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
