Sorely needed

October 3rd is a legal holiday hereabouts. It was also the last day before a predicted stretch of rainy and cold weather.

So, DH and myself decided to take advantage of it. 

We rode to a neighbouring city that is situated in a river valley, surrounded by steep hills, and there we went for a long hike. As such things go, one should never underestimate the number of hills to climb before reaching one´s destination. Which is what happened to us. Instead of a leisurely stroll, we found that we had to climb steeply upwards, which made for a good bit of exercise. My fitbit afterwards told me to the equivalent of 94 storeys climbed...and about eleven kilometers (some seven miles) distance covered. 

I know, regular hikers would scoff at that, but for me who has been lacking way too much exercise this year, it´s a reason for a bit of pride. The sore legs I have on the day after are proof that I really did get exercise on that hike.

One surprise awaited me when coming home. We hadn´t had lunch, so I felt ravenous. But when dinner was ready, I could only eat half my usual portion before feeling sated. 

There must be something to the theory that exercise suppresses the appetite.

Weight this morning: 84.9 kgs (187 pounds). 

I keep watching the carbs, and hope that the weight rend has changed back to "downwards" again.

I lost too much time on this stupid regaining thing already. 

Julia

Green leaves

...no, not spinach today, but on the bushes beside the entrance to the building where I work. Finally. Ascension day is a legal holiday over here, so I spent the day at home with DH. 

The average weight curve is finally pointing downwards again when I go back for one month, but the quarterly, six- month and yearly averages are still pointing upwards in an accusing red line. 

And the losses are smaller than they would have to be for me to get to goal in time for next year's birthday. At the going rate, I'd take about twice as long as that.

On the other hand, eating cleaner, without bread and legumes but plus plenty of fresh veggies, seems at least to help with the persistent fatigue that had been plagueing me in the last months. 

Which is a good thing after all. But I'm not completely satisfied as long as that condensable matter won't budge. 

The caloric difference between what I am losing and what I should be is... thirty to sixty minutes of exercise a day :(. 

I don't know myself why I am resisting the idea so much. Perhaps because I have never before been trying to juggle as many commitments as I am right now, all of which have to take precedence over my own wishes. Putting another thing on my plate that takes up so much time just doesn't seem doable. 

Actually, the only time I could even think about regularly carving out an hour of anything is in the mornings. Which, in turn, would mean having to go to bed an hour earlier or run an even bigger sleep deficit than I already have. 

Everywhere I look I read about exercise reducing fatigue. Great. If I weren't so fucking tired I might give it a try...

Just where do other people take the energy from?

Julia

Out of shape

Finally, warmer weather has arrived. This morning I woke up to bright sunlight, blue sky dotted with small white clouds, and temperatures that seem warm in comparison to what we used to have. So, I decided to walk to work instead of using the tram.
It isn't that far, about twenty minutes' distance. Still, I found myself slightly out of breath on arriving. Last autumn, I would walk that distance without feeling any exertion. The enforced rest over several months seems to have a worse impact on my shape than I thought. High time, thus, to get moving again.
The new refrigerator having arrived two weeks ago, I am taking advantage of the extra space and the vegetable crisper it has. We've been having fresh vegetable salads almost daily, and it's almost as if my body were sighing in contentment at finally getting the fresh stuff again instead of frozen and cooked vegetables.
Weight-wise, the curve is slowly turning back downwards again. I'll keep walking to and from work this week, to get started again, and then go on to resuming my morning walks in the park. Being so out of shape was not what I expected to happen. but then again, while I was busy most of the time it wasn't the physical kind of busy. Nor was the fatigue I have been feeling due to physical exertion. Getting back to moving regularly might even lessen it. And the sunshine will also help. Nothing like a walk in the sunshine to kick up those endorphins.
So, I should not let my fatigue get the better of me.


Julia

Harbingers of spring

Sometimes, my job requires me to travel outside of the city I live in. Today was such a day, with an " outside" appointment that will be keeping me out of town well into the afternoon.
The vegetation in the forests and on the fields is still a drab, dried-out brownish color, with nary a sign that anything might be blooming or growing leaves anytime soon. But in the garden of a villa I passed by en route to my appointment, I was delighted to see a flowering carpet of snowbells and purple croci.
In my corner of the world, those usually come out in early March, so, with the freaky cold weather we've been having these last weeks, Nature's a good month behind schedule.

Which means one more month where walking for exercise was out of the question unless I were keen on catching pneumonia, as the only time I could regularly carve out the time for exercise is the early morning, and we've been having sub-zero temperatures every morning for several months in a row.
As I had to cut out my lunchtime walks, too, due to the high workload that kept me at my desk over lunch break, I'm actually having a bit of a case of being eager to get moving again. So, I'll take my walking equipment out of storage and lay it out ready for use as soon as the warmer weather that has been forecast really arrives.
For those wondering- I do my nordic walking in a public park. For one, the route is not safe when it is dark, there have been several attacks there on women in that area. So, I stick to exercizing there only when it's daylight, thank you very much. And they don't shovel away the snow and ice there, either, so in winter the pathways(no tarmac) are either slippery as hell or ankle-deep in slush. Which is why I prefer not to use them in winter. Usually, that results in a hiatus of no more than two or three months where conditions don't permit my morning walking. Being, in spite of my good intentions, kept from walking till well into April is a first.
So, I am hoping for spring to finally arrive. Maybe it really takes exercise to get that condensable matter off me again.


Julia

Planning (not) to fail

That number on my bioimpendance scales has been scaring me quite a bit.
So, more than half of what I have recondensed by now is NOT fat.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why I have lately had the feeling that moving my body around has not become easier in proportion to the weight I lost. I must have lost too much muscle, actually.
Which means I will have to start exercising to build muscle, or at least minimize further losses (the amount of lean tissue remaining with me being, mathematically, exactly how much lean mass I would have at goal weight at 25 per cent body fat).

Which in turn engendered some purchases over the weekend. Mark Lauren's books on bodyweight exercise and a pair of new Adidas trainers, my old running/walking shoes having had their cushioning squished flat by some thirty kilograms more of me.
What I am still lacking, considering that we have a completely carpetless floor, is some kind of gymnastics or yoga mat to do those bodyweight exercises on that require going down on the floor to kneel or lie down for. Learning to do pushups will, for me who has almost no upper body strength, be difficult enough without adding the discomfort of an ice-cold hard surface beneath me. So that's what will be my next purchase.
I know that my present fitness level is somewhat below zero, but in that case, any exercise would be better than none, wouldn't it? So I am preparing myself mentally for failing miserably at my first attempts at those exercises, knowing that these will probably the worst I'll ever make.
Yes, I will fail. But what counts is having a chance of working up to the point I no longer need to fail. The point where my body will finally be able to execute those movements properly.

Even if it takes awhile.


Julia

Thick and tired

Maybe it's the darkness and cold of deep winter. Maybe it's the lack of rest that comes with having too much on one's plate.
Whichever it is, for weeks I have been suffering from permanent fatigue. Not a good thing if I want to continue recondensing. And not a good place to contemplate starting an exercise program, either. If all I want to do after work is plunk down in my recliner and doze off in front of the TV set (which is turned on for the benefit of DH, not mine-I didn't even have one before DH moved in), exercise of any kind is an even more daunting proposition than usual.
Intellectually, I know that not moving my body beyond what is unavoidable might be contributing to that feeling of general weakness and malaise, and also to the persistent aches and pains that have been plaguing me ever since the onset of the cold weather.
As several of the women in my family have been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis that started around menopause, I am, of course, worrying that my genes might have caught up with me there.
The condensable matter, under these circumstances, is of course not budging. I just barely manage not to regain. And with every day on that plateau my chances of getting to goal before the big five-oh are shrinking.
I'd rather be shrinking myself...

Perhaps the lengthening of daylight time and better weather will help. I am not giving up. Not after how far I had come.

The weather forecast says temperatures will be back above freezing next week, but it also says there'll be a lot of rain. If they were wrong about the rain part, I could, perhaps, start on the nordic walking again. If not, I'll have to wait for my usual route through the park to turn back from ankle deep slush to a walkable pathway.

I have also been looking into the purchase of a cross training machine that would free me from weather constraints. Apart the fact that they are quite expensive, those things take up a lot of space, which in our flat is at a premium anyway.
Perhaps I should throw out the guest bed in the office to make room. Putting DH's small desk that right now sits in the living room over into the office would mean enough room for a cross training machine where that desk lives now.
Then again, what I definitely don't want is another white elephant sitting around. I used to own a stationary cycle that ended up as a rather impractical clothes rack for several years before I threw it out. So, if I were to buy me that cross trainer, I'd better use it.
I know that there are specimens of that machine which are a lot cheaper than the one I have been ogling, but whichever machine I bought would have to bear the weight of either DH or me, and those cheap ones probably wouldn't hold up.

Perhaps I should look for one on ebay...


Julia

Feeling good in one's skin

Like everybody else on this planet, I have been born into it wearing that contraption of flesh and bones called a body. And ever since, I have felt uncomfortable in the particular specimen I am stuck with, and I have envied people who seemed to be able to generate any pleasant experiences from the fact of having a body. To me, it seemed always preferable not to be reminded of having one.
Living was something I did in my head and with my brain.
Of course, being brought up by two elderly people who, out of fear that something might happen to me, never allowed me outside the house to play, either by myself or with other kids, didn't exactly help. At a time when other children, blissfully unaware of any limitations of their bodies, test their limits and grow the synapses necessary for coordinated and effective movement, I was perpetually confined to a six-room floor plan.
Besides, my grandparents, while loving and well-intentioned, also were rather Victorian in their attitudes. Everything about the human body was considered gross and unmentionable.
And then I entered school.
Being uncoordinated and clumsy for lack of exercise, I was relentlessly bullied, most of all during gym class. Add to that a gym teacher who, in retrospection, obviously did not see what the cause of my klutziness was, and what you got was a deepening conviction on my part that any activity that involved moving my body around was absolutely pointless torture and should best be avoided. Which meant that I spent almost all of my free time indoors, reading.
I have, even when normal-weighted by BMI standards, always had what is called a "stocky"build, which set off another bully in my immediate family who kept calling me fat- though I technically wasn't- and forced me into my first diet at age eight, as if starving my body would remove the klutziness, which of course it didn't. Neither did it change the basic build of my body.

What all that left me with was a solidified case of body hatred, and the conviction that my body was nothing but a perpetual source of shame and discomfort, an obstacle to be dragged around that would meet nothing but revulsion from others.

And that was before I gained over a hundred pounds of excess fat.

In a way, hating my body like that made it easier to be obese. To me, my body had always looked like that. When I first gained all that weight, what I thought was that my body was, for the first time, really looking like what I had believed it looked like all my life. And the physical limitations that came with obesity were, from my twisted point of view, just extensions of the limitations I had perceived even when still slim. That was also why it was so easy to deny them.

Today, I have successfully recondensed about seventy pounds of that excess fat. Enough to come back to a point slightly below, or as slightly above, that limit of obesity.
And for about a year, my weight has been plateauing. Two thirds of the way down achieved, and then stalled.
I have no idea if it is my body trying to get back to some kind of elevated setpoint or my mind playing subconscious tricks on me. What I know is that this is not goal. Not even remotely so.
I don't want the description of the subject, if ever a postmortem were done on me, to read "obese female". Being normal-weighted is the number one item on my bucket list.
But, after trying out most of the recent scientific results on what to eat for weight loss, the only thing left I am not presently doing is.... exercise. Moving my body above what is unavoidable in my daily life.
When I started on my weight loss journey, I was doing two rounds of about forty minutes a day of nordic walking. The action with the walking poles helped with the back problems I had.
Then came winter and weather that was too cold for walking outside. So I quit. When spring came around, I did not restart.
I had so hoped I could get to goal without having to resort to exercise, especially since I was convinced that any weight loss caused solely by exercising would not be maintainable for me.

So, it seems that I won't be able to avoid facing that body of mine after all if I need its cooperation. The problen with that being that I still hate my body. I'm still uncoordinated, and the ravages of obesity on my joints and on my skin have made me even less anticipate any enjoyment from moving it.
It hurts, it jiggles in places where it should not, it is clumsy, and it feels increasingly weak, as if the last, say, ten pounds I lost had been the muscles I had used for dragging around the weight I have already lost.
I have no idea what my body fat percentage is right now. It used to be too high for my bioimpedance scales to measure, giving me an "err" reading instead. What I am afraid of is finding out that what I lost would be lean tissue instead of blubber.
I'm not usually so shy about facing the truth.

Whenever I read someone's description of how they enjoy moving their bodies, whenever I read about "positive body image", all I can feel is envy of people who can generate enjoyment from their bodies, and resignation at my own inability to do so. The worst part of it all being the knowledge that I was probably born with that ability and lost it somewhere along the way. I haven't yet found a way to reclaim it.

Perhaps I should just pretend. Act as if I knew how to perceive moving my body as a thing to be enjoyed instead of a chore to be avoided. Others have managed it.

And then I would have to find the time for doing some exercise.
And pick one to do regularly.

The problem being that my schedule of late has been so irregular that I am glad if I manage to get six hours of sleep in. Making time for an hour of exercise (counting in the time to shower afterwards) will require some major tweaking of my timetable.

And, as walking or nordic walking are about the only kinds of exercise I know how to do at all which require neither equipment nor participation in a group activity, and right now we have ten inches of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, I have some time to make those tweaks before I can start again.

If only my knee-jerk reaction to the proposition of exercise weren't so much like that to the proposition of having a tooth pulled without anesthesia.

Actually, I'd probably prefer the tooth.

Being stuck with a body that requires regular maintenance beyond feeding, cleaning and sleep sometimes sucks. Big time.


Julia

Creeping closer

I know, I know. Getting below one´s basal metabolic rate in calories may kick you into starvation mode.
But I am wildly determined to break the barrier of obesity within this week, before DH comes back. So, I have been skipping dinner, mostly, and limited myself to about half of what I usually eat. And things are moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. Per this morning, I was 250 grams away from that limit. 0.55 pounds. And at a weight I haven´t had since about the turn of the millenium.
I know that the way I eat this week is not sustainable in the long run, but that´s not what it´s about. What matters is that I need to break this barrier, to motivate myself to go on doing the right thing.
Um, what? no, I don´t presently do execise. Guess what, I did lose another ten kilos since stopping, so, it´s obvious that what I do doesn´t work just because I am expending so many calories. Which is the point.
You cannot out-exercise a bad diet, as someone said. If one gets the facts on metabolism, the basal metabolic rate (that´s what your body expends when you are doing nothing but just living) accounts for the majority of calories used, while one would have to do some rather heavy exercising to use up anything like a similar amout by exercising. Just try and google for those web sites that tell you how many minutes of exercise you have to do to offset the calories of a single cheeseburger or one piece of cake.
I, for one, am full-time employed and simply don´t have time to do more than sixty minutes a day of any activity on top of what I must do. Nor am I ready to sacrifice all of these sixty minutes to getting sweaty and out of breath.
So, if I want to use up all those calories stored away in my condensable matter, what I must do is refuel my body below the amount it uses up. Which is just what I do now.
And no, with some thirty pounds to go till I am normal-weighted again, I´m not in danger of running out of fuel anytime soon. Besides, when I have broken that barrier, I promise I´ll take it a bit easier again. This is, after all, a long-term project.


Julia

What to do if you can´t exercise

Exercise, to me, used to mean jogging. Panting, red-faced, with my knees and feet hurting from the jarring impact of too many pounds.
So, I had given up exercise completely.
Until that fateful day when I found myself bent over with a slipped disk and unable to reach up to the cupboard over my sink to get a glass out from it.
With short, shuffling steps (couldn´t pick my feet off the floor because this so d...hurt) I went to the umbrella stand and took out my trekking poles. The collapsible kind that mountaineers use, and that, for me, had allowed me to stay mobile at all in spite of my being morbidly obese. I knew I had to do something for my back muscles, and also get rid of those 100-plus extra pounds I had acquired over the years. Jogging, for obvious reasons, wasn´t it. I was, at the time, glad if I managed to just walk. 
On the next day, I took my trekking poles out for a walk in the park. I had to sit down every 100 meters, gasping for air, but I did, on that day, walk about a kilometer. 
And the next day, again. And the next.
There´s a name for that. Nordic walking.  I did actually, from an earlier attempt at recondensing myself, have a pair of Nordic walking poles, too, which came out as soon as I didn´t need to lean on the poles with my full weight any more.
The biggest benefit for me was that you get a good workout for your upper body, too, and the legs are spared from those jarring impacts of too many pounds crashing down on your knees and ankles with full force of gravity. And you get to burn more calories, too, because you use not only your leg muscles. (The book I linked to seems to be only available in German, sorry).

So this is what I am going to resume as soon as the weather will allow it.  Perhaps I´ll be able to get off this plateau then.


Julia

Calm after the storm

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


Julia

Slowly creeping downwards

The relatively strict no-carbs approach of the last days seems to start to pay off.
I´m down over a pound from Monday, which is a lot for my messed-up metabolism.
But then again, I have been doing my power walk every morning before breakfast, and I have been avoiding carbs with the exception of that croissant on Tuesday.
It´s good to see that pay off at least a bit.
I hope that I have managed to switch my body back into losing mode.
Per today: 19.4 kgs lost off my top weight, 20.6 to go to goal weight.
So, not yet halfway there.
I have to remind myself that it did take time to gain that much weight, too, and that even steps of just one pound off, if repeated often, will move me to goal.
It´s akin to the compound interest thing where you take some small-seeming amount of money and let it gather interest for a longer period of time.
When you see that calculated for the first time, it´s surprising because for most of us ordinary humans, the mind isn´t very good at estimating the sum total of something that comes in many seemingly small increments.

Let´s just imagine a few scenarios (I´ll use kilos, for the metrically challenged: multiply by 2.2 for an approximate value in pounds).
Losing 0.2 kilos a week for a year? 0.2 kgs times 52 makes 10.4 kilos.
Losing 25 grams of fat a day? (That equals a deficit of just 225 calories)? 9.125 kilos in a year.

Of course, the shoe fits on the other foot, too. You can gain those same nine kilos (or twenty pounds) in a year by overeating by just 225 calories a day on average.

Do that for ten years and  you get to  morbid obesity stage three, all the while claiming that you "barely ate anything".
It´s pure mathematics, and it´s in my opinion putting an end to the claims of morbid obesity always being the result of grossly overeating. Of course, it´s another thing if someone gains very quickly, say, two hundred pounds in a single year. As fat doesn´t grow from thin air, that makes it quite possible that the person overate big time. Perhaps not even noticing the too-big portions. Been there, done that. I was just lucky to stop at just an 88 pound gain.
But for those who find the extra pounds creeping up in small increments, there may even be some solace in those calculations, namely, that it is but a small deviation from the equilibrium between input and output that must be corrected to stop gaining further, and an additional correction by the same amount will make the pounds melt off as fast (literally) as they had come.
Actually, there´s even some helpful science behind that. The human body being very adaptable to changes in the environment, it is possible to reduce intake by about two hundred calories a day and not at all notice it. Add to that another two hundred used exercising, and you may just be starting to lose weight, without having to castigate yourself unduly. Slowly but certainly.
Even if your metabolism fights back at first, as does mine.



Julia

Limits of the possible

Of course, I am impatient to lose that excess weight. If there were a push-button that would magically make all of the fat go away at once, I´d probably be pushing it like crazy.
But there simply is no way past it.
One pound of fat equals roundabout 3500 calories.
My body, on an average day, uses up about 1800 calories.
Therefore, the theoretical maximum I could possibly lose, if I ate nothing at all, is about half a pound a day.
I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Of course, since I am working full-time, and have a household and a husband to take care of, a complete fast is out of the question. I have to be fully functioning, after all.
What I am aiming for right now is to stay about five hundred calories below my daily requirements.
And that, in turn, is going to amount to losing one pound a week, again, maximum.
Which means that I will take at least  another month to repair the damages from the last weeks.
And three months to go below the limit of morbid obesity.
Then again, three months, as a time span, is not so terribly long, is it?
I could be no longer morbidly obese in three months.
It would be a place I haven´t been since before the end of the last millenium.
And that is something to look forward to.
Actually, for a long time, I did not believe in my own ability to lose that weight any more. I had resigned myself to being stuck in a body that was functioning way below optimum level.
What, then, is different this time around? First of all, I started moving again. Nordic walking, to be exact, which is a lot kinder to my creaking joints than jogging. So, it was easier for me to keep it up.
And the second part is having discovered just how much I had been overeating without being aware of it. And then doing the right moves to correct that. That did involve investing in smaller sized crockery and pots, and training myself to always put food I wanted to eat on a plate or into a bowl first, so as to never eat anything directly out of the package.
Move more, eat less.
It´s almost insulting in its simplicity. I, for one, know that I´d have bitten the head off (figuratively, of course) anyone who would have dared to suggest to me that it was that simple. I had to go through the experience myself.
Reading of others who went through a similar experience just did not replace seeing it for myself.
Yes, it is possible for me to lose that excess weight.
Even if it does take time.


Julia

Drip drip

...that´s what I heard on getting up for my morning run today. It´s been svelteringly hot hereabouts yesterday, but overnight, a steady rain has set in, accompanied by a ten-degree drop in temperature. So, I looked outside, and ...

...resisted the temptation to stay inside! I put on my usual walking clothes, plus a cap with a big visor to keep the rain from getting on my glasses, and off I was.
And it turned out to be so worth it! The rain had washed down all of the dust and pollen that had been in the air, so, it was pure oxygen all the way, mingled with the wonderful smells of a freshly watered park.
The only ones who didn´t like the weather were a couple of crows sitting on the lawn, croaking mournfully.
I came back aired out and dripping wet, and just a bit proud of myself for not chickening out.
Oh, and more good news came from the scale, where another half-pound was off. So,2.2 kilos down, 21.8 to go.


Julia

I´m walking...

every morning this week! And asking myself why the dickens I kept procrastinating about it for so long.

There is, of course, an answer to that. I have been what they call an owl for all my life, staying up late and sleeping in as long as possible in the morning.
Now, the only time of the day where I can shave the 45 minutes I require for my daily walk off my schedule is early in the morning, as in before breakfast and while DH is still asleep. Which doesn´t make it any easier to withstand the lure of just snuggling up to him instead. Especially when I am prone to fatigue anyway. Getting up when I still feel tired from the night before and just feel as if just an hour of more sleep would make me less tired just so goes against every impulse.
You know what the surprising thing is? When I do manage to drag myself out of bed in time and start walking, I almost immediately feel less tired. And, coming home some forty minutes later, I don´t fell tired at all any more. And the effect doesn´t diminish all day long.
Now there may even be some very hard science behind that.
I am, by going outside, exposing myself to the light of the morning sun, and I am, when I walk in the park where we live, breathing in a lot more oxygene than if I were to stay in bed. Both of which lessen fatigue.
So, that´s two more reasons to get up early and walk.
Getting my extra baggage off is another, of course. I´m glad to announce the weekend´s spike in weight is gone again (after two days of strictly no carbs), and I am intending to stick to that as far as possible.

So, I´m walking, yes indeed (insert rendering of Fats Domino record here), and I do intend to keep doing it as long as the weather permits this year.
And I am looking forward to finding out how far that will take me...

Julia

U-turn in a container ship

Somehow, that´s what my current weight situation feels like to me.
You know those bi-i-ig container ships that take immense amounts of freight across oceans? I read somewhere that, once such a behemoth is moving into a certain direction, it takes, even at "full speed backwards", several miles to stop it, and also to turn it around.
I made the mistake of being too certain that a couple of weeks off plan wouldn´t harm my weight loss efforts too much.
And, like that container ship staying on course, for a while I maintained, or almost, and then, slowly, the direction changed, and my weight went up. Slightly, at first, and then in one-pound-a-day fluctuations, as if everything above plan I had eaten had been hovering in some fifth or sixth dimension, only to materialize on me at once.
And now I have to throw the rudder around again and get back in the other direction. The one leading to health, the one leading to feeling better.
And, like that container ship, right now it looks like the thing won´t budge off its course.
Knowing that it will eventually, if I hold the rudder tight, doesn´t make the current situation less frustrating.
What vexes me most is that I didn´t even feel like I was overeating the last days. But I had some rice and pasta and, perhaps worse, several rolls and slices of bread. Which didn´t push me over the caloric limit, but it almost looks as if my body were having an allergy to the stuff, so fast did my weight go up.
And that in spite of the fact that, with the rice and pasta at least, I cut the portions to one-fifth of what I used to believe was a portion , and did feel rather virtuous about it, too.
The reality of the scales was putting me back on the ground again fast this time.
Now, I have to complete that turnaround before I go back up even further.
So, no carbs. Absolutely none. No cookie, no bread, no rice, no pasta. No wine, either. Not until I am back at the point I had already reached.
And back to walking again. Half an hour every morning, at the very least. Preferably more. Even if it rains.
The most difficult part will be arranging this plan with the needs of DH. Last year´s weightloss was successful partly because DH was gone a lot and I felt free to not eat. Now that he is here most of the time, even if I don´t want to eat, I have to cook for him. He doesn´t know how, so cooking is my personal resposibility. But I don´t think he´d accept the kind of very-low-carb plan I need to go on for himself, in spite of being very supportive of me otherwise.
So, I´ll have to exercise my restraint muscles, too. Even if the pasta looks good.
And wait for that ole container ship Body to complete its turn.

How do you, dear readers, deal with the problem of being the family feeder while having to restrain your own consumption of food?


Julia

Re-starting a routine

They say it takes thirty days to make something into a habit.
So, today I am officially on day 2 of re-installing my walking habit.
And it still feels great!
Even Hubs (who isn´t participating yet due to an injury and did, while I was out, prepare breakfast instead) claimed that the good feeling even showed on my face when I came back.
It´s funny how, once I have conquered the Beast of Resistance to Getting Started, the good feelings from having started are replacing all the reasons for not starting.

So, I´ll keep on walking!


Julia

Up and walking!

That´s what I was this morning. The weather is still wonderful, no rain this morning, so, no excuses, either.
So, I jumped out of bed, straight into my walking clothes and shoes, and went for a 45-minute round of the municipal park we live close to.
I had stopped my nordic walking routine last December when the first frosty mornings with ice on the pathways came, and it has been too cold most mornings  to pick it up again until now.
What it feels like to be walking again? All aired-out, and incredibly awake.
What came as a pleasant surprise was that I have obviously not lost all of the positive effects last year´s walking  had on me, condition-wise. I walked my usual distance, did not (like at the beginning of my weight loss journey) have to stop and catch my breath several times, but walked on and took just 1/9th more time for the distance than in December.
And yes- it feels as if the cobwebs had been blown out of my head by the fresh morning air.
So, this is definitely going to be a daily routine again.
I´ll see if it also helps me break through the plateau I´ve been stuck on for three months now.
Even if it didn´t, the good feeling definitely is worth getting up early even for a confessed night-owl like me.

Julia