August 27, 220 lbs

220 pounds! Wow, that was abrupt! Even I didn't expect that.

Aug 26 - part 2

I

am

HUNGRY!

Over and over, especially if I wait too long to eat, I begin to have visions, almost taste hallucinations - of whatever - chicken salad, russell stover chocolates, crackers, pie. They come at me sometimes as the result of a smell, and sometimes out of nowhere! Tonight our houseguest was cooking dinner. I'd driven all the way back home just to get my snack. I had to leave ASAP for fear of the aromas of her cooking. Today I waited too long to eat breakfast - until about 3 or 4 p.m. and for the first time since I can remember, that tbig bowl of oat bran left me HUNGRY. I went ahead and ate midmorning snack and lunch too. Then I was overfull. I'm wearing my size 16 shorts and a shirt and both are too small for me but it's a healthy reminder that these clothes need to at least fit (if not get kinda baggy.) I'm chewing on gum and slurping up crystal light just to deal.

I'm headed home now (soon) for a spinach bean salad. It's going to be the best spinach-bean salad ever!

Aug 26, 2010, 223 pounds

As I just informed Facebook - summer's over. I had some troubles getting back on the plan this summer. When I go to work sometimes I have no idea if I'll be there for 4 hours or until late at night, and the concerts I work often cater - sometimes with healthy food, but with no predetermined limits on how much one should or shouldn't eat, and with desserts of course. And the camping trips and road trips and the not being able to get to the grocery store... And I started off the summer allowing myself, and every time I'd try to get back started there would be some reason or other to hold off one more day.

For instance, the other day I decided NOW'S THE TIME. Now's the time to get back on board. It was Monday, and I was transitioning into work mode from summer mode, and I made it to the grocery store, and I go in to work, and someone's girlfriend had baked toffee pecan brownies for everyone on the crew. Having just breakfasted on oat bran and apples and walnuts, I resisted, because "It's important."

But then on Tuesday, we wound up being kept at work from 8 a.m. until midnight, and I hadn't expected to be there past, oh 5:00. So I didn't pack the whole day's worth of food, and went to get some Pho noodle soup from a restaurant for dinner, and some sugar-free candies (to get off the sugar kick) and then in the evening I was dealing with gross fatigue and people put cookies and bagels in front of me and I kept going back and the next day I weighed more again.

Yesterday, then, was Wednesday and I stayed "on-plan" and I expect I will again today and tomorrow. Saturday I have an all-day gig at a concert venue again - I really kind of don't want to do it, but I can't really say no to the money. I can pack my food for the whole day, but it might still be hard not to get "shaky." Over the past few months my appetite and intake have increased back to their original levels, so as I go back on-plan, I realize I do feel a little light-headed and hungry. I feel this is temporary as I get back on plan, so there is that little push to stay on plan until it gets easier and not fall off every 2-3 days.

"It's important."

So I've not been dieting, not been blogging, not been weighing myself, not been keeping track. I got up to around 225. Today I'm 223 or 224 - wait - I'll go check - 223, possibly even 222.5. 222.5 would indicate progress to me - 223 is still in holding mode. :-) I've gotten a long way from my goal of getting under 200 pounds but that is still my aim. More immediately, I just want my size 16s to fit again! Though it has been nice to have full boobs again. (truth!)

gotta cut the sugar out

Hey. I haven't posted because I haven't gotten myself back on track. I mean, I do for about a week and then some kind of confusion or slackness or project gets in the way. It's been a long process of going from small allowances to getting pretty much right back where I was in the very beginning. The most recent thing to get in the way of my efforts was an impromptu road trip that wound up taking a week and was a lot of driving and rushing and sleeping in the car. Right now, I'm expecting to take several days to go camping with Dad, so it doesn't seem a good time now to get back on it either. But I'm looking at several empty boxes of Fiber One bars on my bed and knowing that the reason I binged on them was because of the sugar. Clearly I need to go back on the Glycemic Index plan and cut the sugar out of my diet in order to restore order. And next time I get to where I feel confident enough to give myself tiny little allowances, I will remember this. Sugar is my major downfall. I was balanced pretty good there for a while but the monster grew large. I've been on large amounts of it daily for a while now. I watch it happen and remember not too long ago when things were different. Yesterday I took my picture and didn't like my face - that's a big difference from my pictures where I thought it was hard to take an ugly picture of my face. And I weigh about the same now as I did then, so it could be that the bad foods are making my face puffy and lumpy in ways that they were less so before. (Just call me the queen of confusing sentence structure.)

I don't feel drastic and I'm not beating myself up, but I do feel confused when I watch myself go through the process of binging.

Diet's not the only place I'm letting things get possibly out of hand - I'm also just not even paying attention to the whole making money thing and yet I am spending. I figure this will last until the theatre season starts up again in a couple weeks. Right now I guess I'm on summer vacation.

I don't weigh myself much anymore (compared with every day before) but I think I'm at about 220-225.

So just letting you know that I keep getting delayed but I am consistently aware that things are getting to a point that I can't let it go on like this forever.

I also haven't been exercising not on much the road trip or since the road trip since I've been focused on blogging about it - and not just writing out my scribbled thoughts like I do here, but actually kind of trying to make a real blog out of it, and practice journalistic skills and layout and organized writing. Really put some effort into doing it right. I'm afraid I fell far short of that, but I hadn't planned to do it before and so I wasn't as well-prepared as I might have been. And after all that effort, it doesn't seem to be anything my friends are actually going to read anyway. My parents said they wanted more information, but my friends probably want less. Anyway, I had to rush to get it all out and done before I forgot it or lost momentum, and it took all week! Amazing!! Between that and the road trip, it's really starting seem like things are taking 7 times as long as they should!!

Now that it's done, though, hopefully I can start pushing through on some shorter tasks that need to get done. It'll feel great to make some progress.

July 20, 215

There it is, today's weight is 215. Last time I weighed myself was 2 weeks ago at 205. Don't worry, people, someone made the comment that I must feel bad about myself. I don't feel bad about myself. There are more important things in life than losing weight with constant success! I was lucky - I lost 70-80 pounds last year and got to ride that ride, and it was a great ride! But I always knew things would slow down. One thing's for sure, I'm really dependent on meal plans. Last time I was posting here I was talking about unsubscribing from ediets but I know I can't do that right now until I make my own meal plans successfully as a way of life. When faced with open-ended eating without a plan, I get baffled, I really do.

I'm still overwhelmed with work stress, and life's kind of a drag right now. Had to get up early to go in at 4:00 and get some work done this morning on one show and the other show is breathing down my neck, too. Nevertheless, when the time came to leave this morning, I popped over to the gym for a quick swim to remind my body about exercising and my mind that it's not that hard to fit in 30 minutes of movement.

picking myself back up again

Hey. I haven't been posting because I haven't at all been on plan. I have been on no plan. I haven't even been weighing myself. I was sick and then I was busy with work and had a week-long obsession with a computer game. I'll be so happy when next week's dance show is past. I am not well-made for freelancing, it seems, at this time in my life.

But, I did have some time off today and went to the grocery store. I have been off-plan for so long now I don't really remember what on plan feels like. Again. :-) But I can tell you that off-plan (better to call it no-plan) kinda sucks a bit. I don't feel nearly as good in comparison.

I hate to think about how exercisey I was before I got sick and how different it is now. Just a couple days can changing your habits can make a real difference in how you feel, and a couple weeks begins to make it seem more normal, easier to embrace.

I feel a bit of a need to go back to being strident for a while. Start again on the same path I probably posted about last time I was here - to get to 182, wasn't it? To definitely push to under 200 pounds. Using exercise and meal planning. And go off the sweets again for a while. Three months isn't so long to push past the barrier, and then think of the benefits.

I'm working now with a director who I suppose hasn't seen me since I weighed a lot more, so he gushed a little bit about my weight loss. I don't get the reaction so much anymore and when I do, I feel a little weird since I just gained 10 pounds pigging out on candy bars! Several years ago he also began battling the bulge and lost a bunch of weight, and you can tell he struggles to keep it off because sometimes he has gained some back and no matter how much he works out or eats lettuce, he's just the pudgy body type. Anyway, he was a sympathetic soul is what I'm getting at.

And I've remembered - as I feel my side rolls pudging out into my arms a little more - what it felt like to feel my body reducing on a daily basis. Definitely strange and wonderful. It was due to determination. I can do that again.

July 2, 206

Oh, don't we all love getting sick and losing weight! I got sick and am down 2 or 3 pounds to 206. I've done a lot of sleeping and sweating. I went straight off the diet and started downing fruit juices and V8s (calories and sugars notwithstanding) and all the fruit (canned and fresh) I could scarf up. Also a bunch of chocolate bars that were on sale and some KFC but I couldn't really taste the joy in any of that because my sense of taste is off, but I ate it anyway and now I understand why - not because of my illness but because I was about to get my period. You'd think I'd learn to anticipate things like that - lol. It didn't even occur to me. There was one time I tracked my period for a year or more. It had suddenly become regular when it had never been at all regular before, so I was fascinated. Eventually I stopped keeping track, and started thinking I wasn't quite so regular anymore. Anyway, I added an iPod app for tracking your menstrual cycle and was actually startled to see that (after only one entry last month) it had guessed that I would start my period yesterday, just exactly when I did! Now you regular women out there are saying "big effing deal" but I have never considered myself to be normal, especially in terms of my sexuality. I just am always surprised that I work just exactly the way women are supposed to.

Anyway - I finally got started transcribing some menus into a menu planner for myself so I can break from ediets - it may take me a couple months and I'm not starting this week after all. I am still too sick to exercise sadly but I will make a trip to the grocery store.