Girding My Loins
I weighed in at 166.50 pounds on Saturday morning, down about a pound from last week..
As of Friday night, I was down less than 0.50 pounds, and I was so irritated over having a light loss on the week of my period that I actually ran on the treadmill. It didn’t help, but I did get to demo the new phone/mpg3 player that Howard bought me for Valentine’s Day. Let me tell you, I am in dire need of a Playing With Phone tutorial. I couldn’t ever figure out how to get to my music, and doing that while jogging made the job even tougher. I kept logging myself on to the telephone network’s private internet account. I’m pretty sure I text messaged Fiji before the whole thing was over.
I declared a goal weight of 163.0 pounds at WW, which would equate roughly to 160.0 pounds at home. I think I can do better than this, but I am loathe to declare my actual goal, for fear I’ll never get there. My body might be okay to hold a lower weight, but my brain knows that I haven’t seen the lighter side of 160 pounds since Big Hair was in.
Part of the reason I have a good shot of dropping the Big Bar on the balance scale once more (first from 200 to 150, and then from 150 to 100), is that I haven’t exercised at all, apart from near-daily sex with my betrothed. I’m not thin so much as I’m squishy. Muscle weighs more than fat, and so since I have less muscle, I can support a lower body weight.
So a goal weight at WW below 160 is probably still very achievable, since even if I went down to 150, I could never put on 10 pounds of muscle. I get hard-body pretty nicely when I’m lifting weight, but I don’t ever get bigger. When I was in my 20s, I worked out 5 days a week, 2 hours per session, and even then, when I could bench press 150 pounds and squat nearly twice my body weight, my arms were still smaller than a man with no training.
My meso- to ectomorphic frame takes on muscle with great care, only after convening with my brain, my bones, and my central nervous system. They do a Project Scope, send consultants in from Omega-3 University and the Institute of ‘Please, Don’t Let Her Do That Man-Wannabe Thing Again!’, and then, 4 to 6 weeks after I have put my flesh to the metal, I might see a teeny muscle-weight gain. It always comes with that Strict Father threat—you know, the kind that crabby dads give to their children whenever a new present is handed over. “You take good care of that, or I’ll send it back to where it came from, and give you a whoopin’ besides.” I get firm almost right away, and all the curves get accentuated. I never, ever have issues with bulky shoulders or thunder thighs. Those things come when I’m not working out.
I know I must do it, and really, I want to. I love weightlifting. I love the feel of the bar in my hand, and the burn of my muscles as I take them to failure. I love wearing gym-ratty clothes and grunting as I squeeze one more rep out of my screaming thighs. And I love, love, love the feeling when it’s over. If I really push it, then when I’m leaving the gym, I feel like I’m levitating.
I owe this to myself, and to my heart, and to my happiness as a Lifetime Loser. Fitness is The Key to keeping weight off. Bodies adjust to lower calorie intakes and food sameness, and they get efficient at digesting; hoarding calories and taking less energy to metabolize, so eventually, the calories you ate to lose are now the calories you must cut in order to keep from gaining more.
Howard and I have talked about getting a weight bench and some hardware to put in the lower level. My only real concerns are that I’d have to do it when DS was sleeping (he’d want to join me) and the cats are constantly in the way. They jump on my chest when I’m lying on the bench, weave in and out of my legs when I’m trying to squat, and howl at me when I’m doing pretty much anything else. When I ran on the treadmill Friday, 2 of them stood on the little perch by the window and stared at me as if I’d gone mad. I get that: after all, what logic is there in running until your lungs bleed, to go exactly nowhere? That is crazy.
But there are reception dinners to buy and honeymoon plans to reserve, and now Howard and I are eyeing a new refrigerator, since the one that came with the house is total crap. I can justify this, sort of, since we are actually using the refrigerator now. Before WW, my refrigerator was strictly for stacking empty flower vases, storing rotten vegetables and holding take-out cartons between trips to the microwave.
But it’s a completely ridiculous purchase to make, since the current model is fine. Really, it’s the disposal begs to be upgraded, since it’s constantly coughing up its rejects into the other sink. Plus, our shower door is falling off its hinges, literally, and both our cars are edging toward 75,000 miles. I already have a family membership to the YMCA. All I really need to do is get up early and go, or leave work early and take a tiny detour. There is no reason for me to bulk up my already-filling household with equipment that I cannot commit to using.
Lest I forget the aerobics, let me say, ‘ooooooh’. Ooh, the feel of the elliptical bars in my hands as my legs threaten to spin off my hip joints and my breathing comes so heavy that I can’t hear Melissa Etheridge booming inside my ears.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that I had a light loss during a period week, so I can see that the last group of pounds, however many they may be, must come off the truly old-fashioned way, by diet and exercise.
In the mean time, my size 10 dress pants are starting to sag in the seat, and my size 12 blouses border on the Ridiculously Huge. Today I tried to anchor my Medium sweater into my skivvies, because it kept sneaking out of my pants and showing my low back to the company at large. I figured I might let my high-cut briefs do something other than give me panty lines. I tucked it inside my drawers, and then checked my reflection in the mirror. Guess what? Fully two inches of my underwear was sticking out above my waist band. I mean, it’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.
And now, since I have pudding-jiggly thighs and my triceps are now exposed enough to wave along with my hands when I’m short-sleeved, I may actually have to consider wearing knickers all the time and transfer permanently over to either a ‘support garment’, which is code for ‘thin, but too wobbly to support the clothes you fit in’, or (gasp!) a thong. My god, as if flossing my teeth weren’t enough. Now I have to push stuff into my hoo-ha region, just to get some coverage. Oh, the irony. But at least this way, if I have to double my drawers as shirt-anchor, people will see something other than “Hanes” across my backside.
Maybe it’s time to consider one of those Chinese character tattoos.
Or, maybe it’s time to realize that I’ve been dang lucky to lose nearly 85 pounds while doing nothing but food-deprivation, and if I’m to stand someday in front of a gaggle of suburban wives and declare my Years of Maintenance, I’d better get my Disappearing Hiney into an exercise program. It’s all in the starting. Howard is on Week 3 of pounding it out on the treadmill every morning. The weather is warming up…sort of. I mean, yeah, it was barely above freezing today, but compared to last week, when the “high” was a ten degrees below zero, 31 degrees and sunny is practically windbreaker weather.
Get me to a swimmery. Or a runner. Or someplace I can burn calories doing something other than ‘at rest’. Even DS is bowling now, and taking swimming lessons. I owe it to him to give a good example. Thin isn’t enough. Skinny isn’t sexy the way that trim is. Lithe is lovely; sticks are just, well, sticks. Besides, even in a size 6 jean, the octopus lounges across my lap, happy for the lycra and oozing over the places my thong would be (dear god, am I seriously considering this?). If for no other reason, I have to get this nasty invertebrate off of my abdomen. I don’t mind the stretch marks; in fact, I rather like them. But the wrinkle-puss look has got to go.
And so do I. See you out there. Don’t worry if I look like I’m about to collapse. If I fall off the treadmill and start to bleed, I can always use my thong as a tourniquet.
A the G(oing to Firm it Up)
As of Friday night, I was down less than 0.50 pounds, and I was so irritated over having a light loss on the week of my period that I actually ran on the treadmill. It didn’t help, but I did get to demo the new phone/mpg3 player that Howard bought me for Valentine’s Day. Let me tell you, I am in dire need of a Playing With Phone tutorial. I couldn’t ever figure out how to get to my music, and doing that while jogging made the job even tougher. I kept logging myself on to the telephone network’s private internet account. I’m pretty sure I text messaged Fiji before the whole thing was over.
I declared a goal weight of 163.0 pounds at WW, which would equate roughly to 160.0 pounds at home. I think I can do better than this, but I am loathe to declare my actual goal, for fear I’ll never get there. My body might be okay to hold a lower weight, but my brain knows that I haven’t seen the lighter side of 160 pounds since Big Hair was in.
Part of the reason I have a good shot of dropping the Big Bar on the balance scale once more (first from 200 to 150, and then from 150 to 100), is that I haven’t exercised at all, apart from near-daily sex with my betrothed. I’m not thin so much as I’m squishy. Muscle weighs more than fat, and so since I have less muscle, I can support a lower body weight.
So a goal weight at WW below 160 is probably still very achievable, since even if I went down to 150, I could never put on 10 pounds of muscle. I get hard-body pretty nicely when I’m lifting weight, but I don’t ever get bigger. When I was in my 20s, I worked out 5 days a week, 2 hours per session, and even then, when I could bench press 150 pounds and squat nearly twice my body weight, my arms were still smaller than a man with no training.
My meso- to ectomorphic frame takes on muscle with great care, only after convening with my brain, my bones, and my central nervous system. They do a Project Scope, send consultants in from Omega-3 University and the Institute of ‘Please, Don’t Let Her Do That Man-Wannabe Thing Again!’, and then, 4 to 6 weeks after I have put my flesh to the metal, I might see a teeny muscle-weight gain. It always comes with that Strict Father threat—you know, the kind that crabby dads give to their children whenever a new present is handed over. “You take good care of that, or I’ll send it back to where it came from, and give you a whoopin’ besides.” I get firm almost right away, and all the curves get accentuated. I never, ever have issues with bulky shoulders or thunder thighs. Those things come when I’m not working out.
I know I must do it, and really, I want to. I love weightlifting. I love the feel of the bar in my hand, and the burn of my muscles as I take them to failure. I love wearing gym-ratty clothes and grunting as I squeeze one more rep out of my screaming thighs. And I love, love, love the feeling when it’s over. If I really push it, then when I’m leaving the gym, I feel like I’m levitating.
I owe this to myself, and to my heart, and to my happiness as a Lifetime Loser. Fitness is The Key to keeping weight off. Bodies adjust to lower calorie intakes and food sameness, and they get efficient at digesting; hoarding calories and taking less energy to metabolize, so eventually, the calories you ate to lose are now the calories you must cut in order to keep from gaining more.
Howard and I have talked about getting a weight bench and some hardware to put in the lower level. My only real concerns are that I’d have to do it when DS was sleeping (he’d want to join me) and the cats are constantly in the way. They jump on my chest when I’m lying on the bench, weave in and out of my legs when I’m trying to squat, and howl at me when I’m doing pretty much anything else. When I ran on the treadmill Friday, 2 of them stood on the little perch by the window and stared at me as if I’d gone mad. I get that: after all, what logic is there in running until your lungs bleed, to go exactly nowhere? That is crazy.
But there are reception dinners to buy and honeymoon plans to reserve, and now Howard and I are eyeing a new refrigerator, since the one that came with the house is total crap. I can justify this, sort of, since we are actually using the refrigerator now. Before WW, my refrigerator was strictly for stacking empty flower vases, storing rotten vegetables and holding take-out cartons between trips to the microwave.
But it’s a completely ridiculous purchase to make, since the current model is fine. Really, it’s the disposal begs to be upgraded, since it’s constantly coughing up its rejects into the other sink. Plus, our shower door is falling off its hinges, literally, and both our cars are edging toward 75,000 miles. I already have a family membership to the YMCA. All I really need to do is get up early and go, or leave work early and take a tiny detour. There is no reason for me to bulk up my already-filling household with equipment that I cannot commit to using.
Lest I forget the aerobics, let me say, ‘ooooooh’. Ooh, the feel of the elliptical bars in my hands as my legs threaten to spin off my hip joints and my breathing comes so heavy that I can’t hear Melissa Etheridge booming inside my ears.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that I had a light loss during a period week, so I can see that the last group of pounds, however many they may be, must come off the truly old-fashioned way, by diet and exercise.
In the mean time, my size 10 dress pants are starting to sag in the seat, and my size 12 blouses border on the Ridiculously Huge. Today I tried to anchor my Medium sweater into my skivvies, because it kept sneaking out of my pants and showing my low back to the company at large. I figured I might let my high-cut briefs do something other than give me panty lines. I tucked it inside my drawers, and then checked my reflection in the mirror. Guess what? Fully two inches of my underwear was sticking out above my waist band. I mean, it’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.
And now, since I have pudding-jiggly thighs and my triceps are now exposed enough to wave along with my hands when I’m short-sleeved, I may actually have to consider wearing knickers all the time and transfer permanently over to either a ‘support garment’, which is code for ‘thin, but too wobbly to support the clothes you fit in’, or (gasp!) a thong. My god, as if flossing my teeth weren’t enough. Now I have to push stuff into my hoo-ha region, just to get some coverage. Oh, the irony. But at least this way, if I have to double my drawers as shirt-anchor, people will see something other than “Hanes” across my backside.
Maybe it’s time to consider one of those Chinese character tattoos.
Or, maybe it’s time to realize that I’ve been dang lucky to lose nearly 85 pounds while doing nothing but food-deprivation, and if I’m to stand someday in front of a gaggle of suburban wives and declare my Years of Maintenance, I’d better get my Disappearing Hiney into an exercise program. It’s all in the starting. Howard is on Week 3 of pounding it out on the treadmill every morning. The weather is warming up…sort of. I mean, yeah, it was barely above freezing today, but compared to last week, when the “high” was a ten degrees below zero, 31 degrees and sunny is practically windbreaker weather.
Get me to a swimmery. Or a runner. Or someplace I can burn calories doing something other than ‘at rest’. Even DS is bowling now, and taking swimming lessons. I owe it to him to give a good example. Thin isn’t enough. Skinny isn’t sexy the way that trim is. Lithe is lovely; sticks are just, well, sticks. Besides, even in a size 6 jean, the octopus lounges across my lap, happy for the lycra and oozing over the places my thong would be (dear god, am I seriously considering this?). If for no other reason, I have to get this nasty invertebrate off of my abdomen. I don’t mind the stretch marks; in fact, I rather like them. But the wrinkle-puss look has got to go.
And so do I. See you out there. Don’t worry if I look like I’m about to collapse. If I fall off the treadmill and start to bleed, I can always use my thong as a tourniquet.
A the G(oing to Firm it Up)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 6:25 AM
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