May 5, 322.7

 Weight loss success by day 3.  Way too sleepy.  Preparing food for tomorrow took me an hour and a half.  I have sleep to catch up on so I'll have to do more tomorrow.

May 4th 323.5

 Okay I have a starting weight.  323.5.  And I have now been on the diet two days.  I ate the same thing today as yesterday, almost.  I tracked my food at Lifesum, and tracked 5 glasses of water.  I was very sleepy today, again, after more than an hour of sleep but honestly still not enough sleep, maybe 2-3 hours.  I am starting to feel the hunger.  The temptation to conveniently forget the diet and have one, no a handful, might as well finish the bag of chocolate Riesens was a bit stronger.  This is the advantage of being on a strict diet where all your meals are already planned - Riesens aren't on the list.  I know I will have cheat days but first I need to strain my body of the sugar and the sugar cravings that come with it, and the same with the aspartame which is why I'm not having a soda today or tonight.  I regret that I was, again, too sleepy for exercise.  I still feel abdominally uncomfortable.  Hey, it's only day 2.  Hopefully on the third day, after several hours of healing sleep during which my body tenaciously works on itself, I will see a change on the screen, feel a little less punky in the abdominal area, something to inspire me to stick with this another day that will possibly be harder yet.

Well, I am falling asleep even here.  And my cat is comfortable here and I don't want to nudge her away by getting up to take a shower.  Aren't my priorities in order?

Only three days left until I have to go to the grocery store again for another week.  Better start planning.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

May 3, First day

 I spent a lot of time last night after grocery shopping preparing my meals for the next three days, when I'll be at work all day.  Today I ate it all except I skipped the snack that was an apple and string cheese.  I logged to Lifesum 2370 calories which may seem like a lot and it was 51 calories over.  I had only had about an hour of sleep and was very tired.  Indeed, I nodded off at work while being asked to do nothing all day.  I found that I was very thirsty today and I drank a zero-calorie energy drink, a zero-calorie Propel, and a Diet Ginger Ale, but also a lot of water.  I am still feeling abdominal discomfort and felt some uneasiness and thought maybe I would cut way back on artificial sweeteners, in fact cut them out altogether for now (which will be hard for me I think) but I really welcomed the three bottles of water I drank in addition to the above.  Tonight I am drinking sleepytime tea with just a *little* honey.  I like honey in my tea, not so much because it is sweet but I like the flavor of honey and how it makes me feel.  It feels natural and good.  It also mellows out a tea.  But, after one day on this diet I am feeling like I *could* drink herbal tea without any honey at all.

I failed to get a start weight this morning.  Hopefully tomorrow! 

I am still concerned about this abdominal discomfort.  I'm starting to wonder if it even is an umbilical hernia at all.  It feels like large pockets of hard fat, outside of my abdominal muscles.  Perhaps it is this fat that has been pushed out instead of intestines.  Maybe all my discomfort is from an increasing amount of hard internal abdominal fat making my organs struggle to operate properly.  So I hope some fat starts flying off straight away!  I just read an article that said that if I lose a chunk of fat right now I can expect like 80% of it to be the hard fat.  So let's get to it!  I want to feel better within a week!

I refused some work for next week so I can focus on my diet and going to the gym, and also I am thinking about learning some of these programs others in the industry know, like QLab and SketchUp, etc, and also I want to enjoy this fine weather with hiking and gardening and sitting in the yard.  Also I have been dipping in to digital painting and I am terrible!  So that's a lot to ask for a short period of time off and I do need to keep money coming in but the summer is packed with incessant Broadways and I figure it's likely I won't get time off then.

I think I should set a goal and a reward.  When I hit 285, go shopping.

A note about 285 - that was my initial start weight in 2009, but that was as measured on my home scale.  On other scales like at the Doctor's office and the Y, I weighed more than at home.  I was probably more than 285.  But also probably more muscular than I am now, as I become a middle-aged, going-on-old woman.  So 285 will mean I weigh less than my start weight from back then.  I hate all my clothes right now and I don't know if that's boredom from being old and not being inspired by anything or just that nothing really makes me feel good about how I look.  So maybe I could find one new outfit to feel better and celebrate weight loss success.

May 2nd, starting tomorrow

 During the run of The Nutcracker, I finished copying out all the meal plans I had kept printed out and in a box.  It was a major project and I finally was able to throw away that box of papers and print out an organized book of the meal plans.  However, getting to the grocery store and getting started has been tough, and it hasn't happened, and now it's May!  But I finally got a week of meals planned and went to the grocery store and tonight I spent the whole evening preparing my meals for the next three days because my work schedule will have me out from early morning until late night.  Because that's how it is in this business.  Also, I still live with my parents and still watch TV with them every night and still feel like that was when I stopped and still have foot problems (but the knee problems not so much these days) but now I've lost my lighting design outlet and I'm not sure how I feel about that.  Do I pursue opportunities like a freelancer or settle in for the most success I can get in stagehanding or try for that elusive "library job" with regular hours.

Anyway, I've decided that I need to blog about this regularly, and I typed in blogspot.com and damn if this blog didn't come up without me even having to sign in or remember my password.  Just ready for a new entry.  I reread the entries of my weight gain, and how that fistula seemed to end my activity level and my spirits.

I don't know what I'll weigh in at tomorrow morning, about 317-330 is what I've been at lately.

I feel uncomfortable in my midsection and I have apparently an umbilical hernia and occasionally wonder if I have any intenstinal problems, but I FEEL like I need to lose 20 pounds before I make a doctor's appointment, because she's not going to respect me unless I can tell her that I'm losing weight.  That's how I feel.  Plus, I want to lose any abdominal fat from under the muscle if I can, so I feel more supple and so we can push that hernia back in.

So I'd like to get to under 300 pounds ASAP.  My parents know what I'm doing and I'm a little worried Mom will mess things up by getting back in to cooking right when I DON'T need her to.  She has been not cooking for such a long time but if she sees me at it she might get inspired herself and then I'll have a harder time of declining her food. 

That's my goal and I'm publishing it.  Weekly trips to the grocery store for the meal plan.  Daily blogging, for now.  Daily calorie tracking.  Daily weigh-ins.  Keep it simple.  I'm 49 years old, the weight will be harder to lose, but it can happen if I am motivated and BELIEVE.  Doesn't sound much like me.  But it is me tonight.

trying to get back into it - again

It's been a few months.  I continued my daily habit of going to the gym and was really feeling the benefits.  I had to stop to go to work for a week or two, and then I got sick thought exercising would be a bad idea, and that lasted 3 weeks.  After over a month of sedentariness, it's past time to get back to it!  I walked yesterday and felt those crazy tingles in my thighs afterwards, telling me it'd been too long.

I'm going through old pictures - not that old - 2009 - when I lost weight that time - and went hiking and stuff.  My life is so different now - crippled by financial burden and fat again and watching lots of TV series and living with my parents and feeling like this is where I stop.

I took the time and effort to commit to rejoining ediets, which is cheaper now at $10 per month, a downright manageable rate and very sensible compared to the $18 I was paying.  However, I was disappointed.  They've changed.  I didn't like the new look, it didn't seem as convenient to me.  So, I'm back to my box of the old ediets recipes and meal plans.  Wish me luck, I've got to overcome the obstacles of the time it takes to manage the paperwork of it (hopefully not much, and I'm getting an idea about getting those typed up into usable formats, slowly but surely) and beyond that, the challenge of doing it while living with my family.  Much to negotiate.  By the way, I have hit the old high weight of 285, and even a bit above sometimes.  It's almost like I never lost the weight at all, except I have all those photos I've been going through, and piles of clothes I can't fit into.

At this weight, it is about attractiveness almost as much as it is about my knees.  But, oh yeah, my knees are pretty important.

So - guess I'll write up my grocery list and get my gym workout for the day done.

I can't decide which crisis is in need of worse attention - my health crisis or my financial crisis.  Because I think I'm going to put a couple weeks' attention into this health thing, without going back to work right now.  But I'm not decided on that.  I've got to find a few thousand dollars for taxes and health insurance payments in the next few weeks.

12/10 update

Well, I regained.  I am still going to the gym every day, except a couple times I missed it.  I think the blame mostly lies in not being so attentive to the food going in my mouth.  That loss of focus started when Mom came back.  Now Dad is back.  We all share the same kitchen, they tend to choose cheaper, bulk products that are pretty easy to grab and full of the wrong carbs, like microwave pizzas and crummy chicken pot pies.  Sweets that aren't really *good* but have enough sugar and refined flour to keep me reaching for them.  Now that they are home, I need to try harder.  They both say they want to "go on" "my diet" - I think having realized that would help.  However, they are possibly going to balk at the cost, if they ever figure out which are the wrong foods, and that bringing the wrong foods in the house and hoping I will be able to train myself to have "just a small portion and then stop" is not where I am right now!  Also, I should stop buying movie theatre popcorn.  I've been going out to the movies kind of a lot - 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Thor 2, last night a great flick called Rare Exports.  Today I'm thinking Frozen.  For some reason all my Facebook friends are going to see it and oohing and so on over it.  I actually did high school theatre with the lyricist, and I am kind of enchanted with the idea of a female lead with secret enchantress powers.  So my reasons not to go to a Disney animated movie are dwindling, despite the fact that I *usually* am less responsive to kid's movies than some of my friends.  (I have this debate thingy with a friend who says Pixar is awesome, and I'm ready to agree it's great and all that except I don't want to see any of their movies.  Most of them just plain look ugly to me.  For instance, Toy Story - looked ugly, nothing about it attracted me, and I figured I'd just never see it.  EVERYONE says it's JUST WONDERFUL and someone told me I really should check it out despite my misgivings.  Having seen it, I figure it's fine for kids - rather dull tale for grown-ups, despite revolutionary tech behind it and the star-studded cast - but I'm more convinced than ever that I should listen to my inner voice when deciding which kids' movies *I* want to see or not.  I did love Wall-E, by Pixar.  But that's it.)

Anyway, I gained a little weight back which is sad.  I stopped tracking my exercise and calories at LoseIt, so I can't point out the reason, but I'm sure it has to do with reaching out for too many of the wrong foods.  The slackening probably started around Thanksgiving!

I need to start working in weight lifting.  I tried yesterday.  I found that attempting to use the heavy weights I'm used to on my legs (especially the leg extension) was kinda crunchy and painful on my knee.  So I used lighter weights and lifted for a while.  It was all a bit more freestyle than I'm used to - I need to find the right system at the gym and hopefully be able to track my proper weights for each machine.  Today, I only feel it in my triceps.  And I'm looking at myself sitting on my bed now with the amount my belly is sticking out, my fat upper arms.  But I am resigned that now it's no longer about appearance, it's about maintaining a system for improving my health and then living healthily.  It's just that I hope that will involve taking some weight off these joints eventually!

12/3/13 275

I don't know why, I come to blogger today and it says I'm not subscribed to any blogs, so my bloglist is blank.

As for me, I'm only here to express frustration that the scale hasn't dropped yet.  Maybe it's the wanton ingestion of Thanksgiving leftovers.  Or anything else.  It's not ultimately all about the weight loss, but I do want to weigh less than I am right now, and I was just eager to see some results today.  Especially since I was craving that brownie a la mode, or any chocolate, all day yesterday and resisted.

Speaking of muscle gain, yesterday I felt like my thighs were especially rock hard.  I have not started the weight lifting yet.  One thing about the cardio is, I get a lot of Netflix watched, and reading done.  But weightlifting would not lend itself to multi-tasking.  Boo hoo.  Lifting myself out of the bathtub, my arms feel weak.

You know, my natural state seems to be to live very slow.