Starting again - week 1 weigh in

Week 1 is done - which was really more like 2 ish days.  Mostly just remembering how to get enough water in, how to track and journal foods and to be comfortable eating in a different and more mindful manner.
My trick to getting enough water is simple - I cant have anything with flavour until all my water for the day is in.  That means 3 of my refillable plastic bottle of water.  They are 800ml each, so that covers me for 64+oz.  I aim for one before lunch, one before dinner, and one in the evening, but if I drink them faster, I can have coffee or diet pop - things that taste good.  It isn't always fun but water is key to helping you lose weight.  it also helps you not to confuse thirst with hunger - I always try to have a good sized drink first if I think im hungry to see if that's the real problem.
I weighed 190 today, which was a loss of 1.5 lbs so far.  Some of that will be water weight, some of that is just my body adjusting to being back on track.
I did get a fitbit for Christmas.  So far I have discovered any day I work, I hit 10 flights of stairs and 10k steps without even thinking.  Which is what I cant figure out.  Basic pillars of good health - good healthy food (not too much), keeping moving, lots of water.  I do these things and am still significantly overweight.  I eat fresh fruits and veggies by choice.  I walk all the time.  I drink lots of water, even when im not keeping track.
My first thought was that maybe I was misestimating - but the fitbit tells me I really do move more than I thought I did.  My food scale tells me what I thought a serving was is actually smaller that what it should be.  Im fighting a battle against some nasty genetics and that is the part I don't know how to win.  How to reset my body to have a happy point at lower weight when all it wants genetically is to pack on the pudge?

Im back

I'm back after a major fall off the wagon.  The kind in which we don't want to talk about how much weight I regained.  As in, I regained all but like 10 lbs I lost. 
Oops..
Ok, to be fair, I was poor during that time and working in fast food, which I still am.  But the kind of poor in which my staff meal guaranteed that I ate dinner, and I needed that guarantee.  And there was much reliance on pasta at 88 cents a pound, and free potatoes from my boss at work.
But J and I need to lose this weight - he is at an all time high of 135, and I'm at 190.5, so January 1st is our start date.  Weigh days are Friday, so we will chat again in a few days.  By then I may have a fitbit to help monitor activity (and tell me how much sleep i'm not getting which may be a factor).  I also have a get moving plan, on a calendar on the wall, and brand new weight watchers membership.

Lifelong weight loss, try 3, here I come

Stats (me)
weight - 190.5
waist - 39.5"
hips - 50" (almost as round as I am tall)
bust - 40"
thigh - 30"
arm - 13"

Stats (J)
weight - 235
waist - 48"
hips - 44.5"
bust - 42.5" (is it still called bust on a man?)
thigh - 23.5"
arm - 15"

The voice

There is a voice in my head.  Not a schizophrenic voice, but an insistent one never the less.  It reminds me where the tasty food is in the house and, if there isn't tasty food, how much money I have and how to get it.  It remembers every cupcake I walk by and how many pieces of candy there are. 

I was talking to a friend today about this voice.  Now I am speaking out about it.  This is the voice that needs silencing.  I do not need another serving of Chinese food, and if I don't eat the chocolate and someone else does, that's ok.  This voice tells me lies all the time.  It tells me I NEED to eat the treat before someone else does - that if I don't there might not be more.  It tells me to stockpile excessive amounts of food, for just in case.

My friend call this voice a monster.  He wasn't wrong.  But it is a smart voice - it can calculate how to get the most calories and fat and sugar for the $7 in my pocket and it knows how quickly I can get them.  What the voice doesn't know is I have an ally.  I can choose to hear new messages about food - I can choose to hear that fruits and vegetables are good and filling, and I can choose to listen to that message, instead of the one about how if I don't eat carbs I will be hungry.

The voice is the master of guilt.  If I eat too much chocolate, to many chips, another brownie, the voice lets me forget about it.  But today, the voice wanted me to feel bad for eating salad and peanuts.  "too much" the voice said - but the voice is wrong.  These are the foods that are good for me, not snickers and ruffles.

So lets talk about those messages that play in our heads.  The ones that let us justify what we are doing, the ones that don't leave us alone.  Lets talk about it and then lets learn new things to talk about so that eventually, we can find a way to quiet or weaken the voice.

What does your voice say?  How are you working to overcome it?

hungry/full

They say in north American culture we don't know if we are hungry or full, thirsty or not.  I do sort of agree with this - but not completely.

I know when I am thirsty.  I have felt thirst, the kind that needs water to fix.  Absence of this feeling, to me, is not thirsty.  That being said, the meds I take give me a dry mouth.  So, even though im not thirsty, I drink a ton of water trying to correct this.  Note: it never works, and chewing gum is more effective but not my fav habit. My mouth gets tired of chewing.  It doesn't get tired of sipping water, and since water is free and easily available, I usually just keep a big bottle of it nearby. That being said, I know a lot of people who likely are dehydrated - they don't drink as much water in a day as they lose.  And yes, I know we get water from our foods as well.

Hungry though is a different story for me.  Physical hunger I don't know that I have ever felt - at least not in the way other people describe.  The growling stomach? For me that normally means i'm feeling nauseous.  Putting food in sometimes helps, sometimes makes it worse, but I usually try food anyways.  The gnawing pit?  I've never felt that.

For me, hunger is when I think of food and it sounds tasty.  The more kinds of food that sound tasty, the hungrier I must be.  Chocolate cake sound good? well that's normal, so I must not be hungry.  Bread, peanut butter, eggs, apples, etc etc all sound amazing?  I must be pretty hungry.  Unfortunately, this usually means I eat everything on the 'sounds good' list, plus whatever else I see next to these items in the kitchen that also strikes my fancy.

The downside to this system is that doing things like browsing pinterest can convince me im hungry.  Look at 25 pictures of tasty looking food, recipes you would be interested in trying.  All these things sound noms?  Must be hungry, lets go eat something.

On the flip side of the coin I also know that I don't listen to 'full'.  It takes us 20 mins to know when we are full and in that time, most of us, myself included, just keep eating.  So full becomes uncomfortable, feeling ill and painful because we have eaten too much before the signal arrives to stop eating.

One of the things I am learning is to think before hand how much food is enough and eat till that point.  It usually coincides with full - not with ill.  Im also learning to put food on a schedule, eat a certain number of times a day and that doesn't seem to coincide with hungry but it does mean I never get food ideation - which usually avoids eating ALL THE THINGS.

That being said, there is another kind of hungry.  It is not helped by any system out there that I have found yet.  Emotional hungry.  I feel, therefore I will put food on top of it to not feel.  That is the one I struggle with more often.

But I am looking at the new food system and wondering - could I do this for stress?  could I do this for fibro?  could I use this for something else to manage my life better.  Can I make a plan to avoid the two extremes in any situation (too busy/bored, stressed/bored, etc) and teach myself balance?

It sounds like a great idea.  I just don't know what the action plan would be.  I need someone to teach me balance.  I need a life coach ;)

Ill end with more good news.  I'm down another 2 lbs total this week.  I am also close to saying goodbye to the 170's.  Squee!

Fighting

Most relationships don't end, in my experience, over huge issues.  The problems are not - usually - over cheating, or any of those catastrophic events people hear about.  In my experience, they end over whose turn it is to do the dishes and the importance of saying thanks.

They end because someone stops feeling loved, appreciated and like the relationship has meaning or value anymore.

If you want to hurt me, break your word to me.  And do so for no real reason, not because something happened but because nothing did.  I can forgive you sleeping with someone else.  I can't forgive the 10th time you 'forgot' something you said you would do, the 16th time you ignored me or the 30th time you choose to play your xbox in the middle of a fairly important, are-we-going-to-make-it discussion with me.

I have a busy life - I have 3 jobs. 120% course load.  community involvement commitments.  an active social life.  a disease that steals my health, energy and patience.  I don't have time, or the desire, to pour my energies into something that is not returned, to not be valued.

I don't have time for passive-aggressive bullshit.

Look at the people in your life.  Are you treating them the way they want to be treated?  are you taking the time to honor and respect them, to listen, to be a friend?  Have you reached out recently to find out what's going on?  There are people in your life right now for whom a few mins of your time, a hand to wash the dishes, a shared meal, would mean a lot.  Even a phone call helps.

Who are you going to be in the world?  How are you going to treat people?  Choose wisely, because, as the meme says, a good woman can be lost.

STRESS!!! And a win

This has been a long week for me.  I look something like this:

 

Its been a bad week.  The kind of week that involves multiple days of tears, the admission that I think its time to find a new job and the occasional discussion about why I should or should not put mass amounts of food on top of my feelings in order to keep them under control.

 

 

The good news is that I mostly won the battle against food vs feelings.  I didn't eat a ton too much, i did eat some.

 

 

The bad news is the stress screwed up the fibro largely - a lot of hip and back pain, the loss of the ability to reach the floor again (ugh, I hate that one!) and generally feeling crappy which never helps the situation any.

 

 

The good news - someone I know just had 5 kitties arrive at her door.  The cuteness im picturing in my head just made everything else i was thinking of disappear

 

 

The bad news - the rest of this post may have just been chased out by thoughts of kitty cats.

 

 

The good news - I lost 10 lbs in total.  Today I got to move my little marker to the next wall and do a happy dance.

 

 

The bad news - i'm feeling like if I hadn't put a chocolate cupcake and a few other slips on top of my emotions, that would have been better

 

 The good news - the center is paying me 10$/lb lost this weekend as an incentive to stay on track despite turkey and maybe even lose.  Ill take it.

 

 

Actually, that may be enough rambling for today.  I'm thinking about kitties now.  I want kitties - especially since we have a great foster program up here where everything is provided and all you do is love them.  I can't though as I'm allergic.

My old friend prednisone

 

When I was first diagnosed with fibro it was because of prednisone.  I had taken a 5 day, high dose course because a virus had given me sad, painful, hard to breathe asthma lungs.  Taking this medication, I felt normal for the first time in ten years - no exhausted all the time, decreased pain.  So I took the prescription in and asked the doctor to explain me why and how this happened.  She finally figured out what had been going on with my body the whole time and started me on the path to where I am today.

I end up on this drug every year or so, usually because of asthma lungs.  Once because of a really good allergic reaction to some kind of mutant mosquitos we had up here.  And, although the side effects are not the greatest (insomnia anyone?), its one of the more fun drugs to be on as I get a few days of normalcy and really catch up on things in my life.

Friday, while still battling the head cold-from-hell, I woke up with the sad painful lungs.  And proceeded to tell myself all day I was fine and didn't need to do anything about this.  Just ignore the fact its hard to breathe, oxygen is no longer necessary.  After fighting through my shift at work, I gave in and went to a surprisingly quiet, you-are-next-in-line, walk in clinic. (Clinics here have a 2-4 hour wait normally...if the doctor even shows up).  The doctor walked in. 

"That was you I heard in the waiting room?"

Yes.....

"How long have you had asthma?"

Oh, crud.  Ok, I know where this is going, since the next question was did I feel like I needed prednisone?  And by the time I made it to the pharmacy, the pharmacist asked if I want the meds, or the ER.  Yea, I guess the sad lung sound was a little prominent.

So I get a course of meds.  To be honest, 36 hours in, its not working as well as I might hope.  I may have to go back to the clinic tomorrow.  Not sure yet.  But this does mean its not likely I'll be losing much weight this week - prednisone is noted for this.

However, if I'm going to be awake all night, I plan on finding new recipes on pinterest tonight.  I made a great couscous for dinner, with lots of veggies, salad and a half a rainbow trout.  It turned out delicious and I'm looking forward to the leftovers for lunch.