Quitting concerns

After my relapse some three years ago, I have been, once again, a regular pack-a-day smoker. More than that if the stress levels were high.  DH, too, smokes.  Of course, we *know* both that that isn´t what a person with hypertension should do.  As per now, he still flat out refuses to quit. 

DMIL´s constant nagging both of us about smoking in that querulous old-woman whiney voice doesn´t help there in the least. Whenever she gets started we both have to strive hard not to scream at her to STFU.  The result of that nagging is even more resistance to quitting than we had before. Luckily we are not with her all the time, else there might be a serious quarrel. Quitting, when demanded in that kind of way, becomes synonymous to caving in. 

But the medications and dietary changes haven´t brought down DH´s blood pressure far enough. He will have to quit or at least cut his smoking far, far down. 

Which means that I, too, must stop smoking or else he´ll never manage. 

Now I, apart the occasional cough, have not had any health problems related to smoking. My BP is normal to lowish, arteries were free the last time they checked, and genetically, there´s been no cardiovascular disease in my parents and just one case within the preceding generations, so I should by all accounts be a low-risk smoker. Which means that I have absolutely no reason to quit for my own health. I actually have several reasons not to quit, one of them being that I gained about fifty pounds within the year after quitting successfully for the last time, and the second being that soon after quitting, I began having serious panic attacks that left me incapacitated for days on end and disrupted my sleep. These took almost two years to go away.

Both of which I never again wish to experience. Becoming a morbidly obese nervous wreck again is not what I have in mind for my future. 

Then again, I do have a better starting point today than I had back then. 

I know now that it is entirely possible for me to work or socialize without smoking. The rules about smoking having changed, I am not allowed to smoke inside my office any more. Smoking in restaurants is banned, too, besides, I rarely go out any more anyway. And at home, we have a strict no-smoking-inside policy, too. Whoever of us wants to smoke has to go outside on the balcony. 

Which means that some of the most powerful triggers for smoking I used to have before my first quit just aren´t being activated any more, and most situations of which I used to assume that I could not navigate them without a cigarette are actually still smoke-free. 

The weight gaining part and the panic attacks were related to each other in that the medications I got against the panic attacks were causal for the weight gain, as proven by the fact that I didn´t gain further  after going off the meds. 

Besides, I have gone a long way towards healthier eating since then, and will have to go even further in the future. 

And I do know today that while the meds definitely didn´t stop the panic attacks, what did stop them finally was something deceptively simple I read about in a book and tried out then. Namely, that smoking cessation may lower the dopamine levels in the body, and too low dopamine levels may cause panic attacks. So, to get rid of the panic I had to raise my dopamine levels. It was as simple as having a protein shake with a spoonful of honey and a dash of vitamin C powder every night before bed. In the beginning I also added some valerian pills, plus vitamin B complex for good measure. A week after I started on that regimen, the panic attacks were gone. 

Having made that experience, I should be able to avoid any panic attacks this time. 

Besides, back before my first quit I was regularly smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. Today I smoke half as much. 

Even so, I am still addicted to nicotine, that is why I am still resisting quitting. And there are still some triggers I don´t really know how to deal with. Mostly, they concern situations where I go outside for a smoke to escape an unpleasant situation inside, whether  it´s DH wanting to watch something on TV that I don´t want to see, or any unpleasant task that may either be put off for a few minutes by smoking first, or the doing of which is rewarded by having a cigarette afterwards. Then there is the regular after-meal cigarette. I´ll have to find something else to signal to me that I have to stop eating. 

All of these I am still working on. 

Quitting before christmas would mean saving myself several days of old crone whining and harping on the topic. And the money I´d save would sure come in handy. 

Weight this morning: 196 pounds (89 kilos).

Still undecided,

Julia

Back in Onederland

The last weeks had some serious upheavals in our household. DH had to stay in hospital for several days after a bad health scare, and one of the things they found out was that he has high blood pressure. Not something unusual in a male over fifty, but it had gone unnoticed for quite a while because he steadfastly refused to go for a checkup. He´s on medication now, and of course, we needed to take a good hard look at the way we are eating. 

That, in turn, means no more chocolate feasts for him, we have switched to nonalcoholic beer only, the salt shaker has been put away, and I have, for two weeks now, done my best to switch our diet around to what is recommended for fighting high BP. I have also downloaded a book on the DASH diet on my kindle, hoping for more information on the dietary requirements in a person with hypertonia. 

While I, myself, tend more towards having hypotonia, i.e. too-low BP, I have gone along with DH´s new diet out of solidarity. I did not actually look to lose weight that way, but the results are pretty impressive. Down nine pounds in two weeks, from the highest point reached regaining. Which means 199 pounds. 

Back in onederland, as they say. DH, too, has been losing steadily.Now he wasn´t as overweight as me to start with, but his after-hours glass of beer and the sweets he used to binge on after dinner had made for quite a bit of a paunch over time, which is the worst place to carry one´s fat. 

As it is, the way we both eat now seems to be quite conducive to weight loss. And solidarity makes for quite a bit of motivation when it comes to not bringing certain things into the house in the first place. The salty crackers and nuts I had become all too fond of are absolutely off-limits for DH, so I don´t buy them any more. The same thing goes for the sweets and chocolate stuff he used to think he couldn´t do without. 

I´ll see how this all pans out over the long haul. Right now, we´re both motivated and ready, and the results are quite convincing. 

Next minigoal: get below 90 kilograms (198 pounds)- I can put the ten-kilo weight down a notch on my scales then. 

Finally. And hopefully for the last time.

Julia

Same old same old

Those 95 kilograms, thankfully, were a one-day mirage that disappeared the next day. But the irregularities in my monthly cycle are continuing- right now it´s a biweekly cycle actually, and every time I retain several pounds´ worth of water before it starts. 

What I am doing is journal my intake religiously. Mathematically, I eat about 1500 to 1600 calories a day. I also walk, on an ordinary workday, about 8000 to 9000 steps. From what my fitbit and myfitnesspal calculations tell me, I ought to be steadily losing. What with PMSing twice a month, I unfortunately cannot confirm that, really, as the average of my weigh-ins still tethers around those pesky 93 kilos, give or take a few grams. But, at least, there is a slightly downwards trend when I look just at the days in between. 

Work-wise, the last weeks were some serious shit. All kinds of Very Urgent and very difficult stuff, which means that my regular stuff has once more fallen by the roadside, necessitating a cleanup over the weekend.

Then again, I am not about to drive myself crazy over that. Nobody but myself is expecting me to be able to work in two places at once, and even I should not. 

Perfectionism is, in that kind of situation, the biggest trap I could fall into. So I shouldn´t. 

Keep calm and carry on. Anything else would be crazy. 

And hope that this is just the usual pre-holiday-season tidal wave of files coming in.

Julia

That Time Again

For about three months now, my weight had been dithering around the 93 kilogram point. One pound above, one pound below. No dramatic swings. I call that maintenance. And for me it meant that I had finally stopped the regain.

Or so I thought. 

I also thought that I was finally rid for good of the monthly visitor, after all, I had for those same three months not had my TOM which usually is regular as clockwork. I could exclude a pregnancy at my age. 

This morning- my weight had gone up by four pounds, to a high of 95 kilograms, within two days. As I was diligently journalling my intake, no way I had eaten that much, so it must be water weight. And Aunt Flo is back with a vegeance. Looks like I will be premenopausal for a while yet. I just hope the weight will come off again fast, as this regain has brought me to a point where my rings and my as yet biggest clothes start to feel uncomfortable. 

Running as fast as I can and not even managing to stay in place. 

Sometimes I really hate my body.

Julia

Starts and fits

Thank goodness there are no more MIL visits planned for the next weeks. The one we did last week surprisingly ended with a stall, weight-wise, which means that I can now go for the loss I have been trying to achieve too often already. And I took advantage of a special offer at a local store on my favourite protein powders, so, there´s enough of them in the pantry to get me through some serious recondensing these next weeks. Of course, DH might interfere, but I am, this time, wildly determined to do what it takes to get me back off this plateau. And that includes cutting down on having dinner together. I am convinced by now that nothing short of an almost-fast will get me through that barrier, so that is what I must do. 

The first time I went below this weight, DH wasn´t in town most of the time which allowed for absolute moderation already when shopping for food. Not having it around meant I couldn´t eat it. And, while I really like having him around, in the presence of DH that kind of frugality just isn´t possible. At least he only wants two meals a day and not three like MIL.

I´ll try to cook a lot of veggies for myself so he won´t notice how little I am eating. 

Gotta stick to my guns this time, or I´ll never get this fat off me again. 

Julia

Two-oh-five

For well over a month now, my weight has been dithering around the 93 kilograms mark. 205 pounds. That seems to be where my weight stabilizes naturally right now. I remember that I was weighing roundabout the same before the reaction to medication I had to take catapulted me up into morbid obesity and a BMI 42 in a matter of months. Three years ago, that was also where I hit my first serious plateau on the way down. So, I should probably not despair if it takes me some time to get off this point. 

Being in for yet another MIL visit, with the attendant problems concerning what to eat, doesn´t exactly foretell greater losses in the next week. She´s a veritable diet hazard. But I´ll try to avoid the stuff that is worst for me, namely, bread. In other aspects, there´s a problem. She will refuse almost everything made with vegetables claiming her delicate stomach doesn´t digest them well, which means that the number of veggies she still eats has dwindled to about four or five, and those only when they are cooked almost into a mash. Ugh!

If I could stay at the weight I´m at today, I might perhaps be able to restart recondensing once we are left again to our own devices food-wise. And tonight, I´ll have a big ass salad. Raw, and with many different veggies in it. Get my nutrition in as long as I can. 

Julia 

Stop Before You Turn

I´m back to doing almost all of the things I did when I started out recondensing three years ago. I log my food, keep under my calories, weigh myself daily and record the results. The only thing I haven´t restarted yet is exercise. I have no idea how to fit that into my schedule right now. 

The result is... a stall. Or, more charitably, maintenance. Instead of the hoped-for loss. Rowing as fast as I can only to avoid being sucked into Niagara Falls, instead of making headway. 

At first sight, that would be sheer frustration. But the good news is that I have finally stopped gaining, even though it´s on a much higher level than I had hoped for. 

Before I can turn my weight curve around, I must first stop gaining. So achieving this is a sign that things are going back in the right direction after all. 

Now if the multiple work overload I´m labouring under were to go away, I might even make time for exercise again. It won´t be easy, the bit of physical fitness I had reached being long evaporated, but I might get an exercise buddy in the guise of DH, who has been advised at his orthopedist´s that, of all things, nordic walking might be just the thing his shoulder joint needs. Go figure. 

We would not even have to purchase any additional equipment as we already have the sticks from way back. 

The only thing keeping us from starting is exhaustion. Finding at least half an hour each day for exercise gets hard when one is either busy at work or coming home so tired that one just drops down into an easy chair, puts up one´s feet and dozes off in a matter of minutes. I don´t think I have finished watching the evening news for several weeks. 

The lifelogging appliances I use tell me about my sleep time at night being way too short. Having to get up an hour earlier several times this week didn´t help that particularly. I wish I could but once get the uninterrupted eight to nine hours of sleep I know I run best on. Right now I am lucky if I get more than six. Knowing the effect of sleep deprivation on weight, that is definitely something I must work on. 

If only knowing what to change meant doing the change.

Julia

Strawberries, Asparagus and Wasps

After a rather frenetic last week, I had been looking forward to a nice relaxed weekend puttering around at home, including trying to catch some sun on our balcony. 

Unfortunately, we had visitors. 

For some days already, we had noticed that a wasp was regularly circling our balcony table, disappearing underneath it and reappearing some time later. Well, we weren´t certain it was the same wasp, so we paid no attention to it. 

This weekend, the wasp had brought a buddy along for company. As DH is allergic to wasp stings, having two of the critters buzzing around us all the time was out of the question. And they still kept flying underneath the table. So, we decided to find out what was so interesting down there and turned the table over. What we found was the openings that table had near where the legs are fixed jam-packed with yellow pollen and the greyish stuff wasps use for building their nests, plus, there were also several already-developed cocoons squeezed in there. Eeeek! To think that if we had not looked for some reason, there might have been a fully grown wasp´s nest down there...

In the building stage it was in, what we did was immerse the part in question in scalding hot water, then pry out the whole construction, all the while circled by the parent wasp who took two days to realize it (she?) had just been evicted and leave the balcony. Opposite that much tenacity, it was all too clear that reconstruction work would start immediately if we were to leave the offending table where it was. So we took it apart and put it in the basement (it´s plastic so the humidity won´t destroy it), and then went for a new table to put in its place. One that has no holes or ridges a wasp could use to fix a nest to. Even after we set up the new table, the wasp was back. I don´t know if it was still looking for the destroyed nest, or looking for a place to rebuild. In any case, after some time, it left. 

As it was, the critter had cost us almost all of Saturday afternoon. But we do have a new balcony table to show for it. I had actually planned to replace the old one for some time, it being a bit too large in diameter for our relatively narrow balcony, and the one we bought now is about fifteen centimeters smaller across, so, the balcony, too, looks more open and spacious with it. 

Losing Saturday afternoon to the wasps meant having to do laundry on Sunday, which in turn means I did not get around to doing the ironing as the clothes weren´t dry yet (I line-dry my laundry). 

On the food and weight front, I did buy myself some fresh strawberries for the first time in several years. It used to be that I was so busy that I kept missing out on strawberry season, thinking I would get some when the time for them was right and finding it was already over when I went to look. This year, I finally got some in time. 

The daily protein shake (with fresh strawberries in it) and cutting down on the nibbling have, at least, stopped my regain. I actually had the Fat Watch curve register a net loss for the week for the first time in about a year. Just 70 grams, but I did not gain. 70 grams a week, if repeated for a year, would mean seven pounds down. Which is not what I want to stop at, but the important thing is that I seem to have succeded in turning around that roller coaster back downwards at all. 

Having fresh asparagus with new potatoes and almost fat-free serrano ham as Sundays´ dinner was another of the joys of spring that one has to be careful not to miss out on, and on top, it´s recondensing-friendly. 

Finally, there´s hope of getting back to where I was one year ago. 

Julia

Egging Myself On

It´s been eleven months now since the inundation and as many months of having regained. 

I am still convinced that the regain and the flooding were somehow connected, most probably via some toxins that were set free in my old office. 

In spite of being out of there for good, it wasn´t like the regain stopped immediately or the weight started to drop off from the day I changed rooms. 

What I have managed by now is slowing the regain from a rate of 270 grams a week to about 80 grams a week, on average. Which still has me at 93 kilograms and a 33.3 BMI. Actually, I might have been further down had we not been duty-bound to visit with MIL for a week twice  (she expects us down there for every bank holiday). Every time that ended with a three-pound regain that I had to try and get off before even thinking of recondensing. 

As it is, I´m sick and tired of being stuck at this weight. Sick and tired of being thick and tired. 

That´s why I have switched my breakfast from bacon and eggs to a protein shake, and I am trying to replace as many meals as possible with shakes. Otherwise, I try to halve the portions of what I eat. 

I had actually, over the years, succumbed to another case of portion creep. The smaller dinnerware we use has been limiting the damages, but still, having three instead of two eggs for breakfast means about a hundred more calories, and if I don´t cut down on my eating elsewhere it partly explains why I´m still stuck in gaining mode. 

Total weight regained: 13.8 kilograms or 30 pounds. 

Distance to goal of being normal-weighted: 23.8 kilograms or 52 pounds. 

DIstance to goal at my lowest weight reached: 10 kilograms or 22 pounds. 

So, this regaining thing more than doubled the distance to goal. 

 Or, in other words, if I were to restart recondensing at a going rate of half a pound a week, I´d take another year to get back in the vicinity of the place I had already reached. 

I´ll try to be there sooner. 

This time I won´t be doing this just for myself, DH, too, has grown quite a paunch during the last year. As DFIL was type two diabetic for many years, I am afraid DH might put himself over the edge, too. Offering healthy meals, which I had been criminally neglecting since the flood, is therefore important. 

And for myself, resisting those extra nibbles and sneaky snacks in the time between coming home and putting dinner on the table. 

I have done this before. I can do this again. 

Julia

Needed reminder

Sometimes life has to bring out the really big guns to wake us to our own stupidity. 

Having both DH and myself injuring a tendon in a space of less than three weeks is what drove me to look for things that might have made us more susceptible of such injuries. The prime suspect, as usually, was nutrition, or rather the fact that we had been neglecting the nutrition density of what we ate for months in favor of just gobbling up things that needed no work, as in convenience food and candy, all the while ignoring the veggie stores in the freezer. 

After I twisted my knee simply carrying a - not even heavy- shopping bag up the stairs, we both have started on a supplement regime with vitamins, minerals, and gelatine to feed our tendons. The effect has been amazing for both of us. Less fatigue, more energy, smoother skin, general improvement of how we feel. And for me, having the pain in my knee go away after just four days. DH, too, reports less pain in his shoulder joint. 

Weight-wise, nothing has moved yet, but DH claims I look less bloated in my face. 

And, surprise of surprises, DH, who usually is a devoted lover of all things chocolate, has himself suggested we should stop purchasing such things for him, which would also put myself out of temptation´s way. 

So that´s the plan: no more pre-prepared snacks and convenience food. No more bread and white flour. Rice and pasta must not be the main part of what´s on the plate. Instead, plenty of vegetables. I´ll continue the supplements, plus at least twice daily protein shakes and plenty of water. 

I´ll see if that gets things moving downwards again.

Oh, and the air pollution expert claims to have found sky-high levels of terpenes in the furniture in my old office. I don´t know if that explains all of the symptoms I had when still working in there, but I do know that terpenes are retained in the fatty tissue of the body, so that would match my suspicions I had about the reasons for my regain. 

I hope that I can get back to recondensing now that I am no longer exposed. 

In any case, I´ll insist that they remove all furniture from that room, air it out and then measure again- the smell in there is nothing like turpentine or wood which would be the likely sources of  terpene so I suspect they haven´t found all of the problem yet. 

And I´ll keep on keeping the windows open as often as the weather permits. 

Julia

Foursquare

Four square meters. That is the open space in my living room that was liberated by ditching the last of the IKEA armchairs plus the guest bed. As they only pick up big pieces of trash once a month, they had been languishing in the cellar awaiting pickup day. Yesterday, very carefully of course not to put too much of a strain on my knee, we put them out in front of the house. I actually expected them to be gone before the pickup truck arrived. Well, that didn´t happen. They were obviously not looking attractive enough for anybody to carry them home. Which is sobering when I consider that I had actually been hesitant at first to throw them out. Anyway, the trash collection took them this morning. 

Watching from the kitchen window how they were compacted into the trash lorry made me a bit sad. Then again, I am glad that I have reclaimed the space they occupied in our flat. 

Come to think of it, I spent the twentieth part of our rent every month on making room for something that others wouldn´t even pick up for free.

And there are more such white elephants still around taking up space and making the apartment look crowded and small. 

The couch, which has been temporariliy relegated to the guestroom in place of the bed, is a prime such candidate  Two more square meters beckoning to be liberated. We are actually only waiting for our respective injuries to heal before dragging it downstairs. 

The living room minus the old easy chair and the couch appears twice as roomy as when they were still in there, even with the new easy chairs in place. 

One step after the other, we are improving on the way we live. And I keep being surprised at how small a step may sometimes translate into a dramatic improvement. 

On the weight front, unfortunately, no such luck. I have been supplementing with gelatin and resistant starch for several days, hoping to get my digestion and my joints back to working properly. What that brought me was a three-pound gain. I just hope that it´s a matter of the body adapting to being refed and will go away again. Meanwhile, it´s sheer frustration. Pants growing tight again ( yup, the bigger ones I hesitated so long to buy), shortness of breath, and of course that bum knee. 

Looks like it´s one more time my body shows me that it won´t do what I want it to do. 

If only that would stop. 

Before I get back to where I never wanted to be again for good. 

Julia

The Law of Three

Bad luck always comes in packages of three. That´s at least what they say hereabouts, and it looks like they are right. 

After the trouble with DH´s shoulder, which still isn´t back to functionality, and that pesky cough I caught, yesterday, I was carrying some groceries up the stairs to our apartment when my left knee decided in mid-climb that it had had enough. Which means that I am, per today, hobbling around on crutches and just hoping that I did not tear anything. As the pain is already less than what it was when the injury had just happened, I just hope it´s only a pulled ligament that may with being careful heal by itself. 

Being careful, in that case, also means having to cut my usual lunchtime walks short. That, in turn, means even less exercise, which is annoying as I am still trying to stop that upwards trend in my weight. After three weeks of maintaining, I have by now gained back another two pounds that won´t budge. While that may be due to lack of sleep, my regular eating patterns have been falling by the wayside, too, during those last weeks. That the extra weight is probably to blame for my knee acting up, requires no special mention. 

All in all, I think I have been neglecting the feeding of DH and myself for too long once again. Lack of time, lack of energy, and lack of motivation meant grabbing for something convenient and fast instead of something healthy way too often. It should be a red flag for me that I did not have to restock our frozen veggies on the last Costco-equivalent shopping tour. Usually I take at least three or four of their seven-pound bags because that´s at the very least how much we usually eat in a month. The fact that we did not use as much last month means I haven´t been cooking very often. 

Shame on me.

DH, too, has been taking his frustration to town with a bag of chocolates or two to the detriment of his waistline. 

No one to blame for the weight gain but us. 

Knowing what to do is one thing. Actually doing it, unfortunately, quite another. 

I just hope that my knee will be calming down enough by tonight to allow for me to do some cooking without having to balance pots, pans, knives and crutches. 

Never give up. 

Julia

Out of commission

Doing the furniture shuffle can be downright dangerous. That´s what DH found out the real hard way. Two days after rearranging our furniture, he got pain in his left shoulder so bad he fainted in the living room. As that kind of pain might also have meant a cardiac event, I called a doctor. We then spent the greater part of the night at the emergency room, him getting examined and treated and me sitting in a draughty waiting room awaiting news about what was up. Luckily, it wasn´t anything to do with his heart, so he could come home with me. Turned out he had an inflammation of his shoulder joint and may need to be operated on in the future. 

As if that weren´t bad enough, I caught a serious cold that kept me awake for about two weeks every night coughing. It got bad enough for me to spend part of each night sitting in my new easy chair trying to find at least some sleep in the upright position. 

Of course, that cold meant I could not drive to see MIL, as I didn´t want to pass it on to her.

So DH had to drive there on his own (luckily his shoulder wasn´t  hurting as badly any more), and I thought I had several days´ time to recuperate. I had intended to catch up on the work that had been backing up because I was so fricking tired over the weekend, but decided to go in on Monday (which I had intended to take off work) instead. And, just in time (argh) I lost a dental filling which meant that the second day off I had counted on was spent at the dentist´s. Who replaced the filling, but now I keep getting little electrical shocks from the new filling acting like a little battery combined with what I already had in my mouth. 

At least the cold seems to be abating. Keeping my mouth open long enough to get that filling in would have been impossible last week. And I have been able to sleep through the last nights, mostly. I still am coughing a bit, but no comparison to what I had. 

And being caught up with work again is a good feeling. 

Weight-wise, I have been paying the price for two weeks on less than three hours of sleep a night in the guise of a two-pound gain that is, right now, slowly coming off. 

I wonder if that cold was so tenacious because my body was taking the occasion of getting rid of some of the poisons I must have inhaled in my old office, too. I have never had a cold that stuck on for well over two weeks before, and apart the indoor pollution problem at the office I don´t think there was anything that would have reduced my immune defenses like that. 

The expert for indoor pollution was in last Tuesday, by the way. He took a shelf out of my office furniture for further testing. Somehow I am not convinced that smell was just the furniture gassing out. After all, I had no problems before the high humidity after the flooding last year. But I have been promised a copy of the expert´s report. 

The decluttering project, of course, has come to a screeching halt. Still, I have noticed feeling calmer in my living room with the new arrangement. The only hitch is that we will have to develop new habits when it comes to bringing mail or other stuff home.I still catch myself wanting to drop the mail on the living room table behind the door- which isn´t there any more and which is also not intended to be the drop-all any more. Having less surface to drop things on forces me to think about where things go at once. I haven´t yet developed a functioning system for that. 

And, before we can finally move our sleeping quarters into what used to be DH´s den/the guestroom, we will have to repaint the walls there. In the living room, too, because now that this room is optically calmer the sad state of the walls is that much more noticeable. But having more free space in the rooms also means that repainting them won´t be the giant horror project it used to be any more. 

Which means that I am eagerly waiting for warmer weather so I can go about painting the walls while keeping the windows wide open to air out any fumes. The experience I had at the office taught me quite a bit about what those may do. For the ceilings, I will have to enlist DH as soon as his shoulder is back to normal. 

As for the books I removed- I had budgeted to replace them all with their respective e-book counterparts. But when I had to decide which ones to buy as e-books, I discovered that I didn´t even want to replace most of them any more. I had read them once, and kept them just in case I should want to read them again. And now I realize that that would be a highly improbable event. So what were these books doing taking up space in my life any more?

Perhaps I will even go for another round at the leftover pocket books. Keeping them just for the sake of having them around is not a good use of the valuable closet space in our living room. 

As it is, there are five shelves´ worth of hardcover editions that are temporarily shelved in the guestroom which I still have to cull and then transfer to the living room. The open shelving there happens to be filled with my cookbooks and some self-help stuff that may, if kept at all, as well be kept somewhere less obvious. So, I will have to do some decluttering there, too. 

But- with every bit of clutter I remove the goal of having only things I like or use gets a bit closer. 

And with every knicknack I remove it gets easier to keep the place reasonably clean and dust-free. 

More isn´t better. Most of the time, it´s worse. Unless it´s more space, more time, and more peace. 

Julia

Obsolete

I am rapidly approaching the big five-oh. 

While it is obvious that I won´t get below morbid obesity by then, what I can do for myself is getting rid of those possessions of mine that no longer fit in with my lifestyle. 

Of course, I don´t have fifty years´worth of stuff around any more, as I have been decluttering with every move and several times in the last years, too. But I do have stuff I kept for almost forty of my fifty years that has strictly no relevance for my daily life today. 

So does DH.

Yesterday, we went for the vinyl rack. You know, every vinyl record ever acquired by both of us. Given that we were both voracious consumers of all things music, it was quite a sizable collection.

The kicker was that the last functioning record player in our household had broken down and was discarded.... six years ago. Well, it had actually broken more than ten years ago (ahem). 

We don´t intend to buy another record player, as we have our favourite music on CD (with few exceptions). 

So, the records were just taking up space. 

We don´t need them to remember the music we liked before the arrival of the CD. And after that, we both bought just CDs and no more vinyl records. We could both date the point when we got the first CD player from the dates of publication of our records. And, while these records had been well-loved when we first got them, there were plenty we would never buy again or even listen to today, even if we had a player available. 

So, we parted ways. 

And there´s another empty shelf in the living room.

If I were ever to replace my IKEA shelves with something else, that means three feet less of necessary shelf length to account for. 

And those feet add up. 

Removing all the things that are obsolete removes a lot of the clutter we have. 

Which reminds me that I should take a look at my tape collection, too, even if I still own a cassette deck.  The ones I would not listen to any more, and the self-recorded ones (does anyone remember sitting in front of the radio with one finger on the "rec" button to catch your favorite songs?) where I have no idea what is on them are natural candidates for eviction. Which means one or two drawers are going to be liberated soon. 

I don´t need the actual tapes and records for the memories to remain. And the space is something I can always use. 

Julia

Making room for living

As our new easy chairs have arrived today, the weekend turned into one big decluttering and furniture-shuffling exercise. Part of my IKEA shelves were scrapped, instead we put DH´s massive bookcase in that place. The closed parts of the shelves that had to go fit exactly into what were the still exposed shelves of the other ones, which means that we have now a closed cupboard instead of open shelving mixed with closed parts. 

The most important result is that there are barely any horizontal spaces left that would allow to put things upon them. Of course, a lot of what I thought was visual interest in the room has gone, too. 

But, what visual interest really meant was tchotchkes , bric-a-brac and family pictures. 

What is really amazing is how much calmer the room looks without all that stuff. A few choice pieces have gone on the still-open shelves on the third wall, and the rest is either inside the closed cupboards or in the trash can. 

In order to make room for the new arrivals, we also tossed the remaining IKEA easy chair and DH´s big dark couch, which means that we now have mostly uniformly colored wood and, after all is said and done, seating for a maximum of six people (we kept the danish design chair and my Grandfather´s easy chair). Which is quite a step forward from the ten sitting places we used to have and leaves plenty of open space between the seating arrangements, especially since we picked modern chairs that are looking a lot lighter and less massive than the old couch. 

Once again, taking things away has been the way to creating a better feeling for that room. 

In retrospect, we should have arranged things differently from the start when DH moved in with me. The big furniture pieces he brought plus the ones I already had were just too much stuff in too little space. 

And we used to make things worse by adding stuff instead of subtracting it. 

Case in point: the old VCR I still kept, plus about three feet of videotapes on a shelf. We haven´t watched any video tapes for many years- the device wasn´t even plugged in any more. The DVD player on top of it was what we used if we wanted more movie entertainment than 50 cable channels could offer at all. 

So, we decided that we didn´t need the VCR and tapes any more. If we ever wanted to own one of the movies again, they are all available on disc. Somehow, I am rather certain these discs will never enter our flat. 

And I cleared out all and sundry of my pocketbooks that I could reacquire on my e-book-reader if I wanted to. 

Having to pull out the complete stuff in the closed shelf compartments anyway, I still found plenty of things I decided not to put back, which meant freeing up several of those compartments completely. 

The chests of drawers had been the target of a decluttering session several days ago already, which included plenty of cables and chargers for gizmos I don´t even own any more. 

Lo and behold, even DH decided, when he saw the purge taking effect on the look of the room, to go through his own stuff and let go of his old "lava lamp" and a cheap imitation "petroleum" lamp whose wiring was faulty and which we had kept on top of one of the shelves for decoration. 

The astonishing part, for me, is that there was still so much stuff around even though I had been decluttering fiercely two years ago, finishing with the conviction that this was the lowest I would go with my stuff.

Looks like I was wrong.

And the side of the room where we didn´t yet change anything looks decidedly cluttered now compared to the other half. The culprits are mainly the decorations. Perhaps we´ll get around to repainting the room this summer. I know already that not all of the pictures and wallhangers will be replaced afterwards. 

There still is plenty of work to do, but right now, I just enjoy my "new" living room. 

Julia

Getting my mojo back

Sometimes, you only realize how rotten you were feeling after you feel better. That is certainly what I have experienced during the last week. 

After moving my stuff to my new office I noticed an immediate improvement in how I was feeling. The only thing I had to move back into my old room were my flower pots- looks like the dirt in them has soaked up a good deal of what´s in the air in my old room, and they were smelling of it. So, I´ll probably have to replant my sanseverias in clean earth before I can put them back. But apart that- everything roses, and I don´t mean just the smell! Of course, I threw out everything in terms of food and everything made of plastic. My coffee cups went home for a good soak in desinfectant to get rid of the smell that still clung to them. And my books are luckily inside a closed cupboard, so I guess they either didn´t get too contaminated or they are sealed off from the room enough to keep them from spreading the smell to the new room (they are legal casebooks I need for my job and would be outrageously expensive to replace, so they have to stay). 

The most striking thing is that my energy and concentration are back. No more dozing off in front of the TV at night or, even worse, in front of my desk at noon. So, I am catching up with the stuff that didn´t get done during the last weeks due to my concentration being absolutely shot. 

And I have, over the weekend, gone on another decluttering stint. 

This time, it´s the living room once again. We will be getting new easy chairs for the both of us next week, which means a big rearranging session coming up over the weekend as DH is not ready to toss his old sofa, which will be moved to the den, and I want to keep my Grandfather´s easy chair, too. 

So, it´s goodbye to the old IKEA easy chair and footstool I had, and the guest bed in the den, too, because that´s where the sofa will go. 

And DH wants to transfer his big antique bookcase he got from his parents to the living room. I´m not too happy about that, as the thing isn´t exactly my style, being way too heavy and dark. Actually, the thing is rather high on my all-time-list of things I wish DH would get rid of. I guess DH will have to see what that thing does to the style of our living room before he´ll admit putting it there isn´t such a grand idea.  As it is, DH can be pretty stubborn, and parting him from that thing would be a major effort. 

Putting a four-door bookcase into our living room means having to make room for it, which in turn means that three of our IKEA shelves will have to go. 

Of course, the stuff that is stored in that bookcase won´t disappear just because it is moved. Nor will the stuff inside the IKEA shelves, which won´t all fit into the space the bookcase was in, either. 

So, the only chance I have  to keep the whole operation from turning into a desaster is minimizing the stuff inside our living room shelves even more. 

This time, the chosen victims are my favorite books. 

Say that again?

Throwing out my favorite books? 

The ones that did survive every attempt at decluttering? The ones that were read and re-read?

Might I not just go and kick some cute furry things instead to prove I am a barbarian? 

Actually, it´s not as crazy as it sounds. The books in question are paperback editions of several prolific authors whose works I like to read. They are also, after many readings, rather dingy-looking and dog-eared. And I found out that the big-internet-bookstore-whose-name-I-won´t-name has every single one of those books available for my e-book reader. When I added up what they would cost me, I came up with a figure so ridiculously low in comparison to what owning the paperbacks costs me in terms of space that the decision became an instant no-brainer. Throwing the paperbacks out will liberate at least half an IKEA shelf which is also what would be the space lost by the rearrangements. 

I am even thinking of cutting down the paperback department even further, by checking which of my paperbacks would be available in e-book format and getting rid of all those I could, if ever I wished to read them again, download to my e-book-reader. Which would also mean I´d have to decide if those books were even worth downloading at all. As paperbacks, they are already there and take up space. I might even find that most of those other books won´t be downloaded after all. 

The whole scheme will, of course, only be applied to paperbacks. The hardcover part of my library will stay for the time being, as those are, for the most part, the irreplaceable ones. They are also decorative enough to put into open shelves.

As it is, DH´s idea of a proper living room for decent citizens includes shelves and shelves of coffee-table books, gilt-backed classics and encyclopedias. The whole impress-your-visitors array. 

For my part, I feel about being visited by anyone the same way I feel about getting a tooth pulled. No visitors at all if I can help it. It was bad enough when DH brought DMIL here several years in a row for her b-day. While I wish her health and wellness, the fact that she does by now not travel any more came as quite a relief to me. And apart from her, if DH ever wanted to invite guests we would be in for a discussion of the state of the union. Meeting people can be done outside our flat. There´s no need to drag anybody into it. 

Which means that the whole impressive library won´t ever be seen by anyone unless we had to have the repair guys in. 

Oh well. But then again, I´m conservative enough to like the feeling of a library, too. Maybe I´m not too happy about this library  because DH has so many books on art, which definitely is not an interest of mine. Or it´s because my parents, too, have so many artsy books, sometimes even the same ones as DH. Which may also be why I am not that happy about the medium brown bookcase, because it´s almost the same color as my parents´ shelves at their place. 

Then again, DH is very attached to the furniture his parents gave him. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it? 

And I will have to work on fitting those things into our living room without cramping either the living room or our style...

The bad news is that the weight gain hasn´t stopped yet. Perhaps my body needs some convincing still that I am out of that gas chamber of an office for good...

Julia

Fresh air at work

For several months, the air pollution problem in my office has been getting progressively worse. I´m not an expert, but what I guess is that the solvent-free materials they supposedly used in renovating the ancient building I´m working in must be hygroscopic, meaning they attract humidity, and when we had the flooding last summer, the sky-high humidity that ensued for weeks afterwards must have started some kind of chemical reaction that set free some as yet unknown pollutant. What I know for certain is that it was after the flooding that my health problems started. Stuffed sinuses, coughing, headaches, and worst of all bouts of triplopia (triple vision in one eye) that left me dizzy and continuously tired. All of which only occurred when I had spent time inside my office, never outside of it. 

After my christmas vacation, during which I had been symptom-free, it took just one day at the office for the symptoms to come back in full force. And as it was winter, I could not leave the window open all the time which rised the concentration of whatever poison there is in that room even worse than in summer. 

For the longest time, my complaints to everyone who might be able to help me had gone unheeded. 

Last Monday, finally, I had enough. When coming to a room in the morning that had the concentrated miasma of a weekend with closed windows, I fetched a colleague to take a whiff of the smell in that room. He didn´t even step all the way in before recoiling, and I guess he must have told the powers that be that there was really something off in my room. In any case, this Monday the official smelling party has been in and they immediately decided to call in an expert to measure and find out what it is that makes that room stink so badly. 

I was also relocated to a different room. I have, by now, moved all of my stuff including books and plants to the new room, hoping that they did not absorb too much of what´s in the other room. The other room is locked up. 

The difference, health-wise, is striking. I haven´t had triple images once, no headaches, and my sinuses are decidedly less stuffed. And the fatigue is diminishing, too. 

It´s just incredible. 

I will probably replace my office plants, too, as soon as the weather allows for transporting plants again, as a measure of caution. But the important part is that I am out of that gas chamber.

Of course, I am still worried about just what it might have been I was exposed to all this time. By the effects, it might have been some kind of toxin that acts on the nervous system, which is pretty scary to think of. 

Which also could be an explanation for my weight gain that coincided with the appearance of the problem. Perhaps my body has been trying to store away some poison and for that purpose it has been growing fat cells. 

The litmus test for that suspicion would be if I stopped gaining now. Or managed to get back to recondensing. Which, of course, would mean that whatever toxins there are in those fat cells would have to be removed from my body. So, I might still face a period of feeling lousy. But, as long as I don´t have to go back in there, I hope I will be able to clear that stuff out of my body again. I´ll have to read up on how to help my body detox. Perhaps I will really get my health back. 

Actually, I had to be out of that room first and see the dramatic difference that made before I really understood how much that stuff had been making me sick. 

Perhaps I should do a Whole 30 to start a proper detoxification process. The only thing that keeps me from starting at once is that I would also have to quit smoking (I know, it is probably mega dumb that I didn´t stop when the problem started, but I am still afraid of gaining even more weight were I to quit) .

At least I am no longer exposed to those toxins. I´ll see how things develop further. 

And hope for my weight to start moving down again.

Julia

Seven Months Is Enough Already

Seven months, almost to the day. June 15th, 2013. That was the last day I experienced not being obese. 

Since then, my weight has been steadily creeping up. Half a pound a week, on average. Which has by now catapulted me back to 200 pounds. 91 kilograms. 

I am by now convinced that the only thing I can do to stop this is go off the carbs again- and stay well below the 1800 daily calories that should, according to the charts, equal my basal metabolic rate at a weight below morbid obesity and therefore should mean at most maintenance, not a ten-kilogram regain in just seven months. 

Looks like my metabolism is even more tanked than I had assumed. 

Actually, I have been feeling what is supposed to be the signs of a slowed-down metabolism for quite a while already. Continually cold hands and feet, digestive issues, fatigue, and, of course, weight gain. The whole combined with a continuous feeling of sluggishness and difficulties concentrating. Which was also the reason why I stopped blogging for so long- I was just too fricking tired all the time. 

So, when I came upon some books that claimed that the only way to get one´s metabolism back up is to stop undereating and refeed your body, I chose trying to lose my fatigue over trying to lose my weight. The choice was facilitated by the accompanying recommendation that one should eat plenty of carbohydrate, fat and salt. In other words, all the things I had been avoiding when losing were suddenly, not only allowed but preferable. 

Supposedly, the body should gain back some weight and then stabilize at it´s "natural" weight. 

The only problem being that after several months of doing this, there is no sign of the regain slowing down. At the going rate, I´d be back where I started from within another year. 

And the fatigue hasn´t diminished either. My hands and feet are still mostly icy cold. And my digestion still is a mess. 

This morning´s scale shock is the point where I have to reevaluate my choices. 

Obviously, the "getting my metabolism back up" thing is not working. What with the advice given running counter to everything I did when losing the weight two years ago, it´s likely making my situation worse by the day. Having all the aches and complications of morbid obesity back is certainly worse than having to accept that my metabolism is slow, even if that means cutting way down on the calories. Or the carbs. 

So, beginning today, I´m back on the wagon. Carbs below 20 percent of calories and 1500 calories a day maximum. Upping my fluid intake again (another thing that was discouraged for getting my metabolism back up). For the time being, no alcoholic beverages. And using the stairs at the office again even if I´m, by now, wheezing when I arrive upstairs. Trying for 10000 steps a day instead of my customary 5000. 

I took seven months to regain those last ten kilos. The first time around, I have been taking nine months to recondense them. 

I´ll see how long it takes me this time.

As for setting goals, I am by now aiming to get back to the lowest point I had reached. There isn´t a deadline, as it is mathematically impossible for me to reach that goal by my birthday in March.  

And I am, at present, not intending to force my weight down further than that. If more weight should come off, I´d be glad about it, but if that 80-kilo point were where the buck stops for me, I´d accept that, too. 

What I won´t accept is being back out of onederland. What I won´t accept is becoming that beached whale again. 

Enough already. 

Yes, having my stomach growl will probably lead to the production of stress hormones. But so does having to buy new pants because the old ones are wearing through, or starting, once again, to actively avoid everything that might physically exert me. I´m not starting an exercise regimen ( no time for that), but I don´t want to have to think about the shortest way to go somewhere, or the easiest way to do things. Nor do I want to cut out regular activities because they would be too strenuous. 

I want my life back. As simple as that.

Julia