Stop this train, I want to get off!

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

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

First the trouble with my eyes. Then fatigue. 

And the weather keeps going up and down like crazy. 

Inescapable Math

There is an app for almost anything, they say. 

And if there is not, there is one that can be used off-topic, so to say, to do what one wanted. 

For keeping a running total of my caloric intake, I have downloaded what is originally a financial tallykeeping app. I have used that since September 1st, and every day when entering my in and out totals I was watching the deficit grow. Until the weekend, that is. Due to hormonal fluctuations (don't ask how I know...) I was absolutely ravenous for two days. I decided not to restrict myself overly, and found myself at least (not journalled everything, actually) 2000 calories over and above what I would have needed on either day, even though I was also doing a lot of walking on Saturday. So, not only has all of the deficit I had so painstakingly created gone up in smoke, no, I have, for this month, a 500 calorie minimum surplus that I have to spend before even starting to really lose fat relatively to the beginning of the month. 

The problem being that I still feel hungry. 

No wonder my weekly intake and expense never evened out. As I have remarked more than once, the true miracle is that I am not yet back at a BMI of over 40. 

And I have squandered one of the just 60 weeks I have to get myself to goal weight. 

Weight this morning: 95 kilograms or 209 pounds. 

Back to Square...one?

I know. It´s hot outside, and it has been hot for over two weeks. And yes, my body is probably retainig water. Still, what I saw this morning on my scales was making all the red lights go on at once, complete with klaxons and whistles. 

98 kilograms before adjusting for brekkie. 

Just two kilos away from that shameful two-zentner mark. 

And I know already that even when it gets cooler most of the regain will not disappear in a water whoosh.

Which means I have to do something fast.  Hmm, a fast would probably be it. Only that would make DH  freak.

Fatlogic.

I got the book by a german author who gives quite a rundown of Lies We Tell Ourselves Why We Are Fat. Guilty on all counts, I fear. 

Things to take along: 

There is no such thing as a starvation mode that would prevent the body from burning off fat. 

-Of course, or else it would be impossible to kill a person by not feeding them once that person had been obese in their life, or what? 

Human thighs do not touch when walking in their state as nature intended it. 

-D´uh. If the ability to walk bare-thighed without getting a serious case of friction burn is an indication of someone being at their nature-intended weight, then I have indeed been overfat my whole life. As it is, I cannot remember ever being able not to wear at least pantyhose to reduce friction and - lets call a spade a spade- chub rub. 

Which means, again, that my father- this hurts to admit- was right about me being overweight. Fuck the height-weight tables. 

Former dieting episodes do not fuck up one´s metabolism for good.

- That was the one I stuck to the most. Daddy forced me to diet at age seven (see above), I dieted several times in my life, that is why dieting does not work for me any more and my metabolism is permanently and irrevocably down in the dumps. What really is out of whack is probably my sense of portion sizes. If I eat what I perceive as normal portions and to a point of what I perceive as satiety I would probably down some six thousand calories a day, without having the feeling of having overeaten. Even now, I can gobble up some two thousand calories between coming home and dinner and still feel  that I have barely eaten anything. 

There is no such thing as a food one may consume ad libitum (except water).

-Reading the low-carb and paleo diet books gave me one problem I did not use to have, Namely, I lost my avoidance of fat as a macronutritient. Now, I have cravings, not so much for carbs but rather for dripping fat. Butter, slathered on half a centimeter thick. Bacon strips with grease dripping out of them. Cream. Sausage. My mouth starts watering when I think of these. 

At home, we never had that kind of food because of my mother´s hep C. I was actually revolted by fatty food, as with like-to-be-MIL´s oil, butter and cream cuisine. 

Today, I crave the stuff. Unfortunately it is all too easy to consume a full day´s worth of calories in the guise of a few bags of nuts, or slices of bread piled high with butter and camembert cheese. 

The one thing I still won´t wrap my mind around is exercise. I hate my body too much to voluntarily engage in any activity that would make me feel my body. Or that would interrupt my surfing and expose me to real life. 

Weightloss that would require me to exercise will never be sustainable for me. So what it comes down to is bite the bit but not the food, count calories and reduce them. 

I have found a german calorie-counting site and app that has a lot more foods saved already than myfitnesspal., and is easier to use when logging. I will have to weigh and measure everything I eat and drink. Perhaps I should bring a pair of food scales to the office, too. 

98 to 62 makes 36 Kilograms to lose. What I want to be able to do is wear a skirt (a long one, of course) with nothing but my panties underneath. Or with nothing at all. Without having the inside of my thighs rubbed raw and bleeding. 

And wear high-heeled boots again without my feet hurting like hell. 

I stopped recondensing after my mother´s birthday, having no more goal to achieve. I do not know just how much of my success up to that point was due to the urgent desire to kick my asshole of a father in the face with high-heeled boots. What I do know is that I did not have a real why any more after that day. And that I never had a goal for myself to achieve. Something that would make me feel good, quite apart from the burning desire for revenge for a fucked-up childhood. 

This heatwave has at least reminded me that there might be something I could wish for. Having to swathe myself in long trousers and compression stockings at 35 degrees centigrade is not what I would like to do. And as the climate is getting ever warmer I would have to do this quite often. NOT. 

80 pounds (non-metric ones) to lose. 280.000 calories of fat to burn. 

If I stay 500 calories below my TEE that would take me 560 days. One and a half years. Or else, I would be at goal at the end of 2016. 

Were I to go down by 1000 calories a day I would need 9 months. Goal date: sometime around April 2016. 

If I were to cut down to a 1500 calories a day deficit, I would be at goal... in December. 2015. Six months. 

But that would mean either eating just 500 calories a day or expending as many. 

So 1000 it is. 

In the time that other women take to make a baby, I want to get rid of the fatty equivalent of quintuplets. Drat. 

But if I do not react now, I might become immobile again. The pain is already back. So are the difficulties dressing or cleaning my body. 

Kicking myself for allowing this to happen again does, unfortunately, not burn enough calories. 

That Time Again

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

Or so I thought. 

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

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

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

Sometimes I really hate my body.

Julia

Egging Myself On

It´s been eleven months now since the inundation and as many months of having regained. 

I am still convinced that the regain and the flooding were somehow connected, most probably via some toxins that were set free in my old office. 

In spite of being out of there for good, it wasn´t like the regain stopped immediately or the weight started to drop off from the day I changed rooms. 

What I have managed by now is slowing the regain from a rate of 270 grams a week to about 80 grams a week, on average. Which still has me at 93 kilograms and a 33.3 BMI. Actually, I might have been further down had we not been duty-bound to visit with MIL for a week twice  (she expects us down there for every bank holiday). Every time that ended with a three-pound regain that I had to try and get off before even thinking of recondensing. 

As it is, I´m sick and tired of being stuck at this weight. Sick and tired of being thick and tired. 

That´s why I have switched my breakfast from bacon and eggs to a protein shake, and I am trying to replace as many meals as possible with shakes. Otherwise, I try to halve the portions of what I eat. 

I had actually, over the years, succumbed to another case of portion creep. The smaller dinnerware we use has been limiting the damages, but still, having three instead of two eggs for breakfast means about a hundred more calories, and if I don´t cut down on my eating elsewhere it partly explains why I´m still stuck in gaining mode. 

Total weight regained: 13.8 kilograms or 30 pounds. 

Distance to goal of being normal-weighted: 23.8 kilograms or 52 pounds. 

DIstance to goal at my lowest weight reached: 10 kilograms or 22 pounds. 

So, this regaining thing more than doubled the distance to goal. 

 Or, in other words, if I were to restart recondensing at a going rate of half a pound a week, I´d take another year to get back in the vicinity of the place I had already reached. 

I´ll try to be there sooner. 

This time I won´t be doing this just for myself, DH, too, has grown quite a paunch during the last year. As DFIL was type two diabetic for many years, I am afraid DH might put himself over the edge, too. Offering healthy meals, which I had been criminally neglecting since the flood, is therefore important. 

And for myself, resisting those extra nibbles and sneaky snacks in the time between coming home and putting dinner on the table. 

I have done this before. I can do this again. 

Julia

The Law of Three

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

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

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

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

Shame on me.

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

No one to blame for the weight gain but us. 

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

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

Never give up. 

Julia

Seven Months Is Enough Already

Seven months, almost to the day. June 15th, 2013. That was the last day I experienced not being obese. 

Since then, my weight has been steadily creeping up. Half a pound a week, on average. Which has by now catapulted me back to 200 pounds. 91 kilograms. 

I am by now convinced that the only thing I can do to stop this is go off the carbs again- and stay well below the 1800 daily calories that should, according to the charts, equal my basal metabolic rate at a weight below morbid obesity and therefore should mean at most maintenance, not a ten-kilogram regain in just seven months. 

Looks like my metabolism is even more tanked than I had assumed. 

Actually, I have been feeling what is supposed to be the signs of a slowed-down metabolism for quite a while already. Continually cold hands and feet, digestive issues, fatigue, and, of course, weight gain. The whole combined with a continuous feeling of sluggishness and difficulties concentrating. Which was also the reason why I stopped blogging for so long- I was just too fricking tired all the time. 

So, when I came upon some books that claimed that the only way to get one´s metabolism back up is to stop undereating and refeed your body, I chose trying to lose my fatigue over trying to lose my weight. The choice was facilitated by the accompanying recommendation that one should eat plenty of carbohydrate, fat and salt. In other words, all the things I had been avoiding when losing were suddenly, not only allowed but preferable. 

Supposedly, the body should gain back some weight and then stabilize at it´s "natural" weight. 

The only problem being that after several months of doing this, there is no sign of the regain slowing down. At the going rate, I´d be back where I started from within another year. 

And the fatigue hasn´t diminished either. My hands and feet are still mostly icy cold. And my digestion still is a mess. 

This morning´s scale shock is the point where I have to reevaluate my choices. 

Obviously, the "getting my metabolism back up" thing is not working. What with the advice given running counter to everything I did when losing the weight two years ago, it´s likely making my situation worse by the day. Having all the aches and complications of morbid obesity back is certainly worse than having to accept that my metabolism is slow, even if that means cutting way down on the calories. Or the carbs. 

So, beginning today, I´m back on the wagon. Carbs below 20 percent of calories and 1500 calories a day maximum. Upping my fluid intake again (another thing that was discouraged for getting my metabolism back up). For the time being, no alcoholic beverages. And using the stairs at the office again even if I´m, by now, wheezing when I arrive upstairs. Trying for 10000 steps a day instead of my customary 5000. 

I took seven months to regain those last ten kilos. The first time around, I have been taking nine months to recondense them. 

I´ll see how long it takes me this time.

As for setting goals, I am by now aiming to get back to the lowest point I had reached. There isn´t a deadline, as it is mathematically impossible for me to reach that goal by my birthday in March.  

And I am, at present, not intending to force my weight down further than that. If more weight should come off, I´d be glad about it, but if that 80-kilo point were where the buck stops for me, I´d accept that, too. 

What I won´t accept is being back out of onederland. What I won´t accept is becoming that beached whale again. 

Enough already. 

Yes, having my stomach growl will probably lead to the production of stress hormones. But so does having to buy new pants because the old ones are wearing through, or starting, once again, to actively avoid everything that might physically exert me. I´m not starting an exercise regimen ( no time for that), but I don´t want to have to think about the shortest way to go somewhere, or the easiest way to do things. Nor do I want to cut out regular activities because they would be too strenuous. 

I want my life back. As simple as that.

Julia

And the stress goes on...

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

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

WTF. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am scared of gaining it all back. 

Julia 

Stop Wa(i)sting Time

The sight of those 89 kilos on the scale at the beginning of the week has been a much-needed wake-up call. I simply cannot afford to procrastinate on getting my body out of gaining mode and back to recondensing, because the task is getting harder with every day I allow the regain to continue. 

What I have done the last days is going on a round of meal replacement shakes only during the daytime, plus my usual bacon-and-eggs breakfast and reduced portions of what is for dinner. No bread, as little carbs as possible. 

The reward is a two-kilogram loss by today, down to 87 kilos. 

I know, the powdered stuff isn´t optimal. But if it manages to really turn that weight switch back to losing, I´ll bear with the disadvantages. 

As it is, I have started to prepare those shakes at home and bring them to the office in a thermos, which  means that I won´t have to fight the temptation of getting something else to eat just because I´m not feeling like having to clean up the shaker afterwards (which at my office means having to carry that thing all along the corridor to the tea kitchen at the remote end). Sometimes the thought of having to do that was enough to drive me to the cookie jar instead. 

If I do not do something I know I ought to, it pays to look at the things that make it harder to do it and, if possible, to remove the obstacles. 

In this case, that meant looking for suitable containers to carry the shakes in. One wide-mouth aluminium bottle was still sitting in my cupboard, so that one is used for one portion of the shakes, and then I found a sale on some nifty stainless steel (so no BPA-containing coating) thermos cups originally intended for coffee. They are, in contrast to most coffee-to-go cups one sees, absolutely spillproof, meaning they may be thrown into my bag every which way without emptying their contents all over whatever I carry in there. One of them is already in use, and I plan on getting another one over lunch break (they still are pretty expensive, so I wanted to try out one first before paying for two of them). 

If I ever were to stop having to carry protein shakes to the office, they can be returned to their originally intended use as coffee containers. 

In any case, if I bought pre-prepared shakes of the same brand I now have as powder that must be mixed up, I´d have to pay two euros for one single bottle. The powder comes at seven euros for a ten-portion supply. So the new thermos cups would pay their way within less than three weeks. Besides, I could even go back to preparing my own shakes including fruit and berries and bring them to the office. As I have no blender at the office, fruit as an ingredient was not possible for any shakes prepared there. Being able to carry a full workday´s supply of prepared shakes means being able to incorporate real food into what I can eat there. 

And the thermos cups are small enough not to become a nuisance by themselves, so it is less likely that I might discontinue carrying them to the office than with a single big container. 

DH will be out of town for a few days next week, which means that I can do a full day´s worth of just the shakes without any additional foods. Perhaps that will get my recondensing switch back to "execute".

Never give up hope.

Julia

Results Typical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

Backing down slowly

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20-20 vision of hindsight...

Julia

Skyrocketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definitely not what I want. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep more, obviously. 

Eight hours per night would be nice. 

Eat less, as obviously. 

And watch out for portion creep.

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

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

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

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

Julia

White Flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

Stuck and Hungry

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

And I am continuously hungry. 

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

As in bacon, butter, greasy sausages. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weight this morning: 86.2 kilograms. 

Feeling like as many tons avoirdupois. 

Julia

Accepting What Is

I won´t enter my fifth decade as a normal-weighted person, no more than I entered my second, third or fourth. That is, by now, glaringly obvious. 

I haven´t even been able to stop gaining, even though is has slowed down, at least. But that body of mine has decided not to react to any attempts at getting it to start recondensing again. 

Almost 86 kilos, and back to a BMI of 31.4. 

Of course, I do search for what it might be that makes my body cling to that weight. Overeating it isn´t. I haven´t been eating beyond the point of being stuffed even once. No desperate binges like when I first gained all that weight.

If there is such a thing as an innate wisdom of our bodies, why does mine decide that it better be a lot heavier than what I would like to be living in?  It´s true, I have a stressful job and a busy private life. But what good are almost forty pounds of extra weight to drag around when it comes to coping with everything? 

Admittedly, being fat was like having an elephant´s hide suit of armor. Losing some of that fat meant feeling more exposed. But by what subconscious quirk should I ever want the pain that came with the weight back? And I´m not just talking about the physical pain of obesity, the feet tha kept hurting after a few steps, the back that kept aching, or all the things I could not do when fat. I´m also talking about the lack of respect, the sneers, the invisibility. 

My head doesn´t want that all back. Then why should my body? 

I am still at about 24 percent less weight than I started out at. Compared to statistics that claim you´re already a success if you keep just ten percent off, I am still ahead. But I do have to find out what really drives this regain before I slip back even further. 

Right now, I haven´t got a clue. 

Keep on keeping on....

Julia

Roller coaster

Up two, down two. Or up three, down one, up one, down one, up two...

No, I have not been pigging out on vanilla pudding or fries. I haven´t eaten any fast food. I have not been eating myself into a food coma. And I haven´t, at least that I noticed, eaten more than I did while I was losing. Nor did I miss any things in the morning that were in my fridge when I went to sleep. 

Still. I have gained over three kilos in the last three months. 

The regain started when I had been forced to eat more carbs while we were off the grid due to the flood in June. After that, it´s been an uphill fight, first against the carb cravings induced by having to eat bread for a week, and by now against my body having switched back into gaining mode. 

I did have a similar experience two years ago. Back then, it was carelessness about my diet that started it. Being pushed into an upward spiral by a natural desaster makes for quite an irony. Mind you, while we were off the grid and without clean water I could not cook. I could not store food that had to be kept cool. I could not wash any vegetables. I honestly don´t know what else I could have eaten than what I did, unless I had been going out to eat every single time which just wasn´t in the budget after losing all of my food stores because the freezer wasn´t working while electricity was off.And don´t get me started about roughing it- there´s a difference between being outside in the clean outdoors, with plenty of space for a campfire to cook on and clear water nearby, or being stuck in a city apartment with no gas or electricity and a safety warning for the drinking water out. What I ended up relying on was highly stockable, ready-to-eat things. If you guess that means carbohydrates as in cookies and highly processed foods, you´re right. 

The damages I am fighting now are ample proof as to how harmful that stuff is to me. 

I had so hoped not to become one of the statistics  that claim most successful losers gain it all back. 

As per now, I am still within a range others would call maintenance. But I know that what I am really in is the danger zone. I will have to keep working at getting out of it. 

And carbs are the first thing that will have to go. 

Julia

And The Ride Goes On ...

This morning´s WI: 86 kilograms. Over two pounds up from yesterday in spite of having a slight case of diarrhea which ought to flush out any retained water, too. And in spite of having eaten below my calorie limit. 

I don´t understand what is happening. Scary doesn´t begin to describe it. The last time my weight skyrocketed like this, I was on medications, and the gain stopped as soon as I stopped the meds. Only right now, I´m not taking any. And the extra rest my staycation offers should not have such an extreme effect, either. 

I have, by now, reached the point where my pants begin to get too tight, and the red belt I bought just a month ago is cutting uncomfortably into my belly. 

I don´t think I´ll be normal weighted by my birthday any more. With what´s happening right now, I´d be glad if I managed to get back below morbid obesity until then. 

Drat. 

Sometimes there just isn´t any good news. 

Julia

Fresh paint, fresh start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia

Eff stands for frustration

While the heat wave has been slowly ebbing off, the water retention that came with it hasn´t. 

Quite the contrary. I have been having trouble with my circulation since last week, and my weight has been, during that week, gone up by some 300 grams ( that´s 0,7 pounds) A DAY. Every effing day. 

Which catapults me back to a point I last saw almost two years ago. 84.7 kilograms, 186 pounds. 

No, I haven´t overeaten. I stuck to around 2000 calories a day. Mostly, below. No way I could have overeaten by 2100 calories a day. Still, I am ballooning up like a piece of yeast dough. 

We went to see MIL over the weekend, and she immediately asked me whether I had noticed that I had grown fatter since she last saw me. It took all of my self-control not to scream at her. Instead, I bit my lip and then told her calmly that I am still weighing myself every day and yes, I know perfectly well that I have regained so there is no need for her to alert me to the fact. 

As if I could miss what is happening. My clothes fit tighter, my rings are once more cutting into my fingers, and I am feeling the old aches creep back. Knees, ankles, spine. 

But even if it was true, what pissed me off was that the old lady felt the need to address the obvious at all. 

To me, having someone talk to me about gaining weight always feels like an attack. It probably is what growing up with parents who wanted me to lose weight when I had a BMI 21 will do. The strength of my anger flaring up at being taken to task over my weight was, in any case, bigger than what the old lady would have deserved. 

But, apart the anger over that scene, I am still scared. Badly. If this were to continue, I would be back in the bigger clothes sizes in a matter of weeks. 

What scares me most is that I honestly don´t know what is propelling my weight upwards. 

It almost feels as if that body of mine were taunting me. Do what you want, you are still stuck within me and I do as I please. 

The only hope I have is that this really is all water retention. Maybe I´ll pick up a diuretic at the pharmacy tonight. If that doesn´t help, there´s something else wrong. 

Sometimes life sucks.

Julia