Inauguration Edition

What a week this was and therefore, what a week for the my health.

I met my goal of going to the gym 3 times and doing yoga at least once. As I started working again at the beginning of January, this is the best I can say I will do right now. My previous weight loss came on the heels of extensive exercise and not make the changes you need to do with eating to maintain weight loss.

Therefore 20 lb gain (more at times).

Must keep reminding myself that I only want to lose 20 pounds in the next six months. That in 10 pounds I will be back to a weight where I was very happy with myself but wanted more for my health.

But this morning feels very hard. I keep looking at the scale and thinking, I wonder what I am at? I wonder...

I will wait until Monday.

Today I am going to finish working on the grant proposal that needs to be done by Monday. I am working on a grant proposal that I did not know I need to do until Friday. Stressful. Trying to do my best... hoping that's enough.

Nothing like your boss basically telling you that either your job or the jobs of your coworkers are in jeopardy unless you do not get the funding you need.

What do you weigh?

I have been using Twitter to build a network of people to help me stay on the right track with my weight loss. A little bit of background on my weight loss.

For most of my life I have been heavy. However, I was always active in sports, so it mitigated my feelings of "fat girl". Right before I went to college I lost 10lbs and felt fabulous. My first year I managed to keep the weight off. Then came the 2nd year and the next 10 of my life.

At my heaviest I was around 230 and I'm 5'9.

That's difficult to write down and even more difficult to read, but it is the truth.

Starting in 2004, I started working out again. It felt good. I didn't lose weight, but I was running and doing what I could. Eventually, I got down to 200 pounds.

Then I lost my job (and my gym membership with it). The weight came back. We call this time in 2005-2006, the dark year. I don't dwell on it. I eventually got back to the gym.

Then came September 18th, 2006. I sat on a bench outside of the YMCA with my best friend Kate and said, "I think I'm going to try Weight Watchers again." I signed up on September 19, 2006. My weight was 217.

Over the course of the next year, I was able to lose 40 pounds. But looking back I realized that I did it the wrong way. I focused on running every single day. I set unrealistic expectations for myself.

And, as life does, things changed. I got a new job. A great job. However, this job required me to work upwards of 90 hours a week. For the first six months I was able to get myself out of bed at 5:00am to go to the gym. But as we started losing (I worked on a political campaign) and the stress at work got greater, I started feeling run down.

So I stopped running as much. Then I stopped making it to my 7:30am WW meetings. Sleep really was what I needed.

At one point, I had worked over 100 days straight with no day off. Straight. No day off.

That can wear you down.

These are all excuses, but they were my reality.

So here it is, Jan. 2009. Back in October, I started following the program again. I used the online tools completely as I can't afford 40 dollars a month for the regular meetings. I bought a scale. I started again.

When I weighed myself back in October 2008, I had crept back up to 200. I followed the program as best I could throughout the holidays and on Jan. 2009, I weighed in at 195.

My life has settled down. I live with someone (learning to eat with a boy is interesting). My job is more flexible. I joined a more convenient gym.

And so it begins. My goal is to lose 20lbs by the summer. I would like to be down to 175 and stay there. I the charts say 165 as a max, but it doesn't fit my body. At 175, I looked amazing. At 175, I could maintain. At 175, I could be more than on a diet.

My goals are simple. Move 40 minutes a day, 4 days a week. Try to do yoga one day a week. You get 2 days off.

Eat more fruits and vegetables.

Track everything.

Stop snacking. Snacking kills me.

I am using Twitter, online WW, and my own personal journals to get there. I'm also using my partner, who is supportive of this and loves the new recipes I cook for him (or together).


The bottom line here is I'm in a different place than when I was dangerously overweight. I am not dangerously overweight. I am overweight. I need to lose some pounds to feel better and decrease my chances of disease. I am not as scared as I was or anywhere near depressed as I was back in 2006. I am happy. I am healthy. I would just like to be a little healthier and finally get into a Size 10.

Realizations While Running

I'm currently self-employed (read: have one contract that takes up 25% of my time). A good portion of my day is spent alone, except for the evenings and the gym. The evenings I can get outside and hang out with my friends who punch the clock.

This is turning out to be very expensive.

The gym is a better option. However, most days, since I set my own schedule, are spent trying to figure out when I should go to the gym. Sometimes I think about it so much that I talk myself out of the gym. This.is.bad.

My last job resulted in a complete and total lack of health consciousness. I gained 20 pounds and took up smoking again.

It doesn't really seem like a fair trade since we didn't win. But alas.

Today, while running, I felt my ass jiggling.

Seriously.

I'm not a skinny person. I have resigned myself to never being the skinniest person in a picture, never being the person that fits into a ton of stuff (or whatever I want). My years of being overweight have taught me to know my place among the rest of the girls.

Still... as I was running, ass jiggling all the way, I became irrationally angry at myself for allowing it to get this far. And since I took back to the smoking (and I'm trying to quit), I can't run as far. So I ran, ass jumping up and down, and then proceeded to do way too many butt lifting exercises.

I currently cannot move from my couch.

Abba and Marc Jacobs and Hot Pink

Maybe it was Abba, or the mere idea of Abba. Dancing Queen, Take a Change on Me, and god help me Waterloo.

Maybe it was the very public shattering of my up-to-this-point life's dream. Maybe it was the ensuing regulation to a non-person after being so important (or so I thought) to so many people. Maybe it was because I felt invisible in my world again, after feeling so very visible.

Or maybe it was that purse. That perfect representation of love in leather. It wasn't a particularly expensive purse. I mean I had just recently lost my job and even then, my monthly purse budget goes to a home in Southern Indiana that I don't get to live in or see... but it's there. Ahhh, college debt.

Maybe it was a combination of that purse and that pair of Marc Jacob shoes I found for 90% off. Actual Marc Jacob's. Not Marc by Marc Jacobs, but Marc Jacobs. Hot pink with purple rhinestones, so "look at me" that I use them as decoration in my apartment when I'm not wearing them.

So, it's a combination of Abba, a hot pink purse, a pair of hot pink shoes, and a realization that I had become invisible again.

Just keep on going

Speaking of which...

The sex I did have tended to be bad...bad...bad. It was so bad, in the grand overview, that once while having a very painful procedure at the OBGYN, I sat up and snarled, "No sex I have ever had makes this worth it."

-No boyfriends. Plenty of guys I screwed around with when I was a little tipsy or bored or both, but boyfriends. Nope, not really. My last real boyfriend dumped me when I was 21. So it's been about 9 years of dating and hooking up. Which is very similar to the last part of my teens... hmmm.

- No money. I was unemployed 4 times during my 20's. One time was so bad that I was partially suicidal.

-Bad acne. Thought that was going to end when I hit 26. At least it did for all those go-getters on TV.

- No Self-Esteem. I hated myself most of my 20's. Hated my body, hated the sound of my voice, thought about how my laugh was annoying. I tried to change everything about myself. A brief look at pictures of me and my hair over the decade will reveal a person with the self-assured nature of a mental patient. There's one particular hair color(s) that screwed, "Look at my head, NOT MY ASS!"

-Speaking of which, I was very overweight most of my 20's. Right before my 28th birthday, I lost 20 pounds. I kept losing and at my lowest had lost 40 pounds. Still had some to go, but I looked great. However, that was the very end of my 20's, most of my 20's... wow.

In addition to the big ones above, my 20's contained the following
-Drank too much
-Credit Card Debt
-Bad friends
-Living with a Meth Addict who Dealt out of our house
-And all but one of my grandparents passed away in a span of 2 years.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

To listen to people tell it, their 20's were the best time of their lives. Fit, happy, having sex like mad, all the clothes fit, everyone had great skin, great clothes, good shoes, nice handbags, sushi every night, dancing until the wee hours, and kicking ass taking names at work. Every time I watch a TV sitcom, I turn green when a character (be it a VP of some great product, a lawyer, a doctor, whatever) says their age and it's "26". 26 seems to be the age where the next generation is kicking ass and taking names.

When I turned 26, I called my best friend at 2pm having taken a half day from the miserable, slave shop that I worked at (mortgage processor). I was half drunk off a bottle of wine, 4 episodes into season 3 of Sex and the City and I proceeded to launch into what is now known in my friend circle as "The Lost Ten Year's" speech. While Mark can do this speech much better than I can, as he was sober when he heard it and I was not while delivering it, the basic gist is this: When I turned 16 I couldn't remember the years between 6 and 16. Sure, I could piece together visions of the life, mostly horrible ones from my early teenage years, but nothing formative. Now, turning 26, I could remember almost every detail of the past 10 years. Until I hit Alzheimer's, I'm going to remember the ten years prior to my current birthday.

This notion depressed me to no end.

Now, on the cusp of turning 30, I am fully aware that I am looking back at the past 10 years with full memory (okay, some of it is a little blurry).

My conclusion: My 20's sucked.

Here's what I had:

-Suprisingly little sex. I had so very little sex in my 20's.

Please god no.

As I get closer to turning 30, I keep hearing from my younger friends, "30 is the new 20!".

Oh dear lord god please no.

If 30 is the new 20, I'm screwed. Absolutely screwed. If living my 30's is going to be as much as living my 20's I'm going to go take some of those nice pills and just go to sleep for awhile.