Worth my not salt

- no, that´s not a linguistic slipup. It´s my words being un-scrambled by me kicking myself in the tush.
After not exactly "alighting" from my scales this morning, that is. I had a craving for a nice hot bowl of Bihun soup yesterday, which I did indulge. The manufacturer of those soups likes to point out that one can of them has less calories than an apple. What they don´t mention is that the taste, other than from chili pepper, comes mainly from a big load of natrium chloride, aka salt.
So, while not adding a significant amount of calories (after all, this was supposed to be dinner), I got myself a bad case of water retention that somewhat messed up my weigh-in today. Knowing it´s water doesn´t make it less frustrating.
Next time I get a yen for Asian soups, I should, perhaps, try to cook one from scratch.
And read the labels more carefully before believing something is harmless weight-wise.
Even if I do not have high bp yet, I don´t need the extra stress on my body that such amounts of salt create.
My health must be more important than the salty taste, which is an acquired taste anyway. Come to think of it, the time isn´t so long gone when salt was so precious and rare that they paid its weight in gold for it, and many people didn´t even have any in their kitchens. Only when salt became widely available did we start to believe that everything has to be salted to be edible. Just look how many sweet foodstuffs have salt in them. It´s almost as bad as the hidden sugar that is contained in things as unlikely as lunch meat.
But that´s another post alright....


Julia

Juli(a) in disguise...

...with glasses!
I had a major mishap lately with my glasses when one of the side parts suddenly broke off due to faulty material. As I am blind as a bat without my prescription glasses, I had them reframed in an identical replacement of the original frame (I was lucky they still had that exact frame at the optician´s, and they changed it on warranty for free). But, I am none too happy about the "new" frame, either, because I don´t really trust the material to be more stable than that of the first one, and a lorgnon or whatever they call these one-sided things on a stick just doesn´t cut it for an active person :).
So, I took today´s lunch break for a glasses shopping expedition. Lo and behold (no pun intended), they had a frame that was very similar in style to what I have, but, it is made of a far more resistant material. And the best part is that it came at a quarter of the original (rather steep) price because it was a designer piece from last year´s collection that went off-price with the arrival of this year´s new models. Now I am waiting for the prescription lenses to be fitted in there, and then the old pair of glasses will be relegated to my nightstand drawer.
It will be a good feeling to have a spare pair of glasses, in case something happens to the others, and not to be nervous any more because I´m afraid my glasses might break.

That is, by the way, not adding clutter. Having a spare piece of something I need every day, all the time, and which takes, if it were to break for good, almost two weeks to replace, is just good stewardship. 
So is getting a better replacement for something that has not quite lived up to the standards I´m used to from my favorite optician (they were rather embarassed when I came by with the broken frame, and I guess one of their suppliers has had a few questions to answer).

And right now, I can´t seem to get rid of that silly sixties song about someone with a name somewhat similar to mine...

Julia

Side effects included

Seems I was right about that extra weight acquired over Easter being water retention. This morning I was already back down by over a pound, and I am right now sipping a big cup of tea (unsweetened, of course) in the hope of flushing the rest out.
There was a very interesting post out today by Princess Dieter who also describes having a noticeable reaction to eating carbs. It is reassuring to see that there are other people around who have similar problems. After all, the official food pyramid in this part of Europe still has carbohydrate rich foods at the bottom, expecting people to ingest sixty percent of their daily intake in the guise of more-or-less complex carbohydrates.
I, too, have for quite awhile suffered from regular fatigue attacks after eating carbohydrate rich foods for lunch, so badly that I have even fallen asleep for short periods at my desk more than once.
And these fatigue attacks have completely disappeared after I stopped eating carbs for lunch.
I found out that unsweetened yoghourt, hardboiled eggs, or turkey meat, or even a protein shake, get me through my workday just fine, and without the former postprandial slump.
What this requires is taking the food I want to eat for lunch to the office, because there are literally no eateries in the vicinity that don´t have a lot of carbohydrates in what they serve (picking the meat of a burger out from between the bun and a gob of sugar-laden ketchup or other condiment isn´t my idea of fun, exactly).
And the best part- I have been losing weight doing this.
And that makes it a lot easier to deal with people who still say, "but you must eat bread/potatoes/rice or you´ll get sick".
There´s no argument like success, is there?


Julia

After those hoppy holidays...

So, the chocolate bunny festival is over. I managed to be good, mostly, for three days, leaving potatoes and other starches on the dinner  plate and keeping away from sweets. But, as we were not staying at home but visiting with family, I had to accept what they offered for breakfast. Namely, bread. White flour bread, to be exact. And those lovely raisin-filled Easter pastries that you eat with a pat of salted butter.
I did indulge, in moderation. At the time that didn´t even feel too bad.
And then I arrived home yesterday in the evening, and raided the pastry stores. I had a package of four puff pastries I had bought for DH, originally, and I was foolish enough to think I could eat just one.
I ended up eating three of them. Oh well, one I managed to leave in the package, so this wasn´t an unstoppable binge after all. But this morning, I ended up with a three-pound gain from Friday. I know it´s probably part water retention from eating salted foods, but those pastries and the carb-related water retention ought to account for most of it.
The lesson in that? It seems there is no such thing as moderation for me when it comes to refined carbs. It´s not the first time that, after consuming even moderate amounts of them for several days in a row, I find myself hit by an insatiable craving for more that takes several days to subside again.
Which makes me think that those scientists who claim that sugar triggers a reaction in the brain similar to what alcohol, nicotine, or drugs do, may not be so far off after all.
As an ex-cigarette smoker (for seven years now) I have made the experience more than once that, even after a period of successful abstinence, a single cigarette could throw me back into full-fledged addictive smoking. The only way to stay abstinent from smoking, for me, is to never take even a single puff of a cigarette. I can´t even stay in a room that´s full of cigarette smoke if I don´t want to trigger a craving, even though I don´t ever want to smoke again.
And now I find  out that sugar and refined carbs are similarly dangerous for me, and the line between a controlled indulgence and a binge has become narrower.
Not good.
I´ll have to wean myself from those foods again before my eating gets completely out of control.

So, it´s back on the wagon again. Two steps forward, one step back. I have to keep reminding myself that the resulting net movement from that would be forward, even if it´s slower than without that back step.


Julia

Danger! Holidays approaching!

There´s another of these four-day-holiday-marathons approaching, and I am somewhat nervous.
Four days in a row eating with extended family mean, usually, several meals that contain foodstuffs I would, under different conditions, not even get close to any more.
I´m talking baguettes, potato dumplings, deep-fried breaded fish, pork roast with a crispy brown crust, and I´m not even beginning to mention chocolate eggs and their ilk.
So, I have basically two choices (avoiding those family meals isn´t one of them).
I can either stick to my diet like whatnot. That would mean watching the others eat that stuff, and also acting as a spoilsport to all of them  who do not have weight issues. Or upset the senior members of the family who seem to believe that even if someone is still as heavy as I am, leaving out a meal leads to instant starvation and sickness.
The other is trying to deal with what is served responsibly. That means eating an extra slice of pork and leaving half the potato dumpling well alone. Or taking just a small portion of the deep-fried carp that will be served on Good Friday, and leave the potato salad served along with it.
I have found that for most of the food-pushers, when they see someone is eating at all, that´s enough. So, with every meal I expect to have during those days, I will try to find the ingredients I may eat freely and be very visibly eating these. Perhaps I will manage to maintain, at the very least.
And, since I will not completely  forbid myself any of the delicacies offered, I hope I won´t wind up frustrated or, worse, bingeing.
While I know I´ll probably not lose any weight over the holidays that way, I stand, in my experience, a far better chance of succeeding for the long run that way than if I forbade myself all of the tasty stuff only to have my willpower fail over some particularly calorious treat and then binge. 
I know that every day I spend in morbid obesity is one too many, but staying in place beats backsliding any time.



Julia

Croak!

Yesterday´s headache, it seems, was a harbinger of worse things to come. Namely, a bout with the common cold. My throat feels as if I had been breakfasting on razor blades (actually, they were two eggs sunny side up), and I sound like one of the crows that sit on the highest tree in our street every evening just before nightfall. So, I´ll try not to speak too much. Having to visit the pharmacy for throat lozenges once again is annoying.
But, the weekend´s weight gain is gone again, which is reassuring.

Thinking about rearranging our rooms entails thinking about how much stuff has been accumulating in my chests of drawers over the years. (I stopped myself just in time from writing "in my drawers", remembering these are undergarments in British parlance:)) Actually, there are four chests of drawers that at present occupy one full wall in my bedroom but which would not fit into the new bedroom at all. So, there are all in all twelve drawers plus several boxes of knicknacks that rest on top of them which would have to be emptied out and weeded out, too.
The vexing part is that I did not have these things when I first moved into this town. Somehow all of my possessions fit well into the closet I had, which also sported a set of drawers on one side. So, another case of portion creep-this time following the old rule that clutter, if unchecked, can and will expand to fill every available space in the house.
What it also shows is that buying new furniture and storage boxes does not make clutter disappear.
As Flylady uses to say, you can´t organize clutter.
That is something I have to remind myself of, too. Because the four-chests-of-drawers problem was, in the beginning, a two-chests-of-drawers problem. Only when those were overflowing did I get myself numbers three and four.
The result was not the hoped-for relief, but rather twice as much clutter.
And now this clutter is making the rearranging project so much more difficult than it would be had I just stuck to using the built-in drawers in my closet.
The next evenings, I intend to take the boxes and drawers out and throw as much as possible of their contents away. Perhaps, if I rearrange the drawers in my closet, I´ll be able to set at least one or two of  the chests of drawers free then.
I´m probably in for some surprises, too, because I do not even remember what is inside some of those drawers. But that gives me hope, too, because it is not likely that something I don´t even remember I have  could be something I need to keep.
So, I am curious how far I´ll be able to condense the contents of these drawers.

To be continued.....


Julia

Downs and ups

After a couple of rainy days it looks like the weather is finally going to pick up for the Easter holidays.
Which means, for me, a whacking headache until the weather has stabilized again. So, I am feeling rather queasy right now. And, in spite of trying not to overeat over the weekend, my weight is still stuck, even with a slight (argh) upwards twist.

On a more positive vein, I managed to catch up on household and laundry this weekend.  Which is as good, because we are planning on some major rearranging in our flat soon.
That has also been a driving force behind my decluttering efforts these days, because the new arrangement we´re planning will impose some limits on our storage space while giving us (hopefully) more space to live in.
Right now, we have one room that is used mostly as a guest and storage room. The guest room part was for when DMIL (dear mother-in-love) has been visiting us, which she did regularly for the last years. As she is getting more elderly , her health is no longer permitting her to travel, so, the guest room won´t be needed any more as such.
Now this is the room that was originally intended as the master bedroom. Thus, there´s a lot of space being wasted if we just use it as a storage room. But the stuff that was stored there until now will have to find a new home in another room. Unless we get rid of it, that is.
So, there´s still plenty of planning and deciding to do.
I keep reminding myself that I don´t have to store what I don´t possess, and that every piece that leaves the flat for good is one less we´ll have to push around and find a place for. Considering the fact that the amount of furniture we´ll have to shift is considerable, the rearranging part is going to end up like one of those tricky brain teasers that involve several trains and an insufficient amount of rails anyway.
So, things are going to stay interesting for awhile yet.


Julia

How many do I really need?

When I was young, everything in terms of dishes seemed to come in sets of at least six, or twelve. So, my Granny´s wedding china and silver plated cutlery was sufficient to host a party for twelve people. At a time when every family had at least three or four children and the consequently resulting number of inlaws, that wasn´t even a lot.
And yet it did take up all of the space inside a big buffet-style cupboard that filled one whole wall in the living room.

Now, I don´t usually do home invitations.
We have a relatively small flat, which is fine and sufficient for the two of us, but not for having parties.
Still, I have, in my cupboards, several "sets" of things in numbers bigger than what we need and use.
Part of those is due to my, once upon a time, wishing to have a "complete" household, and having something in sets of less than six simply didn´t feel complete.
Another part results from the package sizes things used to be offered in. I have a set of glass cups and plates I bought as a student that was sold in packages of six each. Since they are rather unbreakable, six of each is what I still have.
Of course, I couldn´t afford something expensive while at university, so they are very simple.
But in a pinch, they would be perfectly sufficient. 

And for ourselves?
We are living close to the factory outlet of a locally known porcelain factory. which enables us to get their (usually rather pricey) products with little imperfections at a very affordable price. And they sell them one piece at a time.
So, what I have done over the last years is decide which pieces we use, and then buying just two of each.
This actually has several advantages.
The most obvious is needing a lot less storage space.
Another is having a tidier kitchen. We are both working away from home, and thus, we tend to be rather lazy when coming home. With more than one set of plates for each of us, that led invariably to the creation of the Leaning Tower of China in the sink, which got attacked only when we had no clean plates left.
Nowadays, we have to clean up after ourselves immediately. Less dirty dishes mean less work cleaning them up, so the dreaded task of dishwashing is a lot easier than it used to be.
And I do not spend any more money on things that do not get used, either.

The answer to the question of how many plates we need, even for a multiple-course gourmet-style menu should I chose to prepare one, is simple- one of each for each of us.
That´s what we, today, with the lifestyle we have, need and use.
 I´d also rather be able to change between styles of dishes, to fit the food I am serving, than use the same dishes for everything (I never claimed to be a perfect minimalist). By having just two pieces of each, I can store three sets of plates where only one went before. And they all get their share of use.
Without taking up half of my living room.
The big buffet would not fit in with my other furniture anyway. 


Julia

Never the same river

I am, at present, rather stuck, if I were to ask my trusty scales. From what they tell me, not much ought to be moving weightloss-wise.
And yet, it seems to me as if my body were, while staying at almost the same weight, doing some major rearranging.
The strange thing is that the resulting proportions are nothing like those I had when I first went up to this weight.
So, I have no idea at all any more what I´d look like if I were to condense myself further.
 And it isn´t only the toll of living on a planet that has gravity for some forty-plus years, of that I´m pretty certain, because I think I am slimmer now than when I first weighed this much.
Stranger and stranger...
It seems to be true that you can never bathe in the same river twice.
But, if I really am not going to get the same body I had back, getting one that is actually slimmer makes for a nice exchange. I certainly won´t complain about that.



Julia

Image problems

I have an image problem, right now.
Namely, that I have almost no pictures of myself at a weight much  lower than what I have now.
You see, I used to be the person with the camera.
The one who never appears in the pictures because she was the one taking them.
And I do not have access to the pictures that were taken of me when I was younger (long story there, perhaps for a later day).
So, almost all of the pictures I have of myself were taken when I was already far gone into the process of becoming obese.
These pictures show what was, for over seven years, the mental image I had of myself.
A fat blonde in frumpy, ill-fitting clothes.
Not that this was ever what I wanted to look like. The clothes were what I had convinced myself would make the fat invisible. What they really did was make me look even fatter than I would have looked in clothes cut closer to my body.
But that was something I did not want to see, even when looking at those pictures. What I wanted was to camouflage my weight, to make my body invisible. To be able to move in the company of slim people without attracting those looks of part pity, part contempt, part revulsion.
If something like a bourqa (sp?) had been offered as part of traditional western garb, I would probably  have worn it.
That not being an option, I kept wishing for some other kind of invisibility cloak and wore those fluttering, crinkly wide linen garments in the meantime, effectively calling attention to the very thing I wanted to disguise.

At the weight I am today, I have been able to declutter all of those clothes. I also did buy myself some clothes that are cut to shape, fitting me exactly. Or so my husband had to tell me. The problem I have is that after waking up to the fact that I had been blinding myself to what I looked like for such a long time, I don´t trust my own perception of my body any more.
I know that my body has changed, a lot. DH tells me I even walk differently. But all of this hasn´t arrived in my head to form a complete concept of what I look like now yet.
So, every picture DH takes of me now serves as a building block for the image I have to build of myself as a slimmer person, one who wears fitting clothes, one who doesn´t want to be invisible any more.
Letting go of the things I did to hide my obesity is liberating.
Guess what, I even stopped wearing makeup and dyeing my hair, because for the first time in my life, I feel that what I look like au naturel is good enough. The surprise for me was that my natural hair color (which is by now mostly pewter mixed with silver)  did not make me look as much older as I had feared.

But that´s probably because I feel younger, too. And that´s what shows on every new picture DH takes of me.
Slowly, the new image of myself is beginning to settle. It is the image of a woman who is no longer a victim, not of people, not of circumstances, and not of obesity.


Julia

Taming the cookie monster

The human hand is, all in all, a wonderful instrument. Take opposable thumbs, for one. I know quite a few kitties who envy you those :).
But there is one feature that has, unfortunately for many of us, been omitted.
That feature is a measuring device.
Using the human hand as such is a step on the road to weight desaster.
You know the situation- a big tin full of cookies in front of you, and you take your hand to extract from that tin - what? The amount termed "a handful".
Depending on how far you stretch out your hand, that means anywhere between three or a dozen cookies.
Thus, the perceived "handful" may amount to two, three or more portions when you compare it to the portion sizes in the nutritional informations.
And , since you have had "just a handful", what is the damage in taking "just another"?
Or, how do you eat a handful of cookies? For me, there´s always the danger that I may stuff all of them into my mouth at once, swallowing down the lot without really taking stock of how many they are.
That´s dangerous because it maximizes my cookie intake while minimizing the pleasure I get from eating them. Ten cookies swallowed down in one big gulp are not more tasty than a single cookie eaten slowly. They are, actually, less tasty. Especially when I, out of feeling guilty at eating cookies at all, gulp them down without pausing to really taste them, which is the dumbest thing to do because in that case, I could as well chomp down on a bale of hay for all the pleasure they give me.
And, since cookies eaten by the handful do not deliver the eating pleasure they are eaten for, what does one do- raise the dosage, medically speaking. Eat more cookies, in the hope of finally getting the feeling of having enough.
Do you see the catch in that?
It´s the attempt at eating cookies to feel good while at the same time not permitting myself to really feel that feeling that I hope a cookie would produce.

Instead of savouring one single cookie mindfully.
The big surprise for me, when I first did that, was, that this single cookie gave me more pleasure to eat than stuffing myself with several hands full of cookies at once.
At a fraction of the calories.

And what applies to cookies, also applies to almost all of the other not-so-goodies that I have, for a long time, declared forbidden because I was fat. As long as I do not permit myself to really be present in the moment and be mindful when eating them, I only have a choice of not going anywhere near them, which sometimes takes a lot of willpower, or, giving in to the lure of bingeing on them.
Oh, and there´s yet another surprise.
I have discovered that some of the foodstuffs I had kept myself from with lots of willpower, or gorged myself on when willpower failed, were not even that tasty when eaten mindfully. Their allure had been kept up by me forbidding them to myself, nothing else. Eating them mindfully allowed me to find out that I didn´t even like them.

That experience has led me to adopt an entirely different policy towards culinary "sins".
To me, no food may ever be off limits any more. But neither may I chomp down my food mindlessly. Whenever I catch myself with my hand in the cookie jar, I stop myself, take just one and close the jar again.
I find it surprisingly easy to just have one cookie that way and enjoy it, knowing that two or three or four of them would taste just the same and not deliver any more pleasure in eating.
And I know that I don´t fall off the wagon completely that way. How often did I give up on ever being able to re-condense my body after a single slipup, retiring to the vicinity of that cookie jar instead, and not reemerging from it until several thousand calories and several pounds later.

The reassurance  that I may, if I really want to, have another cookie is the best way for me not to want to eat them all at once.
And not bingeing is prerequisite for me to lose weight.



Julia

Seesawing down

Just in time after the weekend I found this in my blog reader.
Just in time for kicking myself after getting off the scales, actually. I know it´s partly water retention from eating a bowl of chinese soup (very salty) yesterday, but I´m still oscillating up and down the same two pounds for four weeks now.
And, just as Ms. Freedhoff describes it, it´s downward during the week and up by Monday.

Then again, I *did* have some sort of victory this weekend.
For years, DH and I had planned to visit the city where he went to university. And as long, he had been telling me about a cafe there that has, in his words, the best cakes in the world.
So, when we visited his old university town this weekend, guess where he invited me. Of course, this being such a rare event, I did order two pieces of cake, creamy, chocolate-y deliciousness on a plate, and one of their equally delicious pots of hot cocoa with whipped cream. DH hadn´t been promising too much as far as the quality of what was offered was concerned.
Why that was a victory of sorts? well, two years ago there would not have been any way I could have gotten out of there without having consumed at least three or four pieces of cake, stuffing myself to the point of bursting because I was, then, unable to discern the point of "enough".
This time- I did not even finish the two pieces of cake on my plate, feeling full after just one and a half.So, I left half a piece of cake on my plate, being satisfied with what I had eaten. And I did not even regret not being able to eat more.
What´s more, I did not binge the next day, either. That has always been a problem for me, that I found it hard not to binge after overeating. All too often, I have eaten to the point of feeling queasy, and then continued to eat *because* I was feeling queasy. Doesn´t make a lot of sense, does it?
Being able not to do that, even when facing such a delicious temptation, is a big step forward for me.
So, even though my weight ist stuck, I think I´m on the right way.
And next weekend there´ll be no cake to tempt me....

Julia

Mirror blindness

In our flat, we have a full-size mirror right beside the exit door. It is there so we can check our appearance before venturing outside. So, it gets looked into by me at least once a day.
And, for many fat years, I had almost perfectioned the art of twisting myself so I would not have to see my body as it was.
I knew what my "chocolate side" (ironically that is what they really call the most photogenic side of a person hereabouts) was, and I somehow manged to turn that side towards any reflective surface or any camera in the vicinity.
Only rarely did DH catch me unawares, and those were the pix I quickly zapped by when looking at photographs.
The result was that I *knew* intellectually how heavy I was, but I managed to convince myself I was "carrying it well".
That conviction was shattered on a hot day last year.
I had, the evening before, slipped a disk in my back and was, consequently, almost unable to move at all.
So, I was coming out of the shower and wanted to pick up my crutches from the umbrella stand beside the door. To get there, I had to pass that mirror. This time I was unable to perform the usual twisting maneuvre, and so found myself, unpreparedly, face to face with the bare reality of what almost 110 pounds of excess weight look like on me. Suffice it to say it wasn´t a pleasant surprise.
And that was the day I started on my weight loss journey.With a vengeance.

What I still have trouble accepting for myself  is how much and how long I managed to ignore the reality of what my body had become.
Even the loss of one physical ability after another didn´t get through that screen of denial I had built.
Not being able to climb the stairs without stopping several times and pulling myself up on the handrails? Not being able to bend over to pick up something, having to get down on my knees and stand back up every time? Not being able to stand up from sitting without leaning on something?
Every one of these should have started me frantically trying to get my body back into a more functional shape.
And, every one of these, if it had happened overnight, would have made me desperately seek for a cure.
The insidious thing is that the loss of my physical abilities came slowly. So slowly that the avoidance maneuvres could become habits without my becoming conscious of them. 
I was acting like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of water that is slowly heated up, not reacting until things really get to a boil. I am, to this day, grateful for that slipped disk (which stopped hurting two days afterwards and hasn´t recurred that badly since), because it woke me up to something that was hurting myself much more, namely, my weight.

And I keep reminding myself to be grateful for every physical ability that returns with weightloss.
Getting up three flights of stairs without pausing, or just bending over to pick up  a dropped tool.
That´s what condensing myself is about, not some beauty ideal.
Getting back to the point where my body functions again the way the Lord constructed it.
I am grateful that this time, it seems like I´ll manage to do it. Finally.



Julia

Tiny pots and pans

Which things do contribute to overeating? It´s a question I have been asking myself quite often during the last couple of months.
I have, by now, lost more weight than I would have believed to be able to, and I have decluttered  the clothes I wore at the higher weight. So, I must not go back to where I am coming from.

When I gained that weight, I felt as if something uncontrollable had taken possession of my body, making it go out of control and pile on pounds without my active participation.
That was wrong, of course.

What had happened was that the amounts I had been eating had, over time, become a lot bigger without my noticing it. Much bigger  than what I needed to eat.

And the plates weren´t the only culprits.
There was also the pot collection. When my husband and I moved in together, the single-serving-size cookware I had was relegated to the back shelves and replaced by bigger pots.

The problem with pots is the same as with plates: every increase in diameter of the pot makes for square times the increase in bottom surface, and consequently, for that much more volume in the pot.
Same thing with pans.
I was using cookware to cook for the two of us that held, not twice, but three to four times as much food as my old pots.

Of course, who sits down and calculates the contents of a pot or pan before buying it?
Nobody does.
And then there´s the pot on the stove, and you put food in it, say, vegetables. If you are like me, you´re mostly too lazy to get out the kitchen scales and weigh it, so you use the good ol´ Mark one eyeball to gauge how much you need to put in.
And boom, you´ve cooked three portions, while still believing you are cooking for two people.
So, you just divide  the contents of the pot by two and believe that to be one portion each, not the one-and-a-half  portion it objectively amounts to.

Those of you, gentle readers, with Weight Watchers experience will perhaps say, what´s wrong with one-and-a-half portion of zero points veggies?
Well, they are not zero calories veggies, and outside of a diet do, of course, get a generous slathering on of sauce, or butter, or olive oil, too.
Besides, what applies to vegetables will apply to every food that is cooked in these pots, portion-wise.
And what happens then is  your weight seemingly  getting out of control.

I´ve had enough of this scenario.
As long as I have only the two of us to cook for, there are not many occasions I would need to use the big pots and pans for. Cooking a whole chicken for soup, maybe, or frying two of those delicious big schnitzels that are flattened out to the point of barely fitting on a plate.
So, I have been drawing the consequences and banished the oversized cookware to the most inaccessible part of my kitchen cabinets.
What I have up front now and use daily are several of the smallest-size (16 cm diameter) pots and pans, plus some medium (20 cm or 24 cm diameter) ones. 
The scary part of using them is that I still feel as if I should cook more than would fit in there, only to see, after ladling the food on our new smaller dishes, that the portions are completely sufficient.
I think that is scary because in spite of having cut down on portions for almost nine months now, there still is that feeling of "not enough" even though it has been amply proven by now that what fits into these pots is enough.
What that means for me is clear. I must keep using the smaller cookware and the smaller plates, to avoid slipping back to unhealthy portion sizes.
And it´s for life.
 Because the Mark one eyeball simply doesn´t work for this.



Julia

Re-starting a routine

They say it takes thirty days to make something into a habit.
So, today I am officially on day 2 of re-installing my walking habit.
And it still feels great!
Even Hubs (who isn´t participating yet due to an injury and did, while I was out, prepare breakfast instead) claimed that the good feeling even showed on my face when I came back.
It´s funny how, once I have conquered the Beast of Resistance to Getting Started, the good feelings from having started are replacing all the reasons for not starting.

So, I´ll keep on walking!


Julia

Up and walking!

That´s what I was this morning. The weather is still wonderful, no rain this morning, so, no excuses, either.
So, I jumped out of bed, straight into my walking clothes and shoes, and went for a 45-minute round of the municipal park we live close to.
I had stopped my nordic walking routine last December when the first frosty mornings with ice on the pathways came, and it has been too cold most mornings  to pick it up again until now.
What it feels like to be walking again? All aired-out, and incredibly awake.
What came as a pleasant surprise was that I have obviously not lost all of the positive effects last year´s walking  had on me, condition-wise. I walked my usual distance, did not (like at the beginning of my weight loss journey) have to stop and catch my breath several times, but walked on and took just 1/9th more time for the distance than in December.
And yes- it feels as if the cobwebs had been blown out of my head by the fresh morning air.
So, this is definitely going to be a daily routine again.
I´ll see if it also helps me break through the plateau I´ve been stuck on for three months now.
Even if it didn´t, the good feeling definitely is worth getting up early even for a confessed night-owl like me.

Julia

Magnolias in bloom!

And daffodils, and the chestnut trees in the park are also close to bursting open their leaves.
We´ve had a wonderful weekend, weather-wise, in these parts. And Nature is fairly exploding with the warmer weather. As always when it has been too cold for too long, it looks as if everything was bursting into flowers at once.

Unfortunately, today started with heavy rain so I still didn´t go walking in the morning. I hope the weather will be better tomorrow, because Hubs, too, said he wants to come along for the walk.

Finally getting rid of those clothes and shoes I had been thinking about throwing out for so long is wonderful. I feel empowered now, ready to take on the next steps in decluttering and condensing myself.
And the only thing I ask myself is why I kept myself from doing this for so long. 
Sitting on the fence about it took, all said, more energy than finally doing it.

Perhaps I should have taken a cue from the magnolia trees. They don´t worry about not being able to undo opening their buds. They just bloom.


Julia

After a busy weekend

When the decluttering bug bites, one should keep up the momentum. Which is exactly what DH and myself did yesterday.

Actually, getting started was the hardest part of decluttering. Especially when it came to clothes I had worn gladly and often, clothes that did make me feel good, in spite of the excess weight I was carrying.
The best cure for that kind of sentimentality was our full-length mirror. Putting those clothes (they were mostly jackets and blouses) on and seeing that there was so much room inside there that I could have hidden a soccer ball underneath them. And, looking at the sizes of these garments and realizing I am, by now, down five full sizes from the biggest clothes I had! Which does translate to even more than it would be in ordinary sizes  because the size differences get bigger with rising sizes due to vanity sizing.
I did keep the biggest pair of pants/trousers I found. That is probably something everyone who ever lost a lot of weight does. Perhaps, when I get to goal, there will be one of those "wearing one trouser-leg like a skirt and stretching out the other so far that another person would fit in there"- pictures of me, too (don´t expect that to happen anytime soon, though- I´m notoriously shy:))
Until then, just putting my present jeans (which are cut in the same style so can be compared perfectly) on top of those old pants to see the difference gives me a well-needed motivation burst every time I´m in danger of falling off the wagon.

I did, this time, decide to be absolutely ruthless in throwing out the garments I hold partly responsible for the fact that I took so long to wake up to what I was looking like.
And for the really hard decisions?  I used a trick that helped me get beyond the sunk cost fallacy (aka "this item hasn´t been worn often enough to justify what it had cost me").
It is actually one simple question that makes things very clear immediately.
If I did not already own that item, would I buy it today if I were to see it in a shop?
When you´re talking about clothes four or five sizes too big, that´s a pretty dumb question. After all, it´s not the question whether I would buy it in my present size again, but whether I would buy it exactly as it is.
When I think of it like that, the decision gets very easy.

So, I now have a closet that has plenty of room for the clothes I own now and which all fit me. 
One thing I hadn´t thought of before was the fact that smaller clothes do take up less closet space than their bigger counterparts, too, at least when folded. Thus, it is a lot easier now to see what I have in there.
And this helps to see what things I do not need to replace. Another side effect is that I am, that way, less likely to lose an item from sight by having it slide behind a stack of something else.

And, last but not least, the almost unworn eviction candidates have taught me a lot about what I should probably not spend money on again. Throwing out clothes with the price tags still attached after five years is not something I want to do again.
What these were? What someone jokingly called "someday best". As in "someday I am going to be the kind of person who wears this". Or, "someday I am going to go swimming again".
Clothes for a person I am not who does activities I don´t do.
Clothes that are little more than declarations of good intentions.
Even if I got them on sale, they were the most expensive clothes I ever had, if I translate their cost to cost-per-wearing.

In the future, I´ll try to be a more conscious shopper when it comes to clothes, too. After all, I love how roomy my closet looks now. And  I have found that the adage about most people wearing only about twenty to thirty percent of their clothes most of the time had been applying to myself, too. So why not restrict myself to exactly those thirty percent anyway? It´s frugal, and it´s ecologically friendly.
And it helps to keep the place tidier, too, by forcing me to do laundry more often, and by being able to hang clothes away without having to squeeze them into the closet.

So, an all-around winning situation.
And, on the sneaky side of things, if I let myself go and regained the weight, I´d be quickly out of something to wear. And that, hopefully, would bring me back on the wagon.


Julia

Mission accomplished!

DH just dropped off three big blue plastic bags of oversized clothes of mine plus one bag of his stuff at the Red Cross! Which means that not only did I finally take courage to get rid of what I can´t wear any more, my decluttering was obviously infectious because Hubs started to weed out his wardrobe, too.
It just feels good to know that I can wear really everything in my closet right now, and so can DH.
And I have completed the wardrobe rollover,too, putting the heavy sweaters into storage for summer.
Not having everything in several sizes means having plenty of room in my closet, all of a sudden.
This feels great!


Julia

Lessons from a shoe closet

I did try out the forgotten inmates of my shoe prison, eh, closet, yesterday.
One pair that looked cute on the outside, but when worn became pretty uncomfortable after a short while.
And another that didn´t look half as cute, just sensible, but was so comfy that it may well become a new summer favorite.
If I look past its unassuming exterior, that is.

The experience got me thinking about how often I tend to go by the exterior of something and miss out on the inner qualities it may have.
And how often I have, in the past, decided to ignore discomfort going on with a particular shoe or garment because "it looked so good".

My Granny-who all her life was a sensible-shoes kind of person- used to say "the place you wear an uncomfortable shoe is in your face".

And it´s true, I have often spent whole days with a drawn look in my face and clenched teeth because the shoes I wore hurt like hell.
Part of that was due to the sad fact that my feet kept getting bigger with weight gain. I chose to ignore that for a long time, squeezing my feet into shoes that had what used to be my size. Of course, by noon at latest, I could only hobble.
But, as with my weight gain, I somehow managed to ignore the fact that there had to be something wrong for my feet to hurt so much.
Until the day when an attentive shopping assistant (to whom I am grateful to this day) noticed how I had to squeeze into the shoes she brought me to try on and made me have my feet measured.
The result? My feet needed shoes two sizes bigger than what I had come into the store in. No wonder there had been so much pain.
Astonishingly, the paramount feeling wasn´t one of relief at knowing what the problem was, but regrets at "losing" my small feet. Having the smallest shoe size had been a matter of pride for me. I might not be slim, but I had dainty little feet.  And now, all of a sudden, my feet were average-sized. That took some getting used to at first.
And, of course, it meant letting go of all the smaller-sized shoes that had become instruments of self-inflicted torture. 
Only when I realized, after some time of wearing the better-fitting footwear, that I had no more pain in my feet did I understand how much I had been hurting myself by not facing up to the changed size of my feet.

The lesson in that goes a long way beyond simple footwear.
If I don´t face up to changes, be it in my body or in my life,  I´m going to hurt myself sooner or later. And the hurt won´t stop before I acknowledge what has changed and act accordingly.


Julia