Well, at least it's gone now, but temptation in the form of birthday cake was in the house for a day and a half. My daughter's birthday went off without a hitch (although I have a pair of unclaimed socks still). It was in the park, and the kids mostly ran around and played games. I paid a teenager to do face painting and they played with a parachute. It was a little juvenile - that party would have worked for 3 years and these were 8 year olds - but they're not yet so jaded that they didn't enjoy doing younger-type games. They colored cardboard fairy wings with pens and glitter glue, then ran around with them on. At the end of the party they had cake and ube ice cream, then sat in a circle and played a game that involved opening presents. My daughter was wearing her the dress I had made her, and it gave me a boost to hear her telling everyone I made it. Ha! How many years do I have left where she'll appreciate a homemade dress? And will actually brag that her mom made it to her friends?
We took her to Benihana for dinner. I've never been, although I've heard about what it's like for years. I would say the food was respectably good but certainly not overly healthy. But she really enjoyed the spectacle and the chef loved having an enthusiastic audience. When he did the tricks with an egg, ending with flipping it high and landing it in his pocket, my daughter clapped and gushed, "You must have practiced that for a really long time!" He laughed and said most kids said, "That's nothing. I can do that!" He built a volcano out of onions and we all laughed when it exploded. It was a fun night.
This morning, my daughter was ready to hit her presents, but I told her she needed to write her thank you notes for any toy she wanted to play with. She sat down and pumped out 8 thank you notes. I really was expecting a fight, but I think she was just overwhelmed by her friends' generosity. We don't have a party every year, and people really gave thoughtful presents. One friend gave her a Fisher Price sewing machine! We've already started her first project.
(Sorry grandparents, she started writing friends first...and come to think of it, she's already broken the rule because I know she's been playing with those Breyer horses.)
Next week is a big girl scout event - 2 nights camping out with 40-some odd troops. I opted out, sorta. My co-leader and another parent will be with the girls, but I'm still going to drive, help them get set up. I also was involved in planning the event so I coordinated one of the workshops, which involves an outside vendor. So I will be working with the vendor all day Saturday and won't be with my troop - which means I won't have to do the miles of hiking that I normally do at a Camporee. In other words, it's pretty fortunate that I was already planning to be at the workshop considering I wouldn't be up to it physically this time.
I'm not sleeping at the camp overnight; if I'm with the troop, the girls will be coming to me for everything and they need to start getting used to other parents being in charge. I'm looking down the line to when this baby is born and I am hoping to work out a schedule with my two co-leaders so that we take one meeting every 6 weeks, much more doable than me doing all the meetings every 2 weeks.
Today we snuck up to Huddart Park for a late afternoon barbecue. While my husband cooked, I took my daughter and her best friend for a walk. We went up a hill and they found a big meadown where they just wanted to sit and plan their big plan - a Webkinz camp. I was secretly grateful because even though I wasn't out of breath, walking up that hill sapped all my energy. I still don't know if this is from the surgery, first trimester fatigue, or just generally being more sedentary the past few weeks taking its toll. After a short rest I could walk again, but it's 9:00 p.m. and I'm nodding off.
Monday, I have five, count 'em, five interviews: Lester Holt of NBC news, three Survivor finalists, and the Survivor winner. (No hints here!)
Happy Mother's Day!
Pizza anyone?
(Chocolate chip cookie crust, cream cheese frosting with yellow food coloring, and fruit roll-ups.)
I'm getting out and about. I haven't been exercising much yet. I did skate once but after about 20 minutes had to get off the ice. But I've gone from not being able to get out of bed without pain, to the stage where I could get out maybe once a day, to being able to do a normal amount of errands but having to take an afternoon nap in there.
At the OB's this week, they gave me my first set of freebies: a bunch of formula samples packed in a diaper bag with a changing pad. I love the little freebies even though I plan to breastfeed. I can donate them to a food bank. But I had to laugh at the diaper bag. 8 years ago when my daughter was born, the diaper bags we got were pastel colored, covered with little pictures of Peter Rabbit. In the usual way of the world of pregnancy, that's all changed now. This diaper bag is chic black. Nice! Even the changing pad is black - now I don't know why, but that seems funny to me. Every changing pad we had when my daughter was a baby was pristine white.
They say technology moves fast, but the world of baby advice moves just as swiftly. 8 years ago I didn't have the internet, and anything I learned about pregnancy came from a book. My favorites were What to Expect When You're Expecting and The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. Now these books are interactive websites. You can find all your dates online with pregnancy calculators, make cute little tickers, and have inspirational articles mailed to you daily. 8 years ago I didn't know a single other diabetic mother - meaning, someone who was a diabetic before pregnancy. Now you can find them on message boards and online forums. You go to a site like Yahoo Answers and every teenager in there knows about implantation spotting and mucus plugs. The information is so readily available that it's easy to get overloaded with details that probably aren't important in the bigger picture.
Items I ate throughout my first pregnancy are off limits now, such as cold cuts of turkey. I'm not supposed to use nail polish remover. I knew about not dying my hair back then, but I am much more grey now 8 years later so I'm looking into natural henna and wondering if it's worth the trouble to cook up my own batch and leave it on my head for six hours. I'm drinking no diet Coke this time but allowing myself a few sips of my husband's coffee in the morning. I'm allowed to take anti-nausea medication this time when last time it was never offered and I didn't even know it was a possibility - was that because my OB preferred I not take it or was it just not around 8 years ago? I had seven months of morning sickness and it would have been appreciated.
I dropped six pounds from the surgery and I've already gained them back, putting me 2 pounds up from my first OB appointment. I don't want to gain too fast but I am a slave to the morning sickness. If I don't eat, I get queasy, a headache, and short-tempered. Last night I had a banana and a string cheese on my way out the door to the ice rink (for my daughter to skate, not me). That was at about 4:45. We got home at about 7:20 and I was STARVED. I felt like I could gnaw on a table leg.
My favorite recent pregnancy dinner: turkey kielbasa (microwaved and sauteed in cooking spray to an extreme because sausages are off-limits unless you cook the heck out of them), kraut, onions and mushrooms, pickles, grainy mustard with a side of sourdough (low-glycemic) toast. Sour, vinegary pregnancy-craving heaven. My daughter wouldn't touch it.
Today is my daughter's birthday and I am taking treats to her class. We baked a cookie pizza, frosted it with yellow frosting, then added some cut-up fruit roll-ups to look like pepperoni. I admit I don't enforce my eating requirements when it comes to my daughter. At her birthday party, we're having a little more balance: cut up fruit, pretzels, cubes of cheese, little star-shaped sandwiches of jam & cream cheese, then cake and ice cream. The ice cream is bright purple, ube flavored. This is a like a purple yam; we get it from a Filipino ice cream shop near where my husband grew up. It tastes like a less-sweet version of vanilla and it's delicious. It's a "Fairy" party so I thought the color would get the kids to try it. I'm just going to call it "fairy ice cream." My daughter loves it, but I'm betting the other kids have never seen ube ice cream before.
Well, I've had an eventful two weeks. Don't read past this if you're squeamish.
I wrote about this somewhere in my blog, but I have an umbilical hernia that has probably been there for some time. I consulted a surgeon about it a year ago but as I was still losing weight, and it wasn't giving me any problems, he suggested I wait until I'd lost 20-30 more pounds and then we could talk about a tummy tuck at the same time as the surgical repair of the hernia. He had done a scan and seen that the hernia was a pocket of fat. There is a cushion of fat between your intestines and skin; this is normal.
I continued to lose weight, then stalled around the turn of the year. Eventually I pieced together that I was pregnant, and I had an appointment (today, actually) to talk to my OB on what to do about the hernia.
As it turns out, two weeks ago my body decided for me as the hernia expanded to include my intestine. It felt like a fist to the gut, and I knew right away it wasn't something that would go away on its own. Still, it was the middle of the night, and I didn't want to drag my daughter to the ER or have her go to a friends or my parents' hotel room in the middle of the night. My parents were visiting because she had been in an ice skating competition on the weekend - what a lucky coincidence for me.
So we waited until morning, took her to school, and went straight to the ER. The pain was no better, and I was in agony. The ER nurses were so nice; they took one look at me and got me on a bed before even asking me what was wrong. I kept telling them, "and I'm nine weeks pregnant" every other sentence because I wanted to make sure that didn't get missed. They gave me morphine for the pain and got a surgeon in.
Because I am pregnant, the surgeon told me he would try to see if it could be pushed back in non-surgically. I already had an IV with morphine flowing, but let me tell you - this was the most pain I have ever felt in my life. I don't know how long he tried but it felt like a long time until I just told him I couldn't take it anymore.
We discussed my options. When possible, they don't like to operate on women in their first trimester because the loss of the baby is a real danger. But I would have had to wait four weeks. I am not good at communicating pain; the more it hurts the quieter I get. I have learned to just tell a doctor, "That hurts quite a bit," because I just don't cry out or scream. So I told him that this was incredibly painful and I was certain that I wouldn't make it four weeks. He took me at my word and told me we would speak to the anesthesiologist because being put out is a risk to the baby, too.
The anesthesiologist said we could try a spinal block, but she didn't think it would go up far enough. I begged her to try; by that point I was obsessed with making sure they didn't put me out. I could tell it wasn't her first choice, but it actually turned out fine. I could feel it at first, she added a local, then I could only feel pressure. She asked if I was feeling anxious - well, duh. So she added some sort of mood reliever...then everything was copacetic. I still get flashes of memory and I know I was chatting with the surgeon, anesthesiologist and nurses about our kids' schools.
Then I was wheeled to recovery, where I spent a couple of days learning how to go to the bathroom again and how to get out of bed without using any abdominal muscles. The surgeon was able to go entirely through my belly button so I won't even have a scar. The bad news is that the hernia will most likely be back by the end of my ninth month, and I'll have to go through all this again (but with a more permanent fix in place, a mesh, which they didn't do this time because of the risk of infection which is highly dangerous for the baby). But the good news is that the baby came through everything just fine. On the ultrasound a week later, we could see him/her kicking around like crazy.
The surgeon told me later that not only could the surgery have not waited four weeks, I was very close to having dead tissue in my intestine that would have had to be cut out -- a mini-gastric bypass, as my husband called it. It turns out the intestine had been crimped and the blood supply had been completely cut off. He said the tissue was compromised, but still living. A few hours would have made the difference. In retrospect, I should have gone to the ER right away instead of waiting for morning, but on the other hand, I am glad that I got a fresh surgeon and nursing staff. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but I am glad I got the doctors that I did.
It amazes me that my body could go through so much pain and stress and the pregnancy is fine. I am so thankful.
Time to come clean. I've had to throw the diet by the wayside simply because 1200 calories a day is not enough to sustain a pregnancy...that's right, I'm pregnant. Unexpectedly! I'm 38, I have an almost 8-year-old daughter, and I had kind of a nightmare pregnancy last time. So of course I am happy about a baby, but not looking forward to the next few months.
My body was giving me fits. I would stick to my diet plan all day but at the end of the day I'd find myself eating from a jar of peanut butter. I just felt so compelled; it was always fat, too - like nuts, peanut butter, cheese. Usually if I'm going to crave something compulsively it would be something bad like cookies. I chalked it up to exercise and my body fighting me to lose the next 30 pounds.
I had been working out hard and not progressing in the gym; meaning, I wasn't able to lift more weight when usually it's a pretty solid progression after taking some time off. I remember telling my workout partner that I felt so chunky all the time because my gut was just poofy all the time. I had taken off pretty much the entire month of February because of a respiratory infection for which I took a round of oral steroids, then antibiotics when it couldn't break up the asthma. The OB told me that the steroids can affect your cycle and it's possible I extra-ovulated. Whatever happened, I am worried about what I did when I didn't know I was pregnant - mostly medications. I can't remember if I took any pain killers or anything. My blood sugars are under control in general, but I wasn't testing all day or anything.
So I'm about 9 or 10 weeks along according to ultrasound.
When I realized I needed to eat more, I read the usual advice of adding 300 calories to your day. Since I was on restriction I knew this couldn't be right even though I've got fat stores to spare. Looking at the "Best Odds Diet" recommended by What to Expect When You're Expecting, I was shocked to see their daily menus are in the 2600-2900 calorie range.
That seems like a mountain of food to me. I've been on restricted calories for so long that it seems like an unreal amount of eating. I munch and nibble all day (thanks, morning sickness) but it's all stuff I have on hand, so it's pretty healthy. If I have a cracker, it's whole wheat. If I have something sweet, it's either a yogurt or some fruit. I've had to consciously add more fat to my diet. I have to say I'm enjoying having guacamole, avocado, and peanut butter when I want it.
Enough about food - I'm always obssessed. Getting pregnant throws a wrench in the works for my skating goals. I really hope my feet don't change after having custom skate boots built for me a few months ago. All my favorite activities - ice skating, biking, weight lifting - will be off limits in two weeks. We might sneak one short ski trip in next weekend (my friend who knows about it thinks I'm nuts to attempt it). Not to mention we have a tiny house and I really don't want to move. I guess we have a few months to figure it out.
My daughter is in a skating competition this weekend. I'm so proud of her and once again, feeling parental guilt. Skating is so HARD. You can do all the elements right but it will look wrong if you have your arms in the wrong place. If you tilt your chin down your spins will be off. If you make a fist instead of pretty fingers that counts against you. When you stroke your hands and feet are all supposed to be in a precise position, like ballet - but unlike ballet, you have to look pretty while keeping your balance and making sure you don't fall. She's only 7! She'll be fine, but I'm a nervous wreck.
This time of year gets busy and I neglect to write. I'm working on Girl Scout projects, our first campout coming up, PTA, skating, weight lifting, the works.
I promise to be back soon. :) Vicky, thanks for checking on me - I have been trying to comment on your blog and it times out for me, I don't know why. And it loses the comment whenever I do that so it's very frustrating! If you read this, I thought what you wrote about a chemical reaction rang very true to my own experience. I go from not missing it to wanting to cram sugar down my throat after one bite.
I've long known my best plan of action is avoidance.
Hooray! I feel better! 24 hours of antibiotics, and I'm already BREATHING. I'm not going to waste time being irritated and it taking so long to be put on antibiotics - okay, maybe a little - I'm just going to enjoy being able to BREATHE. Ahhhhhhhh.
I got some blood drawn today and I get the results online, so I was able to look at them tonight. Holy smokes, my cholesterol went up 50 POINTS! Argh! I was really puzzled by this until I googled around a little and found that Prednisone lists elevated cholesterol as a side affect. I know it raised my blood sugars, but I was able to take more insulin to compensate so it wasn't much of a problem. But WOW. I had no idea it could shoot it up so badly, so fast! I was only on Prednisone for 8 days.
I was reading around to find out if there were foods I didn't expect that have a high content of saturated fat. Pretty much I know my fats. Because I was sick, I was eating things like an orange for breakfast, fat free cottage cheese, butterless popcorn for lunch (lol) - I would make it with kernels and canola oil, not low-fat but not high in saturated fat either - and some sort of simple dinner. And...*drumroll*...more than my fair share of Girl Scout cookies. Damn those Lemon Chalet Cremes! I had a couple of cookie days and then I made sure to get rid of them entirely by serving them out when people or kids were over. I went with kids to Baskin Robbins once and had a kid's scoop of ice cream - definitely that has saturated fat. I know someone had birthday cake in there somewhere. But that's about it.
So I'm wondering. Yes, the Prednisone lists it as a side affect but I was on it a very short time. Could Girl Scout cookies have that dramatic of an effect on my blood chemistry? It's probably a bit of both, but when you consider that when I'm exercising and am in "the zone" I don't eat much saturated fat at all, maybe I had an exaggerated reaction?
This list of foods comparing saturated fats made me chuckle. I just don't eat like this!
* fatty cuts of meat, including meat drippings * bacon, sausage, and processed meats * duck, chicken, or turkey with skin * egg yolks * butter * fat or oil that is hard or in stick form, lard, and shortening * hydrogenated vegetable oil * coconut, coconut oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil, and cocoa butter * avocado * cream, half-and-half, and whole-milk dairy products, such as cheese, ice cream, and sour cream * processed grain products, such as cookies, cakes, muffins, and pastries
I don't eat cheese, cream, or butter unless they're the fat-free versions. I haven't tasted real bacon in ages. I eat hard boiled eggs sometimes, but keep a carton of egg beaters. My husband roasted a chicken a few weeks ago and I had some skin then. Pretty much though, my regular eating patterns don't include these products.
But those GS cookies have fat - most of them have about a gram of saturated fat per cookie. The peanut butter cookies have more.
My chest is still roaring like a campfire. It's not enough to go to the ER but I'm going to have to squeeze in an appointment to the doctor's tomorrow. Just walking around the block with my daughter to mail a letter brought out more asthma. This is so frustrating. I have to ride my bike a little later because my husband will have the car and I have to be somewhere, but I'm going to allow myself enough time that I can go slowly. The latest symptom I'm going through is that I've completely lost my voice. It's such a pain to not be able to bellow across the house when I need to - something I didn't even realize I did much.
I feel much better today; in fact, since yesterday I've felt mostly like myself again. I still have a racking cough but my energy level is so much better that I feel like I've turned a corner. Yay!
A little bit about the skates - I got them! And they weren't exactly perfect. The boots felt great, but when he went to mount the blades, they were falling to the inside. What is wrong with my feet? A simple blade move wasn't enough; he built a custom insole to account for the shift as well - and it was still falling to the inside.
I took them to a rink on Sunday. Yes, the edges were not where I want them yet but after an hour of skating I could see that my foot was already fitting into the skates a little differently than they had in the first few minutes, and it was improving my position over the blade. I took them back to the boot fitter on Monday and had him adjust them a little further. Again, they didn't look quite right. He had me lace them all the way to the top to see if that helped; if it was a "support issue." Great, I'm thinking, I spend all this money on skates and I'm too FAT to wear them! But lacing them up did improve how my weight is over the blade.
Mr. Bootfitter will be out of town for a couple of weeks, so my plan is to skate on them and see where they settle. If they're still out of whack, his plan is to build up something more in the boot - rebuild them like the bionic woman. I feel a little like a freak of nature about this. My daughter gets new skates and bam! She's out jumping and spinning without even a blister. But at that point, even with all the adjusting/custom designing, I didn't feel right in them. I had already decided I wasn't going to sign up for lessons in the upcoming session because if you don't feel comfortable on your edges, you're just not going to be able to do the maneuvers in class, so there's no point.
This morning I tried them out after the latest adjustment. In the first few minutes I was panicking again. Did I make a mistake with these expensive skates? They are stiff, stiff, stiff even though I got basically the softest boot beyond a beginner level. But slowly, I got a little more comfortable on my feet and I could feel that they're going to be okay. There is only one place on my left foot where it sometimes feels a little loud as if the blade is dragging when it should be on a clean edge. In other words, pretty damn close. I think the two weeks on the skates should be a good amount of time to really test them out and settle into them.
These are the first skates I've had where my heel does not move at all! Already I can feel what a difference that makes. Looking at them, I look like a duck-footed skater - but who cares? I'll have to take a picture when I have them on.
We had our GS event and as usual, it's worth it despite the chaos of getting permission slips and money and all that. For our next one, I spent extra time making it clear that if they didn't get the money to me by such-and-such a date they could not go - no exceptions!
Diet-wise, since I've been on freaking steroids for the past few days I swear I've gained 10 pounds. Well, I haven't actually gotten on the scale but it's been so hard to control my eating because they make you hungry. I'm still wheezing and this morning's ice skating left me completely exhausted, so I'm not quite 100% yet, but I'm planning to get back to the weight training today or tomorrow. Scratch tomorrow - daughter has a field trip and I'm going along. Today it is.
I'm feeling okay, but coughing up so much junk that I'm getting tired from all the coughing. I felt good enough to walk on a treadmill but when it came time to go I was coughing so much that I decided not to do it. My lungs just aren't ready for an exercise-triggered asthma attack right now.
I'm trying to pull together our booth for World Thinking Day, which is this Saturday. I've already decided we're not going to do this next year. I sound like an sourpuss, but this is one of those activities where too much gets dumped on the leader because it's unrealistic to ask the girls to go home and craft up a booth, activity, two crafts, and a food. I can barely get parents to bring snack to meetings, much less pull together something complicated. I told them that they would have to arrange their own transportation because so many of the girls have basketball games and other activities, and today one of them stopped me to ask who is going with whom. I had told them I will be available to bring girls up at such-and-such a time and out of the whole troop, I had two takers. I told them that if they don't go up with me they have to arrange their own ride, but with even this simple instruction they come to me and ask how their kid is going to get up there as if I'm going to be shuttling up and down all morning taking kids as they get through with their respective activities. Gah! I had better quit talking about it before I get all worked up. It's just so irritating because the driving is the least of my worries, I have a million different errands to do and things to finish to set it all up, I've got a monster of a cold, and the topper is that the person who was asking me this is supposed to be the transportation coordinator for the troop! At the beginning of the year she volunteered to be the person who calls around, finds drivers, and collect permission slips. She hasn't done this even once, and we've taken, oh, four or five trips since September.
Diet-wise, I'm a mess. I do better as the whole package: gym + diet. When I can't make it in the gym, I fluctuate between under eating and over eating.
I'm still here. I haven't got all the results back from my doctors' tests but the initial bloodwork all came out normal. Which is what you want, but I wasn't imagining the pain, so it's frustrating. The pain knocked me out of commission for a few days, then faded away. The doctor speculated it could be ovulatory pain - something I've never had, and it's hard to believe because it was so intense.
Somehow, in those doctor visits I must have picked up some bad germs because for the past week or so I've been going through a chest cold, which is kicking my asthma into high gear. Having a chest & head cold coupled with the asthma is making me walk around lightheaded everywhere.
I wish February weren't so darn busy. I had signed up to help out at a Girl Scout recruitment event Friday and I was feeling crummy, but I didn't have a fever or anything (and it's really rough on them to find adults) so I went. It was fun, but while I was there the council rep hit me up for a couple of other jobs that need filling. I'm so tired of getting pressured to take on more volunteer work just because I helped out! I ended up agreeing to order cakes for 250 people from Costco, but told her I couldn't take on the association registrar position, which is probably all she was aiming for anyway. But they wonder why people hesitate to jump in...it's like you're marked once you do.
If I can just make it through past this weekend I'll be through a couple of big projects and I can relax a little. Time to down a little more vitamin C.
Thanks for checking in on me, Vickie. I've just been too tired to blog and for a while I couldn't get comfortable anywhere, so it was hard to get on the computer.
I've been having a lot of pain and I suspect it's my gall bladder. I was waiting for Monday so that I wouldn't have to go to the ER - I have a doctor's appointment a little later today and hopefully I'll get some help.
With all the snow dumping on the Sierra Nevada, we took a day trip, figuring we would stop wherever the snow started and just sled a little.
That worked for a while, but we figured we'd head up 80 a little farther to a rest area where we could snowshoe. But so much snow had dumped overnight (80 had been closed for hours) that they hadn't plowed any of the exits until we were all the way to Truckee - a bit farther than we had planned on going.
Truckee was well-snowed under. Amtrak had a couple of trains stuck up there, and nothing was running. This is the train station.
We picked up some cheap snowshoes at the hardware store and walked around in Donner Memorial State Park. I wish we'd had x-country skis because it would have been perfect for it, but it's part of the spontaneous day trip experience - no rented equipment ahead of time.
The snow was so fresh and powdery..and delicious!
Even on the groomed trails I don't think we could have done it without snowshoes. It was so powdering you sank about hip-deep.
Still, we could have stuck with the sledding hill and had a great time.
In other news, I checked up on the status of my skates. They are being molded today, and I have an appointment for a final fitting on the 19th. Only two more weeks!
Keep it simple, stupid. I've been inspired by Vail, who is getting away from animal proteins and discovering lots of delicious vegetarian recipes. Okay, I'm not giving up my precious animal protein just yet, but it has led me to re-examine my eating.
A typical nutrisystem lunch looks like an NS entree, a salad, a protein serving. NS entrees break down into 1 carb + 2 protein servings. (I think in diabetic exchanges: carb = 15g carbs; protein = 7g protein; fat = 5g fat). So a turkey sandwich on 15g of bread - I have a diet bread for which that equals two slices - plus a salad is a typical sort of lunch for me. A Luna bar fits right in as 1 carb + 2 proteins, around 180 calories. I used to eat those all the time for my lunch plus a salad with a hard-boiled egg. Even though I've never been a lunch bar person, I did well on this lunch.
I've been eating more NS lunches that are more like real food, like mashed potatoes, beef soups, etc. Then I add a salad and some sort of protein. Somehow, even though these are bigger meals than a lunch bar I have been having trouble avoiding snacks afterwards. I feel like I need something sweet to finish off lunch, so I've been eating apples. It's a "healthy choice" but it's still an extra 60 calories of sweetness that I hadn't budgeted for.
Today and yesterday I went back to eating a Luna bar plus a salad with protein, and finding that I'm not getting antsy for that extra apple or other snacks. Hmm.
It reminds me of something that the girl who sat next to me in Chorale said: "You'd be surprised at how little you need to eat at lunch." Now, with a little more life experience under my belt I know this girl was anorexic, but at the time I was struck by the thought...and how I wasn't willing to eat the way she did. She was explaining to me that her lunch was an apple, and only an apple.
But the principle is sound. I don't need to have a 120 calorie fish filet (my "protein", barely under the NS stats) plus a container of NS mashed potatoes and a salad for lunch. It feels like a dinner, and it triggers the feeling that I need a dessert.
For me, it's not the best solution to feel like I'm eating as much food as possible for every meal. It's pretty common on the Nutrisystem site to maximize your eating plan this way - and there's nothing wrong with that from a "calories in calories out" standpoint. But if it's triggering me to eat more, THAT is a problem.
I was linked to a blog entry from 2006 to Jack Sprat, someone who lost a significant amount of weight but who struggled with plateaus at times. He eventually realized that his desire to lose all the weight was equal to his desire to stay the same.
If I sit down and look at it, I feel like I do want change. I do want to lose the rest of my excess weight badly. And yet, this describes me well:
At the same time, when we’re at a plateau, the desire to stay the same flies under the radar...Eating even just a little extra and exercising even just a little bit less are not as noticeable as the reverse!
Hello, popcorn at 11:00 p.m.! I've been nickel and diming my diet for a while, now - not every day, but certainly every week. Furthermore, this is the clincher:
But you might want to think of it this way. Imagine for a moment that you decide to throw in the towel. That is, imagine that you simply stop every single behavior you’re engaging in for the purpose of losing. What would be left?
Yep, the desire to stay the same.
I've been plenty worried about gaining the weight all back. It's time to put that behind me and focus on getting past where I am now because no matter what, I'm not going to re-gain. In the back of my head I've had a little voice saying, "It's okay as long as you don't gain it back." That's not good enough.
This is supposedly a current picture of Carnie Wilson. I couldn't find the source of the picture, but she is on a new reality show called "Gone Country" airing on CMT, and this seems to be a picture related to the show. I saw it on Obesity Help.com.
Most of the time I can stay in my "to each his own" zone, but when I see a picture like this, I wonder: why go through the pain and struggle of major surgery to re-arrange your insides, give up certain foods forever, commit to taking supplements without fail for the rest of your life - in short, give up normal digestion - unless you are going to get completely kick-ass results?
I figure that a person with the resources of minor celebrityhood would have a better shot at maintaining their weight loss than the average shmuck in the 'burbs such as myself. I don't blame Carnie for gaining weight back. I see this as credible evidence that weight loss surgery is not worth the pain and suffering. If a person who can afford to hire a personal trainer and chef can't make the weight loss permanent, then what chance does someone like me have cooking and exercising on their own? It's a bad bargain if it only works for a short while.
I hear people who have had the surgery say it is a tool in weight loss, and that you have to use it to make it work, etc. The flip side of that comment is that if you re-gain weight, YOU did not use your TOOL correctly. What I don't understand is that if you have enough willpower to use the tool perfectly, why would you need the surgery in the first place? I think the TOOL IS AT FAULT. It's like putting on a hard hat, jumping out of a plane, then faulting the hard hat for not protecting you from the crash. It may be a tool, but it isn't necessarily the most helpful one for the problem of obesity.
I have my off days, and I pay for them on the scale, but at the end of the day I know where the fault lies. I know how my body absorbs nutrients and how to burn off calories. When you add in the complexities of a rearranged digestive system, it becomes more mysterious than it needs to be - otherwise, we wouldn't have people regaining like Carnie or losing too much, which also happens.
Then there's the complications. Not everyone has them, but those who do...wow. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I wish health on everyone.
Oh yeah, and I'm editing this to say that I know Carnie had a baby. But it had to have been a while ago because she had a baby before she went on Celebrity Fit club. Her stint there was to lose the baby weight. I still say there is more to the equation than simply putting on weight during pregnancy, because she was smaller in CFC than she is in this picture, and with all the help at her disposal, if she can't keep it off, then her surgery is not helping her.
I make a terrible gym rat. I made the entire family go last night to make it more interesting. The first half hour was great. My daughter and I worked on her stretches and balancing exercises from her off-ice training class. We did plyometrics on a step in the gym. She can really do those one-footed jumps on and off the step no problem, but she does one or two and gets bored. I have the discipline to do more but to me it's pretty hard.
Then I popped her in child watch to color pictures of Disney princesses while I sweated on the elliptical. Here's how it goes for me:
Hmm, how long have I been doing this? Three minutes. Ugh. I guess I'll read more of this book. Surely now it's been a long time. 11 minutes? Not even halfway? Ugh. How come this guy next to me is going so fast? Okay, reverse direction. Now how long has it been? 13 minutes. I'm only going to do 15 because this is ridiculous. No, I signed up on the board for 30 minutes and I'll look like a fool if I time out before Mr. Hotshot next to me. It's only been 16 minutes? I'm only doing 20. Hey, I might finish the book at this rate.
And so on. I did the 30 minutes, but I have to nag myself the whole way. It's mentally exhausting.
Someone I know is getting gastric bypass surgery today. I wish her the best. Hopefully, she will be one of the ones without complications. I know her surgeon - he's the same guy I consulted about surgery for my hernia. He's young, seems nice. He asked me a lot of questions about how I lost weight, as if he'd never heard of anyone doing that before, so he's either good at flattery or he genuinely doesn't see it that often.
I was looking at some pictures from last April and I was shocked to see that I only weigh about 10 pounds less now than when the pictures were taken. However, I know the pants I was wearing in the picture were size 18, and I'm in 14's now. It's odd, but I guess I did some reshaping in there. I changed over to free weights mid-year. Before that I was using the weight machines, but I'm getting better results with a free weight program. Just not scale-wise.
I can see it's going to be a bit torturous for me over the next six weeks. I'm without decent skates, so I'm off the ice. The trouble is, my daughter is NOT. She skates three times a week minimum, and usually hits two more days for "fun." That's a lot of time at the rink for me without being able to skate.
Yesterday, after hours spent sitting on my butt at the rink, I didn't give much thought to exercise because I'm usually done exercising by 10:30 on Saturday mornings after an intense class. So it wasn't until mid-afternoon that it occurred to me that I hadn't actually done any exercise that day, duh. My gym is a YMCA and they close at 5 or 6 on the weekends, but more than that, the pool has been closed for a couple of months and yesterday was the grand opening, so I knew the gym would be packed. I figured, I'm in California and there's no reason I can't go jogging around my neighborhood for a while. But somehow, by the time I got home it was time to make dinner, then I didn't feel like going out and braving the cold, yadda yadda yadda - in short, no exercise. It's obvious I need to give this more thought.
I'm heading over to the gym in a few minutes and picking up a group exercise schedule. I'm usually not a fan of them because I'm a loner type, but I do respond to having a regular set time to shoot for.
I can't wait until I get my new skates. I want to hang out at the factory and watch them being constructed. I want to see them cut the leather and layer them, add lots of lovely padding, stitch them up. Maybe I can arrange a tour with the Girl Scout troop!
I decided to bite the bullet. The only way out of my skating boot hell is to be fitted by someone who really knows their stuff, so I drove up the peninsula to SP Teri to meet with George Spiteri (Spiteri - get it?) for a fitting. We're fortunate in this area to be near two world-famous skating boot manufacturers, SP Teri and Harlick. From what I hear you really can't go wrong with either. What tipped the scales for me is that Jackie Spiteri sometimes runs the Coffee Club at my rink, and she's a really nice lady. Boy howdy, she's got some fancy skates - zebra striped, purple suede, gold leather with gold blades. It pays to be married to a boot manufacturer.
Walking in, I have to admit that it's thrilling to see the photos of thank yous from famous skaters, boots signed by the likes of Michelle Kwan and Oksana Baioul (who has a very cute siggie built out of the "O"). Mr. Spiteri was friendly but all business. He clucked a little over my old skates but promised it would work out much better. After tracing my feet, he measured them at several points.
Fact: I have a wide ball. Also fact: I have a narrow heel. What was I saying about duck feet? It worked out to a C width at the ball but an A width at my heel. Plus, the ball of my foot does this little jog just below my pinkie toe that makes it hard to fit because it's extra wide, then narrows up quickly. I was mildly embarrassed when he said they would have to cut a boot with a little extra leather around the outsides for that odd curve on my foot.
Also, although it's nice to hear someone say you have a "thin Achilles tendon" (he has no idea that it took many hours of sweat to be able to even see my Achilles tendon) my vanity was short-lived, as in the next breath I learned I am "thick" where the boot ties at the top and he would have to add a little leather up there so that the tongue was properly restrained under the side flaps. Ha...ha. He's right. It's muscle, I swear!
But the result will be a boot cut to fit me and only me. I am over the moon! The padding inside felt soooo soft compared to my old skates. I can't wait to get out on the ice...which brings me to the bad news, besides the fact that these cost more than my first car. 6-8 weeks to build the boot. It could be March before I'm skating again.
So I'm off to the gym to find other ways to get my cardio in. I roped a friend into joining my gym recently with a free membership coupon, so I'm going to bully her to actually go to the gym tomorrow. Plus, I passive-aggressively added my husband to my gym membership for his birthday. I think having friends around who are members of the same gym will help break up the monotony.
When spring comes, I'm going on a bike ride with Vail. It's a date!
What a day! I had a visit from Vail and her friend LotusJade at the ice rink! I'm flattered that you put me on your list of California tourist attractions, Sandy! But seriously, of all days to have a visitor come see me skate...I couldn't skate! I am so frustrated, it was the first time out on my skates since they were worked over by the skate guy, and they just aren't salvageable. They were okay on my left foot, but my right foot has the blade shifted as much as possible, with inserts inside the boot as well as under the blade -- and it still falls into an irretrievable inside edge. The boot itself is warped, too. I really couldn't skate much at all, but I hope they enjoyed a nice cup of tea in the warm and cozy club upstairs.
I was very disappointed in the skates this morning, I had held out hope that they would be skateable enough to do the advanced class I am three weeks into on Saturdays. But there's no way I can do the class on the skates the way they are. It just seems to have happened so fast! I guess when the boot starts to break down it goes pretty quickly.
The boot fitter doesn't believe me when I said my feet have gotten shorter since they were first fitted. He says your feet can get less wide, but hey - I'm the one wearing those skates. I've seen my feet shrink in all my shoes, and it is in length. I like to have my running shoes fit very close to my foot, and in Nikes I went from a size 10 to a 8.5. I bought these skates after my feet were smaller than the 10's, but they weren't as small as they are today. It could be something like a lighter weight puts less force on the foot, so they don't spread out as much? I don't know.
It will be weeks before I can get my hands on a new pair, so no skating for the time being. :( I'll have to make do with the cardio room at the Y. Yuck! Exercise machines are not my favorite activity, but it's too cold to swim (the lap pool I like to use is outdoors) and it's still too wet where I like to go walk. Maybe I can get a little more serious about biking, take on some hills. That's another activity I don't usually do until Spring, at least.
I had so much fun having blog visitors visit me in the FLESH. Thanks so much, ladies! And so what if one of my earlobes hangs lower than the other? :P
Subscribe via RSS
