How Time Runs...

It´s been almost a month since I last found the time and energy to do a blog post. First, I had to stand in for my colleague while he was on vacation. That of itself would have kept me rather busy, but, to add insult to injury, we were, after that over-rainy spring and the inundation we had, struck by the worst heat wave in quite a while. 

Now if there´s one thing I cannot stand it´s extreme heat. When I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, the one thing I immediately ruled out was going into diplomatic service. Not that it wouldn´t have interested me, but you have to be able to live in the tropics, and I´m simply not heatproof. So, having temperatures bordering on forty degrees centigrade for almost three weeks, on top of the extra workload, was definitely too much for me. The office building I work in doesn´t have air condition, so the electric fan under my desk was running all day, and we have an air pollution problem, too (new building that hasn´t gassed out properly yet), that is definitely worse when it´s hot and relatively humid. Which meant coughing, rheumy eyes and headaches. 

I did the best I could do under the circumstances. Blogging was not a part of it. Neither was exercise- if I am glad if I can make it home without collapsing from heat exhaustion, there´s no way I´ll go exhausting myself even more. And while we had fresh veggie salad for dinner regularly, and drank plenty of water to avoid heatstroke, I didn´t take too much care of the food side of weightloss, either. 

Together with the water retention and edema that regularly come when it gets too hot, that translates to, essentially, a stall. 82,8 kilograms per this morning. Of which I hope at least a few are water, judging from the way my rings are cutting into my fingers. When the heat subsides, they will hopefully drop off me again.

 The heat was actually so extreme that DH´s  tower PC broke down and had to be replaced, which meant introducing ourselves to the "wonders" of the most recent incarnation of WIndows (tm) operating system and several days´worth of setting everything back up in working order. Luckily, it wasn´t the hard disk that had burned out, so we could at least save the data. That´ll teach DH about backing things up... I´m glad I know how to do those things myself, else we´d have had to pay through the nose for having someone else do them. But it still took me all weekend. We were lucky, still, in that a big electronics store in town is closing down so we got the necessary hard- and software at a hefty discount. So, I probably shouldn´t complain. It could have happened at a much more inopportune time. As such things go, having to shop for one thing often leads to discovering another.

In this case, it was the fact that fitbit activity trackers are now also available in Germany. 

I am now the proud owner of a Fitbit One tracker (which I wear clipped into my bra) and the matching app on my ipad. The best thing is that the app ties in with the sparkpeople app I already used for journalling my food. 

The first data collected points to several things I could improve.  

First, I get too little sleep. An average of six hours is certainly not enough for me. 

Second, on an ordinary day I usually have about 5000 steps, even less when I am staying at home on the weekend. There´s room for improvement there. 

Having the flights of stairs I climb counted has made me stop using the elevator at work. Together with our elevatorless flat, that makes the preset stair climbing setting of ten a day the only thing I regularly top. 

If the calories spent calculation on that thing is halfway correct, I must not wonder about my weight being stuck, as I have been eating quite exactly at maintenance level. If I want to recondense some more (which I do want) that means having to cut down even more. Or taking up some form of exercise... 

For the time being, I am still collecting data. The forced inactivity of the heat wave probably gave me less than representative data until now. As it has become a bit cooler, there might be more activity on my part to record. 

I know, why don´t I just do some exercise. But I want to keep that to the absolute minimum I can get away with. Any weight loss I can only achieve by making heroic efforts would probably turn out to be not maintainable if circumstances changed so that I would be prevented from said heroic efforts. And there are several ticking time bombs, so to speak, that might make circumstances change from one moment to the next without my being able to prevent it. I can just pray that doesn´t happen. 

Until then I have to make the best of circumstances as they are. 

What the heat wave did do for me was provide a minor non-scale victory. 

When I was at my top weight, I had taken to wearing floor-length skirts to cover up my legs. After recondensing, I had stopped wearing these, as they were actually quite frumpy, and kept only trousers to wear. 

This year, when I went shopping for some light pants to wear when it started getting hot, I couldn´t find any I liked. Instead, I tried on some knee-length pencil skirts they had on sale. Guess what, they fit. In a size 44 (about a size ten in US measurements). I bought myself a wide red belt and matching ballerina flats to wear with them, and some brand new pantyhose because, you guessed it, the old ones I still had are by now way too big, too. 

I even got a few compliments from female coworkers on that look. 

Wearing a short skirt was something I had not done in a long while. It feels good to be able to do it again. 

And to have a bit more variety in what I can wear. 

I don´t have the style of what I´ll wear when reaching goal pat yet, but I´m working on it. 

Julia

Eye of the needle

For well over a year, DH and I had not gotten around to doing any trips purely for pleasure. So, when the new edition of that out-of-town appointment that gave me a spontaneous holiday two weeks ago was coming early on Monday, we decided to make a quick escape and both took off Tuesday, too. 

Which explains the bloggy silence. 

Ancient buildings, historical churches, timber-framed houses, a candlelight dinner, and both of us soaking up the atmosphere of a thriving and alive city. 

And on the next day, sightseeing in a nearby castle that offered, from the top of the tower, a breathtaking view of the surrounding landscape.

To enjoy this, of course, I had to climb that tower. 

The last iterations of the winding staircase were just wide enough to pass through.

Had I attempted to climb that tower three years ago, that would have been the place I could not go on because there was no way sixty-plus more pounds of me could have fit through that passage. 

This time, I just continued the climb and enjoyed the view. And I wasn´t even out of breath when exiting the staircase.

There have been many occasions where I stayed at the foot of a tower or a hill while DH climbed it and brought down the pictures of what I might have seen had I managed to move my fat body up there. 

Today, we can enjoy the sights together, first hand. 

That, too, is Why I Do This.

Julia

Tubby revelation

It's been cold and wet over here during the last days, which meant a flare-up of my back and leg pain, probably from my muscles cramping up with the cold. So I decided to do something unusual and take a hot bath yesterday.
Now this is unusual because I had stopped bathing several years ago. Not what you think, I do of course shower daily, but that bathtub.... I had stopped using it after a particularly humiliating experience of being wedged in there so tightly that I had to call for DH to help extract me from it. Plain and simple, I had become too fat to use that tub. So I didn't.
Those sore muscles yesterday made me rethink that decision. After all, I'm down five clothes sizes from that day of humiliation.
Guess what, I'm also down one bathtub size- not only did I fit in there, I had several inches of wiggle room on either side. Comparing that to the memory of that beached whale stuck in the same tub fighting to extract myself from it sure brought home how far I have come since that day.
So it wasn't just the hot, fragrant water I enjoyed, but also a major NSV.
Which helped the soreness and upped the motivation.



Julia

Shopping bags

Ever so often, even if we are trying to cut down on grocery shopping, there comes a day when the pantry needs restocking, so we drive to the local equivalent of Costco and get us a carload of frozen veggies, canned beans, bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and of course a load of milk products, too, while we´re at it.
All that stuff goes into our insulated grocery shopping bags. These are big enough to put a bottle crate into one, so there´s plenty of room inside. When they are filled, they are rather heavy.
So there we were unloading the car after our shopping trip, and I remarked to DH how heavy the bag I was just handling felt, and that I had lost more than the equivalent of two of those, wondering aloud at the fact that I had, back then, been able to climb the three flights of stairs to our flat at all.
DH looked at the bags and said, no way could I have had that much extra baggage on me.
So, before unpacking, we put the bags on the scales.
It turned out that it wasn´t two of them, it was all three, fully loaded, which together equalled about the weight I have already recondensed.
I stood there, looking at the bags, picking them up from the floor to feel their weight.
And I remembered what it had felt like to have all that condensable matter on my body, sticking to me, weighing me down. 
I don´t ever want to be back in that place.


Julia

Worker´s Day

As I mentioned earlier, yesterday was a legal holiday in Germany, and the weather, for once, was quite celebratory, too.
DH being out of town, I took the chance to go at the housework that had been left undone over the weekend.
And I found out that sometimes, having the right tools equals the difference between impossible and possible.
Namely, about four years ago the entrance door to our flat had come off its hinges (I guess the workers who installed it didn´t properly fix it in the first place), and, when forcing it open so we could get in, we had left an ugly semi-circle of black markings on the laminate floor from the door scratching against the ground. These had, until now, proved resistant to every method of removal, and I had already assumed that they were damages to the top layer of the floor.
Now, some weeks ago I had discovered a new kind of microfibre cloth at our local drugstore, with a "scratchy" side that doesn´t abrade. These had already helped to get some glue marks off our window sills that the workers who built the place had left, and which also had withstood years of scrubbing at them with other instruments. With the sun shining into our corridor yesterday, those black marks on the floor stood out even more than usual, so I decided to try and remove them.
Ten minutes of elbow grease, fortified by plastic cleaner, later- the supposed scratches had proved to be rub-off from the door insulation, and entirely removable.
Which means that I have a clean entrance again and don´t have to be greeted by something that looks broken any more when coming home.
And I also removed the last of our winter coats from the corridor wardrobe to their respective places inside our freshly aired-out and wiped-down closets. This time, I put moth paper into each coat pocket, as I definitely don´t want another surprise of the holey kind in autumn.

I´m typing this with the windows wide open, and right now, a big fat bumblebee came in, made a beeline around the desk, and flew out again.
Smack in the middle of a city, no less.

As for weight loss, my weight is still going down slowly. But the changes to my body are becoming more evident. Witness the white blouse I´m wearing today. Last year, it was tight-fitting. This year, it´s so wide that I have to button up my leather vest to avoid getting indecent exposure- or wear a tank top beneath, which pretty much nixes the appeal of a white cotton blouse as far as coolness of material is concerned.

NSV of the day: When I sat up in bed this morning, I was looking down at my legs- which look about half as wide as they used to look, but then I flexed my feet a bit and- could actually see my calf muscles move!
For a long time, there was so much fat on my calves that those muscles had been completely hidden from view, so this is a major success.

And the scales say just 27 pounds to go until I am, by BMI,  normal-weighted again. More than two thirds of the way, gone.

And I am going onwards.


Julia

Footprints

In front of our shower, just besides the scales, lies a red terrycloth foot towel to prevent slipping when getting out wet.
For the longest time, the wet footprints I left on that were looking like the full outline of my foot, with no trace left of an arch, and I had resigned myself to believing that all that extra weight must have collapsed the arches on my feet. I could, at that time, wear no shoes that didn´t have moulded insoles if I didn´t want my feet to start hurting badly after walking or standing for even a short moment.
When I looked at the wet footprints I left this morning, what I saw was... a healthy-looking footprint, with no trace of a flat foot any more. The change may be partly due to some fat having condensed off my feet, and the other part would be the reduced pressure from those seventy-plus pounds less weighing on them.
It´s a small detail, but one more thing to show me how far I have come. What it also shows me is that at least some of the changes in my body brought on by having been obese are really reversible.
And I´m glad about that.

Julia

Results are showing (again:()

I happened to meet an old neighbour today on the way to work. She stopped in her tracks, looked at me, and asked in a whisper: "How much weight did you lose?"
That was the good part.
And then came a reminder of things past which I had, while not forgotten, put into a very secluded place of my memory.
"Didn´t you lose so much weight when you were living in the same house as we were, already?"
I did. And then I thought I didn´t need to follow up with watching what I put in my mouth. And I gained all of it back, and then some. And found myself third-degree obese, almost immobile, and despairing of ever losing weight again.
I mentioned before that there is a time between the 80s of last century and the change of the millenium of which I have no data about my weight. I actually avoided the scales during that time a lot. Especially when I could already feel that I had been gaining.
It was during that time that I lost the weight my neighbour talked about. She did, today, even admit that her husband had suspected me of having gotten weight loss surgery, which I hadn´t.
The only thing that I had been doing was...
...you guessed it. Protein shakes for breakfast and journalling what I ate. I had, back then, the old Weight Watchers (TM) programme on a compact disk ( that was before they started their online stuff). Which, finally that I remember now, is also the explanation for the big gap in my weight lists. I had simply kept that list with that programme, and when that became unusable because it wouldn´t work with the more recent operating systems any more, hadn´t bothered to save the data before abandoning the former platform for good.
Today, I wish I had. Saves me right for not backing up my data.
But I digress.
The reminder, to me, was of what would happen if I stopped doing what I do now, if I stopped watching my weight and what I eat, if I were to just go back to mindlessly munching.
These things have been catapulting me back into Obesity Hell once already.
This time, I must not ever forget the lesson to be learned from the past.

I needed that reminder. Even if it came in the guise of a compliment.
Don´t stop doing what works, and don´t go back to doing what didn´t work.


Julia

Ribs and clavicles

I knew they had to be somewhere underneath all this fat, but yesterday...

...DH hugged me, and suddenly he paused and said "what´s this?". with his index finger running down my flank, probing for something, and then poking me a bit to show me what he meant.

What the..?
I touched that spot, too, and burst out laughing (as he´d probably intended, too). "These are called ribs, darling, and yes, I have them, too".
On closer inspection in the mirror, I found that my clavicles have emerged from their longtime hiding place, too.
So it seems to be true that my body is rearranging itself at the weight I have reached before recondensing further. Being able to feel my clavicles and ribs again instead of a solid layer of fat covering them feels good.
So, even though the scales haven´t really moved in the right direction lately, it seems I´m still recondensing. Perhaps it´s just my skin shrinking back to my present size, but I am getting slimmer.
And when my body has done adapting to its present weight, maybe I´ll be able to lose some weight again.


Julia

Bowing down to work

Some things never occur to you until long after they happened. Case in point, while I was at my top weight it never occurred to me how much my weight had reduced my ability to bend over. I just had gotten into the habit of going down on my knees if any kind of work had to be done that involved picking things up from the floor, or working close to it. The reason for that was, of course, my protruding stomach that effectively squeezed off my breath had I tried to bend over instead, but the avoidance maneuvre of kneeling down had become so automatic that I didn´t even think about it any more.
Over the weekend, we´ve been visiting MIL who has a problem with moss that keeps growing on her tiled patio due to high humidity from a nearby river. After a relatively mild winter, it was time again for some scraping. The last time I did that, I went down on all fours, and ruined a pair of pants in the process because that green stuff gives you some very tenacious discolorations on your knees. This time, I took the scraper- bent forwards and scraped the stuff off, never touching knee to ground.  Only when I finished did I realize that I had done anything differently than before.
It´s the little things like that which make it worth recondensing the excess weight.
Bending over to pick up something. Sitting down in an armchair without being afraid of having it wedged to my bottom when getting up again. Sitting down on any chair without worrying about whether it will collapse.
For far too long, these were things I had resigned myself to being incapable of.
In my experience, there are so many things that I couldn´t do any more with my fat body, and which I can do again after recondensing the greater part of my excess weight, that I think that people who claim that there is no difference between being fat and being slim must be where I was. Up a river in Egypt, big time.
The thing being that even if I was in denial about how many things I couldn´t do any more, the limitations my body´s shape imposed on me didn´t disappear. I was, for all practical purposes, handicapped. Trying to find ways to work around the handicap was not changing the fact that I did, by doing so, not make it go away.
The most important thing for me was not giving up the hope of finding a way to recondense my extra pounds. For me, it was cutting out carbs and shrinking portion sizes that did the trick. For somebody else, it may be counting points, or whatever.
While I, as a now almost former fatty who did hear it all over the years, do think that shaming people because of their weight, or discriminating against them because of the shape of their bodies, is dead wrong, I still believe that encouraging them to find out a sustainable-for-them  way of getting to a more functional body shape isn´t the same thing as discriminating against them. A paraplegic, or a blind person, do generally not have the chance of doing something to make their handicap go away. We fatties, on the other hand, have a chance at making our physical situation better. Since there is, in my experience, not a one-fits-all solution that would allow each of us to take that chance, it´s up to each of us to be mindful about our bodies, experiment with different possibilities, and find the one that works for our bodies.
What everybody who wants to lose weight has to remember is that slower can be better. When I finally started to lose weight, one of my bigger fears was that I´d end up with my skin being too big for my body, necessitating cosmetic surgery. I am, after all, not so young any more that I could trust my skin to shrink back along with my weight. I´m glad to find myself, after losing, on average, half a pound a week for a total of over sixty pounds, without any turkey neck or excess skin folds. I´m certain the protein supplements I use helped there, too.
Finding out what works for you, and sticking to it.
It´s working for me, and it just may work for you. Whatever your shape.


Julia

Woolen joymakers

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

Off the lists

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

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
 

Double trouble

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

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

Missus with a big M

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...

...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

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

Autumn arriving

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

Teetering on the brink...

..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

I´m melting

...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