55lb

Nancy Rommelmann and I are blogging about our efforts to lose a combined 55lb. Please do drop in for a visit!

 

Is this thing on?

Thank you to those who emailed and left comments wondering how I was doing – I’m sorry to have neglected this space for so long. Things have been pretty hectic.

So here’s what’s up with me, health-wise:

1) Since March 10, I’ve been spending about three weeks per month in the US. I haven’t seen Tracy, my fantastic (and much-missed) personal trainer, since then. (Actually, I hadn’t seen her for several weeks before I left, due to holidays and totally clashing schedules.) I still have some leftover sessions with Tracy, which are paid in full, to use. I may transfer them to my guy, who is still in London full-time.

2) I hadn’t weighed myself in months, until approximately two minutes ago, just so I could give a more accurate update. I was pleasantly surprised – especially since it’s nighttime (when I always weigh more) and we just had a massive meal at our neighborhood Indian restaurant here in London – to find that my weight is still at the low end that it was when I was training hardcore. Whew.  I would have guessed as much by the fit of my clothes, even though my habits have not been as perfect as they could be. Progress not perfection, right?

3) One reason why my weight is probably better of is that I stopped drinking about two months ago: June 2nd will mark 60 days since my last drink.

I blogged back in early December that I was going to try to stop drinking, but I didn’t really make much of an effort. I didn’t really want to stop then – I was having too much fun! Happily, the urge to quit came upon me in early April, after a series of benders in London that – while they did not make me physically ill – really made me sick of my drinking.

I may blog about this more at some point, but suffice to say that while many people can handle drinking as much as I was (I was an occasional binge drinker, not an everyday drinker…but ALWAYS a binge drinker), I can’t. Everyone is different.

I’m very lucky to have found a wonderfully supportive, hilarious, smart bunch of people in my home AA group in Cincinnati, all of whom give me the incentive to live a sober life. Honestly, I would have been drinking many times on this latest trip to London if not for the thought of my friends in AA.

4) I’m still in psychotherapy, which is as difficult – and rewarding – as ever. I wasn’t trying nearly as hard as I should have been when it came to making changes as a result of insights gained in therapy, until early April. Part of my breakthrough was realizing that I may as well be setting fire to $2000 per month if I wasn’t going to do anything with what I was learning; the other part was just getting to the point where I was certain I would not move forward unless I started putting thoughts into action. It’s still a struggle, but a rewarding one.

5) I’m starting NutriSystem when I get back to the US in a few days. It’s an experiment, and a relatively inexpensive one: less than $300 for five weeks’ worth of meals. We’ll see how it goes.

Time to head to Heathrow now, but I’ll post more soon.

 

I am tired all the time

And it’s getting old. Last night, I slept for almost 13 hours, and woke up feeling like I could have slept for another 13. (I’d had only three hours’ sleep the night before, but still. Surely I should have been well rested after only 8 hours.)

We fly to the US on Saturday, for Christmas with my family, and I’m a bit concerned about how I’m going to deal with another case of jet lag. I’m not a fun person to be around when I’m sleep-deprived.

 

How I’m doing: Eh

1) Due to travel, I haven’t seen my trainer for more than a week. I’m now coming down with something that feels like it’s going to get very unpleasant, so I am considering not seeing her later this morning (for what would be our last session before both she and I head abroad for the holidays).

2) About that travel: I had a blast in New York, and am just thankful I was pretty active, with lots of walking, and one early morning session in Central Park, but that was quite rushed due to the lateness of daybreak and the earliness of my appointments. Because, foodwise? I was not doing too well. I tried to stick to whole, unprocessed foods, and stayed away from alcohol every night but one (when I only had two drinks over the course of about four hours). But I was powerless in the face of genuine New York City cheesecake, not to mention the scrambled eggs and bacon breakfast quesadillas at Norma’s. Even that granola up there was deceptive – it looked like there would only be a sprinkling of it, with berries, on top of a cup of yoghurt. But there was actually a ton of granola, a little bit of yoghurt, and a few berries. I didn’t finish it, but hate wasting calories on stuff like that. PLUS, American Airlines said they had no record of my request for a low-fat, low-calorie meal on my flights, then later told me that they did, but it didn’t matter, because they don’t serve that option on the London-to-NYC route. So…WHY OFFER IT? Argh.

3) I’m jetlagged, tired, getting sick, and stressed about upcoming travel and general holiday crap.

4) Due to the amount of time and money I am having to devote to exercise, physiotherapy, and therapy – plus a heavier workload starting next month – I am tweaking my routine somewhat. I am going to see my trainer once a week, go to Pilates once a week, have physiotherapy once a week, and join a gym for workouts when I can fit them in during the rest of the week. Luckily, my trainer is very cool with this and understands completely.

5) I’ve had some pretty key breakthroughs in my therapy, which have blown me away in terms of what they have revealed to me. But what they have revealed is not really that pleasant, and actually quite hard to get my head round at the moment. Being told that you were denied the most basic element in developing into a well-adjusted adult, and that the window of opportunity for getting that element was small, and that having missed it, there’s no way you can ever compensate for it, and that the only option is to immerse yourself in the pain of having missed it, and to get closer to the ‘bad’ part of you, if you want any hope of living a healthier life…is kind of rough. (If you struggle with any kind of addiction or self-destructive behaviour, and you had a narcissistic mother, feel free to email me at dynamist AT gmail DOT com for more details.) Don’t get me wrong: It’s interesting and satisfying to put these pieces of the puzzle together, and to get to the bottom of things which I thought were inexplicable or all my fault. I walked out of my therapist’s office last week feeling really positive and good about what I’m learning – and I am going to learn how to manage all this in a way that will make my life better.

But still. It’s hard.

It helps to have a partner as incredibly and unceasingly supportive as the one I have, and to have good friends I can talk to about things, but in the end, I have to deal with all this in solitude. (The same is true for all of us, with our own individual baggage.) With that, I am not doing so well. Years of sweeping this stuff under the carpet is now catching up with me, and in a not very pleasant way.

Consequently, this past week has felt like a write-off in terms of food and exercise. People keep giving me gifts of chocolate, and I haven’t turned any of it down.

Starting today, though, I am going to be ‘good’ until we leave for America on Saturday. I’ll have to struggle to balance a couple of meals with family and friends before we go, but I’m not going to think, “Sod it, I’m having foie gras on Friday, so I’m just going to eat crap all week.” The all-or-nothing approach gets me nowhere but to guilt and revulsion.

I wish I could be more positive about things, because I am certain that I am headed in the right direction. And if you were to meet up with me in person right now, you’d find me as upbeat as ever. (Something else my therapist wants me to work on: integrating my public and private selves more fully. Now THAT I dread.) It’s just difficult right now, and although I fear I am revealing too much, I keep getting rewarded for doing so. Plus, I’m hoping that when I read this back in a year’s time, I’ll be very relieved at having got through such rough times. That’s the plan, anyway.

 

Progress, physiotherapy, and Pilates

I guess I should be weighing myself, but I’m not. When I weigh myself, I feel compelled to do so about six times a day, so I’m just trying to forget about scales. Also, the floor is terribly unlevel in every room of this house, so readings vary wildly depending on where I’ve placed the scale. I might run to the doctor’s office later today and weigh myself on their scale, though, if they’ll let me in for a minute to do so.

The other thing is that I’ve been trying to concentrate on overall fitness, not just weight.

I can judge my progress by a couple of things this week: I was able to run for a lot longer than usual, and a couple of pieces of clothing that I was wearing quite recently are now ridiculously, unflatteringly big on me. (Antoine’s mother, who sewed for the couture houses in Paris and always tailors my clothes, is taking them in. She took a good two inches off the waist of a pair of trousers, many inches off around the legs of the same trousers, and is now working on a jacket that I am swimming in.)

I was also quietly pleased to be told yesterday by my physiotherapist that I am “incredibly flexible” with “very strong” leg muscles. Since I was doing back bends in my underwear for her, I felt I deserved at least a kind word or two.

It was my first visit to the physio, to whom I was referred (privately, as I did not fancy waiting the months and months it would take to see an NHS physio) by a rheumatology consultant. I’ve always had a problem which I thought was with my hips, where they can get sore after a lot – or not very much – exercise, limiting my range of motion and sometimes throbbing so badly that I have to take painkillers to fall asleep at night. I had x-rays, which showed that my bones are in great shape, and the rheumatologist felt that it was a problem with inflamation of the adductor muscles in my thighs.

After making me do various bends, giving me physical challenges to gauge my strength, and pushing into my back for a while, the physiotherapist told me, “This is nothing to do with your legs or your hips. This is a lower back problem.”

I’m banned from doing sit-ups the way I have been doing them, and she showed me how to do them on a Swiss ball (one of which I thankfully already own). She also told me not to wear high heels, which almost made me cry, and so she modified it to say I should only wear them if I’m not going to be walking a significant distance or standing around a lot. I’ve got to buy all sorts of gear to modify my computer and desktop set-up. I’m also supposed to try to sleep on my back, something I have never been able to do. Oh, and I’m now wearing orthopedic insoles in my shoes at all times. Sexy!

I may need an MRI on my spine, but the physio is hopeful that we can sort out the problem without going down that road. The waiting list for MRIs is monstrously long, and to go privately for that would be about £700, so I’m hoping we can indeed sort it out. She also recommended that I start doing Pilates, to strengthen my core muscles and get me to really concentrate on my spinal health and posture at all times.

So I’m doing well, and I’m less down about my progress than I was last week. It is happening, albeit more slowly than I’d like, but that’s just how it goes. My biggest problem right now is that I feel tired all the time, and no amount of exercise gives me the much-promised extra energy I’d like to have. This may be a side effect of my depression, though. (Speaking of which, I am loving my therapist, who is really freaking smart and incisive. What a great investment in me he is turning out to be.)

I’m off to New York tomorrow, and I’m taking my running shoes so that I can jog in Central Park. I’ll need to, because I’m scheduled to have several meetings at restaurants almost every day I am there.

 

Progress

The dress pictured here is one that my fiancé bought me in Paris, for my birthday, in late July. At that time I wrote:

I don’t think I’ll fit into it…until next summer

Today, I was reorganizing our closet space and came across the bag containing this dress. I was right in the middle of a huge task, but immediately took off all my clothes and tried this on. When I’d tried it on in Paris, I’d asked Antoine to zip it up; it would only go about midway up my back, but otherwise wouldn’t zip (or maybe it would have, but he would have ripped the delicate linen in the process).

This time, I got Antoine to zip me up…and up it did zip. It fits very well, with a little extra room.

So, you’d think this would mean a lot to me. And, in a way, it does. I’m glad. I would have been really crushed if it hadn’t fit, but I also was not expecting it to do so.

I’m struggling right now, with a lot of things. I’ve been diagnosed as clinically depressed, which is actually something I view as a positive thing – it’s nice to be getting to the bottom of things that have troubled me my entire life. (I’ve probably been depressed since I was about five years old, which is perhaps why I never wanted to believe I was depressed; I can’t remember living any other way.)

So I’m starting to make the connection between my depression and how it manifests in my behavior – eating the wrong things, drinking too much, and arranging my life so that it is so hectic that I won’t have time to slow down and be hit hard by the feelings of depression. My therapist has also shown me how even my incredible impatience is tied to my need never to slow down enough for those feelings to take root.

There are other manifestations too personal to mention here, but my worry right now is that while I am finally making the intellectual connection between these feelings and how I act as a result of them, I am having a hard time feeling the way I should be. Logically, having made such good progress, I should be feeling fantastic. Instead, I almost always feel as if I am getting bigger, even though I know I am shrinking. I obsess on these feelings a lot more than I should. It all gets me down, and lately I am tending to drink more or be more careless in my food choices because I just want some relief. (Another aspect of how my depression manifests is a vein of wanting relief. This is either relief from depression and loneliness, or relief from the pace I subject myself to so that I “won’t have time” to be depressed.)

So, yeah, I am making progress in lots of different ways. Most days, it just doesn’t feel like it. I’m not asking for anyone to give me reassurance – believe me, I get it from lots of people on a daily basis (poor Antoine, always having to hear about how hideous I feel, has it worst) – but if anyone has had a similar experience and would like to share, I’d really appreciate it.

 

I’m going to (try to) quit drinking

Cidre

Originally uploaded by dynamist.

I’m definitely not an alcoholic – I drink an average of once every two weeks, max – but I always drink way too much. If someone suggests having a single glass of wine or one G&T, I won’t even bother.

Here’s why I think I should quit:

1) My motivations for drinking are unhealthy

2) When I drink, I usually make bad food choices

3) When I drink, I usually feel at least a little ‘off’ the next day

4) I am unwilling to drink in moderation.

I had a LOT to drink last night – an entire litre of dry French cider and about seven or eight bottles of Corona. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also ate a 6 ounce burger (with Monterey Jack, guacamole, and ketchup) and shared fat chips, onion rings, skinny fries with cheese, and a brownie with ice cream with friends. I mean, I feel gross just thinking about all that.

So I think it makes sense to stop drinking. Maybe I will make occasional exceptions – like my best friend’s wedding in January. I’m already thinking of how hard it’s going to be to be teetotal through the holidays, when we usually have loads of champagne (eating oysters with no champagne? Not looking forward to that.) and wine. But if I can’t do it, then I’m really not in control of myself – which I want to be.

Blogging things always motivates me to stick to them more. I’m not sure if I’m ready to stick to this one, but I am going to give it my best shot. (Speaking of shots, have one for me. Please.)

 

Long overdue progress update

No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. Things have just been pretty insanely busy with work and home stuff, and non-paying blogging has come bottom of the list. Happily, exercising has not.

Some interesting things have happened to me lately:

1) I’ve seen several people for the first time in months, and they’ve remarked about how I’ve “lost a ton of weight” or asked “How did this happen?” Which is nice, since I often doubt that anyone but me can tell a difference. In fact, sometimes even I am not sure if there’s much of a difference, and I don’t always believe people who tell me there is.

2) Lots of clothes which were tight on me a few months ago now fit perfectly, or are baggy. Today, I got my winter coat out of the dry cleaning plastic (always dry clean winter stuff when it’s time to put it away!) for the first time since February or March. At that point, the coat was tight on me – I always hold my abs in anyway, but by the time winter ended, I knew I had to hold my tummy in so that the coat didn’t look bad on me. I was uncomfortable in it, felt gross, felt like I had let myself down, and HATED all of that. I figured that it would fit me more comfortably now, but I was completely floored by just how loose it was. I could get pregnant and probably go a good seven months in this coat. Staggering. My perceptions are so very off-base when it comes to my progress, it’s ridiculous.

3) I have become a little less strict with myself, food-wise, which is not a brilliant thing…but not a disaster. After all, I am working out – hard – three hours a week with my trainer, plus the walking and other activity I do the other four days. Also, I want longterm success, and I know that means avoiding that feeling of deprivation.

We’ve had a lot of social functions lately, where the food has been out of my hands. But also, I have been feeling a buzzy thing with my fiancé, where (WARNING: digusting talk ahead) I am just so totally thrilled to be with him that it seems life is too short not to have dinner at the Wolseley on a whim…and if I want to follow my swordfish and vegetables with a lemon meringue, well, so be it.

What I’m saying is, I used to only have one ‘cheat day’ a week, but lately I’ve been having cheat meals a few times a week. I should change that, but at the moment, it’s not bothering me enough to do so.

4) I haven’t bought any new clothes since I started seeing Tracy, my trainer, but after weeks of hints (”Wow, that top is really loose on you now!”), she finally told me very bluntly to stop wearing baggy workout clothes. “You’re not that person anymore, and you won’t be again, so stop dressing like her.” It was a message I needed to hear, and I’m so thankful to her for it.

So I went shopping the other day and bought new workout clothes (USA Pro stuff from John Lewis – good but not cheap). I also picked up a red suede jacket I’ve had my eye on for a few months, and some black suede tall boots for winter. The jacket is a little more snug than I’d like right now, but I could wear it out, buttoned, easily. A few more pounds and it will be perfect. A few more pounds after that, and it won’t be so big that it looks bad. A few more pounds after that, and I’ll get it tailored.

Speaking of which, my fiancé’s mother has now tailored one jacket three times for me, and it needs to be taken in again. I’ve also got a pair of trousers she’s taken in twice, which are now stupidly baggy on me.

5) I’m now doing tons more in terms of exercise than I used to be able to do. I usually do 200 crunches or so per session, plus 50 press-ups/push-ups (sounds like not many, but I used to only do 16 or so!) and 50 tricep dips (ditto). Weights freaking kill me, but I know they’re good for me. I felt a real high recently when, after Tracy indicated that I could rest after a set of 50 crunches, I said, “I can keep going,” and she replied, “Go on, then.” So I did, and it was only my aching neck which made me stop 137 crunches later.

In the face of all this progress, I still feel like I have a huge struggle ahead of me to get to my goal…whatever it is. I’ll know it when I get there, and despite several people telling me I’m fine where I am, I know better.

 

Scenes from a health kick

This morning, I got involved in a terribly interesting conversation with the cashier and another customer in my local health food shop, about which of the three Chinese medical clinics now operating in our neighbourhood is the best. Amongst my purchases: aduki bean sprouts, wheatgrass juice, carob powder, quinoa, and wakame. What on earth has become of me?

 

Catching up and keeping up

Apologies for the lack of updates here. I have been all over the place since getting back from Egypt – including a quick trip to Paris – and getting back into the swing of work and domestic life.

Yes, I’m still doing well in terms of my health progress. I’m still seeing Tracy for our three hours a week (though this week, due to unavoidable personal matters, we can only see each other twice). I’ve been eating well, with the occasional restaurant trip (the hummus pictured was consumed at a Turkish restaurant a couple of Fridays ago) and the efforts to be sensible that go along with that. I’m trying to create an affection for Guinness, because I read it’s the most nutritious alcoholic drink one can choose (gin and slimline tonics just don’t do it for me) – and no, I can’t just give up alcohol completely. I only drink once every two weeks or so, though, so I’m not going to beat myself up for it.

I’ve also signed up for an Open University nutrition course, which should be interesting. I find that so much of what I read about ‘healthful’ food – and I read a lot about it – is contradictory. One study says chillies are great to fight off colds, another says they wreak havoc on the digestive system. One nutrition guru says that juices are devoid of fiber and so should be avoided in favor of whole fruit, and another recommends lots of smoothies and glasses of vegetable juice. I want to be better able to evaluate such claims accurately, and make the best decisions about what I put in my body. The course might end up being a bit of a letdown, as it’s based on the (deeply flawed) USDA food pyramid, but I should learn some solid basics of food chemistry.

Oh, and last night I saw some friends for the first time since July, and they were gawking over how much weight they think I’ve lost. I mean, I know I have lost a lot of weight since they last saw me, but it’s hard for me to believe the difference is that drastic to other people. That’s one other difference I’ve noticed: I am much more interested in my overall health now, instead of just being purely focused on losing weight. I think that’s a good thing.