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