A Condensed Version Of Myself

Recipe Monday: Pasta with tuna sauce

2012-02-27T02:42:00.001-08:00

..or, as our Italian friends call it "al tonno"!
I put a lot of veggies into the sauce for a really balanced meal.

First, you prepare and cut up the vegetables. Think onions, peas, carrots, bell peppers, celery- whatever catches your fancy and can be cut up in small pieces. I admit to being lazy and using pre-cut frozen vegetable mix and onion cubes.
Stir-fry these in a bit of olive oil until they begin to get tender. Add some olives, some diced peperoni if you have any (again, to taste- I guess jalapenos would be too hot), season with dried oregano, add some concentrated tomatoes (you can get these packaged in a tube) and a bit of water so the ingredients will mix well. Drain a can of water-packed tuna, add to the mix, and allow to simmer at a low temperature with the lid closed. Stir regularly in between to avoid the sauce sticking to the pot. Season with chili powder to taste.
In the meantime, cook a sufficient amount of pasta ( I prefer spirelli) to taste in a bigger pot. Drain, then mix with the sauce and serve.
For good measure, you can put a bit of grated parmesan cheese on top.
I use the pot the pasta was cooked in for mixing, so, I take one that´s big enough to hold both the cooked pasta and the sauce, with some room to spare.
The good thing about this is that you can stock all of the ingredients in your pantry and freezer, and preparing it with those frozen prepared veggies takes about twenty minutes. It tastes not at all fishy because of the oregano and chili powder, and can also be used for using up those last vegetables in the crisper.
If you don´t like to use tuna, a similar dish may be prepared with cubed pieces of chicken breast (fry them until done first, then add the veggies etc. into the same pot) or even with cubed bacon, or for the vegetarians out there with tofu or feta cheese (though you should add the latter only directly to the dishes when serving to avoid it sticking to the pots).

Enjoy!

Julia

Say cheese!

2012-02-24T04:17:00.002-08:00

Lent, to me, means 40 days of eating no meat. Poultry and fish are allowed. So are eggs and cheese. The problem for me is that at least the latter is very calorie-dense, which might make indulging too much a recipe for failing my present goal of having two more pounds gone till the middle of March. But, for the most time, I´m not that deeply into eating fish. Nor is DH who might just go on strike at repeat sightings of pollock or mackerel in my kitchen. My daily allotment of eggs is eaten at breakfast, and I must also- as last weekend´s gain painfully brought home- avoid those meatless but carbohydrate-rich fillers like pasta and potatoes. Which makes this whole lent thing a bit of a meal-planning balancing act for us two carnivores.
One thing I discovered at the grocery store may help there. It´s a package of dollar-sized (the coin kind you get at Las Vegas to operate the slot machines) breaded goat cheese pieces that you can bake in the oven. I had four of these little cheeses yesterday, putting them on an ovenproof platter along with an arrangement of broccoli and bell peppers, which I had doused with a bit of olive oil. The veggies were roasted nicely by the time the cheese was ready, and the whole arrangement on the platter looked definitely restaurant-worthy. As it was, DH and me were speculating about how much such a platter would cost if served at a restaurant. Four times the price of the ingredients for two home-made servings seemed to be a good guess, meaning the two of us would have spent eight times as much to eat the same thing in a restaurant.
I can, actually, get quite angry at people who claim that it´s impossible to eat cheaply. Yes, things have gotten more expensive overall, but the last time I looked, fresh or frozen produce still came a lot cheaper than those microwaveable meals, or fast food.
Of course, feeding one´s family on produce instead of fast-food burgers means you have to get off your bum and cook. People who never learned how to cook are at a decided disadvantage there. And the number of those is rising, even among the better educated.
In my eyes, it´s a crime for parents to have their children leaving home unable to prepare their own food. Apart from putting them at the mercy of Big Food for what they ingest, it also prevents them from realizing that it is possible to eat like a gourmet on a shoestring budget, if you know how to prepare those delicious things you get in a restaurant for yourself at home.
The ever rising number of people who don´t know how to cook coincides with a rise in the number of cooking shows on TV. I don´t think these are a good thing, because they are, well, shows which means that the cooks featured there will make everything appear like, well, a show. Someone who doesn´t know how to cook will look at displays of excellent knife skills chopping up onions, or at pancakes being turned over by flipping them in the air, and say, "I could never do that". The threshold to cross before starting to learn how to cook is thereby getting higher.
Guess what, cucumber salad made by slicing a cucumber slowly one slice at a time tastes just the same as if said cucumber had been cut up by a chef´s knife working like some fast-motion guillotine, cutting so fast it looks like that cucumber came apart all by itself. And for a novice cook, going slowly may prevent you from serving up an unplanned side dish of fingertips...
Yes, you may take a lot longer than they make it look on TV. They have pre-prepared ingredients backstage, did you know? And yes, you may end up burning instead of roasting your meat at the first try. But with time, you´ll learn. Just don´t say you can´t so you won´t. Try it. It is not rocket science. Generations of women in the Dark Ages when there were no restaurants around the corner have done it, with far more impractical appliances than what we have today. You can do it, too. And while you are at it, try to learn something aout your ingredients. Reading about kids who believe that milk is an artificially created product, or who aren´t able to identify even the most ordinary veggies, is just scary. Knowing which ingredients mix well and what seasonings to use with them is something that will enable you to make something out of any pantry.
There was actually one cooking show I liked, where they bought some especially ill-assorted ingredients, and the challenge for the cooks was to turn these into a proper meal within a time limit.
I thought that was the most realistic show they ever had, because it showed that with some creativity, you can turn even the last resort remnants of your pantry into a proper meal. And that´s what learning how to cook is about, too, because that way you will be able to feed your family tasty food even when grocery money is tight.
It is, after all, not what you spend on the ingredients that makes a good meal. It´s how you prepare them. A cheaper cut of meat done right will be better than the most expensive filet not properly prepared.

So dare to cook- it´s fun and frugal!

Julia

Still having beasties on board?

2012-02-24T01:03:00.000-08:00

At least that´s what Google told me when I just tried to subscribe to an RSS feed, that my machine was generating automated queries (???). So, I´ll have to run the antivirus over everything again, which will take almost the whole night (my HD is that full :( ).
Success notice of the day: I am back at just 200 grams (that´s half a pound) over the lowest I had reached before Christmas, so, two pounds away from overweight!

I just hope this will send...

Julia

Slow motion

2012-02-23T06:51:00.001-08:00

For a couple of days, my beloved netbook has been driving me crazy because things were moving so slowly that it felt as if there were some kind of digital syrup clogging up the machine. I could- to pun on what I heard is an Indian greeting-almost say "ram ram" to every pixel appearing- before the next one appeared, that is. Yesterday, things came almost to a standstill. After fighting the settings for a whole day, uninstalling each and every program not absolutely needed, I managed to wrangle the most recent edition of the anti virus program I use on the machine, which I had intended to do anyway as the older one´s license was running out. Guess what, my little machine is back in working order.
What really has me p.o.´d is the nagging suspicion that the makers of that program have something inserted there which will slow down your machine should you chose to ignore the permanent reminders that your license is about to run out. I had been doing that for about two weeks because I wanted to use up every bit of time on my old license before installing the new version. Now, I had to give up on two whole days, but I have a working machine again. Oh well.

For the stainless steel pan dilemma, my parents called me yesterday asking me what present I´d like for my impending birthday.You can guess I had the description of a certain something on hand. I´ll see if I´ll get it. It would be free for me, and hopefully save me from being given something useless that is clutter from day one (they have been known to do that). As I have been flying circles around one of those pans for quite a while I think it´s a good application for a wish, if I have one free.
Of course, I will have to wait until my birthday to get it, which is something that I had, in the past, rarely done. If I saw something I liked, I had to have it, at once. Quite often, I carried the item home, stashed it away somewhere, and promptly forgot about it as fast I had seen it.
The only way to counteract this was to install a rule of never, ever, buying something at first sight. Only if I keep returning to something over a period of several weeks , or at the very least several days if it´s something cheap, will I buy it. I have found that these items, the ones where the decision to buy is fuelled by a desire going deeper than just the surface attraction of something glittery or pretty, the ones where the purchase has been thought about weighing the pros and cons, are the ones that, in the long run, give me the most satisfaction for my money. They are also the ones that get used instead of just cluttering up our flat.
Postponing my wishes is thus doubly useful. It´s frugal, and it keeps clutter out.
And seeing some pretty piece of bric-a-brac in a shop no longer means having to store that particular piece for the next years. I used to think I had to own such things in order to enjoy them. Today, I enjoy them when passing them by in a shop, I may have a good laugh at some particularly funny coffee mug, but I don´t have to take it home to enjoy it.
And not buying at first sight also keeps me from one of the more insidious shopping traps, namely, the trap of being in a foreign city not knowing when I´ll be back there. Quite often, I ended up spending more than I intended because I put myself in that "last chance to get this" mindset.
Actually, the internet helps a lot there. Knowing that I could order almost anything online, plus knowing that I could still do so after a waiting period, works wonders to take the urgency out of shopping. Nowadays, when I am window-shopping, I mostly use that as an opportunity to see what something looks like in real life so I won´t have to depend on an internet photo to decide whether to buy it.

This morning´s weigh in gave me quite a surprise because the whole gain of the weekend is off again, so, it definitely was water retention. Which gets me back to the fact that I had, over the weekend, eaten bread and potatoes. It seems my body is reacting ever more strongly to those, as everything else I ate were things I eat all the time without retaining several litres of water afterwards.
And today´s number is low enough that I can hope to reach the land of Just Overweight before my b-day yet.

Julia

Lent(e)ment

2012-02-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

If I remember correctly from my school times, that´s French for slowly. Which is exactly how things on the weight loss front are moving. The weekend´s five-pound (ugh) gain is coming off at a rate of a pound a day, which means it´s still somewhat over four pounds to the Promised Land of No Longer Obese.
With Lent beginning today, I have decided to stick to a meatless diet until Easter, which means plenty of fish and poultry instead.
It also means changing my breakfast habit from "bacon and eggs" to just eggs. As DH still will be eating meat, I prepare two portions of eggs every morning- one with and one without bacon.
That means I use two small pans, too. Yesterday, in preparation for this morning, I thought about what I needed today, and, being at work, went to look for a small stainless steel pan (no teflon coating) to use. Only when I stood in the mall in front of a display of small stainless steel pans, did I remember that I had bought one exactly like that- last year. Which, of course, is still perfectly serviceable. So, it was like "duh, I´m forgetful" and I had my lesson on where all those double items in my household must have come from. Remembering that I need something and completely forgetting I already have it.
Before starting on my shopping embargo, I would not have thought twice about buying another of those pans. I consider it a step forward that this time, I realized in time that I was about to spend money to re-buy something I already had.

Something else, unfortunately, seems to have gone completely missing, namely, the stainless steel pans with a larger diameter I used to have. I can remember taking them out of my pot rack after buying several teflon-coated pans. I had thought that they were in the cellar along with the extra china, but it looks like they got tossed along with some cheapo pots I used to have. While these weren´t exactly high-quality, I have read enough by now on the dangers of teflon and such to kick myself for buying a set of nonstick pans at all. So, if I really did declutter those steel pans, that would make them the one and only thing I really regret tossing out. Replacing them won´t be easy, nor cheap, as most shops around here seem to have nothing but nonstick pans any more, unless you are ready to pay half a fortune for some professional-quality pan. At least, I still have a single-portion-sized stainless pan which means I can do my fish frying without having to resort to the nonstick ones (for meat, I use my cast iron ones, but if you use these for fish, the smell will linger for a long time, and I don´t have a spare cast iron pan to dedicate to just frying fish). I´ll have to go through the cellar once more, perhaps I did yet keep those pans.
Until then, I´ll have to live with the results of my decisions. Doesn´t everyone.

Julia

The best laid plans

2012-02-20T04:23:00.001-08:00

...sometimes end up cut short by life. The last week, for me, was once more exemplary of that. First, I had to go out of town unexpectedly over the weekend. Then, on the day I had to catch a train to do so, a sudden influx of Very Urgent Work (the kind that cannot be postponed even by a single day) kept me glued to the office for so long that I almost ended up missing my train. And when I wanted to drive back home with DH on Sunday, the battery of our car -the same one that had been starting nicely after having stood in a sub-zero parking garage undriven for several weeks just two weeks ago- decided to quit working for good. So, it was calling for road assistance, and a new battery, which of course wasn´t planned for. That the mechanic told us it wasn´t possible to check in advance whether that kind of battery would die anytime soon was scarce comfort.
And today´s weigh-in, after just four days of having to eat standard european fare, had me up almost five pounds from last week. Most likely, that´s mostly water weight- I can see that because my hands and legs are swollen, and I definitely didn´t have enough calories to gain that much. Still, I hope it will come off as fast as it came on. I´ve been stuck above the limit of morbid obesity for far too long already, and sliding back to what I saw today is just mega frustrating.
Keep calm and carry on...

Julia

Murphy was here

2012-02-15T03:20:00.000-08:00

Seriously, have you ever noticed that the worst things happen at the most inconvenient times? Like, the door of my flat coming off its hinges just when we were about to drive off for a holiday? Or a TV set that expires right in the middle of Super Bowl? Or the exhaust of a car coming off in the middle of a lengthy trip?
It´s that kind of things that makes you go, "why is this always happening to ME?" and curse a certain Mr Murphy who by popular lore is supposed to be the legalistic genius behind the law that governs mishaps.
If anything can go wrong, it will, at the worst possible moment.
But is that really the case? In each and every of the above examples, the impending catastrophe could have been averted. That door had been hard to open for several days, I chose to ignore that instead of calling in a repair man. That TV set had had a somewhat flickering image for months, which, again, I chose to ignore. And the exhaust pipe on my car had been slowly rusting away, again, ignored by me.
The only part that was not predictable about the outcomes was just when desaster would strike.
It´s all too human to procrastinate about having something repaired, as long as it keeps functioning of sorts. Sometimes, we even hide behind the screen of frugality, as in "I don´t want to spend money on having this repaired right now".
And suddenly, what would have been a minor repair had we dealt with it at once becomes a major catastrophe that requires immediate and sometimes expensive action, upsetting our schedules and/or wiping out significant parts of our emergency funds.

Quite often, the human tendency to ignore anything unpleasant leads us to ignoring something unpleasant until it really hurts. Only when it really hurts do we finally start to take action. Sometimes, that means that it´s too late. Other times, it means having to deal with a big hassle instead of a small inconvenience.
And of these outcomes, it´s not Mister Murphy who is guilty. It´s the one who procrastinated.

Julia

Customs clutter

2012-02-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

At the house I grew up in, every day had a fixed rhythm that revolved around eating. Breakfst, lunch, as the day´s main meal, with some kind of dessert as a follow-up, afternoon coffee with some cake or cookies, dinner which meant bread, cheese, sausages, and the occasional salad. Like clockwork, these were eaten daily, always at the same time, and, of course, with the prerequisite utensils.
Breakfast meant egg cups and a salt shaker, plus, for the coffee, a sugar-bowl and creamer set to match the china being used. Dessert meant a set of glass bowls to serve the desserts in. Coffee time meant another sugar-bowl-and-creamer set, plus a cake plate, and dinner time meant yet another set of dishes, plus- you guessed it- another sugar bowl.
Can you tell there was more than one perfectionist roaming that house?
When I started buying my own china and glassware, it felt quite natural to me that the sets had to be complete, meaning they had to contain those sugar bowls and creamers, too.
For those china sets that did not come with their own ones, I bought some stainless steel sets.
In the end, I had about ten sets in total, plus another that DH brought into the household.
I was, thus, well-equipped for any coffee table or dinner table to be set in a visitor-worthy fashion.
But-
we never have visitors. At all.
And while I use milk in my coffee, neither of us ever uses real sugar. And for the milk, I prefer using one of the neutral containers that closes tightly and saves having to fill, refill and clean up several different creamers a day.
Which leaves those pretty creamers that match my china, largely unused, and the sugar bowls completely so.
Most of them, by now, live in the cellar, to the exception of some that are doing duty as little vases.
Now I don´t think that our coffee table, should I choose to set one, is any less civilized than what I grew up with. It´s just that we don´t need to keep things on hand because custom says we should have them. If we never use them, they are clutter.
Have you ever gone on ebay to look for replacement pieces for a china set? I did recently, and what surprised me most about what was offered there was the sheer number of...egg cups and sugar bowls. Ordinary plates or cups were a lot more rarely offered, which has led me to conclude that I am, obviously, not the only one who owns an unused stash of egg cups and sugar bowls.
And I am certain that there is plenty of that kind of clutter in other households, too, the kind that is created by wanting to have all of the paraphernalia to recreate the customs of our childhoods, even though our lifestyles, today, are radically different.
Another place I can see that is the linen closet. My grandmother owned plenty of real linen sheets and pillowcases, which were ironed, folded up, and lined up nicely in her immaculate linen closet (she stopped short of tying ribbons around them, however). Using them meant having to re-iron and re-fold them, which meant having to employ a laundry service because you had to use an ironing machine, because a hand-held iron simply wouldn´t straighten the fiber enough.
Some of those linens have ended up in my household. The only thing I ever used one of them for was to cover up furniture when painting the ceiling. Otherwise, they are simply too impractical to use. I very much prefer my jersey fitted sheets, thank you, that I can, after laudering them, roll up and put into a zippered container, which will of course never look as great as my grandma´s linen closet in all its glory, but it works for me and my lifestyle.
So, the most important thing to declutter in that context is expectations and outdated customs. Our lives are, and will continue to be, radically different from those of, say, our grandparents. Keeping the paraphernalia for long-outdated customs around even though we will never use them is just cluttering up our living space- and our vision of what we want our lives to be like.

Julia

Flakey view

2012-02-09T06:22:00.000-08:00

Last winter, we were smothered in snow for over four months. This year, the white stuff did take its time arriving, as we are having the first heavy snowfall of the year right now. In February, no less. And it seems as if Father Frost were determined to drop the whole year´s stockpile on us at once. As long as we don´t have to use the car, that´s fine with me, but I sure hope they´ll have the roads cleared by the next time we have to drive to visit MIL Until then, I enjoy looking at the flaky white stuff falling down gently in front of my window.
As we have been, without using the car, pretty much housebound these days, I have had ample time to putter around in the kitchen.
Guess what, there was one more thing I decided to get rid of, namely, an electric knife that had been taking up the better part of one of my kitchen drawers. When I bought that thing, I intended it for cutting up roasts, the kicker being that the serrated edges on the knife were tearing up rather than cutting the meat, and besides, what it did, unfortunately, cut a lot faster than the meat was the surface of my cutting board. So, I stopped using it pretty fast, but I did what happens all too often when something I bought doesn´t work out the way I thought- I put it away into that drawer, where it stayed through several moves, unused.
Last year, I splurged on a set of really good Henckel´s chef´s knives, among them a carving knife that cuts through even a stubborn roast as if it were butter. The likelihood that I would ever use that blunt electric knife again has, therefore, dropped to something below zero, so, I finally decided I had better uses for the space it occupied. It´s currently in the recycling basket for electronics, awaiting the next trip to the recycling center.
The lesson in that? It´s not always better to have an electronic gadget for preparing ingredients. If a gadget doesn´t work properly, it´s absolutely permissible to dump it at once instead of carrying it- and the guilt about having wasted money on it- around for the next twenty years. Provided, of course, you get rid of it in an environmentally friendly way. And it sometimes pays to pay for quality. I´ve had several cheap knife sets over the years, but the ones I have now will probably be used for the entire rest of my culinary career.
On the same note, I´ve had several sets of cheap pots that broke down rather fast, losing their handles or getting warped bottoms. The oldest of the more expensive professional-quality stainless steel ones I bought after having that happen once too often have been with me for some twenty years now, and show no sign of the hard use I have subjected them to, apart of course some scratches and discolorations- it happens even when you are careful.

But, they still work, and hopefully will continue to do so for years to come.
If I were to calculate the cost-per-use factor for the cheap stuff versus the high-quality stuff, it would almost certainly be a lot higher for the cheap stuff, apart the fact that working with good-quality equipment in the kitchen also saves a lot of time and hassle over using cheap pots and knives.
It has, of course, taken me several years (and some lucky finds at special sales or special discount offers) to replace my cheapo stuff in the kitchen, but it´s definitely been worth it.
And by not going around replacing everything at once, I could work those things into our budget without creating any undue waves.
Today, I have the equipment I need for preparing us nutritious food- which also saves us plenty of medical copays because the better nourished our bodies are, the less they get sick.
And the price of dinner in a restaurant compared to having the exact same meal prepared at home is, even at the cheaper eateries, at least three times as high, plus, you can´t control what they put into your food in a restaurant.
So, I´m thankful to my Grandma who taught me how to cook. It´s healthy, and it´s frugal. What more can you wish for? And yes, even if I say so myself, it tastes as good or better than what you´d get in a restaurant. Just ask DH :).

Julia

Woolen joymakers

2012-02-08T04:48:00.000-08:00

That boundary of morbid obesity is still teasing me from less than three pounds´distance.
But there is one thing that makes me realize just how far I have come every morning, namely, my woolen pantyhose. I know, so not sexy, but it´s still in the tens centigrade below zero, and I´m using public transport to and from work, which means waiting at the tram stop for extended periods of time if there isn´t one coming up right when I arrive. With the greater part of my insulation layer recondensed, that means either shivering or putting on something warm underneath my jeans.
Now, for the last years, I had a definite problem there, because woolen pantyhose, hereabouts, is sold only up to a size 1XL. So, even the biggest pair on sale would only fit me by pulling and stretching it in directions these things aren´t made for, and even so, the panty part would reach only halfway up my bottom, and I had to keep pulling it up so as not to have them retreat into the nether parts of my pants legs. Usually, I preferred to freeze rather than subject myself to the ignominy of bunched-up hose at the lowest part of my pant seat. The existing pairs of warm hosiery were thus relegated to the back part of my stocking drawer.
This year, for the first time, those things fit. I can put them on as easily as I would a pair of nylon stockings, and they even stay up all day long without any retrieval maneuvres because the waist part is, well, at my waist.

Which reminds me every morning how far I have come, as does being able to put them on without wrestling with my legs and belly to reach my own feet. It´s a good kind of reminder because it would be all too easy to forget what it felt like to be too fat to put on pantyhose, what it felt like to become exhausted just by trying to close your own shoes. For several years, I wore open sandals without any stockings all summer because it was too difficult to put on stockings, or even proper shoes. Only by grabbing the lower part of my pants leg and pulling hard was I able at all to reach my feet, and even so, my legs kept slipping away from me. More than once, I ended up in a sweaty, crying, humiliated mess after having my slipaway feet tear up the last pair of hose or stockings I had. It was one of the bitterest lessons when being fat, that I had become too fat to dress myself properly.
I never want to go back to that place. But I mustn´t forget it either. It would be all too easy to take all those abilities that have come back with recondensing for granted. I don´t think anybody who never lost them could understand just how ridiculously happy such a small thing can make me- putting on hose when it´s cold.

Julia

Under pressure

2012-02-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

Not only is it cold, the atmospheric pressure, too, is sky-high of late. Which for me means a whacking headache and dizziness to go with the shivering. I´m trying to avoid taking painkillers as long as possible, but still, I´m feeling rather lousy. I only hope I didn´t catch what my colleague already has- which means his work on top of mine because he´s home sick.
Weight´s going back down slowly from yesterday´s scale shock.
Guess I´ll be going home early today and get some shut-eye and a bunch of veggies. Maybe I´ll be back in working order tomorrow.

Julia

Laurel, not hardy

2012-02-06T03:16:00.000-08:00

Somebody once said that the wrong thing to do with one´s laurels was rest on them.
Another thing one shouldn´t do, it seems, is leaving them outside in winter. I had been trusting the information I had, namely, that the cherry laurel bush I have on my balcony, was winter-hardy and would not mind it if things got cold. What with the siberian cold that has been holding all of Europe in its grip these days, that seems to have been too optimistic. Yesterday I went out on the balcony to look after the plants, and the cherry laurel is frozen stiff. I brushed it with the edge of my coat, and immediately a couple of leaves came off, brittle as glass. So, if I´m lucky I´ll be able to cut it down in spring and allow it to grow back up from the roots, but most likely, it´s a goner. As for the buxus, it doesn´t yet show signs of advanced frostbite, but with temperatures dropping to something like twenty degrees centigrade below zero every night, that, too, may be deceiving.
It makes me glad that at least my two oleander bushes are well and warm inside, which was also what DH and myself were over the weekend.
The enforced rest has been doing both of us good, I think.
Unfortunately, it also meant being too close to the refrigerator, so, I allowed myself to be tempted by a package of vanilla-flavored yoghourt, and some rye bread with cheese and sausages. This morning, I got my just deserts for just desserts, to a tune of a four-pound gain in two days. Most of that, of course, would be water. Still, it means that these last weeks, on average, I have just been maintaining, and the limit of obesity is as far off as ever.
I wonder if the unusual vanilla-lust means that I am once more sabotaging myself. At every approaching milestone, my weight has been plateauing for several weeks, and I have found it difficult to stick to my plan. Once the milestone was past, things went smoothly until I approached the next one.
Which brings me back to the fact that just condensing off those pounds isn´t enough. I also have to think about what they mean for me, what unconscious motivation I could have to hang on to them. And I have to find something to motivate me instead of the threat of that now-past family celebration looming over me.
One great motivator, for me, is seeing my own reflection wearing something form-fitting and realizing I´m no longer The Blob. What with MIL´s fur parka, I have been looking like a giant furball on legs for some days now. It really is time it got warmer, and I could return to more shapely apparel. Then again, I know that just two years ago, I couldn´t even wear that parka because it wouldn´t close over my extra baggage, so, that furball look still means there´s less of me, even with that uptick over the weekend.
So, now that the vanilla stuff is gone, it´s back on plan. I only hope that means going on below that limit of obesity soon.
Even if I´ll have to redefine myself then.
It´s a strange feeling to be so close to the point where the one defining criterion I had for over ten years when describing myself will no longer apply. Perhaps that was the mistake, that I let my obesity become the most important thing about me in my own eyes. I was Julia, and I was morbidly obese.
I was -and am-also a loving wife, accomplished cook, good friend, able professional, music-lover, caring DIL.
The fact that I had to pause and think for a moment to list these up tells a lot about the way I have reduced myself for too long, as if the fact that I was fat cancelled out everything else about myself that might be positive. Talk about fat hatred. I didn´t need the external haters, I was doing too good a job of putting myself down. And now I have to find out about those parts of me that got smothered under layers of fat.
Like any archeological dig, that can only be done layer by layer.
But perhaps there´s some treasure to be found under all that debris, after all.

Julia

Deep cold

2012-02-03T03:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight, the temperatures hit a long-time low of eighteen degrees centigrade below zero. If you take into account the wind chill factor , it feels rather like 25 degrees below.
So, there´s the worry about our car battery dying from the cold- the parking lot we have is in an open-sided structure, so, the inside is as cold as it´s outside. Luckily, I don´t think we´ll need the car this weekend, unless something of a professional nature were to creep up. Weekend shopping will, for this weekend, be done by tram, which is quite feasible because our fridge is, happily, well-stocked.
Having to carry all of my purchases at once will, moreover, help me to stick to the essentials, so, it´s also frugal.
Speaking of frugality, in December I got a nice fat refund from the energy provider we use. Too fat to be true, I thought and had the calculation rechecked. Turned out there had been a mixup of gas meters, so, they had erroneously billed me the gas use of another flat that had stood empty half of the year. So, almost half the refund had to be returned.... What vexes me is that the mistake only became evident because of that big fat zero for the second half of the year´s use. Had the other flat not stood empty, I might have gone on paying somebody else´s gas bill indefinitely and never been the wiser for it.
The lesson from that is that you can´t just rely on your utility bills being correct. Find out the numbers of the meters connected to your flat, and watch how much you´re using.
Having a central heating system for just our flat was, for me, an important criterion when I was looking for a new flat, because that way, I decide when the heating gets turned on or off, and how high the temperature is set. No haggling with my landlord over heating costs, either. And definitely no paying for any other tenants who believe that the way to regulate room temperature is to heat the place all the way up and then leave the windows wide open.
Having your own closed-circuit heating system with a thermostat that can be set to automatically lower temperatures during the daytime when there´s nobody at home, and at bedtime, can save a lot of money there. As can lowering said thermostat by just one or two degrees. The drop in heating cost is several percent for every degree centigrade less, and besides, we could always wear a sweater or vest if it gets too cold.
After all, the epitome of wasting energy, as defined by some prankster, is "heating up your room in wintertime until it´s as warm as it was during the summer when we complained about the heat and switched the A/C on".
I´d rather wear season-appropriate clothes and save on the cost of heating and air condition.
Come to think of it, even a hundred years ago it would have been sheer luxury to have a room in winter that had temperatures above zero at all. Our grandparents all have stories of windows coated with a layer of ice from the inside, or water pipes frozen up, or washing from a bucket where you had to break the ice first.
Our forebears dealt with that by dressing warmer. Heating up your rooms to the point where you can sit around with just a t-shirt even though it´s freezing outside, to them, would have seemed preposterous.
So, while I dislike shivering as much as anybody else, I still believe that central heating, too, is a commodity that should be used but not overused.
The environment and my purse both agree.

Julia

Joe to the rescue

2012-02-02T06:41:00.000-08:00

The job I have entails being on emergency alert duty 24/24 every second week (every week when my estimated colleague who usually does the other week is off on another holiday). The kind of emergencies I have to deal with are, luckily, all solvable by phone and mostly few and far between, but still...
Last night´s phone call had me awake and sitting at my kitchen table (that is doing double duty as a desk at night) some one hour and a half after going to sleep. So, right in the middle of a sleep cycle which meant going back to sleep after dealing with whatever it was proved a bit more difficult than had I been woken half an hour later.
So, I´m once more yawningly tired.
Thank God for the coffee cup- its contents are taking me through the day nicely. And, luckily, it seems that business, too, is a bit slower than usual, so, there aren´t that many clients to see me yawn...

Julia

Sales temptation

2012-02-02T03:53:00.000-08:00

It´s cold outside. Cold enough to freeze some important parts off a brass monkey, as they say.
And the sweater problem still hasn´t been solved.
So, I have gone to work lately wearing a woolen vest over a turtleneck sweater, topping it off with MIL´s hand-me-down fur parka. Warm enough as it is, but the fur parka is a bit of a pain. For one, I can´t use my usual knapsack or anything with a shoulder strap with it so as not to break off the fur. So, I have to carry my netbook inside what is usually my overnighter bag that can be carried using one hand. If one is used to having one´s hands free, that´s quite a nuisance. Besides, the thing sheds worse than one of those hungarian shepherd dogs, so, my dark-blue woolen vest looks as if I´d recently acquired canine company.
So, the thing is somewhat impractical to wear. And it totally doesn´t match my usually simple style. Top that off with the fact that, cold or not, I´m right now the only person at the office wearing fur, and therefore drawing quite a bit of unwelcome attention to myself, I´d rather wear a simple down jacket or something like that. Except I don´t own one. The ones I had were decluttered when they became decidedly too big after condensing off a good part of excess weight, and the ones offered at the beginning of winter were too flimsily made to even think about them as a possible solution.
Enter the end-of-season sales. Fifty percent off all winter jackets. And they do have some jackets that are a lot better than the ones in December.
Then again, it´s February already, which means that the big cold will, probably, last no more than two months at the most before it gets warm enough to return to wearing my woolen coats.
And by the time winter returns, I fully intend to have gone on condensing myself by at least another dress size. More, if possible. Were I to buy myself a jacket now, it would probably be too big by next winter (at least I hope so), so, by buying now, I´d cheat myself out of the experience of buying a jacket in a smaller size and wear it next winter.
Then again, I might have to pay retail for next year´s jacket if I were to need it before it gets downmarked.
It´s d..d if you do and d...d if you don´t.
Or is it? Even if that fur parka is so darn inconvenient, it´s what I have now, and won´t have to pay for, either. So, from a point of frugality, the best solution would be to keep using it and stop whining about how uncomfortable it is. And practice a little gratitude considering that without that thing, I´d be a lot colder this winter.
Besides, I´d be able to use a really warm down jacket for maybe one or two months before it gets too warm to wear it. And that is a timespan during which I can stand the inconvenience of wearing that fur parka.
And for the next winter, I can always reconsider buying a down jacket.
Being in the process of recondensing myself means not knowing what size I´ll need next winter. Thus, it would be stupid to buy now.
For everyone who intends to be the same size next winter, there may be some real occasions to be had right now. But that´s something I don´t intend, so, I´ll wait and see which size I have to buy by next winter. And save myself from buying another garment that would end up on the decluttering stash barely worn.
After all, I have resolved that I would only buy the absolute necessities in garments while still in transition to my goal weight. Everything else would mean throwing out money. Even at half price.

Julia

Damages almost repaired

2012-02-01T03:24:00.000-08:00

With today´s weigh-in, I´m less than a pound away from the point I had reached before Christmas and the obligations that came with it threw a monkey wrench into my eating habits.
The land of Just Overweight is beckoning-from less than a kilogram away, no less!
And I fully intend to go there and stay, as soon as possible.

Julia

Portion size, cleanly

2012-01-31T02:12:00.000-08:00

It´s not only food where you have to watch your portion sizes.
I found that out recently when taking the time to read the instructions on a bottle of liquid laundry detergent.
So, these bottles have caps which double as a measuring cup, too. And for the longest time, I had assumed that the size of a cap full was the recommended amount to pour into my washing machine.
Guess what- the instructions (printed very small, with an illustration I could only decipher with the help of a magnifying glass) mentioned something about a "line" up to which you were supposed to fill the cap to get one portion of detergent. So, I went looking for that line- and discovered it, after some seeking, about a third of the way up from the bottom on the cap´s inside.
And I had kept wondering why those bottles were running empty all the time! Knowing now that I was using triple the recommended amount, that particular miracle got its scientific explanation...
So, the next time, I used that line as a reference point. And while I was at it, I also looked for a similar marker on my fabric softener´s bottle cap, which in that case meant having to fill the cap less than halfway.
From the results, there was no difference.
The same principle applies to shampoo, shower bath, or dishwashing liquid. Most of the time, half the amount you are used to pouring from the bottle would do the job as well. Actually, using as little as possible may save you hard cash in more than one way, for example by using a lot less water to rinse the shampoo out of your hair.
Some brands try to discourage that kind of frugality by making their product very liquid and the openings on the bottle very large in diameter, making it near impossible to pour a small amount.
In that case, I refill the product into a bottle with a pump on it that gives single portions.
Total savings on cleanliness from watching portion sizes? About fífty to sixty percent. Plus, less impact on the environment. Win-win for everyone -except the people who sell those products...

Julia

Weekend before the Big Frost

2012-01-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

From what the weather guys are telling us, Father Frost from Russia is about to drop by for a visit in our usually benign middle European climate. So, I took my fur-lined jacket out today, and the warm tchapka I got myself before Christmas. Before anybody flames me for wearing fur- the tchapka is made from fake fur, and the jacket is a hand-me-down from MIL, so, as those animals were probably dead before I was born, and I acquired it as a gift, I think it´s doing more honor to the shades of the original owners of those pelts to wear the jacket than it would have been to throw it out. Besides, what with the momentarily limited range of my wardrobe due to those sixty pounds I lost, it also is the warmest jacket I own, a lot warmer than my woolen coats. With temperatures of twenty degrees centigrade below zero in the forecast, it will also be necessary.
After all, those sixty pounds lost mean I lost a major part of my body´s insulating fat layer. I had noticed already that I feel the cold a lot more intensely than when at my top weight. But then again, that´s what slim people wear sweaters for, isn´t it?
The weekend, with some heavy snowfalls, was spent at home. Once again, frugality and weightloss were clashing, because the best-by dates on some not-so-healthy stuff in the fridge (namely some salami and sausages) were running out. I decided to go off the wagon for the weekend and use those up in two traditional recipes that are, unfortunately, rather greasy and carby. The resulting two-pound uptick was expected, and I hope it will be back off by the end of the week.
If somebody says here, why did you have that stuff in your fridge at all, these were leftovers from MIL´s visit, intended to be used up then, so, the most I´ll plead guilty to here is poor meal planning.
The jump in weight, disproportionally again to the total amount of calories ingested, once more drove home that the common potato- a main ingredient in most of the traditional dishes hereabouts- to me is sheer weight poison. If I want to keep having some of the good taste of childhood, I´ll have to find ways to take the potatoes out of those recipes, or at least greatly reduce the amount.
Anyway, what´s left in my fridge is more diet-friendly, as in chicken breast and vegetables, so, I´ll just have to avoid buying junk again.
I don´t know if it´s the cold, but I have found myself craving greasy food (as in bacon) a lot more than usual. That´s another trip I have to get off, or else I´ll keep going over my calories.
But then again, I had my fill of some of the traditional favorites over the weekend, so, abstaining from them again might have become a bit easier.
And maybe I´ll use more calories when it´s that cold.....

Julia

Great expectations vs.baby steps

2012-01-27T03:35:00.000-08:00

It´s the beginning of the year again, and magazine stands are full of glossy magazines with title stories of "ultimate diets" promising losses of ten pounds or more in ten days.
If I were to bet on the outcomes of all the people who try out these, I´d probably come out on the side of a sure win were I to bet on them- not losing ten pounds to begin with, -regaining more than they had lost in the first place after going off those diets again.
Actually, the bogosity of those claims is pretty much self-evident if you do a little number-crunching first.
One pound of fat would be the equivalent of 3500 calories. Ten of them would be 35000 calories.
To lose one pound of fat a day, you would have to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories.
Now the average daily caloric needs of us sedentary office workers are about 2200 calories a day. Less, even, if like myself you have botched your metabolism with long-term yo-yo dieting.
Which spells out plainly that in order to lose a pound of fat a day, you would have to eat nothing and expend an extra 1300 calories on top of that. Make that two hours of uninterrupted jogging.
Would you do that for ten consecutive days? Of course not, if you want to keep functioning. When you eat less than your basal metabolic rate, your body starts to digest, not the fat you want to get rid of, but instead the muscles you probably want to keep, and which you need for that two-hour run, too.
Besides, the body´s survival instincts would kick in quickly, making you think of nothing else but when you will be able to eat for the next time.
So, if those diet plans tell you you can eat anything at all and not exercise, what they will allow you to get off your body will, for the most part, be water. If you start out on an eating plan with highly diuretic properties, you may be able to see the scales go down some two or three kilos in a week. But guess what- as soon as you resume normal eating, your poor dehydrated body will quickly fill up its water stores again, bringing those same two or three kilos back within a mere matter of days. Fast loss, fast regain. That these kilos tend to bring along a couple of friends because your body is ravenous to fill its nutritient stores back up, and therefore keeps you eating until you have consumed enough of every nutritient you ran short of, is what keeps, after such a diet, the weight seesaw going in an upward direction. Not exactly what we want.
Still, those numbers on the glossies, impossible as they are, influence how we perceive our own success rates.
There was a study (I forgot where I read it, so no link, sorry) where they asked people about how much weight they expected to lose when on a diet. The average expectation, as far as I remember, was to lose at least two pounds a week.
What happens with that kind of expectations is that we believe to have failed as soon as we lose less than that. All too often, that´s what drives us to retire to the vicinity of the cookie jar and give up the hope of ever getting back to normal weight.
Been there, done that.
Now would you be satisfied to lose just seven tenths of a pound in a week?
Before you raise a wail of "but I´ll stay fat forever then", that´s exactly what I have been losing for one year and five months now, on average. And the most I ever lost in a single week was 2.46 pounds.
You still with me?
Are you ready for some more numbers?
You know what that adds up to, after 73 weeks? Fifty-five pounds, that´s what. Plus of course the nine pounds off my highest recorded weight I had already condensed before getting real serious about this.
Or, in other numbers, BMI going down from 40 to 30.4.
Morbid obesity stage three down to almost just overweight.
A paltry 0.7 pounds a week is what got me there.
And, of course, patience.
But it can be done.
When you read up in the net about weight loss methods that work, you will probably find a lot of articles that claim that at a BMI higher than 35, or at BMI 40 or more, the only chance to get that off will be bariatric surgery of one kind or another.
To me, that never was an option. First of all, these procedures are not done as often in Europe as in the USA. Besides, they are usually not covered by health insurance, unless the patient is already in a life-threatening condition or severely crippled by that weight. Even at BMI 40, I would, by that standard, not have qualified. And, on a very personal level, the thought of having my bowels cut up and maimed just to lose weight was so revolting that, in my humble opinion, that should always be a last-ditch option. I wasn´t yet in that last ditch when I started to recondense myself.
And I succeded.
The first thing I had to toss, of course, was all those unrealistic expectations about how and how much to lose. No, you don´t need to have your stomach banded or cut up to lose weight, and no, you won´t lose those two pounds a week, much less those ten pounds in ten days. Oh, and no, you don´t have to put in two hours of jogging a day, either. If I excercise, it´s rarely more than thirty minutes at a time, and I´m not even too regular about it. Of course, regular exercise might be helpful, but it´s not the most important part of losing. Watching what you put in your mouth is. And knowing that, if you want the extra pounds to stay off, you´ll have to watch that for the rest of your life, so, the menu plan you chose to lose better be one that you know you will be able to live with for the rest of your life, too.
Which pretty much nixes those "diet" suggestions in the glossies anyway- or would you want to eat cabbage soup only for the rest of your life? Nothing against cabbage soup there, it can be delicious when well seasoned, but I for one would refuse to make that my one and only meal if I could avoid it.
Sustainability is the buzzword here. In my experience, a way of eating where you are not allowed to eat your favorite foods isn´t sustainable. What if your favorite is pizza, or chocolate cake? I have had these too, during those one and a half years. In controlled portions. And that´s what kept me from going for the whole cake at once. Plus the knowledge that, if I do slip up, I can get back on the wagon the very next day. It´s the long-time results I´m after, after all, and, if I say so myself, my long-time results show that I must have been doing something right.
Yes, it´s just baby steps of 0.7 pounds a week. But they got me where I am today, to a place I had, to tell the truth, almost given up hope I could ever return to.

And baby steps can get you to the place you want to be. Just because one isn´t Usain Bolt doesn´t mean one won´t be able to walk, not run, those 100 meters, even if one has to use a walker to do so. For almost everybody, there is some kind of baby step you can do to deal with your biggest problem, be it weight or something else.
Just take that step, and remember that even a small step brings you closer to where you want to go.

Julia

It´s easy...until it´s not

2012-01-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

For seven years, I had been nicotine-free. Then, I slipped up with a single cigarillo. Two weeks later, I was back to smoking a pack a day.
Dumb, isn´t it? Even dumber when I stopped exercising soon after because I preferred sitting on the balcony smoking to getting sweaty running through the park, and besides, I was so fast out of breath... And even dumber when I had to work the cost of smoking into our budget. Let´s just say at the price of cigarettes today, a pack-a-day-habit would consume more than what I have to pay for utilities each month, so, nothing to sneeze at.
And, of course, my cough is back.
Quitting should be easy, after all, I have done it once already. And there really isn´t a sensible alternative.
But the last time I quit, I gained those very close-to-sixty pounds I just condensed.
I´m scared of gaining again. And I´m scared of climbing the wall with cravings.

I must remember this is an addiction. For seven years, I could get up, go to work, work, and come home and relax, without lighting up. I could do it without climbing the walls, too, without snapping at people, and for the last year before my relapse, without eating everything that wouldn´t eat me first. I could watch an entire movie withouit fidgeting halfway through it because I wanted to go out for a smoke.

I want that feeling back.
At the same time, I´m absolutely scared of quitting.
Damn that cigarillo.

Julia

One week on the lips, three weeks on the hips?

2012-01-25T07:48:00.000-08:00

That´s at least what it looks like now. Of the seven pounds of baggage I reacquired over Christmas, three have gone off again and four are still sticking around. I´m not surprised because the last weeks had been somewhat hectic, and eating therefore a bit below par. But the main thing is that the weight curve is moving downwards again, and I have a full three weeks to go before the next family event throwing a wrench into my eating habits. I´ll see how far three weeks of strict adherence to low-cal and low-carb eating will take me. What I have noticed already was that the last weekend off plan gave me not only two pounds of water gain (luckily off again by now), but also a bad case of an upset stomach.
That seems to be what eating more than a minuscule amount of carbohydrates will do to me these days, plus serious fatigue and trouble concentrating.
When I look at it from that point of view, those pastries on Sunday so weren´t worth it. Nor were the potato dumplings, and the two rolls for breakfast. None of that was good enough to warrant alternating between stomach cramps and runs to the powder room for two days straight.
Perhaps this is a good sign. If my body refuses to properly digest junk food, that indicates that it likes the other, protein-rich stuff I usually feed it a lot more. Talk about somatic intelligence...
Ayway, I´ll see how far down I can get this time. There´s after all still that mirage of being just overweight less than six pounds away.

Julia

The sum of little things

2012-01-23T04:50:00.000-08:00

Buying just one thing at a dime-and-dollar store. Eating just one piece of candy. Bringing home just one item.
For most of us, these would be filed under "small indulgences". The things we do "because we deserve it". The things that "cost just a little bit".
But these are also the things that get us into trouble, if repeated more than rarely. For my money, it makes no difference if I spend one dollar ten times, or spend ten dollars at once. For my weight, there´s in the long run no difference between a once-a-day-one-piece chocolate habit or eating a whole bar once a week. For the fight against clutter, there´s no difference between bringing home one small item at a time daily or bringing home seven once a week.
Still, the threshold to cross before doing something that is against our better interests is a lot lower when we perceive the transgression as a small one. And it gets even lower when it´s coupled with a feeling of entitlement.
Which is exactly what a lot of stores prey on. One of the most dangerous shopping traps for me, in the past, was a chain of stores that, originally, sold just freshly-roasted coffee. And then the owners had the idea of including other merchandise, namely, household stuff. They started selling coffee drinking paraphernalia first, as in coffee machines and cups, and graduated to garments, tools, kitchen stuff and decorative items. The kicker being that they have a different set of merchandise every week, so, there is the added pressure on the customer because the item may be out of stock the next time they come by.
I used to drop by there every week, not for coffee, but for those pretty things they had besides coffee. Most of the time, I came back with something that, the day before, I didn´t even know existed. so, definitely not something off any long-time wish list. And those somethings added up, financially as well as clutter-wise.
Had I wished so, I might have gotten myself a complete set of table decorations every year for Easter or Christmas, or a new set of garden tools every spring, never mind that last year´s ones were still good and stored away somewhere.
The realization that there was a regular return of themes in their merchandise helped me to see the most recent set of merchandise as just another variation on a theme they had had already, and, if I had bought the items the first time they came around, I didn´t need another edition just because this time they were yellow and the first time they had been red.
What also helped me was adding up the total cost of those small indulgences and measuring it against the cost of those items on my all-time wish list that I had always put on the back burner because they were so expensive. Turned out that, if I had restrained myself from grabbing the small stuff, there might have been enough money saved to go for some of the big-ticket items.
Which is why I have stopped indulging myself with little things. They usually end up cluttering my flat anyway, the pleasure to be had from them is mostly short-lived, and buying them keeps me from achieving the bigger goals I have for my flat and my lifestyle. I can appreciate that something looks pretty, but I don´t have to buy it to enjoy it, especially not if I already own something to do that item´s job.
The number of those items that see regular use is rather small, anyway. So, I still look at their merchandise when passing that particular shop, but I rarely even enter to see what they have inside, and even more rarely do I buy something. Actually, I only buy something there if it is something I have had on my wish list for a while. The last thing I bought from there was a pair of chef´s pincers for turning around bacon when frying it. That was something I had seen in a cookware shop and refrained from buying at the time because they were pretty expensive, so, when I saw a similar item at a highly reduced price at the coffee sellers´, I took it home and am using it daily when preparing our bacon-and-eggs breakfast.
Then again, in my book, something that sees daily use is not exactly an indulgence, even if I could get around using a different instrument for the job ( I used to turn the bacon with a fork).
But the number of things I would use daily is small when compared to that of things I used to bring home just because they were pretty.
Knowing the difference keeps a lot of clutter out of my home and a lot of cash in my pocket.

Julia

Danger zone

2012-01-18T03:49:00.000-08:00

Journalling what I eat on Sparkpeople is still an educating experience.
After having been off plan over the holidays and the resulting seven-pound regain, I have re-started my food journal on the weekend, only to find myself massively over my daily calorie allotment for three days in a row.
The culprits were to be found in the daily intake breakdown they give you which shows, not only the daily totals, but also the calories in each food eaten in order of decreasing amount, so, the top item in that list is what gave you most calories on that day.
In this instance, it meant finding things on top of that list which I had, when ingesting them, not even intended to be a full meal, entering them under the category "snacks".
That single slice of gouda cheese I ate when coming home. Those two handfuls of mixed nuts that I just had to have after a long workday "just to tide me over till dinner". Those were, on two respective days, the top runners for the day, giving me some 20 per cent of my total intake. The problem being that, having counted these as "just a little nibble", I still ended up having a full dinner after eating them, none of the ingredients of which came even close to the impact of the preceding "snack".
Huh? I could have stayed within my limit if I had not had those caloric bombs as a snack?
Actually, it´s more a matter of convenience than anything else. I try, for reasons of frugality as well as time constraints, to do all of my grocery shopping on one day a week. Thus, I prefer to buy my veggies frozen so I won´t have them go bad before I can eat them. Frozen veggies, in turn, mean having to heat them up, and that means cooking. Which I do every evening for dinner.
The danger zone, for me, is the time between coming home from work and starting to cook dinner.
It´s about eight to nine hours since I had breakfast then, and even with a protein shake at the office thrown in, I´m usually ravenous on coming home. I´m also quite wired usually, having a job that brings a lot of stress.
Hunger+stress=the munchies. Simple as that. And that´s when I grab things that don´t need preparing and fill me up quickly. Things like cheese or nuts. Being hungry, I usually eat these fast, being stressed, I chomp them down without pausing to taste or feel what I´m eating. Which in turn leads to the subjective feeling of not having eaten much.
The food journal is a great tool for getting out of denial on that point.
Now I have to find a way to turn that realization into something useful.
The stress I´m in at work, I can´t change.
But I could avoid becoming ravenous if I were to have, not one but two protein shakes at the office, one of them at the end of the workday so I´m not as hungry when arriving at home.
And I could try to break the connection between coming home and eating, perhaps by exchanging those nuts and cheese for a cup of tea to sit down with.
I could also try to prepare dinner an hour earlier. DH has been grumbling about our eating dinner after eight PM anyway. But that´s what happens because we eat so much upon coming home that we are just not hungry any sooner.
I could also try to have something less caloric on hand to munch on until dinner´s ready.
No matter how I do it, I have to stop stuffing myself with calorie-dense foods when coming home. If I don´t, I have no chance of continuing to condense myself.

Julia

Coffee cup

2012-01-17T06:42:00.000-08:00

Spending my time sitting at a desk full of paper files and electronic equipment for a living, the question of what to put my beverages into to avoid accidental spills happens to be an important one. When I found my lidded to-go tea cup, I already thought I had found the optimum vessel. One thing still remined unsolved by that- the big coffee question. I don´t like to use instant coffee powder, preferring my coffee freshly brewed. As we aren´t supposed to have electric coffee makers in our cubicles, I started using a french coffee press instead. The only disadvantage to that was that the coffee cooled down rather more quickly than I had time to drink it up, leaving me with somewhat less than optimal enjoyment of my beloved cuppa.
I was overjoyed when I found out that the makers of my teacup-to-go also have one that is in reality a french press to go, with the wire-mesh stamp integrated into the lid, but otherwise exactly the same as my tea cup, which means these are heat-insulating as well, and, because you pour the water in there boiling and drink directly from the same cup you brew your coffee in, there´s no loss of heat by pouring the coffee into a different cup.
I was quite excited about these, so, when I saw them in an advertisement on sale for less than half their usually steep price, I immediately drove to the store that had them to secure me one.
What I found out when using it was that I need just two teaspoons full of ground coffee to brew me some 400 ml (that´s two cups) of coffee, so, one packet of ground coffee lasts about five times as long as if I were to use an electric drip coffee maker. What with coffee prices having risen quite a bit, that cup will have amortized itself long before the end of the year. And the insulation on it is so good that the contents keep warm for well over two hours if I have an interruption during my coffee break.
The tea cup, of course, is still in use, too. After all, one can´t stress the importance of hydration enough. And when it´s as cold outside as it is now, that definitely doesn´t mean cold water for me!

Julia

Calm after the storm

2012-01-16T04:16:00.000-08:00

This weekend was the first time in over a month that we neither had anything urgent on our plates nor anything coming up to be nervous about. Just catching up on the backlog in our household that had been created by being out and about most of the time, puttering about with the floral decorations a bit, and apart from that, just relax. It was a badly needed break for both of us.
This being the first full week I´m working this day, I´ll also have to get back into my pre-christmas eating patterns if I want to reach my next minigoal of leaving morbid obesity by my b-day in March.
I have actually been taken aback at how fast the pounds have gone back up as soon as I was going off plan.
But then again, I´ve had plenty of proof in the past that I must absolutely stay watchful if I don´t want to gain everything back. Even if I believed I was eating "normally", what I gained shows that I have been overeating by some five hundred calories a day on average, plus water retention. So back it is to weighing and journalling every bite that crosses my lips. With my body being condensed by about sixty pounds, the margin for slipups has become decidedly smaller, as my basal metabolic rate, which was low to begin with, has gone down by about three hundred calories a day.
Which means that as soon as the weather gets a bit warmer, I´ll have to get back to walking. Thirty minutes of walking fast with my sticks equal about those three hundred calories, so, if done daily, would offset the effect of the lowered BMR. Except it´s still ice cold and dark in the morning and I´m admittedly not a morning person anyways. So, I still have a grace period of about two months where I have an excuse not to exercise. Actually, I have been looking into buying an elliptical for at home, but these things are huge and expensive, both of which are, at least for now, a good enough reason for me not to buy one, after all, come spring, I can do the same workout for free again without squeezing that big machine into our already crowded living room.
Not exercising has, by the way, already had a negative effect on my back, so even if there weren´t the question of weight, I would have to get back doing it to avoid another slipped disk or such.
Can you tell I hate exercise? Yet the human body seems to be built to require it, so, it´s not a question of what I want but what I need to do.
Perhaps I must just pick my momentum back up. After all, I have been exercising regularly for the second half of 2010, and not-so-regularly for several months in 2011, and I was, at the time, feeling good. I have to remember that feeling, not how good it would feel to sleep in for another half-hour.
And I also have to start taking my protein shakes again. After four weeks without, I see a noticeable change for the worse of my skin´s condition, so, unless I want that Shar-Pei look, I have to re-nourish it fast.
Good intentions... now I must only put them in practice.

Julia

Floral decorations, minimalist model

2012-01-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

The big family celebration I attended this week was, of course, the occasion for giving plenty of flowers to the person being celebrated, so, at the day´s end, there were more than a dozen big floral arrangements standing in my relatives´ living room, made from beautiful flowers and some of them so full that it was difficult to find a vase big enough to hold them.
Apart from the fact that the recipient rightly pointed out that she´d rather have had one bouquet at a time for a longer period of time, instead of having the room full of flowers for a week or so and then nothing, what struck me when looking at this abundance was that the sheer amount of flowers did actually make less of an impact than a single bouquet, and that the most visually interesting arrangements, to me, were those that showcased just a few exquisite blooms, while the ones that were made from many flowers were, in comparison, looking a lot less interesting.
It´s a mistake I used to make with the floral arrangements at home, too. I used to have several silk flower bouquets that were filling their respective containers to the limit. When I started to minimalize my decor, these went out and weren´t replaced.
What I did wrong when making them was thinking that I had to have a lot of flowers for a bouquet, when really the sheer mass of blooms would be looking so cluttered that the beauty of the individual flower had no chance at all to be seen and appreciated.
Once again, it´s the question of enough versus too much.
So, when I had the chance of visiting a shop close to where my relatives live that has the most stunningly lifelike silk flowers, I decided to try a different approach this time. No more than three of the same kind, and some greenery or branches for a background. It´s not Ikebana minimalist, but the resulting arrangements look a lot better than what I used to have. And they sure brighten up our apartment in this dreary weather.
The best thing about those flowers is that they will, being made of silk, last a long time, so the investment I made when buying them is also sustainable. Real flowers are beautiful, too, but for decorating my home I prefer silk flowers- they don´t spoil, need no care except dusting from time to time, and, considering the high prices of real flowers, give you a lot more mileage for your bucks than the real ones.
And I don´t think I´ll tire of the new arrangements the way I had been visually tired by the old ones.

Julia

The silence of the wolves

2012-01-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

So, the dreaded event has come and passed. I went to that family celebration, and I met my critics in person for the first time in four years. I also met a number of old acquaintances I had not seen for as long, and each of them complimented me on my new weight. From "them", not a word on it. It´s more than I hoped for.
Otherwise, the general mood was that of a pack of wolves faced with a newcomer, not knowing how to treat each other, being extremely careful not to step on any conversational land mines. Normalcy that was not. Not even the semblance of it. But we went through the motions of acting civilised, making small talk and pretending the big bang had never happened. I guess that is the maximum I could hope for, considering how much I dreaded that event and meeting them.
Knowing that that meeting is now a thing of the past instead of looming before me means knowing that now I can go back to doing things, weight-loss-wise, not in order to prepare for that meeting, but for my own sake.
On the one hand, that means no more deadline ahead. On the other hand, the knowledge that I had to go and see them and the desire to be as slim as possible until then has perhaps been too big a part of my motivation to lose weight.
Now that is gone, I will still have to get myself back on track with eating and exercise. I have had a seven-pound regain over the holidays, which I want recondensed as fast as possible, and I´m still clinically obese, which means that I missed last year´s goal, too.
So what do I aim for this year?
Getting below morbid obesity is, of course, still top of the list. Getting back to "normal" BMI would mean condensing another 37 pounds, or almost twice my annual losses from 2010 or 2011, so I don´t think it would be realistic for me to set that as a goal.
Then again, I didn´t start losing in 2010 until late August, and in 2011, there was a six-month stretch of plateaus and regains that effectively stalled my weight loss half of the time. Were I to go down with my weight at the rate I did during the periods of my big weight losses, and not hit another plateau, I could indeed be normal-weighted by the end of the year 2012.
But first I have to get back into the groove of recondensing, which means re-starting to journal what I eat, and being extra careful about carbs.
Three weeks of having to eat a "standard" diet with bread, potatoes, and sugar in it have been working havoc on the control I had over my eating impulses, too, which means I´ll have to apply more willpower than what I needed by the end of last year.
They also had a detrimental effect on my digestion, which I hope will disappear fast when I return to the way of eating that helped me lose those first sixty pounds. If I regard the experience as an experiment, I have proved that I feel less good all over, have poor digestion, and gain weight, as soon as I eat more than minuscule amounts of carbohydrates.

Luckily, the temptations in the shape of Christmas sweets and cakes have mostly left the house by now. The last unopened package of stollen I gave as a hostess gift to my relatives. Let them eat cake, as Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, while I will return to a way of eating that is better for my body, and my shape.
I´ll see how far that takes me.

Julia

New year, old weight

2012-01-07T06:59:00.000-08:00

Here it is- the new year, and my first official weigh-in. Seven pounds up over the holidays, in total. Definitely not what I wanted. I know part of it is water retention- I usually regain something between two and four pounds in water weight whenever I eat more than my usual amount of carbohydrates.
The regain is even more vexing because I have that family celebration ahead I already mentioned, and I won´t be able to recondense those holiday pounds before having to go there.
Still, I am fifty-five pounds down from what I weighed when "they" last laid eyes on me.
I´ll see if that shuts them up at last, though I´m not too confident that might happen.
Building up my confidence before going there is something I need to do badly. After all, I have suffered from their criticisms all my life. And I find that even being away from them for more than four years the very thought of going there makes me feel edgy and defensive. Thank goodness that DH has experienced the way they treated me, too, and is coming along to back me up. There would be no way I´d go there alone.
I´ll see how it works out meeting them this time....and I must not allow the fact that I am still clinically obese to undermine my confidence.
I wished that was over...

Julia

End of year stats

2011-12-30T00:51:00.000-08:00

As the year 2011 is drawing to a close, time for a little summary.
I have, per today, lost a total of 11.5 kilos in 2011 (that´s 25.3 pounds for the metrically challenged), going down two sizes in clothes and reentering the land of standard sizes.
For a period of about six months, my weight had been stalling, due to my being less careful about eating carbs. Only when I went back to eating the way that had helped me get rid of the first 13.6 kilos of condensable matter in 2010, did my weight move in a downward direction again.
So I know what my goal for 2012 will be- stick to my low-carb way of eating, and see how far that will take me towards my goal of no longer being overweight. It´s less than fifteen kilos to go, so, if I were to avoid hitting another big plateau, it would be entirely reachable within the next year.
What I did miss, sadly, was my goal of leaving obesity by the end of this year, but I am, even with the slight regain over the holidays, still less than three pounds away from that point, and I am confident that I will be able to reach it soon.

Happy new year to everyone!

Julia

Timely Xmas present

2011-12-23T04:25:00.000-08:00

Wooo-hooo!
The running around for the final errands before the holidays seems to have paid off nicely- as per this morning I´m officially less than one pound away from being no longer obese!
Wishing everybody a similar surprise for the holidays, and "have a busy Santa", as they say hereabouts!

Julia

Loose ends of the year

2011-12-21T11:19:00.000-08:00

That´s what I´m just tidying up at the office before I go off into my well-deserved Christmas staycation. I may be posting somewhat less frequently for the rest of the year because literally all of the Christmas preparations are on my back, so blogging will have to take a back seat, and I didn´t have any posts ready to schedule either. Right now, I feel like one of those Hindu deities with at least eight arms and one instrument in each hand, but I hope the number of my arms will be back to normal after some R+R .
Until then,

here´s wishing everybody a merry Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, Festivus or whatever you celebrate, and a happy New Year!

Julia

Pesky plateau

2011-12-21T02:37:00.000-08:00

It´s less than a week till Christmas and the extra-special meals that go along with it. I had hoped to break the barrier down from morbid obesity before that, but it doesn´t look like I´ll be able to make it any more, as my weight seems, once more, to be plateauing. Now this isn´t the first time that has happened, actually, I have encountered a plateau about every ten kilos down and at any weight I´d had for more than a couple of weeks. As I´ve gone down some ten kilos since this summer, hitting another of these should not come unexpectedly. From past experience I know it´s the time during which my body reorganizes itself around the lower weight, the time where the multiple chins and loose skin recondense and I find myself going down in clothes size in spite of my weight being stuck. But still- I had gotten so close! Less than three pounds from where I am, there´s the land of Just Overweight waiting, and me looking at it like a person on the wrong side of a river with no bridge. As it is, the high workload during the last weeks has been taking its toll on my dietary habits, resorting to pizza for dinner too often and having to dig into the pantry for pasta and rice because there was no time to grocery shop. So, I did go over my carbs, if not my calories, for several days in a row, and promptly regained two pounds. I´m not as vexed by that as I might be, because I know that filling the carbohydrate stores of the body back up will keep some water inside, too, to a tune of about two pounds, so, I know where the gain came from.
As I wrote before, the human body is a perfect accountability instrument.
Which is what I will have to keep in mind during the holidays, too. I am intending to stick to my guns as close as possible, which means leaving out all those starchy and sugary goodies, and hope I will be able to keep my weight and not regain. As I have taken some time off work beyond the holidays themselves, maybe, if the weather stays warm enough, I might even resume my morning walks that had stopped when the demands on my time at work became too big.
As I will be away from my scales for some time, too, being extra vigilant of my intake will be of the essence if I don´t want to have a rude awakening at the start of the new year.
Then again, I should not complain. I am, at present, twelve kilos down from what I weighed at the same time last year, and twenty-seven from two years ago. At that going rate, I might even get close to being normal-weighted again by the end of next year. Provided I don´t fall off the wagon and stick to my caloric and carb limits, of course.
In the end, it´s perseverance that counts. I would never have believed that I could get my weight down to where I am now, given what more than twenty years of fighting my weight unsuccessfully had done to my metabolism, and the relatively slow speed at which I am going down again, compared to what some other big losers claim, is what I can do and keep up without stressing myself too much. Besides, what I also found is that my body would switch into starvation mode rapidly if I went too far below 1200 calories a day, so that, too, is a limit I have to respect.

Slow and easy does it. Sometimes, it even works small miracles.

Julia

No frost wardrobe

2011-12-20T04:53:00.000-08:00

It´s getting colder hereabouts, and basically, it would be time to pull out the warm winter sweaters and jackets. Only this year, I have a little technical problem there. My warmest sweaters, those that only came out when it was really cold, were all from the time when I was at my top weight. Thus, they had become way too big, hanging down to my knees, so I donated them this spring so that somebody else might still get some use out of them. I thought, at the time, that it would be no problem getting new ones to fit me this winter.
Alas, I find myself in the wrong. I just made a beeline through the shops, only to find that this year´s fashion seems to be made for a somewhat warmer climate. Would you imagine I did not find a single warm sweater in my size? Same thing for jackets. I was looking for some cozy down jacket or something of that kind that I could wear whenever my usual long coat would be impractical, and all they had were jackets that were so flimsy and cheaply made that wearing them at temperatures below freezing would be a certain way to catch pneumonia.
I am, at present, quite angry at the fashion industry. If it weren´t for my vintage coat that still fits me, I would be out of winter wardrobe with no way to replace it. With me, that´s because I have condensed myself, but what, for example, about young girls who have outgrown their old jackets? Every woman who doesn´t have an old coat to tide her over this year´s fashion is, by decree of the fashion industry, sentenced to one winter of shivering.
Hey there, fashion designers, just because winter is arriving late this year, that´s no guarantee it will stay that warm till spring!
Guess I´ll just have to take advantage of the fact that I still have a somewhat wider coat and a winter blazer in my former (bigger) size, and then put on layers to keep from freezing if it were to get cold. And hope that next year´s fashion will be more sensible.

Julia

Windy city

2011-12-16T03:10:00.000-08:00

The first gusts and gales of the forecast storm are rattling the windows as I write this. The earflapped hat I bought yesterday has been doing me good service already on my way to work, and I intend to go home as soon as possible today, as the forecast by now is so bad that they are warning people not to go outside or drive if they can avoid it.
This weekend being the last before the holidays, I´ll have to get the menu planning and shopping done as far as possible. Once more, there´s ample reason to be grateful for my big freezer, because I have plenty of room to store and freeze the ingredients for Christmas dinner in advance. And, of course, there´s laundry to be done, and some paperwork, too. So, I don´t think I´ll be bored this weekend at all.
Which is as well because I´ll have to watch what I eat even more than usual if I want to get below that magic limit of morbid obesity before Christmas. I´ve been stuck for a couple of days now, and I just hope this isn´t another pesky plateau hitting just two pounds away from overweight. So, definitely no noshing on this weekend.
As we´re going to have MIL over for Christmas, I´ll not be able to do my usual routine over the holidays, which worries me a bit. After all, there´s that unavoidable family celebration in January, and I will be meeting some people who last saw me at almost my top weight, and whom I have barely spoken to any more since then, partly because of their hurtful reaction to me having become fat. I´m pretty nervous about meeting them as it is, and knowing I were no longer obese would do wonders for my confidence when facing them.
It´s strange how those people who have absolutely no place any more in my day-to-day life still can get at my guts that way. If they were not related to me, there´d be no way I´d ever allow them to meet me again, whatever my weight. But the way things are, I´ll probably not be able to avoid it. I have even thought of praying for a blizzard or some other natural event that would allow me not to go there in January. But I don´t think I´ll get that lucky, so, I should better be prepared as well as possible before going there.
Until then, I try not to think of them at all.
After all, I´m not doing this for their sakes, but for my own.

Julia

Storm warning ahead

2011-12-15T05:45:00.000-08:00

Looks like we´re going to expect one of the worst storms in the last years tomorrow. Luckily, the town I live in is situated at the bottom of a valley, so we might be spared from the worst, but still, this means that after two unseasonably warm months that felt more like spring than like autumn, winter is finally coming.
I´m glad that my car has been serviced recently, and I can be certain there´s enough antifreeze inside. We also have a parking lot in a closed garage, so, no danger of any shingles, branches or such hitting our car.
As for weatherproof apparel, I still have last winter´s coats which still serve me well and allow for layering sweaters and vests underneath.
Over lunch break, I went looking for a new winter hat, since the ones I already have are either not covering my ears or looking more than a bit silly. When I was fat, any hat would look silly over my then rather round face, but now that my face isn´t looking like the full moon with a double chin any more, I´d rather not wear these any more.
What I found was a hat shaped like a russian tchapka, with downturnable ear flaps, made from leather with a fake fur lining. The best thing about it was that, due to sales of winter garments having been poor because of the too-warm weather, the shops are already downmarking the winter stuff, so, I got it at a discount, too. At home, I´m going to treat the leather with leather spray, so this hat will also be waterproof. And I hope I´ll be able to wear it for some years to come.
We´ll see if the rest of winter is going to make up for the too-mild weather before. While I like a white Christmas as much as anyone else, I hope we- and all the other people visiting their families- won´t have to drive there through snow and ice.
Apart that, right now, at the office there´s a bad case of what they call December fever going round- everyone is feverishly pulling together loose ends in time for year-end statistics! Including myself, which means I have a bit less time for this blog than usually.
And I´ll have to get my Christmas shopping done this weekend, which means finishing the meal planning, too. Oh to be Robinson Crusoe...he had all his work done by Friday :).

Julia

Gifted necessities

2011-12-14T03:25:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons why I hated having to make up a Christmas wish list every year as a child was that not only did my parents insist on me making up one, they were also fundamentally opposed to giving anything as a gift for Christmas that was even remotely useful or practical. To be fair, the things I needed, I got, but not for Christmas. As if wishing for a warm coat, or even some college textbooks, were an obscenity, while wishing for some utterly useless stuff like another plush teddy wasn´t.
But, for many people besides my parents, Christmas gifts are not supposed to be sensible or practical, just pretty, or cute, or surprising. Picking out something that the recipient really needs and will use seems so- un-romantic by comparison.
What that means is that most of these pretty, cute and surprising things are clutter as soon as they enter the house.
Even worse is the "but there must be presents or it ain´t Christmas"-mindset that leads the giver to spend hard-earned money on -or even go into debt for- things that the recipient neither needs nor wants.
Economically, in that case you give away something of no value to the recipient and get back something of no value to you, meaning that you just sold the family finances short by the price of two pieces of clutter.

In my own family, I don´t ever want such things to happen.
The premise is simple: I do not ever want to give or receive a present just so that a present is given, which means that yes, Christmas with no presents at all would be perfectly fine with me.
On the other hand, to me, it is perfectly acceptable to pick out something you need and can use and chose that to be your Christmas wish.
So, for our grown-up Christmas, we will perhaps get some items we can use and put them benath the tree,or rather, in front of it but we won´t take home any additional clutter.

Looking at those wish-inducing catalogues that make letterboxes overflow in December, what I have realized this year is that they are marketing a lot of things as "special Christmas sets" that are packaged to look most impressive under a tree (think ten colored-enamel matching pots of which, at most, four will see regular use, or that twenty-knife block for someone whose most-used cooking utensil is a can opener). Such things give the impression of being practical and useful, but they are also a form of clutter if the recipient doesn´t need or use them.
The positive thing about this is that by applying the rule of necessity to any offer in those catalogues, I have, once more, reminded myself that our household is, by now, so well-equipped that we really need, at this point in time, nothing new in the way of kitchen utensils or such, and very little in the way of anything else, and that, if I disengage the purchases from the holidays, I may even profit from some hefty after-holiday discounts on the things my family really needs. And that is better than having to wrap or unwrap them in time for Christmas.

Julia

Wants vs. needs

2011-12-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

I just dropped off my car at the repair shop for the biannual checkup that is mandatory hereabouts. There are also some minor repairs that must be done before I get that sticker on the license plate, and the repair guy told me I´d get the car back tomorrow at the earliest because they will have to procure some replacement parts first- "we don´t keep all of the parts for the older models in stock any more".
What that tells you is that I don´t drive the most recent model. But, I have wheels. And they are paid for.

Which is more than a lot of people can claim.

It never ceases to amaze me when I see those big, latest-model, expensive new cars, and behind the steering wheel, there´s some waif of a twenty-year-old girl, or a male of the same age with heavy tattoos on his arms, dressed, invariably, in clothes with visible brand names on them, and holding the latest model smart phone. Now I know one shouldn´t judge a book by its cover, but most of those young people don´t look as if they were earning as much in a year as those cars cost. So, they are most likely paying through the nose for a car loan on an asset that has, just by being driven off the dealer´s lot, lost some ten to twenty percent of its monetary value on the day they bought it. Those same young people are patronising electronics stores, clothes stores, and they don´t hesitate for a moment to spend twenty bucks at a fast-food restaurant instead of cooking two or three home-cooked meals off the same amount. There´s a reason why someone dubbed the sixteen-to-forty-year olds the "advertising relevant target group".
In our consumerist society, a lot of people have forgotten- or worse, never learned- the difference between something you want and something you need. Even kindergarteners clamor for the most recent brand name dolls or clothes, and brand name logos on jeans or sneakers appear sometimes to be more important to the teenaged wearers than the garments themselves.
What these things create for the owners is an external semblance of wealth.
The story behind the scenes, most of the time, is a different one.
Consumer debt has been steadily on the rise for several decades, and the number of people who reach the point of having to file for bankruptcy before they reach the age of thirty along with it.
And then, when it´s too late, they are forced to learn and apply the difference between a want and a need.

Because most of those consumerist goodies are just wants.
Someone defined "needs" as "food, clothes, transportation, and shelter". While I agree with that definition in general, it doesn´t cut it when trying to determine what to cut out of a too-tight budget.

Food is a need. Eating out in a restaurant is a want.
Clothes are a need. Brand name tagged jeans are a want.
Transportation is a need. A brand-new Porsche is a want.
Shelter is a need. A five-bedroom-condo for two people is a want.
Being reachable by phone may be a need. The most recent I-Phone (TM) is a want.

Come to think of it, most of the things we acquire are, strictly speaking, wants. If we could live without it, it is expendable.
Now if you can afford the price for a want, there´s nothing wrong with indulging. But by that I mean, can you pay for it in cash? Or do you have to put it on your credit card? Because then you really can´t afford it. You are instead betting on your future self to be able to afford it, whatever it is, plus cumulative interest, which can make those credit card purchases a lot more expensive than the price tag on the item.
That alone should be reason enough to revive that strange ancient tradition of saving up to buy something, because that will keep your future self from cussing you for being fool enough to pick up such a load of debt. Besides, you might even find you don´t want the item any more after a while. Guess what, it´s cheaper to find out the interest in a thing was short-lived before you have dragged it home to clutter up your habitation and mess up your credit card balance.

And the needs? If you remove the wants from the budget, you might just find you have enough to get on by. At the very least, you´ll have a bit more breathing space.

And always remember that the very best things in life mostly come without a price tag.

Julia

It pays to watch

2011-12-12T01:53:00.001-08:00

For many years, the ups and downs of my weight were, to me, looking like the results of throwing dice- random and frustrating. Many were the days when I would have sworn by all the deities that I hadn´t overeaten, only to find my weight up by several pounds the next day. Less often, I thought I´d goofed, but weight numbers didn´t tell at all.
What that gave me was a feeling of having totally no control over my body. How else to explain weight gains that did not compute with what I´d eaten? As in overeating by one thousand calories, say, and gaining two pounds which would mean seven thousand calories if it were fat?
For a long time, the sheer helplessness of facing what looked like a totally randomized response pattern stopped me from even trying to recondense my excess baggage. I suffered from the effects of dragging around those 100 extra pounds, but I had no idea how to get rid of them. The only thing I knew was that the diets I had tried out until then had not helped. Quite the opposite. They only made me feel worse because, heck, one was supposed to lose weight when sticking to them, and I sometimes even gained.
The fallacy I´d fallen victim to, of course, was that a calorie is a calorie no matter where it comes from. Only when I started tracking how much of the macronutritients I ate did I see that there was indeed a predictable pattern to my gains and losses, one that depended on the ratio of carbohydrate calories to protein and fat calories. In other words, my weight follows my carbohydrate intake. Many carbs, even if I stay under my daily calories, mean the scale goes up on the next day, and few carbs mean a maintain or a loss.
I´m not going on a soapbox here, but cutting down carbs is what worked for me. It also worked for DH, who has, just by eating the same things I eat, gotten down two pants sizes since May. So, in our totally non-randomized two-subjects study, we have found that keeping our carbohydrate intake below 30 percent on most days has enabled us to condense weight that, with more carbohydrate-loaden diets, no amount of caloric restriction short of starving ourselves would have moved.
This weekend, I put the counter-check to this into practice. We did, for the third Sunday in Advent, have some mulled wine, some lebkuchen with a cup of hot cinnamon chocolate, and dinner was a big portion of spinach-and-feta lasagna. In the end, I had about twice the carbs I eat ordinarily. And this morning, I predictably found myself up two pounds (not what the lasagna weighed).
While any gain is not exactly a reason for joy when you´re as close to an intermediary goal as I am right now (I absolutely want to be below the limit of morbid obesity before Christmas), I know this time that the nominal gain of two pounds is less than three ounces of fat, maximum, and the rest is water retention from eating those carbs, plus what I still have inside me of the food I ate yesterday. So, today, I´ll cut waaay down on the carbs, drink a lot of water, and go back on plan in general. And that will be a lot easier now that I don´t have to feel I´m missing out on all the season´s goodies this year.
Besides, when looking at where those carbs came from, I could even see that the lasagna accounted for half of them, so if I had had either lasagna or lebkuchen and hot chocolate, not both, I´d even have stayed on plan. As I said before, I may eat every food, just not everything at once, and in moderation. After all, this has to be for life, because if I went back to what I always did I´d be back having what I always had real fast.

Julia

Unsaddling sight

2011-12-09T03:41:00.001-08:00

Right now I´m wrapping up a week of sheer pandemonium (again) at the office, which is also the reason why I didn´t post lately. Just why everyone is wildly determined to get all things that only have been procrastinated about brought in order at a time when there is enough on everybody´s plate with things that absolutely need doing by December 24 or 31, is amazing me every year. Oh well.
One thing that did go according to plan, this week, was my weight. As per today, I´m less than one kilogram away from the point where I´ll no longer be morbidly obese. just overweight..
Once more, my body seems to be rearranging itself. I had to use the handicapped restroom (there was just that one) at a public building yesterday, which had a mirror fixed so that a person in a wheelchair would bee able to see themselves. To me, that mirror was reflecting back the upper part of my legs, which I had always avoided looking at because of the pronounced saddlebags I had. As we have only one full-legth mirror in the house, I hadn´t looked at them for awhile, even avoiding to look that way last Saturday in the dressing room.
So, when I suddenly saw them reflected back at me, I did a double take because...the saddlebags are almost gone! My legs still can bear to part with some condensable matter, of course, but there is, suddenly, a smooth line from my hips down to my knees, even without the help of spanx (TM) or such.
And I am wearing my brand new size XL pants. One thing that´s especially good about getting down to that size is that my old pants from the plus size store were more than twice as expensive as the new ones, so, keeping up with the decreasing sizes has just gotten a lot less pricey than it used to be, apart being less of a hassle because I can, now, shop at any normal-sized clothes store.
Not that I intend to go overboard with clothes shopping. This year´s wide-over-tight look is great for wearing last year´s size sweaters and jackets over my new pants, apart from the fact that they have only a few items at all in the jewel tones I like in sweaters. No way I´m going to turn myself into a grey mouse now that I finally am getting into the shape to wear form-fitting clothes again. So, I´ll wear what I have, and save myself buying the transition sizes that hopefully would also be too big next year.
This weekend, I´ll go for another wardrobe raid- evicting the baggy trousers! I´ll box them up for the time being, but I most fervently hope they´ll follow the lead of my 5XL- jackets which, from that same clothes box, did, after some time, go directly to Goodwill.
If there´s one thing I have learned on my way down so far, it´s that I must not ever stop being watchful. Journalling every bite, and weighing in daily. Gaining it all back would be as easy as reverting to my old eating habits, that´s what I must never forget. And keeping it off is as easy as sticking with the things I learned about portion control and what not to eat that helped me get to where I´m now.
As a matter of fact, I have found out that it has become easier for me to resist the usual sugary and chocolate-y treats of the season. And whenever I start to think of eating some, I remind myself that the "goodie" in question will never make me feel as good as wearing those size XL pants, and then I´m not ready to pay the price of indulging my sweet tooth any more. I may have to have a Christmas without stollen or lebkuchen, but I will be having it in size XL pants, for the first time in this millenium.

Julia

Off the lists

2011-12-06T02:31:00.001-08:00

For many years, I have more or less faithfully kept a running list of what I saw on the scale. I expanded that by adding the data from some even older weighing lists, and I do, by now, have a rather complete set of data back to May 2002, plus several fragments from 1992, 1990 and earlier, back to high school and the time before my weight struggle started in earnest.
What these lists tell is a classic story of how yo-yo dieting plus plenty of diverse stressors in my life plus my several bouts with binge eating disorder turned a small weight problem (medically, actually a non-existent one) into morbid obesity stage three.
What they also show is the times I quit journalling my weight, and the fact that these, of all times, should have been where I should not have closed my eyes to what was happening. Every gap in those lists corresponds to one of the major gains that ended up putting me at 110 pounds above my starting weight.
It wasn´t as if I hadn´t tried to reverse what was happening. Several times, I managed to get rid of some ten or fifteen kilos (20 to 30 pounds), only to regain them faster than they had come off, and then some.
I sometimes regret not having the complete data for all those years. There might have been some interesting things to be found out by analyzing that.
But what I can do is look at those lists and find out how long ago it was that my body weighed what it weighs today.
Er, that must be "what I could do". As per this morning´s weigh-in I have officially entered the uncharted areas, meaning that I do not have the data to tell when I last weighed what I weigh today. The only thing I can tell is that it must have been sometime around the beginning of 2002, which means that I am, right now, enjoying the body feeling I had for the last time a full decade ago . The next recorded data, apart one single glaring number from when I first went up to the 220s in 1992, will be from the eighties of the last century, from the time when I first went from normal to overweight. So, if ever I get there I´ll know that I haven´t been there since the days of shoulder pads and teased hairdos.
I have been morbidly obese for almost ten uninterrupted years.With every pound I lose, and with every ability that comes back, as in walking without crutches or putting on my own stockings, I realize how much these years have cost me in terms of quality of life, and I appreciate those abilities perhaps a lot more than someone who never lost them. I might have stayed inside that fat prison for life, missing out on many things that give joy, and suffering from ever more limitations.
I´m grateful that I have come out of it thus far, and I know that I will have to stay vigilant for the rest of my life to avoid sliding back.
And now, I am going for the limit of morbid obesity. It´s less than three pounds away!

Julia

Fancy pants

2011-12-05T05:09:00.001-08:00

For a long time, purchasing trousers was one of the things I passionately hated to do.
Going into a shop, finding the rack that held the biggest size pants they sold, picking a pair and going into the dressing room. Avoiding the sight of my legs and b*tt in the mirror, stepping into those pants only to find they were impossible to pull up any higher than my knees. Stepping out of them again, putting the pants I arrived in back on, leave shop for another that might have a bigger size to offer. Rinse, wash, repeat.
When I discovered a line of plus size pants that would fit me, I quit trying on any others, just buying the same pair of pants over and over again, in ever-growing sizes. On the way down with my weight, still those same pants, this time in decreasing sizes. And the knowledge that, with successfully condensing myself, the day was near when the smallest size of those plus-sized pants would cease to fit me, and then what next?
As I am approaching the point of no longer being obese, the dreaded moment has arrived. Thus, on Saturday, I found myself standing in the middle of a dozen pants racks in a shop that stocks every garment in normal through plus sizes, wondering just which ones to try on first so as to not end up frustrated at the first try.
I actually didn´t have the slightest idea what size I need now, so, the way into the dressing room couldn´t be avoided this time. So, gingerly, I grabbed several pairs of size XL jeans and tried them on and...

...they fit! All of them, actually. I was able to pull them up, button them, and close the zippers.
Hey, I haven´t worn that size since the last millenium! I know, it´s still "X"L, but when you have had 3XL or 4XL in a brand that is also vanity sizing its products (meaning you have to add at least another "X" to realistically compare them to regularly sized brands), being rid of the numbers before the "X" is enough to make you dizzy.
So, I ended up taking home three pairs of form-fitting trousers, which ought to take me through another couple of pounds´ loss.
What I couldn´t resist, of course, was pulling out the same style trousers in my old size and look at them. Just seeing how big the seat of those looked made me cringe. That had been me. That was where those sixty-plus pounds had been. Holding up the ones that fit me now, I still have trouble adjusting to the fact that I really, actually can fit my body into these, but boy, it feels good to see them.
And wear them, of course, without those droopy bottoms, and with the knowledge that I am back to a size I have last worn before becoming obese.
This feels good.

Julia

Wreaths and decorations

2011-12-02T01:52:00.001-08:00

When setting up my Advent decorations, I had been somewhat vexed by the fact that I could not find the little decorated wreaths which go over the bottom ends of candles to make them look more festive. I knew for sure that I had had one for every candle holder I put out, and I was fairly certain that I had not decluttered them, either. But they weren´t to be found in my living room cupboards, so I had already guessed I´d tossed them.
Yesterday, when taking the trash down to the cellar, I decided to look for them in the china boxes. Inside a waterproof chest, I discovered, not only the wreaths, but also a whole bunch of artificial flower decorations I hadn´t even remembered I owned.
Now, me and Christmas decorations has always been a mixed story. Christmas at home was always a bit of the "be merry, dammit" variety, my father being about the only one who insisted on there being a perfect feast, which absolutely had to include a real tree, oodles of decorations, and a multi-course dinner that kept my mother and me nailed to the kitchen most of the day, while my Grandparents and myself could have well done without all that ado.
As such things go, the likelihood of anything going wrong rises exponentially when you try to make things perfect, so, there ensued invariably some culinary or other drama which led to tears, door-slamming, and everyone feeling, not festive, but altogether lousy. The whole affair was so upsetting for me as a child, that, like clockwork, right when that gorgeous dinner was about to be served, I came down with stomach cramps so bad that I had to retreat to my room and couldn´t even eat any of the food served.
So, as soon as I could, I decided not to go there for Christmas any more. Which led to another round of drama, because visiting for Christmas was one of those "done" things my parents insist on.
For several years, I avoided Christmas by volunteering for emergency duty at the office over the holidays, that being a reason they had to accept why I couldn´t come.
I was, in those years, glad that I did not have to celebrate Christmasat all any more. One of my more memorable Christmas eves was spent at the office, listening to Gregorian chant on my computer, catching up with work, and enjoying the quiet outside. That was, actually, the first Christmas I experienced where there wasn´t any crying or door-slamming.
How my -otherwise rather intelligent- parents managed to turn the holidays into such a turn-off while claiming all the while that they should be beautiful, still escapes me.
For a while, I had become a veritable grinch. Anything to do with Christmas was, for me, taboo. That did lead to some tensions with DH, who did not have the same kind of Christmas memories I had, and would have liked to have our flat decorated for Christmas, while I flat out refused to have anything of the kind in view.
All through that time, my relatives kept sending me those decorations. Most of them, actually, came from my beloved Aunt, so, I didn´t outright throw them away, but I wasn´t ready to put them up yet. Just to humor DH, I still exchanged decorations for summer and winter, but I kept them relatively neutral, trying to avoid that christmas-y look.
Which is why all of those pretty silk flowers and wreaths were, years ago, unceremoniously dumped into that box and went down to the cellar, waiting for me to change my mind about Christmas.
When I found them again yesterday, I picked out the most beautiful ones and took them up to our flat, and spent the rest of the evening distributing wreaths to candlesticks and poinsettia bouquets to vases, all the while watched by DH who must have wondered who that woman was and what she had done with his wife.
Guess what, the flat looks good. Festive, joyful. And we are going to celebrate Christmas together, not perfectly, but perfectly our way. There won´t be any slammed doors, and there won´t be more than three courses to the Christmas dinner, but I will be able to try all of them. There won´t be mountains of unwanted presents, but the joy of being together. And that is, after all, what Christmas should really be about, isn´t it?

Julia

Rounding up the strays

2011-12-01T04:46:00.001-08:00

One of the things I find when decluttering is that some categories of things have been distributed all through the flat. Take stationery- I had writing utensils and paper stashed away in four different locations, which led to several unnecessary double purchases because I couldn´t find the ballpoint pens or envelopes or whatever when I needed them, so I just went and bought another pack.
Only now have I managed to put all of my stationery in one place, and I think I won´t have to buy any for quite a while.
Another culprit, it turned out, was candles. After yesterday´s candle closet cleanup, I had that nagging feeling of having missed something. As indeed I had. Hidden away in the corridor cupboard was one decorative (read: too-pretty-to-burn) Easter candle, plus a plastic bag full of even more votive candles. Putting them into the candle closet made, for one, sure that I will have that Easter candle out next year instead of letting it languish in that closet, and the votives (which I had plain forgotten about) have a chance of getting lit, too.
And the corridor closet now holds only the two handmade pottery table sets I own which, by now, only come out for special occasions, plus some thermos coffee pots of DH´s, and two extra packs of paper napkins courtesy of IKEA. As for the latter, a napkin roundup is already planned. As far as I remember there are three places where I have some of those.I´ll see how much space I need for them.

Not having a designated space for things is obviously another big cause of clutter. Some of those hidden stashes came about when I had to do a quick tidying up, and did not have a designated place to put things. To get them out of the way, I just put them into the closest available space, which made the outward room look tidy and turned the inside of the closets into a mess.
If I want to avoid a repetition of that situation, every thing I own must have a place to keep it in.
Things for which I have no place where they can live are automatically clutter. So are things stashed away in unlikely places, because it´s not likely their existence will be remembered when such an item is needed.
Just the act of keeping track of things distributed all over the place creates stress.
Reducing the amount of items to keep track of, aka decluttering, plus finding permanent homes for the items I keep, reduces my general stress level considerably.
Rounding up the strays from different categories has allowed me to become conscious of things I tend to overbuy, and even get rid of some unnecessary extras, thus creating even more space to give a permanent home to the things I keep.
And then all I have to do is lead the strays back to their homes whenever I find them out of their places, and enjoy my uncluttered flat.

Julia

Candle mess

2011-11-30T02:51:00.001-08:00

For several days now, I have done small decluttering projects in the evening. Yesterday, it was time to go at those candle boxes and cupboards. What I found in there was the result of keeping candles in a room that has no air condition for several hot summers (which also tells a lot about how long I haven´t been looking into those cupboards). Several of the candles had actually melted together into one unrecognizable block of wax, others were bent into a c-shape, and some more were so badly dented on the surface that no polishing could restore them to a semblance of presentability.
What was left after tossing these were all in all three unopened packages of vanilla scented votive candles, so I know better than to get another of these before having used up those I already have, plus six large-diameter candles.
And five heavy iron candle holders intended for those altar-style large candles. The thing being that I use, these days, a brass candle holder for the big candles, so these haven´t been used in a long while. As DH was against tossing them altogether, they will go to the cellar to join the extra china.
Two also unopened boxes of IKEA chandelier candles are bearing witness to the dangers of their decorations department. Being yellow and blue, I´ll use them up in the spring. And the half-burned chandelier candles I also found will be used up this season. These are actually left over from table decorations, as I like to have a fresh candle to light for every celebration. In the future, we are going to have candlelight for dinner more often, and I´ll try to always use up a candle once I put it in the holder.
At the end of the evening, I had created enough space in my cupboard to store the leftover candles so that they will, hopefully, not melt or bend before I can use them up.
And I found myself at a goal line of sorts. The things inside my cupboards now are things I do, at this point in time, not want to throw out.
So, when I get around to using up those candles, the space I have then is what I must work with, unless I take another swipe at the pocket book and video department.
Which perhaps I should do. There are still too many books that entered my household whenever there was a book sale in the vicinity, and which were sometimes not even read. The worst marketing trap for me used to be the sales where you got a hefty discount if you bought a certain number of books. I always came home from these with several carrier bags full of books. Most of the time, when looking inside, they turned out to have been marked down for a good reason- uninteresting, boring, or plain literary junk.
Now if I want to decide whether to buy a book at full price, I go to the closest bookstore and take a look inside. Most of the time, that´s enough to see that the cover is the most interesting thing about that book, and it stays where it is. At book sales, I did not take that time.
A lot of the results have been decluttered already. But I´m certain there are still enough to get rid of.
Besides, I have found myself reading a lot less since DH moved in with me. You see, we actually talk to each other, so there´s no need to anaesthesize myself with books in order to not feel the loneliness any more.
Thus, I am free to keep just the best ones, and let go of the rest.
I know which cupboard I´ll be digging in tonight...

Julia

Fairly different eyes

2011-11-29T02:46:00.001-08:00

For several days, the way home from work has been leading me through the booths of the local Christmas fair. Smells of food, mulled wine and incense cones wafting across the streets, and the glitter of Christmas decorations, plus plenty of christmas-y decorations for sale.
Before I started condensing myself and my possessions, it would have been an occasion to shop for candles, figurines, and other tchotchkes, and for stuffing my face with fat-dripping deep-fried donuts and sugary stuff.
After over a year of becoming more mindful, I find myself not even wanting to go at all those goodies any more.
Knowing that I have plenty of decorations at home, and remembering how many I did already declutter because they simply weren´t used any more, helps, of course.
So does the realization that most of the things sold at fairs are coming at decidedly un-fair prices.
If, for example, I wanted to eat a baguette with garlic butter on top, at the fair, that would set me back by about four bucks, and I would have to eat it standing up, in the cold. The same kind of baguette bought frozen from the grocery store and prepared and eaten sitting down in the warmth of my home would cost me one buck, ok, plus electricity for the oven, but I could, at least, be certain everything is hygienic.
The prices for decorations, too, are sky-high when buying them at those pretty-looking booths. So, if I should want another polystone reindeer, I could get one at any chain store for half of what I´d pay at the fair, too.
And candles? I have, at home, an extensive collection of brass candle holders, and also several boxes full of candles I bought and didn´t use up in the past years. So, this year, I am determined to use up the candles I already have before shelling out my hard-earned moolah for yet another one. Doing so saves me money and also space, because once the candles will be gone, I do not intend to hoard as many again, especially not those big, tall ones that take ages to burn down, so, even if I burn a candle every night until Christmas, I will not even be able to use them up. I still have several partly burned down ones that are on the list of things to go, and by actually lighting them I´ll get more joy out of them than by having them take up a whole cupboard.
Provided, that is, that I won´t overstock on them again, but right now, seeing how long I have had them, that´s not likely.
In the meantime, I am enjoying the new-found spaces in my living room, and the realization that not keeping too many things in stock allows me to liberate space that can be used better.
Not indulging in those small things will allow me to go at bigger remodeling projects. After all, if I added up what I have already decluttered in terms of excess decorations, the money I spent on those would probably buy a new couch or flatscreen TV had I but kept it.
So, this year, I´ll keep my purse shut when walking through the fair, and my mind on those things that somehow keep getting postponed because the money that could have been used for them was frittered away on clutter.
Perhaps I´ll even set up a piggy bank. Not pigging out on deep-fried anythings any more and putting the savings to feeding it instead might fill it up rather fast. And then I can go at my next habitation improvement projects.

Julia

It takes just two- or one

2011-11-28T03:02:00.001-08:00

As we were spending the weekend at home (no black Friday or first-of-advent shopping madness for us), I had plenty of time to continue with the living room.
Guess what- the red cushions are still there, and they will probably stay, too. How that?
I mentioned that I had taken one of my red-cushioned easy chairs out of our living room. I had, at first, intended that to be just a test, to see what the effect would be. So, I was looking for a way to store it where the cushions wouldn´t get spoiled by moisture or such (we have a rather humid basement). And I had a sudden inspiration after DH told me he´d be sorry to see the red cushions go, because they look so friendly. I put that surplus cushion into Grandpa´s chair. It fits exactly, makes the sitting even more comfortable, and it brings that chair together with the others, optically. And I could put away the blanket I used to throw over the black chair, too. DH´s couch seat is now covered with a blanket in the same red, plus several throw pillows of the same color. What I put away were several blankets and pillows in yellow, blue and orange, which were actually left over from previous decorating schemes. The now cushionless chair frame I took apart ( thumbs up to collapsible IKEA furniture) and put it into the cellar.
The end result was a seating space that is pulled together by the same color being used on every chair and couch in it, and with enough room to move in. It looks a lot more airy, too, even though there´s just one piece of furniture less.
On the other side of the living room, besides my computer desk, there was the perennial hotspot in the shape of a side table that once was intended to serve as an extension to my desk, but which ended up being buried in paper clutter that hadn´t made it into my filing cabinet. Besides, it made the space next to the desk look and feel crowded. So, I put away everything that was on that table, and then discovered that it could easily be slipped under my kitchen table where it´s out of the way, but still accessible if I should need it (I sometimes put my sewing machine on there, too).
Again, that area looked a lot more spacious than before.
Just by removing two pieces of furniture and some cushions and blankets, I turned a room that felt stuffed and suffocating back into one that looks open and inviting. What surprises me, actually, is how few things I had to remove for that effect.
And, as the red blanket and pillows were already there, the whole remodel was practically free. Maybe I´ll pick up two or three more red pillowcases to replace the yellow ones, but that´s all.
Next stop, pictures. I have, for several years, been collecting the title pages of a wall calendar that has images of medieval book art, and each year´s title page is elaborately printed including the metallic effects that make old illuminated manuscripts so stunning. I also had bought several frames and matching frame mats for them, but somehow had gotten around to framing only three while the rest of frames and what was intended to go in there was languishing on top of our living room shelf. Yesterday, I finally went at framing the last ones and hanging them. The wall they hang on is now looking complete, and the stack of stuff on top our shelves is gone, leaving me wondering why the dickens I kept procrastinating about a job that took, all in all, less than an hour to do.
That out of the way, I did take out my minimalist Advent decorations and, after placing them, settled down with a good book, a lit candle, and a nice hot cup of tea.
Advent time just as I like it.

Julia

Sweet tooth

2011-11-25T06:16:00.001-08:00

The cold evenings we´ve had last week made me wish for a big cup of tea every evening when I came home. Usually, I drink herbal teas only, but, as DH wanted a cup, too, I took some Assam or Darjeeling black tea instead. Which I like, but only with milk in it. Before recondensing myself, also with a lump of brown sugar. As I am trying to avoid sugar now, I took some artificial sweetener instead.
And found myself climbing the walls with craving chocolate and cookies yesterday. I managed not to let that slip into a real binge, but boy, was it hard.
The thing about this is that I had never had such cravings during my weight loss journey before. Not even if I had eaten something with real sugar in it. I´ve still eaten chocolate or cookies, but never had a problem stopping after one or two.
It seems that it was the sweetener (which I don´t ordinarily use) that triggered the cravings. So this is one more thing I should better steer clear of if I want to get to goal.

Julia

Optical duh!

2011-11-25T03:29:00.001-08:00

So, I did remove one of the two easy chairs in my living room. The second one with a matching stool is still there, as it turned out it was mostly the other one that kept getting in the way.
Space-wise, thus, the situation has been getting better. But optically, it still isn´t quite right.
You see, that easy chair has bright red cushions. DH´s couch is dark brown leather, and Grandpa´s easy chair is black. The cocktail chairs have dark green leather seats and backs. When I bought the red cushions, I thought they´d brighten up the room a bit. But now, with a more minimalist decorator´s eye, they clash with about everything else in the room, apart from having gotten a bit dingy.
As I was intending to replace the cushions anyway, I went to the IKEA website to look for new ones, and found out that they have these now in dark brown leather, matching DH´s couch exactly.
I had thought of buying white leather cushions before, but that was when the only alternative color they had in leather cushions for those chairs was black. As I don´t really like black as a color for furniture, that precluded getting another color than white, even though I knew these would be staining easily.
Seeing they have them in dark brown now, I know what I´ll put on my wish list. Having the same color upholstery for couch and easy chair will make the whole room look more styled-through and put-together.
Besides, while I really like red as a color in general, those red cushions are so dominating the room that I have to keep everything matching them color-wise, or rather, that the other chairs keep clashing with them optically.
Dark brown, dark green and black are close enough together to match, but these red cushions will have to go. Just imagining the brown ones on that chair means thinking of a room that has more optical calm than it has today.
The other problem with our living room furniture is that there are also several different kinds of wood. My furniture was mostly pine and birchwood, so, light-colored kinds of wood, while DH, being a guy, brought darker-colored kinds, like teak or walnut. Having these in the same room means even more optical noise than just the upholstery would create.
Now if I could do as I wish I´d toss all of the dark stuff and replace it with birchwood or maple shelving and matching chairs and tables. Unfortunately, DH is very attached to the walnut and teak stuff because it came from his parent´s house as a gift to him. But maybe we´ll be able to put most or even all of it into what is now our old bedroom, which will become his office and den as soon as we can exchange rooms.
It´s amazing how decluttering has made me aware of the visual clutter that our furniture is creating. While there was plenty of stuff lying around on those chairs and tables, I blamed it just on that if the place looked cluttered. Now that most things have either gone or found their permanent homes out of sight inside some cupboard, I suddenly see that the furniture mix in our living room looks cluttered enough on its own to keep the room from getting that feeling of calm that is what I wish for in interior decor. And I have discovered that it isn´t adding something new that will bring that feeling. Rather, it is removing things.
So, this weekend I´ll be once more going through our stuff, deciding what to get rid of, and enjoying the fact that we are getting ever closer to the goal of having a peaceful and calm flat.

Julia

What I´m grateful for

2011-11-24T07:13:00.001-08:00

Even though Thanksgiving day isn´t officially celebrated hereabouts, just reading all the articles on other blogs where people list up what they are grateful for is enough to start me off with my very own (non-complete) list.

Right now,I´m grateful for
-the beautiful weather we´re having even though it´s late November
-the nifty spill-proof to-go cup I have on my desk for water or tea
-the fact that I can walk the stairs to my flat again without having to pause
-my fridge full of nutritious foods
-every bit of space in my flat that I have already liberated by decluttering
-a wardrobe that has only clothes that fit me now
-the back-friendly office chair I sit on
-my coworkers who are a great team to work with
-the knowledge that I already possess everything I really need
-every pound I don´t have to drag around any more
-my rings that fit me again

-and most of all, for the wonderful man I´m going to meet with tonight, and the knowledge that he is my husband, and we are sticking together no matter what life brings, and for every minute we may spend together!

Julia

Counting down...

2011-11-23T01:47:00.001-08:00

With just four and a half weeks left before christmas, countdowns are starting for holiday preparation as well as for the usual end-of-year frenzy at the workplace.
This year, I´m determined to pre-plan holiday meals so I can do the bulk of the shopping in advance. Maybe, if I stock up my freezer in time, I can avoid the annual price rush that comes right before the holidays.
It feels a bit strange that this will be the second christmas where I´ll apply portion control before preparing the meals.
In former years, at christmas, food was always the main event. So, the best cuts of meat and fowl were bought, and every meal went with at least two side dishes plus a sumptuous dessert. Everything was served in amounts big enough to allow everybody at least two servings of everything. At the end of meals, there were still plenty of leftovers, and everyone was stuffed to the point where belts become torture instruments.
The whole thing was costly, of course, including the bags full of vegetables that we dragged home only to find that many of them didn´t even make it to the end of the holidays in spite of being kept in a cool place.
In the end, we regularly ended up overeating because we didn´t want any of those extra-special goodies to spoil.
The error in all this, of course, was that drive to overabundance I had. As if a meal weren´t as tasty if there was just enough of it for everyone to eat to the point of comfortable satiety, as if the very fact that there was twice as much food on the table as we needed was necessary for a meal to be a "real" holiday meal.
So, every year, I ended up with a too-big drain on the wallet and a too-big gain on the waist.
And I started to dread the holidays.
Now, there are some other reasons why I don´t like christmas, at least as it is commonly celebrated. But the food situation didn´t make things any better.
This time, I´ll apply the things I have learned during the course of the year to holiday cooking, too. Things like portion size control, meal planning, and most importantly, the knowledge that nobody has to overfeed in order to celebrate a proper holiday.
The best thing I can do to make sure of that is starting to plan early.
Especially as I am now so close to the point where I´ll no longer be obese. Less than five pounds away per this morning.
I intend to give myself a very special christmas present this year: a body that is no longer clinically obese, just overweight. And if I managed to get there before the holidays, I still want to be there after the holidays.

As I write this, Americans are probably already preparing their Thanksgiving turkeys.
Just as a reminder- if there are leftovers, most can even be re-frozen in single-meal portions, so, if you have a freezer that was big enough to hold the whole bird before cooking it, there´s certainly enough room for leftovers. From the point of food safety, deciding at once how much of the leftovers you´ll be able to eat before they go bad when they are just refrigerated and not refrozen, and then re-freezing the excess at once is best. Besides, it helps to get back on track immediately after the holiday meal.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Julia

Occupied space

2011-11-22T04:43:00.001-08:00

We are not, it seems, going to move to another appartment anytime soon. That´s ok with me, after all, the one we´re living in right now has a nice layout, and the best (and biggest) kitchen I ever had.
But it also means that we will have to find the right balance between furniture and empty space.
Just removing a single chest of drawers from our bedroom has changed the way that room feels, opening up space and making things look altogether more spacious. And that wasn´t even a big chest.

Our living room is another room that could do with a bit more space. The culprits, in that case, are the easy chairs.
Before DH moved in, I owned two matching IKEA easy chairs and a double-seater couch, which left plenty of free space in the living room. With DH, there arrived a big three-seater, which replaced my double-seater, plus a small desk, the chair to it, and a fifties-style cocktail table with three matching chairs.
Now, I also got to inherit my grandpa´s recliner (much bigger than the other ones), and then there was the vintage danish design teak armchair that MIL gave us.
What it amounts to is that we have a living room that could seat ten people at once. The only hitch being that there´s just the two of us to use them. Granted, DH likes to put up his feet on the couch, thus occupying three places, but that still leaves six unused seats. No wonder the place feels crowded.

The likely candidates for eviction are my two easy chairs, because I would not have to have a discussion with DH before I could toss them. Except these are the only ones, apart the one my grandpa had, that I would keep. Then again, they have some stains on the upholstery that I haven´t been able to get out, and the replacement cushions I´ve been ogling would set us back by a coupla hundred bucks, for a pair of easy chairs that we are, right now, using for dropping blankets or newspapers on. The frames, btw., are no more expensive than the replacement cushions.
Perhaps I should try and put the frames of the IKEA chairs into the cellar for a try. The cushions I could store on top of my wardrobe, just for as long as it takes to decide whether these chairs should come back at all. It might even be that we like the more spacious feeling so much that we won´t miss them at all. In that case, we could pass them on to someone else who might be able to use them, and if ever we had a house where there´d be room for those, we could buy another set. If, that is, by then we wouldn´t prefer something more, er, stylish.

I´ll go for putting them out of the way tonight, and I´m curious how that will change the feeling of the room.

to be continued....

Julia

Files and drawers

2011-11-21T03:16:00.001-08:00

When it´s cold outside, staying inside turns into the preferred modus of spending one´s time. Weekends, in late autumn, turn into golden opportunuties to boldly go where no declutterer has gone before.
This weekend, I took advantage of such an opportunity to go for another of the chests of drawers in our bedroom, managing to empty it out completely. Its former contents, at least those that did survive the purge, have migrated to the other three chests, and the empty chest is right now standing in the corridor, awaiting the final decision on it´s fate (toss, put into cellar, donate, give away?). Careful re-measuring of the available space in our future bedroom did, by the way, convince me thet there will be space enough for one such chest of drawers, or two stacked one on top of the other, besides the bed when we exchange rooms, so, the problem has just become somewhat smaller than I thought.
And then I went at the testimony to my own laziness.
I own a file cabinet with hanging files that hold the most important documents. Unfortunately, it also has a drawer on top that regularly becomes the repository for bills, bank statements, and such, that get tossed in there rather than filing them away at once. Every now and again, that drawer is full, and I´m forced to start filing. Which I did, sorting out what didn´t need to be kept, which meant a full bag of paper to go to the shredder.
Next stop, the other multi-drawered cabinet I have at my workplace at home, which held plenty of small electronics parts that I sorted through. Among them a graphics tablet I just "had to have" when it came out, and which rested unused in a box that named the systems requirements as "Windows 2000". It´s neither likely I´ll use that thing, nor will it fit in with my existing (somewhat more recent ;)) hard-and software. So, out with it. Out, too, with half the USB cables in there- I have more of them in use with my computers, so, any that could still lie in a drawer are probably superfluous. Also went- several outdated address and phone book CDs, CDs with drivers to some appliances I no longer own, and parts of said appliances. If any cable still is inside a sealed plastic baggie two years after I bought the appliance it is supposed to go with, I probably don´t need that cable. An old cell phone and charger, complete with a headset that doesn´t match my existing phone, went, too.
In the stationery department, I ditched about a hundrerd dried-out felt-tip pens plus the metal box they´d been in.
And found myself wondering how on earth I come by four packages of unused artist´s crayons. As these don´t dry out, I kept them, together with the box of watercolors. I haven´t given up hope yet that I just might have time to use them someday. The single drawer they occupy is something I gladly spend for that hope. Even if the number of times I felt the impulse to create can, as per now, be counted by the times I bought materials, instead of by the number of things I actually painted:(.
Surprising doubles, next take: two six- hole-punches that go with my old filofax calendar- if ever I´ll use that again, one punch is enough, so out goes number two.
The end result of a whole day´s work is a workplace where I can finally find things again, and I have made room for the things that, due to overflowing cabinets, were left on the desk, so, the place is tidier on the outside, too.
Any lessons from this decluttering session?
Number one, if I print out something because it is relevant at the time, I should check it for further relevance before burying it in a drawer. Among the paper stuff I tossed were several centimeter´s worth of printouts made when I was shopping for my freezer online. The freezer has been bought two years ago, and one of the retailers half of whose freezer sortiment I printed out has even gone out of business by now.
Number two, ther seems to be no area where I wouldn´t have to watch out for my tendency to buy something, and then buy the same thing over again. With things that can be used up, that may not be so bad unless I buy more than I can use up before it goes bad. But non-perishables are one area where I have to be careful in the future to check whether I have something already before buying myself another one, before I find myself spending twice and then needing twice the space to store all that stuff.
After all, I still want to do that apartment remodel, and I don´t want to provide storage any more for things that are plain junk.

Julia

Old silhouettes and ancient hurts

2011-11-18T01:16:00.001-08:00

The de-boxing project being in full progress, I attacked another box yesterday. In one of the drawers I found a small packet of photographs of myself, all of them more than twenty years old and therefore pre-dating my weight gain. I had stashed them away in there and almost forgotten about their existence.
Of course, before finding a new home for them, I looked through them.
Now, when I try to remember what I felt about my body back then, what comes to mind is the feeling of shame about it. I was totally convinced that I was looking grotesque and fat, courtesy, mostly, of that relative of mine who kept trying to force me to lose weight in order to conform to what he thought I should look like.
That insecurity is evident in those pictures in the way I stand.
What is also evident when I look at these pictures today is that back then there was no factual base whatsoever for anybody to call me fat. The pictures show a young woman with a narrow waist and curves in all the right places, a slender neck and face, and hips that were narrow enough to wear a size S pencil skirt over them.
The person in these pictures is slim. BMI 23 slim, so, normal-weighted. Right in the middle of normal.
I don´t know what my relative saw when he looked at me. When looking at those pictures I can´t even imagine what he would have wanted to see that would have satisfied his standards.
What I do know is that, in order to make me conform to said standards, he kept making disparaging remarks about my body, all centered around the theme of "you´re fat, ugly, clumsy, stupid and lazy".
He repeated these often enough to sink down into my own subconscious, making me, not conform to his impossible standards, but instead grow into a bad case of body hatred, insecurity, and general low self-esteem. All of which set me up for a lifelong battle against my body, an eating disorder, becoming a victim of a bullying boss at my first workplace, and several mentally abusive relationships. And for getting as fat in real life as he had made me believe I was back then.

I wish I could go back in time to tell that young woman that her tormentor is wrong, that she isn´t fat. I wish I could somehow spare her from the experiences that her abysmally bad self-image will get her into.
But that isn´t possible.
What is possible for me today is working through the hurt.
I can´t undo my life´s experiences, but I can bring that young woman back from the fat suit she has been imprisoned in for so many years, and then continue to live the life I might have had all the time had I but been able to realize what I, what my body, really was like. A life free of shame.

Julia

Sixty and counting...

2011-11-17T04:53:00.001-08:00

Yup, that means exactly what it looks like. As per today, I have successfully condensed myself by sixty pounds.
You may have noticed I avoid using the word "loss" in that context- because I don´t ever intend to find these again. Or allow them to find me.
The knowledge that I will have to be careful what I eat for the rest of my life to prevent that from occurring is mitigated a bit by the fact that I am, this time, not forbidding myself anything, and most of the time, I´m not even feeling hungry.
My secret in a nutshell? 1500 calories and below 30 percent carbs as often as possible. And if I find I´ve gone above one or both- not beat up myself but try better the next day. Because it´s the long run that counts. If I stay on plan most of the time, one piece of cake or a bite of chocolate, or a single pasta dish, may raise my carbs above what I set myself as a limit for that day, but it won´t make all of the fat come back at once. And by judiciously allowing small portions of my favorite goodies, I find I can avoid bingeing on them whenever my willpower falters. The operative word being, of course, small.
And I will have to continue keeping tabs on what I eat, even when in maintenance, as well as weighing myself daily. Those two simple acts were what brought me down from this summer´s plateau.
So, I better keep them up, after all, there are thirty-six more pounds to go before I can call myself "normal"-weighted again.

Julia

Needles, pins and boxes

2011-11-16T03:23:00.001-08:00

They come into your house looking harmless. They multiply when you´re not looking. They play hide-and-seek with you.
I´m not talking about white mice or guinea pigs, even though these fit the description, too.
What I´m talking about is those omnipresent wooden boxes with drawers in them. They come cheap, and they promise to bring order into the chaos of small parts that somehow seems to keep re-erupting in spite of any attempt at taming it.
I, too, have fallen into the trap of believing those boxes would finally bring order back into my possessions. What they did instead was allow me to avoid any decisions about the things I owned and did not use. Thus, I did, after several box purchases, end up with a whole battery of them taking up space in my bedroom. The little drawers on them are filled to the point of almost refusing to close with those diminutive items that I was afraid could get lost if I put them into a bigger container.
The problem is, once a piece has entered them, there it stays. Most of the time, I don´t even remember what is in there.
And the other problem is that these boxes, as well as the chests of drawers they sit on, would not find a place in our new bedroom if we were to do the exchange of rooms we´re planning.
That´s why I have started to eliminate them one by one. Yesterday´s candidate for eviction was fairly small, actually, just six little drawers. What I discovered in there- one drawer shock full of pinboard pins and paper clips. Now the pinboard those went with has left our household several years ago, so all they were good for was pricking the fingers of anyone opening that drawer unawares. As a matter of precaution, I dumped them on a tray first before tossing them, and lo and behold- there were also several padlock keys the locks to which were languishing in the next drawer. So, I reunited locks and keys, and dumped the rest into the trashcan. Next drawer- a bag of guest soaps that went into the bathroom to join our soap stack. Next one- bottles upon bottles of nail lacquer, which I put in the cosmetics drawer where they might even be used. Also in there, filling up two of the little drawers, were about a hundred ballpoint pens and colored pencils, plus, as if in testimony to where the boxes came from, a load of those little pencils that you get for free at a certain Swedish furniture store. After ditching the ones that were definitely broken, I corraled the rest into the pencil cases that were lying unused in another drawer, awaiting the great stationery purge I intend to do once I get all of my writing materials into one place. Result? One less box of drawers and the realization that a lot of what I had in there might have been tossed or used up long ago if I had not had that box to stash and hide it in.
Actually, that is the danger with every storage container. From the outside, it looks tidy no matter what you put in there. Whenever some small piece turns up, it is all too easy not to decide if you need it and dump it into a container instead.
The contents of most such containers are nothing but postponed decisions. And the decision doesn´t even get easier to make if you finally open that box or drawer, sift through the contents and find yourself wondering just what appliance or piece of furniture that oddly-shaped piece of plastic used to belong to.
So, I made two resolutions concerning those containers: I won´t buy new ones again, no matter how pretty or practical-looking. And the next time I am tempted to put something into such a container, I will first check whether the item in question needs to be kept at all, or if the better receptacle for it isn´t the trash can at once.

There are still four of the boxes left, plus all in all twelve big drawers that need sorting through, before I can decide what alternative storage to get to replace those with, if at all. After all, I´ve promised myself to eliminate everything I don´t need any more before I pick out any new furniture to store things in.

To be continued...

Julia

Balancing out Justin

2011-11-15T04:20:00.001-08:00

The similarities between being overweight and being cluttered are something that makes me think real hard about those behaviors that are tacitly encouraged by our consumerist society.
Consuming food in amounts that are not conducive to our health or consuming stuff in amounts that are not conducive to our financial well-being or to order in our households- both are fuelled by the misconception that more of a good thing must be a better thing.
Actually, it isn´t. One bit of folk wisdom from DH´s family came from a male relative who used to say something that in English translates to "too much and too little is just the same thing".
The man was right.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped a goddess called Ma´at. She was the divinity in charge of "the right measure" or, in other words, the goddess of balance.
We seem, as a society, to have lost that balance long ago.
How else to explain the so-called obesity epidemic, or the rising number of people who are suffocating under mountains of debt and clutter and, in order to feel better, proceed to buy even more stuff with borrowed money, thereby effectively making said mountains grow even bigger?
Evolutionarily, perhaps, that kind of behavior even makes sense. In times of general scarcity of resources, the one who managed to secure for himself as many as possible of those resources had a decided advantage when it came to surviving, say, the next famine or the next ice-cold winter. "Having a lot" became synonymous with being secure.
In our times of an abundance the like of which has never been known before in the history of mankind, this connection is something that must, at the very least, be redefined. In first-world countries, at least, there is mostly no danger of things running out or becoming unavailable anytime soon.
Thus, we´re called upon to find out the right measure of things to have or food to eat. The paleolithic forebears to whom we owe our clutter genes as well as the propensity for overeating are, in terms of asking how much of something is good for us, not exactly the best advisors to listen to.
If we ever should need it, it will be available.
How much of the space inside our homes is taken up by the glaring manifestation of the fact that we still refuse to believe that?
And- even worse- how much debt has been incurred in order to fill our stashes of things who have entered our homes, not because we needed them at once, but "just in case" we might need them someday?
This Justin Case person is singlehandedly responsible for quite a significant percentage of clutter and debt.
Any time we invoke his name when buying something, what it really means is "I don´t need this right now". More often than not, it even means "I won´t ever need this". Either way, it means that another piece of clutter is about to enter our life and our habitation.
Simply by not catering to the pretended needs of Justin Case, we could save ourselves quite a lot of money and space.
So how does one tell them from legitimate foresight?
For me, the litmus test is asking myself whether I can reasonably expect to use the item anytime soon. What "soon" means depends on what item you´re looking at. For a winter coat or warm boots, it may mean "within a year". Same thing for an oven pan that holds a whole turkey, or a set of snorkeling equipment. If the item is already in my possession, I usually prolong the period of grace a bit before I toss it. But if I am in the process of acquiring it, I tend to be ruthless and set the time limit for using it no further than it would take me to get to the place where the item is sold again. (as in, we do not have a big electronics store where we live, so, if I go there twice a year and the item is, say, a USB stick that I may need in the future, I set the time limit to six months because I could, if I needed it later than that, buy it on my next visit).With items I could grab on every lunch break, that means strictly no buying in advance, unless it´s consumables and the last pack at home has already been opened and is being used.

Every Jew and Christian probably knows the biblical story of the manna in the desert. God gave the Jews who had just escaped from Egypt with little more than the clothes on their backs food that just had to be picked up from the ground. But there was a hitch to it- they were only allowed to pick up enough to feed them for that day. Anything more than that was spoiled and rotten by the next morning. Generally, this story is interpreted as being about trust. They had to trust their God to repeat the miracle on the next day.
We are, in a way, called upon to make a similar leap of faith by trusting that most things we would bring into our lives "just in case" would still be available to us if ever said case should arise. Doing so frees up time, money and space in our lives that would otherwise likely end up wasted.

Julia

11.11.11.11.11.11

2011-11-11T01:36:00.001-08:00

Here in Europe, we are approaching the number that will be the occasion for some weddings, as well as- in Germany- the official start of the karneval season. You will, today, experience a date that comes only once in a century- 11.11.11, 11.11.11. For just one second, all you´ll see on your digital timekeeping device will be the digit one. And, as digital timekeeping devices are a quite recent invention, our generation will be the first to have that opportunity.
After just one second, the number will have changed again.
There´s a lesson in that. Perfection of any kind is something that you may achieve- or think you´ve achieved- for a fleeting moment, only to have the law of entropy take over and have things revert to their usual less-than-perfect state. In contrast to that clock, you will likely have spent plenty of effort, only to find some of it, at least, going to waste faster than you can say Jack Robinson.
That doesn´t mean you should quit trying to get closer to perfection. Just don´t get frustrated when you can´t achieve it, or, after achieving it, can´t keep it up. Because, you know, the moment of time marked 11.11.11,11.11.12 has as many possibilities in it as the second preceding it, or the one that follows. And even if you´re not perfect, it´s up to you to be your very best in every second of your life.

Julia

Out of Dangerfield

2011-11-10T06:24:00.000-08:00

It´s November, and the weather, after several weeks of unseasonable but welcome sunshine and temperatures in the high tens (centigrade), has finally decided to catch up with the season. So, for some days already, it has been foggy, humid and close to freezing. Which, of course, meant that my winter coat and warmer sweaters had to come out. Luckily, I stocked up on fitting sweaters last year, which I haven´t outshrunk yet (they are a little loose, but tolerably so).
With the colder weather, I´ve also been exchanging my water cup for a cup of hot tea as a fixture on my desk (actually, it´s the same cup, which serves as well keeping water cold as it does keeping tea warm).

As I am approaching the limit below which I won´t be morbidly obese any more, I find that people approach me about my weightloss more often. Mostly, they do it somewhat hesitatingly, as if fearing to insult me, which IMHO is plain nonsense. Of course I look different- I just condensed more than half of my excess weight! And what with the amount lost, it would be strange indeed if the loss didn´t show at all.

One of the more humiliating moments of my career came one day when I came upon my secretary talking to a client on he phone, who seemed unsure of my name. She asked him whether he wanted to talk to Ms. Stambor, reminding him he´d met me on an earlier occasion, and then she burst out laughing hard at what he replied. Only later did she tell me that the man had asked, "was that the short fat one?" Realizing that this was what people remembered me for, not my professional abilities, was a real bummer.
And it was something I never got out of as long as I was fat. People would see me, and they´d immediately form a mental image of someone who was funny, gregarious, anything but the professional image I wanted for myself.
Since I have lost weight, I find a subtle but still perceptible difference in the way new clients approach me. What it boils down to is being treated more respectfully from the start. Not that I didn´t earn respect before, too, but there´s more of it to start with now. It may not be right, but it´s the way things are. Humpty Dumpty just doesn´t cut it as an authority figure, even in a business suit. Of course, one could cry fat-ism and discrimination here, but to me, that meant having to be twice as tough and twice as competent in order to be professionally accepted.
My job is difficult enough as it is without dealing with any Rodney Dangerfield moments on top. So, yes, I am glad that these are becoming a thing of the past, along with those extra pounds that are condensing themselves off my body.

Julia

´tis the season...

2011-11-09T04:55:00.000-08:00

For several weeks already, the shops and bakeries around here have been showcasing christmas candy. Cookies, lebkuchen and stollen, marzipan, cinnamon-flavored chocolates, the works. And today, there are workers underneath my office window mounting the christmas illumination on the streetlights. There´s no way to miss it- christmas is approaching fast, and with it, all those too-rich delicacies that go along with it.
As if that weren´t enough, letterboxes are regularly stuffed with catalogues featuring merchandise that no one- really no one- needs, but when it comes to christmas presents, it is bought, often by people who could use the money for other things they would need.
For many families, the pressure of the expectations that come with the holidays means the extra sress of having to procure all of those presents the kids clamor for off an already too-narrow budget, as in "it´s not christmas if there are no presents". The result, often, is additional debt that will continue to hound the family budget for months.
A merry time, in my book, works differently. Even if I remove the religious context, the holidays are meant to be a time for families to spend together, a time for reloading your batteries, so to speak. And that is not a function of the height of the stack of parcels under some unlucky coniferous tree that had, for the occasion, been dragged from its natural habitat to death and somebody´s living room.
And then, there´s decorations. No other holiday in the course of the year breeds them like christmas. Santas, reindeers, angels, garlands, candles, and tree ornaments, which then go on to clutter storage spaces for the rest of the year.
Now, if there are small children in the house, it may be understandable if parents want to turn their houses into a wonderland of glitter and lights for the season.
But for those of us who do not have children, and those of us who do not have an attic or dry basement to store all of these ornaments after use, there must be a way to celebrate the holidays that is compatible with minimalism.
I have been working on that for several years already, and by now, we have a set tradition of what we do put up before and during the holidays that is sustainable and keeps clutter at a minimum.
First of all, I discarded all and sundry ornaments that were simulating the branches of trees, as in garlands and wreaths. I have a four-candle circular candle holder made from brass (thus, unbreakable) with candle rings that look like small poinsettias that has been serving as an advent wreath for years. The only thing I have to do when setting it up is replace the candles every year. Then, there are, in total, about fifteen christmas-y figurines of different makes and materials which I spread out on surfaces all across the flat for a little festive touch, and which reside, out of season, in the china cabinets behind the plates, plus several brass vases and candlesticks (I used to collect these, might as well get some use out of them) and, for the dining table, one christmas-themed tablecloth. For the holidays proper, I have a big white christmas-tree-shaped candle that was a present from a dear aunt years ago, which of course has never been lit, but makes for a pretty decoration, plus a glass dish with several spherical glass ornaments originally intended for trees,and matching mirrored glass candle holders, to adorn the coffee table.
And that´s all. Of course, our best china and stemware will be used for the christmas dinner, and we will have incense cones and glühwein, nuts, and oranges, maybe even one or two natural fir branches to perfume the air, so, the place will be festive alright, but I, for one, don´t need to drag a whole tree inside for that.
All of the things I mentioned have been used and enjoyed for years. They can be put up in a jiffy, and taking them down and putting them away is done in mere minutes. And the best thing about them is that they do not clutter up our flat, and, having been paid for years ago, are perfectly sustainable.
And after putting them up, there´s plenty of time for us to enjoy our clutter-free christmas-decorated home.

Julia

Double trouble

2011-11-07T05:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes going through one´s stuff yields some unexpected results. I went for the handbag department this weekend, as planned, and discovered not one, but three identical- or almost identical- pairings of handbags I had not been aware of owning. For one, I used, before the days of my fabulous multi-pocket vests, to carry a small zippered bag with a long, thin strap across my body, hidden underneath my jacket, to keep my wallet and keys from getting pickpocketed. I used to have these in black and bright red, and I always thought I had one of each. This weekend´s roundup unearthed two of these bags in each color, one of them visibly worn and the other still looking brand new. I can´t even remember buying the second set! So, it was a no-brainer to toss the worn specimens. The third "twin set" consisted of two black shoulder bags, one of them slightly smaller, but these I kept both because they are both used regularly. What else went- a pink backpack that had become dingy over the years, apart from looking a bit too juvenile for someone well beyond her twenties, -a white handbag that I had originally intended to carry for my wedding, but when I put my stuff in in the morning, the magnetic closure came off, so, it didn´t close any more, and I used another bag for the occasion. I don´t know why I didn´t toss it at once because it was quite obvious the thing couldn´t be repaired, and by now, the white leather had turned rather yellowish (note to self: After being happily wed for four years, there´s absolutely no reason for me to ever buy another white bag), -a white tote bag that had been a hand-me-down from MIL, intended for putting my swimming stuff in, except I never go swimming and even with that much weight off, I don´t think I´ll ever be comfortable enough in a bathing suit to wear it in public, -plus diverse old wallets and purses that had long ago been put out of service and of which I don´t know either why I did not toss them at once. Also went two of the bags from my aunt that I had accepted because I liked the color, but which both are highly impractical to use and thus had been lying around unused, and an old leather backpack I never used any more because it has just a magnetic closure, so it´s neither pickpocket- nor rainproof.
All in all, the purge produced one big trash bag full of bags to take to donation, and one big empty drawer which now houses my winter hats. As these used to lie out on top of the wardrobe all winter long, this, too, means less visual clutter in our entrance area.
The lesson to be learned from what I found in my handbag collection is that it would have been a lot less cluttered had I, upon buying a replacement for some bag or purse, immediately proceeded to throw out the old one instead of keeping it for just in case. The other lesson is that it is not very likely I´d have to spend any money on handbags in the next years, being equipped with enough bags of different sizes and makes to carry me through any conceivable situation. There is an advantage to preferring relatively simple, classic styles and real leather there, because the bags I own now won´t go out of style anytime soon. Lesson number three-just because an item comes in two different colors, I don´t have to buy both, because I usually end up using just one of them anyway. And anything in a fashionable color, be it shoes or bags, will wear out a lot faster than good old black, navy, brown or burgundy. So, if I want a sustainable wardrobe, I´ll have to keep away from trying to jazz up my look with colorful leather goods. For that, I can use blouses, or scarves, or the occasional brooch.
Being busy with sorting out leather goods also took me to my belt collection, and there I found the only survivor of the belts I owned before becoming obese. It´s made from sturdy leather, and I had, for a long time, not even been able to bring the ends together around my waist. And now- I could even close it, albeit on the widest setting. That belt still has the extra holes I punched in it because it used to be too wide, so, it will be marking my progress back to having the waist I used to have.
All in all, the results of the weekend have been quite satisfactory.
It´s actually quite educational to see which items I got rid of, because these are things I must not buy again.
After all, I´m getting older, too, and I have found out that most of the flashy styles of my younger years simply don´t look as pulled-together as I like to look now. And things I would not use any more, I don´t have to keep either.After all, maybe there´s someone out there whose lifestyle they fit better than mine.

Julia

Old pictures and new dimensions

2011-11-04T04:20:00.000-07:00

Going through old pictures sometimes brings some realizations that I didn´t have when first looking at them. Namely, how much I was in denial about what my body looked like, even though these pictures also tell the story of clothes I grew out of, jewellery that didn´t fit around my fingers and wrists any more, belts that refused to close around my belly and went into disuse, and chairs I didn´t use any more because I was afraid of crashing through them, or having the chair wedged to my thighs when trying to get up again.
By now, at about half my excess weight gone, my facial structure has begun to reemerge from the blubber it was hidden under for years, and so has my waist. Just being able to put my hands on my hips again, instead of sinking into a roll of fat, is an achievement. Having most of the too-tight rings fit me again, too.
I have, these last weeks, been losing rather steadily at a rate of about a pound a week, and it seems that I am by now in the zone where that leads to results I can notice, in contrast to the start of my weight loss journey when losing a pound hardly made a difference in how I looked and felt.
Besides, I think my body is once more rearranging itself, meaning that my pants size ( and the size of my posterior) has been rather stable while my torso and my legs seem to be the places I am losing right now. Not that I am overly sad about that, as the stable pants size means I didn´t have to replace the size 22 pants yet, and the slimmer thighs mean that they take a lot longer to wear through.
At my top weight, I had to replace my pants about once every three months because the material between my legs was getting holey and worn-through. The pants I have now I´ve had for about nine months, and they show hardly a trace of wear at all.
Being back at a weight I haven´t had for over ten years still takes some getting used to. I still hesitate in front of every tight spot (as in restaurant booths or doorways) that I wouldn´t have been able to navigate, and putting laundry on the clothes line I marvel at the fact that those diminutive-looking panties are in fact mine.Seeing the size M in my smallest fitting sweater is nothing short of a miracle. And I still glance at my reflection in every full-legth mirror I pass, every time almost expecting to see The Blob again.
Knowing that the third-degree morbidly obese version of me is a thing of the past feels great.
But I know that I will have to be careful of my food intake for the rest of my life if I never again want to go back to that place.
And I´m glad that this time, I have obviously found out what I had to change about what I eat in order to go to a healthier weight.
Describing the difference between what my body feels like now and what it used to feel like would probably sound like unabashed boasting. For me, it´s the difference between being handicapped and stuck inside a straitjacket of fat that kept me from more and more activities, and being free.
And if I managed to get out of that straitjacket, so can everyone out there who has been handicapped by their fat bodies. Just never ever ever give up trying. If what you do doesn´t work, try something else. But keep trying. Perhaps you, too, will find something that works for you, the same way I did. It has been taking me twelve years to find it, but in the end, I have, by exclusion of the things that didn´t work, found a way out of my fat prison.
Being morbidly obese doesn´t have to be a life sentence. Nor do the limitations it places on what you can do.
Even if I know (to stay with he legal imagery) that I will for the rest of my life be on parole and have to stick to being good, else I get back into that prison I never want to see the inside of again.

Julia

Julia

Taking time

2011-11-03T06:26:00.000-07:00

It´s been two years now that I went from dragging home stuff to trying to get rid of stuff I had dragged home.
Some twenty to thirty (I didn´t count them) bags of trash and recycling have left the flat for good, plus a similar amount of too-big clothes. Of the several boxes of books, nothing to say.
The kitchen, by now, is pretty much decluttered. In the other rooms, at first sight I still haven´t made enough of a dent in the amount of stuff to be stored to really create some empty space. What I have reduced is the number of homeless items, meaning that almost everything has, by now, a place to put it away.
But- I haven´t yet been able to reduce the amount of storage needed. What I had hoped for was being able to declutter some of our shelving, too, but that hasn´t happened yet. We still have three armchairs, a big sofa plus three cocktail chairs in a living room used only by DH and me. There´s still an IKEA shelf on every wall except the one with the windows in it, using up every inch of free space there is. Even after sorting out things, I still have those four chests of drawers in my bedroom, with those wooden IKEA drawer boxes on top, and every one of them is filled with small items.
When I see pictures in catalogues of rooms with minimalist furnishings, I become envious. Imagining a whole wall with nothing but a picture and a couch in front of it. Or a living room where you don´t have to zigzag between chairs and armchairs to clean.
Things in my living room are more difficult to keep up with because what I have is mostly open shelving, with only a few closed cabinets in between. Open shelves mean horizontal space, and that, in turn, means things being placed there, in front of the books. I have removed the greater part of my own tchotchkes long ago, but DH has immediately occupied the liberated space with an army of picture frames. As these are family pictures, and DH is a real family man, there would not be any reasoning with him over them. Even limiting the number probably wouldn´t work. If we had been able to exchange the rooms as planned, I could, at least, banish the picture frames to his office. But in order to do that, some of the shelving in the living room would have to go. So, that´s the place where the cat catches his own tail. If I could but remove some of those shelves, we could rearrange our flat.
The meaning of that is all too clear. I have to declutter even more things, in the hope of finally emptying at least one or two of these shelves. And that will take some more time, as I can start bigger decluttering projects only when DH is away, or over the weekend. Besides, I have decluttered most of the no-brainers long ago, so the speed at which I can declutter even more is necessarily slowing down.
With winter approaching, perhaps I can do this in small increments. Just 15 minutes every evening, for example. Maybe there´ll be a visible result by spring.
Until then, I must remind myself that I took several decades to accumulate all this stuff. I can´t realistically expect to get rid of it at once.

Julia

Bag lady

2011-11-02T08:36:00.000-07:00

If there´s one thing that has always been my downfall, it´s handbags. I´ve spent oodles of time and money in my quest for the perfect bag.
As my needs when it came to bags have, over the course of the years, changed considerably, each new item that came up to carry along meant going on the prowl for a bag that would accomodate that particular item, for example, when I got my first (half-brick sized) cell phone I absolutely had to have a handbag with a pocket for the cell phone.
Add to that the fact that I was brought up quite traditionally, which meant that bags and shoes had absolutely to be of the same color, and you can see easily why my bag collection is by now filling a big six-drawer IKEA chest of drawers plus two compartments of my wardrobe. Inheriting several expensive specimens from a dear aunt just added to the clutter.
The kicker is that I rarely use handbags at all these days. I have a black leather design backpack that houses my netbook paraphernalia, my digicam plus a portable HD that holds my pictures, and also some writing material should I need it. My wallet, keys and cell phone I keep in the interior pockets of my vest.
As I have quit using makeup at all, there´s no lipstick or eyeshadow,and with my super-short buzz cut I don´t need to take along a hairbrush, either.
The only time I need to use a handbag at all is for those rare occasions when wearing a men´s vest would not be appropriate.
So why do I still hang on to all these bags? Part of it is certainly sentimentality. After all, each of them had its time when it would accompany me everywhere I went. Auntie´s bags, too, come in that department, even though it will be a long time before I ever use a faux-croco patterned Kelly bag.
Over time, I have built several criteria that a new handbag would have to fulfill.
It has to be big enough to hold my netbook. I prefer bags that have a compartment that zips close (less risk of being pickpocketed or losing things) and a shoulder strap to keep my hands free. Having zippered side pockets for all those little things to carry is a must.
If I apply these criteria, the number of bags that fit the description is actually a lot smaller than the number total of bags I own.
Another group of eviction candidates consists of bags that were bought to match a pair of shoes in a special color. The shoes have been discarded ages ago, the bag they went with stayed. As the color matches nothing else I have in my shoe closet, the bag in question languishes in the back of my closet indefinitely.
Or the big two-compartment bags I thought I absolutely had to have when I was on a diet plan that required me to take several containers of salad and yoghourt to work every day.
And last not least the bags that have become too -er- youthful for me to actually use. And those where the shoulder strap turned out to keep slipping off my shoulder, annoying me no end and earning them a place in handbag limbo in the back of my closet, too.
And don´t get me started about the suitcase full of travelling bags under my bed. As reaching it requires a partial dismantling of the bed, they haven´t been out of there for ages.

But one of these days, they will have to come out. As will all of the others. I´ll see how many of these I really still would use. The rest will go on to bless someone else. And the space they occupy will go to a better use.

Julia

Incredibly shrinking

2011-11-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it´s not horizontal but vertical shrinkage I discovered this weekend.
On a whim, I made DH help me measure exactly how tall I am. The result was not what I had expected, as the exact measurement was several centimeters less than what I had measured the last time, which means that gravity and all of that condensable matter must have compressed my spine a bit more than I thought.
Back to the calculating board- at my present size I need to take off about five more kilograms than I thought to get below morbid obesity (BMI 30), and my highest ever weight translates to a BMI of 41. So, the happy day when I will be able to say that I am just overweight, not obese, has just slipped several weeks into the future. But at the rate I´ve been losing, it´s still attainable within 2011.That is also my revised goal for this year. I want to start 2012 no longer obese.
The line for getting back to normal weight has also gone down by almost ten pounds.
Finding out that I was -and am- even fatter than I thought has been a bit of a downer.
But there have been some positive things, too.
First, the kitchen decluttering project.
There´s been some major reshuffling done in my cupboards, and the happy result was that two sets of 40 cm-diameter charger plates that used to live on top of my microwave for want of a better place now have found a home in the cabinet that used to house the redundant microwave dishes.
And we have spent a wonderful weekend. Monday was a bank holiday where I live, and we took advantage of it by visiting an exhibition of historical statues and stonecuttery in a city about an hour´s drive away. The exhibition was wonderful, with originals and casts of medieval works of art that we ordinarily would have to travel through most of Europe to see, all gathered in one place. As wonderful was being able to walk through that exhibition for about eight hours in total, wearing ordinary shoes, not using crutches, and not have my feet hurt in the end. It would have been impossible for me to do, last year and all those years before.
Can you see how I am still elated about this?
Experiences like that drive home just how much joy of living my excess weight has been taking away from me for a long while, and they are a good reminder of how far I have come these last two years.
In case I forgot.

Julia

Domino effect

2011-10-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

So I went and pulled those glass dishes out on Monday. Tuesday, when I had to go into the cellar (that´s also where the trashcans are), I took the plastic box I´d put them in along and dumped the whole contents into the trash. They hadn´t hit bottom before I caught myself wanting to dig in and retrieve them. So pretty, and I had them for so long, and besides, they were a gift from Granny. Well, actually, they were just bought off some money she had given me, and she´d never even seen them. So, I stuck to my guns and left them where they´d fallen.
Yesterday, I ditched the bowls to that set I still had in my kitchen, and then dug out the other glass cups and plates I have, which had been languishing hidden behind the pots in the kitchen, and, after washing them up, put them into the cupboard formerly occupied by the white ones, where they are relatively more accessible and have a chance of being used. The space that used to hold them will be the new home of my pasta machine that used to clog up a whole compartment of my hallway cupboard, and the space that held the bowls is the new storage for spare dinnerware (we have two of each in use, but did get some extras for MIL´s visits, so there are actually three sets of our most-used ones, but they don´t forcibly all have to sit in the main dishware cabinet, do they?)
Going through all that stuff went a long way towards showing how far our culinary habits have changed during the last years. Witness the layer of dust on those 36cm-diameter-pans that I was once so keen on getting because I thought you had to have them if you wanted to be a good cook. It´s, with me, something like a father-daughter-thing. My father is, himself, having a passion for good food, likes to cook and spends a fortune on cookbooks and kitchen gadgets. He´s also always been super critical of me and my lifestyle. For a long time I tried to put together a set of kitchen equipment he´d approve of, even though he has been inside my flat only once and will not enter it again (long story there, let´s just say we´re both quite stubborn).
Having good kitchen equipment, as in, pots, pans, knives, and such, is in my opinion really essential for good cooking, So, getting me pots and pans of good quality wasn´t all a waste of money.
Getting multiples of each, on the other hand, was. I simply do not do meals that have several courses where I´d need to have, say, three big pans at once.
And I´ve by now discovered that the smaller portions we eat can easily be prepared in the smaller pots I have, so, the big ones that hold a gallon or more of liquid are, for all practical purposes, not used any more.
Another category of rarely-used items are the multiple microwave glass dishes I once thought I absolutely had to have. Nowadays, I rarely ever use the microwave any more, and if I do, I find myself using the same two dishes all the time (again, the best ones). Thus, the other ones are also candidates for eviction. Even if I want to keep them in case one of the others should break (it does happen sometimes), I can take them to the cellar, after all, glass doesn´t rust or get musty. And that would free another compartment of prime kitchen cupboard.
This is getting interesting, really. Perhaps, when I´m through decluttering and reshuffling, I´ll finally know just how much cupboard space I really need. And be able to put what I have in there without building stacks of things that require careful disassembling every time I want to use a part of them.

Julia

Liberating cupboards

2011-10-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was pure pandemonium at work, so, when I came home by eight p.m. I found myself pretty wired and hungry enough to eat up half a cow on top of it.
As DH was out of town overnight, it was up to me what I´d do with the rest of the evening. Culinary and otherwise. So, I just opened myself a can of smoked mackerel with lots of pepper, and then I took advantage of the fact that DH was, for once, not occupying the couch in front of the TV to push said couch aside and attack the cupboards that are usually hidden behind it.
Due to their extreme inaccessibility, these are, by default, the storage place for things that are not used frequently.
So, I found my old ivory-colored opaque glassware dishes for eight people, which I bought about 25 years ago while still a student because I believed I would someday be popular and give a lot of parties.
They have been in there since I set up those cupboards, unused because I have, long ago, bought myself some pretty china that we use every day. They were taking up a whole compartment of premium storage space, so I have decided to remove them. As I am not much into having visitors, the number of occasions I´d use them is zero.
What makes me hesitate to ditch them altogether is once more sentimentality, as they were a present from my Grandma. But there´s another set of transparent glassware in an acorn leaf pattern that has even more memories attached, because they were the first dishes of my own I had, also as a present from Grandma, and which is right now stacked in the depths of a cupboard in my kitchen. Actually, these are still rather pretty, and the other, white set is a pattern that is heavily used in bistros and cafes hereabouts, because a snow-white version is always available for very little money. The ones I have, as I said, are ivory-colored and look decidedly yellowed and dingy when seen next to the snow-white ones.Besides, I found that they seem to attract some kind of greasy film when not in use that makes it feel icky to touch them.
And the latest additions to that white glassware are the 32 cm-plates that were part of the reason why I overate and gained weight. These, in any case, have a date with the trashcan. I just didn´t want to throw them in last night. The same fate awaits two giant pasta dishes. Which reminds me that I have several big serving bowls that go with them, too, somewhere in the kitchen. That I have to locate them first shows how little use I got from them. Again, I have several stainless steel bowls that I use for the purposes I´d use the bowls for, so, this is another case of clutter coming about because I did not toss the old ones when I got the others. I guess the trashcan will be quite full this week, after I put all that stuff in there.
Emotionally, I´m a bit on the fence about tossing them, because they come from a time in my life when I imagined my future a lot differently than what my reality is now. But in my present reality, I have no use for them. And that´s what should matter, not the old fantasies of being a master hostess, giving parties and making giant bowls of salad for my guests.
Besides, if ever an occasion should arise when I would need these dishes and bowls, I can always replace them for very little money. Until then, I have the use of at least one of my cupboards back. And perhaps I´ll be able to liberate another one in the kitchen by discarding those extra bowls. Not that there wouldn´t be anything to put in there yet. But the number of stacks of things that barely fit into the cupboards will be decreased, and if the things I keep are better accessible, I might get more use out of them.
Just why is it so difficult to say farewell to things that have been given as presents? I have a tea mug with a matching lid and saucer, and a porcelain sieve for loose tea, that I have never used. It was a birthday present from a friend at school, I don´t even remember which, and I have dragged it along since I-don´t-know-when because I feel absurdly guilty about tossing it. I mean, I did at the time not care who gave it, and now I am feeling bound to keep it? The same goes for a single ice cream dish and a clay pot for making baked apples in the oven. Perhaps I should make it a point to use these. If they work well, they can stay, if they don´t, they go.
For those moments when I need reminding of the time I was given them, or of the fact that I ever had them, there´s my digicam. I´ll take pictures of them before tossing them. Digitally, that costs nothing and takes up no extra space.
And with every such decluttering session, I get closer to goal: having only things I need or like.

Julia

The wide wide vest

2011-10-24T04:48:00.000-07:00

I must be doing something right. My weight has been steadily going down for two months in a row, and this time, there being less condensable matter left on me, the results show even more than when I was losing weight at the same rate last year but still closer to my starting weight. I guess it has something to do with percentages- if I lose five kilos off 100 kilos, that´s five percent of my weight, if I lose those same five kilos off 90 kilos, that´s five point five percent, and so on. Right now, in total, I have lost about 22 percent off my highest ever weight, which means almost a quarter of old me gone, or, the other way around, I was weighing in at about 130 percent of what I weigh now.
That´s the good news.
The bad news is that yet another of my favourite leather vests had, by now, become so wide that I decided I couldn´t wear it any more. I mean, if you try to button a vest that closes in front and it overlaps so much when you pull it close to your body that they could sew on buttons under your arms and it would still close on those, that is too big. So, another farewell, apart that this vest, like its predecessors, will go to DH on whom it fits just fine after his latest weight loss.
As the vest I got myself this spring is cut somewhat tighter, it doesn´t mean I´m growing (or shrinking?) vestless yet. And, since the present weight loss seems to go along with a disproportionately big shrinkage of my body, I´d be silly to go shopping for new clothes yet while the old ones still are fitting relatively well. Besides, what with wearing warm sweaters under my vest in winter, the extra width will be coming in usefully.
And next spring, I just might be able to fit into the next or next-to-next size down. So, I´ll bear with the wide vest for now. And look forward to shrinking into yet another size I haven´t had in years.

Julia

Missus with a big M

2011-10-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

This week´s been incredibly busy, as I have to carry the workload of a colleague who´s away on holiday on top of my own. That everyone seems to pick exactly this week to go bat shit about things that need doing at once is just the usual snafu.
But I did have an NSV this morning. On sale last year, I had bought a turtleneck sweater that proved to be too small when I tried it on at home- my head went through the collar alright, but the rest was impossible to pull down, so, I put that sweater into the infamous clothes box with the others. Today, I went through the pullover shelf in my wardrobe, looking for something else, actually, and chanced on that turtleneck.
It´s a nice shade of blue. It is also a size M. I haven´t been a size M since about the last millenium.
I held up that sweater, looking at how small it looked.
Still, such a nice blue.
Might it...?
I doffed the sweater I was wearing and....put it on. With no difficulty at all. It is no longer too small.
And I- am, today, one very happy Missus with a capital "M" inside the collar of my sweater and a big grin on my face.

Julia

The wurst has gone...

2011-10-18T05:12:00.000-07:00

...no, not a typo!
When I was at my top weight, I was feeling rather miserable in my skin and desperately trying to find clothes that would make me look less fat and jiggly than I was.
Enter shapewear. Those stretchy, elastic-loaden underthings that are supposed to take at least ten kilos off your looks. I became an avid fan, buying a whole drawer full of those. What they did do, in reality, was make me look as if I´d been built from a bunch of sausages. Besides, at least the bottoms were supposed to reach halfway down my thighs, which they did, but they just cut into the flesh there, causing a roll of flesh to accumulate right underneath so visibly it even shows on pictures from that time. So, no wearing pants with these. I turned to long skirts, which didn´t show that inverted muffin top but had the additional danger of being so loose that I could gain another couple of kilos. Besides, they were plain frumpy.
When I started losing, I stopped wearing those "slimming" panties, putting them into the farthest corner of my wardrobe.
This weekend, out of curiosity, I tried on a pair.
I was flabbergasted to see that the same panties that used to literally cut off the flesh on my thighs were, by now, so loose that their leg part was wider than the legs I have today to fill it with. Instead of sausage-skin tight, they were about half a hand´s width too big!
So, it really seems that the "wurst" part of the excess on my legs has gone.
What this meant, of course, was a panty raid. I went through all of my underthings, eliminating everything that has gotten too big for me. In the end, I had one plastic sack full of worn-out things that went to the trash, and the joy of having an undie drawer that finally closes again, with only things that fit me now.
Holding, while sorting them out, the old to the new was a real eye-opener, in more than one way. If I think of pictures from the time I kept wearing that stuff, one thing is very clear: they didn´t fulfill their promise to make me look slim. A stuffed sausage doesn´t look slim. And the illusion I had of looking better probably kept me in denial about my weight even longer.
Today, I´m glad I managed to turn back my weight in time. And I´m glad to be rid of my sausage casings.

Julia

Sending those rolls on a roll

2011-10-17T04:01:00.000-07:00

Autumn is here, with an abundance of golden leaves and, unfortunately, the first chilly nights with temperatures just above freezing.
So, this weekend marked the end of the balcony season. I put the spice plants into smaller containers and removed them inside, where they are now decorating the windowsills. Either they make it through winter, then I can put them back outside next year, or if they don´t, they will at least have prettied up our flat for another while instead of wilting outside. The oleander bushes are on the landing inside in front of our flat, where there´s at least some light from the staircase, and the rest (buxus and cherry laurels) is supposed to be winter-hardy and stays outside.
Talking of plants, did you know magnolia trees bear fruit? I didn´t, so, when I noticed something reddish-pink between the leaves of the big magnolia tree in our park, I thought it might be blooming for the second time this year. Only on closer inspection did the supposed blossoms reveal themselves as fruits. They are actually quite funny-looking, a bit like aliens in pink, and they contain bright red seeds which burst out when ripe. From what Wikipedia tells on the subject, it´s extremely rare for Magnolias in our climate to bear fruit, so this had not happened in the last few years. I did, of course, pick up some of the seeds that lay on the grass and am trying to get them to grow into my own little magnolia tree. Maybe there´ll be another green houseguest on my balcony next year.
The cold mornings did require another activity this weekend, namely, taking out my warm clothes for winter. In the process, I happened on the last pair of my all-time-big pants. Holding them up and imagining in three dimensions the posterior that shaped the stretched-out seat on them is a great way of visualizing just how far I have come.
Those pants, thus, remain in storage, if only as a deterrent to gaining again. Five other pants that I had kept last spring in a bigger-than-now size are awaiting to be shipped to Goodwill in a big blue bag, along with one very scratchy sweater that gave me a rash on my neck every time I wore it, but which was still kept "just in case".
The other sweaters did, for the first time in a long while, fit into the shelves in my closet. I may still have to go through them and sort out the ones that are too big, but for now, I´m satisfied to have just one zippered storage box left on top of my closet, and that one holds not clothes but blankets.
Apart from that, I´ve taken advantage of the cold weather to defrost my freezer. While it was warm, I had no way of storing the contents, but yesterday it stayed cold enough that the goods , when wrapped into an insulated bag and put outside, kept cold enough to prevent thawing. The amount of ice that came off the freezer was quite impressive, so I´ll definitely have to do this more often.
The added advantage of being able to take an inventory of what we have in there isn´t something to sneeze on, either. Perhaps I´ll make a list to hang on the outside, laminated, to cross off what I use up. That way I´ll save myself any double purchases (like the two opened bags of leeks that I discovered) and make sure nothing gets spoiled.

Oh, and today- I am officially a full 25 kilos down from my heighest ever weight. The trying on of those too-big pants revealed that a lot of the fat rolls I still had last winter have gone. Never to return, I hope.
And on the ones that are still there, I keep working.

Julia

How much is enough?

2011-10-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

For some weeks now, I have been faithfully journalling every bite of food that crossed my lips. I´m trying to stay below 1500 calories and 30 percent carbs a day, as I still have plenty of condensable weight to work on. Now, the journalling software I use not only allows me to write down what I ate, it also gives me an immediate running total of how much I have already eaten on that day.
And it shows me immediately which are the culprits should I go over my limits. Which considerably dampens the appeal of my old favorite, peanuts, and helps me to stick to small portions of anything carby.
You know what the kicker is? After sticking to that plan for awhile, I find myself less hungry than before. I did, actually, have to have another protein shake in the evening several times because I was too far under my calories (don´t want to go into starvation mode).
As I am the one who cooks, I have been preparing the same meals for both of us, except DH got slightly bigger portions. Guess what, he, too, has been condensing himself by a two-digit number, and he claims that he has not at all felt hungry. Besides, he keeps pointing out how good it feels not to be stuffed after dinner.
Did I mention he´s my greatest supporter?
What really starts me thinking with all this is the amount of food we have to buy these days. Or rather, the amount we don´t have to buy.
Grocery shopping for a week used to mean having at least four to five big reusable bags filled with foodstuffs to carry upstairs afterwards. Sometimes there was so much stuff that it became difficult to put all of it plus the two of us into the car.
Sadly, most of that stuff was also eaten.
Nowadays, I usually take one insulated bag for refrigerated goods, plus one normal for the things that don´t need cooling. Even when having to stock up because some things have run out, there´s rarely more to carry than these bags would hold.
And what is in there- is enough! Enough to take us through another week, or sometimes two, without feeling deprived at all.
What the other bags used to hold, then, were the things that were too much. The things which we ate, and felt stuffed afterwards. The things whose calories are now residing in those rolls of extra flesh that I am trying to recondense.
Even if I do try to make a projection of how much more food I´d need to eat in order to just maintain my present weight, the resulting difference wouldn´t fill another of those grocery bags by a long way.

While my weight gain was happening, I never even realized just how much I ate, even though I was almost constantly chewing on one thing or another. Coming home meant making a beeline for the kitchen and the refrigerator, for a big bowl of pudding or big chunks of cheese and sausage "to stave off the worst hunger". I had no idea that what I thought was just a tiny snack had in reality the calories of a full meal. Actually, I didn´t want to know. The calorie listings were there, after all. Right on the packages. I avoided looking at them in those days. And I avoided measuring my portions. A portion was the amount in a package.
Of course, seeing the sky-high grocery bills we had, I blamed them on rising prices and went on to tell myself it was thrifty to buy the bigger packages. And then I downed a big package of pudding in one sitting instead of a smaller one, and since two pounds of pure vanilla cream pudding were likely to make even me feel queasy, I topped the soft stuff with chocolate drops, granola and chopped almonds for a bit of crunch, adding even more calories.
What I had lost was the feeling of "enough". That queasy feeling was really my body trying to tell me it had enough, my stomach trying to tell me it was full.
But I had long ago stopped listening to them. I just ate and ate. And gained and gained.
For a long time I avoided weighing myself. I knew, of course, that I was getting fatter. I knew I couldn´t walk without a crutch, I knew I could no longer reach my own feet to put on stockings.I knew that I had had to replace my clothes in a bigger size more that once. But I didn´t want to know how many kilos that meant.
When I finally revved myself up to face the music, I was devastated.
The worst part of it was not believing that I had eaten too much. I blamed the gain on quitting smoking, on an accident I had around that time that kept me from walking for several months, on medication I was on during that time. I blamed it on anything except eating too much, to the point of kicking loose a family quarrel with a relative who flat out told me I couldn´t have gained that much from the other reasons alone.
I know today that the medication was probably inhibiting my self-control when it came to food, and that quitting smoking can lower one´s metabolism. But that doesn´t mean that I had to grow all that fat in such a short time. It took another ingredient for that, namely, the amounts of food I kept ingesting.
As long as I was in denial about that crucial fact, I was absolutely helpless when it came to getting rid of that weight again. I was feeling like someone trapped on the back of an elephant that is running amok. My body kept getting fatter, I was ever more handicapped by my weight, and I was, after some time, simply scared that this weight gaining thing would never stop, that I would end up as one of those people who couldn´t leave their house any more, or who couldn´t leave their beds because their legs couldn´t support them any more.
I told the story before of how my husband kept me from that fate.
Still, it was a long way before I started to think about how much food my body really needs. And then, only then, did the pounds start to come off.

And today? I still have to weigh and measure my food, then journal it, to convince my interior glutton that these are really sufficient portions. There´s still that slight twinge of disbelief that that amount of food would be enough whenever I look at the portions I serve myself.
And after eating, the comfortable feeling of satiety. Not stuffed, not queasy, just comfortably filled.

The feeling of having had enough.

Julia

Quarterly resumee

2011-09-30T03:16:00.000-07:00

With the end of September in sight, I am, once more, looking over what these last months brought me. This time, I am rather pleased with the way things have been going. My weight has dropped by several kilos, and I am, once again, on a losing streak of the desirable kind, so there´s hope for the next quarter of the year to bring even more success in the weight loss department.
In the exercise department, sadly, I have almost completely slacked off. Too much going on around here. Maybe I´ll be able to get myself back on track there in October, after all, there are still some three months to go before I reasonably can expect it to snow. And ninety days times 300 calories burned might mean just those four kilos that would get me below morbid obesity.
Knowing that that point is within reachable distance by now actually feels strange. For so long, my interior representation of myself was something like "hello, I´m Julia, and I am hopelessly morbidly obese.".
One of the most urgent tasks for me, right now, is finding out what to think about myself when I am no longer obese.
Another is finding out all those things about myself that I never even got around to thinking about because my weight was, literally and mentally, getting in the way.Considering how long I´ve been obese, there are bound to be plenty.
And I have to go through them lest I regain every pound I´ve lost.

Julia

Roadside photo booth

2011-09-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, stupidity is the criminal´s worst enemy.
Several weeks ago, the license plates of my car were stolen. I had not really had a lot of hope they´d find the perpetrator.
But now, I (and the police) at least know what the perp looks like- he´d put my plates on another car, and was photographed speeding by an automated radar trap, one week after I´d discovered the theft.
Of course, I was sent the ticket, complete with picture, and on top of the time I wasted getting new license plates, I had to inform the local traffic authority that this was neither me nor my car on the photo, add copies of all the paperwork that has already accumulated, and inform the local police.
Still, I did have a good laugh at that guy´s expense. The only drop of sadness is that he had to pick an automated station to get himself caught speeding. Well, I hope he´ll run into a police control soon- I have some bills I would like to present to him :(.

Julia

Shoe closet revisited

2011-09-27T04:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend I finally tackled a task I had been procrastinating about.
I did do a round of decluttering my shoe closet in the spring already, but that time, there were several pairs that were either not loose enough yet or "too good to toss".
I had talked myself into keeping them by saying, I could always wear these with thick socks. Back then, that even worked, sort of.
But during the last weeks, I found myself avoiding those shoes, and when I wore them, socks or not, I found my feet floating around in them, sliding sideways and forward, with the heels flopping around with every step.
Conclusion? I have lost volume in my feet, too.
So, this weekend, I pulled out all of these candidates and put them into a big trashbag to take to donation.
First, of course, I tried on several pairs of them one last time.
Doing so helped me in getting several things very clear.
First of all, I am really down one and a half shoe sizes. Keeping the bigger shoes and wearing them only hurts my feet, apart from looking frumpy.
The second insight had to do with a pair of high-heeled mules I had bought in the first euphoria of weight loss.
As a teen and twen, I always wore shoes that had at least five to six centimeter heels. I had to quit doing so when I got too heavy to walk in them. And I had always imagined that I would wear them again if ever I were to lose enough weight. So, when I saw those high-heeled beauties (they had a somewhat wider heel, so I thought I´d be having enough support in them), I just had to have them.
But when I wore them for a full day the first time, my ankles hurt the day after. So, I thought I wasn´t thin enough yet to wear them. Back into the closet they went.
Yesterday, I tried them on and- found my feet sliding around in them, and I found that the arch of my foot hurt after just a few steps. I don´t know if there is any damage internally to my feet from the weight they have been carrying for so long, but like it or not, I´ll likely never again be able to comfortably wear shoes with a bigger than four centimeter heel.
It was one of those senior moments. The realization that my body, even when the excess weight is coming off, will retain some of the damage done by overload and time. The realization, too, that the interior image I have of a slim me is badly dated. At my age, I won´t be able to wear the things I thought I would be able to if only I were slim.
Most of them have been decluttered a long time ago, anyway. But even when I threw them out, I still believed there´d be others just like them.
It was almost as if there was a stored version of a younger me, complete with clothes, heels and lifestyle, inside my mind that was just waiting to be reloaded.
But life doesn´t work like that. I have changed. My life circumstances have changed. My job has changed. My body has changed.
It´s time to put that other version of me to rest. I wouldn´t want to have to go through the things that she went through again. So why should I bring her back? I won´t get a mulligan either. No chance to do it over knowing what I know now.
What I can do is accept that my life is different now. Actually, it´s a lot better than back then. I don´t need to perch on impossibly high heels any more just because they made me look taller and slimmer. I have found that respect doesn´t have to depend on having that long-legged tall slim look I tried to achieve. Nor does it depend on wearing the most garish makeup, or the wildest hairdo.
These days, I never wear make-up any more, I keep my hair cropped short in its natural pewter color, and in my low-heeled shoes, I have to look up to see a lot of people straight in the eye. The stick-on long fingernails have long gone to be replaced by plain old short nature.
I spend no more time and money on faking something that I am no more, and have never been. And what I save that way I can spend on being with DH and experiencing life with him. Life in the here and now.

Julia

Going nuts- with reason

2011-09-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

One of my primary binge foods have always been nuts. Peanuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans. Preferably roasted and salted. Or almonds, the smoked variety.
They have the distinction of being easily storeable, needing no preparation, and thus they are perfect as a standby food for those days at the office when all hell breaks loose, your stomach growls and you don´t know when you´ll be able to get yourself a decent meal.
The problem, for me, was that I couldn´t stop eating until the bag of nuts was gone. I´d dig into those bags, pull out nuts by the handful, and chomp them down while attacking the files on my desk. On my worst days, I ended up having to throw out two such bags afterwards, empty.
The problem is that nuts are one of the calorie densest food groups. So, that kind of nut orgy instead of lunch would cost me the caloric equivalent of several day´s caloric needs.
Still, giving up nuts entirely is something I would not do, so they still are part of my diet. But, since I have started to journal my food intake to the gram, I can no longer take out a handful and gobble it up. I have to count them or weigh them, and when eating them afterwards, I try to be conscious of how they taste, how it feels to chew them, eating them one after the other to prolong the experience.
Eating them like that means that I have a bag of nuts (same caliber I used to down in one sitting) in my kitchen that hasn´t gone empty for about two weeks. I have been eating some five to eight halves a day, consciously, incorporating them into my daily calorie count.
Being attentive when eating is proving to be one of the most effective weapons in my weight loss arsenal, actually.
I have found that I can, unfortunately, down incredible amounts of food without paying attention to it. Eating while on the phone, eating while watching TV, eating while driving. You could always recognize my car by the dropped peanuts under the driver´s seat.
The problem being that after that kind of mindless eating, I ended up still wanting to have a meal. It was, psychologically, as if I hadn´t eaten at all. The food- never mind how much- had simply passed by my brain and dropped straight into my stomach.
This tendency to wolf down food is also one of the things I try to consciously change. For example, hubs and I usually have the same breakfast of ham and eggs. Hubs- who never had an ED- enjoys his, cutting off small pieces and savouring them. I, on the other hand, keep having to slow myself down. I don´t know if having had to sneak foods past my diet-happy relatives as a child is still influencing me there, but I sometimes catch myself eating as if I might get caught doing it.
The result is always that I do not feel satisfied after such a meal. My stomach may be full, even painfully so, and I still want - something.
By now, I have found out what that something is. It´s the sensory pleasure of eating. The taste, smell, and texture of food. I start a meal expecting that kind of experience, and if I shovel it down mindlessly, I deprive myself of the real pleasure to be had from eating. Which leads me to wanting another fix, a second helping, or a different food.
There´s only one cure for that. For someone who has been yo-yo dieting all her life it´s a momentuous step. I have to allow myself to eat. No more sneaking food, not even by myself, no more "if I eat this fast enough perhaps no one would see I was eating". Just sitting down, with nothing before me but the food, and then savouring every bite, taking my time to take in the taste, the texture.
I have found that I can, that way, be satisfied with less than half the amount I used to eat.
More satisfaction for less calories.
Sounds like the perfect weight loss recipe, doesn´t it? And all it requires is being mindful.

That way, even the infamous nuts become an acceptable weight loss food.

Julia

Down fifty

2011-09-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

As my regular readers may have noticed, I live in metric country. But blogging about condensing myself gets me to convert my measurements to US pounds rather regularly.
This morning, I had the expected visit from the whoosh fairy: down two pounds from yesterday. When I converted my total loss to pounds, I saw...fifty! Fifty pounds gone off my top weight.
Kilogram-wise, it´s 23 down, 17 to go till goal, which means that I am more than halfway there. I haven´t weighed that much- rather, so little- since 2002, before my last big gain..
So, any further loss is taking me into unfamiliar territory. I have to find out what to clothe a body of that size with, how to move it, how to define myself.
For way too long, I´d been defining myself as "the fat one", the one who was glad if she found anything that fit her at all. I lived in a uniform of stretched-out jeans, elastic-waist skirts and baggy t-shirts, which in winter were replaced by equally baggy turtlenecks, topped off with jackets whose only saving grace was that I was able to put them on at all.
I have, over the last months, started to replace my wardrobe piece by piece with things that fit me now.
But, when browsing the clothes stores, I still find myself pulling out the plus sizes out of habit, only to put them back tut-tutting because these are way too big by now.
The rapid losses of the last few weeks are begetting a problem I never thought I´d have. Blouses and even jackets and coats may be somewhat oversized and still look good. But jeans? They are still my favourite kind of pants, and I like them tight-fitting. The part of me that seems to be changing the most right now is my posterior. Now, I don´t really grieve losing some inches off my backside, after all, I have always had a bit too much...abundance...there, but the smaller behind makes the seat of my jeans droop down in a bunch of superfluous material. I don´t feel good in jeans that don´t fit properly, but then again, I haven´t even worn out the ones I bought this spring, and I´d be crazy to go shopping for new ones when I know they´d be drooping, too, within mere months (I hope). So, I´ll have to stick with what I have for now. Perhaps I´ll be able to take them in a bit on the weekend, although I´m not so certain of my talents as a seamstress. And I´ll have to do another wardrobe raid to evict the ones that have, by now, become positively unwearable. To me, too-big clothes are like a grown-out haircut. One day I wake up and find that I need a haircut now, and don´t feel good until I had it. I have the same kind of itch when I find my pants are getting too big, but I have decided to wait at least until Christmas (and hopefully another coupla kilos and another size down) to scratch it.
And until then, I´ll try to rejoice in what the droopy bottoms mean: another part of me recondensed.

Julia

Rebalancing my walk

2011-09-20T04:42:00.000-07:00

There´s one part of losing weight that I had not, until now, really been aware of.
You see, there´s a difference between the way a thin person walks and a fat person walks. If you are fat, you have more tissue on the inside of the thighs that forces you into a wide-legged gait and more weight to balance out all over. The result looked, at least in me, like a big fat duck waddling along, feet wide apart and with the toes turned outward, and with a distinctive sideways motion that made my head and upper body move from right to left at least twenty centimeters with every step. It´s not the way a human being is physiologically intended to walk. The sideways movement strains the hip joints, the outwardly turned toes make the footing instable, leading to frequent sprains and a bad case of plantar fasciitis on top. To add insult to injury, the weight of my chest and belly was pulling downwards on my spine, making me bend over forwards with my head hunched between my shoulders.
All of this, I could, at my top weight, not help. I simply wasn´t able to walk in a different way with all of that condensable matter to lug around. Since my joints, my back, and my feet creaked in protest at what they were forced to do, I started to use a crutch all of the time, thereby effectively abandoning any pretense at walking straight.
But didn´t I lose half of that weight by now? And put the crutch away many kilos ago?
The kicker is that the body goes into autopilot when walking. The way you walk is determined by habit, unless you pay conscious attention to what you are doing.
It was MIL who alerted me to this. On our last visit, I got up to walk over to the kitchen when she suddenly asked me if I was in any pain. When I replied that I wasn´t, she wanted to know why I was limping so badly then.
As I said, I hadn´t been conscious of limping. But when I did pay attention, I realized that I still, at just four kilos above the limit of morbid obesity, walked as if I still had to carry those almost fifty pounds I already got rid of .
Habits die hard. Bad habits die hardest. And a bad part of that habit is that there is probably already some cartilage in my joints worn off the wrong way, so, it feels- at least now- easier to move like before than it feels to walk straight again. But that is what I must not succumb to. Right now, I am starting a new habit. Every couple of meters, I check my posture when walking. I pay attention to not set my feet to far apart sideways, and I keep reminding myself to walk straight.
It feels different to walk like that. More confident, taller. The way I walked before I became fat.
It is mine to take back. All I have to do is pay attention.
There are some little-used muscle groups, especially in my back, that I have felt for the first time in ages now. I never even tried to stand tall while I was fat, so, the muscles used for straightening my back have obviously suffered from underuse.
Perhaps I should try some strength exercises to get my muscular balance back.
And then, I can enjoy the fact that, with the condensable matter gone, there´ll be nothing left in my appearance to tell that I have been third-degree morbidly obese.

Julia

Autumn arriving

2011-09-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

We took advantage of the last sunny day on forecast to go for a long hike on Saturday. As the map we were using didn´t have height indications, we suddenly found ourselves, well, not exactly in the middle of nowhere, as we could see the city lying below us, but it was a steep incline of some fifty meters height difference down there, and what had seemed, on the map, like a comfortable walk down proved to be a slippery slope full of acorns and pebbles.
Before recondensing, it would have been impossible for me to get down there, even with my walking sticks. And now? I had left my sticks at home, opting instead for a pair of sturdy walking shoes.So, I started out downwards and did indeed manage to get to the foot of the mountain without accident. And I didn´t even have sore muscles the next day!
It´s experiences like this that remind me of how far I have come.
Another NSV this weekend came from the jewellery department. I have a ring that I bought long ago and wear every day. When I bought it, it fit on my middle finger. For a long while now, I was wearing it on my ring finger. And yesterday, it fit on my middle finger again! DH did look a bit astonished when I gave him that time-honored gesture, saying, "just look at this" :) - when all I wanted was to show him where I was wearing that ring...
Weight-wise, the plateau before the next decade is a lot more tenuous than I thought, so, I´m still waiting for the moment I can slide that decade weight down a notch. But I have- in spite of being home all day and a four-day visit with MIL- stayed at my pre-holiday weight. I still journal every bite I eat, stick to my calorie limit, and hopefully, that will translate to the jump into the next decade anytime soon.

With autumn arriving, I´ll have to do another wardrobe rollover. Luckily, I got myself a couple of blazers for the office on clearance this spring, which still fit me, and I have a couple of coats that are relatively size-tolerant, so I should be fine with them for another season. What is starting not to fit any more is, once more, my pants. Even with the stretchy material, they are beginning to look downright baggy. So, I´ll have to weed through them and evict the worst offenders. On the other hand, I´m glad my waist has reappeared from under the excess weight, so, with a belt I can still cinch my pants up on my hips and am in no danger of them sliding down inadvertently, which means that I´ll wait as long as possible to replace them- after all, I have another 18 kilos to go till goal, and continuously replacing my too-big pants is getting costly, after all, I have gone through five pant sizes in a year already. I am, by now, almost regretting that I threw out those smaller clothes that I thought I´d never fit into again. The jeans, at least, would come in handy. Then again, I kept them in a plastic box on top of my wardrobe for years, and I was, back then, definitely glad to be rid of them. Besides, they were those extremely washed-out styles that haven´t been in fashion for a long time any more.
So, no regrets about these any more. If my present pants get too big, I´ll have the joy of shopping for pants in a regular size for the first time in over ten years. And until then, I´ll wear my baggy pants like a medal. After all, it hasn´t been that long ago that those same pants were tight.

Julia

I´m astonished about myself

2011-09-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

I have never been a fan of budgeting. In my native family, there was one person who was a veritable bookkeeping fiend, who kept tabs on everything from money spent on groceries to how much gas our car had used per kilometer. Everything was duly recorded, and woe to the perp who didn´t fill out the required lists, or whose lists didn´t add up.
It was enough to make me shy away from anything that looked even remotely like such a list. I didn´t like being made accountable, neither in the literal nor in the figurative sense.
It took me a long time to re-learn that budgeting is something that can make life easier, instead of harder.
What changed everything for me there was the realization that a budget isn´t meant to chastise you after the fact for going out of control. It´s meant to keep you from going out of control in the first place. And the control it keeps you under needn´t be something external. It can be your own.
These days I, too, am a listmaker. Not to keep tabs on anybody else, but to keep control of my life.
One place that helps immensely is my food intake. It is a really satisfying feeling to sit in front of my netbook in the evening, add up what I ate during the day, and then look what I may still eat. As I have the same thing for breakfast and lunch regularly, it´s the evening meal where I tend to get over my caloric limit. So, looking first what I may eat has been a big step forward for me.
It is actually what makes my weight, right now, go down rather steadily at a rate I haven´t seen since last year. Not grabbing that string of cheese, or "just a handful" of nuts, or "just one" chocolate bar. Not munching on peanuts all the time while preparing dinner. I had developed quite a number of self-defeating habits that I wasn´t really aware of just how bad they were, calorie-wise.
Seeing that, for example, the innocent-looking cut of cheese I ate when coming home "just to pass the time till dinner" was, on that day, what gave me the most calories, not the chicken breast that was dinner, made me realize that I was, actually, taking in a lot more calories grazing while cooking than I was supposed to eat at all if I wanted to lose more weight.
Having to write down every morsel, every peanut and every cookie, and then seeing immediately how they affect my calorie count, is helping me to keep within my limits. And I have started to really budget, that is, think first, eat last.
That way I don´t end up wondering every morning where the (high) number on my scales came from. It´s amazing how much one can overeat without noticing it. I am, today, determined to never again become a victim of the Sneaky Peanut or the Stealth Cookie.
Being accountable to myself for every morsel I eat is the trick. Then, ther is hope for me of getting rid of the rest of my excess baggage, too.

Julia

Thinking twice- and saving!

2011-09-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

Food labels are sometimes a most educating thing to read.
I have, for two weeks now, been using Sparkpeople to track my food intake.First of all, it´s free. I can access it from any computer that has an internet connection. And it gives you a precise rundown on the contents of what you ate.
The latter feature, to me, is the most helpful one because you cannot only look at how many carbs etc. you had but also at a number of micronutritients, like calcium. Which got me back to supplementing. It seems to be near impossible to get in the RDAs on a 1500-calorie-a-day plan otherwise. But with a few well-chosen supplements I think I´ll be fine.
What surprised me was that their food lists seem to cover most of the things I can buy here, too, even though I live in Europe and the company is US-based. (Full disclosure: I am not affiliated to them, I just use their website for tracking).
Sometimes, though, I have to look for a close equivalent for what I want to eat, especially when I am resorting to pre-prepared meals which I sometimes have to do for convenience´s sake (I´m working full-time, after all, and get home quite late on some days).
And that, in turn, requires me to go and read the labels of some old favourites.
Like that of the frozen vegetable pizza that is a standby for those I-don´t-want-to-cook evenings in our household.
One pizza (twenty-cm diameter) for each of us.
Who eats half of what looks like exactly one dinner plate of pizza, anyway?
Me, that is, after I discovered that the nutrition information gave half a pizza as one recommended serving. So, after that discovery, I took a bread knife to the still-frozen pizza and cut it into two recommended servings, one of which went back into the freezer for next time.
Which meant that I didn´t go over my calories or carbs yesterday, and I know now that I can eat twice off one package of those pizzas. Which is, in effect, like a fifty-percent markdown per meal.
DH, who is not at present dieting, had a whole one, but then, as a male and being taller than I am, he can use the calories just fine. For me, seeing that I can have the same thing he eats if I watch my portions makes everything easier, too.
The serving size trap is something that I noticed quite frequently these days. Like the 400g- pack of greek salad that I would, formely, have divided by two and served. The recommended serving was..100 grams. Half of what I used to serve. Again, we had two meals off that salad.
What annoys me most is the packages where recommended servings and package content don´t compute. Like, when you have a 200g- pack and the recommended serving is 75 grams. You can either toss the rest, or eat it, putting you at 1.3 times the recommended serving size. Depending on what is in the pack, that can seriously impact your caloric balance.
I admit that I am not yet ready to toss those leftovers every time. But I think I should remember that the food industry doesn´t mind at all what happens to their product after we bought it. We could buy and toss whole packages for all they care.
I have been guilty of that, too, before starting to recondense myself. But first, I would stuff everything that threatened to pass the eat-by date into the bipedal bin, aka my body. Only what I didn´t manage to eat went to the trash bin.
First overbuying, then abusing my body as a receptacle for the excess food we had dragged home. Cooking way-too-big portions and eating it all because one doesn´t throw away food, or does one?
And I was wondering where the fat came from...
Of course, the excess food we dragged home was partly due to my wanting to be prepared for every eventuality. What if one of us wanted to eat, say, a piece of cake and there wasn´t any in the house?
I have, by now, found out what happens then. Nothing. If the person is really hungry, he or she will eat something else. If it is just a yen for something that appeals to our appetites, it will pass. Not being able to act on your appetite (vs. hunger) is, actually, keeping a lot of unnecessary calories out of our bodies.
Apart from that, our grocery bills are considerably lower, too.
And not dragging home too much food means that we barely ever have to throw out food that has spoiled.

What if you have been brought up as a member of the "Clean your plate, there are children starving in Africa"-club? Guess what, if you leave the excess at the store in the first place, a lot of supermarkets donate merchandise that is close to the sell-by date to food banks, so there´s a chance that the food that would be too much for you could, if unsold to somebody else, even be used to do good to somebody in your own community. In your trashbin, it helps no one. And if you really care about the children in Africa, consider donating the money you didn´t pay for those excess goodies to a charity or a development aid project that will really help the people there. <getting off my soapbox>

We inhabitants of the so-called developed countries are living in a world that has more food choices to offer than anybody can reasonably eat. We have- most of us, at least- cars to help us bring home gigantic stashes of food, and pantries full of more food than we can hope to eat before it expires.
All of these things are making us fat.
For me, that realization was the first step in getting my weight under control. And it´s a continuing battle, one that requires planning, journalling my food and reading labels all the time.
But the result is worth it.

Julia

Teetering on the brink...

2011-09-06T02:48:00.000-07:00

..of the next decade!
The scales I use for weighing myself are of the kind that has sliding weights you have to move to find your weight. Being in Europe, they are calibrated in kilograms. One slider is for the decades- as in 70,80,90- and the other one for single kilos, in increments of 0.1 kilos. The decade slider has notches to slide it into, so it doesn´t move off its place when weighing in.
And the most satisfying weigh-ins are those where I can, finally, take that slider a notch down. This morning, I was just 100 grams away from that point, so I expect to see it this week. Getting into this decade is special because it contains the point where I will officially cease to be clinically obese and just be overweight. It is a place I haven´t been for over ten years.
And my body seems to have made good use of the plateau that was so frustrating me. Namely, I caught a sideways reflection of myself in the corridor mirror yesterday, and did a double take before running over to ask DH, "am I imagining things or is there one chin less on me?" Hubs took a look and confirmed what I had, up to this point, not really noticed. At my most obese, my chin had been buried in a big roll of fat that went around my neck, actually making my face look twice as wide and giving me the appearance of having at the very least three chins agree with my real one whenever I nodded. And that- is almost gone! The best thing being that the skin of my neck has contracted, too, so I have been spared that turkey look I was afraid of getting.
One more incentive to stick to my guns. This time, it looks like I found the right way for me to continue condensing myself.

Julia

Kitchen epiphany

2011-09-05T02:29:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing I can´t stand it´s feeling deprived. So, scaling down ingredients is sometimes a bit scary for me because I worry it might harm the taste of the food.
Case in point: my beloved caprese salad with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. I had, all these years, had the habit of drizzling on the olive oil and balsamico after arranging the other ingredients on a plate. And, all of the time, I ended up pouring about two or three tablespoons of oil minimum on each plate (as I found out when I weighed the amount I was wont to pour), thus turning what should have been a healthy meal into a caloric desaster.
Yesterday, I was determined not to use more than one tablespoon per person. If you imagine the surface of a caprese plate, most of it would remain untouched if you tried to drizzle that on. So, what I did was chop up the tomatoes, put them into a bowl, put the olive oil, pepper,salt and a bit of balsamico in, too, amd mix it through. I let that marinate while I cut and arranged the mozzarella, then drained it (discarding the liquid that had collected) and put it between the pieces of cheese. I had used a diminutive creamer, like they use in coffee shops for individual servings of cream for your coffee, that holds just twenty grams of oil (checked it on the scales), and I had taken just half to marinate the tomatoes in. What was left inside was just enough to give each leaf of basil (I put one on each piece of mozzarella) a tiny drop of oil, too.
Guess what- this version of caprese was even more tasty than when I just slathered on the oil. At a fraction of the calories.
So, my kitchen epiphany for this weekend was the realization that pre-marinating my salads before arranging them allows me to reduce my oil consumption considerably. And, on a side note, finding out that that little stainless steel coffee creamer is a perfect measuring device for oil, apart allowing for much more precise application when I do drizzle some oil on something. Remember that the olive oil vendors want you to use more of their product, so the pouring spouts on the bottles aren´t designed to facilitate application by the drop, quite the contrary.

Which brings me to another unpleasant surprise I had this weekend. We have bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning, and I use a cast-iron pan for preparing it. Now, as that pan is used exclusively for the purpose, it is, by now, well-seasoned. I have a straight-edged steel spatula I use to take out the eggs and then clean the surface. Normally, there´s almost nothing that sticks to the pan.
I had, in a pinch, bought a different brand of bacon last week, and suddenly there was a sticky brownish layer of something in the pan that was hard to remove and made the eggs stick, too.
The cause of this development could be found on the ingredient list of that pack of bacon. The third ingredient in line was- glucose. Sugar. The kind of bacon I usually buy does not have that on the ingredient list.
Now, that is one brand I´m not going to buy again. And a striking example of how the sugar industry is pushing their product down our throats.Nobody needs to be fed sugar when they believe they are eating bacon. This sugar did nothing, not even improve the taste. Just push up our carbohydrate consumption and mess up my beloved cast iron pan (if that´s what sugar does to something you fry, what does it do inside you?).
I´ve returned to the original sugarless version of bacon, and with a bit of scrubbing and re-seasoning my pan is back in working order. Still, I found it shocking that there seems to be literally no food group outside unprocessed raw ingredients where you do not have to watch out for hidden sugar.
Ingredient reading seems to be one thing I need to do regularly if I want to avoid sugar.

Julia

U-turn complete

2011-09-02T04:29:00.000-07:00

As I had suspected it took some time for my body to resume losing after my upward bump in weight. But today I went, for the first time, below my lowest weight I had before regaining. Which also means that I am officially back in onederland.

I must have been doing something right.

And now on to the next milestone, which would be going below BMI 30 and thus from morbidly obese to just obese. It´s less than ten pounds away...

Julia

Back in town and feeling good

2011-09-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

It´s cooler, by about ten degrees centigrade. And for the first time, the four-day visit with MIL did not end in a several-pounds gain. Instead, I had a two-pound loss to celebrate!
How I did it? First of all, as little carbs as I could get away with. That meant bacon and eggs, but no bread or rolls for breakfast. Meat and vegetables, but no potatoes for lunch. Instead of the perennial cake in the afternoon, just two small cookies to go with my coffee.
And I had a straight talk with MIL about why I was eating like that, namely, that I´ll never be able to get to a lower weight level if I keep regaining what I lost in-between every time we go to visit her. Surprisingly, she seemed to understand and even voiced approval when she noticed that I was weighing my portions and journalling quite literally every bite.
The surprise obstacle turned out to be DH (I still think that stands for Diet Hazard) who kept offering me those carb-loaden goodies. Sometimes I had to turn on the broken record, as in "take just one, will you?"-"No" "but it´s just one" -"No".
This little word is becoming my best weapon when fighting to lower my weight, actually. Just Say No- to sweets, starches, and too-big portions of anything.
And the scales. Not the ones I get on, but the ones I´m weighing my food on. It´s shocking to see that the portions I would serve us if I did just eyeball them would be so much bigger than the portions I serve when weighing the ingredients.
One bad habit sticks out here. I used to pour oil for frying or a salad straight from the bottle. Even though I did not believe I used much of it, seeing the number on my food scales shoot up when I did, as an experiment, pour the oil I wanted to use into a little separate bowl first with my usual motion of tilting the bottle, was a real waker-upper. I mean, the stuff has nine calories per gram, and pouring some forty grams when all I need would be ten means putting myself back by a whopping 270 calories. In other words, all other things being equal, that would be two more pounds I could lose every month if I just ditch that habit.
Now, I am usually something of a very independent cook who hates recipes where you have to weigh everything. But when I look at where just eyeballing everything has gotten me, I know that this is one thing I have to change fast. Even if I feel a bit silly doing it. But then, I´m not yet at the point where I weigh spices, too. So I can still use my old eyeball measure for something. I mean, nobody ever got fat from eating too much oregano or parsley.
Somebody once said losing weight has a lot in common with getting out of debt. Namely, that the best way of doing both is setting a budget (monetary or calorie-wise) and writing down your expenses respectively your caloric intake as exactly as you can, so you see early when you are at the point of going over your budget.
What it amounts to in the end is mindfulness. That means switching off your autopilot and becoming conscious of the things you are doing out of habit, because some of your habits are most likely the cause of your problem.
Case in point, I had gotten into the habit of dipping my hand into a bowl of nuts and almonds I had in my kitchen every time I passed that bowl. Yesterday, I caught myself reaching for the nuts and stopped myself just as I was about to down a whole handful of them. I have since removed the contents of the bowl to a closed container that I have to take out of a cupboard and open if I want to eat nuts. The extra steps are helping me to stop and think before gobbling down several hundred calories without even being conscious of the fact that I am eating.
I have, actually, started to get into the habit of watching out for that kind of thing because that is where the calories have, in the past, snuck up on me. Bad habits and automatisms, combined with not measuring my portions, were what made me gain those almost ninety pounds, all the while protesting that there had to be something wrong with my body and metabolism because (or so I thought) I didn´t eat too much and kept gaining.
And good habits and portion control is what will help me to get them off again. With the first forty pounds off again, I find that I have to become even more careful about my intake if I want the next forty pounds to recondense, too. So, journalling and weighing ingredients it is for the time being. And I hope to see some results soon.

Julia

High temps

2011-08-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

When it´s really hot
-ballpoint pens spit ink
-the printer´s ink goes dry
-and my brain goes into slug mode.
So, no lengthy post from me before the weekend, either. Diet is going on well, even though I tend to retain some water when it´s that hot, but that bodes well for a whoosh in the not-so-distant future. Exercise is still nonexistant (I´m not risking ending up in a molten puddle on the tarmac), but I have stuck to about 1200 calories a day, so this should about even out the laziness. They promised a drop in temperature for the weekend, and then I´ll get my lazy bum off the couch again for morning walks.

On a different note, let´s pray for the people in the way of hurricane Irene. They sure can use it.

Wish y´all a cool and unharmed weekend.

Julia

I´m melting

2011-08-23T06:50:00.000-07:00

...and so are the pounds (I hope). I´m sitting at my computer with an electric fan at my feet to keep from dissolving in a puddle. I know, people from, say, Nevada would scoff at this but 34 degrees centigrade at 60 percent humidity is enough to make me wish for a big glass of something cool.
The weekend was, at least where good intentions were concerned, a success. I maintained, which is more than I could say about most of the other weekends this year, and I am determined to get the weight even lower down. The heatwave we are having right now helps there because I´m just not hungry.
The down side is that it also keeps me from attacking the bigger projects I have for my flat. Getting a stroke because of overexerting myself would not do it at all.
And on the exercise side, the only time I can do anything there is very early. Well, I never said I was built for the tropics...
I had a small NSV this morning when I went through my closet for something airy to wear to work. I mentioned the factory outlet shop I used to frequent before, and on one of the last visits they had a four-piece mix-and-match linen ensemble where the jacket and vest fit me okay, but the pants and shorts were way too tight. I took them along anyway because I liked the style, but had never been able to wear them. Today, I decided to finally try them on and- they fit! Except for the trousers being way too long, but now I can see what needs to be taken off the length. Maybe I´ll take out my sewing machine tonight and shorten them. Unless I melt down first, that is.

And now I´m off for something cool and my balcony.

Julia

Recipe monday: Zucchini wasps

2011-08-22T05:10:00.000-07:00

Low-carb and kiddy-proof dinner for two (or more, if the zucchino is big enough)
1 bi-i-ig zucchino, cut lenghtwise and hollowed out, but with the skin still on to keep everything together,
put a thin coating of olive oil all over its surface and set it on an ovenproof dish.
Into the hollow comes a mix of ground beef, onions (cubed), concentrated tomato puree, pepper, salt and lots of oregano. Top it off with a generous sprinkling of grated cheese. 30 to 45 minutes in the oven, at the temperature you´d use for pizza, and dinner is ready. (I don´t do temperature conversion, but I use 180 degrees centigrade)
Why I call these wasps? I cut a thin stripe of the skin off the bottom of the hollowed-out zucchini to keep them from toppling over, and I cut narrow stripes from it and put them on top of the filling before I put the cheese on. The end result looks like a big wasp without wings, so, with a bit of creative decorating... :).

Enjoy!

Julia

Hopes for the weekend

2011-08-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

There it is again- the weekend. Just as this is a planet where everybody is forced to spend 1/7 of their lives on Mondays, it´s also a planet that has, at least hereabouts, 2/7 of the total time occupied by weekends. While that seems to be, mathematically, obvious it´s also a big source of frustration to me these last weeks when looking at my weight graphs.
During the week from Monday thru Friday, my weight usually goes down fairly steadily. What does me in every time is the weekend. I haven´t managed lately to keep my weight at least stationary over the weekend, thus ending up regaining and then losing the same four pounds (or worse) over and over again.
So what are my intentions for this weekend?
-go easy on anything with carbs in it (if possible, avoid it altogether)
-halve the portions of anything else
-keep away from nuts
So, no bread for breakfast, and no more than one tablespoon full of anything rice, pasta or potato.

They used to have a kind of pasta that was made from soy protein instead of grains at the health food shop. Perhaps I should go look for that again. The downside is that it is rather pricey, but then again, if I get by this plateau, the expense would be worth it.

I´ll see what the weekend brings...

Julia

My laundry´s online

2011-08-18T06:09:00.000-07:00

That´s what I can reply whenever somebody enquires about those still-humid items I pull out of my washing machine. It is, of course, a bit tongue-in-cheeky, but the core of it is that we don´t use an electric clothes dryer. Instead, I have a folding wire contraption I can set up for towels, pantys and such, and everything that would go on a hanger for storage will go on the same hanger, and a mobile clothes rack, for drying, too.
I used to have a combined washer/dryer that was, for one, prohibitively expensive to buy in the first place, and when I used the dryer function I found out quickly that it had two settings: "boil" and "fry", meaning that either the clothes were still sogging wet when they came out, or the heat did severe damage to everything inside that had just a trace of synthetic in it. Either way, the only thing I could put in there to dry was towels and bedsheets. So, I started to line-dry my laundry the good old-fashioned way.
When the old washer/dryer finally expired, I had to decide what to replace it with, as there´s only room for one machine in our bath-and-laundry room. I opted for a washer-only model, preferring to spend a bit more on that to spending the same amount on a so-so washer/dryer.
I have never regretted the decision. Of course, I still look at driers sometimes in the shops when I am window-shopping. But since they are required to put the amount of electricity used for a dryer cycle on the machines, just the thought of what it would do to my electricity bill to use one stops me rather fast.
And there´s another, even more compelling reason.
Everybody who owns a dryer knows about dryer lint. That´s the fluffy batch of dust you can remove from the lint screen after each use. It´s also the amount of fabric rubbed off your clothes in one drying cycle.
At my parents´ place we had an electric dryer for towels (they were doctors and needed plenty of them at their office). These terrycloth towels were used once, then washed and dried. Every about five years, they needed to be replaced because the washing and drying had taken off the "terry" and left just the "cloth", so to say, rendering them unusable.
Now if a dryer can eat up thick terrycloth fabric like that, of course it won´t be any kinder to whatever else you put in there.Synthetic fabrics may not rub off as much in the dryer, but the heat weakens the fiber, making them more prone to tearing. I always wince when I see someone who takes care not to use too hot a setting for laundering the items and then dumps them into the dryer as if the dryer heat were less harmful than washer heat.
My clothes have never even seen the inside of a dryer, and they take a lot longer to wear down than those towels of my parents´.
But what happens if I need something to dry fast? In wintertime, I put it on or in front of a radiator, and in summer I set a big electric fan in front of the clothes rack. The moving air will dry things as fast as a dryer, at a fraction of energy costs, and with no damage to the garments. And the fan is something I have anyway, instead of air condition.
Oh, and the shirts and blouses require less ironing, too.
The initial investment of a clothes rack and waterproof hangers has been recouped long ago, just in terms of electricity bills being lower.
Nowadays, I wouldn´t take an electric dryer for a gift, because the follow-up cost is just too big. Even if I had room for it in my bathroom.

Julia

Freezing my bottom off

2011-08-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

No, I have not moved to the land of the kiwis who right now have plenty of that white stuff you get in winter.
But I have a NSV to celebrate, and it has to do with my trusty freezer.
You see, I have always loved curry dishes. The warm yellow goodness of chicken and ananas, coated with generous amounts of sauce, mixed with mounds of rice... I usually ended up stuffing myself to the point of bursting at the seams. The fact that ananas comes mostly in big cans and chicken breast filets are sold in packs of four meant having to use up all of the packages if I didn´t want to have part of it spoil in the fridge before I got around to using it up.So, there was always plenty of curry to overeat on. I had stopped making curry dishes because I deemed it too risky for me.
Yesterday, I prepared a chicken and curry dish for dinner, in the usual amounts.
And then I went on to serve it, in bowls half the size of the ones I usually take for curry dishes. With just two tablespoons of cooked rice for each bowl, and two soup ladles of the curry on top.
Guess what- both DH and I found that to be enough!
And the remaining rice and curry went into two portion-sized microwaveable containers and into the freezer, for DH to brown-bag it to work.
So, what used to be one dinner will now be one dinner for two plus two lunches for DH, thanks to being able to use the freezer.
And I have, this morning, not had to face any damages on the scales the way I was used to after having had curry.
For me, that is what it means to freeze my bottom off.
If I eat just small portions and freeze the leftovers in single portions, I will most likely be able to condense my rear end some more, and I won´t have to pay for it by not being able to eat my favourite dishes any more. The only thing it takes is the willpower to put any surplus into the freezer instead of into my mouth.

Julia

Greetings from the cat´s cradle

2011-08-12T03:38:00.000-07:00

..at least that´s what my workplace has been these last days. Add to that the continuous shifts in atmospheric pressure that have been giving me a whacking headache most of the time, and you have the reason why I haven´t been posting too much these days. Thank God it´s Friday.
I´m going to catch up on some badly needed zzzzzs, go back to eating healthily after having eaten mainly prefab meals for a week and hope that the weight that has brought on will also disappear.
See you next week, hopefully somewhat less hurriedly.

Julia

Mirroring reflections

2011-08-10T02:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went shopping during lunch break. I had to stand in line at the cash register for some time, and they have a mirrored wall right opposite it. I have, for a long time, avoided looking in that direction so I would not have to face myself.
Yesterday, I looked. What I saw was an average-looking woman, perhaps even looking somewhat younger than the number in my passport, wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a pair of boots with a little heel.
What I did not see was The Blob I had been avoiding to look at. I did not look grotesquely fat any more, but average.
And that means yes, I look better because I lost those almost forty pounds. I feel better, too.
I have lost almost forty pounds. And I can lose forty more, even if it takes longer than with the first forty.

I needed that reminder, I really did.
Never ever ever give up.

Julia

Recipe Monday: Organic ramen spice

2011-08-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Ramen... it´s the old standard standby if all you have is a water cooker and a bowl to prepare a quick lunch at work.
For me, it meant getting a headache most of the time I ate the stuff. Until one day, I had the misfortune of spilling some of the ramen broth on a white blouse, leaving an ugly reddish splotch that proved resistant to each and every method of spot removal I tried on it.
So that was what I had been putting inside my body? Just what the heck was inside those little bags labelled "spice mix"? Apart an unhealthy dose of monosodium glutamate?

So, I decided to find out if there would be a healthier way of seasoning my lunch noodles.
It turned out there was.
I took plain chinese mie noodles to start with, you can of course use the noodles from a ramen pack minus the spice.
Then I bought myself a cheap electric coffee grinder that is, now, used exclusively for grinding spices.(Don´t use your regular coffee mill for this unless you want to have your coffee taste of spices).
And used it for grinding up a mixture of dried chili flakes, laurel leaves (use sparingly), curry powder, and powdered onions, plus a good amount of a dried mixture of leeks, carrots, parsley, and celery that is sold hereabouts under the name of "soup herbs". The resulting powder I mixed in with a portion of organic dried beef broth concentrate ( chicken will do, too, or vegetable broth for the non-carnivores out there).
I put the mix into an airtight container, which I took along to the office with the plain noodles.One teaspoonful of it will spice up a bowl of ramen noodles as well as the mixes furnished by manufacturers, without the side effects of artificial aromas or monosodium glutamate. You can, of course, tweak the spices to suit your personal taste. And, the mixture also is great for spicing up a pot of vegetable soup.
Try and enjoy!

Julia

Grrrl on a swing

2011-08-08T02:45:00.000-07:00

The last month has brought no change at all with my weight, or rather, my weight range. The weight pendulum ist swinging back and forth in an amplitude of roundabout six pounds between highest and lowest points, meaning that every time I hope that I get closer to breaking the downwards barrier, I find myself face to face with sudden regains which bring me back to where I started from.
It doesn´t help that we have to visit DMiL at least once a month, which always means too little sleep and too many carbs on that weekend, both of which seem to bring my weight back up further than just the calorie count of what I ate would make me expect.
It seems to get ever more difficult to shed those gains again. As if something were draining my body´s ability to recondense itself.
The problem I have with that is that every time I see such a regain on the scale, I keep remembering the sneers of my relatives, as in "you´ll NEVER get rid of that weight, you fat, worthless SLOB". I heard that a couple of times too often, and the scars it left on my self-esteem are not healing as well as I would wish. Nor is the impulse disappearing to do what I used to do back then, namely, stuff my face until I didn´t feel the hurt as badly any more.
The difference is that I recognize the impulse now, and most of the time, manage to not act on it. But that takes strength, too. As does the eternal vigilance I´m forced to when I see that even a single day´s slipup, even a single day when I don´t watch every bite I eat, means facing a four-pound gain the next morning and that it takes, by now, four to five days of strict dieting to get that off again.
Before anybody asks- I did not even eat four pounds extra of anything on that day, so the gain must be mostly water, that much I know.
I´m going to do an experiment with myself as a guinea pig this week. Namely, I´ll try to consume a lot more water than I did during the last weeks. If it´s water retention that makes my weight fluctuate so much, perhaps flushing out whatever substances inside my body make it hold on to too much water might help.
At least it will give me the illusion of doing something that makes me more likely to succeed. Before I throw in the towel for good and retire to the vicinity of the fridge.

Julia

Learned reflexes

2011-08-04T03:39:00.000-07:00

Just how much of what we buy do we really need?
I have, in the last months, had occasion to ponder that more than once.
As I am working smack in the middle of town, going out during lunch break means walking right through the busiest shopping streets hereabouts.
Of course, I don´t walk past there with my eyes closed, so, I cannot help but notice the shops and their decorated windows. And if it´s raining and I still want to stretch my legs a bit, I enter the bigger shops and do some walking around in there.
I usually do not even bring my wallet along any more for those walks, and that made me realize something that I would, in olden days, not have noticed.
Namely, how often I see something that seems to say "buy me".
In the old days, I would not have thought twice about it. If it said "buy me" and I had the cash on me to buy it- or the credit cards- I bought it.
There was hardly a day going by when I did not carry home some plastic bag filled with something bought on that day, starting out with things like scented soaps, or perfumes, or makeup, to aromatized loose teas, or music cds, or decorations. I ended up with a full drawer of makeup that spoiled faster than I could use it up, several shelves full of cds I don´t have time to listen to, and more tchotchkes and bric-a-brac than I could ever put on display in my household.
I also ended up renting a bigger apartment to put the stuff in.
The bigger apartment part did come in handy when DH moved in with me, so I´m not complaining there, but still the continuous influx of mostly small items without a corresponding amount leaving the flat again made me reach a point where it was virtually impossible to keep the place tidy, simply because most of the items did not have a place to put them away.
Fast forward to now.
Several years of continuous decluttering have, by now, reduced the amount of stuff to the point where everything can, theoretically, be put away somewhere.
I still have some cupboards that require ingenious stacking methods to put everything in, and some drawers that are a bit hard to close, but hey- I never said I was perfect, did I? And our cellar compartment still houses several plastic boxes of china and kitchen utensils I´m not yet ready to toss.
But apart that, I have whittled my possessions down to a point where they have become manageable again.
It was hard work to get there, and I do not want to go back to where I was. So, I have installed an ironclad rule. No item may enter our flat of which we cannot in advance tell where it will live.
The second rule is no shopping for recreational purposes. I can, of course, look all I want. But I must not buy.
That is where I suddenly realized how often I had the impulse to buy something. Having no cash or cards on me meant not being able to follow that impulse. So, I left the shop without the item.
The interesting thing was that I rarely even felt the need to go back to that shop to get the item at a later point.
Imagine that- the very things that I would, before, have dragged home without a second thought to clutter up my flat are now not even interesting enough to come back for them. Or, on having time to think about them, I remember I already have such an item and do not need a duplicate. So, no new teapot if I already have five of them ( for different sorts of tea ;) )and no new coffee mug, however funny, either unless I am ready to toss one of those I already own.
And no freebies either.
The desire to acquire is something that sometimes makes it difficult to resist new stuff knocking at your door.
Case in point, several years ago my parents had to dismantle the household of a very dear cousin after her death. Now, this cousin had, all her life, liked to invite people over, and she had owned several twelve-settings sets of expensive china, crystal glasses and cutlery for the purpose.
My father offered me one of the china sets. I did hesitate at first, because I genuinely liked the former owner and it was part of her inheritance, after all. But then, I don´t do invitations, and the beautiful china would, for us, have become just another white elephant to store and care for, a source of guilt because I don´t do the society life my parents had brought me up for.
So, I declined. But I declined with a heavy heart. I also declined most of her kitchen utensils that my father tried to give me, apart one pot, one small ladle and an ingenious twist-off-cap opener I had always coveted.
These things I have in my kitchen, I love them, use them often, and they remind me of Cousin Mary every time I use them.
And the others things have, instead of saddling me with the problem of how to store them, gone on to a better life with another relative who will actually use them regularly.

So, it´s not about saving money. That is just a side effect. It is about defending our precious space from the influx of stuff that mindlessly acquiring things creates, and about consciously deciding what we want in our lives.

Because in the end, it´s not the one who dies with the most toys who wins, but the one who got to play the most. And the number of items one has acquired over a lifetime may just end up as a measure of the amount of work dumped on the people who will have to dismantle one´s household someday.

Think about that for a moment.
Someday you will die. Life has been found to have a 100 percent lethal outcome in laboratory mice, and the findings are applicable to humans, too.
And then somebody will have to go through your belongings.
Think of that somebody.
Did you just catch yourself pitying him? Or even think "serves him right"?

And now think about how much of your own life you spend on your belongings. Acquisition, storage, care.
Count the time you have to work for your stuff, the time you have to take care of it, once acquired.
Don´t forget to think about what else you could have done with that time, with that money. Think about places you could afford to see, experiences and memories you could have.
For people who have children, there´s also the intention of leaving something good for them. But demographics have changed, just as the quality of merchandise has changed.
In the olden days, things were made to last for several generations, handed down from father to son or mother to daughter. I, too, have some items that did once belong to my great-grandmother.
But today, most things do not even come with a one-lifetime warranty. Mass-produced goods are not supposed to outlive their owners. And- which is in and of itself a good thing- people get to live a lot longer than they used to.
And that means that, if parents live to be eighty or ninety years, their children will have to build a complete household from scratch without relying on any heirlooms coming their way.
So, without any bad intention, they will in all probability not have any use for most of the things they find in their late parents´ homes, just because they had to acquire what they needed to live long ago.
Thus, acquiring things in the hope of passing them down to offspring someday does, in most cases, not make any sense.
For those of us who do not have any offspring, the question never even comes up.

So what do you want to do? Live your life, which means having experiences and building memories, or spend it on stuff?

To me, that is not a question. But I know that those acquisition reflexes die hard, and I must always be on guard against stuff taking over more of my life than I care to miss.

Julia

Biting the bullet

2011-08-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

I have, in the last months, experienced weight fluctuations the like of which I hadn´t seen in a long while. Differences of up to four pounds from one day to the next, all other things like circumstances of weigh-in being equal. So, it is quite possibly my body´s water regulation playing tricks on me, as I am not -I swear- overeating enough to warrant such gains. What´s more, they sometimes drop off me again in equally giant jumps. Without having had any, er, syptoms of accelerated excretion, that is.
So, I have to content myself with maintaining right now, it seems.
The nasty weather we had also kept me from my morning walks for several days already, as I didn´t want to catch a case of the summer flu.
Now, I don´t know if last year was exceptionally lucky for losing weight and everything else, but this year it seems someone put the hex on it. I know whining doesn´t help, but still...I´d be glad if things were to pick up at last.

Julia

Still stuck

2011-08-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

The total change of my weight in July was...zilch. Zero. Nix. Rien. Nada.
I´m right back where I started from at the beginning of the month. .
And that in spite of being very, very good with what I ate.
Perhaps a maintain, technically, is also a success. But I´d rather succeed at losing.
The weekend brought none of the optimistically expected tidying, decluttering or rearranging. Rather, I had a long date with a steam iron (can you tell I hate ironing?) and a warehouse shopping expedition that has filled up our pantry and freezer again.
Do you know that feeling of rowing as hard as you can just to avoid sliding back? That´s what I feel now, and the rainy and way- too-cold-for-August weather we are having adds to it. I´d curl up under the covers and sleep if I could, but that wouldn´t change anything, really.
So, I have to keep hanging on.
It´s just so hard not to get discouraged sometimes.

Julia

Get up and go

2011-07-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

For several days now, I have been going to bed an hour earlier. The result -somewhat confusingly- is that I am feeling, not less, but more tired in the mornings, which may be due to a typical sleep cycle lasting two hours, so it may just be that I am right now trying to get up in the middle of one where I was used to getting up at the end of one. The experimental way to verify that would be to go to sleep two hours earlier, something which would make a real impact on the way I spend my evenings.
Still, I did go out for my morning power walk every day, stumbling down the stairs from our flat half asleep still, and then slowly waking up fully while already striding through the lush greenery of the neighboring park.
I take it for a good sign of a habit becoming entrenched that I could walk half of my customary round of the park on autopilot, so to speak, and I can attest to the fact that pumping your body full of oxygene works as well as a cup of coffee to wake you up (not that I didn´t add the latter for good measure).
And I found out that the park has some new tenants. There´s a woodpecker with moss-green wings and a red head, and a pair of little black-and-white birds with bright red beaks whose antics make me smile every morning.
There has been a time in my life when I would not have appreciated something like that. I am glad I can appreciate it now.
Oh, maybe we will attack the long-planned rearranging and painting project in our flat this weekend. If I can get DH to help me...
Perhaps we should do some serious decluttering first, to further reduce the amount of stuff to deal with.
The worst part of the rearranging will be DH´s big bookcase and desk, both family heirlooms, that can´t be taken apart and will be a b**** to move around. Especially since they, of all the things to be moved, are supposed to go into a room on the opposite side of the flat, around a corner in a narrow corridor. If that doesn´t work, we´d have to rearrange the whole living room to fit those things into. You can tell easily I don´t like either item, but DH is totally attached to them, so there´s no chance of getting rid of them anytime soon.

This is going to be interesting...

Julia

Lasagna woes

2011-07-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

There´s a very popular comic strip kitty with a penchant for lasagna, and then there´s DH who likes to have home-made lasagna, too.
Yesterday, he did ask for it, and I did prepare some. Actually, I have been tweaking the recipe for somewhat less calories by replacing the better part of the ground meat in the bolognese sauce with cut-up vegetables.Still, I found out that there was one big impediment to keeping portions at the correct size, namely, that I do not yet have oven-proof lasagna dishes that hold single portions. I have oven-proof single-size platters that are great for putting toast on or anything else with cheese on top to melt, but they are too low at the sides so the bolognese sauce would just run out and the lasagna leaves would stay hard and dry. Nothing to say of the mess that would make in the oven.
So I took the next size rectangular oven-proof dish, which we used to take for preparing lasagna before I started to curtail our portion sizes. And, of course, I had to fill it up so that the lasagna leaves would be well immersed in sauce.
Guess what- I divided the contents by half, as I had been wont to do, and- we both didn´t finish our plates because we were feeling full much sooner than we used to. The remains, we tossed (not enough for another meal).
While that is a sort of NSV (not stuffing myself beyond capacity with a food I genuinely like because I don´t want to waste anything), the "waste" part of that is still bothering me.
Now, I prefer not to have any unitaskers in my kitchen if I can avoid it. And two portion-sized lasagna dishes would certainly fall under that heading.
Then again, I remember seeing, at the local mall, exactly these, sized just like the lasagna leaves you can buy ready-to-cook. As the bottom surface of the other dish is about three times that size, I know that using the smaller dishes would help me to prepare exactly the amount of lasagna we would really eat and not waste anything.
I think there´s a shopping expedition in my future...

Julia

Sleeping it off...

2011-07-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

...no, not a hangover. My condensable weight.
I had noticed that my weight was, in spite of my efforts, practically stuck. What I hadn´t really noticed was how little sleep I had been getting during the last weeks.
The culprit? TV programmers who schedule the most interesting programs after the late night show, a comfortable lounge chair, and the fact that I like to sit together with DH, having those wonderful deep conversations that have a tendency to become even deeper with advancing hours at night.
Add to that a full-time occupation that requires me to get up for work rather early, and you get a sleep schedule that rarely even reaches the minimum seven hours.
And I am, actually, a long sleeper. I did an experiment when in the last stages of learning for my exams ( I could make free use of my time then). And I found out that, if I removed external stimuli like an alarm clock, or a schedule I had to meet, I was prone to sleep for about nine to ten hours before waking up naturally.
If I did that now there´d be no way I could meet all of my obligations.
But there´s one thing I can do. Not goof off mindlessly in front of the TV.
I´ll have to change that if I want to take good care of myself.
Perhaps I should set an alarm clock, not for getting up in the morning, but for going to bed at night. And resign myself to not watching those late late shows.
After all, most of the time I´m half asleep anyway by the time that I ought to go to bed.
And most of the programs will be re-aired anyway, too.

It´s the old story about wanting to have it all.
Wanting to know it all or to see it all have a similar effect. Because nobody can, in today´s world, watch all of the programs, or acquire all the knowledge.
The idea of an encyclopedia that contained all the knowledge there was could only have arisen at a time when mankind knew, all in all, very little.
And watching all of the programs became impossible on the day the second TV station went on air, because that´s when people had to decide if they wanted to watch program one or program two.
Deciding is what it is about. I have decided to live a healthier life, and that means I have to decide which things in my life are contributing to that and which ones aren´t.
It is always astounding to find out that there are still new things that I must factor in when trying to recondense myself.
Now I must try not to allow that insight to end up as another part of the pavement on a road to a very warm place...:).

Julia