2012 - let's do this, people!

Happy 2012 my Peoples!

Here I sit, afraid to even go look at this blog’s older entries to see how bad I’ve been.  I’m not going to make excuses (they all look and sound the same anyway and there’s the whole thing about what excuses are like which is an in-and-out space south of my equator and how things that come from there are just about as valuable as excuses and all of this is just to say yadda, yadda, yadda, life got busy and I suck as usual.  If you’re still reading this blog AT ALL you’re well used to that by now.) and instead going to start the new year on what I sure hope will be a better foot. 

Sittin’ here in my bathrobe at 2pm, with The Empire Strikes Back on the tv (not because I said “know what?  I feel like enjoying cheesy-but-classic movie gold…” but because the other things already on the tv when I shuffled out to the couch at 11:30am were Law and Order marathons of several flavors, Storage Wars and a truly miserable movie about a girl pretending to be a boy in school so she could play soccer.  So Star Wars marathon was an easy choice.  Also “laugh it up, fuzz ball…”  So I’ve got that going for me.) and my ½-dressed sweetie sitting beside me, also clickety-clacking on his many keyboards.  We’ve had a lovely couple of holidays and today we both decided that the rule would be “do only what you want to do, full stop.”

Tangent:  “full stop” is one of the many cool English phrases that have infected my vocabulary (or that I’ve shamelessly stolen, depending on who you talk to).  It sounds so much classier than “totally” or “period” and makes me sound worldly, as though I’ve traveled all over the place picking up phrases that are not from around these parts.  So far, though, I’ve resisted calling my mother “mum” or throwing in the additional and completely unrepresented-by-spelling syllables in the word “aluminum.”  I’ll be strong as long as I can on those.

I’ll admit that even though I support and understand the general hatred for new years resolutions I can’t help but head into each new year wanting to make some goals for myself.  Most of the time I actually come up with the goals during the fall, but I see that there are holidays and other end-of-the-year complexities coming and that trying to make changes to my life amidst all that chaos, let alone while I’ve got my guy here, is a recipe for both failure and crap-chowder, so I push them off to start after all those chowder-mixings are through.  Last night we drank many bottles of truly dangerously lip-smacky cider (I wish I could quit you, J.K. Scrumpy, but I’m probably going to become an alcoholic instead to give me many more opportunities to climb into bed cradling one of your adorable, brown soldiers of boozy goodness…) and played games where we counted dice or created innovative new products like “Motivational Cereal” and “Evil Clown Security” or debated the inherent value of art vs. medicine vs. sight and we ate chocolate fondue and raspberry tarts and my own body weight worth of ham (that last one was mostly me) and wished a Happy New Year to everybody around us.  That must mean it’s time to start planning for a better future.

I’m doing all those things that they always say not to do when coming up with New Years Resolutions:  I’m picking way too many of them and they’re all rather significant changes and most of them are gonna be challenging to do.  My only hope for this not being just a recipe of failure is to try to put some kind of reasonable scale around them, so I’m going to try to tackle one to two per month.  My goal (seriously, I cannot stress enough that this is just a goal and I’m making no promises here because you people have been let down more than enough by me on this blog!) is to come back each month and tell you how the previous goal went as well as what we’re hoping for next.  (very important note:  I am not setting this as one of my New Years Resolutions.  I’m ambitious, but not stupid.  Well, not VERY stupid.)

So January?  January is about getting back what I sacrificed for my holidays, and about setting up the rest of the year for a bit more sanity. 

In 2011 I really wanted to FINALLY get myself in better shape.  Reach my goal weight of 150 lbs and get my body to a place where I could be naked in front of my hot, super-hot and also very hot boyfriend w/out wanting to do any of the tricks from the sitcoms that they use to hide a pregnant actress.  In order to do this I counted calories slavishly, eventually becoming one of those obnoxious women who always tell you how many calories there are in your snack cake or bag of chips.  I also escalated my daily exercise to the point where if I didn’t do at LEAST 90 min. of cardio a day I worried about any meal larger than three celery sticks and a mid-sized glass of lite water.  (like regular water, but ½ the fat.)  The good news?  By June I’d reached my goal!  The bad news:  I couldn’t write a blog post because the only things I was doing in my life to write about were “working” and/or “working out.”  Blah, blah, blah, “can you believe there’s only 50 calories in this Asian pear???” blah, blah, blah, “can you believe how muscley my arm is?”, blah, blah, blah, B-O-O-O-R-R-I-N-G…

T.E. came for the summer and, big surprise, I gained some weight.  He left and I lost it again, and I lost as much more as I could before he arrived, ending my work for the year at about 147.  I promised myself I wouldn’t count a single calorie or agonize about working out at all during the holidays, nor would I set one teeny, tiny toe on my scales.  (that’s right, I have two of them.  Shut up.)  But he flies away on Friday (sad.) and I’m 100% sure I’ve gained these 3+ weeks. 

So for January I’m climbing back on that wagon to lose the weight back to my goal of 150 lbs again.  The calories – I will count them, counting on my Oogies cheesey popcorn and my sugar-free fudgickles.  The bike rides – I will make them at crazy-early hours of the morning before work in rain and cold and bleah.  The weights – I will lift them.  Above my head and behind my back and explosively and with those grunty sounds one makes when you just.  Can’t.  Lift.  One.  More…  I will go back to my obsessive, weight-losey, abs-flexy, box-kicky ways until I’m back where I want to be.  But I’m also hoping that January will be the END of this part of my life for a while, and starting in February I’m planning to find a much more reasonable, balanced way to live my life where I don’t have to lose weight, but I keep it off and maintain what I’ve achieved.  I love being in the best physical shape of my life, as well as liking how I look and feel.  It’s worth protecting, but there must be some way I can do this that still lets me… well, do ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL WITH MY LIFE. 

Hopefully.

Wow, have I actually been writing this much?  Feast and famine, people.  Well I’ve got another 1-2 goals for January, but I’m going to call this one enough for now and hope to hell that having two other things to write about will encourage me to be back here sometime before February.  Fingers crossed and Happy New Year!

Battle of the Bulge - Re-Winning

I never once thought that I was going to be able to keep losing weight while T.E. was here -- the stuff I did to lose it was "living single" stuff, like working out all hours of the day and night or eating salad for dinner 4 days out of 7.  These are not the way that you show your love how happy you are to have them home.  No, the way that you say that is with pizza.  And Oreos.  And movies with the BIG tub of popcorn.  Which, my friends, we did.

I tried to just maintain, but even counting calories was tricky and we had a couple of weekends where things were totally uncountable and uncontrollable.  We went to PAX up in Seattle, WA to rock both our geekiness and also our gamer status.  While at PAX our meals came from places that were legally-bound to ask if we wanted fries with that.  I didn't count calories that weekend because I can't actually count that high, people.  Big, ugly calorie numbers for about four days.

In the end I put T.E. on a plane, stepped onto a scale and found I'd gained back 5 nasty little pounds.  Well, T.E. is coming back here to spend the holidays with me in just about 6 weeks.  And in that time I plan to lose the remaining 3 pounds of my gainage, plus hopefully another 5 more.  These 5 extra pounds will be the pounds that I can gain back while he's here, between Christmas parties and holiday cookie trays and awesome, awesome egg nog.  (and can I just say thank god Egg Nog is seasonal -- if I could drink that stuff all year long there would not be enough bike rides and kickboxing classes in the world to keep my ass in regular people pants...)

And then once he flies back across the pond I'll have over 6 months to lose even more!  My overall goal, now that I've hit the original number (FINALLY!!!), is to get down to a size that I can enjoy most of the year, but from which I can gain some during the summer and holidays and still like my butt.  It's actually a pretty good butt!  And we're finally enjoying each other's company again, so...  Wish me luck, my people.

Battle of the Bulge - WIN!

First, a quick update:

1) I has job. It remains awesome. Yay for good job.

2) I has home. It is also awesome, featuring wood floors, a garage and right next door to the lovely riverside bike path, as well as being close enough to bike to work and a seriously good deal.

3) TE arrives soon!

…and now that I’m finally settled into my new place with boxes un boxed and furniture in their furnitury places and knowing the locations of the closest gas station and pizza parlor and second-hand dogfood emporium I thought “Hey, didn’t I used to write a blog?”

Sigh.

Something that I have written about many times in the last 6 months of living back in Hippyville has been my progress losing weight.

(what? You haven’t written anything about that in the last six months…)

Oh yes I have. I’ve written about it at least a couple of times, maybe more.

(seriously, you haven’t. I’m the one person left who’s continued to check this sorry location for updates and not a one has mentioned this. I’m really sure.)

I totally have written about it. I’ve written about all the various things I’ve been doing, and the foods I have or haven’t been eating, and about how I had to buy a second scale, even though I spent years never setting foot on scaley-things w/out being forced, because the scale at my parent’s house was off by at least 5 pounds, but in the GOOD direction so my Dad was (understandably) loathe to get it fixed or adjusted or whatever it is you do to make a scale tell the damned truth for once. I wrote about all of this. I wrote it all down.

I just never seemed to finish these posts, or post them. So you never got to read them. But wrote them I did.

Still, since the words never made it out of the file on my desktop called “UIL” to the big, bad interwebs I guess I should update you guys officially.

I lost weight!

As the year started I decided to do something official in the realm of food management. As I think I’ve mentioned before, my hugely finicky palette means I can’t do a true diet, as I would eat only about three things and, of course, starve. More than that I WON’T do a true diet because I believe when you do something that drastic you may lose the weight for a while, but you’ll gain it all right back as soon as you go back to eating normally. You can’t live the way. But I also knew that after over a year of exercising RELIGIOUSLY (and remember, I don’t do ANYTHING religiously, so that’s saying something!!) and yet moving not a pinch of pounds off of my huge ass I needed to try something new. And everybody kept telling me “you should count calories. Calorie counting is totally the way to go. Your calories – let me count them.” And then I discovered that there is an app for that (shock! Wonder! What are the odds? Can it be true?) which would help me count those calories all the time.

I set my goal on losing one pound per week. And I set my calorie intake to a tiny little 1460 each day. And I said my tearful goodbyes to pizza. And French fries. To oreos and waffles and anything that came on a bun. “Farewell, faithful friends,” I said, caressing their salty sides or creamy fillings. I told my beloved Pepsi that we could still see each other, but only occasionally. First it was lunch and dinner; then just lunch. Oh sure, I thought about Pepsi all the time, but I would be strong. STRONG.

To achieve this calorific goal I had to do some other things I’d always shunned. I learned to drink water. (shudder) Not boring, regular old water with only water flavors – this is a thing I cannot stand, and should be reserved for hosting fish and washing the car. But thanks to the invention of “powdery flavors to make water taste like non-water flavors” I was suddenly a water drinker. I was drinking water every day. I was drinking water at almost every meal! Cran-grape water and cran-pomegranate water and cran-lemonade water – these are now my closest friends. I have a lovely collection of huge water bottles that I take with me everywhere like one of those “fitness” people you see and hate walking down the street or biking in the rain.

I also became the expert on all things “low-calorie.” Now I can tell you, right off the top of my brain, that dill pickles and celery and lettuce all have so few calories as to almost not be counted at all. I can tell you that 53 pretzel sticks = 100 calories, and that sugar-free Jello and fudgicles make great desserts with tiny amounts of the bad things in them. My pantry is stocked with Pirate Booty and Pop-Chips and Oogie’s white cheddar popcorn because they’re all low-calorie ways to get a little salty snack. I’ve discovered wonders such as the thin buns and thin bagels that cut my carb calories to a manageable load; the 100-calorie bags of cookies and cheese-its and brownie-bites; the non-fat flavors of yogurt that sound so wonderfully decadent, like “Strawberry Shortcake” or “Triple Berry Torte but also ring in at a tiny 100-calorie number. Ask me any question about low-calorie foods. Go ahead, ask me! And then punch me in the stomach, I won’t feel a thing! Yes, I am the calorie-countingest calorie counter this side of Calorie-Countopia!

On top of the calorie counting, guaranteed (cough, cough, sputter, sputter) to drop a pound each week, I also took advantage of all the free time that being unemployed affords a person and I worked out. A LOT. I went for a 15-mile bike ride every single day. I took a pilates class for about two months, and after that was done I went to the dark side and signed up for kickboxing classes. Some days I did the bike ride and the kickboxing class on the same day. I called these days “sheetcake day” as so much exercise pretty much meant I could eat an entire sheetcake and still not exceed my daily calories, so many was I burning away. I also started doing these brutal toning exercises I found online that brought my hips and abs and big old butt into a reasonable size and shape. I sweated, and sweated, and then I sweated even more.

I took this goal really seriously, you guys. I felt like this was one of the few places that I really should be able to make a change, as opposed to the job and the home and all the other stuff I was desperately trying to achieve. This one was just in my hands, and all I needed to do was not. Drop. The. Ball. I was pretty damned obnoxious at parties, drinking my colorful waters instead of soda and eating my burgers bun-free and shunning desserts in favor of a couple of fudgeickles, thank you very much. In the past I would have looked at someone like me, putting my body size before my fun, and found me ridiculous. But not anymore. I was tired of being the big-but-funny (or smart) girl. I wanted to be both.

Two weeks ago I finally hit the goal I set for myself TWO YEARS AGO: I am down to 150 pounds. A total reduction of over 50 pounds in that time, over 30 of them lost in the last 6 months. When TE steps off that plane in about a week I honestly think he will take one look at me and decide to ditch his old girlfriend for this new hot chick! I’m proud of myself and what I’ve accomplished. And now I know it’s something I can do just so long as I really put my mind to it. I just need to focus; to really concen- ooh! shiny!

Sigh.

Battle of the Bulge -- Where the Heck Was I?

Wanna know how long it’s been since I wrote about my never-ending pursuit to be a less chunky Femtastic? Wanna know? It’s been SO long that I had to go search my blog to even figure out when it WAS that I last updated you guys on working out. Which is bad, right? Except wait, even WORSE, I was surfing back and surfing back and finally got tired of looking and gave up. Are you getting me here? It’s been SO LONG since I updated you on working out I didn’t even have the energy to find when the heck that was. THAT IS A LONG TIME.

Of course I could be excused for thinking I’d posted on this more recently than that because in my mind I totally did. In my mind I wrote this cool post about turning over a new leaf with my foods. I also wrote this terribly clever one about how it was hard to come up with ways to work out after I moved back to Hippyville. In my mind. And which of us will ever forget that epic post about… well, none of us will, no matter how epic it was, because it’s still here. In my mind. Stupid mind, which holds on to stuff and makes stuff seem real and forgets to remind you that you never did it ever…

So all this just to say that we got some catchin’ up to do, my peoples. Now, I could either write a truly colossal tome here covering everything that I should have been posting about in the last 5 or so months, which would make my poor hands cramp and you guys would get bored with the subject matter, not to mention the ridiculous level of detail, about a third of the way in and it would leave me so tired of typing I’d not write again until Christmas time. OR I could just say this: IT’S FINALLY WORKING.

I’ve lost over 20 pounds since I moved home. OVER TWENTY FRICKIN’ POUNDS! That’s real, actual, honest-to-goodness MASS, people! That’s like an entire person’s worth of weight (if they were about a foot and a half tall and had also been watching their weight) or a little more than one of my cats. A big cat’s worth of weight! Huzzah! And I really can’t tell you how satisfying it is to finally be having SUCCESS at this, given how long I’ve been busting my (great, big, FLABBY) hump trying to make a difference. Each success has fueled even more work from same previously mentioned flabby hump!

Currently here’s what my life of fitness looks like:

• I’m counting calories. No more than 1360 of the lovely little buggers a day. It’s such a tiny number…
• I’m going on a 15-mile bike ride, for an hour out and back, four days a week
• I’m taking a kickboxing class for an hour twice a week
• Every other day I do these killer exercises on my hips and my abs and my fanny. They are very, very mean. I hate them, but I think they’re making big things smaller, and that’s good
• I do pee-ups. 20 push-ups each time I leave the bathroom. Many push-ups each day

…not bad, eh? I mean, I spend a LOT of my time sweaty. A LOT. But the pay-off is OVER TWENTY POUNDS! I’ve got a few pounds to go to hit my goal weight. And once I do that there will be three very good payoffs:

1. I will go buy pants. None of my pants fit anymore, so I need pants.

2. I will finally give myself my 3^rd tattoo. It’s been in the wings for over 4 years. But FINALLY I’ll have earned it!

3. I will knock T.E.’s SOCKS off when he walks off that plan in a month.

…of those three I’m sure you can all guess which one I’m most excited about. Yeah you can.

Battle of the Bulge -- Now With Dinner Theater

So here at my shiny, new apartment complex there’s also a shiny, new workout room. It’s… petite, but it suits my needs. Now instead of my bike rides 3 times a week I can take bike rides 5-7 times a week. Rain, snow, sleet or falling frogs, I can still take my bike ride. Which is very, very shiny. (Well, as shiny as anything that sweaty can honestly be.) Plus also there’s this added advantage of being able to read a book while I bike. This, I can assure you, is much more difficult on moving bikes, as there’s that whole thing about needing to watch where you’re going and balance and stuff. So in the “reading while I bike” department the stationary bike in the workout room is a VAST improvement!

Most of the time there’s just me in there. I tend to head down there fairly late, so as to not have to share my panting and wheezing with others, but most of the time there’s someone else trotting on the treadmill or… something with jaunty elliteration on the elliptical machine. I just sit on my bike, pedaling away. But the other night was odd. I’d been zooming along for ten or fifteen minutes when the first guy walked in. He is most often the one who shares my sweat-space, so we did that silent nod-greeting thing and he jumped on a treadmill and took off away from me. (Except of course that on the treadmill you don’t go anywhere. And besides if you DID I’d totally have caught up on him on my non-moving bike, so…)

But after a couple of minutes another guy walked in. And in fact this guy was two guys. And these two guys jumped on the other two cardio-machines, one treadmill and one elliptical, and away they went. From my spot on the bike I had, in those moments when I looked up from the book, this funny little view of a trio of strange hineys bouncing down the road away from me. An amusing enough site that I admit I looked up more than once. A couple three or four times actually. And on the third or fourth time my middle hiney guy started to flap.

Yes, flap.

He was running along, treadmill flying under his feet, and his arms started to flap. Arms straight out to the side, hands palm-down, away he flapped. So enthusiastically I had to look down to his feet to make sure they weren’t coming off the ground. My funny, runny stranger flapped and flapped as he ran and I felt the first giggle coming up kind of like a tequila burp. But be proud of me, my people, for I stifled.

Then the fourth guy showed up.

First of all, there’s never been three, so you KNOW there’s never been four. So that was surprising enough. And yet I was fully committed to ignoring and getting back to my book and disregarding the unprecedentedness of a fourth guy. Still, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that he was headed to the weight machines. I also noticed that he was a little guy. Not short, but more slight. Spindly even. So it definitely caught my attention when he decided to lift so much weight. Because it really was a lot of weight. Frankly, it was pretty much ALL the weight. I’ve never even looked at the number on that bottom weight because I knew I’d never see that come off the ground ever, but I know that some of the numbers above it include combinations of 8’s and 0’s. Mr. Spindly pushed up this big HEAP of weight. Probably a whole 4 or even 5 times.

He then moved to another weight machine and once more lifted all the weight. Numbers of 8’s and 9’s going up into the air another 5 or 4 times too. And then he rearranged the weight to pull from here rather than there and pulled yet again all the weight! With the spindly arms!

After the fourth pile of “all the weight”, though, Mr. Spindly looked dejected and grumpy and wandered back out again. At this point I realized he’d been killing time waiting for someone to step off of a cardio machine, but flapper and his two buddies never even looked back. And so off Spindly left.

And right after that my flapper stepped down. He was done treadmilling, and therefore done flapping. The guy on the elliptical also stepped down, and stepped out, and I knew the show was coming to a close. I felt kind of bad, because it had been a big night in the workout room. And then, as if he heard my mental cries of “Encore! Encore!”, flappy gave it up for one more big performance. He began high-stepping his way across the floor. Not nazi-style, mind you, but more along the lines of “can I knock my own teeth out with my knees? Can I?”-style. Step, step, step he went, first east to west and then back the other way, back and forth across the room twice. I watched, holding my breath and the guffaws contained within that breath, as his knees came higher and higher.

And then he was gone. And it was all I could do to not applaud.

Battle of the Bulge - Get on my Bike and Ride!

Just in case anyone is unsure, I’m not yet a size 2. I know. I KNOW! I don’t get it either, but there you have it. Not a 2. (not even a 4! Unbelievable!!!) So it seems like I need to continue to wage the battle of the danged bulge.

Then again, a lucky thing seems to have happened. All the rain and damp and general lack of sun and warmth and loveliness seems to have gone away. Plus also YAY! Apparently there’s this thing every year, lasts a few months, generally brings sun and nice-type weather and they call it “Some Ur” I’m intrigued. But with all this extra sun each day I’ve got the time to add something to my days.

So I added 15 extra miles of biking.

There’s this bike path that starts pretty dang close to my house and runs out west of town. No, further than that. Further. Past there and keep going… and going… (no, don’t stop at the Target. I know, I love Target too. LOVE Target. But you don’t stop there.) When you reach the end of the path you’re overlooking some lovely wetlands with all sorts of birds and other wildlife. Also you’re 7+ miles away from my house, and generally about 30 minutes too.

And even though it’s a lovely ride ending in a lovely view of great and abundant loveliness you still gotta ride 7+ miles BACK into town to get back. Into town. (But still a lovely ride. But like the lovely ride in reverse.) And both ways there are tons of excellent things of which to take a picture. In fact, the hard part is to set picture-taking standards. If I stop and take snaps of every single thing that seems picturesque these trips will take 2-3 hours each day. Which is too many hours. So I only take the awesome pictures. The "holy crap!" pictures. Of which I've taken... well, none. But I'm ready for it!

At this point, with the biking, I’m doing pretty well. Last week I made my 15-mile trek 4 times. 60 miles total, roughly. As fast as I could without ruining the lovely view at the lovely overlook with my lovely lunch sprayed technicolorly thither and yon.

So far, with the 60 miles and the 4 hours and the sweating, sweating, SO MUCH SWEATING, I’ve lost a total of I haven’t lost anything. Sigh. But supposedly these things take time. Which I’m opposed to, but the loop hole around this rule is eluding me. While I keep looking for this loop hole I’m also gonna keep riding. This week won’t work so well because there’s stuff, stuff and even more stuff to be doing for the end of the school year. But come the weekend I’m RIGHT BACK in the saddle, baby!

Next: I must to upwardly sit, and also upwardly push. Even though I hate the ups, both sitting and pushing. Wish me luck-ups.

Battle of the Bulge – OK, seriously this time

Look, I know I’ve talked a lot about this bulge battling. And I’ve had moments of great intensity – remember those one or two times where I was winning? (And of course you understand that we’re defining “winning” as “the Queen lost 2 lbs and I lost 2 lbs, 1 ounce. And then I did the classy thing, by dancing around all jiggly and pompous and yelling “in your FACE, your heiny!!!” Good times…) But in all honesty I mostly spent all previous attempts at bulge battles resenting that I could only have 2 fudgicles instead of four. (Because really, what kind of communist world have we come to when a serving of fudgicles is only TWO???)

However, something has happened. Something that I swore. SWORE! Would never happen. Something so wrong, so vile and unspeakable and not at all right, that I shudder to give voice to it here. If any of you reading have children in the room please get them elsewhere. Send them to a neighbor’s house or ask your out-of-town relatives to take them far, FAR AWAY! I want no innocents soiled by this.

Are they gone?

My internets, the worst of the worst has happened: my underwear has started to roll down on me. ROLL DOWN. Rolled not by gravity or some unnatural panty-rolling voodoo curse. OH NO! No, my sad, defenseless underwear have been rolling down under the rolling movement of my very own belly.

Oh the horror! THE HORROR!!

All kidding aside… well ok, SOME kidding aside (because really? Who believes I could even DO that?) this for me is a last-straw kind of thing. It freaked me out the first time I was standing next to someone at work and just felt my waistband surrender to the tummy-pressure and just roll down… I felt like everyone who could see me could TELL what had just happened. Like as it was happening they could hear that slide-whistle noise that clowns make? Like my panties rolled down and went “Peeeeuooop!” as they went. And oh, for any of you who have not experienced this yet let me go ahead and give you the benefit of my sad, SAD experience: there is absolutely NO WAY to roll panties back up to your waistline in public. None that a human being should attempt anyway. (and please, for me: don’t be that guy.)

So this weekend I had a serious talk with my mouth and tummy and the kitchen and explained to them that for the benefit of my work reputation we were going to have to stop eating good things for a while, and we will also be fairly hungry pretty much all the time for the next few months. (with the exception of birthday cake this month. Nobody stands between me and birthday cake, ESPECIALLY when it’s my birthday! They’d be safer putting Baby in the Corner.)

I’m also setting a goal. It’s not a pounds goal (because that would require weighing myself, which we just do not do in this house. I’m not putting “bathroom scale” on my birthday list thank you very much!!) or a size goal or a “feeling less tired and with more energy goal” (because that is all LIES AND FALSEHOODS!!!). My goal is simple: to go a whole week without having to reach down my own pants and return my panties waistband to the waist area of my ample girth.

One.

Whole.

Week.

PS: Does anyone want a 1/2-eaten box of Cap’n Crunch? Cheap? It’s got CRUNCH BERRIES!!

Battle of the Bulge - Compare and Contrast edition.

So the battle of the bulge is in full swing! And by full swing I mostly mean that every yummy thing I eat is currently coated in a thick film of guilt, and I’m extremely aware of my tummy. To make matters worse, the Queen has been tracking her eating and exercising on her own blog. And it includes words like “non-fat” and “sit-ups” which make me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

To better illustrate the difference between our battle plans, here is what a week of eating and exercising would look like on MY blog:

Monday:
Breakfast = 2-3 handfulls of cheesy goldfish crackers, 12 oz. of Pepsi
Lunch = leftover Chinese food, some kind of Mein (probably lo)
Dinner = chicken Ceasar wrap
Dessert = 1 fudgicle (maybe 2? I got dizzy around 11:45 and may have treated myself with an additional fudgicle purely for medicinal purposes)
Exercise = biked to/from work twice, 1 bonus Monday hour of tap dancing

Tuesday:
Breakfast = 2-3 handfulls of cheesy goldfish crackers, 12 oz. of Pepsi
Lunch = P, B & J on white bread, 12 oz. of Pepsi, 10 min. of reliving my childhood through food.
Dinner = Exceptionally crappy Banquet chicken dinner frozen dinner w/ mashed potato & corn, 12 oz. of Pepsi
Dessert = 1 fudgicle
Exercise = biked to/from work twice, 1 hour of tap dancing

Wednesday:
Breakfast = 2-3 handfulls of cheesy goldfish crackers, 12 oz. of Pepsi
Lunch = P, B & GJ on white bread, 12 oz. of Pepsi, fat-free memories of youth
Dinner = Chicken Ceasar wrap, 1 dozen tater tots (maybe more – I confess I didn’t actually count them.) 12 oz. Pepsi
Dessert = The Last Fudgicle
Exercise = biked to/from work twice, 20-min. of crying due to lack of additional Fudgicles, absolutely NO tap dancing.

Thursday:
Breakfast = Oh cheesy goldfish crackers, only you understand me. You and your friend, 12 oz. of Pepsi
Lunch = Lean Pocket, which is neither lean nor a pocket, but DOES taste like cardboard filled with cat food and cheese whiz
Dinner = Cheese burger, OK? WITH pickles! And probably not even LITE pickles! But I had things I had to do and it was late and I didn’t want to make food and whatever! You’re not the boss of me!
Dessert = 2 small bowls of Frosted Flakes w/ 2% milk. Because it’s not just for breakfast anymore.
Exercise = biked to/from work twice.

Friday:
Breakfast = 2-3 handfulls of cheesy goldfish crackers, 12 oz. of Pepsi, who the hell brought cinnamon rolls?
Lunch = tiny 1-person cheese pizza w/ chicken scattered around the top because cheese pizza is boring.
Dinner = Take-out Indian Food!!! Chicken Tikka Masala and plain Nan. And big heaping bowl of nirvana because I love me some Indian food! (but it was low-fat nirvana, if that makes any difference.) and, OF COURSE, 12 oz. of Pepsi.
Dessert = 1 small bowl of Cap’n Crunch w/ crunch berries, 1 ice cube (fat free, y’all!!) to stop the mouth-bleeding from the sharp crunch-corners, candy bar at the movies.
Exercise = biked to/from work twice, built shrine to person who brought cinnamon rolls

…yeah, I don’t understand why I’m not a tiny, little size 2 yet either. Probably a glandular problem. Or perhaps a vindictive metabolism.

PS. Dear Pepsi, I expect your corporate sponsorship of this blog to commence immediately. Yes, I am willing to change the name to “Pepsi’s Unlikely in Love” in exchange for a lifetime supply of soda and the promise that you’ll change back the logo immediately. Femtastic don’t like image change!

battle of the bulge, Part Four - weight loss through hate and office products

So I’ve been battling (sort of) and so far my triumphs can be described thusly: I’ve lost a grand total of something like half a pound. And also my soul has been wrung completely dry of all soulful moisty goodness. SO HUNGRY. This, for me, is extremely frustrating because I feel like the last two months have been all about me trying to eat the less bad-for-me foods and less of those food anyway and also trying to find ways to exercise, exercise, exercise. And all this for ½ a pound.

Part of my trouble is my magical and unstoppable metabolism. My metabolism is both sneaky and brilliant, and responds to change almost instantly. I change my foods from those yummy, fatty and deep-fried to their lite ™ and helthi (also ™) cousins and it confuses the systems for a day or two, sure. But by the end of the week the metabolism is on to me and it’s found a way to leech rolly-polly pounds from the Lean Pocket and the sliced apple. So I cut back on the number of apple slices and have only ½ of the English muffin and only 1 taco for dinner rather than 2. And of course the scale drops initially, but once again my danged metabolism figures it out, and even the working out it out-smarts! “Go ahead!” says Mr. Metabolism, “tap your little heart out! Bike to work three times a day if you want! Do your puny little sit-ups! You can’t stop me!!” And then it converts my bone marrow into a new chin.

To make matters worse, I have friends like Risky and the King, who have the good witch Glenda metabolism to my Wicked Metabolism of the West. My friends are related to each other in such a way as to allow them to share their metabolistic traits, which work like this:

Eat a King-Sized Snickers and two bags of Doritos per day + blink your eyes eleven times = drop a pant size, step out of your over-big shoes, become invisible when turned profile. How I hate them.

Case in point: Risky has always been the tall, willowy type with the porcelain skin and the curly, black hair, even in Jr. High School. And yet it was around then that she introduced me to Annual Pig Out Day (which you and I call “Fourth of July”) The way she chose to celebrate had less fireworks and more bopping down to the 7-11 to purchase GOBS of junkfood: chocolate and chips and ice cream and fabulous Hostess creations and even just thinking about the piles of food has caused one of my arteries to completely close – pardon me for a minute as I self-CPR me back to life.

Clear…

Anyway, Risky took a day and ate, ate, ATE and when the dust settled guess how many pounds she gained. GUESS! Do you have a guess? Does your guess start with “not a danged pound” and end with “and so I killed her dead!”? Because if it does you’d totally be right! (except for the killing her part. But I think totally wanting to kill her counts. Also the wanting could be aerobic, so…)

Where was I going with this again? Oh, right! The hate. The searing, seething but apparently not at all fat-burning hate…

Right now the King mocks me and my sad, all-too-human metabolism with his biking to work. He bikes to work once a day, and then also bikes home also once a day. For a grand total of two trips a day, about 40 minutes of biking per day. (when exactly did my blog posts become word problems?) I bike to and from work TWICE a day, taking almost 50 minutes of biking time. And he loses weight! And I lose nothing! NOTHING! GAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!

So here’s the plan for this, the last month of the Battle of the Bulge:
Eat nothing but salad greens, sunflower seeds and reams of copy paper. (roughage)
Stop driving completely and instead walk EVERYWHERE, and always uphill
Channel my hate of my skinny friends to my thighs and tuckas, utilizing it’s fiery hotness to burn away calories.

I SHALL PREVAIL!!

EDITED TO ADD: Did I mention that The Queen now has her own blog? Did ? Because she totally does! And on it she will tell you how she is attempting to win the battle of the bulge. So you can go there to read what she has to say, and then you can come back here and wonder how the hell I don't just explode from all the Strawberry Poptarts. Sigh.

Battle of the Bulge, Part Three – Bad Days = Bad Food

You know what happens when you decide to watch what you eat? Food begins to drop from the sky. Bad food. EVIL food. Soulless food with a chocolaty coating and creamy, black filling.

I’m trying to be good! I mean, not last week of course. The big push last week was to remove the bad foods from the house. It was with this noble goal in mind that I ate fish sticks, tater tots, frozen waffles, peanut butter cookies and terrible, terrible Cap’n Crunch. (oh you devilish seaman, you, with your swarthy, sugary mustache and your berries of tempting crunchitude…) And I was rewarded for my noble deeds! Rewarded Sunday night when I stepped on that scale, STEPPED ON IT WITH PRIDE! Stepped up and said to it “do your worst, Scale!” And it replied “you gained two pounds, Fat-Ass. Step off before you damage my insides.”

Still, I’d done the hard work and now it’s time to dedicate myself to the good foods. The Fish! The Veggies! The foods called “Lean” and “Light” and “of COURSE there’s no flavor here! You want to lose weight, don’t you? Then shut it!” I did away with all the Pockets that are Hot, and turned to the Pockets that are LEAN! Surely they would still be a tasty way to take care of the occasional lunch, right? And just as I’d hoped, they were fine! Oh sure, the sauce puts one in mind of light-orange milk and the crust is most definitely made from mulch and manila folders. But other than that? Fine.

But things at my work are difficult right now. Nay, some might even call it craptastic, with the constant stress and too much to do and “Hey, who put this flaming sack of poop on my chair???” And, like many organizations, we combat the work stress with FOOOOOOOD! At every turn the universe jumps out and attacks me with the savory bombs of temptation! Scrumptious bullets of sweet decadence! Sneaky Snack Attacks! Make it STOP! Just yesterday I fought my way through the day and was doing ok. But I ended up the day at a very angry work meeting, capped off with a lovely plate of rage cookies. Who can say no to sweet little rage cookies, shaped like angels and hearts, but brought forth only to stuff the mouths of the rageful meeting participants? Its just not fair.

And today! Today! Today I didn’t even take a lunch, so busy with crazy was the day, and I thought (in an effort to sketch a lovely, silver lining on a day too busy for lunch) “hey, at least this should help me with my desire to be less of a fatty-fatty-fat-fat!” And like THAT boxes of free pizza and bags of chips and plates of home-baked, love-filled desserty things sprang forth from the ether! Swarmed my desk! Wedged themselves down my helpless mouth! Oh sure, I nommed! I nommed like nobody’s BUSINESS! But still, what is with the non-stop buffet from Temptation Island, people?

Tomorrow my plan is to have a simple P, B & J for lunch. As a result, I’m sure I will receive a gross of deep-fried Twinkies in the mail.

Battle of the Bulge. Part Two - Suck it Billy Jean

Now that we’ve covered whence we’ve placed the finish line, let’s talk about my two prongs of racing-winning success: finding some way to get some exercise in my big, stupid life AND trying to moderate my intake of food without starving or getting very, very blue. And cranky.

OK, so not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I super-hate to exercise. However I do NOT hate to get some exercise if it’s a great big accident, say as a side effect of doing something fun. Remember tap dancing class? FUN! Also the biking to work and back? (sometimes damp but still mostly) FUN! These are some of the keys to my most certain and triumphant success.

Tap class starts back up next week. This is tappy, sweaty exercise that I most definitely love to do. And even though it’s getting rainy, and presently I just cannot find my rain pants, and also I keep having to go to these meetings out at the very far away new hospital which is too far for biking and also I really need to figure out some way to wear a helmet, STILL I will continue to be a bike-commuting girl. Including, whenever I can, doing a scenic route home that takes me about 30 minutes and be even more exercisy.

On top of those existing exercise super-genius plans I’ve got two more. The first? Tennis! Or, more accurately, “chasing yellow, fuzzy balls around a tennis court while explaining what it was that happened that last time which made it totally impossible for me to hit the ball even though it was right where I was. And I was swinging every which way. And did I mention that the sun was in my eyes?”

My Dad and I decided to invest in uber-cheap used tennis rackets (which came with fancy, zippy covers with shoulder straps that make us look like we’re totally good at this! Like the dudes that bring their own cue to the pool hall! Not at ALL dorky or lame!!!) and we’ve been going to one of the multiple free, common-use neighborhood tennis courts that surround my house one night a week. We go about 10pm (for we require an entire day of walking around and talking and just existing in the universe as our warm-up before we risk actual exercise, and also there’s generally nobody else there at that time.)

Now counting the two times that he and I have gone over the last two weeks I’ve only been playing tennis for approximately (wait, let me check this to be sure… yep, that’s what I thought) two weeks. So you can imagine how truly fabulous I am. Why there was one time last week where I served a ball and he hit it back to me! (yes!) Not only that, but I was feeling all kicky myself so I hit the ball back to HIM! (seriously!) Of course by then we were both too exhausted and amazed with ourselves to continue standing, and we did that traditional lying down on the court and wheezing thing that you always see on the Masters or the World Series or whatever that tennis championship thing is called. Which, by the way, I’ll surely be winning next year.

But the REAL key to my exercise success with the balls and rackets and very, very bright lights at 10 at night is the dozen or so times each week that I accidentally hit the ball pretty much right up in the air, way over the stupid fence that surrounds the courts (and which, by the way, is about 11 feet too short!) This gives me the opportunity to run to the single door in or out of the courts (sure, the fence is too small, but they sure didn’t waste any fencing on copious doors in or out!) and then roam around in the neighborhood around the court looking for the runaway ball. My rule has been that I have to run to get the ball and run back. Or at least run our to get it. Or at least run to the door. Or do that little hoppy thing when I first head off to get it that makes it look like I’m about to run, but then I don’t. or at least say the words ‘I’ll run and get it” when I hit it over, even though my Dad wasn’t for even a second planning to go get it. I’m pretty sure that saying the word “run” does burn more calories than any other word.

My other secret exercise weapon? Hot Hoola Hoop Action. I can say no more at this time.

Battle of the Bulge, part one - the Goal.

OK, so this may be an unpopular, unsubstantiated and possibly ludicrous concept, but I’m here to tell it: big, chunky girls don’t get the lovin. They just don’t. And by “they” I am really saying “we” because people, I am currently both big and also inordinately chunky.

Unfortunately I also have some handicaps that make it tough to combat this situation. For instance, I really hate to exercise. Hate it so much that I think my hatred actually does burn calories. Also, I really love to eat food, and especially those things a) deep fried, b) covered in chocolate or c) made entirely of fat. God bless the inventor of the deep fried Snickers bar – I think I love you the most, Scarecrow!

(gurgle, gurgle, drooly love of deep fried Snickers bar…) Sorry, where was I?

Oh, right. Lovin’.

So The Queen is a motivated type. She does things like run marathons and try to push a person through her cooch for something like 62 hours. Give her a challenge and watch her CONQUER. A year ago she had a baby, which lead to some surplus or bonus bodyness, some of which is still hanging around. When she heard that I sometimes sit on my couch and run through my head all the things that my poochy tummy is larger than (loaf of bread, copy of Moby Dick, child’s bowling ball…) she was struck by motivated genius and she came up with our Battle of the Bulge.

The first version of the Battle of the Bulge was just us competing for who could spend more time each day doing something exercisey. Like for me it was biking in to the office twice a day or taking walks or lying on the grass imagining what I could look like skinny. That burns more pounds than you’d guess. For her it was things like going for a run at the break of dawn or taking the kids to the park and chasing them around for an hour. Probably not once did she do any cardio-imagining. She’s hard-core.

But now we’re kicking it up a notch. And this next step required that I do something that I NEVER, EVER DO. This silver-tongued devil, this Svengali, she talked me into STEPPING ON A SCALE! ONE THAT TELLS YOU HOW MUCH YOU ACTUALLY WEIGH! OH, THE HUMANITY!!! As a rule I never step on scales and, in fact, I have not seen/known my own weight for over a decade, on account of I think people completely obsess about The Number. The Number. The Damn Number! But The Queen had a plan, and the plan really did demand a benchmark. And that benchmark really needed to be our terrible, terrible weight. Sigh. So weigh me she did, and she looked at the number and wrote it down and I averted my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears and went “La, la, la, la, I can’t HEAR you, can’t HEAR you!” (just in case, when she saw the actual number, she spontaneously let loose with a “Great Googly-Moogly, I didn’t even know the scale WENT that high!”)

So between now and the end of November she and I are going to do whatever it is we’re going to do and see which of us can lose more weight. We’ll weigh each week (and by “we’ll weight” I really mean “I’ll get back on her big, dumb scale and she’ll write down a number”) and the winner will get some kind of CASH PRIZE. If I’m the big winner I’ll be spending that money on cases of deep-friend Snickers bars. And a dainty little chocolate covered, deep fried trophy. Whee!

where Wii Fit pulls down my pants and makes me cry.

I’m still a big fan of the Wii. In fact, of all the games things I’ve ever messed with, that’s the only one I’m sort of giddy and dreamy over. And people all around me have them, which means I hate people all around me. (sigh) The newest cool Wii thing is the Wii Fit. It’s a game! No, it’s an exercise device! WAIT, you’re both right! And it’s also the first sign of the apocolypse. (up next: Carrot Top for Senate.)

Right, so someone I know (and this time we’re protecting their innocence by using NO NAMES) just got a Wii fit, inviting me to check it out. If someone gives you this opportunity it will SEEM like a good idea. But it is really a trap and you should run away. And your friends who invited you are really just wanting to spread the abuse! And they don’t actually love you! (or they’re very skinny and don’t realize what they’re offering.)

Wii Fit is two things: extremely cool, and MEAN!! And you have to claw through the MEAN to get to the extremely cool. You set up one of those “mii” things, right? You’ll notice that those things aren’t particularly detailed; they’re innocent and simple. They don’t expect you to include your droopy eye or your slight limp or your secret incontenence – just hair color and eye color and maybe height or a kicky little hairdo! But when you take your innocent, helpless mii and run it through the registration of the Wii Fit bad things could happen. I’m just sayin’.

Here’s one thing I do like about the Wii Fit: though I’m sure the fancy pad thing that you stand on has the ability to determine your weight, it doesn’t tell you what it is. It does not bill itself as “most expensive scale ever” But it does ask you for your height and your age. And then the first bit of evil: it takes that precious little mii, all innocent and simple and not hurting anyone, and it throws it up next to a range of, oh lets call them body types. Ranging from something like “skinny” to “normal” to “overweight” to “obese” (yes, it uses the “O” word.) The arrow zooms up and down this range and then it lands somewhere. For instance, if you are ME, it lands on OBESE. According to that rat bastard the Wii Fit, I’m OBESE! And then, just to show you who’s boss the damn thing takes your mii and MAKES IT FAT! Like “First I call you names, fatty-fatty-fat-fat, and then I make your Mii my bitch! Next I’m going to have your Mii eat a bunch of Twinkies and drink an entire Big Gulp! You are FAAAAAAT!”

And does it stop there? Oh no! The festival of abuse is only half-through! (I’m telling you this so that you can weigh your options before you step on the magical pad. Sure, virtual hoola hoops SOUNDS fun, but is it worth the mind games and manipulation? IS IT???) Next the Wii Fit makes you do this balance test where you sway and lean and bend over and I KNOW that there are scores of robot cameras flying around the country filming people doing this in their living rooms for some robo-gag reel that our robot overlords will watch at the Christmas party after they take over the world! Once the balance thing is done if you didn’t balance just right it MOCKS YOU! “Do you find you trip when you walk?” DO YOU FIND MY FOOT UP YOUR WII ASS???

After all of this there’s still one more super-awesome part: your Wii Fit Age. In other words, “now that I’ve told you that you’re both fat and also clumsy, I’m gonna top it off by calling you old before your time. Also I’ll ask if you wore that shirt in public and make you spell endocrine.”

Get this: my friends are both in better shape than I am in real life, and neither of them were honored with the “obese” title, and yet their Wii Fit ages were OLDER than they were, while mine was YOUNGER. And the only thing with which I had more success was the balance test. The message I took from this was “young people have good balance.” Which I KNOW is not true, because the youngest person I know is Princess Long Toes and she is SUPER easy to knock over! Heck, just give her a tiny nudge and she’ll fall right on her ass! She can’t even WALK! So I fear I must call shenanigans on the Wii Fit for that.

Where was I? Oh yeah, fat but with fabulous balance. (by the way, a quality I’m sure most men are really looking for. I’ve already added it to my profile on the free man-attracting website: “not slim, but exceptional balance. Will consider yoga positions during sex!”)

After ALL of this you get to do the Wii Fit stuff, and this is the worst part of all: it’s super-cool! Seriously! There are BUNCHES of things and they’re challenging and fun and yet they really do seem like they’re fit-inducing! Not just aerobic stuff (which we all knew was coming once we worked up a major sweat boxing virtual-dude with the Wii Sports) but also balance stuff (let us all bow our head for a moment of silence for my friend who plummeted to her death off of the tight rope. Like 6 times…) and yoga stuff and strength stuff… Like I think this could make sit-ups actually fun. And I HATE sit-ups!

In the end, even though I felt like I was being hazed for the first 20 minutes, the Wii Fit is still something that I covet and envy and super-want. Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to go walk around the house with a book on my head to give me a feeling of superiority. Obese, well-balanced superiority.

So maybe this hasn't been all for nada.

So I think I maybe might a little bit have lost a smidge of teenyness of weight. Maybe. Or maybe a couple different pairs of pants all got stretched-out some. But MAYBE not. Maybe all the stuff I’ve been doing, which is stuff like biking in to the office and running up and down 4 flights of stairs at work and did I mention the snazzy black shoes with the flashy silver taps on the heels and the toes that go tappity-tappity-flappity-tap when I shuffle off to Buffalo? That stuff? Right, well maybe that stuff is finally working!

And it better be because I was starting to get pretty annoyed with all the doing I was doing and yet still pulling on pants and holding my breath to fasten them. Chubby and pissed off is no way to begin a day! (and in case you’re wondering, the most bestest way to begin a day is at about 10am, with the smell of French toast waiting for you. Sleeping on a bed made of $100 bills. With a live-in foot masseuse. And there should be a cheeseburger in there somewhere too, but I haven’t figured out how to quite work it in yet. What were we talking about?)

Right, thinning! So don’t ask me how much I weigh right now because I don’t know. I haven’t looked at a scale in over 15 years. (I can’t say that I haven’t stepped on one because the dumb nurse at the dumb doctor’s office keeps making me do it. But I don’t look at the numbers, and I don’t let them tell me what they say either!) I don’t think focusing on the numbers is good for one’s sanity. My Dad will get super-excited over a drop of 3 lbs and super-bummed by a gain of 2! Not me. For me all that matters is:

-how do I feel?
-how do I look?
-can I fit into my clothing?

So I started this new job and started biking in to the office almost all the time. And the following excellent things happened: I was getting exercise; I wasn’t polluting AND I wasn’t buying gas. I filled my gas tank once in a whole dang month! How excellent is that? Take THAT, diggers of oil and refiners of gas and sellers of gas and such! Ha HA! Plus I shun the elevator (except when I first get to the office, but that’s just because I’m running late. Because hello? They won’t let me wake up at 10am and come wandering in then! Ridiculous…) so I’m running up and down all these stairs. So much exercise, with the promise over and over that it’s gonna give me all this energy. The fitness people all say it. “want more energy? Exercise more! Voila – instant fish!”

Which. Is. CRAP!! Know what time I was crashing most nights before I started getting exercise? 1:00am. I stay up late. I like to stay up late. I’m an “up late” stayer and happy that way. Know what time I keep crashing these days? Like 10:30! Barely after dinner time, people! I don’t have TIME for that much sleep! I come home from whatever, have dinner, sit to settle my food and wow, now I’m waking up on the couch and it’s 4am and dark and sleepy and I guess I’ll just go to bed, eh? And hey, where the heck is all that energy I’m supposed to be getting from all the biking and running and tapping? Energy! I’ve been promised energy!

And I’m still chubby too. Grumble, grumble…

But lo, yesterday I pull on some pants and they’re not feeling so tight. Not so tight! Not that I’m not still chubby, because it’s the way of me and my people frankly. Not that I didn’t have to suck it in a bit to get that button buttoned, because “ssssup!” But I’m pretty sure… kind of sure… I THINK that the pants felt less pinchy. And I’ll take that. (and then I’ll take a nap. On my money bed. Huzzah!!)