The Reduction Diaries

Determined Or Delusional?

2005-09-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

I'm honestly not sure which.

I've reworked all the numbers in my sidebar to reflect my current (non)progress. As I was doing so, the thought kept pushing itself insistently into my brain: this is just your stubbornness... re-setting these goals means nothing. You'll just fail and then in another six months you'll be back here adjusting those numbers. Get over it. Get over yourself. This is who you are.

Is the voice insane, or am I?

I'm Back

2005-09-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

Despite having messed up so badly that I not only have not lost any weight, I have actually gained exactly 20 pounds, I'm back. Because Miss Zoot is making me a pretty, pretty new blog layout and I am determined to make it work this time.

The Great Reduction, that is, not the blog layout. I'm sure the layout will be oh-so-pretty and will work great right out of the box.

The thing is, I'm 30 now. Thirty. I can't... cannot continue on this path. My husband has little freakouts on a regular basis over the fact (in his mind, it is a fact) that I am going to be dead in five years. I'm thinking about my ankles and knees going, but he? He is convinced my knees will be the very least of my worries. That I will be neck deep in funeral brochures long before my knees give out.

And while I consider that to be a tad melodramatic, I must admit, something has to be done. My God, SOMETHING! Has! To be DONE!

Step number one... reconfigure and recalibrate all my numbers. My self-imposed deadline for that will be tomorrow morning.

Step number two... beg the internet for private, anonymous hosting on a server somewhere. I hate Blogger so much. I want a real blog (i.e. WordPress), but anonymity is important to me, at least until I get down to about 250 or so. It's just too embarrassing to be honest with my real world people about all this right now.

For those of you who have kept checking back, thank you so much.

Wish me less!

Ugh

2005-05-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

So tell me folks, those of you who are struggling with the Demon Otherwise Known As Emotional Eating... is it just me? Or is it really the case that when you try to stop eating to numb your pain, more pain just comes flying down the chute towards you?

I mean... I'm just sitting here in dumbfoundedness. Yes, I made that word up. Whatever. It's just such a feeling of flabbergastedness. I thought things had been hurting just plenty... but it really feels like even more crap is coming down the pike now that I'm so determined to deal with things instead of stuffing them down inside me.

Even worse is the sudden compulsion to drink, or sniff glue, or rejoin the online gaming world. Which I can recognize as a pathetic bid for the return to cocoonity. Okay look, I make up words. Just work with it. I'm having enough trouble saying what's going on without making sure it's actually in English. ;-) Anyway, instead of "just" trying not to overeat, it feels like all of a sudden I'm having to battle cravings all over the board for nasty things that make me feel all nice and numb.

Not an auspicious start to the week, I must say!

Weigh In Day 1: The Week In Review

2005-05-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

Weight: 340 LBS [No Change]
Exercise Goal: 35 minutes of walking per day for minimum of 5 days Achieved? Y
Exceeded? Y

So, no change this week weight-wise, but for some reason I'm not as torn up about it as I thought I would be. I think I thought it would be worse. This has been a very difficult week to work on avoiding emotional eating and I wasn't as good at that as I had hoped to be. At least I managed to keep up with the exercise, and I even exceeded my time today and walked for 40 minutes instead of 35.

The other possible reason for the no-loss thing... I think I ate way too few calories this week. I kept thinking I was just hungry because I was so sad and lonely, but maybe I was {partly} really that hungry. What I need to do is find out exactly how many calories I'm eating, and how many I need and should eat, to help me walk that thin line between way too much and way not enough. ;-)

I promised a review of the bellydancing DVD the other day, but I'm going to be {ouch} brutally honest. I couldn't do the whole thing, I'm too out of shape. Also, I only did it twice. Not enough for a fair review. There, I admitted it. Please don't think I'm a hopeless numpty.

The reason I wanted to add an exercise video to my routine is because I already... already! ...feel my body acclimating to the walking, which means my heart rate is not really getting up there as much (unless I do big hills, but those are also very hard on my knees and ankles) and I'm not really sweating. A little sheen on my forehead. I know from my days as a fit youngster that when I am really in the zone, I sweat like a son of a gun, so that's a sign that I need more. I have found some older workout tapes in a second-hand book store, so maybe some of those will be more to my level. I plan to add workout videos to my routine the week after the next week, for three days a week, as well as walking 45 minutes a day for five days a week. That actually might change, depending on how anxious I get to see some progress!

Wish me less!

Who Me? I Don't Feel Anything

2005-05-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

Something my Self says to me on a regular basis: "What's that? Did you sniffle? Don't you dare cry. Have some chocolate. Pizza. Eat a whole box of Viva Puffs. Just don't cry."

Fool that I am, I've been listening to her for over five years.

Don't get me wrong... it's not like I was fine my whole life and then my Self just decided I was no longer allowed to cry. The admonitions to swallow my feelings have been there for more than ten years, but common sense always won out. I knew it was better to face things and deal with how I felt when I felt it, but... Self wore me down.

It also didn't help that about six years ago my life crumbled into something I no longer recognized, nor something in which I wished to be a continuing participant. Nothing particularly disastrous happened. No one died. I didn't get pregnant (although that was kind of catastrophic in its own way). I just left home to get married and my parents and brother left the country.

See? Nothing serious. People do that kind of stuff all the time. And people deal.
But it was serious. It was so damn serious. All of a sudden, I was walking wounded. There was a ragged, gaping hole in my left side trailing blood and I was trying to pretend nothing was wrong. And we all know what happens when one ignores a ragged gaping hole trailing blood. It gets infected.

I got infected.

My husband, who is a wonderful husband now but who was, at the time this was going on, a sadistic bastard who loved nothing more than f-cking with my mind and who had no clue what I'd given up to be with him, did not help. I had moved out of my home city to be with him and felt completely cut off from my own "family culture". The support, the inside jokes, the easy rapport... it was all gone and he was my sole companion. His constant needling and mind games, coupled with the enormous hole in my heart, led to a complete mental breakdown in early 2001. Things just got worse after that - whenever I had a problem, he insisted it was because I was on medication... when I quit the meds, he insisted I was being irrational because I was off my medication. The emotional stress was unbelievable.

I had already started to eat to numb myself to what was going on around me, but it got worse and worse until just last year when I just knew I was killing myself and had to stop. I have done some calculations based on the things I used to eat daily, and have learned I was eating close to 5,000 calories a day.

Five. Thousand.

Who me? I didn't hear anything. Did you? No? Have some chocolate. You know what would be awesome right now, after such a heavy pizza dinner? Cheesecake. Ah, you know you want to. Just keep chewing. And swallowing. Swallow.

It was bad. But you know what's worse? The pain. I have had a week where the hunger comes in with such breathtaking force that it feels like a punch. Having nothing in the house (in pursuit of my "no-fail environment"), I have thrown things in sheer frustration at not being able to find even one candy bar, one can of Coke, something, anything... well, anything but tuna or salad.

See, that's not hunger. That's emptiness. That's loneliness. That's emotional pain. I'm infertile. My family is so far away. My husband and I have had a fight. I'm scared of the way my future is so blank. My awful Self comes back and tries to tell me: You're hungry.

It's been the hardest damn thing in the world to take my Self by the hand, look her in the eye, and say, "No, dear. You hurt." Then feel the crumpling deep inside, the wrenching and tearing. And cry.

But I have to hang on to the hope that in time, healing will come.

My Computer Died...

2005-05-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

I had some kind of failure and I had to take the computer into the shop. I am so happy to have it back! Apparently, blogging serves to be a bit of a motivator for me. Knowing I couldn't post and therefore wasn't as "accountable" somehow, I slipped a bit and had a very wild week in terms of out-of-control eating.

That's the bad news. The good news is, I kept up with my walking and managed to reach my goal of walking for 30 minutes per day for five days last week! Consequently, I still showed a two pound loss for the week. WOOT!

On weigh-in frequencies... I think you lovely ladies are right in that I should only weigh myself once a week. But I still like the routine of checking first thing in the morning. Not only does it remind me that I am on a journey, it also helps me understand how my body reacts to different situations. I have noticed already that I can count on a 5 or 6 pound gain the week before my period. It doesn't freak me out at all - somehow, at 340+, anything less than 10 pounds really seems negligible. Unless it's a loss, then I still get excited. Anyway, my point is this: I will continue to check daily just to see what's up, but I will only log my weight every Saturday. Eventually, I may just stop the daily thing, especially if I start to get emotional about it.

Tomorrow I will review the Bellydance DVD. Until then, wish me less!

Omigawd

2005-05-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

I really think this is working. My GOD! If I sound shocked, well, it's because I am. Shocked to the core. My morning weigh-in today was 342... there has been a loss almost every single weigh-in since I started this again in April! And this is before I've really attempted to stay under any kind of calorie limit!

It's not only the number on the scale that has me in such high spirits today. I may have mentioned before that the scale number is like a side bonus for me at this point. For the first time in my life I am no longer looking at this as a weight-loss program or get-skinny effort. For the first time, it is much more important to me to get my strength back.

In early April, I was walking from the library to the bus stop and it is on a bit of an incline. Maybe 6 to 8 degrees. We're not talking Mount Everest here. Not even an honest-to-goodness hill. However, my back and chest started burning so badly that I had to stop several times before I reached the bus stop. This is not a major hike, people... this is average, normal, everyday activity. It horrified me that I was having such a hard time with it. When I saw my doctor and reported the aching and burning in my back (around the back of my ribcage), he very gently explained to me that I was so out of shape that the very muscles I breathe with were getting strained and sore. Not my lungs, the muscles in between my ribcage that expand and contract with breathing.

I was so ashamed, so scared. That was when I decided I had to get my strength back. I can't be an invalid before I've even hit 30! I won't spend my thirties in the same kind of restrictive, can't-do-that cocoon that I spent my twenties. No flipping way.

So I began my walking program and it's just been amazing to see what a little commitment and perseverance can bring in terms of pay-off! Now I'm hooked. I'm so excited about the return of my abilities and strength. I'm loving the gradual awareness of my own body - it feels like I was body-less for years and now I suddenly have the freedom to move again.

I'm so hooked, in fact, that walking is not enough. So I'm going to be trying one new workout regime (video or DVD) per week, and posting what I think of them. This way, I can decide what I really like and what works for me before buying something.

This week, it's a Bellydancing DVD. Don't laugh! I will post more later. :-)

Wish me less!

Daily Or Weekly?

2005-05-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

I know this debate has raged since the invention of scales, practically, but I haven't resolved it for myself. Should I be weighing myself every day as I have been? Or should it be a weekly thing?

I do know that weight can fluctuate from day to day and even within a day, so I don't necessarily panic when I see it go up a couple of pounds, but I also don't really "believe" it when it goes down, either.

I would love to hear from all of you - what do you do and why?

I'll post this question again in a few weeks as I need to get some exposure for this poor lil blog. ;-)

Um, Thanks... Not!

2005-05-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

In case anyone was thinking my husband sounded just a little too treacly and too-good-to-be-true, I present to you a snippet from a conversation that was had this afternoon.

Me: (on the verge of tears) I just find it so discouraging sometimes. I mean, it's hard to wake up one morning and suddenly realize that your body could feed a small African cannibalistic country for two years!

Jerk-Butt Husband: (thoughtfully) Well... one, if they used a George Foreman grill...

The rest of the conversation is, as they say, not fit for print.

Walkies!

2005-05-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have got to go for my walk today... it's been over a week. I decided to move up to 25 minutes a day for this week even though I didn't walk last week for 20 minutes a day. D. does not think that's a good idea, but I feel so bad for getting off track. It actually really wasn't my fault though... not really. When your periods are as vicious as mine, there will be days when you simply can't leave the house. Sometimes several consecutive days. Yet another reason to get this weight off me. So 25 minutes per day it is!

Renewed Commitments

2005-05-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Things are very different this spring. I have renewed my commitment to my health and my life. And I'm actually embarrassed to tell you the real reasons. But I will. One reason is because my husband got serious about his weight. Isn't that awful? Such a cop-out. But seriously... he keeps a food journal, writes down the nutrition information for everything he eats, and this spring he joined not one, but two softball teams. And he actually goes to the games and practices. He's lost well over 30 pounds since he started all this back in January or February.

Back then, he persuaded me to let him write down everything I ate. Oh, cripes how much I hated the end of the day when he gets that flaming notebook out and asks me to list my intake. But he never, ever judged me, never acted shocked or horrified, just calmly wrote it all down. After a few weeks, I started to get curious about how many calories on average I was consuming. Some of the answers just floored me. Which is stupid, really.. I mean, how many calories did I think it took to maintain a weight of 300+ pounds? Honestly.

But that was/is the catalyst. I am starting to "see" it. When I sit down to eat an entire family-sized bag of Miss Vickie's Potato Chips, I'm struck by the curiosity to look at the sheer number of calories I'm about to ingest and let me tell you - it is sobering.

Another thing my husband has helped me with. Portion control. Lest anyone think I have somehow managed to conquer my love of Miss Vickie's (hah!), I should mention that I haven't... far from it. The difference is, he sits there and divides the bag into four equal portions, and seals them up "for later". For later. A concept with which I have never been acquainted in regards to food. Until now.

But the key thing here, for any frustrated husbands who might be reading this... he did all of this without a shred of judgment. I told him I wanted to get more serious about losing weight, and he started doing research to help arm me with facts. He did not, I repeat NOT, remind me with every mouthful just how many calories I was shovelling down my throat. He didn't even remind me when I decided that one portion simply wasn't enough and wound up eating the whole bag after all. Which happened several times. Still does once in a while. If I asked, he was ready with the information. If I asked him to hide food from me, he did. He also gave it to me when I broke down. That's if I even knew it was in the house, though. ;-)

Support is the key. He also goes for walks with me when I've left it too late at night to feel comfortable going out alone. He goes with me when I'm lonely. He expresses his fears and frustrations about my health in loving, calm ways, and shuts up on those days I'm not ready to hear them. Most of the time, anyway. He's human after all.

The other reason is... I'm turning 30 this summer. Thirty. Three-OHMYGOD! We want a family before I'm 35. Suddenly, the future is here, someday is now, and I'm ready.

Let The Reduction Begin!

My Story

2005-05-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

Allow me to introduce myself, where I'm coming from and where I intend to go.

I've been over 300 pounds for more than five years. I've been clinically overweight for more than 15 years. Meaning, when I was 16, my doctor said she would be happy to see me lose about 20 pounds. And she was, I'm sorry to say, taking my height and athletic build into account. Before I was overweight, though, I spent two years being underweight. Feeling horribly fat at just 13, I started reducing the amount I ate drastically. I even started lying to my family about how much I was eating. At dinner, I would say I had eaten with my friends, or at my boyfriend's house... when I was with them, I said I had eaten at home. By 14, my weight had gone down to about 119, and hovered between 115 and 119 until I was 15 and a half. That doesn't sound too bad until one considers that I was growing (three inches in three years), and my periods stopped.

Major teen angst and a dramatically changing home situation, as well as fears and insecurity regarding my sexuality with a new boyfriend seemed to trigger emotional eating and by 16, I was 20 pounds overweight and just kept gaining. In college, I was able to lose almost all my over-weight thanks to my student budget, which kept me on a pretty light meal plan. But I became seriously ill in my third year and was forced to drop out. In the space of three years, I was on six different mood disorder medications, dropped out of college, left home, moved in with my fiance, got married and was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder after a nasty, violent breakdown which resulted in the neighbours calling the cops and me being taken to the hospital in an ambulance. At that point, I was over 380 pounds.

The right medications and a sense of rock bottom helped me start losing the weight. It took me about two years to get to where I am now, 345 pounds. It would have been a great deal more except, as you may have been able to figure out by now... I had no clue what I was doing. None. Nor did I have the motivation to really start learning.

Over a year ago, sudden health fears prompted me to get to a doctor to finally face the music. Cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, glucose tolerance... all the tests. Turns out that aside from my heart sounding "too loud" (what does that mean?), my cholesterol being through the roof, and my blood pressure also being too high, I had no real problems. That was the relief/release I needed to get serious. Now that I knew I would not keel over if I quit my Big Mac routine or took a few extra steps now and then, I was free to get going on a plan.

But dang if I still didn't really do anything about it! Halfheartedly choosing diet soda over regular once in a while, having two candy bars instead of three for dessert, being proud if I went out more than once in three weeks... what was that? Who the hell did I think I was kidding? Well, aside from myself, that is!

I'm Back

2005-04-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

You want the good news first, or the bad news? I'll give you the bad news first - that's what I always go for.

The Bad News - I completely overwhelmed myself back in December with this huge reduction goal of mine. It was Christmas. Who in their right mind sets up such a huge do-or-die plan at Christmas? Well, no one. So I wasn't in my right mind. Clearly. Subsequently, there has been pretty much no progress since the inception of The Big Idea.

The Good News - I'm still hovering right around the same weight, which means I did not gain anything during Christmas or afterwards. January is usually a good month for me gaining, so I am pleased. There's more. Every big idea and goal needs a plan to get it moving, and I finally have one. This is very good news, especially since I've already put some work into it!

The Neutral News - Having remained at the same weight for five months into my Big Idea, I will now need to recalibrate and set a new goal date. No biggie. I'll do that tomorrow.

Wish me less!

Um...

2004-12-19T14:19:00.000-08:00

I think this is going to have to wait until the holidays are over. Not that I'm binging or eating all that many Christmas goodies, but that I can't seem to get moving. Exercise? Does breaking into a sweat while towelling myself off after my shower count? Gads.

So, December 27th... because that's the first day we won't be at church for most of the day with all manner of unholy temptations surrounding me. :-) But on that day, boys and girls, we shall start a whole new year- a few days early. ;-)

Getting Organized

2004-12-09T02:10:00.000-08:00

I am trying to figure some sort of system which will organize all the various tidbits of information I want to keep track of, while making it slightly less than fatally dull for those of you reading this. I know I don't really care to read the typical "what I ate today" posts on most weightloss journals, but at the same time, I do need to keep track of this somehow.

Any of you with ideas, feel free to share them! After I get my commenting system installed, that is.

Ooh, weigh-in day tomorrow. I feel nervous now. After all, I have accountability for the first time in my life... wish me less!

Rock Bottom

2004-12-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

There is, I have read in a number of books, a point at which addicts and overeaters have gone as far down the path as they're willing to go, and they hit what so many therapists call "rock bottom". It's a different point for everyone. Some gamblers hit their bottom when they are faced with stealing to feed their habit, others don't hit it until someone dies as a direct result of their lust for the races or some other damn thing.

Most doctors/therapists/self-appointed assvice-givers declare that all you have to do is reach that point, and things will be totally better from then on. Because, you know, you'll be unable to continue on that path somehow. Because of the rock bottom.

What I want to know is, what about those of us who have an astonishing capacity to hit rock bottom and then fall right through it to the next level? What about those of us who view rock bottoms as minor pit stops of requisite guilt before getting out the shovel and fucking digging?

I hate the Rock Bottom Theory. I hit 381 pounds before I was even vaguely aware, in some shadowy recess of my mind, that perhaps all was not well in my immediate environment. But then, being hopelessly overwhelmed by the situation, and having no real idea of whether I was actually obese or slender (can anyone here say dysmorphia?), I just tucked my head back under the blanket of my foggy thinking and kept right on going. After vowing never to set foot on a scale again, of course.

I hit 381 between July 2000 and June 2001. I have very little memory of that time. I just know that the doctor who weighed me told me his scale wouldn't read the weight correctly and that I had to come back. I did, amazingly, and used the scale he'd borrowed from the hospital. That number should have been enough to tell me something was very, very wrong, but it just wasn't.

Since then, I have gradually (oh, so gradually) lost little bits of weight here and there and regained some, and lost it again. In February or March of this year, I became obsessed with the idea that my fat was killing me, that I had diabetes or PCOS or heart disease or maybe all three! I scrounged up the courage to go to the doctor and had a complete physical. Miraculously (and I do mean miraculously), there were few health problems. Blood pressure was high, cholesterol was through the roof, but other than that... nothing.

Which was celebrated by promptly gaining about 25 lbs.

Since then, though... there has been a slow but steady application of the brakes on my self-destructive lifestyle. A painfully slow realization of the situation I was in, and equally slow changes in my eating habits and thinking patterns. There was no rock bottom for me, just a bit-by-bit understanding that I could no longer do this with impunity. Now that I've started down this road I see things almost every week that make me gasp in new wonder at the incredible state I've gotten into, but those are only spurring points. And every day I have to remember that I'm changing or else I slip right back into consuming a number of calories that would make an entire football team keel over.

Now that I have some kind of a mental handle on my situation, here is where I'm going with it. My highest recorded weight was 381. In February of 2004 I weighed 325. By June of 2004, I was back up to about 350. Over the summer I got back down to about 338, and then gained more in the fall. I am currently, as of yesterday, 346 lbs. My goal weight is what the charts say it should be, which is 165 lbs. If I lose an average of 3.5 pounds a week (15 pounds a month) from now until December 2005, I should be at or very near my goal weight.

I wonder if I should start a pool on this...