Stop this train, I want to get off!

Ever since the last weekend, my eating has been out of control. Or rather, out of any boundary in spite of trying to control it. The 500 calorie surplus has risen to a 6000 calorie one in the space of a single week. I am bloated, dizzy, tired. Tired enough to fall asleep as soon as I close my eyes, regardless of whether I am in a bed or sitting in my office. And, as usual, I try to fight the feeling of being completely drained by refuelling, that is, by eating. I have no idea what else would give me my energy back, well, perhaps except sleeping. But the food does not give me energy, either. And sleeping in is just a dream as long as the situation stays the same. I wish there was anything else, legal, of course, that would bring my energy back. Or my ability to concentrate. 

At least I have the next weeks off. But before that, I have to get rid of the backlog. 

First the trouble with my eyes. Then fatigue. 

And the weather keeps going up and down like crazy. 

Fool me once...

I have changed to a different logging app for my food that is Germany based and has most generic and brand name foods already preinstalled. It also syncs with Fitbit. 

And I have started to weigh and measure my food to get as exact a value as possible. 

Shock number one: Once again, I misestimated what I ate. Namely, the small stuff that I mentally neglected completely. If I want to generate a sizable deficit calorie-wise, these small items completely used it up. As in 50 calories for the little bit of chocolate flakes or 70 calories for a mini dip bowl of vanilla pudding. Or 25 calories per cup of tea with cream. Or 70 for a squirt of whipped cream. I had guesstimated the whole bowl at less than 100. 

Shock number two: It took me a whole week to realize that I must reset my daily calorie allotment to basal metabolic rate if I don´t want the Fitbit calories to be added on top of my brutto calories. 

So, my BMR for my goal weight is 1320 calories. The fitbit has, last week, added some 400 to 800 calories a day. Which means that to make sure of that 500 calorie a day deficit I ought to eat less than 1000 calories a day.

Weight this morning: 96,2 kilos. And it looks like I´m getting my period.   

Back in Onederland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally. And hopefully for the last time.

Julia

Same old same old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

That Time Again

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

Or so I thought. 

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

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

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

Sometimes I really hate my body.

Julia

Stop Before You Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only knowing what to change meant doing the change.

Julia

Strawberries, Asparagus and Wasps

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

Unfortunately, we had visitors. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

Needed reminder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

The Law of Three

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

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

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

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

Shame on me.

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

No one to blame for the weight gain but us. 

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

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

Never give up. 

Julia

Out of commission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

Fresh air at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

It´s just incredible. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And hope for my weight to start moving down again.

Julia

And the stress goes on...

I hadn´t really believed that I would be able to finish my work in time before I´m officially on vacation, had I? The number of COMAFUS (completely monumental administrative f...ups)  that had to be taken immediate care of has been staggering these last two weeks, and the pileup of files that need taking care of before I can close up shop for the year has been rising proportionally. So, no weekend. No preparing for the holidays at leisure. Instead, I am chained to my desk for the time being, racing the clock for everything that needs doing to be done. So, no Robinson act (he had all his work done by Friday...), but the one thing I had wanted to avoid, namely the end-of-year dash for dear life. 

Weightloss, under those conditions, has been impossible. The extra stress hormones that restricting what I eat would have triggered would probably have driven me over the edge of a burnout. So, no restricting. I have been eating, unrestrictedly, to the point of satiety. Carbs, too, for their tranquilizing effect. And I am paying for it with another two-pound gain already. 88.7 kilos.

WTF. 

Actually, I have to take it easy with the late working hours. If I get less than seven hours of shuteye, my concentration and everything goes downhill fast, so, no all-nighters except for the last one, after which I can sleep a bit longer than usual. 

Browsing on Amazon, I stumbled upon the works of one Matt Stone. He´s critical of the whole Paleo movement, and of dieting in general, claiming that undereating (or eating the wrong kinds of food) for a lengthy period will downregulate one´s metabolism, by way of a continuously activated stress reaction, because -as he says- ketosis involves the secretion of adrenaline (at least that´s how I understand it) and you can run yourself into a bad case of adrenal fatigue by long-term dieting. 

Unfortunately, the way he writes it it sounds a lot more stringent than what I just wrote. And the list of symptoms he offers, I could turn into a checklist of what is not feeling quite right about my body right now. 

The scary part is his solution. Unlimited eating. Whatever and whenever one desires. He claims that the body will finally self-regulate, even if it does at first gain weight. 

If my body were able to self-regulate I´d not drag around 44 pounds of extra blubber in the first place. Then again, I have been down another 20 pounds already, with the regain obviously being driven by the extra stress I had this year, as if dieting stress plus workload stress had been too much for me. 

Perhaps that explains the infamous weight switch being activated after the flooding. 

Now if I knew how to make my body stop gaining without toppling myself over into a burnout... 

I´ll be having a two-week vacation over the holidays. Perhaps that will help. 

I´d rather be losing weight than losing the fight against my body...

And if Mr. Stone´s premise is valid, I´ll be losing the fight. 

I am scared of gaining it all back. 

Julia 

Results Typical

My weight has been doing somersaults again. Yesterday I saw 89 kilos which is a number I had hoped I would never see again, meaning as it does a full 10 kilogram regain. Today, I was back down at 87,6 kilos, which is still way too much. 

Dragging around 20 superfluous kilograms of fat is wearing me down quite a bit. My back and my knees are once more screaming in protest, which means that I am even less inclined to use the stairs at the office. It also does a number on my sleep as I find it increasingly difficult to find a position that does not hurt. The resulting fatigue comes on top of that which dragging around all of that blubber gives me anyway. 

Of course, as usual, there´s a bad case of December fever going round, meaning that the number of urgent things to be dealt with has skyrocketed. I don´t know if I can get everything done before the holidays require my presence with family. Not a good thing. And not conducive to being able to restrict my eating either. 

One third of what I had lost has by now found me again. If I look at statistics about the average success rate of weight loss, I am still ahead. But if I could not stop the regain, I´d be back among the "typical results" very soon. 

So what- cut out the carbs, step up my water (or unsweetened tea) intake, and hope for the best. The more drastic measures will have to wait until after Christmas. Stepping into the new year that far above morbid obesity was not what I planned on. But if I want to stay functional, the drastic measures I´d obviously need to shock my body back into losing mode are out of the question. 

The interesting part is that I can precisely date the point where the maintenance I had achieved suddenly became a rapid regain. 

Namely, the first week of June. The time when we had the inundation, were off the grid and had to subsist on bread and fast food for two weeks. 

Had I known then what would ensue, I would have gone on a two-week fast instead. 

What still stymies me is that these two weeks seem to have turned a switch in my body from "lose" to "gain", and that any attempts I have made since to switch that back again seem to have had absoultely no effect whatsoever on the rate of regain. 

Half a pound a week, on average. Like clockwork. My Fat Watch curve goes up practically in a straight line.

And it´s not as if I had been on a six-month binge. 

What with the fatigue I am constantly fighting, I am even afraid to lower my intake further lest I make that worse by missing out on nutritients. 

For the most time, I actually stay below the recommended daily intake for my size/gender/weight/ activity level. 

If the body really is an accountability machine, mine got damaged during the flood. 

It´s not easy to not give up the hope that it might still be repairable. 

Julia

Backing down slowly

Monday morning´s WI gave me a fierce determination to stop this. I took the chance of DH being out of town and embarked on what was essentially a three-day intermittent fast, as in no food before six p.m. and no food after ten p.m. The result per today: back down by about three pounds. 87.1 kilograms. But I know I am by no means home free. 

DH´s back, so I will have to contend with having to partake in breakfast and dinner. Of course, he is being supportive. He also chides me whenever he thinks I am going too low with my intake. Which means that the kind of restriction I can do when he´s not around is not possible. 

I know. Once more, I am not being kind to my body. But, dammit, if I had a child or a dog who would not obey me I would punish them, too. And I am not going to take any insubordinance from that bag of flesh any more, either. It stops gaining, or I stop, as far as possible, feeding it. 

Of course, there is a minimum requirement of food if I want to keep functioning. And there are those awful holidays ahead, complete with having to cook and visit MIL. Both of which I don´t really fancy at this stage. The usual end-of-year snafus at the office get on top of that. 

Seeing the four-month-at-one-view calendar in my office and the glimpse of January it already shows, I only hope that I will at least, until my b-day in March, be back below morbid obesity, normal weight being absolutely out of reach. 

I never would have thought that those two weeks in June when I had, perforce, to eat carbohydrate-y stuff like bread would throw such a wrench into my recondensing project. I should have fasted instead, because two weeks of a growling stomach would not have been as bad as regaining twenty pounds. 

The 20-20 vision of hindsight...

Julia

Skyrocketing

Two full years. That´s what I have been thrown back by now. 

The number I saw when weighing myself this morning is one I last saw in November 2011. 88.4 kilograms.195 pounds. After getting down to 174 pounds last year, that means I have gained back 21 pounds. Almost ten kilograms. Or, in other words, almost a third of what I had recondensed. Most of it within the last six months. My Fat Watch curve is going up almost vertically. 

The scary part is that I haven´t binged. No eating to the point of being stuffed. Just eating what I used to believe was normally. 

I have no idea why my body has decided it wants those pounds back. 

What I have noticed is that the aches are coming back. Hips, feet, knees hurting. Shortness of breath when climbing the stairs. 

If I keep gaining at that rate, having recondensed myself would be history within just another year. 

Definitely not what I want. 

The search for what causes the regain does unearth a few things that have changed from the time I was recondensing. 

My workload has been hitting an all-time high. The private life stressors, such as eldercare, have increased. The air pollution problem at my office has become worse. 

Is my body wanting to buffer me against all that? And if it is, what could I do to deal with the extra stress other than become fatter? 

The dominating feature of what I feel like health-wise is the chronic fatigue that has me falling asleep in front of the TV almost every night. On some days it´s so bad that I fall asleep at the office with my head on the keyboard. Even when I have just gotten up from a full night´s sleep you could put me in a horizontal position, tell me to close my eyes and I would be fast asleep within minutes. 

Being able to sleep until I am no longer tired is the number one item on my wish list. 

Unfortunately, what with having to go to work and the long-distance care of an old woman who has to be reminded by phone of taking her medicine, which means the first phone call of the day by eight a.m. and the last by ten p.m. that is not in the cards for a long time. 

I have been tracking my sleep via my fitbit, and rarely do I get more than seven hours of sleep. What I would probably need is eight to nine. 

But tell that to DH who is not ready to push bedtime forward beyond eleven, twelve p.m., or beyond the late night news. 

I am actually glad about having my Grandfather´s easy chair to sit in and doze off while DH is feeding his TV addiction. Going to bed instead would have him either irritated or worried, and talking at me until I were wide awake again in either case. 

Even when he´s out of town he insists on calling me after ten p.m. and gets annoyed when I´m not enthusiastic enough about his call. 

No, I am not angry at him. I´m just bone tired. 

And when I´m tired, my body screams for energy, aka food. 

Not a good place to be when I want to recondense myself. 

The studies that link lack of sleep with weight gain are spot on, obviously.

So what do I do to get myself back on track and stop that regain? 

Sleep more, obviously. 

Eight hours per night would be nice. 

Eat less, as obviously. 

And watch out for portion creep.

The most recent addition to my kitchen is a set of stainless measuring cups and spoons to help me measure and track my food. Living in Germany where everything is metric makes it difficult to use the tracking apps sometimes if amounts are only given by the cup or teaspoon. 

As it is, using those measuring spoons has given me a nasty surprise when I compared them to what I used to employ for measuring. Namely, the tablespoon I used to measure fats in holds twice what the calibrated tablespoon measure holds. Same thing with the cup measure and the teaspoon one.

So, I have been consuming twice as much as I thought even when I thought I was measuring everything. 

Time to pick myself off the floor, dust myself off and get back on track. Before that trip on a fireworks rocket run wild takes me back to where I never again want to be. 

Julia

White Flag

Today´s WI: 86.9 kgs. So, my weight is still rising. EIght kilograms, in total, gained back. 

Saying I am frustrated about what my body does doesn´t cover it. 

Then again, those last weeks had a number of Very Urgent and Very Stressful experiences. The kind that makes memories of old VU and VS experiences come back full force, experiences which I still rate among the worst things that have happened to me and which were, without wanting to go any deeper into them, at the root of my first descent into binge eating disorder and morbid obesity.

At those times, it´s all I can do to keep functioning and try not to let my PTSD get the better of me. 

And, as I found out to my own dismay, food still is my coping tool of choice. So I did have some cookies, I did have some of those mint-filled chocolates, I did have bread spread with grass-fed butter and a bit of peanut butter on top. I stopped counting calories, too. 

All in all, there were about seven or eight ´days I went absolutely over my maintenance calorie allotment. The two-pound gain tells me how far. 

But there´s something else. When the situation came, I allowed myself those foods, consciously, and knowing that anything that would raise my serotonin levels would be beneficial to me. 

The positive part was that for the first time in such a situation, I was able to stop eating before I had finished up every last morsel of food before me. I opened a box of cookies and ate just half of them. I had two slices of bread and left the rest of the pack intact. And I felt satisfied after that. 

There used to be a time when nothing short of running out of food or reaching the physical limits of what my stomach could hold would have stopped me. 

So, perhaps, I have become better at this after all. 

The situation will last for another week or so, and then maybe I´ll be able to climb back on the wagon.

The price of passing through this time is knowing that I definitely won´t be normal-weighted when I turn fifty next year. I´d be glad if I managed to get back down to not being obese. As it is, when the turbulences have passed, I intend to do a week-long all-protein fast to turn around my metabolism again. 

At least, I want to get back below obesity. ASAP.

Julia

Stuck and Hungry

The curve of my weight has been steadily climbing for about four months. Actually, when I look at the long-term curve, my weight is climbing as fast as it came off two years ago. 

And I am continuously hungry. 

Strangely, what I am jonesing for isn´t the high carb stuff. It´s lipids. Fat. Grease.

As in bacon, butter, greasy sausages. 

When I grew up, that stuff was definitely not a part of everyday fare. My mother had had a bout with hepatitis C, and the medics had advised her to avoid anything fatty. So, family meals were definitely low-fat. 

And that was what I mostly stuck to, with the exception of a spaghetti aglio e olio phase I went through. Eating Low Fat was not difficult for me. 

So why should I suddenly want to stuff myself with grease-dripping fried bacon? 

Or fry my morning eggs with an extra pat of butter on top of the bacon?

Maybe it is an aftereffect of the flooding experience and losing all of my food stores in a single day. When my binge eating disorder was at its worst, the only way for me not to go bingeing on fast food was if I knew that I had plenty of food in the house. Which was one of the reasons why the losses were so big when the freezer stopped working. Keeping my food stores well filled meant security. Having them destroyed so brutally might have upset the precarious balance I had reached in dealing with food and eating. 

Or it might be my flirt with going paleo. Having things like bacon suddenly on the list of allowed foods might have been more than I could handle. 

As it is, there is still enough human fat on my body that there cannot be a medical reason for the fat cravings I experience. 

I definitely do not need to administer any lipids to my body, apart what would be needed for getting my fat-soluble vitamins in. 

And I do not need to provide my body with the extra calories all that fatty stuff brings. 

On top of it all, my vision problems haven´t cleared up. Today, I suddenly found myself experiencing what the French term "triplopie", meaning that I saw, not a double but a triple image in my right eye. As I have been born legally blind on the left eye, that meant I had to stop working and call it a day. 

One probable cause of that phenomenon, according to the web, would be a developing cataract. 

What I am suspecting is the air pollution problem we have at the office, as the problems only happen when I am there. 

At home, not even after a full day´s worth of reading and surfing the web, they do not happen. Nor do they in the morning, after having been away from the office overnight. 

As I do not think a cataract would cause a non-permanent impairment, the on-off nature of the problem makes me search the cause in the place where I experience the problem. 

Sadly, telecommuting isn´t an option when you have to work with paper files that are circulating in and out in a single day. 

Perhaps I should bring one of my warmest sweaters to work and keep the windows open as long as possible. And set my electronic displays to a bigger letter size so as to avoid straining my eyes.

Weight this morning: 86.2 kilograms. 

Feeling like as many tons avoirdupois. 

Julia

Fresh paint, fresh start

When a weight-loss blogger drops off the face of the blog world for several weeks, it usually is not a good sign. I do not make an exception there. This morning´s WI: 85 kgs. 187 pounds. Or, in other words, 6 kilograms in total regained from my lowest weight over a year ago. 13 pounds that have joined the 25 I would have had left until goal. I certainly did not intend to find them again, ever. But it is what happened. 

What that regain really was was my body crying foul over the workload and stress I forced it to bear those last months. Nights with about four hours of sleep, days in the office where I wished for a pair of extra arms to handle the demands coming on, or where I was barely able to work because my eyes were strained so badly I almost could not decipher what I had on my screen before me. And continuous hunger. If the body runs out of energy it demands to be fed. Which I did, because collapsing at my desk would have been infinitely worse than regaining a few pounds. 

When I realized I was headed for a burnout, I have taken two weeks off my job. 

After cleaning out my office, of course. But that was half as bad because I knew that I would be allowed to sleep it off on the next day, and the assurance of knowing I did complete all of my projects was well worth sacrificing the better part of a night for. 

So, I´ve been home for several days already, sleeping, reading and relaxing. 

I also went to the optician´s to have my prescription checked. As I had already guessed, I do need new glasses because the old ones aren´t strong enough any more. Another expense that wasn´t budgeted for, but if I am able to see better that is definitely worth spending money on. 

As we will not be going away for the vacations, I am using the free time to catch up on postponed projects at home, too. Today, that meant getting some non-drip wall paint and rollers and paint one part of the corridors in our apartment that was in dire need of some whitewashing. Which I did this morning. For a desk jockey like myself, any project that yields instantly visible results is a good project. 

So, I am sitting here satisfied with what I did this morning. 

The weight, of that I am certain, will come off again in its own time once the stress wears off. 

Taking care of my body. Noticing when I demand too much from it. One day I will learn to do that early. But at least this time, I pulled the brakes before the point of collapse. 

And now, I´ll go on enjoying my staycation. 

Julia

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

Mired down

Looks like that short holiday came just in time. In time before my estimated colleague has been doing the disappearing act for three full weeks again and left me with having to shoulder his caseload on top of my own.  Which somehow always results in more than double the work in spite of the fact that I still have the nominally bigger half of the caseload. 

On top of it, temperatures are going up again. Well, it´s summer. 

And the two days away from home and low-carb eating meant once again half a week of an upset stomach and a four-pound gain on top. 

So, I´m still stuck on that upward escalator. 

The fatigue is back, too. In spite of sleeping like a baby, I start feeling tired around midafternoon. If there were a bed or recliner in my office, I´d probably doze off in a couple of minutes. 

Well, perhaps I need more than the six to seven hours of shuteye I´m getting right now. But where to find the time? WIth DH having accustomed MIL to being called on the phone first thing in the morning and last thing at night, that means getting up at seven a.m. and staying up till ten p.m., minimum. Which would compute as nine hours, I know, except that the time after that last call in the evening is when we finally can sit peacefully together and relax. 

Well, that´s what we have to work with, We´re lucky MIL still can be left alone for any amount of time. 

Still, in the long run, having to care for her does take up plenty of energy and time. 

Which then is missing in other respects. 

Keep calm and carry on...

Julia