And the stress goes on...

I hadn´t really believed that I would be able to finish my work in time before I´m officially on vacation, had I? The number of COMAFUS (completely monumental administrative f...ups)  that had to be taken immediate care of has been staggering these last two weeks, and the pileup of files that need taking care of before I can close up shop for the year has been rising proportionally. So, no weekend. No preparing for the holidays at leisure. Instead, I am chained to my desk for the time being, racing the clock for everything that needs doing to be done. So, no Robinson act (he had all his work done by Friday...), but the one thing I had wanted to avoid, namely the end-of-year dash for dear life. 

Weightloss, under those conditions, has been impossible. The extra stress hormones that restricting what I eat would have triggered would probably have driven me over the edge of a burnout. So, no restricting. I have been eating, unrestrictedly, to the point of satiety. Carbs, too, for their tranquilizing effect. And I am paying for it with another two-pound gain already. 88.7 kilos.

WTF. 

Actually, I have to take it easy with the late working hours. If I get less than seven hours of shuteye, my concentration and everything goes downhill fast, so, no all-nighters except for the last one, after which I can sleep a bit longer than usual. 

Browsing on Amazon, I stumbled upon the works of one Matt Stone. He´s critical of the whole Paleo movement, and of dieting in general, claiming that undereating (or eating the wrong kinds of food) for a lengthy period will downregulate one´s metabolism, by way of a continuously activated stress reaction, because -as he says- ketosis involves the secretion of adrenaline (at least that´s how I understand it) and you can run yourself into a bad case of adrenal fatigue by long-term dieting. 

Unfortunately, the way he writes it it sounds a lot more stringent than what I just wrote. And the list of symptoms he offers, I could turn into a checklist of what is not feeling quite right about my body right now. 

The scary part is his solution. Unlimited eating. Whatever and whenever one desires. He claims that the body will finally self-regulate, even if it does at first gain weight. 

If my body were able to self-regulate I´d not drag around 44 pounds of extra blubber in the first place. Then again, I have been down another 20 pounds already, with the regain obviously being driven by the extra stress I had this year, as if dieting stress plus workload stress had been too much for me. 

Perhaps that explains the infamous weight switch being activated after the flooding. 

Now if I knew how to make my body stop gaining without toppling myself over into a burnout... 

I´ll be having a two-week vacation over the holidays. Perhaps that will help. 

I´d rather be losing weight than losing the fight against my body...

And if Mr. Stone´s premise is valid, I´ll be losing the fight. 

I am scared of gaining it all back. 

Julia 

Busy-ness as usual

The number of things that need doing before the holidays seems to be rather highish this year. 

Of course, the hurried feeling engenders cravings for exactly those things I should not eat when recondensing. Put the monthly female complaint on top of that and what you get is one very hungry and very cranky girl. 

This morning´s WI: 87,3 kilos, so a slight up, but that is probably the baggage the monthly visitor usually brings along. 

I got myself that second thermos cup for my shakes yesterday so I can take two servings of the stuff along without having to expose myself to that BPA stuff that probably leaks from the plastic-coated old container I had used before. 

What I have already noticed is that there is probably something in those shakes that acts as a diuretic as I find myself having to "go" quite more often than what I am used to.  Then again, I´m not complaining if that means I get rid of retained water, too. 

Next week, my car is due again for the biannual checkup. I just hope they don´t find anything more than the things I already know about. Having to bring the car in at the repair shop and pick it up again is a major annoyance in the last week before the holidays, but there was no way I could have done that earlier. 

Oh well. 

Hanging on with the help of God...

Julia

Stop Wa(i)sting Time

The sight of those 89 kilos on the scale at the beginning of the week has been a much-needed wake-up call. I simply cannot afford to procrastinate on getting my body out of gaining mode and back to recondensing, because the task is getting harder with every day I allow the regain to continue. 

What I have done the last days is going on a round of meal replacement shakes only during the daytime, plus my usual bacon-and-eggs breakfast and reduced portions of what is for dinner. No bread, as little carbs as possible. 

The reward is a two-kilogram loss by today, down to 87 kilos. 

I know, the powdered stuff isn´t optimal. But if it manages to really turn that weight switch back to losing, I´ll bear with the disadvantages. 

As it is, I have started to prepare those shakes at home and bring them to the office in a thermos, which  means that I won´t have to fight the temptation of getting something else to eat just because I´m not feeling like having to clean up the shaker afterwards (which at my office means having to carry that thing all along the corridor to the tea kitchen at the remote end). Sometimes the thought of having to do that was enough to drive me to the cookie jar instead. 

If I do not do something I know I ought to, it pays to look at the things that make it harder to do it and, if possible, to remove the obstacles. 

In this case, that meant looking for suitable containers to carry the shakes in. One wide-mouth aluminium bottle was still sitting in my cupboard, so that one is used for one portion of the shakes, and then I found a sale on some nifty stainless steel (so no BPA-containing coating) thermos cups originally intended for coffee. They are, in contrast to most coffee-to-go cups one sees, absolutely spillproof, meaning they may be thrown into my bag every which way without emptying their contents all over whatever I carry in there. One of them is already in use, and I plan on getting another one over lunch break (they still are pretty expensive, so I wanted to try out one first before paying for two of them). 

If I ever were to stop having to carry protein shakes to the office, they can be returned to their originally intended use as coffee containers. 

In any case, if I bought pre-prepared shakes of the same brand I now have as powder that must be mixed up, I´d have to pay two euros for one single bottle. The powder comes at seven euros for a ten-portion supply. So the new thermos cups would pay their way within less than three weeks. Besides, I could even go back to preparing my own shakes including fruit and berries and bring them to the office. As I have no blender at the office, fruit as an ingredient was not possible for any shakes prepared there. Being able to carry a full workday´s supply of prepared shakes means being able to incorporate real food into what I can eat there. 

And the thermos cups are small enough not to become a nuisance by themselves, so it is less likely that I might discontinue carrying them to the office than with a single big container. 

DH will be out of town for a few days next week, which means that I can do a full day´s worth of just the shakes without any additional foods. Perhaps that will get my recondensing switch back to "execute".

Never give up hope.

Julia

Results Typical

My weight has been doing somersaults again. Yesterday I saw 89 kilos which is a number I had hoped I would never see again, meaning as it does a full 10 kilogram regain. Today, I was back down at 87,6 kilos, which is still way too much. 

Dragging around 20 superfluous kilograms of fat is wearing me down quite a bit. My back and my knees are once more screaming in protest, which means that I am even less inclined to use the stairs at the office. It also does a number on my sleep as I find it increasingly difficult to find a position that does not hurt. The resulting fatigue comes on top of that which dragging around all of that blubber gives me anyway. 

Of course, as usual, there´s a bad case of December fever going round, meaning that the number of urgent things to be dealt with has skyrocketed. I don´t know if I can get everything done before the holidays require my presence with family. Not a good thing. And not conducive to being able to restrict my eating either. 

One third of what I had lost has by now found me again. If I look at statistics about the average success rate of weight loss, I am still ahead. But if I could not stop the regain, I´d be back among the "typical results" very soon. 

So what- cut out the carbs, step up my water (or unsweetened tea) intake, and hope for the best. The more drastic measures will have to wait until after Christmas. Stepping into the new year that far above morbid obesity was not what I planned on. But if I want to stay functional, the drastic measures I´d obviously need to shock my body back into losing mode are out of the question. 

The interesting part is that I can precisely date the point where the maintenance I had achieved suddenly became a rapid regain. 

Namely, the first week of June. The time when we had the inundation, were off the grid and had to subsist on bread and fast food for two weeks. 

Had I known then what would ensue, I would have gone on a two-week fast instead. 

What still stymies me is that these two weeks seem to have turned a switch in my body from "lose" to "gain", and that any attempts I have made since to switch that back again seem to have had absoultely no effect whatsoever on the rate of regain. 

Half a pound a week, on average. Like clockwork. My Fat Watch curve goes up practically in a straight line.

And it´s not as if I had been on a six-month binge. 

What with the fatigue I am constantly fighting, I am even afraid to lower my intake further lest I make that worse by missing out on nutritients. 

For the most time, I actually stay below the recommended daily intake for my size/gender/weight/ activity level. 

If the body really is an accountability machine, mine got damaged during the flood. 

It´s not easy to not give up the hope that it might still be repairable. 

Julia

Backing down slowly

Monday morning´s WI gave me a fierce determination to stop this. I took the chance of DH being out of town and embarked on what was essentially a three-day intermittent fast, as in no food before six p.m. and no food after ten p.m. The result per today: back down by about three pounds. 87.1 kilograms. But I know I am by no means home free. 

DH´s back, so I will have to contend with having to partake in breakfast and dinner. Of course, he is being supportive. He also chides me whenever he thinks I am going too low with my intake. Which means that the kind of restriction I can do when he´s not around is not possible. 

I know. Once more, I am not being kind to my body. But, dammit, if I had a child or a dog who would not obey me I would punish them, too. And I am not going to take any insubordinance from that bag of flesh any more, either. It stops gaining, or I stop, as far as possible, feeding it. 

Of course, there is a minimum requirement of food if I want to keep functioning. And there are those awful holidays ahead, complete with having to cook and visit MIL. Both of which I don´t really fancy at this stage. The usual end-of-year snafus at the office get on top of that. 

Seeing the four-month-at-one-view calendar in my office and the glimpse of January it already shows, I only hope that I will at least, until my b-day in March, be back below morbid obesity, normal weight being absolutely out of reach. 

I never would have thought that those two weeks in June when I had, perforce, to eat carbohydrate-y stuff like bread would throw such a wrench into my recondensing project. I should have fasted instead, because two weeks of a growling stomach would not have been as bad as regaining twenty pounds. 

The 20-20 vision of hindsight...

Julia

Skyrocketing

Two full years. That´s what I have been thrown back by now. 

The number I saw when weighing myself this morning is one I last saw in November 2011. 88.4 kilograms.195 pounds. After getting down to 174 pounds last year, that means I have gained back 21 pounds. Almost ten kilograms. Or, in other words, almost a third of what I had recondensed. Most of it within the last six months. My Fat Watch curve is going up almost vertically. 

The scary part is that I haven´t binged. No eating to the point of being stuffed. Just eating what I used to believe was normally. 

I have no idea why my body has decided it wants those pounds back. 

What I have noticed is that the aches are coming back. Hips, feet, knees hurting. Shortness of breath when climbing the stairs. 

If I keep gaining at that rate, having recondensed myself would be history within just another year. 

Definitely not what I want. 

The search for what causes the regain does unearth a few things that have changed from the time I was recondensing. 

My workload has been hitting an all-time high. The private life stressors, such as eldercare, have increased. The air pollution problem at my office has become worse. 

Is my body wanting to buffer me against all that? And if it is, what could I do to deal with the extra stress other than become fatter? 

The dominating feature of what I feel like health-wise is the chronic fatigue that has me falling asleep in front of the TV almost every night. On some days it´s so bad that I fall asleep at the office with my head on the keyboard. Even when I have just gotten up from a full night´s sleep you could put me in a horizontal position, tell me to close my eyes and I would be fast asleep within minutes. 

Being able to sleep until I am no longer tired is the number one item on my wish list. 

Unfortunately, what with having to go to work and the long-distance care of an old woman who has to be reminded by phone of taking her medicine, which means the first phone call of the day by eight a.m. and the last by ten p.m. that is not in the cards for a long time. 

I have been tracking my sleep via my fitbit, and rarely do I get more than seven hours of sleep. What I would probably need is eight to nine. 

But tell that to DH who is not ready to push bedtime forward beyond eleven, twelve p.m., or beyond the late night news. 

I am actually glad about having my Grandfather´s easy chair to sit in and doze off while DH is feeding his TV addiction. Going to bed instead would have him either irritated or worried, and talking at me until I were wide awake again in either case. 

Even when he´s out of town he insists on calling me after ten p.m. and gets annoyed when I´m not enthusiastic enough about his call. 

No, I am not angry at him. I´m just bone tired. 

And when I´m tired, my body screams for energy, aka food. 

Not a good place to be when I want to recondense myself. 

The studies that link lack of sleep with weight gain are spot on, obviously.

So what do I do to get myself back on track and stop that regain? 

Sleep more, obviously. 

Eight hours per night would be nice. 

Eat less, as obviously. 

And watch out for portion creep.

The most recent addition to my kitchen is a set of stainless measuring cups and spoons to help me measure and track my food. Living in Germany where everything is metric makes it difficult to use the tracking apps sometimes if amounts are only given by the cup or teaspoon. 

As it is, using those measuring spoons has given me a nasty surprise when I compared them to what I used to employ for measuring. Namely, the tablespoon I used to measure fats in holds twice what the calibrated tablespoon measure holds. Same thing with the cup measure and the teaspoon one.

So, I have been consuming twice as much as I thought even when I thought I was measuring everything. 

Time to pick myself off the floor, dust myself off and get back on track. Before that trip on a fireworks rocket run wild takes me back to where I never again want to be. 

Julia

White Flag

Today´s WI: 86.9 kgs. So, my weight is still rising. EIght kilograms, in total, gained back. 

Saying I am frustrated about what my body does doesn´t cover it. 

Then again, those last weeks had a number of Very Urgent and Very Stressful experiences. The kind that makes memories of old VU and VS experiences come back full force, experiences which I still rate among the worst things that have happened to me and which were, without wanting to go any deeper into them, at the root of my first descent into binge eating disorder and morbid obesity.

At those times, it´s all I can do to keep functioning and try not to let my PTSD get the better of me. 

And, as I found out to my own dismay, food still is my coping tool of choice. So I did have some cookies, I did have some of those mint-filled chocolates, I did have bread spread with grass-fed butter and a bit of peanut butter on top. I stopped counting calories, too. 

All in all, there were about seven or eight ´days I went absolutely over my maintenance calorie allotment. The two-pound gain tells me how far. 

But there´s something else. When the situation came, I allowed myself those foods, consciously, and knowing that anything that would raise my serotonin levels would be beneficial to me. 

The positive part was that for the first time in such a situation, I was able to stop eating before I had finished up every last morsel of food before me. I opened a box of cookies and ate just half of them. I had two slices of bread and left the rest of the pack intact. And I felt satisfied after that. 

There used to be a time when nothing short of running out of food or reaching the physical limits of what my stomach could hold would have stopped me. 

So, perhaps, I have become better at this after all. 

The situation will last for another week or so, and then maybe I´ll be able to climb back on the wagon.

The price of passing through this time is knowing that I definitely won´t be normal-weighted when I turn fifty next year. I´d be glad if I managed to get back down to not being obese. As it is, when the turbulences have passed, I intend to do a week-long all-protein fast to turn around my metabolism again. 

At least, I want to get back below obesity. ASAP.

Julia

Stuck and Hungry

The curve of my weight has been steadily climbing for about four months. Actually, when I look at the long-term curve, my weight is climbing as fast as it came off two years ago. 

And I am continuously hungry. 

Strangely, what I am jonesing for isn´t the high carb stuff. It´s lipids. Fat. Grease.

As in bacon, butter, greasy sausages. 

When I grew up, that stuff was definitely not a part of everyday fare. My mother had had a bout with hepatitis C, and the medics had advised her to avoid anything fatty. So, family meals were definitely low-fat. 

And that was what I mostly stuck to, with the exception of a spaghetti aglio e olio phase I went through. Eating Low Fat was not difficult for me. 

So why should I suddenly want to stuff myself with grease-dripping fried bacon? 

Or fry my morning eggs with an extra pat of butter on top of the bacon?

Maybe it is an aftereffect of the flooding experience and losing all of my food stores in a single day. When my binge eating disorder was at its worst, the only way for me not to go bingeing on fast food was if I knew that I had plenty of food in the house. Which was one of the reasons why the losses were so big when the freezer stopped working. Keeping my food stores well filled meant security. Having them destroyed so brutally might have upset the precarious balance I had reached in dealing with food and eating. 

Or it might be my flirt with going paleo. Having things like bacon suddenly on the list of allowed foods might have been more than I could handle. 

As it is, there is still enough human fat on my body that there cannot be a medical reason for the fat cravings I experience. 

I definitely do not need to administer any lipids to my body, apart what would be needed for getting my fat-soluble vitamins in. 

And I do not need to provide my body with the extra calories all that fatty stuff brings. 

On top of it all, my vision problems haven´t cleared up. Today, I suddenly found myself experiencing what the French term "triplopie", meaning that I saw, not a double but a triple image in my right eye. As I have been born legally blind on the left eye, that meant I had to stop working and call it a day. 

One probable cause of that phenomenon, according to the web, would be a developing cataract. 

What I am suspecting is the air pollution problem we have at the office, as the problems only happen when I am there. 

At home, not even after a full day´s worth of reading and surfing the web, they do not happen. Nor do they in the morning, after having been away from the office overnight. 

As I do not think a cataract would cause a non-permanent impairment, the on-off nature of the problem makes me search the cause in the place where I experience the problem. 

Sadly, telecommuting isn´t an option when you have to work with paper files that are circulating in and out in a single day. 

Perhaps I should bring one of my warmest sweaters to work and keep the windows open as long as possible. And set my electronic displays to a bigger letter size so as to avoid straining my eyes.

Weight this morning: 86.2 kilograms. 

Feeling like as many tons avoirdupois. 

Julia

Sorely needed

October 3rd is a legal holiday hereabouts. It was also the last day before a predicted stretch of rainy and cold weather.

So, DH and myself decided to take advantage of it. 

We rode to a neighbouring city that is situated in a river valley, surrounded by steep hills, and there we went for a long hike. As such things go, one should never underestimate the number of hills to climb before reaching one´s destination. Which is what happened to us. Instead of a leisurely stroll, we found that we had to climb steeply upwards, which made for a good bit of exercise. My fitbit afterwards told me to the equivalent of 94 storeys climbed...and about eleven kilometers (some seven miles) distance covered. 

I know, regular hikers would scoff at that, but for me who has been lacking way too much exercise this year, it´s a reason for a bit of pride. The sore legs I have on the day after are proof that I really did get exercise on that hike.

One surprise awaited me when coming home. We hadn´t had lunch, so I felt ravenous. But when dinner was ready, I could only eat half my usual portion before feeling sated. 

There must be something to the theory that exercise suppresses the appetite.

Weight this morning: 84.9 kgs (187 pounds). 

I keep watching the carbs, and hope that the weight rend has changed back to "downwards" again.

I lost too much time on this stupid regaining thing already. 

Julia

Accepting What Is

I won´t enter my fifth decade as a normal-weighted person, no more than I entered my second, third or fourth. That is, by now, glaringly obvious. 

I haven´t even been able to stop gaining, even though is has slowed down, at least. But that body of mine has decided not to react to any attempts at getting it to start recondensing again. 

Almost 86 kilos, and back to a BMI of 31.4. 

Of course, I do search for what it might be that makes my body cling to that weight. Overeating it isn´t. I haven´t been eating beyond the point of being stuffed even once. No desperate binges like when I first gained all that weight.

If there is such a thing as an innate wisdom of our bodies, why does mine decide that it better be a lot heavier than what I would like to be living in?  It´s true, I have a stressful job and a busy private life. But what good are almost forty pounds of extra weight to drag around when it comes to coping with everything? 

Admittedly, being fat was like having an elephant´s hide suit of armor. Losing some of that fat meant feeling more exposed. But by what subconscious quirk should I ever want the pain that came with the weight back? And I´m not just talking about the physical pain of obesity, the feet tha kept hurting after a few steps, the back that kept aching, or all the things I could not do when fat. I´m also talking about the lack of respect, the sneers, the invisibility. 

My head doesn´t want that all back. Then why should my body? 

I am still at about 24 percent less weight than I started out at. Compared to statistics that claim you´re already a success if you keep just ten percent off, I am still ahead. But I do have to find out what really drives this regain before I slip back even further. 

Right now, I haven´t got a clue. 

Keep on keeping on....

Julia

Roller coaster

Up two, down two. Or up three, down one, up one, down one, up two...

No, I have not been pigging out on vanilla pudding or fries. I haven´t eaten any fast food. I have not been eating myself into a food coma. And I haven´t, at least that I noticed, eaten more than I did while I was losing. Nor did I miss any things in the morning that were in my fridge when I went to sleep. 

Still. I have gained over three kilos in the last three months. 

The regain started when I had been forced to eat more carbs while we were off the grid due to the flood in June. After that, it´s been an uphill fight, first against the carb cravings induced by having to eat bread for a week, and by now against my body having switched back into gaining mode. 

I did have a similar experience two years ago. Back then, it was carelessness about my diet that started it. Being pushed into an upward spiral by a natural desaster makes for quite an irony. Mind you, while we were off the grid and without clean water I could not cook. I could not store food that had to be kept cool. I could not wash any vegetables. I honestly don´t know what else I could have eaten than what I did, unless I had been going out to eat every single time which just wasn´t in the budget after losing all of my food stores because the freezer wasn´t working while electricity was off.And don´t get me started about roughing it- there´s a difference between being outside in the clean outdoors, with plenty of space for a campfire to cook on and clear water nearby, or being stuck in a city apartment with no gas or electricity and a safety warning for the drinking water out. What I ended up relying on was highly stockable, ready-to-eat things. If you guess that means carbohydrates as in cookies and highly processed foods, you´re right. 

The damages I am fighting now are ample proof as to how harmful that stuff is to me. 

I had so hoped not to become one of the statistics  that claim most successful losers gain it all back. 

As per now, I am still within a range others would call maintenance. But I know that what I am really in is the danger zone. I will have to keep working at getting out of it. 

And carbs are the first thing that will have to go. 

Julia

And The Ride Goes On ...

This morning´s WI: 86 kilograms. Over two pounds up from yesterday in spite of having a slight case of diarrhea which ought to flush out any retained water, too. And in spite of having eaten below my calorie limit. 

I don´t understand what is happening. Scary doesn´t begin to describe it. The last time my weight skyrocketed like this, I was on medications, and the gain stopped as soon as I stopped the meds. Only right now, I´m not taking any. And the extra rest my staycation offers should not have such an extreme effect, either. 

I have, by now, reached the point where my pants begin to get too tight, and the red belt I bought just a month ago is cutting uncomfortably into my belly. 

I don´t think I´ll be normal weighted by my birthday any more. With what´s happening right now, I´d be glad if I managed to get back below morbid obesity until then. 

Drat. 

Sometimes there just isn´t any good news. 

Julia

Fresh paint, fresh start

When a weight-loss blogger drops off the face of the blog world for several weeks, it usually is not a good sign. I do not make an exception there. This morning´s WI: 85 kgs. 187 pounds. Or, in other words, 6 kilograms in total regained from my lowest weight over a year ago. 13 pounds that have joined the 25 I would have had left until goal. I certainly did not intend to find them again, ever. But it is what happened. 

What that regain really was was my body crying foul over the workload and stress I forced it to bear those last months. Nights with about four hours of sleep, days in the office where I wished for a pair of extra arms to handle the demands coming on, or where I was barely able to work because my eyes were strained so badly I almost could not decipher what I had on my screen before me. And continuous hunger. If the body runs out of energy it demands to be fed. Which I did, because collapsing at my desk would have been infinitely worse than regaining a few pounds. 

When I realized I was headed for a burnout, I have taken two weeks off my job. 

After cleaning out my office, of course. But that was half as bad because I knew that I would be allowed to sleep it off on the next day, and the assurance of knowing I did complete all of my projects was well worth sacrificing the better part of a night for. 

So, I´ve been home for several days already, sleeping, reading and relaxing. 

I also went to the optician´s to have my prescription checked. As I had already guessed, I do need new glasses because the old ones aren´t strong enough any more. Another expense that wasn´t budgeted for, but if I am able to see better that is definitely worth spending money on. 

As we will not be going away for the vacations, I am using the free time to catch up on postponed projects at home, too. Today, that meant getting some non-drip wall paint and rollers and paint one part of the corridors in our apartment that was in dire need of some whitewashing. Which I did this morning. For a desk jockey like myself, any project that yields instantly visible results is a good project. 

So, I am sitting here satisfied with what I did this morning. 

The weight, of that I am certain, will come off again in its own time once the stress wears off. 

Taking care of my body. Noticing when I demand too much from it. One day I will learn to do that early. But at least this time, I pulled the brakes before the point of collapse. 

And now, I´ll go on enjoying my staycation. 

Julia

Eff stands for frustration

While the heat wave has been slowly ebbing off, the water retention that came with it hasn´t. 

Quite the contrary. I have been having trouble with my circulation since last week, and my weight has been, during that week, gone up by some 300 grams ( that´s 0,7 pounds) A DAY. Every effing day. 

Which catapults me back to a point I last saw almost two years ago. 84.7 kilograms, 186 pounds. 

No, I haven´t overeaten. I stuck to around 2000 calories a day. Mostly, below. No way I could have overeaten by 2100 calories a day. Still, I am ballooning up like a piece of yeast dough. 

We went to see MIL over the weekend, and she immediately asked me whether I had noticed that I had grown fatter since she last saw me. It took all of my self-control not to scream at her. Instead, I bit my lip and then told her calmly that I am still weighing myself every day and yes, I know perfectly well that I have regained so there is no need for her to alert me to the fact. 

As if I could miss what is happening. My clothes fit tighter, my rings are once more cutting into my fingers, and I am feeling the old aches creep back. Knees, ankles, spine. 

But even if it was true, what pissed me off was that the old lady felt the need to address the obvious at all. 

To me, having someone talk to me about gaining weight always feels like an attack. It probably is what growing up with parents who wanted me to lose weight when I had a BMI 21 will do. The strength of my anger flaring up at being taken to task over my weight was, in any case, bigger than what the old lady would have deserved. 

But, apart the anger over that scene, I am still scared. Badly. If this were to continue, I would be back in the bigger clothes sizes in a matter of weeks. 

What scares me most is that I honestly don´t know what is propelling my weight upwards. 

It almost feels as if that body of mine were taunting me. Do what you want, you are still stuck within me and I do as I please. 

The only hope I have is that this really is all water retention. Maybe I´ll pick up a diuretic at the pharmacy tonight. If that doesn´t help, there´s something else wrong. 

Sometimes life sucks.

Julia

How Time Runs...

It´s been almost a month since I last found the time and energy to do a blog post. First, I had to stand in for my colleague while he was on vacation. That of itself would have kept me rather busy, but, to add insult to injury, we were, after that over-rainy spring and the inundation we had, struck by the worst heat wave in quite a while. 

Now if there´s one thing I cannot stand it´s extreme heat. When I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, the one thing I immediately ruled out was going into diplomatic service. Not that it wouldn´t have interested me, but you have to be able to live in the tropics, and I´m simply not heatproof. So, having temperatures bordering on forty degrees centigrade for almost three weeks, on top of the extra workload, was definitely too much for me. The office building I work in doesn´t have air condition, so the electric fan under my desk was running all day, and we have an air pollution problem, too (new building that hasn´t gassed out properly yet), that is definitely worse when it´s hot and relatively humid. Which meant coughing, rheumy eyes and headaches. 

I did the best I could do under the circumstances. Blogging was not a part of it. Neither was exercise- if I am glad if I can make it home without collapsing from heat exhaustion, there´s no way I´ll go exhausting myself even more. And while we had fresh veggie salad for dinner regularly, and drank plenty of water to avoid heatstroke, I didn´t take too much care of the food side of weightloss, either. 

Together with the water retention and edema that regularly come when it gets too hot, that translates to, essentially, a stall. 82,8 kilograms per this morning. Of which I hope at least a few are water, judging from the way my rings are cutting into my fingers. When the heat subsides, they will hopefully drop off me again.

 The heat was actually so extreme that DH´s  tower PC broke down and had to be replaced, which meant introducing ourselves to the "wonders" of the most recent incarnation of WIndows (tm) operating system and several days´worth of setting everything back up in working order. Luckily, it wasn´t the hard disk that had burned out, so we could at least save the data. That´ll teach DH about backing things up... I´m glad I know how to do those things myself, else we´d have had to pay through the nose for having someone else do them. But it still took me all weekend. We were lucky, still, in that a big electronics store in town is closing down so we got the necessary hard- and software at a hefty discount. So, I probably shouldn´t complain. It could have happened at a much more inopportune time. As such things go, having to shop for one thing often leads to discovering another.

In this case, it was the fact that fitbit activity trackers are now also available in Germany. 

I am now the proud owner of a Fitbit One tracker (which I wear clipped into my bra) and the matching app on my ipad. The best thing is that the app ties in with the sparkpeople app I already used for journalling my food. 

The first data collected points to several things I could improve.  

First, I get too little sleep. An average of six hours is certainly not enough for me. 

Second, on an ordinary day I usually have about 5000 steps, even less when I am staying at home on the weekend. There´s room for improvement there. 

Having the flights of stairs I climb counted has made me stop using the elevator at work. Together with our elevatorless flat, that makes the preset stair climbing setting of ten a day the only thing I regularly top. 

If the calories spent calculation on that thing is halfway correct, I must not wonder about my weight being stuck, as I have been eating quite exactly at maintenance level. If I want to recondense some more (which I do want) that means having to cut down even more. Or taking up some form of exercise... 

For the time being, I am still collecting data. The forced inactivity of the heat wave probably gave me less than representative data until now. As it has become a bit cooler, there might be more activity on my part to record. 

I know, why don´t I just do some exercise. But I want to keep that to the absolute minimum I can get away with. Any weight loss I can only achieve by making heroic efforts would probably turn out to be not maintainable if circumstances changed so that I would be prevented from said heroic efforts. And there are several ticking time bombs, so to speak, that might make circumstances change from one moment to the next without my being able to prevent it. I can just pray that doesn´t happen. 

Until then I have to make the best of circumstances as they are. 

What the heat wave did do for me was provide a minor non-scale victory. 

When I was at my top weight, I had taken to wearing floor-length skirts to cover up my legs. After recondensing, I had stopped wearing these, as they were actually quite frumpy, and kept only trousers to wear. 

This year, when I went shopping for some light pants to wear when it started getting hot, I couldn´t find any I liked. Instead, I tried on some knee-length pencil skirts they had on sale. Guess what, they fit. In a size 44 (about a size ten in US measurements). I bought myself a wide red belt and matching ballerina flats to wear with them, and some brand new pantyhose because, you guessed it, the old ones I still had are by now way too big, too. 

I even got a few compliments from female coworkers on that look. 

Wearing a short skirt was something I had not done in a long while. It feels good to be able to do it again. 

And to have a bit more variety in what I can wear. 

I don´t have the style of what I´ll wear when reaching goal pat yet, but I´m working on it. 

Julia

Mired down

Looks like that short holiday came just in time. In time before my estimated colleague has been doing the disappearing act for three full weeks again and left me with having to shoulder his caseload on top of my own.  Which somehow always results in more than double the work in spite of the fact that I still have the nominally bigger half of the caseload. 

On top of it, temperatures are going up again. Well, it´s summer. 

And the two days away from home and low-carb eating meant once again half a week of an upset stomach and a four-pound gain on top. 

So, I´m still stuck on that upward escalator. 

The fatigue is back, too. In spite of sleeping like a baby, I start feeling tired around midafternoon. If there were a bed or recliner in my office, I´d probably doze off in a couple of minutes. 

Well, perhaps I need more than the six to seven hours of shuteye I´m getting right now. But where to find the time? WIth DH having accustomed MIL to being called on the phone first thing in the morning and last thing at night, that means getting up at seven a.m. and staying up till ten p.m., minimum. Which would compute as nine hours, I know, except that the time after that last call in the evening is when we finally can sit peacefully together and relax. 

Well, that´s what we have to work with, We´re lucky MIL still can be left alone for any amount of time. 

Still, in the long run, having to care for her does take up plenty of energy and time. 

Which then is missing in other respects. 

Keep calm and carry on...

Julia

Eye of the needle

For well over a year, DH and I had not gotten around to doing any trips purely for pleasure. So, when the new edition of that out-of-town appointment that gave me a spontaneous holiday two weeks ago was coming early on Monday, we decided to make a quick escape and both took off Tuesday, too. 

Which explains the bloggy silence. 

Ancient buildings, historical churches, timber-framed houses, a candlelight dinner, and both of us soaking up the atmosphere of a thriving and alive city. 

And on the next day, sightseeing in a nearby castle that offered, from the top of the tower, a breathtaking view of the surrounding landscape.

To enjoy this, of course, I had to climb that tower. 

The last iterations of the winding staircase were just wide enough to pass through.

Had I attempted to climb that tower three years ago, that would have been the place I could not go on because there was no way sixty-plus more pounds of me could have fit through that passage. 

This time, I just continued the climb and enjoyed the view. And I wasn´t even out of breath when exiting the staircase.

There have been many occasions where I stayed at the foot of a tower or a hill while DH climbed it and brought down the pictures of what I might have seen had I managed to move my fat body up there. 

Today, we can enjoy the sights together, first hand. 

That, too, is Why I Do This.

Julia

Sometimes it pays to wait

When I acquired my tablet computer, I was also looking for the peripherals to go with it, namely, a wireless keyboard that would allow me to work on text documents without having to use that popup keyboard. Back then, I declined, as those things were out-rage-ous-ly expensive at the time. Yesterday, we went grocery shopping and they had, on sale, just such a keyboard, except not of the brand with fruit on it, at a quarter of what the other one would have cost me. The great thing being that it is small enough to fit into the sleeve I carry my tablet in, so, no extra protection needed. And, as I am typing this, I find I´m able to type as fast as with an ordinary keyboard.

As, even with a touchpen, that popup keyboard makes writing a somewhat tedious process, I have always disliked using it. Typing with my fingers was out of the question, as those are a bit too big for the minuscule "keys" on that thing, and besides, not being able to use both hands typing is a bit, er, demanding if you are used to doing so. 

So, the new keyboard removes one thing that has been nagging me for awhile, it takes up very little room, doesn´t require extra storing space, and I did not have to buy any extras to go with it, as I already owned a USB loader that I can use with this, too. 

Which means that it fits perfectly with my idea of minimalism. Useful, space-saving, low-price. 

And I am glad that I waited and did not shill out for one of the more expensive ones at once. 

What was also on the list yesterday was the acquisition of new plates for my car. 

Yes, again. After having both our license plates stolen last year, we had always parked our car in a closed, guarded parking lot, thinking that nothing would happen to it there. Well, last Friday we came to our car, and the back license plate had disappeared. 

Which meant another afternoon at the police station and, yesterday because there wasn´t time to do it earlier, another afternoon at the municipal car license office. And of course, having to spend the money  to pay for the new plates. Saying the whole thing was a major annoyance doesn´t cover it. 

Weight-wise, I have another uptick, to 82.6 kilograms. Maybe because I ate some salted nuts yesterday, maybe because I am retaining water (temperatures are going up again after a few days of cooler  weather). In any case, I will have to be watchful so things stop at that and I can continue to lose. 

Two steps forward, one step back. This plateau is, to date, the hardest to break. But break it I will. 

T minus 35 weeks for my dream goal. Thirteen kilograms to go. There still is a chance to make it in time. 

BMI 25. Being normal-weighted. I haven´t been there since I was twenty. I want to get back there by the time I´m fifty. Thirty years of overweight and obesity are enough. 

Julia

Next stop, real food

DH arrived back last night, so I shared, after a day of protein shakes, his dinner. For me, that meant two cups of lowfat yoghurt with chopped almonds and unsweetened cocoa powder, four stick salamis (about 50 calories apiece) and a finger-sized piece of cheese, plus a glass of beer. 

This morning, 81.9 kilos, so, up 100 grams. But that might be from the salt in the salamis. 

As DH's business trip had taken him to Bavaria, he'd brought some of their good wheat ale. As the basement still is dripping wet, storing that in the cellar was out of the question so it had to be carried up four flights of stairs (there's no elevator). 

Dragging that crate upstairs, I once more wondered how on earth I had gotten myself up those same stairs at thirty kilos more. 

Yesterday, I carried that crate upstairs, without having to pull myself up by the handrail, and without having to pause. Both of which would have been impossible at my top weight, even without carrying anything. 

Just so I won't forget why I am doing this...

Julia

It works, but slowly

Restricting myself to just two big protein shakes a day plus, yesterday, a salad of leafy greens in a homemade balsamico vinaigrette for dinner seems to start things moving. But, they move slowly.

Todays WI: 81.8 kgs, or 180 pounds. 

When I started recondensing, I could, if I ate what I eat right now, count on my weight dropping by about a kilogram a day for the first week. It is, of course, water weight that comes off whenever things move that fast, but still, that big loss at the beginning of a strict diet phase used to give a real push of motivation. 

This time, I will have to make peace with the fact that it will take a bit more patience to get back below 80 kgs, which is how far I want to be before reintroducing other foods. 

For over a year, that 80 kilo notch on my scales has been a barrier I could not break. 

From experience I know that beyond such barriers there may even be easier terrain ahead. After all, where they happen is usually at some weight I had, on the way up, managed to maintain for a longer period of time. The area around those 80 kilos was such a place. The next one "down" would be around 72 kilograms, putting me back at my postgraduate weight.

Dreaming on and doing my best.

Julia

Overfed and undernourished

When I was recondensing myself, I was careful to consume enough protein and regularly taking my supplements ( vitamins and minerals). I felt reasonably good. Most importantly I was barely tired. 

Slacking off in those two respects was probably what made the fatigue come back, big time. 

At least that's what I suspect. I had several protein shakes yesterday and started on a high-dosage vitamin/mineral regimen to fill up my depleted stores. Guess what, I am, this morning, for the first time in ages, not tired. I slept like a baby for six and a half hours, thankfully uninterrupted by any emergency calls, woke up half an hour before the alarm went off, and am sitting here more alert than I had been in months. 

I am also down 0.8 kilograms. Todays WI: 82.2 kgs or 180.8 pounds. 

Still a pound above morbid obesity, but I intend to keep up the protein fast for the next days. Perhaps I'll be able to undo some of the damages that way.

I sometimes wonder if the fact that I have always hated my body has something to do with how often I simply forget to properly feed it. Drinking my water. Eating my protein. Taking my vitamins and minerals. It ought to be easy. But what happens regularly is that I start doing it, keep it up for a little while, and then forget to do it. Treating my body well is not something I am in the habit of doing. 

I prefer being able to ignore it as completely as possible, thank you very much. Which also explains my aversion to intentional exercise. 

The problem with that is that neglecting my body usually ends up making the demands of said body louder, causing all kinds of annoying symptoms like fatigue. 

So, I should better get in the habit of taking regular care of the things my body needs. 

After all, it and me will, statistically, have to get along another thirty or forty years. And keeping it well-nourished might just make it a bit more comfortable to live in. 

Julia

Over again

The last weeks, weight-wise, were absolute desaster for me. The curve indicating my weight on FatWatch has turned into an almost vertical rise that has catapulted me back to about where I was at the beginning of last year. 

Highest point reached regaining:83.8 kilograms. 184 pounds. 

This morning's weight: 83.0 kilos, 182.6 pounds.

The most vexing part being that the rapid rise came after things ought to have been back to normal after the flooding in June. Not while we were off plan due to being unable to cool, wash or cook fresh food. Which either means that the results of that week were taking time to materialize, or I didn't get back on the wagon asap. 

Most likely, it's the latter. 

If mentally kicking oneself counted as exercise I might have an easier time getting the regain off again. 

Four point six kilos up from the lowest point last year in May. 10.12 pounds. 

The seventh part of what I had recondensed. 

If I had needed a reminder ( obviously, I did ) that I cannot must not may not ever return to eating the things I used to eat, this is it. It had taken me almost two years to get down there. Losing, statistically, fifteen weeks worth of distance already covered to being less careful for one year and just one month of not being careful at all goes a long way towards demonstrating just how fast the other sixty pounds might be back. 

So, back onto the rails. 

As DH is out of town once more, I have started doing a protein fast, with nothing but protein shakes for the next three days minimum. Not a sustainable way of living, but the point is that I must get off carbs again. 

I'll be posting my daily weigh-in results to keep myself accountable. 

The one thing I want to regain is the ground I lost this year. Being halfway through it already, that may mean I won't be able to reach my goal by next March any more. But I keep trying. 

Julia

Gift horse

Sometimes, I have business appointments that take me quite far out of town. Today, I had one that was supposed to start at ten a.m and take place in a city some 250 kilometers off. As DH needed the family car, I went by train, which meant getting up at four o'clock so I'd be on time. Five hours later, I arrived, only to find out that the appointment had been cancelled because someone had had to call in sick. I later found out that they had phoned my office about the cancellation... after nine:(. 

Which left me in that town with a day of nothing to do, as I had purchased a return ticket for the afternoon already that was nonrefundable. My estimated colleague had advised me that the city I was going to has plenty of historical buildings, and I should really do some sightseeing. 

Which is what I did, after buying a pair of sneakers on sale because my business shoes, while comfortable enough for walking to that appointment from the station, weren't exactly made for walking around on cobbled streets all day. 

Of course, as it was Monday, all the museums and churches one could have visited were closed. So I took a couple of pictures of the outsides of the buildings to show to DH and set out to explore the older part of the city. 

All in all, that meant walking for almost five hours with a backpack full of files. I was rather glad about the sneakers soon...

And, as this was kind of a holiday for me, I did sit down at noon for an ice cream with sliced almonds and hazelnuts on top. I had not had any ice cream for about three years, and besides, had not had any breakfast because I just could not get anything down at such an ungodly hour. So, I did enjoy that ice cream to the last spoonful, and then proceeded to visit the sights. 

Which of course meant window-shopping, too. 

Being female, of course, I ended up at a shoe store.

I didn't buy anything for myself, but I found something for DH. He'd had, for a long time, had a favourite pair of brand-name shoes that he practically lived in. Having to retire them because they were worn out was a sad event for him, but we had not found another pair in his size. Guess what, they had those very shoes, same model, his size, and at half price, no less. So, tonight DH is in for a surprise...

And I am interested to find out if ten degrees less heat plus five hours of walking might turn that upward trend on the scales around again..

Julia

Never out of the woods

For the longest time, I had been getting along without consuming cookies, bread, or sweets. If I did have some, say, at MIL's, I was able to stop eating after consuming just one slice, or one piece, without having cravings for more. 

I had been certain that I could, by now, handle that stuff. 

I was wrong. 

That week of enforced feeding on carbohydrate-rich foods has been wreaking havoc on my self-control. 

For one, I am almost continuously hungry. Even worse, I crave carbohydrates, to a point where I gave in and bought a big tin of chocolate cookies. Not only that I ate most of these over the course of the last week, yesterday I had a veritable binge for the first time in years. One of the kind where I keep going in and out of the kitchen, returning for another handful or bowlful of food as soon as I finish the preceeding one in spite of my stomach already feeling uncomfortably full. 

What saved me from an even bigger caloric desaster was the fact that my former favorite binge foods were not in the house.   

The whole thing has been scaring me, badly.

I can still remember what it felt like, many years ago, to be stuffing my face with two pounds of spaghetti aglio e olio, while begging my boyfriend to take me away from the house because I could not stop eating, or that other night when, after scouring my pantry for the literally last crumbs of dry cereal, I drove my car ten miles to the next McDonald's (tm) drive-in and bought twenty of their standard hamburgers, and began wolfing them down in the car while driving, dripping ketchup and grease all over me and having finished off half that giant bag of food by the time I came home. 

In that kind of situation, it is no longer about willpower, because that just got short-circuited. The only chance I have of interrupting that kind of binge, other than reaching the point where I literally can't get any food into my body any more, is physically removing myself from food. 

Re-experiencing that kind of out-of-control food craving is scary. 

If I don't stop this fast, I will regain, big time. 

I had not thought that the effect of eating sugar and wheat several days in a row and in larger amounts would be so drastic. 

Obviously, it is. I am acting like a dry alcoholic who has been made to down a bottle of something 80proof and ends up craving alcohol as if he'd never been dry. 

Which is probably the lesson for me in this. My body doesn't react normally to wheat and sugar. If I consume more than a minuscule amount of either, the cravings for crap food I thought were gone come back full force. And I, especially when there are other stressors around, may not be able to resist them. 

So, what I need to do is detox again. Go cold turkey on anything wheat and sugar. Fill up on real food. 

If I don't, I'll be back where I never again want to be. 

Todays WI: 83.3 kilograms. 183 pounds. 

Again.

And I never wanted to be back up there, either.

Back in morbid obesity.

High time to pick myself up and get back on the tracks. 

Julia

It's a jungle out there

...at least if I look at the temperature and humidity. As there is still plenty of water in the ground from the flooding, the forty-degree centigrade (about 100 degrees Fahrenheit) heat vaporizes that. The result feels like a Turkish steam bath, except I still have to work in that climate. 

As always when it's that hot, I'm retaining water, which means swollen hands and feet and my weight going up at a rate of about a pound a day. 

Exercise is, at least for me, a physical impossibility right now. I'm glad if I make it home from work without collapsing halfway to the tram stop. 

My office has no A/C, so all I can do to keep my cool is switch on the big fan under my desk and drink lots of water.

The forecast says severe thunderstorms tonight and ten degrees less tomorrow.

I just hope it's true.

Julia

Going up

Temperatures and my weight. Both of which I don't want. But whenever there's a heatwave, I find my hands and feet swelling up and my body retaining water to a tune of a several-pound gain that takes away all of this year's losses at once. 

So, groundhog day again. If I could catch that critter I'd ask him if at least this time, the weather guys are right about the heat being over by the weekend. 

Tonight's dinner will be caprese salad with mozzarella and fresh basil off our balcony plants. And lots of water, because the edema does not keep me from showing the symptoms of dehydration otherwise. 

I'm off to the relative coolness of our home before I start to melt....

Julia

Swinging pendulum

This year, the weather has been outright crazy. Cold and snow well into April. A few sunny days in May, but apart those, mostly rain, culminating in the torrential rainfalls leading to wide-spread flooding at the beginning of June. And now, as if to make up for the delay in arriving, meteorological spring gives us the first serious heatwave of the year, with a forecast of up to 37 degrees centigrade (over 98 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Definitely not my kind of weather. 

At least we did restock our freezer over the weekend so there's no need to go grocery shopping in the heat. 

As the unperishable foods (ie carbs) that found their way into our pantry to fuel us during the emergency are, by now, mostly used up, things are slowly getting back to normal.

Except that having eaten a carb-rich diet for over a week I now am back to battling carb cravings like I didn't have for a long time. 

Maybe there is truth in the claims of sugar being addictive. In that case, a sugar detox would be in order if I want to get back on the losing streak that was so rudely interrupted by the flood. 

As it is, I still have digestive problems, and in spite of having had my usual two-egg breakfast, I am ravenously hungry by noon. 

Just what I needed to happen... I just hope the weather guys were wrong about how hot it will become this week. Carb cravings plus melting in the heat is a bit too much. 

Julia

Almost normal

Except for cable TV, all amenities of life have by now been restored to us. The experience of having been a whole week off the grid is beginning to recede in the background among the usual business of the day. 

Still, there are things that have changed. 

Just this morning, DH and I both stated that we are glad to be rid of the junk in the cellar. 

Mind you, with almost every piece that went down there, there had been an argument, either between the item's owner and the other person in the household, or between the owner and himself or herself. 

The argument went like- we don't use this any more-but it's still good for using- it clutters up our flat-but in another flat we might use it again- it's not worth keeping. - but if we ever wanted to use one again we'd have to pay for a new one - I ought to toss this in the trash -but if you did you might regret it-   and so on. 

Deliberations, in all of those cases, regularly resulted in a hung jury and the defendant in question being confined to the cellar. Which meant that decluttering our flat turned into cluttering up our cellar.

When the flood hit us, that cellar was actually so full of stuff that most of it was, for all practical purposes, inaccessible unless one were to climb over other things and dig down to the crate in question, if one knew at all which one it was. 

Apart that, it always had high moisture, and very poor lighting, which perhaps made it even easier to bury our junk there, sometimes half hoping for humidity to make it tossable, as in "this is too far damaged to save it, now we may throw it away". 

The Greek have that tale of Hercules being required to unmuck the stables of King Augias that had not been cleaned in ages. He did it by making the waters of a river flow through there. Our personal Augias stable also has had a river run through it, and now that the clutter has gone for good I am still stuck wondering why the heck I did keep most of it. As I mentioned, a lot of the things we tossed might have been cleaned and dried, but when thinking of the work that would have meant, and the fact that we would have to find a home for every single piece we rescued from the debris upstairs in our flat, there was suddenly no discussion at all about tossing things which we had almost quarreled about when it came to taking them out of our flat. Not even the fact that some of those things cannot be replaced did stop us from throwing them out. Actually, it was the realization that we might go to the pain of cleaning those things, only to box them up again and put them into the cellar, never to be thought of again until the next inundation. 

If I neither love nor use it, it is clutter. 

The very fact that I did not want these things around any more and banished them to the cellar amply proved that I neither loved nor used them, in spite of what I made myself believe about how valuable they were. The things I really value have never been inside that cellar. 

The knowledge that it is no longer feasible to stash stuff that is too much for our flat in the cellar actually helps declutter in even another way. I know now that bringing any new item into our flat means having to make room for it, and that any item that was in the way would have to be tossed at once, so, even before bringing in the new item I must realize that it will probably cost me, not only what the price tag says, but perhaps also another piece of my possessions that would have to be thrown away to make room for it. 

Considering that, it suddenly becomes easy to leave things at the store. 

There may even be a second round of decluttering coming on at our flat, because there are still plenty of candidates for inspection which, in the past, escaped being banished to the cellar only because there was still closet or cupboard space they could be put away in. 

Even if I have a space to keep it in, it may be clutter. 

And I do not forcibly have to hang on to every piece of crockery or flatware I ever bought. 

It has taken me many years to arrive at that conclusion. 

But the feeling of peace and accomplishment after getting rid of all that stuff in the cellar tells me it might be very much worth my while to put it in practice. 

Julia

Levelling back to normal

Slowly, things are returning to the usual path. With electricity and gas back working, the only things in our household that still bear witness to the inundation are several boxes and flower pots that sit on our balcony awaiting the cellar to be cleaned and my bicycle on the landing in the staircase, waiting for the same. And, of course, we still have no cable TV reception. 

I ran several loads of laundry yesterday. The things that had been contaminated by contact with the muck I have been washing with desinfectant. The salvaged china did, after some reshuffling, find a new home in one of the cupboards. 

The empty freezer will be filled up again on the weekend (didn't have time to do the grocery run yet). 

And just one day of being able to eat normally again made two pounds of carbohydrate bloat drop off me again. 

Business as usual. What a concept. 

They say it's a blessing to live in uninteresting times.

How true. 

Julia

Tallying the damages

Up four pounds and back above that pesky limit of obesity. 

That's what one week of being unable to cook and having to eat crap has been doing to me. 

Actually, I had feared worse.

Yesterday, the first errand after work took me grocery-shopping. Yoghurt, eggs, bacon, cheese. 

For the frozen veggies, a trip to the local Costco equivalent is planned tomorrow. 

The experience of being flooded with no chance of saving any of the contents of my freezer has actually made me a bit apprehensive about what to put in storage. Stockpiling enough meat to last us through a whole month is something I'm not likely to repeat anytime soon. As long as I can get over two or three days' worth of cooking before the next occasion to grocery shop, I ought to be okay. 

Once again, the damages were worse than necessary because I had too much of something. Too much stuff in the flooded cellar, which necessitated several times the work we would have needed to do clearing out everything than if we had been more choosy about what to keep, and too much food in the freezer. 

And the experience of being in the middle of a natural desaster instead of watching it on TV has been humbling, to say the least. Maybe people who live in areas that are regularly hit by floods or storms are more sanguine about such things, but we had been operating under the assumption of being well out of harm's way. Things like the possibility of having to evacuate on short notice just weren't on our radar.

When desaster struck, we were helpless and unprovided.

My new pantry will hold some things I had not bought before due to relying completely on cold storage. I know now that I must keep some things on hand that can be prepared without cooking and don't need cooling. 

And I will have to prepare a bug-out bag. We were lucky not to be cut off from water, too. Had we been, we, too, would have joined the ranks of the evacuees at local school gyms. If ever something like this flood were to happen again, I want to know just what to grab and take along. Hint: it won't be most of the stuff we still own. 

As it is, digging through all of that waterlogged stuff from the cellar, tossing most of it and having to clean the rest was exhausting. But if I were to apply the same standards that the emergency forced on us to the stuff we still have high and dry in our flat, I am certain there would be even more things that are, mostly, clutter and need tossing. 

Even after believing I had already got rid of most clutter. Some of it, instead of leaving our household for good, had ended up in that basement and came back to haunt me last week. 

Of all of the china, glassware, stainless steel stuff, and cooking accessories from the cellar, just one box the size of a beer crate is left. These will have to find a home upstairs. Perhaps even at the cost of removing other things. And this time, those other things will feed the trashcan instead of cluttering the basement. 

They say that what you keep in your basement is symbolic of your relationship to the past. If that is true, we have just been presented with a golden opportunity to bring new experiences into our lives. 

Julia

Hosing down

As our landlord announced that the whole cellar will be hosed down and cleaned today, we dragged the remaining stuff with the exception of our tires, two ladders and one bicycle upstairs yesterday. I spent the remainder of the day hosing down flower pots, boxes and one complete set of china in our bathtub. The china I dumped into a tub full of desinfectant after rinsing off the muck and let it soak overnight, so I can put it away tonight. And after the cellar is cleaned, I can put my other bicycle ( that still sits upstairs, blocking half the staircase) back down there again, as well as the big boxes holding flower pots. 

The weather is still doing somersaults. After a rather dryish and partly sunny week that helped greatly with clearing out the flood debris, it has been raining hard for two days again. As long as the water drains away, that's fine with me, as the rain washes off at least some of the muck that still coats the streets. 

The permanent smell that permeates everything should also diminish, which would be nice because the forecast says now we're expecting a heatwave. And a mosquito invasion because they have ideal breeding conditions on the flooded areas. 

Gas and hot water will probably be back tonight. 

I'll shower until I notice fins sprouting...

It's good to see normalcy returning...

Julia

Beep beep

Ordinarily, that sound would signal a major annoyance. It's my freezer's alarm that goes off whenever the temperature inside gets too high. 

Today, it's the most beautiful noise (cue Neil Diamond) I could imagine, because it means we are, after six days of no electricity, back on the grid, and our technical gadgets have survived the switchoff without damage.

Thank God.

Cleanup ops in our city are continuing. At every street there are heaps of soaked and unusable stuff. The trash removal guys are doing overtime filling and carting away garage-sized containers.

By now, people are beginning to question the way the catastrophe was handled by the Government. It looks as if things were dealt with rather inefficiently and damages could have been less if they hadn't. 

It makes no difference to the work at hand. I am, presently, through with clearing out the cellar. The stuff that's left in there is waterproof and cleanable stuff that I intend to keep. The two boxes of soggy paper I had taken to the balcony to sort are mostly empty. Nothing important in there, but some papers with personal data on that need shredding before discarding, so I have to take every single sheet and decide if it can be tossed at once. Two bags of immediate goners are already in the container in front of our house. Having to do the sorting with rubber gloves because the papers are all mucky doesn't help sorting speed. But sort them I must. Were I to procrastinate, the work would get ickier by the minute. 

So it's back to work.

As we did not know when electricity would be back, the food situation is still not back to normal. Too many carbs. I'll look at the damages when I can restart to eat normally. 

But after this experience, beating myself up because I have probably regained is the last thing on my mind. 

We still have no gas, which means no hot water for showering. I am beginning to admire the old Spartans... washing my hair with ice-cold water gives me a headache every time. .oh well.

Force majeure, I think the French call it. An act of powers higher than us. 

I hope there won't be a repetition anytime soon. 

Julia

Regrets and what-did-I-thinks

Yesterday night's cellar cleanup operation made quite a not-so-clean sweep of the contents of the boxes of kitchenware and china I had decluttered from my kitchen only to carry them to the basement and keep them there. And most of what turned up belonged either in the "what, you're still there?" or in the "why did I ever bring you here?" category. 

A set of brand new teflon coated pans- I had been able to buy those at a steep discount once and bought two of each size because I wanted to have one in reserve if the coating on the other got worn. By now, I avoid using teflon-coated anything, so they were not likely to ever be used anyway. When I put them out with the trash, it took less than five minutes for someone to pick them up. 

About a dozen stainless steel lidded jars that I had relegated to the cellar after realizing that they were not airtight enough to store loose tea leaves without them losing their aroma. Unusable for the purpose I bought them for. Kept purely because they might someday be usable for storing something in. As the occasion to do that has not arisen in several years, it's not likely to ever come. Not worth the work of cleaning them. Ditched. 

A ceramic tea warmer for a single cup. Never used, because not stable. Ditched.

Another for a teapot. Was given to me as a present, which is why I hadn't tossed it yet. I own several other tea warmers that are more stable and prettier. Ditched.

Plastic containers for carrying apples and bananas to work. I'm not much of a fruit eater, so these wandered from the kitchen to the cellar instead of to the trash. As they were impossible to sanitize, ditched, along with the case of bad conscience for not using them and eating fruit. 

The two sets of colored glassware I had been agonizing over two years ago. They had, of course, not been used since. Ditched. The sanitizer necessary for cleaning them would have been more expensive than replacing them if ever the need should arise. 

A piece of juniper wood my parents brought as a holiday souvenir forty years ago. I had imagined crafting something from it. Ditched.

About half a dozen sets of paint rollers. I must have bought new ones every time I wanted to paint something, even though I had painstakingly cleaned the old ones after use and kept them. Buying new ones was obviously easier than locating the old ones every time. Ditched. And for the next time I paint anything, I'm resolved to just toss the rollers afterwards and save myself the mess. 

Several buckets of paint. As the water had been standing more than five feet higher than where they stood, there was, even if they were closed, no way of telling if it had been contaminated. .No way I would risk spreading that stuff onto our walls. Ditched.

When we finished working yesterday, there was just one set of china in a sturdy plastic box left, still dirty but minus the wet paper it had been wrapped in, two empty boxes, one metal stand for hanging files that I'll try to clean, one very dirty bicycle (dito), a yellow watering can, two empty buckets, our tires, the flower pots and boxes, and two ladders. 

That cellar has not been as empty since before I moved in. 

I was, actually, rather taken aback at what having to empty out all of the boxes and removing the loose stuff, too, turned up. We'd had it all set up tidy-looking, or put away in boxes. But still, even in the boxes, it was clutter. As were most of the boxes themselves. I had kept dozens of plastic boxes from my last removal, and so had DH, just in case we would move again. 

If ever we should move, it would be no problem at all to find other boxes. In the meantime, the important thing is that the cellar dries out fast so we don't get a mildew problem in the upper storeys, too. And that the layer of mud mixed with whatever gets removed. 

At least now we can do that easily because the cellar is almost empty.

Julia

From high water to hell in a handbasket

That's the way my eating has gone these last days.

After being cut off electricity by the flooding, we can neither cook anything, nor keep anything refrigerated. As the tap water has also been tainted, there's a public health advice out to not use it for drinking without boiling it first. Which we can't do because there is no electricity. So, we've been drinking nothing but bottled water and the boiled water I took home in a thermos from work.

If the water is not safe for drinking, it can't be used for washing produce, either. The veggies I still have sitting in my turned-off fridge would have to be washed before eating, so we cannot eat them either.

Nor could we wash our dishes with the stuff. So, anything that would leave smelly traces on the plates is out, which means no canned fish or something like that. 

What that leaves us at is exactly those things I had stayed clear of the last years. Bread and cheese for breakfast, fast food for lunch and dinner. 

Of course, my intestines are, by now, in open rebellion. While I cannot be completely certain that this is due to the lousy diet I had been eating these days and not to picking up some stomach bug from the flood water, I think the latter would create a bit more, um, drama. Anyway I've been feeling a bit queasy and very bloated for days, with a hefty uptick of my weight on top. 

Of course, most foods that don't need cooking or washing before eating and can be kept at room temperature, which right now are the requirements for what we can have in our pantry, are sky-high in carbohydrates, which means I am getting an unplanned carb refeed which explains the gains. Still it's annoying, especially as the electricity and water situation is unlikely to resolve in the next days. 

Being city-dwelling upper-storey appartment dwellers with a rather smallish balcony, we don't even own  a charcoal or gas powered barbecue, and if we did, it would probably have been kept in that basement. Buying one might be difficult because so many people still have no power, so they are probably sold out, and besides, we have no place to safely use it. So there's nothing left but to suck it up, although I am beginning to consider putting in a week of fasting to compensate for last week's nutritional catastrophe. 

I just hope we'll be back on the grid soon, before the personal damage gets worse.

Julia

Goodbyes made easy

While we are still off the grid with no hope of getting back electricity soon, one of the neighbors had organized for a portable generator to give us at least the chance of emptying out our cellar. Which meant that DH and I spent the better part of last evening down there.

Of course, everything was still wet and smelling like a big sewer. In the weak light of the jury-rigged lamps, we found a scene of utter and complete chaos and destruction. Pieces of wood mingled with soggy paper, plastic boxes filled up to the brim with water that had been carried several feet away from their former place and deposited on top of overturned furniture. The car wheels with tires on we keep down there must have acted like a mixer in the enclosed space when the air in the tires set them afloat. 

What used to be a wise precaution, namely, putting everything into waterproof plastic boxes, has come back to haunt us with a vengeance because these boxes, once filled up to the brim, won't empty on their own, which means having to drain them manually of the stinking liquid. As some of the boxes contained things that were salvageable, such as several complete sets of china (I mentioned these before), ditching them wholesale was out of the question.

Anything wood, cloth, paper and electronics, such as our battery loader, and the pieces of Ikea shelving I had kept down there were, of course, only fit for tossing. So toss them we did. The surprising thing, for me, was that many things that would, theoretically, have been cleanable turned out to be, to us, not worth the hassle. Pots, pans, the remains of my cheap glassware. Flower pots. Most of the plastic boxes. 

What I kept, at least for now, is my bicycles, the car wheels, both of which need to be inspected for damages, the best of the china sets, about half of the flower pots, our balcony boxes which we hadn't planted and hung yet, and about half a dozen especially sturdy plastic boxes. 

The rest of the stuff is mostly gone. I still have about five waterlogged boxes down there which I did not get around to emptying before the generator ran out of gasoline, so I'll have to return down there tonight. 

Of course, everyone on our street was decluttering their soaked stuff from the cellars. What was incredible was that some of the stuff obviously was picked up by someone else less squeamish than we were. Well, good luck with that. 

Decluttering our cellar was something we had planned to do for quite a while, except that the attempts we made were regularly cut short by the sheer amount of things to be moved. Having a bad case of might need that someday syndrome didn't exactly help, either. So the stuff stayed and multiplied.

Being forced to get rid of most of it is an incredible feeling. Everything in that cellar that was clutter is gone, just like that. It was not even hard. Tossing a piece of junk that drips with brownish, stinky liquid, or is caked with a layer of sediment, is easier than deciding to keep and clean it. 

That sounds good as long as I do not remind myself that I might have saved myself hours of slaving away in that sewage hole if I had only kept those things that are, today, valuable enough to me to go to the pain of cleaning them. 

Just because I have a space to put something in does not mean I have to keep it.

Going through that kind of experience drives that home pretty hard.I don't think I'll ever fill that cellar up again. 

Tonight, if the generator is running again, I'll do the rest of the boxes. And then there's nothing left but to wait for electricity and heating to be turned back on so I'll have hot water to clean what I want to keep. 

Julia

Hell or high water

As suddenly as it had arrived, the flooding has drained away. Yesterday, coming home meant wading through about three feet of muddy water, with a backpack that held bread and two thermos bottles of boiling water so we would at least have some hot coffee. This morning, the street was almost dry except for a layer of smelly sediment covering everything. Only the cellar is still half full of water.

I shudder to think of what to expect down there when the water has gone. Most likely, I'll curse myself over every single postponed decision I stacked down there. As it is, the muck and water will probably make a lot of those decisions easier. And I might berate myself for procrastinating about painting our bedroom and rearranging some of the shelves in my living room, as both the paint and brushes I bought for the former and the wooden shelf parts I wanted to use for doing the latter are certain goners. 

Apart those, the cellar holds several boxes of china currently not in use. These should be salvageable after tossing the newspapers I wrapped the stuff in, unless the incoming water broke something. 

What also is unlikely to have survived are my christmas decorations. The box they are in is supposed to be waterproof, but I don't think they meant proof to being submerged for several days. 

Then again, nothing of all that is especially valuable. So, I should not be too upset.

And we were lucky on another front, too. 

As it had been raining cats and dogs on Saturday, we did not drive for our usual start-of-the-month grocery shopping. Which means the freezer is half empty, and we did not fill it up on Saturday. As everything in there has spoiled after two days with no power, any money we might have spent on refilling it would have fed the trashcan. 

The stuff in the refrigerator has been keeping until now, to the exception of some steaks I bought on Saturday as a special treat and decided to save for today instead of cooking them on Sunday. Oh well. 

Yesterday, I picked up some burgers and fries for dinner- not what we usually eat- and I will have to pick up something else tonight, or eat out with DH. Not what I budgeted for, nor were the stainless steel thermos bottles I bought for carrying the hot water. 

And the weight loss project has to be suspended for the duration. Not being able to cook anything is a real obstacle there. 

At least, from what I can see from my office window, the tram is operating again.

Keep calm and carry on.

Julia

Inundation

The valves were not closed. For another two days it has been raining without pause. We've been watching the weather and flood reports all day. This morning, looking out of the third-storey windows of our flat... the ground had disappeared under three feet of muddy brown water. Electricity has been turned off, the basement has completely filled up with the stinky brownish gunk, and I have no idea when we will get power back. The contents of our deep-freezer probably will not survive until then. 

As the colleague who would have to do my job were I to call in as being unable to come has been even harder hit, I have been braving the flood in a pair of old running shoes and my jogging dress, with my pants in a knapsack on my back. Goodness knows what is floating in that muck, and I just hope I did not catch anything from being immersed in it up to my waist. 

The forecast says even more rain, plus they will have to release even more water from an artificial lake upstream. So, the worst has not arrived yet. 

Of the cleanup that will have to follow in our cellar I don't want to think. 

Looks like Fate just gave me some big help with the decluttering I procrastinated on...

One doesn't usually think of how many things in our lives depend on electricity running smoothly. Or how dependent one is on clean water coming out of the wall. I am loading my phones and ipad at the office, as we still have electricity there. Our landline phones are dead, so we need the cell phones, especially since we need to stay in touch with MIL. 

And that fridge won't hold the temperature more than 24 hours. After that, goodbye to the contents of my pantry...

I only hope they will not have to turn off the water, too, even if we can only use it for washing right now.

And I hope the water won't rise much further...I don't even know if I will be able to return home tonight. 

Julia

Open valves

We are, these days, having some of the worst rainfalls in years. Constant precipitation for almost a week, and neither the ground nor the sewers can take any more water. As they have predicted another  ten gallons of water per square meter (that is about a gallon per square foot) to come down in the next hours, part of it as hail, I have postponed the weekend shopping until tomorrow, hoping that the weather will clear up until then, or at least get a bit drier. 

Somebody please close the valves on those clouds... Luckily, we live neither adjacent to a river (though there is one about a quarter of a mile down from the street we live in, but that has excellent flood protection that was built after an inundation that rose high enough to enable people to navigate our street by boat. I have only seen photographs of that, and with the new measures it should not repeat itself), nor at the bottom of a hill (the rain has led to several muddy avalanches coming down on streets in the area already). 

As the tram lines aren't yet affected, either, I'll do some quick shopping after work for the articles we have run out of (namely bacon and eggs for breakfast). 

At times like these, I am glad to be living right in the middle of a not-so-small city and close to all the amenities one might need. 

Julia

Tracking eye openers

Anyone who has been following my blog for some time knows that I am a bit obsessive about tracking my progress, or lack thereof. Be it FatWatch or Physicsdiet.com, whenever I am near a scale in the morning I weigh in and record my weight. As both of these programs give you long-time averages and trend curves, I can see which way my weight is developing. 

I found that especially helpful on the near-plateau I've been on for over a year. 

Just weighing in daily would have kept me under a false impression of security, because the day-to-day variations were actually rather smallish. Had I not kept those records, I would certainly have believed that what I did was maintaining.

Enter the FatWatch curves for the last quarter and the last year. Ouch.

Only when I looked at these did I recognize that I had been slowly and insidiously starting to Gain It All Back. Not in a big way yet, mind you, but the tendency was pointing in the opposite direction of where I wanted it to go. Had I continued that way, I would perhaps have reached my starting weight in less than a decade, instead of my goal weight next year. 

So, what I am working on is to pull that curve back down. 

Wrecking the train you're on can be as easy as closing your eyes to where you are going. 

Which is why intuitive eating would never work for me. 

Julia

A matter of discipline

Someone claimed that any diet plan works as long as you stick to it. While I would not say that about a lot of plans I tried, and failed to get results in spite of following them to a "t", it is certainly true about what I am doing now. 

I started out recondensing myself in August 2010. That's when I found out that going high-protein, low carb was, for me, what made the pounds come off, something that more carb-heavy plans had not done. I ditched the breakfast cereal for bacon and eggs, I stopped buying bread and sweets, I exchanged my perennial vanilla pudding for protein shakes, and the pounds just melted off. 

Fast forward two years, during which I went from BMI 41 to BMI 29 point something, and I let myself become complacent. An occasional breakfast roll, some potatoes, one more handful of nuts. Nothing extravagant, no binges. Still, those small indulgences added up to a year-long stall. I kept dithering around that limit of obesity. To get things moving downwards again, I had to return to what had worked. 

Only now that I am once more sticking to my plan is that weight curve beginning to point downwards again. The damages of my off-plan year are rather reluctant to leave, and losses are considerably slower than when I first started losing. But that should not surprise me as my basal metabolic rate would be about 300 calories lower from the weight already lost. 

I don't know if I will reach my goal of being normal-weighted before turning fifty, but I am still aiming for it. After all, it's just 12 kilograms to go. And every single one of those kilograms I recondense is one less I have to drag around. 

So, what it amounts to is discipline. If I have that, I can still make goal in time. 

Julia

Skipping the hurdles

I took a few days off work over Pentecost, and once again, we went to visit MIL. I was a bit apprehensive about the effect that five days there might have on my weight, so I went there prepared. 

Namely, for breakfast and supper I took along thickly sliced smoked turkey meat, which I ate with a topping of horseradish sauce or mustard. No bread, no peanuts. On Monday, MIL invited us out. I had a dish of lamb chops and a salad. The two big potato dumplings that came with the meat I left untouched. In the evenings, I kept sipping on my water bottle.

The end result- up a pound from Friday, but that may be due to normal variations. And it's certainly preferable to the four pounds on average I used to gain there over just two days.

And still a good place to continue downwards from. 

Julia

An apple and an egg

In Germany, that's what you call an outrageously cheap price for something, as in "I bought these for an apple and an egg". 

For me, these days, it's also the measure of what I eat between breakfast and dinner. An apple plus a hard-boiled egg. Actually, it's what I eat when I come home in the evening. I have found that it is enough to quelch the hunger that has built during another workday of too-busy-to-eat, and, at less than 200 calories it's a lot less damaging than my former several handfuls of peanuts plus a chunk of cheese which could easily pack more calories than what I allow myself at dinnertime. 

I find that limiting my choices of what to eat is working fine for me. Most of all, it keeps me from grazing on a dozen different things, all the time justifying every bad choice by saying it's just a small portion. 

I used to do that a lot, grabbing one handful of nuts, then a slice of salami, then a piece of cheese, then a cup of yogurt with toppings, without thinking of all that as a meal. The old calories don't count if you eat it standing up or while in your car fallacy at its finest. Today, I keep reminding myself to sit down and eat, trying to concentrate on the act of eating. For someone like me who spent many years chewing almost constantly while doing something else, that sometimes still takes vigilance. But it prevents me from vacuuming a whole bag of cookies without being consciously aware that I am eating. Breaking that habit of constantly moving hand with food to mouth, eating without being aware of it, was hard at first. I would frequently catch myself entering my kitchen, for whatever purpose, and in passing dipping my hand into the cookie jar automatically. 

So I removed the cookie jar. I also stopped buying chocolate and most of these other snack foods. 

And I started to look at food and eating differently. What I used to do was the see-food diet, as in I see food and eat it, and food, to me,used to mean all those highly palatable, processed things that you can munch down mindlessly even if you are not hungry and which never leave you sated, either, just stuffed. 

Today, the processed crap stays at the grocery store. What I have in the house is mostly Real Food, to the exception of a few pre-prepared things like sauces or the occasional pizza (which is far less bad than you'd think because I found a brand that has a spelt crust, vegetable and yoghurt topping and just about 500 calories for a whole pizza). The sauces serve as toppings on vegetable-loaded dishes. Neither food invites mindless grazing. 

The grocery bills have, by the way, taken quite a nosedive. So much for people claiming eating more healthy food is too expensive.

Today's WI: down another pound. Looks like what I do is working.

Finally.

Julia