A Confession

I've never told anybody this. And I don't know why it tapped into my core so badly.

The last time I tried to exercise outside was a very very long time and a great many pounds ago. I weighed like 180 and was focusing on fitness. I was by myself, on a bicycle in a flat agricultural area nearby. It isn't well traveled so I was ok about going slowly if I needed to or stopping when necessary.

I was struggling up a small grade when a car whizzed by, then screeched to a stop about 100 feet in front of me. It was an old beater and the young man on the right -- an old teenager with long hair and a ripped tee shirt -- leaned half of his body out of the car window and shouted at me "Get off the road you fat cow." He then threw an open beer in my direction and the car took off like a bat out of hell.

I stood there for the longest time, shaking. The situation felt totally unsafe, but the fact that I was being ridiculed overwhelmed me. I trembled while I struggled my way back to my car, put the bicycle in, and went home. And never did it again.

I'm sitting here trying to make myself go to the gym, all of 7 minutes away. And all I can think about is how embarrassed I am. Maybe it's an excuse but maybe not. I think I need to work on this.

Recipes?

Today it is very cold ... nine degrees I believe ... and I was craving creamed chipped beef. So after a bit of fussing, some Pam in a pan, heavily browned dried beef strips, about half a tsp of flour for thickening, and non-fat milk, I made an amazingly satisfactory concoction. It was thinner than it might have been but ok. I toasted a slice of 9 grain toast and pre-diced it. Covering it with the "milked" concoction, the toast squares soaked up the mixture. I now have a very warm tummy.

And the day before yesterday I made french toast. I soaked leftover italian bread in a mixture of non-fat eggnog mixed with one egg, a little nutmeg, and (my favorite) black pepper. Fried two sliced on a Pam-sprayed pan. I don't know what the calories were, but it was different and tasty and couldn't have been so bad as a Sunday brunch.

Yay!

Ten days after the beginning of the new year I have lost .2 lbs. Oh it seems trivial to you, but it is the lowest in six months and going in the right direction. So YAY!

And I'm going for a massage and the roads aren't covered with the threatened ice. YAY!

258.8

I think Sunday is a good day for a regular weigh.

I'm Tired

and that's one of the times I eat. But I'm always tired when I go to work at 6AM. I have to deal.

Baby steps.

Chinese Food

does such a dance on the scale numbers. I know, I know. The scale shouldn't matter but it does. It is the simplest way to measure day by day. And dammit, I need feedback.

The New Year

I've never been inclined to make resolutions. I'm more inclined to mark the passage of time with a little reflection. Today I've learned that for the first time I'm actually changing my life style instead of just saying it is the right thing to do. I'm not eating what I want every single time but I'm making better choices. Sometimes that means not eating crap now so I can eat crap later. That's an improvement.

I'm also feeling more settled, less desperate, than I have in the past. I don't know what that means or even why. I'm just observing.

In the spirit of that balance I'm going to work on developing the habit of exercise and movement. That may mean 5 minutes a day but nearly every day. I think my goal is six days a week but it may have to be seven for the habit to take root. I'm also working on sleeping more. I typically sleep 5 to 6 hours a night during the week, catching up a bit on weekends. I can muddle through but that's just not enough.

Now I'm going to stop talking about what I'm going to do and look forward to reporting on what I've done.

And today I weight 259. One of these days I'll put that in the sidebar.

New Year's Eve, Goal-setting, and Change

Everybody's doing it. But I've never done this before, this goal-setting and measure-noting. In fact I usually don't even note the passing of the year with much interest. Even at work I resist the formal goal-setting process. I've never needed it before.
But I acknowledge that what I have been doing isn't working for me and this is as good a time as any to start something new. So I'm going to set goals.

This morning (I'm off of work this week and I haven't just been a vegetable as usual.) I decide to check out the BMI charts. I am encouraged by Late Bloomer who is doing a year in review and has wonderfully gone from "severely obese" to "obese". I know there is a lot of controversy over BMI but honestly, a BMI of 47.6, mine as of this morning, can't be good whether BMI is an ideal measure or not.

Here's a chart tailored for me:

Weight 260 BMI 47.6 Morbidly obese
Weight 245 BMI 44.8 Semi-morbidly obese (I made this up)
Weight 218 BMI 39.9 Severely obese
Weight 191 BMI 34.9 Obese
Weight 163 BMI 29.9 Overweight

(I made up the semi-morbidly obese because from a BMI of 40 up, it shifts from every 5 points to every 10. And this dismissal of nuance for the heavier folks is just unacceptable. They tell us that even 5 or 10 pounds matter. They should act like it.)

So my numeric goal will be to become semi-morbidly obese (245 pounds) by July 1 and to go from morbidly obese to severely obese by this time next year (218 pounds). This is 42 pounds in a year, about 3.5 pounds a month. And that seems quite doable.

More tomorrow. I'm going to the gym. Goal: Something for three minutes. Yes, just three minutes. Why do you ask?

I'm Surprised

to find that I am glad to have been found. Thank you to those who have dropped by. It is nice to see you and hear from you.

The Dead of Winter

Thanks to my propensity to look for easy solutions and slogging through Lyn's archives at Escape from Obesity I purchased a light therapy lamp a couple of months ago. Ok, you have just experienced my habit of putting a weeks worth of stuff into one sentence.

I was wading through those archives. I loved reading her stuff but, as always, when I slog through archives I got them in a concentrated form very different than the form in which they were written. So I see a lot of change and a lot of emotional stuff quickly. Somewhere in there she talked about SAD and getting a light to help fight it. I'm not sure whether I have SAD or not, but I resonated to the notion that I never see the sun.

Winter was drawing nigh -- nice hokey construction, eh? -- and I had just bought a car. This matters because I struggled with not having a sun roof. My new car doesn't have one available. And some part of me realized that most of the sun I got was because I had a sun roof. This time of year I leave home in the dark and arrive home in the dark. If I were to get sun I'd have to go outside regularly at midday which just isn't going to happen. And even if it did, I'd be wearing a lot of clothes so only my face would be available to the sun. So I figured it was worth a shot.

I use this thing for 15 minutes while I am performing ablutions and dressing in the morning. And after about a week I found that things just got easier. I don't know how to explain it better than that. It was less of a struggle to get up and do whatever I need to do. It isn't that I felt depressed before so much as that I feel undepressed now. Does that make any sense?

Anyway, I am hopeful that this might help to reduce my inertia, ease my reluctance to get up off of my padding and move. I've had a lot of years of not moving. At this point I'll take all the help I can get.

Weight today: 261

Explain That Stupid Blog Name

Ok. I have to start somewhere.

As it says over there on the side -- of course these things change -- when I was born my mother struggled between two names. I got the other one.

Most of my life I have been glad that I landed where I did. But in the more recent past I have longed to be Claire. The Claire in my mind is an ethereal pale tall slim creature with long fingers. She ages well, with a pronounced sense of personal style. She has a quiet grace, punctuated by occasional humor.

I am not that person. I am short and fat and older than death. I don't appear to have much subtlety (a trick to throw folks off track) and can't wear stylish clothes to save my life. They don't design stylish clothes for 260 pounds and 5'2". And, as I said, older than death.

I'm sick to death of feeling clunky and inelegant. But apparently not sick enough to fix it. Gee, I've lost 6 pounds in the last six months. Aren't you impressed? I'm disgusted. But there is that teeny voice that says "Losing 6 pounds is a whole lot better than gaining 6 pounds." While true, that isn't saying much.

It is the dead of winter but the days are finally getting longer. I'm giving this place a shot. Maybe talking about it here will help, give me a little distance and more focus at the same time. And if you drop by, whoever you are, you are welcome.

Starting Weight back in October: 268
(It was a while back but I'm taking credit for every ounce I remove.)