Almost normal

Except for cable TV, all amenities of life have by now been restored to us. The experience of having been a whole week off the grid is beginning to recede in the background among the usual business of the day. 

Still, there are things that have changed. 

Just this morning, DH and I both stated that we are glad to be rid of the junk in the cellar. 

Mind you, with almost every piece that went down there, there had been an argument, either between the item's owner and the other person in the household, or between the owner and himself or herself. 

The argument went like- we don't use this any more-but it's still good for using- it clutters up our flat-but in another flat we might use it again- it's not worth keeping. - but if we ever wanted to use one again we'd have to pay for a new one - I ought to toss this in the trash -but if you did you might regret it-   and so on. 

Deliberations, in all of those cases, regularly resulted in a hung jury and the defendant in question being confined to the cellar. Which meant that decluttering our flat turned into cluttering up our cellar.

When the flood hit us, that cellar was actually so full of stuff that most of it was, for all practical purposes, inaccessible unless one were to climb over other things and dig down to the crate in question, if one knew at all which one it was. 

Apart that, it always had high moisture, and very poor lighting, which perhaps made it even easier to bury our junk there, sometimes half hoping for humidity to make it tossable, as in "this is too far damaged to save it, now we may throw it away". 

The Greek have that tale of Hercules being required to unmuck the stables of King Augias that had not been cleaned in ages. He did it by making the waters of a river flow through there. Our personal Augias stable also has had a river run through it, and now that the clutter has gone for good I am still stuck wondering why the heck I did keep most of it. As I mentioned, a lot of the things we tossed might have been cleaned and dried, but when thinking of the work that would have meant, and the fact that we would have to find a home for every single piece we rescued from the debris upstairs in our flat, there was suddenly no discussion at all about tossing things which we had almost quarreled about when it came to taking them out of our flat. Not even the fact that some of those things cannot be replaced did stop us from throwing them out. Actually, it was the realization that we might go to the pain of cleaning those things, only to box them up again and put them into the cellar, never to be thought of again until the next inundation. 

If I neither love nor use it, it is clutter. 

The very fact that I did not want these things around any more and banished them to the cellar amply proved that I neither loved nor used them, in spite of what I made myself believe about how valuable they were. The things I really value have never been inside that cellar. 

The knowledge that it is no longer feasible to stash stuff that is too much for our flat in the cellar actually helps declutter in even another way. I know now that bringing any new item into our flat means having to make room for it, and that any item that was in the way would have to be tossed at once, so, even before bringing in the new item I must realize that it will probably cost me, not only what the price tag says, but perhaps also another piece of my possessions that would have to be thrown away to make room for it. 

Considering that, it suddenly becomes easy to leave things at the store. 

There may even be a second round of decluttering coming on at our flat, because there are still plenty of candidates for inspection which, in the past, escaped being banished to the cellar only because there was still closet or cupboard space they could be put away in. 

Even if I have a space to keep it in, it may be clutter. 

And I do not forcibly have to hang on to every piece of crockery or flatware I ever bought. 

It has taken me many years to arrive at that conclusion. 

But the feeling of peace and accomplishment after getting rid of all that stuff in the cellar tells me it might be very much worth my while to put it in practice. 

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

Let the madness end

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness. I disremember who said this first, but it is rarely more true than during those frantic, food-loaden last two months of the year.
There we are, having spent ten months of the year (hopefully) watching our budgets and our food intake. Our waists have shrunk, our bank accounts have, while not fattened up, at least recovered a bit from last December's low. Toys, gadgets and trinkets bought last Black Friday have, predictably, given up the ghost simultaneously with the expiration of their warranties and gone on (again, hopefully) to cease cluttering our lives.
And then come along...The Holidays.
And with them that heady mixture of "I was so good all year, I deserve a reward" and "it's a holiday, and on holidays one does eat certain foods, and gives each other lots of presents".
So we find ourselves in the middle of the Black Friday melee again, clutching our shopping-bags full of loot that was payed for with our credit cards, or sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table having to open our belts and grabbing for the Maalox (tm).
Of course, it doesn't stop there. We go on like that all the way through Christmas, gorging ourselves and shopping as if stores went out of business, without a thought about our scales or bank balances.
Six weeks of free-for-all.
Except it isn't free.
Do you remember what it felt like last January? Going on the scales for the first post-holiday weigh-in? Opening that horrifying credit card bill?
Feel that pain now. Remember it as vividly as you can.
Remember how long it has taken you to undo the damages, if you even managed to undo them at all.
And then decide if you want that again.
Remember- the holidays are not about consumption. They are about people.
When you look back at your childhood, what do you remember about Christmases past? What presents you got? Or do you remember going sleighing with your parents, or sitting in front of the open fireplace playing Scrabble (tm) with your siblings?
What do you want your kids to remember, or yourself if you don't have any?

You decide.
Decide wisely.


Julia

Big bird landing-are you prepared?

It's always slightly amusing to watch the hubbub about turkeys before and after Thanksgiving, from Germany where that holiday is not celebrated. And then Christmas comes around. The standard fare for that holiday in Germany? a whole roasted goose, with stuffing, gravy, potato dumplings...the works. Not so amusing if you try to watch your weight.
Especially when you end up eating three or four consecutive days off that bird and the trappings.
For all those whose homes will in the next month be the place where the big birds come to roast- are you prepared?

Tip one: Think about how big a bird you want to serve. It's absolutely unnecessary to prepare more food than the whole family can eat in at most two sittings. For me, that meant downgrading the goose to a duck, which is as tasty but half as heavy. If you absolutely have to have a certain species of bird, look for the smaller ones. Geese, for example, come in calibers between three and ten pounds, so if you have just four people don't take the biggest ones.
Tip two: Usually, there are some side dishes that are eaten by everybody. Others are the last dish standing on the dinner table. You know which ones they are. You may as well not prepare them at all this year. I bet no one will miss them. But we always have...with our bird is not a valid reason to put something on the table nobody wants to eat. Reduce the amount of the other recipes, too. If it's gone it's gone. As long as there has been enough for everyone to have a taste of their favorites, there has been enough- period.
Tip three: Be prepared for leftovers. The best thing to do with them is freeze them at once and spread the enjoyment over several widely- apart meals instead of serving the same thing day after day until it has to be tossed, or your family goes on strike, whichever comes first. If you bought your bird frozen and didn't thaw it at once, there's a space in your freezer where that bird was kept. Use it to freeze the leftovers. Have suitable containers prepared when clearing off the table, and freeze the leftovers at once while they are fresh. For one, that prevents after-meal refrigerator raids, and it also minimizes any risk of food poisoning.

Wishing all of you a not-so-gainful holiday,


Julia

Recondensing is frugal!

Ever so often, there's another flurry of articles published about how obesity is rampant in the poorer segments of society.
Regardless of the veracity of such statements, what irks me about that kind of story is that many people will automatically jump to the conclusion that losing weight has to be an expensive undertaking. And those who are in a financial pinch already could go on to resign themselves to the conclusion that they cannot financially afford to try to lose their excess weight.
Guess what, they are wrong. Completely wrong.
Let's start with food.
Yes, most fattening foods are cheap, while the things touted as " healthy" often come with a heftier price tag.
But an obese person has a much higher basal metabolic rate than a slim one. To put it simply, maintaining twice the weight requires twice as much calories.
Allan of Almost Gastric Bypass has in the past given several vivid accounts of what amounts of food it took to maintain his former girth.
Which means that if you chose to buy non-fattening foods such as vegetables or lean meat, and buy only as much of them in terms of calories as your basal metabolic rate as a slim person would require, you will, for one, lose weight until you are that slim person. And from a point of frugality- you will probably end up spending a lot less on food if you prepare your own nutritious meals from scratch from quality ingredients than if you feed at Mickey D's regularly.
All bets are off, of course, if you go for these ready-to-eat Lean cuisine (tm) meal trays or their ilk. That stuff is expensive. But it's expensive because you pay for the preparation and for the profits of the producers who know that they have an audience of people who are desperate and would pay anything to get rid of their excess weight. While their products, if the nutritional values are right, are not scams, you still end up paying a lot of money for the convenience of using them. So, if money's tight, don't use those products. Find out what healthy nutrition is (shouldn't be too difficult since you obviously have internet access if you read this) and prepare your own food.

Savings potential: From my own experience, by conscious shopping and sticking to the portions slim me would need, about fifty percent of my former food budget. YMMV, of course.

Another place to save is your wardrobe. As a fat person, I was forced to buy new pants about every two months because the material between my legs rubbed through that fast. I also had to keep replacing blouses, shirts, and coats that got torn because they had become too small,or because they got caught on some obstacle course (as in restaurant or even shop) that I was too fat to navigate without bumping into things. Shoes bore my weight only for a short time before giving out. When I started recondensing, of course, there was the initial investment in a set of smaller clothes. But, for one, they came a lot cheaper at a standard clothes store than what the same garments would have cost me in a plus size, and for seconds- I have, in over one year, not have had to retire a single garment due to being worn out, so, I get several times the wear out of a garment, too.

Savings potential:May depend on whether your taste in clothes changes when you become slimmer. If you keep wearing similar garments in your smaller size to what you wore when big, halving your clothes budget is entirely possible ( don't forget the cost of the retail therapy you probably won't need any more when you're more satisfied with your body).

And for the rest? Don't get me started on the extra gasoline you need to move a bigger body, or about the price of things that need replacing when there is an obese person in the house (toilet seats, anyone?).The part about the medical costs has been brought up too often already.

Losing excess body weight isn't expensive. Being fat and staying that way is.



Julia

Shopping my closet

As I've mentioned before, I used to be an avid collector of handbags. During one of my latest decluttering marathons, I got rid of a number of specimens that just did not fit my needs any more, and I'm happy to report that not a single one of them has been missed. The drawer in my handbag storage chest that used to hold them now contains winter hats and scarves,which have ceased to clutter my entrance area.
Still, there were a few specimens left which saw relatively little use, but were too good to toss.
One of them is a sturdy leather shoulder bag which I had originally intended to hold my netbook, but it turned out that the opening was just a tad too tight to comfortably put it in or remove it. Thus, said bag went into hibernation in my closet.
Last week, I decided to take the plunge and acquire a tablet computer. I had actually vacillated between a tablet and an ebook reader for quite a while, since I had discovered that Amazon has reading apps for tablets, too. As I am not exactly a teenager any more, the size of the letters in what I read has become increasingly important, so, any device with too small a screen would be out of the question because of eyestrain. Then again, the netbook, while rather sturdy, weighs in at more than four pounds if I take along the cables for loading it, too, which meant that I would need to use a backpack to carry it or have my back hurt from carrying it on one side.
What kept me from exchanging it for a tablet was the prohibitively high prices those things usually are sold for.
Enter my friendly phone provider and an inductory offer on a tablet with cell phone connection that meant that I could swap my existing contract for one at the same monthly cost but with higher speed and receive a tablet for half what a 3G-capable Kindle would have cost me. So, my tech equipment got a new addition. I was, of course, lucky in that my old contract was running out right now, so I could go for that offer without penalties to pay. It really pays to keep the expiration dates for a contract in mind sometimes.
The new tablet, of course, needs something I can carry it in, which also must protect the screen from damages. After seeing the prices they demand for made-for-this-tablet sleeves, and seeing that they are mostly too soft to really protect the screen from damage by accidental pressure, I decided to go shop my closet instead. An old netbook sleeve was soon found, but the neoprene was only good against scratches, not for screen protection. What item could I use for that? It had to be flat, stiff and about the size of the tablet. What I settled on for the time being is the backside of an old picture frame. I put the tablet into the sleeve and then into a bag with the screen side facing the particle board piece. Thus, it's safe from damage. This works only with a bag that is small enough so the whole thing cannot slide around and stays together.
And that meant the reactivation of the aforementioned shoulder bag. While it was too small for the netbbok, it fits the tablet as if it were made for it.
I might upgrade the whole thing to a proper case someday, but for now I have what I need to carry that tablet without spending a dime on it, everything coming from my closet.
Including the shoulder bag.
There used to be a time when I would have gone out to buy a new bag for a new gizmo. I'm glad I don't need to do that any more.
Shopping my closet is something that did, at first, not come naturally. But with more experiences like this, it keeps getting easier.


Julia

The fruits of uncluttering

This weekend was, once more, wardrobe rollover time, meaning that my summer clothes went into storage until next spring, and the warm sweaters and fake fur hats and the other cold-season stuff went to take their places in the readily accessible part of my wardrobe.
In years past, before my weight loss, that used to mean wrestling with at least four of those zippered things I use to store my out-of-season clothes in, digging through them, and spending at least two hours doing so.
Not so this year. Having gotten rid of every piece that had become too big for me when I packed the winter stuff away last spring, I just took out the remaining stash, replaced the summer t-shirts and such where the sweaters had been, and put the (one) zippered box needed for that back on top of my closet. Total time spent- ten minutes. Then I took my warm jackets out and the thin ones back in (five minutes) and I was done. There wasn´t any garment I needed to toss, and the fact that my formerly overcrowded closet rods hold, by now, only the clothes that right now fit me also means that the things I store on hangers don´t have to go into storage any more- I just push the out-of-season stuff to the less accessible side of the closet.
What used to be an endeavour taking up the better part of an afternoon has thus become a fifteen-minute project.
What´s more, having gotten through one winter already on what I have in my wardrobe right now, I know that I won´t have to buy anything new this winter. Which suits me just fine.
There must be some "up" side to that weight plateau and slight regain, mustn´t there?


Julia

Shopping the gaps

The changing of the seasons, for me, meant, for the longest time, shopping.
First, making a tour of every clothes and shoe selling establishment in town to find out what the most recent must-haves were, then the acquisition of at least five big plastic totes full of garments.
At home, then, the attempt to squeeze those into the overflowing closets along with last year´s bounty, and that of the years before that. As it was, most of those clothes never even got worn because they had been pushed to the back of the closet, wedged in with way too many of their brethren.
And still I had that experience of standing in front of said overflowing closets uttering the immortal words "I have nothing to wear".
As I have been decluttering those garments that had become decidedly too big with recondensing myself, the first gaps appeared on the clothes racks. Now I haven´t finished recondensing yet, so any garment I´d buy right now would probably not fit me at goal weight, anyway. And that meant that those gaps were not filled back up by new acquisitions.
Guess what, I didn´t have to go bare. I didn´t even have to raise the frequency with which I´m doing laundry. The clothes I own today are completely sufficient for my needs, even though there are maybe half as many as I used to have. And by now, most of them get to see regular wear, too.
By now, I have successfully recondensed the greater part of my extra baggage, and come down to clothes sizes in the normal range. There´s  a high probability that the clothes I have would mostly still be wearable down to goal or at least close to it. So, this year, there was no shopping expedition (excepting one summer blazer I got on sale). Instead, I shopped my closet.
By now, I´ve grown so used to those gaps between garments on the rack that I don´t even have the feeling of missing something any more. Partly, that may be due to the fact that my body, by now, isn´t that fat any more. I feel better in it, and the frantic search for garments that would somehow camouflage my obesity is a thing of the past.
Besides, what with my limbs no longer squeezed against each other by the rolls of fat that had developed with weight gain, I have noticed that it takes me much longer to wear out a garment, so my existing stack will last me even longer.
For the time when I reach goal, my intention is to keep the number of garments small, replacing clothes as necessary but not piling them on the way I used to.
Not only will that save me from spending a substantial slice of my income on clothes I won´t even wear, or wear too rarely to justify their price, it´s eco-friendly, too.
And for the first time, there´s no need for pangs of conscience because I´d been wasting my time, my money, and my closet space on items I did not need or use.


Julia

That´s...bananas!

Just when I thought I´d seen it all....
but what I saw in a shop yesterday about topped it all...
The common banana, in its usual state, is in my experience a soft, easily edible food item. It comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.You can bite into it, cut it, or squash it with a fork. No special tools are required to enjoy one.
Or so I believed. Until I set eyes on...the Banana Cutter.
Yup, you heard me right. The thing looks like a pair of scissors with seven sets of blades, and it promises to deliver six perfectly spaced slices of banana with one cut. The price for this special tool? Twice what they demanded for a set of four kitchen knives that sat right next to it on the shelf.
So they expected patrons to buy something that
-had absolutely no practical value,
-could do only one job, and that probably not even well,
-would need a complicated cleanup after use,
-and was, as a unitasker, ridiculously overpriced when compared to the simple-to-clean, more versatile, and absolutely-sufficient-for-the-job-of-turning-bananas-into-slices humble knife next to it.

What struck me was that there were already some empty spaces on that shelf.

There really were people who were ready to spend their money on something like that. Enough money to pay for a full meal in a restaurant, and more than the average worker hereabouts earns in a full hour of work. Which means that whoever buys one of these is ready and willing to sacrifice more than a full hour of their life for the sake of acquiring such a useless piece of clutter.

I just doubt that they make that realization.
Calculating how long you need to work for the price of something you want to buy, a la "Your money or your life", is something that doesn´t come naturally. But when you look at it this way, it sometimes gets easier to avoid things that are destined to be clutter form the start.


Julia

Hot pants reloaded

Losing roundabout seventy pounds of fat has by now taken me down six clothes sizes. The most amazing thing about that being that I used to need a bigger size in bottoms than in tops. Not so any longer- I´m down to a German size 21 in pants, and size 22 in tops and jackets, which doesn´t cease to amaze me- I would never have expected my lower half to shrink further than my upper one.
Not that I don´t enjoy that, but the recondensing of my fat bottom has gone so fast that I didn´t get too much wear out of the size 22 pants I bought when I needed that size. Thus, these ended up in the wardrobe, almost unworn. I had tried the boil-and-shrink treatment on two light-colored pairs to no avail. But I still had two other pairs of dark denims, which I had hesitated to wash at the highest setting because I was afraid they might get too washed-out.
Still, having spent the money on them just to have them relegated to the back of the closet kept vexing me. At their original size, they had become so baggy as to be practically unwearable.
So, this weekend I finally bit the bullet and threw them in the washing machine, at the highest possible setting.
Guess what, these did shrink. Quite exactly by the equivalent to one and a half clothes size. Which makes them, right now, the best-fitting denims I own.
As I still tend to wear through the inside of my pants legs (I have done that even before getting fat, it´s something to do with the way I walk), I had been watching my only pair of size 21 denims with some apprehension for the appearance of that dreaded surface of worn-through cloth.
Now, I have three pairs of dark denims that fit me, which means that I will be able to forgo pants shopping for awhile yet. Actually, I am now saving my size 21 jeans because if I do recondense by another size, I´ll just give them the same treatment and voila- size 20 jeans! All for the price of a load of laundry.
Perhaps I should try to shrink the lighter ones some more, too.
The thing being that I would, formerly, just have given away those perfectly good pants and bought new ones in the smaller size.
But this is so much better.
Waste not, want not.


Julia

The case for ebooks

As I mentioned before, I have to ride by train quite often.
And I am what they call a bookworm.
As our local library is, er, rather badly stocked, that used to mean buying the books I wanted to read. WHich in turn meant an ever-growing accumulation of dead tree with words on it in my living-room.
Now, some books for me are definite keepers. They get read and re-read, cherished, and kept.
Unfortunately, even if I´m careful, there´s just so much life in a pocketbook edition. The paper yellows, and at some point, the binding comes apart. Many books aren´t even sold in hardcover, and those which are sell for prohibitively high prices. It´s not unusual for a hardcover to fetch four to five times what the pocket edition might cost. So, buying the hardcover is absolutely restricted to perennial known favorites.
My book collection, therefore, is mostly pocket editions. The only way to keep these without cluttering up the look of my living room is behind closed doors, and I have just so many closed compartments in my IKEA shelf.
The answer to that is culling. Ever so often, I remove the books I no longer read, the ones that are outdated, and the ones that have become too dingy to openly display. Still, there are plenty of open shelves with books in them, making the room appear untidy. Not the leather-backed, gold-lettered books that are as decorative as they are entertaining. Just the usual cheaply-bound motley stuff.
Enter the ebook.
What kept me from embracing those earlier was that I believed you had to buy an ebook-reader to be able to enjoy them. At the prices they demand for these, I haven´t yet been ready to splurge on one. But now they (internationally operating internet book dealer whose name I won´t mention) have an application for your ordinary windows based PC that allows you to read their electronic goods, and that app´s for free!
What´s more, a lot of classic books can also be downloaded for free. Add to that the regular specials where you can buy an ebook for a steeply discounted price for a short period of time, and the fact that the ebook edition of almost any book is cheaper than the paper one, plus if I were to ever buy the ebook reader of that company my downloaded books will follow me there, too.
I´m in luuuuurve!
Plus, as those books take up no more physical space than the netbook I read them on (which is preexisting), my reading habit no longer contributes to the clutter in our living room.
I am, actually, successively acquiring the electronic editions of my favorite books- perhaps my library will be almost exclusively digital someday. And my bookcases a lot emptier. After all, as long as I d not invite visitors that I could make an impression on with overflowing bookshelves, what good are they?
I used to equate possession of books with being cultured. Owning books on many topics meant I was a person of many interests. Having a big library of the classics meant I had a good education.
In the age of digital media, that reasoning no longer cuts it. Even the textbooks of information I need on the job are available online.
The wall-high bookshelves, therefore, will probably be no longer necessary one day.
And that will be the day I am a step closer to a minimalist living rooom.


Julia

Waste to waist to wait

For all too long, that´s what my grocery shopping went like:
Go to the closest supermarket, grab one of their oversized shopping carts, and fill it to the point of overflowing with all those delicious-looking things they had for sale.Then haul it to my car, squeezing in the four to five bags of merchandise such a cart amounted to, drive it home and drag it up the stairs to my flat. Then try to squeeze all of it into my fridge.
Most of the time, that meant removing at least one trash bag full of expired items first.
At the time, I thought that was the way things were if I wanted my pantry to be well-stocked all the time.
Well-stocked, to me, meant having any item I might wish to eat in the house all the time. So, I took home ten different kinds of cheese, because I couldn´t know which one I´d want to eat the next day, could I? Or three different loaves of bread, or five kinds of yoghourt, or six different packs of sausages.
All of these, of course, are highly perishable items, with a shelf life of sometimes less than a week. Having all of them in my fridge at once meant I could either eat them before they went bad, or I´d have to throw away what I couldn´t eat in time.
So I ate as much of them as I could and threw away the remaining packages as soon as they expired.

Just how dumb can you get? I regularly spent way too much money to buy too much food, ate too much "to keep it from going to waste" and still ended up having to throw away too much of it.
The force driving that insanity was fear. I was afraid that I might want to eat a certain food and find myself out of it. I imagined that I would, in that case, completely binge on whatever else I had on hand. The overstuffed fridge meant security. It also meant that I could make my eating decisions at the spur of a moment, eating whatever I happened to have a yen for.
It also meant I got fatter and fatter abusing my body as a bipedal waste bin gobbling down foods about to expire.

When I started out  on my weight loss journey two years ago, the first thing I decided on was a grocery shopping ban. I found out that I could live off what I already had in my fridge for several weeks before I had to go shopping again. With reducing the size of the portions I ate came the realization that I can really fit everything we need to eat in a week into just one of those reusable shopping bags.
I had to give up the idea of having everything always available for that, of course. Now, I have to decide when in front of the cheese shelf whether I want to eat gouda or emmental cheese that week, or in front of the yoghourt shelf whether I want greek or strawberry that week.
Guess what, I did not binge the first time I had a yen for camembert cheese, but only gouda in the fridge.
I just ate a piece of gouda, and - stopped eating. The world didn´t end.
And the next time I went grocery shopping, I was free to decide whether this week´s cheese selection would be camembert or something else. As far as I remember, it was something else.

It does not matter whether I have a special food on hand or not, as long as I have enough to eat.
It does not matter if the fridge appears half-empty, as long as what´s in there is enough to feed us until the next grocery shopping day.
I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. Absurdly so. But arriving at them has meant cutting down on our grocery bills, by more than half, and cutting down on food waste, too.
What my obsession with being stocked up fully with all my favourite foods has cost the environment before I saw the light, I cannot know. What I do know is that now I buy only as much food as will be consumed, and the amount of things we have to throw out because they have spoiled has gone down to almost zero.

And I feel a lot better for it. When I am not thinking about how much food and money I wasted over the years before I realized what I was doing wrong, that is, because then I could kick myself for being stupid.


Julia

They don´t shrink-but I do

That is, in a nutshell, the result of this weekend´s laundry experiment. There used to be a time- and I guess I am dating myself there- when you would, if you happened to get a cotton blouse or a pair of jeans mixed up with items that required laundering at a higher temperature, end up with a rather minuscule version of said garments when pulling them out of the washing machine. Today´s fabrics are treated so that doesn´t happen any more, it seems.
I had, over the weekend, tried to get a blouse and some pants to shrink on purpose, because both were becoming a bit too wide for my taste, but even the hottest setting on my washing machine didn´t make them shrink, so all that got me was two very, very clean garments that are still too wide :(. Well, for the time being I´ll continue to wear them as they are almost new and it would be a waste of money to replace them now while I am still recondensing myself.
The calculation as to when to replace my wardrobe is as follows: From experience, I know that I have been going down a clothes size with about every five kilograms lost. Losing those, at the present rate, would take me about five months, so, by the end of this season I will be down another clothes size, and the next warm season coming around will probably find me two sizes down from what would be my exact size today. Two sizes is also what those too-big blouses and pants are too big by. So, what I have is a choice of postponing the purchase of fitting garments for a year- and then hopefully having my target size, or at least one that will fit me down to goal weight, or buying at once and risking to find myself in too-big garments again next year.
When I look at the prices they demand for clothes and at the poor selection they have this year in classic styles, the decision is actually an easy one. So, I´ll wear the existing blouses and pants for another summer and save the money I would spend on new ones for next summer and, hopefully, my target size. In the meantime, what I already have may be oversized, but then again, when I compare that feeling to what it felt like to be dressed in clothes that kept growing too tight, it ain´t half bad. Besides, just knowing that by now, I don´t forcibly have to buy new trousers every two to three months because the old ones have worn through from my thighs rubbing against each other is priceless. At that time, the too-big pants conundrum would have been impossible because pants, on me, simply didn´t last long enough for me to noticeably change in size while wearing the same garment. And when I had to replace them, it was easy to blame the rising size on manufacturers having changed the cut.
The extra fabric in the too-wide clothes, on the other hand, is a reminder of just how far I have come already this time, and a great motivator to keep up what I am doing.


Julia

Sock it to them!

I did get to buy two baggies full of dried lavender yesterday. When I came home, I opened my handkerchief drawer to look for some hankies to convert to sachets, and chanced upon... a pack of nylon socks that I had bought some time ago, cheaply, and found out to be ill-fitting, so they weren´t worn at all.
As I wasn´t wearing them, they were actually clutter. Until yesterday, that is, because seeing them made me realize that those hankies were far more expensive to cut up for sachets, I would also have to sew those, and I wanted those lavender sachets fast in order to moth-proof my clothes storage and closet.
What I did was using the nylon socks as baggies, fill in some lavender flowers, tie a knot into them, and attach them, by the remaining end of the sock, to the hangers in my closet. The whole thing took me about ten minutes, and now I have a wonderfully lavender-scented closet. I may make some more of these- there are still plenty of socks left! And I just hope that it´s true what they say about moth keeping away from that smell.

Julia

Lavender perfume

So, I picked up two packs of anti-moth yesterday. I had expected to find the old kind of moth paper or mothballs inside, but on opening them, I found it was little sachets smelling of lavender (I guess there was even some real dried lavender in there). These were, of course, fortified with some pesticide (not what I´d ordinarily use, but the cumulative moth damages have, by now, become high enough to call for radical countermeasures).
I also noticed some products heavy on lavender oil. Now I used to have a bottle of pure lavender oil in my household, but when that ran out, the shop where I had bought it had folded, so I didn´t replace it.
What is still on sale in our little town is dried lavender flowers- for making tea with, but I think they´ll work in sachets, too.
As I own a big stack of cloth handkerchiefs that I haven´t used any more since my pollen allergy has gone away (I probably grew out of it), the material for sewing some sachets is already there.
So, I´ll see if I can pick up some dried lavender over lunch break. And for this summer´s balcony planting (which hasn´t yet been done because there´s still the danger of night frost) there´ll be a couple of lavender bushes, too, to be harvested in autumn.
Putting some lavender sachets between my linens, sweaters, and into my other closet spaces might just keep those pesky beasts away for good.
And, of course, it smells good.
If I sew them myself, I´ll be having them for almost free, too- I have seen ready-made ones that were looking cute, but were rather expensive considering how little lavender could fit in there. Simple white ones will do the job as well, I´m certain.

Guess what, I am looking forward to that fresh-smelling closet!


Julia

Quitting fears

I had been smoke-free for about seven years. And then I blew it with just one cigarillo, which led to a complete relapse. I have been back to my old pack-a-day habit for awhile. Which means, at the prices they demand for cigarettes, spending more on smoking than on food.
There it is. As if I needed to see it in writing to fully realize just how utterly dumb this is. Especially when you´re on a budget.
The sensible thing to do would be to quit again.
There´s just one hitch.
After my last quit, I gained sixty pounds in six months. Plus, I had panic attacks for even longer than that.
Both of which should have kept me from starting again. I have no idea if the panic will return if I quit now. What is different this time is that I have changed the way I eat, having a lot more protein and less carbs than back then. Perhaps my neurotransmitters are better balanced now, but I wouldn´t bet on that.
On the other hand, before my first quit, I had been smoking for almost twenty-five years. For all of my grown-up life, to be exact.
I had never been in a restaurant, or out with friends, or even working at my desk, without a cigarette. My biggest fear, back then, wasn´t gaining weight. It was not being able to make it through my day without punctuating it with cigarettes. It was not knowing what to do with my hands, or what to put in my mouth.
Back then, what I put into my mouth instead after quitting was food. Sweets, mostly. And double amounts of everything, because hunger felt so much like withdrawal.
I made it through seven years of not smoking. Actually, I found myself not needing a cigarette to be able to sit at a table with friends. I found myself not needing a cigarette to work on my case files. I found myself not having to smoke first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
So, today, I know that a smoke-free life is possible for me. I even know, because the relapse came some 40 pounds into my weight loss journey, that smoking is not essential for me to lose weight.

Knowing all of that, why am I still scared of quitting?


Julia

Eggs-citement!

I promised accountability about the weekend, so here goes!
For the first time ever, I came home after a four-day holiday weekend and- lost! Just 80 percent of a pound, but a loss! Which brings me to a distance of just 200 grams from the point where I´ll be able to put that ten-kilo slider on my scales down another notch.
How I did it? This time, I had determined beforehand that I would not go off the wagon for the holidays. So, no chocolate eggs. No bread. No Easter pastries. No potatoes or pommes croquette. I had some rice with Good Friday´s fish dinner, but that was all. And apart from that, I just said no to whatever carby delights were offered.
Being below the limit of morbid obesity made things a bit easier for me there, because whenever someone (I´m talking about you, D(iet) H(azard)) offered me some carbohydrate rich stuff, I could remind myself that eating this would probably result in my going back up over the limit of obesity. After having to fight for so long to get below that point, I simply wasn´t going to risk having to do it all over again. None of those treats could possibly taste as good as it feels to be no longer obese.
As I was, once more, the designated cook for the holidays, I simply did not prepare any starchy side dishes for myself. I had brought along a bunch of precooked colored eggs, plus plenty of cottage cheese, which I had for breakfast instead of rolls and bread. Of the cheese and sausages that were offered, I took some small pieces, without bread, so I didn´t even feel deprived. For dinner, I partook from the vegetables and the roast, leaving the potato part to the rest of the family. I put some of the gravy on the meat, so I had all of the good taste without extra carbs.
Obviously, that worked.

There was another NSV over the weekend. I had mentioned my leather vests getting loose again.
On Saturday, I had a chance of visiting the factory outlet store I got these from to look for the next-smaller size.
Or so I thought.
When I came in, the salesperson recognized me from my previous visits and immediately asked me how much weight I had lost. She then proceeded to ask me what my present size in ladies´garments was. When I told her, she went to the vest rack and pulled out- my favourite vest in a size three sizes smaller than what I´d come into the shop in. I looked at her quite flabbergasted because I would have assumed that I´d gone down two sizes at the very most since my last visit. But when I tried that vest on, it fit. Closely, but it fit. I could button it, too. I tried on another of the same size, and that one, too, fit. One of them was a more rugged style of khaki-colored leather, the other a rather elegant dark brown velvety nubuck.
The very best thing about this is that the size I have reached now will probably fit me right down to goal weight without becoming too loose, this being the size in men´s vests I had been buying when I started wearing them some twenty-five years ago when I was only slightly overweight. Being female means being a bit wider around the hip and chest areas than a male of the same weight, so I need that size to accomodate both, even with the condensable matter gone.
What that means is that I will be able to wear the two vests I bought on Saturday for a long while. And they also happened to have a sale so I got those two vests for what would in another store have been the price of one.
And DH will, once again, profit from my changing size because he, too, has been condensing himself by several kilos and will thus be able to take over the vests I have shrunk out of. So, the investment (pun intended) will be doubly frugal.

Guess what, this is so much better than chocolate eggs or potatoes!


Julia

Say cheese!

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

So dare to cook- it´s fun and frugal!


Julia

Slow motion

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

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

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


Julia

Murphy was here

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

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


Julia