Drip drip

...that´s what I heard on getting up for my morning run today. It´s been svelteringly hot hereabouts yesterday, but overnight, a steady rain has set in, accompanied by a ten-degree drop in temperature. So, I looked outside, and ...

...resisted the temptation to stay inside! I put on my usual walking clothes, plus a cap with a big visor to keep the rain from getting on my glasses, and off I was.
And it turned out to be so worth it! The rain had washed down all of the dust and pollen that had been in the air, so, it was pure oxygen all the way, mingled with the wonderful smells of a freshly watered park.
The only ones who didn´t like the weather were a couple of crows sitting on the lawn, croaking mournfully.
I came back aired out and dripping wet, and just a bit proud of myself for not chickening out.
Oh, and more good news came from the scale, where another half-pound was off. So,2.2 kilos down, 21.8 to go.


Julia

I´m walking...

every morning this week! And asking myself why the dickens I kept procrastinating about it for so long.

There is, of course, an answer to that. I have been what they call an owl for all my life, staying up late and sleeping in as long as possible in the morning.
Now, the only time of the day where I can shave the 45 minutes I require for my daily walk off my schedule is early in the morning, as in before breakfast and while DH is still asleep. Which doesn´t make it any easier to withstand the lure of just snuggling up to him instead. Especially when I am prone to fatigue anyway. Getting up when I still feel tired from the night before and just feel as if just an hour of more sleep would make me less tired just so goes against every impulse.
You know what the surprising thing is? When I do manage to drag myself out of bed in time and start walking, I almost immediately feel less tired. And, coming home some forty minutes later, I don´t fell tired at all any more. And the effect doesn´t diminish all day long.
Now there may even be some very hard science behind that.
I am, by going outside, exposing myself to the light of the morning sun, and I am, when I walk in the park where we live, breathing in a lot more oxygene than if I were to stay in bed. Both of which lessen fatigue.
So, that´s two more reasons to get up early and walk.
Getting my extra baggage off is another, of course. I´m glad to announce the weekend´s spike in weight is gone again (after two days of strictly no carbs), and I am intending to stick to that as far as possible.

So, I´m walking, yes indeed (insert rendering of Fats Domino record here), and I do intend to keep doing it as long as the weather permits this year.
And I am looking forward to finding out how far that will take me...

Julia

Spiked and spooked

This is scary.
Over the weekend, I was abroad in a place that served the standard European food, namely, bread and rolls for breakfast, and a starch (potatoes and dumplings, to be exact) accompanying dinner, plus, one- just one- afternoon coffee accompanied by cake.
I know, I should have just said no.
But I also wanted to know the extent of what eating that way would do to me.
And going on a two-day fast wasn´t what I had in mind, either.
So what did two and a half days of eating standard fare amount to?
A four-pound gain, that´s what.
In spite of doing 45 minutes of power walking every morning, and being very busy all day long, too.
I don´t want to know how big the damage would have been had I just sat on my franny all weekend long and eaten the same stuff.
Seeing that number when weighing myself on Monday has been one of the scarier moments of my weight loss journey. If it is possible for my weight to explode upwards like that when all I´ve done is eat what I used to believe was "normal" food, I am back to the point of choice- either I say farewell to a lot of things I have all my life liked to eat, or else I will, by the anniversary of my most recent weight loss attempt, be right back where I started from.
That the lower back pain that started it all is back, too, is another warning signal.
It seems that the, in total, four kilos I have regained from my lowest weight are exactly the difference between functioning and not-so-functioning joints.
So, they have to come back off fast.

I did, yesterday, manage to avoid carbs almost completely, and was down again by two pounds this morning.
And I did my morning walks yesterday and today, and am intending to keep that up unless there´s a thunderstorm or something of that kind going on (getting hit by lightning or a dead branch isn´t healthy, either, and we had several such weather events this year already).
So, here it is for y´all to see:
Distance to goal weight at highest recorded weight: 40 kilos
Weight lost from August 2010 to April 2011: 20 kilos
of which I regained : 4 kilos

Which means 24 kilos still  to get rid of. 52.8 pounds for the metrically challenged. 
And this time I am not doing this in order to conform to some impossible beauty ideal.
I´m doing it because I do not want to become immobile again.
I´m doing it because I want to be able to run again.
I´m doing it because I want to be there for DH as long as he wants me to.
Saying farewell to the idea of doing what I need to lose the weight and then being able to eat standard food again isn´t easy, but this weekend has shown me all too clearly what would happen.
I don´t want to go back to where I was.
And that means I have to change what I eat, for life.



Julia

I´m not the only one...

just after I hit "publish" on my latest post I found this linked to on a blog I follow.
Seems like there´s a lot of what I went through around- even if most of us never admit to it.
And I sure wish someone had told that to my relatives.....

Have a good weekend, free of body-hatred in all forms!

Julia

Love for sale?

Perfectionism isn´t something one is born with. It is taught, by people who think that shame is an adequate instrument of education. By people for whom everything is their way or the highway.
What that looks like in practice?
You have, for example, a little girl who is not as skinny as her parents would wish she was. So, she gets sneered at every time she eats anything. She´s made to sit at the dinner table directly opposite the sneerer. When she does, by that, not get slim there are special foods bought for her, things that usually were, at that time, used in the therapy of morbidly obese grown-ups. So, while the other members of the family breakfast on rolls and jam and eggs, she gets served a plateful of something that looks and tastes like wet paper and has absolutely no nutritional value. And she may not even ogle what the others eat.
When she is, because of having a "funny" way of speaking due to growing up in a different state, bullied at school the same person who sneers at her over the dinner table tells her not to whine because she deserves being bullied, after all, she is fat.
And once a week, she is weighed on a big scale, and her weight written on a list that´s pinned on the wall for everyone in the household to see.
If the list shows a gain, she´s sneered at again.Even if having lost, she is told she´s still too fat because she´s heavier than **** who just happens to be half a head shorter.

That little girl was me.
One of those infamous weighing lists has survived, and I found it recently between the pages of a book.
Now, today, I have access to information I did not have as a child. Namely, the medical weight charts for children by height and weight. And the weights recorded on that list by date were all within the normal weight range. I was not even overweight then, much less obese.
But the way I was treated back then convinced me that I had to be incredibly fat and ugly, even if I didn´t see it myself. I don´t know if the weight gains that followed were due to my body trying to adapt to what my mind thought it looked like. What I know is that on the day I first looked at a picture of myself at top weight my first thought was, now I really look like what I felt I looked like all my life. And the second thought was a rush of anger at the person who made me believe I looked like that long before the fact. And who thereby set me up for a long descent into yo-yo-dieting hell, because trying to get my body down from the healthy weight it had as a child to the weight that this person told me I should have ended up messing up my metabolism so badly that there was a time in my life when I was eating a strict diet of under 800 calories a day (I couldn´t cheat on that because they were prepackaged portions) and I was gaining weight.
To this day, eating what people who were never overweight can eat would send my weight up like a rocket.

The most incredible part of that sad story is that the offender from back then to this day does not realize there was anything wrong with the way I was treated, that this person still believes that what this person did was the best way to treat a child.

To them, love was something that had to be earned, and the only way to earn it was by being perfect.
And what perfection meant was defined by them.
So, what was I to do as a child, who desperately wanted their love and approval? I started making myself into the picture of what I thought was expected of me, and hide all the things about me I thought they wouldn´t approve of. I ate almost nothing at the dinner table, only to stuff my face with sausages and cheese when taking the leftovers to the kitchen. I became an expert in swallowing things whole because I must not be chewing any more when coming back to get the next dish. And for me, the one morning a week when I would go to the cafeteria in secret and order a real breakfast with honey, bread  and an egg, meant eating heaven.

I sometimes think that it was my sense of self-preservation that was keeping me away from becoming anorexic. What it didn´t prevent was that the ideas of what a "good" body would look like took deep root inside me, and made me, whatever else my achievements were, feel deeply inadequate.
When I was unhappy I told myself I was not trying hard enough to be what was expected.

And then I got lucky, even if it didn´t feel like that at the time.
I was, at that time, already morbidly obese because I had been stuffing down my hurt feelings with giant amounts of cookies,vanilla ice cream and chocolate pudding for quite a while, and I did not feel too good about my body.
That was when I first met my now husband.
And I discovered, for the first time in my life, what it means to have a soulmate, a person who accepts you just as you are, who shares the same interests and who never ever withholds his love from you until after you have changed yourself.
A person whose love is a gift, one that is freely given and does not have to be earned by conforming to their particular kind of perfectionism.
Someone whose love I don´t have to pay for by selling my soul, by denying who I am.

It is only slowly that I am learning to see myself with a loving eye, that I learn not to critize myself for the things about myself that I did not manage to change.
And slowly, I realize that these very things are what is the essence of me, that these things are what makes me, me.
As I wrote yesterday, it is difficult to let go of perfectionism. But I think it is incredibly worthwhile.
And by accepting what I am, maybe I can finally become the best me- not perfect, just good enough. But, for the first time in my life, okay with what I am. Curves and all.
Because then, trying to make my body healthier is no longer driven by feelings of inadequacy, and I may, at last, find out what this body is meant to be if I treat it right.
Without measuring myself against someone else´s unrealistic standards.


Julia

Dreams of being a butterfly

Some weeks ago, I was, with my DH, in a city somewhat bigger than ours. We were sitting at a street cafe, and there she was.
About six and a half feet tall, blonde, tanned, and so slim that there was a visible distance between her upper thighs in the skintight jeans.

I saw her from behind at first, and my gut reaction was a stab of desperate envy. I wanted to have such a body. I wanted to believe that my life would be perfect then.
And then she turned around.
She was, perhaps, twenty-five years old, but her face was pinched, haggard and wearing the lines of a perpetual frown. The corners of her mouth, too, showed signs of being mostly turned down.
It was, actually, a desperately unhappy face.
And suddenly, I did not envy her any more.  I imagined how, twenty years from today, these lines of despair would have turned into deep trenches, or else, the whole face into a mask botoxed to the point of utter expressionlessness.
Intellectually, I did realize that that gorgeous-looking body was doing nothing to make that woman happy.

Still, there was that moment of envy and desire to be looking like her, and then realizing that my body, even if I were to hunger it down to the point of near-starvation, would never have her proportions. That my hip bones are wider and my legs are shorter, that my jaw is square and my hair is grey. That my fingers, even if they were just skin and bone, will always be short and my shoulders narrow.


Imagine the disappointment of a larva that goes to great pains building a cocoon, waiting for the transformation to occur, only to find that for it, the end product is not a butterfly, just a different kind of caterpillar.

You see, I always had that fantasy of having a perfect body. I even imagined what it would feel like, having slim, long legs, and a face with visible cheekbones and a triangular chin. Being able to wear high heels and a mini skirt, or really tight jeans. 

That dream  is, perhaps, also part of what is putting the hex on my weight loss right now.

I did, all of my life, believe that there would be some magical transformation occurring if I got rid of the fat. I did actually believe that I would shed the fat like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, and then I would be able to soar.
And now I have to face up to the fact that, even if I were to get down to goal weight, I´d still be that same stubby-legged caterpillar plodding along on the ground, looking up at butterflies in envy.

There is no supermodel body hidden inside my fat suit.
There, I wrote it down.
It hurts to let go of that dream. Even if I know it´s just a dream.
Letting go of it means also letting go of the imagined feeling of what being slim would mean.
But that feeling has been, like it or not, part of my motivation.I did equal it with the feeling of perfection.

And accepting now that my body will never be even close to perfect, whether I lose the weight or not, is hard.

The danger, now, for me is to give up completely. If I won´t end up perfect, why bother? Why lose weight at all?
I have to find an different answer to that one, an answer that works with the realities of my body, with the realities of my life.
But then again, perhaps it will be liberating, too, not to compare myself to butterflies any more. It will give me the freedom to explore what I can do as I am, and maybe I´ll even be able to stop putting my own achievements down, because my worth as a person doesn´t have anything to do with my weight, in spite of what they drilled into me.

The scary part is that I have been in this place before, that I had believed that these issues had been resolved by me a long time ago.The only thing that gets better every time is that by now, I recognize them, and I can draw upon the experience I gained the last times I fought these particular issues.
Maybe, just maybe, I´ll be able to find closure this time.
Before I gain back all I have lost.

Julia

Body- acceptable?

Sometimes, a phrase or question I read worms its way into the nether recesses of my mind, only to resurface unexpectedly when my subconscious decides it´s time to deal with it.
The question that has surfaced today is one that is probably part of the core of my weight problem. Namely, what do I think about my body?

For me, the spontaneous reaction to that question, for most of my life, would have been, "it´s a darn nuisance".

For most of my life, I have watched other people who had bodies that did what they told them. Bodies that jumped when they wanted to jump, that ran when they wanted to run.
And then I have been looking at my overweight, poorly-coordinated body, and I hated to be stuck in there.
I hated the fact that I was constantly tripping over my own feet, that I have little sense of equilibrium, that with every new physical activity, I have to first intellectually grasp the required movements, and then it takes ages for my limbs to perform these movements properly.
I hated being the subject of ridicule in P.E. class, hanging from the bars like a sack of wet sand, or being unable to even  balance on the balance beam unaided.
I hated having to do running sprints, only to trip over my own feet within the first couple of meters, ending up flat on my face while my classmates were already at the end of the track.
And I felt doomed to stay that way.
Add to that some "well-meaning" relatives that ridiculed my every attempt at moving, it was enough to convince me that moving wasn´t for me.
Consequently, I have, for a long time, considered my mind the important part of me, and my body a nuisance best ignored.
I did not want to know if it needed something, I did not want to know if there was anything I could do to make it work better.
And I have, for a long time, not even considered the possibility that my childhood experiences that did so thoroughly put me off exercise might have something to do with how exercise was presented to me.

Today, I know that I was, during the time of my life when other kids are out in the playground learning how to master the art of moving, kept mostly inside by my well-intentioned grandparents, the effect being that I knew how to read by age four, but, when I entered school and had my first P.E. class, I had never even seen a ball and didn´t know what to do with it. I had never climbed anything higher than a chair, and I had never run a distance longer than our living room.
So, I probably missed a lot of neural pathways from brain to muscle that in other kids are grown by playing.
And I do know by now that there is really something measurably off with my sense of equilibrium, which means that I notice it later when I get out of balance and have less time to react. Which explained my frequent falls.
I´m not blaming my grandparents, they had no idea of what they were unintentionally depriving me of, but I know today that at the very least my P.E. teachers, instead of allowing me to become the laughing stock of everybody, should have noticed that I was lacking even the most basic athletic abilities, and tried to give me exercises to allow me to learn them. Instead, I was very much left on my own.
Once a year, we used to have a big fitness test that required, for girls, a sprint, long jump, and throwing a small, baseball-like ball. All three of which I didn´t know how to do properly. So, every year I was shamed to be the only one who had zero points on that test.
On the last time I had to undergo that test, I got rebellious. For boys, the events besides long jumping were medium-distance running and shot put. As I had been doing medium-distance runs with a friend for a while then, I insisted on doing the boys´events. Probably because my results couldn´t get any worse anyway, the teacher allowed it.
And that was the only time I ever had any points on that test.

After leaving school for the university, I stopped doing sports completely. Instead, I started battling my body for every ounce of weight it had been gaining, and I started comparing it to the bodies of models I saw in women´s magazines.
Someone said that you can´t make a basset into a greyhound by starving it, you´ll just end up having a very hungry basset. Harsh but true.
The only thing that my attempts at becoming a greyhound, so to speak, got me was a full-blown case of binge eating disorder.
And even more body hatred.

To this day, I have difficulty telling whether I am hungry, or thirsty, or cold.  I look at the thermometer every morning to see what kind of jacket I have to put on, because I know I´d barely notice it if I were freezing. I have to count the cups of water I drink because I would, as likely, eat some dry cookies as I would drink a glass of water when dehydrated.

The end result of many years of not taking proper care of this body is what I am now contending with.


Julia

Forlorn hopes

The local YMCA is having a charity book sale every year, and over the weekend, DH and I did go through our respective bookshelves to pick out books to donate.
Now, I have been decluttering books quite often. But this time, I attacked something that had, until now, somewhat escaped my efforts. Namely, the cookbook shelf, or to be more precise, the diet book shelf.
I had, in there, all of the diet recipe books I had, over a course of more than twenty years, bought in the hope that this, finally, would be the book that made me slim. Books that had never been used because after reading them I knew their suggestions weren´t sustainable for me, and others I had tried out, only to find, after a small initial loss, that I was constantly hungry and regaining what I had lost and then some.
Books that did conform to the traditional nutrition lore -have 60 percent carbs- and simply didn´t work for me.
And that ended up with me feeling guilty because I thought that it was I who had to be doing something wrong because it didn´t work. So, I kept the books in the hope of someday catching that elusive ingredient that would make them work.
And I felt guilty every time I looked at them.
For the money they cost, and for my lack of success.
Throwing them away seemed such a waste of money and opportunities.
Now, this time, I know that the books I donate will be sold and the proceeds will be going to a worthy cause.
So, it was suddenly easy to purge them from the shelf.
I filled a whole box with just diet books, the ones I know by now don´t work for me. Perhaps someone else will buy them who has a body their systems work with.
I´d rather have the extra space on the shelf, that allowed me to put some other books out of double-stacking.
And no more guilt when looking at that particular bookshelf. 


Julia

Carbs or what?

The good news this morning was three pounds off what I hit yesterday.
I did keep away from carbohydrates yesterday, so, maybe that was part of it, but as I am also  having my monthly visitor I don´t know if the upward tick was due to PMS or eating carbs any more.
Still, I am determined this time to stick with fewer carbs, if only to get results.
Yesterday, I came home from work later than usually, and DH had already eaten. So, I managed to eat just some canned tuna with olive oil and freshly ground pepper, plus a few unsalted peanuts.
For today, I am determined to pass the carbohydrate part of dinner, too.
As I am cooking and serving the food, that entails cooking the carby stuff seperately and putting it just on DH´s plate.
DH is convinced that harm could befall me were I to significantly reduce my carb intake.
Like yesterday, when he saw me eating that tuna with olive oil, and first thing, he said, why don´t you have a slice of bread with it.
Because that stuff, to me, is poison. That´s why.
I´m not ready yet to go completely paleo, but I feel better when I do not eat refined carbs.
Case in point, I used to have, for breakfast, some cereal with yoghourt on it. Two hours after, I´d be fighting fatigue and rummaging thru the infamous candy drawer in my office.
Which led me to assume that breakfast had to be bad for me.
Either I had it, then I could not stop myself from eating all day long, or I didn´t, in which case I could go without food until late in the afternoon.
In both cases I had low energy all day.
Today, I am having breakfast every day. It consists of two eggs sunny side up, with two stripes of bacon underneath, fried in a cast-iron pan (you have to try that to see how different the taste is from frying in a teflon pan).
And I am no longer getting tired two hours later, nor do I have to eat more carbohydrates during the day.
That drawer in my office has been empty for some time already.

Lowering one´s carb intake does, of course, require a lot of label reading.
I used, for a pick-me-up, to have some protein bars, and I always wondered why they were prone to causing me fatigue attacks a short time later.
Until I read the nutrition information.
I was shocked to find that the so-called protein bars actually had more sugar in them than the carby-looking cereal bars next to them. No wonder they had been giving me reactive hypoglycemia every time.
So, whenever I want a pick-me-up today, I stick either to nuts (sans carby coatings) or I make myself a protein shake.
When choosing the brand of protein shake to buy, btw, I looked out for carb content, too. It´s amazing how they keep trying to sell you sugar instead of what it says on the package should be inside.
So, it´s buyer beware all the time.

Watching my body´s reactions to different foodstuffs is educational, too. Perhaps Mr. Taubes is right, after all.
And while "ymmv", I am trying to find out what my mileage will be.

Oh, I did re-evaluate my weight loss goals, too. It was obviously more than optimistic to assume I would be able to regularly lose one pound a week. The difference between where I was and where I should have been had, by now, become painful indeed.
So, I am right now aiming for about a pound every ten to eleven days. I know that is not much, but perhaps it is more realistic to set a goal that is more easily attainable and hope I can get even beyond it than it was to aim high and miss.
The thing being that I am, that way, still hoping to be back at a normal weight before my (gulp) next birthday with a zero in it (no, I´m not telling which). Because that is approaching one of the next years, and I can be either something-oh and fat or something-oh and slimmer than I am today.
Guess what I´d prefer.


Julia

U-turn in a container ship

Somehow, that´s what my current weight situation feels like to me.
You know those bi-i-ig container ships that take immense amounts of freight across oceans? I read somewhere that, once such a behemoth is moving into a certain direction, it takes, even at "full speed backwards", several miles to stop it, and also to turn it around.
I made the mistake of being too certain that a couple of weeks off plan wouldn´t harm my weight loss efforts too much.
And, like that container ship staying on course, for a while I maintained, or almost, and then, slowly, the direction changed, and my weight went up. Slightly, at first, and then in one-pound-a-day fluctuations, as if everything above plan I had eaten had been hovering in some fifth or sixth dimension, only to materialize on me at once.
And now I have to throw the rudder around again and get back in the other direction. The one leading to health, the one leading to feeling better.
And, like that container ship, right now it looks like the thing won´t budge off its course.
Knowing that it will eventually, if I hold the rudder tight, doesn´t make the current situation less frustrating.
What vexes me most is that I didn´t even feel like I was overeating the last days. But I had some rice and pasta and, perhaps worse, several rolls and slices of bread. Which didn´t push me over the caloric limit, but it almost looks as if my body were having an allergy to the stuff, so fast did my weight go up.
And that in spite of the fact that, with the rice and pasta at least, I cut the portions to one-fifth of what I used to believe was a portion , and did feel rather virtuous about it, too.
The reality of the scales was putting me back on the ground again fast this time.
Now, I have to complete that turnaround before I go back up even further.
So, no carbs. Absolutely none. No cookie, no bread, no rice, no pasta. No wine, either. Not until I am back at the point I had already reached.
And back to walking again. Half an hour every morning, at the very least. Preferably more. Even if it rains.
The most difficult part will be arranging this plan with the needs of DH. Last year´s weightloss was successful partly because DH was gone a lot and I felt free to not eat. Now that he is here most of the time, even if I don´t want to eat, I have to cook for him. He doesn´t know how, so cooking is my personal resposibility. But I don´t think he´d accept the kind of very-low-carb plan I need to go on for himself, in spite of being very supportive of me otherwise.
So, I´ll have to exercise my restraint muscles, too. Even if the pasta looks good.
And wait for that ole container ship Body to complete its turn.

How do you, dear readers, deal with the problem of being the family feeder while having to restrain your own consumption of food?


Julia

Flattered or annoyed?

I don´t know what to be, in this case.
One of my coworkers, whom I see quite frequently, approached me yesterday and remarked that she could see that I had lost a lot of weight.
That´s flattering because, well, I have lost a lot of weight.
It´s annoying because I lost that weight last year. 
This year, my weight has pretty much stayed where it was, after all. In other words, I regained everything I had managed to lose this year and am now close to where I was in January. 
So, while the colleague was certainly sincere in wanting to compliment me, she did point me towards the fact that what I do now is obviously not working.
Just maintaining would be good were I below that magic limit of morbid obesity. But I am not.
I started this year with the intention of being back below obesity by the end of the year. Not morbid but any obesity.
I set myself a goal of losing another twenty kilograms by December, and I am by now seven kilos above where I should have been if I had kept losing.
So what happened?
Apart that I stopped exercising regularly and have, in spite of the good intentions, not started again?
And that I have been eating full meals with DH and MIL for some time again?
Perhaps I jinxed myself, too.
The normal-weight-by-December thing is due to the fact that in January there will be a family celebration I cannot avoid, where I will have to meet some relatives that I have avoided for years. I´m not on particularly good terms with them, and that´s mostly because they dislike my being fat and seem to believe that sneering at me and insulting me are the proper ways to make me lose weight. Thus, our relationship has gone to the dumps after my last weight gain.
So, I want to be slim before having to meet them again. To be able to stuff their hurtful remarks back into those sneering faces. Or at least, to watch their jaws hit the table when seeing me slim.
When I calculated, by the beginning of the year, where I could be at the end of the year, and realized that it was theoretically possible for me to reach normal weight by then, I did immediately think of that looming occasion, of how wonderful it would be to go there in an acceptable body that does not give them reason to hurt me.
And that is, paradoxically, part of what is holding me back now.
I have to remind myself that I must lose that weight, not for them, but for myself. And that those vengeful feelings are part of what I have, for way too long, stuffed down with food.
"I´ll show them" isn´t the reason I should be losing even more weight.
Wishing for their acceptance isn´t either. Because if I am only acceptable to them if I conform to their visual standards, that´s not real acceptance at all. (Add to that the fact that one of those offenders has been very fat for quite a long time, too, and lost and regained bigger amounts of weight regularly, and things become patently absurd. Just because right now, he´s not fat, he shouldn´t forget his own past).
What I must do, obviously, is let go of that particular attachment and concentrate on myself.
Only, that´s not easy because for a lifetime, losing weight has been mixed in with wanting approval of others.
As a child, I was a good girl if I had lost weight, and I was a bad girl if I gained.
That that was a way of driving me into an eating disorder, as soon as I was out on my own and didn´t have my food intake dictated to me any more, is probably obvious to everybody except my oh-so-well-meaning relatives.
But those war stories are not helping me now. Instead, I rehash my hurt feelings every time I think of them, and have to fight the impulse to binge and stuff them down.
The best thing for me, therefore, would be to leave them behind.

And stop beating myself up for not being perfect.
Maybe that will allow me to start losing again. And this time, I´ll be satisfied to go below "morbid" by the end of the year. Whether that is enough for my relatives or not.


Julia

Total eclipse of the eclipse

I had been looking forward to it. After all, the predicted lunar eclipse was supposed to be happening in the direction my balcony is facing.
I had, all day yesterday, imagined what it would be like to sit there, sipping on a glass of cold water and watching that amazingly red-glowing disc rise over the roofs.
And then it rained.
Instead of a clear sky, there were a bunch of grey clouds, and that was all we could see.
The next such event will be in 2015.

How often are we sad because we didn´t get to see, do or buy something that was toted as a once-in-a-lifetime chance?
A lot of times it turns out that chance repeats in regular intervals. Be it the discounters, who have a regular cycle of returning offers, or sales items, which you can see clearly after watching it for two or three years, be it the magazines that do, every year, repeat their themes according to season.
So, if I miss out on this year´s edition of running shirts, camping gear or easter bunnies, or on this year´s crop of asparagus recipes, I know by now that there will be more of them next year.

Knowing that makes it easier to avoid the just-in-cases. Those things you buy because, well, maybe you could use them someday. Not this year, because their season is over, but maybe next year, or maybe after losing those next twenty pounds, or once in a blue moon.
It´s okay not to take them home. And if you already have them there, it´s okay to declutter them. If you really needed them someday, you could get another one easily. And in the meantime, the space no longer taken up by those items may be put to a far more productive use.
It may even be left empty.
Then, you might be able to see what is going on behind all that stuff.
And not have your life eclipsed by too much clutter.

Julia

Tuscany on the balcony

That´s exactly what our long-neglected balcony feels like right now.
We picked up a pair of blooming oleander bushes this weekend (at half price, too) that went into two existing terracotta-lookalike containers, plus a cherry laurel plant that now lives in a big white container that had been lingering in the cellar for years. Together with the pyramid-shaped boxwood plant and the herb garden, the place has turned into a veritable Eden.
As I did, when picking out the herbs, look for plants that don´t only look good but also smell good, there´s, at least in the evening when it gets cooler, a definite aroma of lavender, basil and rosemary hanging in the air.
Every night since our return, we have been sitting out there, with a candle in a glass lighting the scene.
What that meant was, of course, that we did not sit down in front of the TV set. We have been talking, reminiscing, planning for future journeys.
We have found out that this little piece of nature in the city is a far better place to sit than if we were going out to some restaurant where you can sit in a garden. It´s more frugal, and -an important consideration for me, at least- a lot more private.
The investment we made is, at least partly, sustainable. Cherry laurel and boxwood can even be left outside in winter, and the oleander bushes and the rosemary will get their winter lodgings in the corridor outside our door. And the containers which were, actually, more expensive than the plants in them, can be reused for years to come.
The dividend we get in terms of feeling good? invaluable.
 And if I cook some Italian food, we may well feel as if we were really somewhere in Tuscany.


Julia

Hot and...dry?

The beginning of summer is approaching fast, and so are higher temperatures. While we have, in these parts, been spared from a spring heatwave, it´s just a matter of time until there will be those svelteringly hot days again.
The place I work in doesn´t have air condition (yes, in Europe that´s still allowed even in public buildings), and as soon as the walls have heated up, it´s oven time in the office. I keep a big electric  fan that I have positioned at my feet, so as not to create a maelstrom of flying papers on my desk, and I do pull close the blinds as soon as the sun comes round to my office window.
Still, that is mostly cosmetic when it comes to lowering the heat exposure.
What summer means, too, is that I will have to be extra careful about drinking enough water.
I use the 15-ounce-cup (about half a liter) I got myself this spring, and try to refill it regularly.
Still, getting in those 64 ounces (or two liters) of water a day is a constant challenge.
To remind myself to drink my water, I have taken four rubber bands that I wrap around the cup in the morning. At every refill, I remove one of them. Not a perfect solution, but it reminds me to be watchful. After all, even mild dehydration is supposed to reduce your mental agility measurably.
I´ll see if that also applies to the speed of weight loss.



Julia

Rested and recreated

At least that´s what I feel like. The little holiday was quite refreshing, and necessary, too.
The hairdo has grown back in enough to allow me to go without a cap again, even if I had to buzz my hair all over a bit shorter than I usually wear it.
On the down side, I saw a number on the scales yesterday I hoped I´d never have to see again. I am, all in all, up six pounds from what I had reached. No sports, and caring for MIL, plus some days of real rest before going back to work, will do that to me every time, thus, I wasn´t too surprised.
The next weeks will be back to my regular routines, anyway, so I hope the unwanted luggage will get back off again.
Last week, my hubby gave me one of those body analysis scales that measure not only weight, but also fat, muscle, bone, and water content of the body. I´m not ready to reveal exact numbers, suffice it to say that I didn´t like what I saw on there. Still being that percentage of blubber sure wasn´t what I expected with 18 kilos of what I hoped was mostly fat gone.
So, back to the salt mines and back to low-carb eating. And back to my long-neglected morning walks. And back to drinking lots of water.
The new scales will be an extra encouragement to keep up.

It´s been good to be away, but it´s also good to go back to my routines.


Julia

Cooling down

After a couple of really hot days, there´s some rain today, and a ten-degree drop in temperature. It feels good, and I have my office window open wide to let the cool air in.
As there has not been a lot of rain lately, nature needs the water, so, while I generally don´t like rain, it´s a good thing for plants and lawns.
What keeps surprising me is how fast plants pick up when watered after a draught. It´s almost like you could watch them grow.
I´ll be taking another digital hiatus until after Pentecost, most likely. Regular posting will resume in about two weeks. Until then,
´bye, folks,


Julia