causes me to go back to sweet, dehydrating soda.
  
  Further, water does not have the caffeine on which I seem to depend, and because I don't drink coffee and rarely drink tea, I sip diet soda as a gradual pick-me-up throughout the day. On particularly bad days, I take caffeine pills too, so I don't actually *need* the caffeine from soda, but I feel more awake by sipping it.
  
  I know that if I want to feel more awake and alert, I need to get a good night's sleep, which comes from a healthy diet, exercise, and drinking plenty of water. Vicious cycle, but a conceptually simple one. I also know that I will not always feel sloshy and like I'm about to wet my pants once my body unshrivels from its Diet Coke snare and reestablishes a more hydrated equilibrium.
  
  Bonus (and this is something I do know from chemistry): by adding more solvent (water) to my system, the metabolic reactions necessary to provide energy, and eventually lose weight, can proceed more readily and efficiently than they do now. Which is to say nothing of the gastrointestinal benefits I'm sure to experience with proper hydration.



• Indulging in Sweets - I have a massive sweet tooth. I always have, and I tend not to feel satisfied after meals unless I have something sweet. More problematically, though, I use sweets to comfort myself and feel better if I'm having a bad day, scarfing down cookies, jelly beans, candies, little cakes, and suchlike with abandon. The more stressed I am, the more thoughtlessly I add "treats" to my shopping baskets, and at several points this semester, I found myself with several bags of Easter candy floating around my apartment. I recently got in a car accident and bought so much candy while I was upset that I've had an unopened bag of Oreos on top of my fridge for two weeks.
  
  The obvious solution seems to be to never buy this stuff in the first place. It's not like I'm going to leave my apartment and walk to the store to buy a bag of cookies, but if they're on top of my fridge, I will eventually eat them all. It's more than that, though, since replacing the processed garbage sweets with healthier alternatives like yogurts and fruit doesn't help - it all just rots in my fridge or on my counter, and I feel sad and deprived. I need to address the emotional difficulties in my life in a way that's healthier and more constructive than binge-eating. My stress response may seem physically demanding, but it certainly doesn't require 3500 calories at a time.



• Body Image - I would be lying if I didn't admit that the biggest reason I want to lose weight is to be more attractive. I am painfully aware of the health concerns and risks associated with being overweight, but at age 29, I'm more upset about looking bad in my clothes and not getting the right kind of attention from guys. The flip-side is that because I am on this cusp between overweight and officially capital-O Obese, I can tell myself it's not as serious as it is. When I allude to my need to lose weight, basically everyone in my life looks perplexed and says something like, "But you're not obese - what are you talking about??" I know I have kind friends, but in a crowd, I don't usually come off as that big fat girl, so much as an average-weight woman. Some of it is that I am proportionately fat over an athletic build, and I'm a pretty careful dresser, so while I may come off pudgy or a little round in the face, I don't think people see just how much fat I've got to lose.
  
  The problem with this is that it lets me make excuses for myself. I may be disgusted, but if I can still cover it up with the right cut of clothing, I act as if the problem's not there. Like many overweight women, I can still look very sexy and put-together in a nice dress because I'm very aware of my body and know how to accentuate curves, and I don't have as many moments of horror as I should, for example, when I look at photos of myself with my average-weight friends and I look the same or a little smaller than them. My body isn't making its decision about heart disease based on whether or not I'm the fattest in a group, though, and I need to recognize that until I am at a healthy weight, this is always, constantly a problem.

Constant Vigilance and the End Game

Having addressed a handful of my more warped behaviors, I come to an observation of sorts about weight loss. Alan Alda mentioned in "Losing It" that to maintain his weight loss, he could no longer mindlessly shovel food into his mouth or drink wine without considering its caloric impact. He said that it became something he had to think about all the time, remaining constantly on the defensive against the weight creeping back on, and I realize that this is one of the massive challenges many dieters face. Being on a diet is not fun. No matter the health benefits or amazing increases in happiness that come with losing the weight, people who have had to lose a significant amount of weight will usually gain at least some of it back because they don't naturally eat that way.

By way of analogy, my brother used to work with drug and alcohol rehabilitation patients, and one of the more surprising treatment concepts is that the client is always an addict, even after quitting the problematic addictive behavior. Much of rehab is to do with replacing the addiction to a given substance with a new addiction, to being sober, which is why the meetings, counseling, and ritualistic behaviors are so key to a client's continued success.

In a similar way, I think that overweight people often remain overweight in their minds for long after they've physically lost the weight. The behaviors and issues that caused the weight gain in the first place are still there, just like an addiction, and replacing the relationship with food to a fervent relationship with dieting seems often to have only limited or short-term success.

As an example, I've been struggling with someone who isn't really a friend anymore, but used to be. Part of why she's not my friend anymore is that she's inordinately self-centered and unkind, but it's taken me a while to recognize this fact about her. She used to be morbidly obese, and her selfishness took the form of gluttonous binge-eating and materialism, splurging on decadent treats and all kinds of expensive "stuff" to fill the emotional and personal voids in her life. At one point she and I were out for a hike, which we had to cut short because she was so tired and hungry. She started whining about food and fretting that she wouldn't have time to get lunch before getting on her train home, and I promised her I'd get her to a sandwich place before putting her on the train. This thought became all she was thinking about, and she started mumbling to herself that she was going to have a big sandwich and an iced tea and some cupcakes and later after work, she'd get ice cream, and so on, planning out the binge that was going to soothe her. I tried to distract her and talk about what a beautiful day it was, or reassure her that the hike wouldn't be much longer, but she not only started getting angry with me, but started crying as she lashed out for making her exercise when she was this hungry (it wasn't really my fault - we were a certain distance into the woods, and I had no control over how far it was back to the car).

When we got to the parking lot, we drank a lot of water, and I tried to cheer her up a little as I let the car air out to cool down. She was furious with me, sat down sweaty on the hot seat, and closed the door. I started getting annoyed at this point, since we're both adults and there was no reason to take it out on me, when a very handsome bicyclist came over and started chatting. We talked about what a beautiful day it was, how it was hot on the trails but the breeze kept it pleasant, and he was getting to the "Do you come here often?" phase when I noticed my whole car was shaking with my friend's thrashing around as she tried to give me pointed looks and indicate that she wanted to leave. I realize that she expected me to get right in the car and tear off just as she did, but we're talking about 30-45 seconds of conversation, which I then had to cut short by saying, "I'm sorry, my friend is really impatient, I guess she's got a train to catch."

When I got in the car, I snapped at her a little. "You'd rather sit in the hot car sweating on my upholstery than cool off?" She folded her arms and stared at the windshield. "Too bad," I continued, "that was actually a really nice, handsome guy," and I tried to get her to look out her window as he drove by and waved. After refusing to look, she turned to me with hot anger, seething, and grunted, "I don't care, he's not a sandwich."

It was at this point that the depths of her food issues started really coming clear, and I wanted to believe she had some sort of wake-up call afterwards because she went on a massive diet (albeit an unhealthy one).

I saw her a month or two later (I needed a break), after she had been obsessively dieting and lost 15 or 20 pounds. I saw a huge boost to her confidence, to the point where she started treating me poorly because she intended to diet down to a smaller size than me. Once she lost enough weight to get within 30 pounds of my current weight (however, she is still much bigger because she has almost no muscle tone and now resembles a misshapen deflated fat person), she started getting just plain cruel. She concluded that guys hadn't paid attention to her before because she was heavy, but now that she was thin, she was entitled to all their attention. I tried gently pointing out that it's not just your appearance, but your personality and what's inside you that attracts people to you, when she turned and said, "Well guys like you because you're slutty and put out." I was stunned and appalled. She is a virgin, so she has never had a sexual relationship, but one would hope that even she could recognize the difference between having a lot of casual one-night stands versus long-term committed sexual relationships with a boyfriend. (For the record, I don't sleep with people when I'm not in monogamous, romantic relationships).

I don't just mean to air my dirty laundry with this friend - I'm actually coming roundabout to a point.

She replaced her addiction to food and unhealthy behaviors with an addiction to carb-free eating and going to hot yoga classes five times a week. The commitment involved to that level of dieting and exercise made it that she doesn't pursue most of her other interests anymore, and in conversation, all she has to talk about is food and exercise. Before I decided I didn't want to be her friend anymore, she started picking on me and my behaviors, constantly offering unsolicited advice or suggestions to do just as she did. I tried hard to remain supportive and say I appreciated her concern, but that excluding carbs from my diet caused a lot of gastrointestinal problems for me, or that I worried about my skin and hair suffering if I tried to lose weight too rapidly, and she shrugged it all off, smugly saying her hair was nicer than mine now anyway (it wasn't, at all).

Obviously this friend has a number of personality defects, so she might not be the best example of diet-obsessing, but I've noticed it in surprising places as well.

A cousin who had been overweight her whole childhood went gung-ho on Weight Watchers, and now she's a meeting leader. I was really happy for her when she started, and it's been great seeing how happy she is now that she's reached her goal weight and succeeds in maintaining it. But... that's all she talks about. She used to have funny, interesting things to say on Facebook, and her statuses started to read more like weigh-ins and mantra recitations. Eventually, she stopped posting anything at all, and it made me realize how much I miss my funny, interesting cousin, instead of the WW After poster child she had become.

One of my brother's ex-girlfriends has had a lot of weight fluctuations and yo-yo dieted her whole life, but eventually started obsessive dieting and marathon training. More than half of her profile photos are side-by-side comparisons of her at her heaviest with her at her current weight. I get so sad seeing them, because I never thought of her as an unattractive fat person - she was always this lovely, happy girl. Now she looks strained and a little crazy-eyed, tensing her neck and trying so hard to look thin that I wonder where all the joy has gone from her life. My take-away thought wasn't "Wow, she looks great now!" so much as "hmm, I didn't realize she was that overweight back then."

Lastly, even my mom, who is usually my measure of sanity and reasonable behavior in the world, has started dieting because she's going on a vacation over the summer and wants to be fitter and thinner for it. She is nowhere near as obsessive as the other ladies I've mentioned, but I notice increasingly that when we talk on the phone, she gives me lists of what she's eaten and the exercise she's done that day. We've talked about how people have to focus so much energy on weight loss that they get obsessed and it becomes their only topic of conversation, and while I know my mom isn't going to become one of those people, I have to say, I don't want to hear any more stories that start with, "Well we were at dinner, and I had only had two Slim-Fasts, some carrots, a yogurt, and an orange that day..."


I don't want to be that type of dieter...

As I'm sure is clear, I do not want to be the type of dieter described above. I know what level of attention and commitment it takes to stay on a diet, but to me, that's as private and uninteresting to others as say, my skin care regime. Or... whether or not I'm doing Kegel exercises. Now maybe, if I lose a lot of weight and someone asks what I've been doing, I'd consider sharing, but I never, ever want to be like my former friend, who spends an entire meal going on and on about how she could never eat what I'm eating, or how she spends her yoga classes staring at her fat angrily in the mirror and thinking "Die fat, die!"

I never want to have side-by-side photos of myself where I show off how much weight I've lost. That seems so mean to yourself and such a badge of insecurity and desperation. I never want to brag to people that I dieted and exercised and am however many pounds from my goal weight. I will never, ever post my weight on Facebook as an accomplishment.

Mostly, it's because I do not want to be Vicki, that Girl Who Used to Be Fat and then Lost 80 Pounds. That's a repulsive oversimplification of who I am. I would be so insulted if someone reduced me to the amount I'm overweight now, so I refuse to ever do that to myself.

I keep this blog anonymously so that I don't talk about all this stuff with everyone in my daily life. When I want to obsess about issues related to being overweight, I compartmentalize it here. I have resisted sharing the URL with friends or family because I don't want knowledge of their possible readership to influence how honest I am with myself. I know that this could be a handwritten paper journal or a computer file, but even with some anonymity, I feel a sort of accountability by publishing a record of what I'm doing, and without trying, I found amazing support from strangers who stumbled over here. I also hope, since I'm going to be writing all this stuff down anyway, that putting it in a public place could help others who are going through the same things as I am, just as the dieters in "Losing It" and countless other essentially anonymous bloggers or people on TV have helped me by sharing their stories.


...because I don't want to diet.

The other big reason I don't want to focus on "becoming an After" is because I don't want to lose the weight by dieting. I don't want to replace my unhealthy behaviors with addictions to dieting and losing weight because I will never make lasting changes that way.

If I set rules for myself, I will fail, and not only will I gain whatever weight I lose back, but my self-esteem will take a hit for failing at dieting too.

I want to make deep lifestyle changes, gradually, incorporating healthier eating and exercise into my daily habits and routines. I want to explore healthier cooking not because it is what The Diet Commands, but because I want to find recipes I enjoy, to replace the take-out and gross stuff I eat now. I want to enjoy exercise as a fun activity that relieves stress and improves my health, and while I realize it will require discipline to stick with it, I need to do it for me, in a positive way, not because I'm punishing myself for being fat.

I realize, in examining my behaviors and attitudes toward my weight, that I will never succeed if I am negative or pessimistic about it. The only way I can ever hope to change my life for the better is to be nice to myself and improve my lifestyle because I deserve to be happy and healthy.

The water drinking, of course, will just have to be something I force myself to do.

Ego preservation and the fat girl's Catch-22

I have been thinking a lot about dating and relationships, in part because I'm still struggling to get over something that ended months ago, and mostly because I like to make sure I have something to fret about at all times.

As I've been mulling over the connection between my weight, my body image, and my receptiveness toward romance, I saw this card posted on this week's Post Secret, and I felt like I could have written it:



I was stunned because yes, that's exactly what I feel whenever I'm getting down on myself and thinking I seem all but transparent to men my age. I think delusional things like, "If I were as thin and fit as I used to be, these same guys would be falling over themselves to talk to me," or I try to rationalize that in a way, being overweight is a good filter for guys who are shallow and only concerned with looks.

The reality is that I am the one rejecting guys, not the other way around. It's not so overt as them coming over to talk to me and me laughing in their faces, but I repel people by making myself unapproachable. When guys are friendly - and even flirtatious with me - I find myself so wary of feeling foolish that I scoff at any possibility that they'd find me attractive. I assume that they're bored, that they're trying to find an in with my more attractive friend, that I'm standing between them and something they need so they're trying to be polite about getting me out of the way, or that they may seem nice but probably have girlfriends who will show up at any second. And so on and so forth. I can imagine an infinite array of possibilities and alternate realities, while believing that a guy would find me attractive and engaging and actually want to talk with me is utterly impossible.

My body language tends to be haughty and almost smug sometimes, rolling my eyes at guys' feeble efforts to show off or not even looking at them, as if I'm above these things and impossible to please. Other times, I act like I am trying not to be seen, hiding behind headphones and a sketchbook, keeping my head down and averting my eyes, doing whatever it takes to avoid even a casual friendly encounter.

I don't really know why I'm like this. It's not the end of the world if I am open, smile, even have some friendly conversation, and then it turns out the guy's not at all interested, has a girlfriend, or wasn't even smiling at me in the first place. Is my fear of appearing foolish or overeager so powerful that it's worth being alone with my defense mechanisms the rest of my life?? I would be the first to criticize people who are afraid of putting themselves out there and interacting with others, yet I find myself doing it all the time lately.

Another maddening aspect of this behavior is that I'm not naturally like this. I'm ordinarily a very warm, approachable, friendly, funny, and outgoing person. I talk with people all the time, eliciting genuine laughs and thought-provoking exchanges. I'm charming, considerate, and once I am talking with just about anyone except a male of datable age, I am the essence of a confident woman wholly at ease with herself and the world. So why do men my own age turn me into a nervous wreck?! Why can I have many-hour conversations with guys a little older than me that cause them to declare they wish they could have found a girl like me when they were my age, yet anyone between 25-39 is some sort of foreign, terror-eliciting species to me?

I started to wonder if it's because I have a good deal of male friends my own age who share their feelings about women with me, perhaps to excess. I see how shallow, emotionally stunted, self-involved, and often cruel they can be, and I assume that all guys their age must be the same. When I talk with strangers at concerts or in bars, I can almost hear them going home and telling their me-equivalent friends that they met a pretty smart, funny, and interesting girl, but they didn't bother following up because she was fat. I can literally hear them saying what one of my particularly unkind friends once said, "If she's let herself go this badly by the time she's 29, I can't imagine what she'd become if I started dating her," followed by the aside, "nice tits, though, for a fat girl."

When I am out with girlfriends and two guys approach us, I assume I am the "landmine" or the fat friend who has to be amused so the more attractive guy can talk to my friend. That's not often the way it works out, and on more than a few occasions, both guys talk to me and ignore my friend, but I am so trained to believe that at the end of the night, they're going to ask for the thinner girl's number that I don't really bother getting my hopes up anymore.

I know that my cynicism comes from years of bad relationships, just as I know that men don't mistreat me because I'm overweight - they treat me badly because I let them. It does seem easier to scornfully call me a "fat bitch" than it should, but when I was in shape, it was "dumb bitch" or "crazy bitch" or any other modifier they could imagine. The point is that the men who are inclined to call me names and treat me like garbage were going to do it anyway, regardless of my weight. And if I put up with ugly treatment, then that's what I should expect.

This brings us full circle in a way, as my weight does repel men who are shallow and only looking for someone with a super gym body who dresses like a stripper. If someone shows interest in me, it's more likely they're actually looking at my face and listening to my words, or that they're looking for something more substantive than a hottie they can take home that night. That is, in some cases. I still do occasionally encounter a baffling variety of man who seeks out the "low-hanging fruit" of heavier, less attractive girls because he assumes, as a particularly misogynistic friend of mine put it "that they're so desperate to get laid, they don't care what I say or do." Apart from an astonishing lack of insight about women, I find that debasing kind of attitude essentially inhuman (and rooted in transparent, ugly insecurity), but I still get wary whenever someone seems a little too assured of himself without displaying genuine confidence. As if I'm supposed to be the one he's settling for.

Recently a friend broke up with his girlfriend after realizing that he didn't love her and was starting to find her annoying. He said he found her completely vapid and boring to be around, save for the fact that she had an amazing body and was always willing to do whatever he wanted in bed. While I was suggesting that staying in the relationship (especially when he was considering cheating on her) wasn't fair to either of them, I felt that it had to be pointed out that part of why he found her boring to talk with is because all she did in her spare time was go to the gym and shop. "How do you think she gets that amazing body?" I asked, "by sitting around reading about physics and current events?" He tallied up the amount of hours she needs to spend at various fitness classes and working out with her trainer, and he recognized that that was the same time he and I spend pursuing degrees in science, reading, and engaging in a whole host of hobbies and fascinations that make us diverse and (I hope) interesting people. He realized that he never asked her about her day anymore because there are only so many times that a person can tell you about working out, shopping, and watching television before you find them utterly insipid and tedious to talk to.

So, like many women my age and weight, I am in a bit of a Catch-22. I want men to find me attractive for my personality, for my heart and my mind. I want them to listen to what I have to say and enjoy me for the substance of who I am. Yet, men my age are unlikely to give me that chance because they are still looking for the girls who spend all day perfecting their bodies and fussing with hair and clothes and makeup. I worry that if I make myself more physically attractive and act more approachable, I will attract the wrong kind of guy, who would mistreat me either way, but I also know that if I do nothing, I won't attract any kind of guy.

I don't know the solution. I want to say All Things in Moderation, since that seems to be my mantra lately. It's possible to be of a healthy weight and fit without spending all my time at the gym taking spinning classes. I can even work hard at it and develop a really great figure, but still dress like a lady and be myself. I can try having some confidence in men that they're not all pigs and believe that some of them might be looking for the same kind of connection I am?

I just really don't want to be wrong, work my ass off to get fit with the expectation that men will treat me better, and find they are even crueler to thin girls. But I guess if I am wrong, I'll still have my personality?

Walk walk walk walk walk

It's been seven weeks since I've started wearing my pedometer to keep track of how much I am walking. I had a few setbacks, most notably another serious case of bronchitis that developed into pneumonia, condemning me to more than a week of bed rest.

However, I've done alright in keeping up a certain amount of activity and mileage, summarized by week below:

Week	Steps	Moderate	Time Mod.	kcal	Miles
1	64,548	31,795	272	2432	25.59
2	55,302	22,464	189	2032	21.52
3	86,245	39,919	332	3333	35.13
4	71,113	40,186	336	2700	28.21
5	61,530	36,419	301	2536	24.46
6	43,067	24,577	208	1667	17.32
7	38.046	20,157	168	1417	14.7

I've averaged 23.84 miles per week, 4.3 hours at a moderate pace, burning 2302 calories. The total mileage I've walked since the beginning of this semester is about 166.93 miles (obviously this doesn't include the negligible days when I don't wear the pedometer around my apartment).

So I guess I am doing something, even though it's not necessarily the aggressive amount of exercise I'd like (yet).


So what have you got to show for it?

In addition to keeping a spreadsheet of my pedometer data, I've kept one of daily (or at least semi-weekly) weigh-ins. There are a lot of fluctuations, but in January, I was 183.5, and this morning I weighed 180. There have been points where I've dipped down to 179 or lower, but also times where I've jutted up to 184 or 185.

The thing I've noticed, though, is that while the scale may remain stubbornly stuck at 180, there have definitely been improvements to the distribution of fat around my body. My arms are still gigantic and disappointing, but my waist and midsection is definitely slimming down a bit. I've been able to wear a number of fitted blouses, dresses, and jackets that had been getting snug, and they've fit better than when I first got them. The particularly gratifying aspect is that those clothes are all size 12, when I've been wearing a size 14.

I have a lot, and I mean a lot of work to do before I'm going to start feeling like I've lost any weight, but it is good to feel like I am heading in the right direction. I know that I have several boxes of really cute spring and summer clothes in my parents' attic, and it would be splendid to be able to wear them again by the time the weather warms up.

I am optimistic that my lungs will have cleared fully enough that I can try jogging tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, and I'm hoping to really give my metabolism a kick by making running a regular part of my days. I did actually run a few times in February when the sidewalks were clear enough of snow and ice, and it felt terrific. I think that even though all this walking may not have as significant an impact as I might like on losing weight, it's definitely helping my leg muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness.

I'm encouraged that if I can get a big jump on the fat, I'll really get the ball rolling on my goals for the spring and summer. Naturally, I'll keep this blog posted if (should I say when?) I do.