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