Bitter-Sweet Sixteen
It was a mistake to declare my WW goal.
My brain, in its expanded capacity of helping me, has decided that since I’m at goal on WW, I should stop losing weight. After dropping an average of 10 pounds a month since the beginning, I logged a paltry 4.75 pound loss in March. I admit to some PMS puffiness this week, but I have been strict and adamant and not putting anything near my Pie Hole that isn’t whole, fibrous, and lean, and still, I remain flat. Sucks.
So even though I want to lose up to 16.50 more pounds, my brain has ‘decided’ that I’m done. I eat exactly the way I have been eating since Day 1, and I’m even mixing up my meals to confuse my metabolism. The scale tips and teeters, but doesn’t really move. After hanging at 160 for this whole week, I dropped to 158.75 yesterday (yay!) only to jump back to 160 this morning. Sucks.
It hurts me further that I don’t exercise (seriously, what is WRONG with me?), and THAT is further exacerbated by the fact that I have somehow developed knee problems. I have no idea how I managed to get a bum knee after I lost 92 pounds. I wonder if it’s something akin to when my grandmother didn’t have a “sick day” for 25 years while she took care of my ailing grandfather, but as soon as he died, she got cold after cold and then developed some weird lesion on her nose that required hospitalization. Maybe my brain knew it couldn’t lose its motive power when I was huge, but now that I’m better mobilized, it’s okay to give me a flat. I raked leaves for 3 hours on Saturday. Nothing big, nothing turbo, and really, I just swept them into piles so Howard could vacuum them up, and now I can’t sit or stand for very long without doing that Old Lady wince-and-rub-your-rheumatism grimace.
Sucks.
After grousing and obsessing about this for a week, I’ve decided that the best way to tackle this is through denial. I deny that I have reached my goal. I refuse to accept a clothed 163 as my final resting place. I commit to losing more weight, as much as 16.50 pounds to go before I sleep.
Sixteen pounds is a lot to lose. It’s pretty close to twenty, and that’s 2 whole sizes in the Misses world.
Twenty pounds is the Magic Weight Loss Number, a figure that kick-starts people into dieting. You can suck in your stomach or blouse out your clothes and hide ten pounds, or even fifteen if you're tall, but at 20 pounds, the body looks different. When people ask me about my weight, they usually offer how much they’d like to lose, and that double-dime figure is a popular one. ‘Boy I sure could stand to lose 20.’ ‘If I could only get 20 off, I’d be happy.’ 'I’m going to stick to this fricking diet until I lose all I want to lose.’
That last one was me. I’m in this crowd, too. I have (nearly) 20 pounds to go. It’s time to re-start the program.
I’m doing Phase 2 –aptly named The Pushing Stage (see post below, “Bearing Down”) as a Recovered Fat Person who wants to lose some more weight. Frankly, I think this will help me, since I won’t have to battle my own “I’m still fat” demons as I work my way down into the 140s. I figure I’ll take the Slimy Salesman approach to this, where the idea is that people who’ve just spent a bunch of money on something new (house, car) are more apt to buy yet more new things (Kirby vacuum cleaners). So it goes for me: the place I’m most likely to lose weight is right after I’ve lost a bunch. Here’s hoping.
So, here they are. The details of Lose the Fat, Phase 2.
Goal #1: I promise to get off my bony, squishy arse and do a minimum of 20 minutes of ‘movement’ at least 3 times a week.
You’ll note that I use the WW term ‘movement’ and not the actual term, ‘exercise’. Coward! But hey, I crushed my knee by raking leaves! That’s so sad. At this juncture, I’m happy that my legs are working, never mind pumping at 60 rpms on the elliptical. Still, it’s getting warmer, DS wants to zoom his scooter all over creation, and there simply is no more excuse. I am going to get cardio.
I think part of my issue with delaying the exercise program is that I wanted to see how far down I could get before I stalled. (Note to self: it’s right here, you jerkoff!). The other piece is that I’ve never stuck to a ‘movement’ program. I start great. I get all fired up, I start packing my gym bag at night, so it's ready in the morning, and as I get firmer, I push harder. It all boils over on itself until gym time becomes a true priority. Sometimes I will get to a place where I start to look at my workouts as calendar items, like doctor visits, where only death and disaster should keep me from honoring the ‘appointment’. Of course my dentist called this morning and cancelled my 4-month old appointment scheduled for this Friday since his hygienist ‘needed to take a day off’. Uh, okay. Guess I’ll use my appointment time to find another tooth scraper. Anyway….
I get into exercise. I love it, and I love how my (secretly athletic) body responds to workouts. I start working out, and I vow on the spot to belong to the gym for a lifetime, and to go every day until I die.
The first part is true: I’m a member of the YMCA indefinitely. The second part falls distinctly into the ‘Ah, not so much’ category. Inevitably, something happens to make me miss a workout, and then I'll miss another, and then suddenly, I'm going 3x a week instead of every day. Then I get a heavy period or I go traveling and the "fitness center" at the hotel blows chunks, so I stay in and eat room service instead of exercising. Before long, I notice my gym bag only because I haven't pulled my clothes out from the last workout, and they've started to stink.
I'm in this time. I owe this to myself, and I want to make workouts a part of my life. A real part. Not auxilliary, not ancillary, and not when it's convenient. It's necessary, and I want to do it. I will get my bony arse moving.
Goal #2: I will remember that I am a moderate at nothing, and that this works to my advantage.
I will drive toward the finish, rather than coast. Coasting is going downhill, and I am most decidedly not doing that. This last piece is hard, and will continue to challenge me with every flipping walk past that stupid chocolate-stash drawer, which, by the way, they have now filled with dark chocolate miniatures. Sometimes I really hate this place.
But, since I am not a moderate, and since I trust myself that I can commit to this for a lifetime, then I will remember that whatever I start, I can finish, and whatever I finish, I can maintain. I have no worries about staying on a healthy diet after the last pound has been wrenched off of my body. I will find a way to have the same faith in myself when it comes to exercise and mental strength. I know that I can do this, because I have. Sticking to something is its own challenge, but I’m not there yet. I will work through that when it arrives. For now, I’m 0.0 pounds into this goal, and all my energy gets channeled to the Loss.
Goal #3: I will become okay with the fact that, while I am as thin (ish) as I was as a teenager, that my body does not look like that anymore, and that's okay.
I like myself so much more now than I did when I was young. I am calmer, more self-assured, and more centered than I ever was as a skinny kid. And yes, I know that seems hard to believe when I’m ranting, but really, I am, at least comparatively speaking. But there’s a way to go before I’m considered calm by Normal standards. Now is the time to become that. I need to be who I am, and to like who I am, in order to succeed. I have to look at my window-shade breasts and the last, drooping bits of the octopus and that weird little fanny pack on the back of my legs, and laugh.
Or chuckle, or maybe just smile for now. I don’t have that tight body of Once Upon A Time, and I will likely never have it again. I might always have the tricep “mary-janes” that flap when I wave my arm, even if I get hard-core into bodybuilding, and my tummy may always sport a little convex curve to it.
The things that count are beneath my stretched skin. My health, already so much better, stands to gain even more. I have a cholesterol reading of 121, and everything that got tested in March is in normal range. Well, everything except the good cholesterol. No idea how that happened or what I can do to fix it. But I’m not anemic anymore, my triglycerides are normal for the first time since they’ve been tested, and I’m of normal body weight on every scale in the western world (I haven’t the same high hopes for my weight in Asia, but I don’t live there, so I’m not bothered by that.).
I’m proud of the stretch marks on my tummy, that show where my DS lived for 39 weeks. I like the fact (sometimes!) that my breasts bear the marks of being functional for 4 years. I’m proud of my scars and my crepe-like skin, and I’m even getting used to the gray in my hair. I might look more like the MOTB in my wedding dress, but I earned every silver streak, and I’m happy to display them.
So it makes no sense that I’d want that old body back, because (a) I can’t have it without zillions of dollars in surgery and then I risk looking like Joan “stretch my face until I look like I’m an astronaut in training” Rivers, and (b) if I could go back, it would have to be all the way, and I don’t want that. I like me as I am, sags and all. So I will learn to love me. And then I will work on firming up those weird saddle bags “out back”. Seriously, they are weird looking.
So, off we go! I’m leaving work now, at 4:45pm, so I can get home, change clothes, and take a leisurely walk. I’d do it hard core, but I fear for my knee. If I burn fewer calories, that’s okay. I might make up some of it while I’m shivering, since it is now Springtime in Chicago, which means 40 degrees and 20 mph winds. Sometimes I hate this place.
But in other ways, I love it. I love This Place, where I am thin and happy, and where I am perched on something fantastic and important. All I need is me to get there. Luckily, there is less of me to drag along to the gym. AND I’ll get a little boost next week when my period arrives. Things are looking up re: moving down already.
A the S(ixteen to Go)
My brain, in its expanded capacity of helping me, has decided that since I’m at goal on WW, I should stop losing weight. After dropping an average of 10 pounds a month since the beginning, I logged a paltry 4.75 pound loss in March. I admit to some PMS puffiness this week, but I have been strict and adamant and not putting anything near my Pie Hole that isn’t whole, fibrous, and lean, and still, I remain flat. Sucks.
So even though I want to lose up to 16.50 more pounds, my brain has ‘decided’ that I’m done. I eat exactly the way I have been eating since Day 1, and I’m even mixing up my meals to confuse my metabolism. The scale tips and teeters, but doesn’t really move. After hanging at 160 for this whole week, I dropped to 158.75 yesterday (yay!) only to jump back to 160 this morning. Sucks.
It hurts me further that I don’t exercise (seriously, what is WRONG with me?), and THAT is further exacerbated by the fact that I have somehow developed knee problems. I have no idea how I managed to get a bum knee after I lost 92 pounds. I wonder if it’s something akin to when my grandmother didn’t have a “sick day” for 25 years while she took care of my ailing grandfather, but as soon as he died, she got cold after cold and then developed some weird lesion on her nose that required hospitalization. Maybe my brain knew it couldn’t lose its motive power when I was huge, but now that I’m better mobilized, it’s okay to give me a flat. I raked leaves for 3 hours on Saturday. Nothing big, nothing turbo, and really, I just swept them into piles so Howard could vacuum them up, and now I can’t sit or stand for very long without doing that Old Lady wince-and-rub-your-rheumatism grimace.
Sucks.
After grousing and obsessing about this for a week, I’ve decided that the best way to tackle this is through denial. I deny that I have reached my goal. I refuse to accept a clothed 163 as my final resting place. I commit to losing more weight, as much as 16.50 pounds to go before I sleep.
Sixteen pounds is a lot to lose. It’s pretty close to twenty, and that’s 2 whole sizes in the Misses world.
Twenty pounds is the Magic Weight Loss Number, a figure that kick-starts people into dieting. You can suck in your stomach or blouse out your clothes and hide ten pounds, or even fifteen if you're tall, but at 20 pounds, the body looks different. When people ask me about my weight, they usually offer how much they’d like to lose, and that double-dime figure is a popular one. ‘Boy I sure could stand to lose 20.’ ‘If I could only get 20 off, I’d be happy.’ 'I’m going to stick to this fricking diet until I lose all I want to lose.’
That last one was me. I’m in this crowd, too. I have (nearly) 20 pounds to go. It’s time to re-start the program.
I’m doing Phase 2 –aptly named The Pushing Stage (see post below, “Bearing Down”) as a Recovered Fat Person who wants to lose some more weight. Frankly, I think this will help me, since I won’t have to battle my own “I’m still fat” demons as I work my way down into the 140s. I figure I’ll take the Slimy Salesman approach to this, where the idea is that people who’ve just spent a bunch of money on something new (house, car) are more apt to buy yet more new things (Kirby vacuum cleaners). So it goes for me: the place I’m most likely to lose weight is right after I’ve lost a bunch. Here’s hoping.
So, here they are. The details of Lose the Fat, Phase 2.
Goal #1: I promise to get off my bony, squishy arse and do a minimum of 20 minutes of ‘movement’ at least 3 times a week.
You’ll note that I use the WW term ‘movement’ and not the actual term, ‘exercise’. Coward! But hey, I crushed my knee by raking leaves! That’s so sad. At this juncture, I’m happy that my legs are working, never mind pumping at 60 rpms on the elliptical. Still, it’s getting warmer, DS wants to zoom his scooter all over creation, and there simply is no more excuse. I am going to get cardio.
I think part of my issue with delaying the exercise program is that I wanted to see how far down I could get before I stalled. (Note to self: it’s right here, you jerkoff!). The other piece is that I’ve never stuck to a ‘movement’ program. I start great. I get all fired up, I start packing my gym bag at night, so it's ready in the morning, and as I get firmer, I push harder. It all boils over on itself until gym time becomes a true priority. Sometimes I will get to a place where I start to look at my workouts as calendar items, like doctor visits, where only death and disaster should keep me from honoring the ‘appointment’. Of course my dentist called this morning and cancelled my 4-month old appointment scheduled for this Friday since his hygienist ‘needed to take a day off’. Uh, okay. Guess I’ll use my appointment time to find another tooth scraper. Anyway….
I get into exercise. I love it, and I love how my (secretly athletic) body responds to workouts. I start working out, and I vow on the spot to belong to the gym for a lifetime, and to go every day until I die.
The first part is true: I’m a member of the YMCA indefinitely. The second part falls distinctly into the ‘Ah, not so much’ category. Inevitably, something happens to make me miss a workout, and then I'll miss another, and then suddenly, I'm going 3x a week instead of every day. Then I get a heavy period or I go traveling and the "fitness center" at the hotel blows chunks, so I stay in and eat room service instead of exercising. Before long, I notice my gym bag only because I haven't pulled my clothes out from the last workout, and they've started to stink.
I'm in this time. I owe this to myself, and I want to make workouts a part of my life. A real part. Not auxilliary, not ancillary, and not when it's convenient. It's necessary, and I want to do it. I will get my bony arse moving.
Goal #2: I will remember that I am a moderate at nothing, and that this works to my advantage.
I will drive toward the finish, rather than coast. Coasting is going downhill, and I am most decidedly not doing that. This last piece is hard, and will continue to challenge me with every flipping walk past that stupid chocolate-stash drawer, which, by the way, they have now filled with dark chocolate miniatures. Sometimes I really hate this place.
But, since I am not a moderate, and since I trust myself that I can commit to this for a lifetime, then I will remember that whatever I start, I can finish, and whatever I finish, I can maintain. I have no worries about staying on a healthy diet after the last pound has been wrenched off of my body. I will find a way to have the same faith in myself when it comes to exercise and mental strength. I know that I can do this, because I have. Sticking to something is its own challenge, but I’m not there yet. I will work through that when it arrives. For now, I’m 0.0 pounds into this goal, and all my energy gets channeled to the Loss.
Goal #3: I will become okay with the fact that, while I am as thin (ish) as I was as a teenager, that my body does not look like that anymore, and that's okay.
I like myself so much more now than I did when I was young. I am calmer, more self-assured, and more centered than I ever was as a skinny kid. And yes, I know that seems hard to believe when I’m ranting, but really, I am, at least comparatively speaking. But there’s a way to go before I’m considered calm by Normal standards. Now is the time to become that. I need to be who I am, and to like who I am, in order to succeed. I have to look at my window-shade breasts and the last, drooping bits of the octopus and that weird little fanny pack on the back of my legs, and laugh.
Or chuckle, or maybe just smile for now. I don’t have that tight body of Once Upon A Time, and I will likely never have it again. I might always have the tricep “mary-janes” that flap when I wave my arm, even if I get hard-core into bodybuilding, and my tummy may always sport a little convex curve to it.
The things that count are beneath my stretched skin. My health, already so much better, stands to gain even more. I have a cholesterol reading of 121, and everything that got tested in March is in normal range. Well, everything except the good cholesterol. No idea how that happened or what I can do to fix it. But I’m not anemic anymore, my triglycerides are normal for the first time since they’ve been tested, and I’m of normal body weight on every scale in the western world (I haven’t the same high hopes for my weight in Asia, but I don’t live there, so I’m not bothered by that.).
I’m proud of the stretch marks on my tummy, that show where my DS lived for 39 weeks. I like the fact (sometimes!) that my breasts bear the marks of being functional for 4 years. I’m proud of my scars and my crepe-like skin, and I’m even getting used to the gray in my hair. I might look more like the MOTB in my wedding dress, but I earned every silver streak, and I’m happy to display them.
So it makes no sense that I’d want that old body back, because (a) I can’t have it without zillions of dollars in surgery and then I risk looking like Joan “stretch my face until I look like I’m an astronaut in training” Rivers, and (b) if I could go back, it would have to be all the way, and I don’t want that. I like me as I am, sags and all. So I will learn to love me. And then I will work on firming up those weird saddle bags “out back”. Seriously, they are weird looking.
So, off we go! I’m leaving work now, at 4:45pm, so I can get home, change clothes, and take a leisurely walk. I’d do it hard core, but I fear for my knee. If I burn fewer calories, that’s okay. I might make up some of it while I’m shivering, since it is now Springtime in Chicago, which means 40 degrees and 20 mph winds. Sometimes I hate this place.
But in other ways, I love it. I love This Place, where I am thin and happy, and where I am perched on something fantastic and important. All I need is me to get there. Luckily, there is less of me to drag along to the gym. AND I’ll get a little boost next week when my period arrives. Things are looking up re: moving down already.
A the S(ixteen to Go)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 2:43 PM
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