Shrinking Responsibility
In the interest of getting back to writing, and to give myself something voluntary to do (this), I’ve decided to work on short posts. I know, HA, HA HA. Believe me, I’m laughing right along with you. Me write short? That’s a Zero on the scale of “Likely to Happen”. But it’s my goal, and anyway, I miss writing like I miss being thin, and so perhaps these two things will help each other.
As a motivator, and to give myself something to write that is (1) short and (2) interesting, and also possibly (3) give my husband a reason to get down off of the roof and put the grapefruit knife back in the drawer, I’ve decided to track my daily mood and weight from the beginning to the end of a cycle. I have suspicions that my PMS has now grown to an all-time length of 12 days. When I add the 6 or 7 days of my period (yup, a full week. Ain’t that sweet…), that gives me roughly 19 days out of 29 that I’m feeling gross, fat, icky, cranky, tired, and/or generally ill at ease with the world. And while I appreciate all the ‘material’ that Feeling Off gives me, I have to admit that this is a long time, even for me, to be sideways with life.
I’ve started by writing in the morning, since I seem to be more even then. If I don’t get a good reading, I’ll switch over to evening check-in next month. At the end of the month, I’m going to make up some charts (geek!) and a few graphs (double geek!) to see what my average feeling is over the cycle, how many days I really do feel Off, and if there’s anything going on day-to-day that might be triggering it other than my 40-something hormones. I’ll post it all, so you can laugh at me while I try to fit my life on a histogram and a bell curve with standard deviations.
I’m taking charge of my life! Well no, that’s probably overstating. What I’m really doing is documenting how many ways I’m not in charge. But you can’t change what you don’t track, and really, I’m determined to fix my moods. I probably won’t splay everything out here, particularly as I get close to the end of the cycle and I start shoving Howard back up on the roof, but I’ll give as much as I can. My hope is that eventually I’ll just come to accept that this is the way of things for now, expect that my emotions start peeling off of me around Day 18 and take the Zen approach. I have all kinds of things going on in my life right now relative to acceptance and Zen and Living Right Now. But of course, there’s no place to put that in a short post that’s about something else.
As a caveat insert here, let me tell you that my life is full. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but perhaps that’s because I don’t have time to stop and think about what all is going on. And it’s not like there’s a lot. Work is busy while I’m there, but I manage to get most of my work done during regular hours (8-5:30, with a rare lunch break). I have started staying late on Wednesday nights (7pm), since that’s Boys Night Out with Howard and DS. I’ve discovered that I cannot be alone in the house, because if I am, I turn into Fat Lady Eating Machine. So, to alleviate some of that stress and some of that problem, I’m just staying at work until I know the boys are on their way home.
Plus, I may start staying late on Thursdays, since there is a great yoga class with an awesome teacher that I’d like to do. It’s really hard to find true Yoga instructors in Wheaton. Most of the yoga teachers here in the west Chicago suburbs are Pilates instructors in (weak) disguise. They go too fast, they talk too much, and they are incapable of doing a yoga class without slipping some Pilates/core/suck-in-your-stomach jazz into the practice. I like, slow, controlled, hold-the-pose yoga. I have decent strength and balance, thanks to years of martial arts and tennis, but I’m about as flexible as a Popsicle stick, and so I need to concentrate when I’m stretching. If someone is yakking about all the benefits while I’m trying to quiet the screams in my hamstrings, well, let’s just say that I’m probably not going to relax. Yesterday I actually rolled my eyes during one instructor’s blather about standing on a block to improve your balance. Who cares what you think? That’s what After Class is for. Ah, hormones. Clearly no good.
Anyway, since I’ve found this class and this instructor that I like so well, it might be worth it to me to lose an evening with my family, in order to be civilized enough the rest of the week so that they’ll want me around.
However, that aside, I’m not working many weekends, and while school is intense, it’s manageable too. I do my homework after DS goes to bed, around 8:30, and I usually finish up some time around 10pm. I do need 4 or 5 nights to get it all in, but I usually have one evening a week (generally on Fridays) where I don’t have anything due, and I can relax and do nothing…Though really, what I do is catch up on the chores I’ve not been able to do all week while I’m building confidence intervals and writing papers. I don’t like being idle. I picked that up from a little snippet from Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett remembers her mother, and how her hands were never idle. I've worked for years to build habits that keep me constantly moving and productive.
My recent foray into Living in the Moment calls for quite a bit of stillness, however, and I’ve discovered that I like it. I prefer to talk less, and to move less, and to BE where I am, rather than simply be there and think about other things. I’m more centered, happier, and definitely more relaxed. But that was last week. It’s easy to be Zen when you’re lounging by the pool, watching your husband’s folks roll around in being grandparents and getting an utterly delicious fill of Being With DS. Taking it back with me is another thing, and since I’ve never been low-key, it is a struggle. But I am determined to calm down.
I WILL DEFEAT THE ANGER, DAMMIT!
Kidding. But it is how I feel. And sometimes it’s so hard to get out of my head and just be. But when I am there, wow…it is a great, great thing.
So I think I was right when I said that my life was full. Unless I get up earlier in the morning (insert sardonic cackle here), I haven’t time for exercise beyond the 2 yoga classes a week (Sunday mornings is the other one), and I have no hobbies. School is my hobby. Work is my filler, Family is my priority, and Weight Watchers is an old friend who is waiting for me to call her. Well, I’m dialing.
I just came off of a 1-week trip to Florida/Paradise with my smashingly awesome in-laws, so really, I have no reason to be stressed. Ah, but Grasshopper needs no reason—only an opening and POW! We’re right back to where we were, pummeling vendors at work, snarling at my husband, and weeping at the scales.
Hmmm. Looking this over, I think that tracking my weight and my moods probably won’t do anything for my psychotic tendencies, except give Howard a record of my bad behavior. But hey, it might help, and anyway, it’ll be fun, I’ll get to write every day, and I’ll get to share some of the less caustic musings out here. And as we all know, writing about stress alleviates it somehow. Or at least it makes it funny. Here’s hoping.
I don’t plan to post every day, even though I’m writing every day. My expectation is that if I start writing a comment that is too long to get down on paper in 15 mins (my allotted time for plotting & tracking), then I’ll type it out and post it here. I don’t want to commit to anything regular, since I haven’t posted in ages, but I really do want to bring it out here and share it.
Day 1: April 13, 2008 (Sunday)
General mood (scale 1-10): 6
Weight 156 pounds
Evaluation of today: Sucky
Yep, I’m up 9 pounds from my goal weight. The 3-pound fairy has come to call; I always jump 3 pounds on the day my period starts, and there it is. Yesterday I weighed 153. No big prize for that, either. I’ve been stuck at 153 for a month, and no amount of water guzzling, pickle eating or general suffering between meals has chiseled off those 6 pounds. And now I have 9. I know these 3 won’t last. They stick stubbornly to the octopus for the duration of my period, and then they vanish, all at once, on the last day. So it’s 6, but today it’s 9, and I feel every ounce.
On a good note, I think I know part of the reason that I couldn’t drop back down to 147 despite all my efforts. Apart from the obvious lack of exercise, and my refusal to stop eating Hershey’s miniatures, I think it’s the Niacin. I started taking Niacin (Vitamin B-3) about a month ago, when Awesome Boss recommended it. My good cholesterol was just a wee bit low last year (38 when it should have been above 39), and he said that taking Niacin would boost it. Plus, Niacin does this wild thing where it ‘flushes’ you, by opening up your blood vessels and rushing your blood around so that you look like you spent the weekend at a Swim-up Bar in Cancun. It's supposed to be really good for your heart. I like healthy organs! bought some Niacin, popped a 500 mg tablet into my mouth and waited.
I flushed all right, and I got itchy and blotchy and really, really hot. But I liked it, and it was cool to see something at work in my body, so I kept at it. In fact, I liked it so much that I started taking it twice a day. When I got a time-released style in Florida and didn’t flush at all, I felt completely cheated. I got home and the first thing I did was down the Niacin. I flushed and all was good.
Sure enough, at my last physical, my good cholesterol had jumped into the 60s. BUT my overall cholesterol, which had been 123 last year is now 174. AND my left side was hard and kind of hurting. I looked up Niacin on the internet (OK, Wikipedia) and it mentions that Niacin blocks the breakdown of fat in your body. For those (MEN) with seriously low good cholesterol, it’s sometimes prescribed to aid in the buildup. And guess what? If you take it and you don’t’ really need it, you can do liver damage BECAUSE THE NIACIN WON’T LET YOUR BODY BREAK DOWN ITS FAT. It is generally not recommended for women.
Ok, then. So I chucked it all, and I have been downing water until I’m leaking, trying to aid my liver in getting back to normal. It was only a month, and I was still below the lowest prescription level, but still…so uncool to muck with the liver. It’s been 2 days and the hardness is waning. It’s less tender too, but it hasn’t gone away completely. I’ve really cut back on my coffee, so I can concentrate on the water and in getting my body back to normal. but now of course I have a caffeine headache. I’m such a moron. No more flushing for me.
And clearly it’s not only the Niacin that’s preventing me from losing the weight. But I have tossed all the B-3 into the trash. Plus, now it’s Day 1, and my chocolate cravings have completely vanished. They appear like clockwork right around Day 21 and hound me without reprieve for 8 days until my period starts. Then they check out, take a 21-day cruise, and if they meet me at the grocery store, they pretend they don’t know me. It’s so odd. I really wish I could remember that they’re temporary and that the craving is not real. But so far, and ever since December, they take me over. I’m hopeful that writing this down and confronting them head on (with mouth closed!) will help.
Concluding thoughts-Writing short will be a much bigger challenge than I thought. I may have to post soon, just to see if I can keep it under 500 words.
A the L(ong and Less Lean)
As a motivator, and to give myself something to write that is (1) short and (2) interesting, and also possibly (3) give my husband a reason to get down off of the roof and put the grapefruit knife back in the drawer, I’ve decided to track my daily mood and weight from the beginning to the end of a cycle. I have suspicions that my PMS has now grown to an all-time length of 12 days. When I add the 6 or 7 days of my period (yup, a full week. Ain’t that sweet…), that gives me roughly 19 days out of 29 that I’m feeling gross, fat, icky, cranky, tired, and/or generally ill at ease with the world. And while I appreciate all the ‘material’ that Feeling Off gives me, I have to admit that this is a long time, even for me, to be sideways with life.
I’ve started by writing in the morning, since I seem to be more even then. If I don’t get a good reading, I’ll switch over to evening check-in next month. At the end of the month, I’m going to make up some charts (geek!) and a few graphs (double geek!) to see what my average feeling is over the cycle, how many days I really do feel Off, and if there’s anything going on day-to-day that might be triggering it other than my 40-something hormones. I’ll post it all, so you can laugh at me while I try to fit my life on a histogram and a bell curve with standard deviations.
I’m taking charge of my life! Well no, that’s probably overstating. What I’m really doing is documenting how many ways I’m not in charge. But you can’t change what you don’t track, and really, I’m determined to fix my moods. I probably won’t splay everything out here, particularly as I get close to the end of the cycle and I start shoving Howard back up on the roof, but I’ll give as much as I can. My hope is that eventually I’ll just come to accept that this is the way of things for now, expect that my emotions start peeling off of me around Day 18 and take the Zen approach. I have all kinds of things going on in my life right now relative to acceptance and Zen and Living Right Now. But of course, there’s no place to put that in a short post that’s about something else.
As a caveat insert here, let me tell you that my life is full. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but perhaps that’s because I don’t have time to stop and think about what all is going on. And it’s not like there’s a lot. Work is busy while I’m there, but I manage to get most of my work done during regular hours (8-5:30, with a rare lunch break). I have started staying late on Wednesday nights (7pm), since that’s Boys Night Out with Howard and DS. I’ve discovered that I cannot be alone in the house, because if I am, I turn into Fat Lady Eating Machine. So, to alleviate some of that stress and some of that problem, I’m just staying at work until I know the boys are on their way home.
Plus, I may start staying late on Thursdays, since there is a great yoga class with an awesome teacher that I’d like to do. It’s really hard to find true Yoga instructors in Wheaton. Most of the yoga teachers here in the west Chicago suburbs are Pilates instructors in (weak) disguise. They go too fast, they talk too much, and they are incapable of doing a yoga class without slipping some Pilates/core/suck-in-your-stomach jazz into the practice. I like, slow, controlled, hold-the-pose yoga. I have decent strength and balance, thanks to years of martial arts and tennis, but I’m about as flexible as a Popsicle stick, and so I need to concentrate when I’m stretching. If someone is yakking about all the benefits while I’m trying to quiet the screams in my hamstrings, well, let’s just say that I’m probably not going to relax. Yesterday I actually rolled my eyes during one instructor’s blather about standing on a block to improve your balance. Who cares what you think? That’s what After Class is for. Ah, hormones. Clearly no good.
Anyway, since I’ve found this class and this instructor that I like so well, it might be worth it to me to lose an evening with my family, in order to be civilized enough the rest of the week so that they’ll want me around.
However, that aside, I’m not working many weekends, and while school is intense, it’s manageable too. I do my homework after DS goes to bed, around 8:30, and I usually finish up some time around 10pm. I do need 4 or 5 nights to get it all in, but I usually have one evening a week (generally on Fridays) where I don’t have anything due, and I can relax and do nothing…Though really, what I do is catch up on the chores I’ve not been able to do all week while I’m building confidence intervals and writing papers. I don’t like being idle. I picked that up from a little snippet from Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett remembers her mother, and how her hands were never idle. I've worked for years to build habits that keep me constantly moving and productive.
My recent foray into Living in the Moment calls for quite a bit of stillness, however, and I’ve discovered that I like it. I prefer to talk less, and to move less, and to BE where I am, rather than simply be there and think about other things. I’m more centered, happier, and definitely more relaxed. But that was last week. It’s easy to be Zen when you’re lounging by the pool, watching your husband’s folks roll around in being grandparents and getting an utterly delicious fill of Being With DS. Taking it back with me is another thing, and since I’ve never been low-key, it is a struggle. But I am determined to calm down.
I WILL DEFEAT THE ANGER, DAMMIT!
Kidding. But it is how I feel. And sometimes it’s so hard to get out of my head and just be. But when I am there, wow…it is a great, great thing.
So I think I was right when I said that my life was full. Unless I get up earlier in the morning (insert sardonic cackle here), I haven’t time for exercise beyond the 2 yoga classes a week (Sunday mornings is the other one), and I have no hobbies. School is my hobby. Work is my filler, Family is my priority, and Weight Watchers is an old friend who is waiting for me to call her. Well, I’m dialing.
I just came off of a 1-week trip to Florida/Paradise with my smashingly awesome in-laws, so really, I have no reason to be stressed. Ah, but Grasshopper needs no reason—only an opening and POW! We’re right back to where we were, pummeling vendors at work, snarling at my husband, and weeping at the scales.
Hmmm. Looking this over, I think that tracking my weight and my moods probably won’t do anything for my psychotic tendencies, except give Howard a record of my bad behavior. But hey, it might help, and anyway, it’ll be fun, I’ll get to write every day, and I’ll get to share some of the less caustic musings out here. And as we all know, writing about stress alleviates it somehow. Or at least it makes it funny. Here’s hoping.
I don’t plan to post every day, even though I’m writing every day. My expectation is that if I start writing a comment that is too long to get down on paper in 15 mins (my allotted time for plotting & tracking), then I’ll type it out and post it here. I don’t want to commit to anything regular, since I haven’t posted in ages, but I really do want to bring it out here and share it.
Day 1: April 13, 2008 (Sunday)
General mood (scale 1-10): 6
Weight 156 pounds
Evaluation of today: Sucky
Yep, I’m up 9 pounds from my goal weight. The 3-pound fairy has come to call; I always jump 3 pounds on the day my period starts, and there it is. Yesterday I weighed 153. No big prize for that, either. I’ve been stuck at 153 for a month, and no amount of water guzzling, pickle eating or general suffering between meals has chiseled off those 6 pounds. And now I have 9. I know these 3 won’t last. They stick stubbornly to the octopus for the duration of my period, and then they vanish, all at once, on the last day. So it’s 6, but today it’s 9, and I feel every ounce.
On a good note, I think I know part of the reason that I couldn’t drop back down to 147 despite all my efforts. Apart from the obvious lack of exercise, and my refusal to stop eating Hershey’s miniatures, I think it’s the Niacin. I started taking Niacin (Vitamin B-3) about a month ago, when Awesome Boss recommended it. My good cholesterol was just a wee bit low last year (38 when it should have been above 39), and he said that taking Niacin would boost it. Plus, Niacin does this wild thing where it ‘flushes’ you, by opening up your blood vessels and rushing your blood around so that you look like you spent the weekend at a Swim-up Bar in Cancun. It's supposed to be really good for your heart. I like healthy organs! bought some Niacin, popped a 500 mg tablet into my mouth and waited.
I flushed all right, and I got itchy and blotchy and really, really hot. But I liked it, and it was cool to see something at work in my body, so I kept at it. In fact, I liked it so much that I started taking it twice a day. When I got a time-released style in Florida and didn’t flush at all, I felt completely cheated. I got home and the first thing I did was down the Niacin. I flushed and all was good.
Sure enough, at my last physical, my good cholesterol had jumped into the 60s. BUT my overall cholesterol, which had been 123 last year is now 174. AND my left side was hard and kind of hurting. I looked up Niacin on the internet (OK, Wikipedia) and it mentions that Niacin blocks the breakdown of fat in your body. For those (MEN) with seriously low good cholesterol, it’s sometimes prescribed to aid in the buildup. And guess what? If you take it and you don’t’ really need it, you can do liver damage BECAUSE THE NIACIN WON’T LET YOUR BODY BREAK DOWN ITS FAT. It is generally not recommended for women.
Ok, then. So I chucked it all, and I have been downing water until I’m leaking, trying to aid my liver in getting back to normal. It was only a month, and I was still below the lowest prescription level, but still…so uncool to muck with the liver. It’s been 2 days and the hardness is waning. It’s less tender too, but it hasn’t gone away completely. I’ve really cut back on my coffee, so I can concentrate on the water and in getting my body back to normal. but now of course I have a caffeine headache. I’m such a moron. No more flushing for me.
And clearly it’s not only the Niacin that’s preventing me from losing the weight. But I have tossed all the B-3 into the trash. Plus, now it’s Day 1, and my chocolate cravings have completely vanished. They appear like clockwork right around Day 21 and hound me without reprieve for 8 days until my period starts. Then they check out, take a 21-day cruise, and if they meet me at the grocery store, they pretend they don’t know me. It’s so odd. I really wish I could remember that they’re temporary and that the craving is not real. But so far, and ever since December, they take me over. I’m hopeful that writing this down and confronting them head on (with mouth closed!) will help.
Concluding thoughts-Writing short will be a much bigger challenge than I thought. I may have to post soon, just to see if I can keep it under 500 words.
A the L(ong and Less Lean)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 7:46 AM
3 Comments:
That has to be the longest post in history!
Humm. Enjoyment for life does not speak from these pages.... Zen and yoga should make you feel less concerned about the world, more in tune... I do hope you find your happy place more often than it seems from the posts.
glad you are posting again! colleen
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