Life sign from underground

It is the same thing every year- christmas approaches and everybody suddenly decides that all the things that weren't urgent are, now, suddenly, absolutely urgent and first priority. Which means I'm once more swamped with very urgent stuff, and blogging needs to take a back seat.
What does not take a back seat is my recondensing project. I am, at present, recondensing at a rate of half a pound a week, which is enough to get me to goal in time, but doesn't require me to reduce calories below what I need for optimum function. So, any silence on my blog doesn't mean I fell off the wagon, I'm just awfully busy.
See you when I've dug out of this here file stack!



Julia

Crunching the numbers

The troble with any long-time projects, at least for me, is that at the beginning the target date seems so far away that it is difficult to gather the momentum to start. I use to joke that no project of mine would ever get ready if the last minute before the deadline did not exist.
The biggest long-time project I have going on right now is getting back to being normal-weighted, meaning a BMI below 25. And there is also a deadline. I want to be there before turning fifty. That means I have fifteen months left to get there, and I am still 33 pounds above that magic limit.
Which means that I will, in these fifteen months, have to create a caloric deficit of...
115500 calories. That's right, one hundred fifteen thousand five hundred.
Divided by the about 450 days I have left until my birthday, that means I have to eat 256 calories less than my body uses up, every day. Any more, and I cannot reach my goal.

Which means being very mindful of what I put into my body, all the time. Doing the weekend binge- weekday fast thing must be absolutely out of the question, as must certain calorie-dense former favorite meals. 256 calories a day means that I will recondense at a pace of one pound every two weeks.
I don't mind it, of course, if the weight comes off faster, but that is the minimum I have to achieve to ensure success.

As losing weight also means lowering one's basal metabolic rate, that means I have to keep my intake consistently below 1400- 1500 calories at my present weight, going down to about 1100 to 1300 during the last stretch. I only hope my body will be fully adapted to eating only that much by then.

256.
I could blow a full day's loss by eating one extra hamburger, or having one extra glass of beer, or a piece of string cheese, or two handfuls of nuts.
And I cannot afford to lose another day to not losing.

Perhaps I should put that number up somewhere I can see it. The fridge door might be a good place, for starters.


Julia

Getting back on the downward path

For one week now, my daily weights were below the limit of obesity again, and my weight curve pointing downward again. So I am confident to be able to get below that ten-kilo mark down to the next decade again before christmas.
I have found that every time I allowed a regain to happen, it was slower to come off than when losing that span of weight for the first time around. Whether that is due to metabolic changes associated with aging or to the effects of weightloss as such, I don't know, but in any case if I want to have a chance at getting to goal, i.e. BMI 25 or below, within the next 15 months, that means I have no wiggle room whatsoever for any dietary indiscretions during said 15 months. I still have about thirty pounds to get rid of before I may call myself normal-weighted again, and long-time losses, for me, have been happening at a rate of two pounds per month on average. Anything higher would thus not be realistic to expect.
Which means that I might be setting myself up for failing my goal if I allowed any regains to happen until then.
Which means sticking to my diet over Christmas, sticking to my diet during any holiday in-between, and knowing that every single off-plan splurge might spell failure for my greatest wish I have for that big five-oh day.
Knowing that, it ought to be easier to tell that piece of stollen or chocolate or that potato dumpling or whatever to get off my plate and away from my body, because there is just no way I would wish to have one of them as much as I want to be normal-weighted again.


Julia

Office meals

As I mentioned before, I work extremely irregular hours, sometimes with little opportunity to get in some nourishment in-between what turns up on my calendar.
Breakfast is at 8 a.m., consisting of two eggs fried on two strips of bacon, and that will usually tide me over until noon. But, as I'm usually not home before six p.m., I still need something to eat in between if I don't want to become all grumpy by midafternoon.
I tried different things. Pasta, made in the microwave, left me becoming fatigued after eating it, even if the calories were right. The offerings of nearby eateries were all too greasy or too carby. Anything that was already prepared, like the day before's leftovers, was inconvenient to bring to work and besides, as I never know when I will have time to eat, and the office fridge is in an unguarded room where there have been instances of food theft more than once, I can't bring food that needs to be kept cool, either, so no salads, yoghurt, or sandwiches, either, apart the fact that the latter would also provoke fatigue due to their high carb content.
What I do now is keep a can of protein powder in my office, and a plastic shaker. One, or two if the day is a long one, protein shakes keep me full without too many calories.
On the meal planning side, having the same thing every morning and noon makes it a lot easier for me to stick to my caloric limit for the day.
And I can be certain of having had enough protein, no matter what dinner will be.


Julia

Diet saboteurs

They are your friends, your family, your colleagues at work.
They mean well, mostly.
They are social because they want to share.

And they have no idea what they are doing.

Around christmas, they arrive in full force.
Food pushers.

Freshly baked or store-bought cookies. Chocolates. Offered with the conviction that the offerer is about to give the recipient something really good.
Which is true, if one takes a high calorie count to be a sign of goodness.

For someone who needs to lose weight, these offers are sheer poison.
Even when you have just one, the amount of sugar and fat in most christmas "goodies" will mess up your food intake. And who has just one? Or who doesn't want more after eating just one?

I have decided for this year to abstain from those offers.

No, thanks.
I'm sure they are delicious, but no, thanks.
I'm not trying just one, thanks.

These will be my security lines, along with my food journalling app.

If those food pushers realized what they are really doing, they might stop pushing. But knowing they are not likely to get it anytime soon, what I can do in the meantime is stop being a pushover.
Just because it's christmas doesn't mean I have to throw away everything I have achieved until now. The last months were a dire warning for me about how fast that could happen.

So, for christmas, I do not want cookies. I do not want chocolate.
What I want is my body to continue the journey to the land of Normal Weight.

And if I have to offend anybody by saying No to their food offers, so be it.

Everybody who really means well ought to understand that.


Julia

Crossing the river

It's just one month till christmas, and I am determined to be out of morbid obesity again before having to face those opulent dinners that invariably come with that holiday. So, I have been sticking to below 1500 calories a day for about a week now, and I am beginning to see results. This morning, the scale showed me a weight below that dreaded point of obesity for the first time in several months. What with the wild fluctuations I had lately, that doesn't mean I am out of obesity yet, but it does at least indicate that what I am doing is beginning to work.
Norma has been posting about FOMO and YOLO as obstacles to weight loss. I had to think hard at first what these might mean.
Fear Of Missing Out. You Only Live Once.
I, too, have been guilty of turning these into excuses for overeating.
But what do they really amount to?
There may be situations where FOMO might even be justified.
For me, one such situation came last year when DH took me to the town where he had been studying. They have a cafe there that sells what just might be the best cakes ever. DH had been rhapsodizing them ever since we met, so, visiting that town meant visiting that cafe. We haven't been to that place together before, and we are not likely to get back there within the next, say, twenty years. In that case, I would have missed out on my only chance of tasting those cakes.So, I did indulge myself, and that indulgence had little effect on my overall weight because it happened only once.
But if, say, DH were buying himself a box of frosted donuts at the supermarket, FOMO would in no way be justified. They sold those things yesterday, they will sell them tomorrow, so I would be able to eat some as often as I wished.
And that is the point where the line must be drawn. Only if it is really something that you will never again be able to eat if you don't eat it right now, can FOMO be a valid reason to eat something that would be off-limits otherwise. The point being the word never. If it is something that comes around every year, like stollen for christmas, I can either plan for it, or feel secure in the knowledge that if I decide to forgo it this year, there'll be another one just like it next year. Either way, FOMO should not be the reason behind the decision made about eating or not eating something that is not on your plan.
Most of all, even if I am deciding not to miss out on a particulat taste experience right now, that must not mean letting go of all the brakes. Two pieces of stollen happen to taste exactly like one piece of stollen, so all you could possibly miss out on by having just one is the feeling of an overstuffed stomach and the calories in that second piece.

And YOLO? I don't ever again want to be third-degree morbidly obese, because I have just that one life to live and that one body I am stuck with.And I know by now that I have been missing out on plenty of things when obese that would have been a lot more enjoyable than anything I might eat.
If I think of that, FOMO and YOLO could just be the reasons I need to stick to my plan this time.



Julia

That dangerous hour

Since returning to religiously journalling what I eat, I have once again noticed an annoying pattern. In short, if the hour right after coming home from work didn't exist, I'd have no problem at all staying within my calories. I'm good at breakfast, good at lunch, good at dinner. What does me in regularly is that single hour when I arrive home, tired and famished, kick off my business shoes and head for the kitchen to prepare dinner. Which in and of itself is a wise decision when you're famished. But cooking dinner takes time, and meanwhile, there is the fridge with the small cabanossi sausages and the block of cheese, or the cookie tin, or the container with the salted peanuts.
I have tried to keep the amounts of such things I eat small. Before writing down everything and evaluating it for content, I would have guesstimated those "first aids' to amount to just a fraction of my total daily intake. What harm can there be in something that fits in the palm of my hand?
As it turns out, plenty. Even in the reduced portions I had lately, when weighing them and calculating their caloric values they all turned out to be, for that day, the most caloric foods I had eaten. Those little nibbles had as many calories as a regular breakfast and lunch, and half as many as my regular dinner- which I ate after ingesting them.
So, I am once more faced with a dilemma. Even if I pre-cooked dinner it would mean waiting for it to heat up. Whatever I do to quench my hunger on arriving home would have to be ready-to-eat, or almost. It would also have to be something that won't spoil fast, because my working hours are so irregular that I cannot even count on being there to eat it, and I hate to spend money on buying food for the trashcan. Fruit, for that reason, is out of the question, because it spoils. The only fruit I buy is frozen, but you cannot just grab and eat that. Anything with lots of carbs won't do, either, so no bread, crackers, or such. Taking another protein shake after a mostly protein breakfast and lunch would probably put my protein consumption too high. And fresh veggies, too, have in my household been known to spoil faster than I would get around to eating them.

Perhaps the place to start is by asking myself why I am so ravenous when coming home. After all, even when I'm working late I usually don't begin to feel hungry until after I leave the office. The connection between relaxing and eating, it seems, is still strong in my brain. Let's relax= let's eat.
The best thing for me to eat between coming home and dinner would be...
nothing.
After all, there's dinner ahead, and it's not as if I were in danger of dying from hunger until then.
What I have to do is find a different way of relaxing into my evenings.
I'll see if a cup of herbal tea will do instead of solid food. That's also quick to prepare and has no calories at all.
Maybe I'll be finally getting back off this plateau then.

Julia

On the wrong side of the river

I had believed I'd never come back here, standing on the wrong side of BMI 30. And then life happened, with my workload exploding, and diverse stressors in the private sector I won't delve into here.
And I stopped being watchful, for just one month. I should have known better. One month of eating ready-bought foodstuffs and not logging what I ate. One month of fighting exhaustion with the help of a bag of nuts. One month of avoiding the scales.
And there goes all the progress I made at the beginning of the year. Yes, I am back to the weight I had before my b- day in March, and back into morbid obesity.
By less than two pounds, yet those two pounds bring me back to this place I had so hoped to have left forever.
And the holidays are drawing nearer. One week of celebratory meals I cannot opt out of. In the past, that meant about four to six pounds up.
I have a choice of either resigning myself to entering yet another year morbidly obese, or fighting to get out of this upward spiral.
Fighting will mean being selective about what I eat.
As I am the one who does the holiday cooking, that should be easy, shouldn't it?
Except for the fact that we will be spending part of the holidays with DMIL. She's old and frail, and tends to eat way too little when we're not there to encourage her.
So every visit with her means trying to make her eat more and refeeding her. My problem in that context is that she will invariably stop eating as soon as anybody else at the table does, or decide early during the meal that she is full and then proceed to divide the remains of her meal between DH and myself. Either way, I end up eating more than I intended.

My defense plan, this year, goes like this:
I must not eat bread or potatoes during the holidays. Of lebkuchen and stollen no more than one piece. Hands off the chocolate. And halve the portions I serve myself. I will have to explain to her why I do this, and hope for the best, because she keeps insisting that I do not need to lose any more weight.
Which is wrong. I am still 32 pounds above what is for me the limit of a normal weight, so, only two thirds of the way down from my highest weight. The fact that I do not look obese any more won't change that. And I am still determined to be normal-weighted before the big five-oh in 2014.
Even if I effed up like that in 2012.
It may well take me all the determination I have at my command.
I sometimes wish I had as much of it as Norma.



Julia

Let the madness end

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness. I disremember who said this first, but it is rarely more true than during those frantic, food-loaden last two months of the year.
There we are, having spent ten months of the year (hopefully) watching our budgets and our food intake. Our waists have shrunk, our bank accounts have, while not fattened up, at least recovered a bit from last December's low. Toys, gadgets and trinkets bought last Black Friday have, predictably, given up the ghost simultaneously with the expiration of their warranties and gone on (again, hopefully) to cease cluttering our lives.
And then come along...The Holidays.
And with them that heady mixture of "I was so good all year, I deserve a reward" and "it's a holiday, and on holidays one does eat certain foods, and gives each other lots of presents".
So we find ourselves in the middle of the Black Friday melee again, clutching our shopping-bags full of loot that was payed for with our credit cards, or sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table having to open our belts and grabbing for the Maalox (tm).
Of course, it doesn't stop there. We go on like that all the way through Christmas, gorging ourselves and shopping as if stores went out of business, without a thought about our scales or bank balances.
Six weeks of free-for-all.
Except it isn't free.
Do you remember what it felt like last January? Going on the scales for the first post-holiday weigh-in? Opening that horrifying credit card bill?
Feel that pain now. Remember it as vividly as you can.
Remember how long it has taken you to undo the damages, if you even managed to undo them at all.
And then decide if you want that again.
Remember- the holidays are not about consumption. They are about people.
When you look back at your childhood, what do you remember about Christmases past? What presents you got? Or do you remember going sleighing with your parents, or sitting in front of the open fireplace playing Scrabble (tm) with your siblings?
What do you want your kids to remember, or yourself if you don't have any?

You decide.
Decide wisely.


Julia

Big bird landing-are you prepared?

It's always slightly amusing to watch the hubbub about turkeys before and after Thanksgiving, from Germany where that holiday is not celebrated. And then Christmas comes around. The standard fare for that holiday in Germany? a whole roasted goose, with stuffing, gravy, potato dumplings...the works. Not so amusing if you try to watch your weight.
Especially when you end up eating three or four consecutive days off that bird and the trappings.
For all those whose homes will in the next month be the place where the big birds come to roast- are you prepared?

Tip one: Think about how big a bird you want to serve. It's absolutely unnecessary to prepare more food than the whole family can eat in at most two sittings. For me, that meant downgrading the goose to a duck, which is as tasty but half as heavy. If you absolutely have to have a certain species of bird, look for the smaller ones. Geese, for example, come in calibers between three and ten pounds, so if you have just four people don't take the biggest ones.
Tip two: Usually, there are some side dishes that are eaten by everybody. Others are the last dish standing on the dinner table. You know which ones they are. You may as well not prepare them at all this year. I bet no one will miss them. But we always have...with our bird is not a valid reason to put something on the table nobody wants to eat. Reduce the amount of the other recipes, too. If it's gone it's gone. As long as there has been enough for everyone to have a taste of their favorites, there has been enough- period.
Tip three: Be prepared for leftovers. The best thing to do with them is freeze them at once and spread the enjoyment over several widely- apart meals instead of serving the same thing day after day until it has to be tossed, or your family goes on strike, whichever comes first. If you bought your bird frozen and didn't thaw it at once, there's a space in your freezer where that bird was kept. Use it to freeze the leftovers. Have suitable containers prepared when clearing off the table, and freeze the leftovers at once while they are fresh. For one, that prevents after-meal refrigerator raids, and it also minimizes any risk of food poisoning.

Wishing all of you a not-so-gainful holiday,


Julia

Chocolate

Sometimes, it just has to be...chocolate. I guess most of us know that feeling. Unfortunately, that means sugar, too, if you go for the usual sources, and fat. And calories.
I have been bitten by the chocolate bug several times, lately, too, which used to eff up my daily stats quite spectacularly.
Until...
I discovered that you can make tea from cocoa nibs, and they also sell it in ready-to-infuse teabags.
So, when the itch for chocolate strikes... I'll have a nice cup of hot cocoa tea, no milk added, and satisfy the itch at zero calories and eight ounces of water.
And for those chocolate dessert attacks...in the shelf with baking ingredients you'll most likely find unsweetened cocoa powder. That and a tablespoon of ground almonds mixed with unsweetened greek youghourt makes for a fully satisfying, low-carb and high-protein treat that I can easily work into my daily plan.
I know, some people claim that thinking of any food as a treat is a sign of a fat mindset, but I, for one, believe the Creator equipped us with taste buds for a reason. Besides, I might lose weight eating tasteless food, but to me, the good taste of a well-seasoned food is an integral part of quality of life. And calling it a treat just means that it is something that has to stay a rare event, because what I have every day is no longer special.
Picking the best choices and eating in moderation. That's the key to losing, not going all food puritan only to spend too much willpower on avoiding a binge.


Julia

Recondensing is frugal!

Ever so often, there's another flurry of articles published about how obesity is rampant in the poorer segments of society.
Regardless of the veracity of such statements, what irks me about that kind of story is that many people will automatically jump to the conclusion that losing weight has to be an expensive undertaking. And those who are in a financial pinch already could go on to resign themselves to the conclusion that they cannot financially afford to try to lose their excess weight.
Guess what, they are wrong. Completely wrong.
Let's start with food.
Yes, most fattening foods are cheap, while the things touted as " healthy" often come with a heftier price tag.
But an obese person has a much higher basal metabolic rate than a slim one. To put it simply, maintaining twice the weight requires twice as much calories.
Allan of Almost Gastric Bypass has in the past given several vivid accounts of what amounts of food it took to maintain his former girth.
Which means that if you chose to buy non-fattening foods such as vegetables or lean meat, and buy only as much of them in terms of calories as your basal metabolic rate as a slim person would require, you will, for one, lose weight until you are that slim person. And from a point of frugality- you will probably end up spending a lot less on food if you prepare your own nutritious meals from scratch from quality ingredients than if you feed at Mickey D's regularly.
All bets are off, of course, if you go for these ready-to-eat Lean cuisine (tm) meal trays or their ilk. That stuff is expensive. But it's expensive because you pay for the preparation and for the profits of the producers who know that they have an audience of people who are desperate and would pay anything to get rid of their excess weight. While their products, if the nutritional values are right, are not scams, you still end up paying a lot of money for the convenience of using them. So, if money's tight, don't use those products. Find out what healthy nutrition is (shouldn't be too difficult since you obviously have internet access if you read this) and prepare your own food.

Savings potential: From my own experience, by conscious shopping and sticking to the portions slim me would need, about fifty percent of my former food budget. YMMV, of course.

Another place to save is your wardrobe. As a fat person, I was forced to buy new pants about every two months because the material between my legs rubbed through that fast. I also had to keep replacing blouses, shirts, and coats that got torn because they had become too small,or because they got caught on some obstacle course (as in restaurant or even shop) that I was too fat to navigate without bumping into things. Shoes bore my weight only for a short time before giving out. When I started recondensing, of course, there was the initial investment in a set of smaller clothes. But, for one, they came a lot cheaper at a standard clothes store than what the same garments would have cost me in a plus size, and for seconds- I have, in over one year, not have had to retire a single garment due to being worn out, so, I get several times the wear out of a garment, too.

Savings potential:May depend on whether your taste in clothes changes when you become slimmer. If you keep wearing similar garments in your smaller size to what you wore when big, halving your clothes budget is entirely possible ( don't forget the cost of the retail therapy you probably won't need any more when you're more satisfied with your body).

And for the rest? Don't get me started on the extra gasoline you need to move a bigger body, or about the price of things that need replacing when there is an obese person in the house (toilet seats, anyone?).The part about the medical costs has been brought up too often already.

Losing excess body weight isn't expensive. Being fat and staying that way is.



Julia

Think first, eat later

It is not by journalling alone that I will get rid of that excess baggage. This simple fact has been dawning on me fast since I acquired the ability to record my food consumption in real time, so to speak. Picking up my tablet, opening that journalling app and recording what I just ate takes less than a minute, in contrast to doing it on my old PC that took ages just to boot and besides, stayed in the living room while a lot of impromptu eating is done in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, recording my intake after the fact might have given me some insights about why I was plateauing or regaining on a given day, but those insights did not use up the excess calories already consumed.
My tablet is, by now, a constant companion in the kitchen, recording what I consume.
And for the first time, I'm doing trial runs before scarfing down something. You know, actually calculating what I want to eat, before I eat it.
That's a big DUH, I know. But preplanning my meals was always something that scared me.
At my first bout with binge eating, I tried to keep myself from bingeing by not buying food to keep at home. Of course, that just led to my becoming a regular at the local drive-thru, going there and pretending the food I was buying was supposed to feed a family. Of at least four.
Recovery, for me, meant stopping to try to keep myself from eating anything at all. Only when I allowed myself a well-stocked pantry was I able to stop bingeing. But planning my meals farther in advance than for today has still been too close to that overcontrolling mindset to me, so I didn't.With most of my pantry consisting of frozen or dry goods, I didn't have to. There is always something I can put together from my stores.
But this is the first time I have been actually, you know, thinking first and eating later. During the better part of my weight loss, I stuck to a very limited number of staples so as to not have to make too many food decisions. That worked, sort of.
But this is better.


Julia

Back to the grindstone

Having a new tablet means finally having access to all those nifty apps they have. Aftr seeing it mentioned on a blog, I decided to try out the My fitness pal app. It's basically the same thing as Sparkpeople, but I think it's less complicated to use.
The only hitch with those US apps, for someone who lives in metric country, is that most measurements are non-metric. The effort needed to convert grams to ounces has been putting me off journaling a bit. And then I took a look at the workings of my digital food scales and found out that by simply hitting a button I can effortlessly switch from grams to ounces and back. So there's no excuse any more for not keeping track of what I eat.
One extra the app has is a weight projection feature, as in "if every day were like today, in five weeks you'd weigh...". It's a real waker-upper on days when food intake was less than optimal. Seeing how a single day of unrestrained eating, if it became habit, would make my weight skyrocket again, is quite educational. Now if I manage to transform that into getting back to recondensing...


Julia

Powdered madness

I had some free time over lunch last week, so I decided to go and inform myself about the most recent developments in protein drinks. The drugstore I usually get my protein powder from has been sprouting some new shelves with "protein diet" cans in a multitude of flavors, and I wanted to know if any of these might be useful for me, too.
Which meant looking for the nutritional information.
The results left me absolutely horrified.
In ten out of ten so-called protein drinks, the main ingredient was... sugar. Up to forty per cent of the total weight of what was in those cans.
So, if I used these products, not only would I ingest about one and a half tablespoon of sugar with each protein shake, I would also pay that sugar with the same amount of money I'd pay for protein powder, which is about ten times the asking price of sugar.
Talk about maximizing one's profits.
Mind you, these were products that were expressly tagged "diet" shakes, so, recommended for people who want to lose weight. Now if I were to consume five helpings of the stuff a day, that would make 75 grams of sugar. That is decidedly more than I may eat if I want my weight to go down.
As these are marketed as protein drinks, there is a strong possibility that people who want to lower their carb intake would try them, thereby probably even raising their total amount of carbohydrates consumed.

Besides, in my experience, the chance of really losing weight on something that's more than a third of it's weight pure sugar is... zero.

I don't want to know just how many people spend half a fortune on those mock protein drinks and give up, seeing no results and blaming themselves for it.

There should be a law against selling something like that.

And until there is, we have to keep looking at ingredient lists and nutrition facts.


Julia

Tubby revelation

It's been cold and wet over here during the last days, which meant a flare-up of my back and leg pain, probably from my muscles cramping up with the cold. So I decided to do something unusual and take a hot bath yesterday.
Now this is unusual because I had stopped bathing several years ago. Not what you think, I do of course shower daily, but that bathtub.... I had stopped using it after a particularly humiliating experience of being wedged in there so tightly that I had to call for DH to help extract me from it. Plain and simple, I had become too fat to use that tub. So I didn't.
Those sore muscles yesterday made me rethink that decision. After all, I'm down five clothes sizes from that day of humiliation.
Guess what, I'm also down one bathtub size- not only did I fit in there, I had several inches of wiggle room on either side. Comparing that to the memory of that beached whale stuck in the same tub fighting to extract myself from it sure brought home how far I have come since that day.
So it wasn't just the hot, fragrant water I enjoyed, but also a major NSV.
Which helped the soreness and upped the motivation.



Julia

Snowy autumn

Last weekend had the coldest weather on record hereabouts for October, with snow and ice galore. Nothing as bad as hurricane Sandy, of course, but enough to keep us from attempting the journey to visit MIL on Saturday as planned- we didn´t have our winter tyres on yet as we weren´t counting on snow before November. Which means DH has driven down there on Sunday alone so he could take care of the appointments this week he was going down there for, while I am staying here on my own.
Which means I have plenty of time for catching up with the things that need doing in the household. Add to that the fact that Wednesday is a legal holiday hereabouts, and thus not an office bound day, and what you get is one big decluttering action. The first thing I did today was deal with the mess on the balcony. The geraniums, which had until Friday been blooming beautifully, didn´t take too kindly to being frozen stiff and snowed in. So I emptied out the balcony flower boxes today, and then took everything down to the cellar including some empty flower pots I had kept under the balcony table. The rosmary and lavender bushes now reside in the bathroom, as that is the only window sill that doesn´t have a radiator underneath.
Taking that stuff down, plus putting the recycling stuff down into the bins, too, actually meant several trips up and down four flights of stairs, so I got my exercise, too.
The balcony looks tidy now, but also quite empty. It´s always a strange feeling to take down the remnants of summer, knowing it will be six months at least before I´ll be able to replant my balcony. The trees, too, have been dropping their leaves after the frost, so, it´s definitely autumn going on winter.
Time to break out the hot tea and some cookies. I think after running up and down stairs all afternoon I can afford to.



Julia

Less luggage

There it sits on my desk. The tablet I wrote about yesterday, after carrying it here.
I have found it a lot easier to carry and handle, because of the smaller weight and size when compared to the netbook I used to lug around.
Still, the difference between both gadgets is less than three pounds.
Only three pounds. How often have I consoled myself over a gain with these words. Only three pounds, barely noticeable.Especially if one has ten times as much to lose.
That tablet tells me a different story.
Three pounds can make a difference, one that is noticeable, one that I really can feel.
So I should not take those regains lightly, because they are not unnoticeable.
As it is, my weight is slowly creeping back down, but still about a pound above that pesky limit of obesity.
I'll have to stay on plan.
Owning a tablet means having access to lots of apps. The first one I installed was Sparkpeople, so I can journal my food intake on the go. Perhaps that will help me stay on track.
Limits and accountability. The only thing that works in the long run.


Julia

Shopping my closet

As I've mentioned before, I used to be an avid collector of handbags. During one of my latest decluttering marathons, I got rid of a number of specimens that just did not fit my needs any more, and I'm happy to report that not a single one of them has been missed. The drawer in my handbag storage chest that used to hold them now contains winter hats and scarves,which have ceased to clutter my entrance area.
Still, there were a few specimens left which saw relatively little use, but were too good to toss.
One of them is a sturdy leather shoulder bag which I had originally intended to hold my netbook, but it turned out that the opening was just a tad too tight to comfortably put it in or remove it. Thus, said bag went into hibernation in my closet.
Last week, I decided to take the plunge and acquire a tablet computer. I had actually vacillated between a tablet and an ebook reader for quite a while, since I had discovered that Amazon has reading apps for tablets, too. As I am not exactly a teenager any more, the size of the letters in what I read has become increasingly important, so, any device with too small a screen would be out of the question because of eyestrain. Then again, the netbook, while rather sturdy, weighs in at more than four pounds if I take along the cables for loading it, too, which meant that I would need to use a backpack to carry it or have my back hurt from carrying it on one side.
What kept me from exchanging it for a tablet was the prohibitively high prices those things usually are sold for.
Enter my friendly phone provider and an inductory offer on a tablet with cell phone connection that meant that I could swap my existing contract for one at the same monthly cost but with higher speed and receive a tablet for half what a 3G-capable Kindle would have cost me. So, my tech equipment got a new addition. I was, of course, lucky in that my old contract was running out right now, so I could go for that offer without penalties to pay. It really pays to keep the expiration dates for a contract in mind sometimes.
The new tablet, of course, needs something I can carry it in, which also must protect the screen from damages. After seeing the prices they demand for made-for-this-tablet sleeves, and seeing that they are mostly too soft to really protect the screen from damage by accidental pressure, I decided to go shop my closet instead. An old netbook sleeve was soon found, but the neoprene was only good against scratches, not for screen protection. What item could I use for that? It had to be flat, stiff and about the size of the tablet. What I settled on for the time being is the backside of an old picture frame. I put the tablet into the sleeve and then into a bag with the screen side facing the particle board piece. Thus, it's safe from damage. This works only with a bag that is small enough so the whole thing cannot slide around and stays together.
And that meant the reactivation of the aforementioned shoulder bag. While it was too small for the netbbok, it fits the tablet as if it were made for it.
I might upgrade the whole thing to a proper case someday, but for now I have what I need to carry that tablet without spending a dime on it, everything coming from my closet.
Including the shoulder bag.
There used to be a time when I would have gone out to buy a new bag for a new gizmo. I'm glad I don't need to do that any more.
Shopping my closet is something that did, at first, not come naturally. But with more experiences like this, it keeps getting easier.


Julia

The opposite of falling

Ever noticed that weight acts just the opposite of other physical bodies? Not on your scales, of course, but whenever my weight vacillates, it's going up real fast, like, two pounds in a single day, and it regularly takes several days to get rid of these again. Which is exactly what happened to me again. I've managed to stop that upwardly mobile elevator, but climbing down again...takes time.
Some weight loss bloggers are, right now, pouring vitriol on those of us who are not, in their opinion, eating as perfectly as they are, or not exercising as much as they are.
Shouldn't everybody remember that everybody is different?
If I remember correctly, there are studies that prove that willpower is by no means an inexhaustible resource. So, if your resistance to certain foods depends on willpower alone, you're quite likely doomed to break down whenever you had to use up your willpower on something else that day.
Which means one thing. You have to replace willpower with something else. One possible replacement is called habit. Once something becomes a habit, you won't need any willpower to keep it up.
The other replacement is planning. You cannot eat what you do not keep where you can eat it, so, not bringing certain foods into your house is the best insurance against gorging on them, if you can keep yourself from going out to get them. That way, the time you have to exert willpower is limited to the time you spend at the supermarket- if the chips stay there you cannot eat them at home.
Or- and that is one thing that some weight loss bloggers are damning vehemently- you can plan in advance what you will do in a certain situation. If you have kids, or a DH who likes to nosh, it's not always feasible to have no sweets at all in the house, unless you want to waste your willpower on contending with their demands. What you can do instead is plan what you yourself can and will eat of that stuff and work that into your plan.
For me, for example, that means hands off DH's chocolate bars, but in case of extreme chocolate cravings, I allow myself two or three squares of dark chocolate which are sold individually wrapped, so I take out what I allow myself to eat and put the rest out of sight.
Or, it may mean having to partake in traditional foods so as not to hurt the feelings of my relatives. If I don't go completely overboard, the damage to my weight loss is minor, which I, for one, prefer to major fallouts in the family.
It's not about excuses, it's about decisions.
The more decisions I make before I get into a situation, the less willpower will I use up when the situation is there.
So, it's actually good policy to start thinking about what I will have at the family christmas dinner today.


Julia

The fruits of uncluttering

This weekend was, once more, wardrobe rollover time, meaning that my summer clothes went into storage until next spring, and the warm sweaters and fake fur hats and the other cold-season stuff went to take their places in the readily accessible part of my wardrobe.
In years past, before my weight loss, that used to mean wrestling with at least four of those zippered things I use to store my out-of-season clothes in, digging through them, and spending at least two hours doing so.
Not so this year. Having gotten rid of every piece that had become too big for me when I packed the winter stuff away last spring, I just took out the remaining stash, replaced the summer t-shirts and such where the sweaters had been, and put the (one) zippered box needed for that back on top of my closet. Total time spent- ten minutes. Then I took my warm jackets out and the thin ones back in (five minutes) and I was done. There wasn´t any garment I needed to toss, and the fact that my formerly overcrowded closet rods hold, by now, only the clothes that right now fit me also means that the things I store on hangers don´t have to go into storage any more- I just push the out-of-season stuff to the less accessible side of the closet.
What used to be an endeavour taking up the better part of an afternoon has thus become a fifteen-minute project.
What´s more, having gotten through one winter already on what I have in my wardrobe right now, I know that I won´t have to buy anything new this winter. Which suits me just fine.
There must be some "up" side to that weight plateau and slight regain, mustn´t there?


Julia

Recondensing FAIL

We´ve just had the first night of below-freezing temperatures, so this weekend will be wardrobe rollover time.
The frugal part of it is that last winter´s clothes still fit me.
The annoying part is that last winter´s clothes still fit me.
I must not even think of how much further I had hoped I´d have recondensed by today. Weight-wise I´m back to about what I weighed in February, and once again, I see little connection between what I have eaten on a given day and what stares me in the face the next morning on the scales. Like in, eat about 1700 calories total on a given day and gain two pounds overnight which then proceed to refuse to come off again. Don´t anybody tell me that isn´t possible, because it´s exactly what happened to me this week. Seems like that obstinate body of mine is determined to show me once again that it refuses to follow any rules about how a body should behave.
And probably all because I had been going off-plan for less than a month due to serious work overload that left me, evening after evening, too exhausted to cook. I mean, I couldn´t even finish watching the evening news with DH at seven PM to seven fifteen PM without falling asleep in my easy chair. DH´s cooking abilities are mostly restricted to popping something in the microwave, so, no help from that quarter, either.
The overload situation seems to be going down a bit, but the fatigue it engendered is still there.
I´m fighting it with coffee, black, no sweetener. Breakfast is two eggs on two strips of bacon, fried. About 300  calories. The nuts that I had been crunching on at peak workload don´t even enter my office any more. Instad, lunch is a very-low-carb protein shake (sets me back about by 200 calories). In the evening, some vegetable-heavy stir fry, some greek yoghourt mixed with cocoa powder (the sugarfree kind you use for baking) and a glass of good German beer to unwind. All in all well below 2000 calories for the whole day´s intake. And still my weight is climbing. Heck, I ate exactly the same things in the same amounts when I was losing!
I don´t know what´s going on here, and that scares me.
As does the possibility that this might not stop before I haven´t gained everything back.
I must not try to drown the panic I feel at that thought in a sea of cookies, lest I end up like one of those Greek heroes who gets a prophecy, tries everything he can to avoid it becoming real, and then it turns out that the very things he did to avoid it were what made it possible to happen.
What I must do instead is watch things very closely. Maybe I´ll find out what started this regain, and maybe I´ll be able to stop it yet.

As long as I breathe there´s hope.

Julia

Shaking things up

Once again, I spent the weekend after a stressful work week at MIL´s place. As usual, that meant eating stuff I shouldn´t eat, such as potatoes and bread. Even though I managed to keep the portions small, on Monday morning, back on my trusty scales, it meant yet another uptick in my weight, back to square 64 and a total of nine pounds regained. Not good.
So, I decided to shake things up a bit, namely, by going back on a strictly low-carb regimen of bacon and eggs for breakfast and protein shakes for everything else. I know, not sustainable in the long run, but I have to get my body back into recondensing mode, and those pure protein shakes are the quickest way I know of doing just that.
I´m rather glad that they come in a variety of flavours so I can alternate between different tastes. I have been trying out a different brand, too, which was on sale lately, and which doesn´t have any added carbohydrates either. Right now, I´m sipping on a straciatella flavored shake which also satisfies any sweet tooth I might have.
Another thing I have to work on is the sleep deficit I accumulated last week. It´s a bit of a senior moment realizing that I can´t pull an all-nighter any more and be back to functioning normally the day after the next day on just one night of regular sleep. So, early to bed and early to rise. If anybody had told me that when I was a student I´d have declared them crazy, being a confirmed night owl who only came into my own several hours into the afternoon and then worked until well after midnight. I just hope there won´t be any more emergencies like last week´s in the near future.
And, of course, I hope the protein shake thing will get me below that threshold of obesity again, fast. Because if it doesn´t, fasting seems to be the only alternative left, and that´s out of the question if I want to stay functioning.
Keeping my fingers crossed and trying to ignore the increasing growls of my stomach,


Julia

Back To Square 61

As you might have guessed from my prologed absence, I´ve been extremely busy during the last two weeks.
Unfortunately, this also meant being careless about what I ate. Either I had no time left to cook after coming home from an exhausting day of work, so I went for whatever was around to eat that didn´t require preparation (which usually meant bread), or I resorted to convenience stuff like frozen pizza. Add to that the fact that my job involves a lot of mental work but very little physical exertion, and my sadly deep-ingrained pattern of reacting to extreme stress by eating sweet and crunchy food like chocolate and nuts, and several consecutive nights of almost no sleep (don´t ask...) and what you get is a recipe for desaster.
Which did hit me hard this morning when I set foot on my scales again.
I have, during just two weeks of not watching what I ate, gained back a whopping seven pounds. From the lowest point I had reached this year, that means up a total of more than eleven pounds. It also means I am, once again, above that limit of morbid obesity that took me so long to break in the first place.
But I don´t intend to stay there any longer than absolutely unavoidable.
So, it´s back to square 61 (the distance to my top weight this morning in pounds).
Which means cut out the sugar and bread, no snacking on nuts while working, and if possible, get a decent night´s sleep, plus keep portions small again and stop eating mindlessly to get rid of stress.
The scary part isn´t only how fast I´ve slipped back into my old habits, but also how fast the weight went up again as soon as I did.
Besides, just two weeks of eating crap again have been enough to make the cravings return in full force. The same ones that I thought I had left behind when I started my weight loss journey. It´s almost as if the mere idea of ceasing to be vigilant were blowing everything I had reached out of the window.
Or perhaps there really is truth to the claims about wheat and sugar being physically addictive.
Either way, this has to stop, fast. Before I end up, not on square 61, but still further back in Area 51, or worse. 

Keep calm and carry on.

Julia

Slowly resurfacing...

...from under a sh**load of work that was aggravated by the fact that most of it was my dear collleague´s who was off on his annual vacation.
So, five weeks in total of extreme heat (temps were scratching on the all-time high record, so it was really hot) and working for two. Not my idea of a holiday. But the truant has returned to work yesterday, and I was glad to drop his cases back on him.
As for my weight, it´s still stuck slightly below the threshold of obesity, with a two-to-four pound variation. But, with the weather returning to normal-range temperatures, at least the water retention has diminished a bit.
And I have a bit of hope that  less stress and less heat might even mean my weight will go down again.


Julia

Flat line

That´s what my weight curve has been looking now for more than four months, on average. Not that the daily weights were all the same- they were, within a total range of about four kilograms, all over the place, acually, with the lowest and the highest values just days apart.
Seeing that kind of spikes is quite scary, actually, especially since they definitely didn´t correspond with any major dietary indiscretions.
Then again, if I look at the data I have from past years, I can see a pattern of my weight going up or at least plateauing whenever outside temperatures go up. As I am not even very hungry when it´s hot, drink absolutely no soda, and haven´t had an ice cream for about two years, the connection cannot be in what I eat, but rather in what I keep inside in the way of water retention.
Every autumn, my weight has been going down again. So I guess I´ll have to wait for autumn...
But looking up that data also reminded me of something rather positive. I am, today, 22 pounds  lighter than I was in 2011 on the same day, and 60 pounds lighter than in 2010. From my all-time highest weight, it´s down 68.2 pounds as per today. Add to that the at least two pounds of water I´m retaining due to the heat, and you get, essentially, a maintain.
Mind you, I still have to watch what I eat, keep my carbs low, and never ever take a dive into the sugar box, whatever carby treat it may contain. But then, the ability to climb all three stairs to our apartment without pausing, or run for the bus, or walk through the city without needing a crutch to lean on, is so much better than anything sweet.
I mustn´t ever forget that, or I´ll end up what Norma calls a trainwreck, in other words, part of those sad statistics that the size acceptance people use to bolster their claim that it is impossible to lose weight and keep it off in the long term.
I don´t think it´s impossible, provided you learn from your experience while losing. And provided you accept reality. For me, reality is that something like "intuitive eating" will never work for me, because my regulatory mechanisms- if there is such a thing- have broken down completely many years ago. So, I just cannot trust my body to tell me what it needs. Reality, for me, also means accepting that my hunger and satiety signals are, for the most part, not working at all. So, I can´t trust my body to tell me when it´s full, either.
What I can do is watch my portions. That has, over time,become easier by the acquisition of some new, smaller bowls and plates, which hold just what is the right portion for me, and by sticking to the iron rule of never ever eating anything directly out of the package, but putting it into a dish first, and then- no seconds. Ever.
And no fiddling around with what has worked for me in the past. If I deviate from my plan, I pay for it in added weight. If I do that often, I´ll regain. As simple as that.
And still so hard to get for many of us out there.


Julia

Shopping bags

Ever so often, even if we are trying to cut down on grocery shopping, there comes a day when the pantry needs restocking, so we drive to the local equivalent of Costco and get us a carload of frozen veggies, canned beans, bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and of course a load of milk products, too, while we´re at it.
All that stuff goes into our insulated grocery shopping bags. These are big enough to put a bottle crate into one, so there´s plenty of room inside. When they are filled, they are rather heavy.
So there we were unloading the car after our shopping trip, and I remarked to DH how heavy the bag I was just handling felt, and that I had lost more than the equivalent of two of those, wondering aloud at the fact that I had, back then, been able to climb the three flights of stairs to our flat at all.
DH looked at the bags and said, no way could I have had that much extra baggage on me.
So, before unpacking, we put the bags on the scales.
It turned out that it wasn´t two of them, it was all three, fully loaded, which together equalled about the weight I have already recondensed.
I stood there, looking at the bags, picking them up from the floor to feel their weight.
And I remembered what it had felt like to have all that condensable matter on my body, sticking to me, weighing me down. 
I don´t ever want to be back in that place.


Julia

Short and sweet

When temperatures soar, so do garment hemlines. Unless you have decluttered all of your high-temp clothes. Which is what had happened to me. I had, quite a while ago, ditched all of my wide, wide linen pants and skirts, and hadn´t bothered to replace them as the weather wasn´t hot enough to warrant the expense. And now there I was, stuck with, at least at home, wearing my running shorts. So, at the next visit to the mall, I looked for end-of-summer sales on something lighter to wear. What turned up was a pair of white cotton shorts.They had them up to a size...L. Without an x in front. And without elastic material. As they were really cheap, I took along a pair, not bothering to try them on first. At home, the first thing I did was peel myself out of my long blue jeans and slip them on.
Guess what, they fit. Size L, from a regular-size store. I haven´t worn size L pants since...I can´t even remember. So, even though my weight has been plateauing for about four months now, it looks as if my body is rearranging itself at the weight reached again. My thighs, too, seem to have condensed. At least, standing in front of my mirror, while I may never be Miss Great Legs, what I see when wearing those shorts looks at least- tolerable.

Which also hasn´t been the case for way too long.
For now, I´ll take tolerable any time.


Julia

Summer he-e-e-e-a-a-t wave

It´s hot. Like, really hot. Melting-the-tarmac hot. The tram that passes by our house is squeaking with the rails being warped by the heat, and everybody is just fighting to keep their cool.
Luckily, the hottest days were the ones over the weekend, so at least I didn´t have to work there, and the good news is that my colleague´s vacation is over, too, so I can finally concentrate on my own stuff again.
And the big electric fan- which I keep under my desk, pointing at my feet, so as to have maximum refreshment with minimum flying papers- is making things at the office almost bearable.
Still, above thirty degrees centigrade outside means my edema has come back, too, and the water I retain messes up my weigh-ins quite spectacularly. Knowing it´s just water retention makes it somewhat less frustrating, but I´d still prefer to be rid of it again, which isn´t going to happen soon as the heat wave is supposed to stay on at least for another week.
We went grocery shopping on Saturday, before things really heated up, and our fridge is now stocked with plenty of ingredients for salad dinners to last us through the next couple of days. So, on the calories-in side, I can stick below my limits, and if I do so, I can be certain that there will not be a "real" gain and it will all come off again when temperatures drop.
Being stuck inside all weekend, except that shopping excursion, als meant being able to enjoy the new arrangement in our living room. DH had been grumbling a bit when I told him on the phone what I had done, but when he saw it agreed at once that this was better. The paper embargo, too, has been working miracles. Well, not exactly, because the papers that used to clutter up our living room are now resting on the guest bed pending their being tidied up by DH, but at least the guest room is now the only place where loose papers are kept, and just maybe he´ll start filing/culling them soon.
That guest bed is actually one of the items on the decluttering schedule, too. The only time we´ve ever used it was whenever MIL came to visit. As that won´t happen again due to the fact that she doesn´t travel any more, this bed definitely is a big piece of clutter now. Were we to remove it, we´d be richer by two square meters of prime real estate in that room, which in turn might allow us to do some major rearranging in there- or, at least, to remove the laundry rack, when in use, from the living room to the former guest room, which could, then, become the official laundry drying and ironing room.
The problem being that we spent good bucks on a new mattress for that bed just three years ago, and that thing is still almost unused. But if I calculate how much it costs to rent and heat those two square meters of apartment, I guess the poor return of investment for that mattress shouldn´t keep us from doing away with it. After all, we´re still thinking about making the guest room over into a master bedroom, and then that bed would be a major obstacle, too. And the positive effect of removing things has by now been more than amply proven in the living room. If I could motivate DH to cull the contents of his den, maybe we´ll be able to do the redecorating this year, yet. We´ll see.....


Julia

Diminishing surfaces

The decluttering of our apartment has, by now, progressed to a point where all of our existing possessions do have a place to put them away. Which, in turn, means that we are now officially progressing to the next stage of minimalization: finding out which items are, even if they have a home, superfluous, or even attracting clutter accumulations.
The fastest way to pick out those is doing a complete tidy-up and then just wait and see which places are the first to become untidy again.
As it is, anything that has a horizontal surface is a possible clutter magnet. It is too easy sometimes to just drop something off, and leave it there.
One of the usual suspects for that was right in our entrance area. We have had two big chests there, with flat lids that seem to attract bags, newpapers, and such like magic.   The problem being that the bags were supposed to go inside the bigger one, while the smaller of the two serves as a tool chest and is only opened when there´s something to do that requires using a tool, which isn´t that often as a hammer and a screwdriver for everyday jobs are kept outside, and the power drill doesn´t see much use outside of a move in progress.
So, after emptying some bookshelves of their literary payload, I took a measuring tape to that tool chest, and voila- it now fits nicely under one of those bookshelves that I rearranged a bit for the purpose ( thumbs up to those incredibly versatile IKEA shelves).
The other chest now has a big basket on top that serves as a receptacle for bags and such, keeping them contained instead of flying all over the place.
Removing the tool chest also opened up the entrance optically, making it look a lot less cluttered.
Again, having a thing less makes for a better look. The tool chest fits under that bookshelf completely, and as it´s from the same wood as the shelf, blends in to appear almost a part of the shelf.
One other thing I have done is make an agreement with DH to make the living room a paper free zone. That means that no letters, advertising flyers, newspapers and such may be put on the horizontal surfaces of the living room, with the exception of one leather-bound file folder I keep next to the computer that holds bills and such pending their being taken care of. Anything else has to be removed. As DH is such a keeper when it comes to paper stuff, what we agreed on is that the new place for his paper stuff will be the former guest room which now has become his home office and den. Perhaps having to pick it up and take it there might even make him throw some of it out at once....
In any case, I am right now enjoying my paperless living room. And eyeing the tchotchkes on the shelves for potential evacuation candidates.
The less I have to take care of, the better I feel. And it´s rubbing off on DH, too.


Julia

Summer in the Dolomites

Have you ever seen a picture of those grandiose-looking Italian mountain crests? In that case you have a good idea what my weight curve these last weeks has looked like. Daily fluctuations of two to four pounde, up and down. The good part is that they have evened out to a net value of zero, so, I have, on average, been maintaining. The bad part, of course, is that I didn´t lose.
I could start a whinefest of complaining about the heat, stress, and frequent visits with MIL keeping me from losing, but that wouldn´t change the situation either. As it is, I am rather glad that the weight I had lost has stayed off under the given circumstances, and I just keep on doing what I did to condense that, hoping for the best as far as future losses are concerned.
One step forward, one in place is still better than one forward, two back.

Julia

Too many lights?

With both of us working full time outside the house, the time we spend actually inside our flat (and awake) is mainly in the evening and on weekends. As the house we live in is situated at the bottom of a valley, so, the sunlight is blocked by a mountain , and the windows of our living room are facing southwest, that means we usually have to turn on the lights rather early if we want to avoid that cavern feeling. Which, in turn, led to a proliferation of light-emitting stuff, as in lamps, more lamps, candle holders, LED lamps, and more such like occupying the better part of the available horizontal surfaces.
The thing being that several of these illuminating devices weren´t even plugged in, and thus didn´t even provide any illumination, while several others were rarely if ever switched on because the light they gave was too feeble to make a substantial contribution to the overall brightness of the room.
For some time now, that is, since the too-many-chairs epiphany, I had been feeling a vague unease about the things on top of our shelves. I think I found another culprit for the general cluttered feeling of our living room.
Thus, today was lamp reduction day. The LED lamps, which I had originally intended to be spotlighting some artwork on the wall, were the first to be removed. Then I proceeded to the unplugged lamps. One of them is DH´s, an electrified version of a petroleum lamp with a brass foot and orange glass lampshade. It looks pretty enough, but with the original arrangement (that had another narrow glass cylinder inside the lampshade) you couldn´t put fluorescent bulbs in there. I have, tentatively, removed that cylinder and inserted a fluorescent bulb- if DH agrees to that solution, that lamp will be used again. For another of his lamps, I´ll have to get a new lightbulb, too.
Of the candlesticks, I removed all of mine and left only one of DH´s which is rather decorative, too.
Then I added a stronger lightbulb to a bone china decorative lamp, which now shines a lot brighter than it used to, and replaced that where the LED lamps used to be..
The overall effect is, once more, stunning. Less visual clutter, less cables hanging around.
The only downside is that I now have those LED lamps lying around. They were outrageously expensive when we bought them because the technology was very new then, but right now, they just don´t have a home. Still, I´m not ready to throw them out. Perhaps I´ll find another use for them, but until then, they´ll rest inside a storage bin instead of cluttering up my living room. 
Tonight, I´ll see what else I can do to improve the lighting and reduce clutter. But once again, it seems that removing the excess is the way to go.
Isn´t it always.


Julia

A galaxy decluttered

Last week, at work, was once again sheer pandemonium. What with being the only of the colleagues left at the office who wasn´t taking their annual vacation, plus another spell of above-thirty-degrees centigrade heat, I neither had any time left to blog, nor did I have, come Friday, any energy left.
So I allowed myself a Bruno Mars style lazy Saturday (as in Today I´m not doing anything, less the part about the nice girl;)), and on Sunday my spirits had returned enough - and the temperature dropped- to make me go at another decluttering project I had been procrastinating about, namely, those red IKEA boxes I keep on top of a shelf in my living room to contain small stuff and papers that aren´t currently needed but which I don´t want to toss, either.
I took all of them down and went through the contents, culling what I didn´t regard as a keeper any more and shredding the discarded papers at once.
With regards to that, an important lesson- just because I once decided an item should be kept, doesn´t mean that decision won´t be revised by time. Where I live, there´s no real possibility that I´d ever need, say, the heating bills from my former flat again when I´ve moved out twelve years ago, nor the repair bills from my old car or even a ticket for speeding I got five years ago. So, what I do is set an expiration limit and return to the receptacle I put the stuff in after it expires. Yesterday, that meant that the content of one whole box went to the shredder. Which came as quite a surprise, as I had already gone through that stuff years ago and ditched all those old rental contracts from long-ago flats, operating manuals for gadgets I no longer own, and receipts for non-taxable payments completed ages ago. And still there was one box´s worth of paper trash that could be tossed immediately.
Another box turned out to hold the remains of my formerly beloved Star Wars collection. I had, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, been an avid collector of roleplaying books, which I hadn´t ditched because I had still hoped they might have some resales value.
Not so. I checked the prices for those on Momox, and found out that of all the lot, only two had an asking price at all, which was a fraction of what I had paid for them and wouldn´t have been worth the hassle of having to pack and post them. So, the whole lot is now in the recycling bin, making me a lot wiser as to the futility of keeping things in the hope that they might be worth something someday. While there might be someone out there who is as crazy about that stuff as I used to be, I won´t keep the stuff on the off chance of finding him because the now empty box it was in can certainly be put to a better use.
In total, I ended up with two completely empty boxes, and enough free space in some of the others to allow me to relocate some items from my everyday filing cabinet, freeing the latter up a bit.
Once again, getting rid of things of the past will give me space to live my present life. It´s liberation at its best, and I will, whenever I have a sliver of time left, continue to weed out the stuff that´s left.
The best thing being that, due to the shopping embargo I keep, the result of such a session is really free space, not just a chance to stash some more acquisitions. And that is definitely something I can get used to.


Julia

Pillar of salt

That´s what I turned into (well, almost) when I stepped on the scales this morning.
Up four pounds in two days.
No, I didn´t overeat. I didn´t have bread or pasta. The chocolate boxes stayed closed, thank you.
But.
It´s been svelteringly hot hereabouts for several days. So, I´ve been sweating. A lot. Which in turn made me crave salt. And gave me the usual-for-that-kind-of-weather swollen legs.
So, what I saw on the scale this morning... is water retention.Not fat.
A look at my weight curve for the last two years pretty much confirmed the pattern. Whenever outside temperature goes beyond, say, twenty-six degrees centigrade, my weight will plateau or even go up, by around said four to six pounds. Which means weight loss just doesn´t happen in summer, even though I eat less than when it´s cooler. As I do not drink soda at all, and summer dishes at our place are mostly vegetables, that darned water retention is the only explanation for that.
Still, it´s vexing. And scary because that four-pound jump brought me back up above the limit of morbid obesity, which is a place I never wanted to go back to.
The only thing I can do now is keep away from salt, stick to my calories, and wait for the water to go away. Oh, and wear compression stockings. I did that all the time when I was at my top weight, and obviously the edema isn´t going to leave along with the extra weight, so I had hoped for too much when I believed I wouldn´t need the compression any more.
Why I tell you this? Many of us seem to be having similar problems, and put them down to failing at weight loss. Witness the lowering frequency of blog postings of some of us. They regain weight, and hide their bloggy heads in shame.
To avoid despairing,
-journal what you eat. If you ate just 2000 calories on a given day, there´s no way on earth you coukl gain four pounds of fat on that day.
-weigh yourself, before breakfast, after potty and in the nude, daily.
-watch external factors, too. How long did you sleep, was your job especially stressing, did you sit more than usual, or work out more than usual, that kind of thing.

And, most importantly, keep records of your observations. Sometimes, it takes several years of records to discern a pattern.
Like for me today.
The good thing about having discovered that pattern is that now I can stop beating myself up over it, return to my normal (less salted) eating habits, and wait for cooler weather to return along with a visit by the whooosh fairy.
No reason to retreat to the fridge, no reason to give up.

But proof, again, that losing the weight and keeping it off requires watchfulness.


Julia

Library declutter: done

I took advantage of the fact that DH´s out of town over the weekend today and pulled out all of my pocket books that were slumbering in the closed parts of my living room shelves, spreading them out on the floor and then sorting them by author.
And then... I grabbed one of those reusable shopping totes I have that can carry a whole week´s groceries... and proceeded to fill it.
First thing I noticed- I still had "double" editions around. Books I liked and which I had bought both in their original language and in translation. As I don´t really need two of the same book, I ditched the ones that were in worse shape, keeping the better ones..
Next to go: those books that are nowadays available for free via Kindle or Project Gutenberg. I am reading quite a lot of classics, but those well-thumbed Penguin editions of everything from Dickens to Bronte really don´t have to clog up my shelves any more.
Next on the list: the unfinished projects department. Some books look better in the store than when you try to read them. In the past, I used to keep these and add them to my (mental) reading list, as if they´d be less uninteresting at some nebulous point in the future. Meantimes, they, too, took up plenty of space.
Lastly, some books that had turned out to be trash, or that had disintegrated so badly that keeping them simply wasn´t worth it. 
Several hours later (I admit to browsing through the books and getting caught up in some of them) I had not one, but two of those totes full of paper to take to recycling, and enough space liberated in my bookcase that I could put two shelves´ worth of pocket books that used to be out on display into the closed compartments.

The shelves that used to house those will, for the time being, be left empty.
And my living room is one step closer to the minimalist look I want to achieve.



Julia

Poison gifts

Last night, I went for another go at my bookshelves. The worn-out tomes I mentioned in yesterday´s post were the first to go. And then I went at the hardcover shelves.
Now, as I mentioned, I don´t buy hardcover unless -there is no pocketbook edition, or- it´s a book I so like that I absolutely want a more sturdy edition to last forever.
Thus, a lot of what I have there are presents, namely, from my family.
Having somebody else buy your books for you is a tricky business at best, as in "you know my taste quite well- I already own all of these".
At worst, it´s an attempt to make someone over into what the buyer thinks that person should be.
So, from my dear family, there´s a steady influx of politicians´memoirs, travel experiences, books on theater and opera (I´m not a fan) and odd specimens of rubbish, which usually go into the shelves unread, some with their protective foils still on.
Every time I get one of these, I get angry at the thought of what useful thing the money they shelled out for that could have bought instead. I also get frustrated because I have told them quite often what I wanted, and got one of those pieces of trash instead.
To me, that shows that they are buying gifts for a person who doesn´t exist, a person who should conform to their idea of what their child should be like. Needless to say I don´t fill the bill in the least. And I sometimes think the sole purpose of those books is to make me feel guilty that I don´t.
Which doesn´t incline me in the direction of reading them, either.
Sometimes, DH reads one of those books, but there was one particular book that no one in our household would ever read, which was "gifted" when there was a serious falling-out as a slap in the face in gift wrapping. I always think it´s funny how the word "gift" in English means a present and in German it means "poison". This book definitely represented both meanings.
So, I put it into the recycling bin. I am still mulling over the fate of the other ones- they are good for keeping up those middle-class academic household pretensions when you line them up on your shelves, but then again- who watches, and who cares?
What I did, incidentally, find out was that these books are of interest to so few people that the online resales place I went to to find out if I could at least recoup some of the money wasted on that book had an offer of...9 cents. Not even a dime. And definitely not worth spending wrapping material on.
And definitely not worth keeping around just to have my hackles rise every time I come across that book.

I have better uses for the space that took up, and for my peace of mind.


Julia

Past tomes

For every period of my life, there have been books that went with it. Books that were given a plastic sticky foil protective coating, and then carried about just everywhere I was going.
Those books, to me, are synonymous with experiences from my past. They remind me of the time I bought them, the places where I read them.
They also represent, for that particular segment of time, the place I retreated to whenever things got rough in the outside world.
Some of them, even, represented rare displays of affection from people around me who, generally speaking, weren´t really affectionate.
They were books for a special time and a special place in the story of my life.

And, when that time and place was past, they ended up stored away in my bookshelf. Taken along with every move to another town, and lovingly re-shelved when unpacking the crates.
Sometimes, I would take them out, leaf through them, and put them back. Doing so made the feelings from that particular time in the past come to life- the very ones I had, back then, tried not to feel by immersing myself in those books.
They were, mostly, not very pleasant feelings.

Still, it didn´t feel right to let go of those books. They were my history, after all, weren´t they? Even if I had ceased to look at them, even if I had been reading some of them, literally, to pieces. Even if I had to hide them behind other books because their cracked and dingy spines were just too ugly to put in the front row. Even if I would, for some of those, have been acutely embarassed to have somebody know that they had been such a central part of my life once.
Every time I declutter my bookshelves, I am faced with those books. For some of them, I managed to let them go. Others are still hanging around, taunting me.

These are my next decluttering project.
If I ever wanted to read those particular works again, in the wonderful time of the internet and international online book retailers I would, probably, be able to procure another printed or even electronic version within a few days.
The actual tomes, the ones I have kept for so long, aren´t necessary for that. After all, in a book, it is the content that makes it valuable, not the dead tree it is printed on.
My past decluttering actions, when it came to books, have shown me that I almost never even think of re-reading any of the books I already decluttered, and if I do, most of the time I end up saying it is not worth my time and my money to hunt up another copy, anyway.
So why should I keep books I am not likely to re-read anyway? Preserving memories isn´t a good enough reason if they aren´t pleasant memories. And the books I am talking about don´t even make good decorations.

I know what I will be doing tonight....


Julia

The measure of enough

For the longest time, whenever I was bored, I took my boredom shopping. The glitter and sounds of the mall distracted me from feeling lonely. A chat with the salespeople or the person at the cash register made up for the human contacts I did not have otherwise. In a period of my life that preceded a rather nasty separation, hanging out at the mall saved me from having to go home and face the situation there.
Being there, of course, meant acquiring something. Sometimes it meant acquiring anything at all, just for the small surge of feeling good that came with each purchase. And most of the time, it meant acquiring something that I actually did not need.
I liked to drink flavoured teas of different kinds, so I was fair game for each and any offer of tea drinking paraphernalia. Cups, teapots, tea sieves, lacquered containers to put the tea in.
Or clothes- in the search for something that would make me look slim, or at least less fat, no week passed without my dragging home a new garment.
Or books. If I didn´t find anything else to buy, I could always drop by the bookstore.
Slowly but inexorably my flat filled with stuff. Soon, there was more stuff than I could put away. So, I bought shelves, boxes, and others of those products that promise order out of chaos.
But these, too, filled up, and still there was stuff streaming in at a steady rate.
What with stashing stuff in those boxes, just finding any particular item was beginning to be a chore. Having to triple-stack my books in overflowing shelves meant looking for a particular tome became a veritable treasure hunt.
I had reached the point where it was all too often more convenient to purchase another edition of the same item than to hunt up the one I knew I had somewhere.
I had also reached the point where the mere thought of my stuff was sufficient to freak me out. 

And then I separated from my partner of ten years for reasons of terminal incompatibility. That also meant that I had to (gasp) move to a smaller flat.
I spent several weeks culling the contents of, at least, my bookshelves. As for the household goods, it was supposed to be an amicable separation, so I let the ex have a rather generous pick of the contents of the kitchen cupboards. It was, actually, not even making a sizable dent into what I had.
To tell the truth, neither any of the books I tossed, nor any of the plates and cutlery, or kitchen electronics, nor any of the furniture I also let him take away, has ever been missed by me.
The same thing goes for the at least twenty flower pots, the trampoline, or the second set of stereo equipment.
For weeks in advance of the move, the trashcans at our place were overflowing. I also made several runs to the dump, every time dropping off a full carload of stuff.

When I moved the rest of my possessions to my new, smaller flat, I had for the first time in ages whittled them down to a point where I could, if I set up shelves in every room, really put everything *away*, meaning that there wasn´t anything left that did not have a home of its own.
The purging of several boxes full of tchotchkes that had been bought during the former relationship also made the place look tidier and more roomy.

I wish I could say it stayed that way. Alas, my shopping habits had not changed. Slowly, new pieces crept in, again filling the place up. And then there was DH, who moved into my flat with all the trappings of a second household in his wake.
So, I had to make room for these, too. Which meant that all of a sudden, the place was more stuffed than it had ever been, with half of it (or almost) not even mine to decide about whether it should remain....
The feeling of overwhelm that came with that was all too familiar.

Only now, I had that memory of better days when I could and did keep the place tidy.
And I remembered what I had to do to get to that place: toss the excess.
What kept me from starting at once was the belief that I had already let go of everything tossable.

I started out slowly, with the double sets of kitchen stuff. I had to take DH into the boat, of course, and together we picked out the things we had two of and tossed the lesser quality ones. Some gadgets I wasn´t ready to altogether part with, plus some sets of china that held too many memories of the ex, were boxed up in the cellar. (I know that´s only prolonging the inevitable, but at least they were out of my kitchen).

Strangely, or rather, to-be-expectedly, the mess did still not grow smaller. Until the day I reinforced my decluttering with a shopping embargo.
Because what I had done was make some room, and then proceed to fill it up again with new stuff. Only when I stopped shopping for new stuff, did I really start to generate free space in our flat.
I also started to question my conviction that I had nothing more to toss.
Life changes. So do the things we need for our present lifestyle.
I used to serve food on large-diameter plates. I found out that was one of the reasons I got fat. The large-diameter plates went out of use, and on to the trashcan.
I used to own at least ten different sets of trekking poles because I needed them to walk. I can walk without crutches again, so I kept just two sets of poles for DH and myself, should we ever want to go trekking.
I used to wear plenty of make-up to bolster my then-fragile self esteem. I ceased doing so when I started to lose that excess weight. Today, I keep one set of makeup for the case of there being some event to attend, the rest has been tossed.
My teapot collection, while it´s still rather sizeable, has been freed from all the specimens that would drip, or be too difficult to handle when full.. And it´s been quite a while since I last bought a new one. 
Of the china we use now, there are no more than two sets of each- not six because there might be visitors.

The best thing about all this is that there is finally free space in our flat, and it´s growing along with our decluttering.
By now, whenever I consider a purchase, I decide up front where the thing will go. If there´s no space left, something else would have to go- which quite often leads to the discovery that I am not ready to give up the old piece for the new, which means the new thing stays unbought.
I found out that works best with shoes and handbags...:).

I intend to continue on my decluttering mission, to the point where the things I do not need which are inside my household will be outside my household.
Sometimes, that requires brutal honesty with oneself . It requires exposing the fantasy selves whose equipment is stashed away under the bed or inside the wardrobe. It requires admitting to myself which hobbies, or activities, that I once thought would be great to do, have either never become a part of my life, or I stopped doing them many years ago. It requires admitting to myself that I have grown older. It requires admitting to myself which clothes, or accessories, are just a bit too... youthful for someone approaching middle age (I refuse to admit I might be there already).
And it requires facing all of those insecurities that I tried to hide behind all this stuff.

Because stuff may cover up insecurity on the outside. But it never cures it.

So, I keep on decluttering.And finding room to live the life I want, without being dragged down by the stuff of the past.


Julia

MIA in the sauna

So, what do you need for a sauna?  Heat, of course, plus those cold-water showers. Both of which we had aplenty last week. Top that off with plenty of work, plus my well-known aversion to too-hot weather, and you get.... one lazy blogger who has been MIA for over a week.
I can´t even promise to better myself as the next week is promising to be just like this one.

Over the weekend, I finally got around to downloading the most recent photographs from DH´s camera. Most recent, in that case, meaning back to the middle of last year, so, before my latest bigger weight loss.
Which meant that I could, for the first time, take a good look at what I look like when I´m no longer obese.
Actually, looking at those pix felt a bit eerie, because I haven´t yet reached the point where my internal representation of myself has caught up with how far I recondensed myself. So, it was more like, who is that slim female wearing my clothes?
Which, of course, made me look up a few of the old pictures at top weight. Seeing them today, I still can hardly believe that I did, at the time, manage to avoid the realization how fat I was looking. But that´s exactly what I did. The pictures where there were impossible-to-miss rolls of fat around my waist and a triple chin, or the ones that definitely showed my face looking like the full moon, used to be what I zapped by, or even accused the innocent camera of having done something to make me look wider.

It´s good to be rid of those fatgoggles.
Because I mustn´t ever stop being watchful if I don´t want to go back there.


Julia

Shopping the gaps

The changing of the seasons, for me, meant, for the longest time, shopping.
First, making a tour of every clothes and shoe selling establishment in town to find out what the most recent must-haves were, then the acquisition of at least five big plastic totes full of garments.
At home, then, the attempt to squeeze those into the overflowing closets along with last year´s bounty, and that of the years before that. As it was, most of those clothes never even got worn because they had been pushed to the back of the closet, wedged in with way too many of their brethren.
And still I had that experience of standing in front of said overflowing closets uttering the immortal words "I have nothing to wear".
As I have been decluttering those garments that had become decidedly too big with recondensing myself, the first gaps appeared on the clothes racks. Now I haven´t finished recondensing yet, so any garment I´d buy right now would probably not fit me at goal weight, anyway. And that meant that those gaps were not filled back up by new acquisitions.
Guess what, I didn´t have to go bare. I didn´t even have to raise the frequency with which I´m doing laundry. The clothes I own today are completely sufficient for my needs, even though there are maybe half as many as I used to have. And by now, most of them get to see regular wear, too.
By now, I have successfully recondensed the greater part of my extra baggage, and come down to clothes sizes in the normal range. There´s  a high probability that the clothes I have would mostly still be wearable down to goal or at least close to it. So, this year, there was no shopping expedition (excepting one summer blazer I got on sale). Instead, I shopped my closet.
By now, I´ve grown so used to those gaps between garments on the rack that I don´t even have the feeling of missing something any more. Partly, that may be due to the fact that my body, by now, isn´t that fat any more. I feel better in it, and the frantic search for garments that would somehow camouflage my obesity is a thing of the past.
Besides, what with my limbs no longer squeezed against each other by the rolls of fat that had developed with weight gain, I have noticed that it takes me much longer to wear out a garment, so my existing stack will last me even longer.
For the time when I reach goal, my intention is to keep the number of garments small, replacing clothes as necessary but not piling them on the way I used to.
Not only will that save me from spending a substantial slice of my income on clothes I won´t even wear, or wear too rarely to justify their price, it´s eco-friendly, too.
And for the first time, there´s no need for pangs of conscience because I´d been wasting my time, my money, and my closet space on items I did not need or use.


Julia

That´s...bananas!

Just when I thought I´d seen it all....
but what I saw in a shop yesterday about topped it all...
The common banana, in its usual state, is in my experience a soft, easily edible food item. It comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.You can bite into it, cut it, or squash it with a fork. No special tools are required to enjoy one.
Or so I believed. Until I set eyes on...the Banana Cutter.
Yup, you heard me right. The thing looks like a pair of scissors with seven sets of blades, and it promises to deliver six perfectly spaced slices of banana with one cut. The price for this special tool? Twice what they demanded for a set of four kitchen knives that sat right next to it on the shelf.
So they expected patrons to buy something that
-had absolutely no practical value,
-could do only one job, and that probably not even well,
-would need a complicated cleanup after use,
-and was, as a unitasker, ridiculously overpriced when compared to the simple-to-clean, more versatile, and absolutely-sufficient-for-the-job-of-turning-bananas-into-slices humble knife next to it.

What struck me was that there were already some empty spaces on that shelf.

There really were people who were ready to spend their money on something like that. Enough money to pay for a full meal in a restaurant, and more than the average worker hereabouts earns in a full hour of work. Which means that whoever buys one of these is ready and willing to sacrifice more than a full hour of their life for the sake of acquiring such a useless piece of clutter.

I just doubt that they make that realization.
Calculating how long you need to work for the price of something you want to buy, a la "Your money or your life", is something that doesn´t come naturally. But when you look at it this way, it sometimes gets easier to avoid things that are destined to be clutter form the start.


Julia

Hot pants reloaded

Losing roundabout seventy pounds of fat has by now taken me down six clothes sizes. The most amazing thing about that being that I used to need a bigger size in bottoms than in tops. Not so any longer- I´m down to a German size 21 in pants, and size 22 in tops and jackets, which doesn´t cease to amaze me- I would never have expected my lower half to shrink further than my upper one.
Not that I don´t enjoy that, but the recondensing of my fat bottom has gone so fast that I didn´t get too much wear out of the size 22 pants I bought when I needed that size. Thus, these ended up in the wardrobe, almost unworn. I had tried the boil-and-shrink treatment on two light-colored pairs to no avail. But I still had two other pairs of dark denims, which I had hesitated to wash at the highest setting because I was afraid they might get too washed-out.
Still, having spent the money on them just to have them relegated to the back of the closet kept vexing me. At their original size, they had become so baggy as to be practically unwearable.
So, this weekend I finally bit the bullet and threw them in the washing machine, at the highest possible setting.
Guess what, these did shrink. Quite exactly by the equivalent to one and a half clothes size. Which makes them, right now, the best-fitting denims I own.
As I still tend to wear through the inside of my pants legs (I have done that even before getting fat, it´s something to do with the way I walk), I had been watching my only pair of size 21 denims with some apprehension for the appearance of that dreaded surface of worn-through cloth.
Now, I have three pairs of dark denims that fit me, which means that I will be able to forgo pants shopping for awhile yet. Actually, I am now saving my size 21 jeans because if I do recondense by another size, I´ll just give them the same treatment and voila- size 20 jeans! All for the price of a load of laundry.
Perhaps I should try to shrink the lighter ones some more, too.
The thing being that I would, formerly, just have given away those perfectly good pants and bought new ones in the smaller size.
But this is so much better.
Waste not, want not.


Julia

Meltdown time

Summer has finally arrived, as usual this year, with a twenty-degree jump in temperature. Not my kind of weather, really, especially when the heat arrives so suddenly. Just where did they put those slow temperature rises from April to June this year? That way, my body could at least adapt to the heat.
On the weight loss front, no news, really. My weight has been dithering around that ten-kilo notch for over a month, with a slight (four pounds from the lowest point I had reached) regain. And what with the summer heat, I can almost count on there being some bloating and water retention to go with it. Oh well. The good part is that I´m still below morbid obesity, and I´ll have to be more careful about avoiding carbs if I want to stay there. The problem being that I did have unusually strong cravings for carbs during the last weeks. I don´t know if it´s the change of seasons (had the exact same thing going on last year, and my weight loss stalling for about six months), but I fully intend to fight it this time.
Keep calm and carry on...


Julia

The case for ebooks

As I mentioned before, I have to ride by train quite often.
And I am what they call a bookworm.
As our local library is, er, rather badly stocked, that used to mean buying the books I wanted to read. WHich in turn meant an ever-growing accumulation of dead tree with words on it in my living-room.
Now, some books for me are definite keepers. They get read and re-read, cherished, and kept.
Unfortunately, even if I´m careful, there´s just so much life in a pocketbook edition. The paper yellows, and at some point, the binding comes apart. Many books aren´t even sold in hardcover, and those which are sell for prohibitively high prices. It´s not unusual for a hardcover to fetch four to five times what the pocket edition might cost. So, buying the hardcover is absolutely restricted to perennial known favorites.
My book collection, therefore, is mostly pocket editions. The only way to keep these without cluttering up the look of my living room is behind closed doors, and I have just so many closed compartments in my IKEA shelf.
The answer to that is culling. Ever so often, I remove the books I no longer read, the ones that are outdated, and the ones that have become too dingy to openly display. Still, there are plenty of open shelves with books in them, making the room appear untidy. Not the leather-backed, gold-lettered books that are as decorative as they are entertaining. Just the usual cheaply-bound motley stuff.
Enter the ebook.
What kept me from embracing those earlier was that I believed you had to buy an ebook-reader to be able to enjoy them. At the prices they demand for these, I haven´t yet been ready to splurge on one. But now they (internationally operating internet book dealer whose name I won´t mention) have an application for your ordinary windows based PC that allows you to read their electronic goods, and that app´s for free!
What´s more, a lot of classic books can also be downloaded for free. Add to that the regular specials where you can buy an ebook for a steeply discounted price for a short period of time, and the fact that the ebook edition of almost any book is cheaper than the paper one, plus if I were to ever buy the ebook reader of that company my downloaded books will follow me there, too.
I´m in luuuuurve!
Plus, as those books take up no more physical space than the netbook I read them on (which is preexisting), my reading habit no longer contributes to the clutter in our living room.
I am, actually, successively acquiring the electronic editions of my favorite books- perhaps my library will be almost exclusively digital someday. And my bookcases a lot emptier. After all, as long as I d not invite visitors that I could make an impression on with overflowing bookshelves, what good are they?
I used to equate possession of books with being cultured. Owning books on many topics meant I was a person of many interests. Having a big library of the classics meant I had a good education.
In the age of digital media, that reasoning no longer cuts it. Even the textbooks of information I need on the job are available online.
The wall-high bookshelves, therefore, will probably be no longer necessary one day.
And that will be the day I am a step closer to a minimalist living rooom.


Julia