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Four square meters. That is the open space in my living room that was liberated by ditching the last of the IKEA armchairs plus the guest bed. As they only pick up big pieces of trash once a month, they had been languishing in the cellar awaiting pickup day. Yesterday, very carefully of course not to put too much of a strain on my knee, we put them out in front of the house. I actually expected them to be gone before the pickup truck arrived. Well, that didn´t happen. They were obviously not looking attractive enough for anybody to carry them home. Which is sobering when I consider that I had actually been hesitant at first to throw them out. Anyway, the trash collection took them this morning. 

Watching from the kitchen window how they were compacted into the trash lorry made me a bit sad. Then again, I am glad that I have reclaimed the space they occupied in our flat. 

Come to think of it, I spent the twentieth part of our rent every month on making room for something that others wouldn´t even pick up for free.

And there are more such white elephants still around taking up space and making the apartment look crowded and small. 

The couch, which has been temporariliy relegated to the guestroom in place of the bed, is a prime such candidate  Two more square meters beckoning to be liberated. We are actually only waiting for our respective injuries to heal before dragging it downstairs. 

The living room minus the old easy chair and the couch appears twice as roomy as when they were still in there, even with the new easy chairs in place. 

One step after the other, we are improving on the way we live. And I keep being surprised at how small a step may sometimes translate into a dramatic improvement. 

On the weight front, unfortunately, no such luck. I have been supplementing with gelatin and resistant starch for several days, hoping to get my digestion and my joints back to working properly. What that brought me was a three-pound gain. I just hope that it´s a matter of the body adapting to being refed and will go away again. Meanwhile, it´s sheer frustration. Pants growing tight again ( yup, the bigger ones I hesitated so long to buy), shortness of breath, and of course that bum knee. 

Looks like it´s one more time my body shows me that it won´t do what I want it to do. 

If only that would stop. 

Before I get back to where I never wanted to be again for good. 

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

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

Mired down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which then is missing in other respects. 

Keep calm and carry on...

Julia

Over again

The last weeks, weight-wise, were absolute desaster for me. The curve indicating my weight on FatWatch has turned into an almost vertical rise that has catapulted me back to about where I was at the beginning of last year. 

Highest point reached regaining:83.8 kilograms. 184 pounds. 

This morning's weight: 83.0 kilos, 182.6 pounds.

The most vexing part being that the rapid rise came after things ought to have been back to normal after the flooding in June. Not while we were off plan due to being unable to cool, wash or cook fresh food. Which either means that the results of that week were taking time to materialize, or I didn't get back on the wagon asap. 

Most likely, it's the latter. 

If mentally kicking oneself counted as exercise I might have an easier time getting the regain off again. 

Four point six kilos up from the lowest point last year in May. 10.12 pounds. 

The seventh part of what I had recondensed. 

If I had needed a reminder ( obviously, I did ) that I cannot must not may not ever return to eating the things I used to eat, this is it. It had taken me almost two years to get down there. Losing, statistically, fifteen weeks worth of distance already covered to being less careful for one year and just one month of not being careful at all goes a long way towards demonstrating just how fast the other sixty pounds might be back. 

So, back onto the rails. 

As DH is out of town once more, I have started doing a protein fast, with nothing but protein shakes for the next three days minimum. Not a sustainable way of living, but the point is that I must get off carbs again. 

I'll be posting my daily weigh-in results to keep myself accountable. 

The one thing I want to regain is the ground I lost this year. Being halfway through it already, that may mean I won't be able to reach my goal by next March any more. But I keep trying. 

Julia

Gift horse

Sometimes, I have business appointments that take me quite far out of town. Today, I had one that was supposed to start at ten a.m and take place in a city some 250 kilometers off. As DH needed the family car, I went by train, which meant getting up at four o'clock so I'd be on time. Five hours later, I arrived, only to find out that the appointment had been cancelled because someone had had to call in sick. I later found out that they had phoned my office about the cancellation... after nine:(. 

Which left me in that town with a day of nothing to do, as I had purchased a return ticket for the afternoon already that was nonrefundable. My estimated colleague had advised me that the city I was going to has plenty of historical buildings, and I should really do some sightseeing. 

Which is what I did, after buying a pair of sneakers on sale because my business shoes, while comfortable enough for walking to that appointment from the station, weren't exactly made for walking around on cobbled streets all day. 

Of course, as it was Monday, all the museums and churches one could have visited were closed. So I took a couple of pictures of the outsides of the buildings to show to DH and set out to explore the older part of the city. 

All in all, that meant walking for almost five hours with a backpack full of files. I was rather glad about the sneakers soon...

And, as this was kind of a holiday for me, I did sit down at noon for an ice cream with sliced almonds and hazelnuts on top. I had not had any ice cream for about three years, and besides, had not had any breakfast because I just could not get anything down at such an ungodly hour. So, I did enjoy that ice cream to the last spoonful, and then proceeded to visit the sights. 

Which of course meant window-shopping, too. 

Being female, of course, I ended up at a shoe store.

I didn't buy anything for myself, but I found something for DH. He'd had, for a long time, had a favourite pair of brand-name shoes that he practically lived in. Having to retire them because they were worn out was a sad event for him, but we had not found another pair in his size. Guess what, they had those very shoes, same model, his size, and at half price, no less. So, tonight DH is in for a surprise...

And I am interested to find out if ten degrees less heat plus five hours of walking might turn that upward trend on the scales around again..

Julia

Beep beep

Ordinarily, that sound would signal a major annoyance. It's my freezer's alarm that goes off whenever the temperature inside gets too high. 

Today, it's the most beautiful noise (cue Neil Diamond) I could imagine, because it means we are, after six days of no electricity, back on the grid, and our technical gadgets have survived the switchoff without damage.

Thank God.

Cleanup ops in our city are continuing. At every street there are heaps of soaked and unusable stuff. The trash removal guys are doing overtime filling and carting away garage-sized containers.

By now, people are beginning to question the way the catastrophe was handled by the Government. It looks as if things were dealt with rather inefficiently and damages could have been less if they hadn't. 

It makes no difference to the work at hand. I am, presently, through with clearing out the cellar. The stuff that's left in there is waterproof and cleanable stuff that I intend to keep. The two boxes of soggy paper I had taken to the balcony to sort are mostly empty. Nothing important in there, but some papers with personal data on that need shredding before discarding, so I have to take every single sheet and decide if it can be tossed at once. Two bags of immediate goners are already in the container in front of our house. Having to do the sorting with rubber gloves because the papers are all mucky doesn't help sorting speed. But sort them I must. Were I to procrastinate, the work would get ickier by the minute. 

So it's back to work.

As we did not know when electricity would be back, the food situation is still not back to normal. Too many carbs. I'll look at the damages when I can restart to eat normally. 

But after this experience, beating myself up because I have probably regained is the last thing on my mind. 

We still have no gas, which means no hot water for showering. I am beginning to admire the old Spartans... washing my hair with ice-cold water gives me a headache every time. .oh well.

Force majeure, I think the French call it. An act of powers higher than us. 

I hope there won't be a repetition anytime soon. 

Julia

From high water to hell in a handbasket

That's the way my eating has gone these last days.

After being cut off electricity by the flooding, we can neither cook anything, nor keep anything refrigerated. As the tap water has also been tainted, there's a public health advice out to not use it for drinking without boiling it first. Which we can't do because there is no electricity. So, we've been drinking nothing but bottled water and the boiled water I took home in a thermos from work.

If the water is not safe for drinking, it can't be used for washing produce, either. The veggies I still have sitting in my turned-off fridge would have to be washed before eating, so we cannot eat them either.

Nor could we wash our dishes with the stuff. So, anything that would leave smelly traces on the plates is out, which means no canned fish or something like that. 

What that leaves us at is exactly those things I had stayed clear of the last years. Bread and cheese for breakfast, fast food for lunch and dinner. 

Of course, my intestines are, by now, in open rebellion. While I cannot be completely certain that this is due to the lousy diet I had been eating these days and not to picking up some stomach bug from the flood water, I think the latter would create a bit more, um, drama. Anyway I've been feeling a bit queasy and very bloated for days, with a hefty uptick of my weight on top. 

Of course, most foods that don't need cooking or washing before eating and can be kept at room temperature, which right now are the requirements for what we can have in our pantry, are sky-high in carbohydrates, which means I am getting an unplanned carb refeed which explains the gains. Still it's annoying, especially as the electricity and water situation is unlikely to resolve in the next days. 

Being city-dwelling upper-storey appartment dwellers with a rather smallish balcony, we don't even own  a charcoal or gas powered barbecue, and if we did, it would probably have been kept in that basement. Buying one might be difficult because so many people still have no power, so they are probably sold out, and besides, we have no place to safely use it. So there's nothing left but to suck it up, although I am beginning to consider putting in a week of fasting to compensate for last week's nutritional catastrophe. 

I just hope we'll be back on the grid soon, before the personal damage gets worse.

Julia

Tracking eye openers

Anyone who has been following my blog for some time knows that I am a bit obsessive about tracking my progress, or lack thereof. Be it FatWatch or Physicsdiet.com, whenever I am near a scale in the morning I weigh in and record my weight. As both of these programs give you long-time averages and trend curves, I can see which way my weight is developing. 

I found that especially helpful on the near-plateau I've been on for over a year. 

Just weighing in daily would have kept me under a false impression of security, because the day-to-day variations were actually rather smallish. Had I not kept those records, I would certainly have believed that what I did was maintaining.

Enter the FatWatch curves for the last quarter and the last year. Ouch.

Only when I looked at these did I recognize that I had been slowly and insidiously starting to Gain It All Back. Not in a big way yet, mind you, but the tendency was pointing in the opposite direction of where I wanted it to go. Had I continued that way, I would perhaps have reached my starting weight in less than a decade, instead of my goal weight next year. 

So, what I am working on is to pull that curve back down. 

Wrecking the train you're on can be as easy as closing your eyes to where you are going. 

Which is why intuitive eating would never work for me. 

Julia

Disposing of the enemy

This weekend, we were staying at our own place. I was attacking what Flylady calls Mount Washmore, namely, two weeks' worth of laundry that had backed up, DH had some paperwork to catch up on, and eating was good. Still, I'm up a pound. I don't know if it's due to TOM or the fact that I had a bit more rest than usual, but I'll take a variation of one pound up over one of four pounds up any day. At least I'm starting the week from a far better place than the last one.
As I have decided to go peanut-free for the next month, I did not restock these before the weekend. And DH, whom I have not informed about my decision, took a good share of the ones left, so they definitely will be out of the house by Wednesday. I'll get me some almonds and cashew nuts instead.
And I tried something new to me. Namely, I bought a big pack of raw spinach, which I used in a lasagna with salmon, onions, and a crumble of feta cheese on Friday, and on Saturday, I put part of the rest into a big bowl of salad.
Making that lasagna gave me another of those d'uh moments. What I used to do when preparing lasagna was, first of all, using four to five layers of noodles. The filling between them used to be the full contents of a pack of ground beef (500 g, that's over a pound). And on top went, regularly, a full 200 g bag of grated cheese. The whole thing, mind you, for two people. And there usually were no leftovers. While I did that recipe rarely, it was a caloric desaster every time.
Today, when I take home ground beef, I immediately divide the pack into two portions, one of which goes straight into the freezer. More than half of what goes into the new version of lasagna is vegetables. Onions, bell peppers, ratatouille mix. Two layers, at most. And I have found out that you can use pureed tomatoes to moisten up the whole thing enough that there is no need for a half-inch cheese crust, either. Which more than halves the calories. Those bags of grated cheese now last through one lasagna plus at least two salads or frittata.
While lasagna will never be something that makes regular appearances in our kitchen because it's rather time- and cleanup-demanding, just stopping throwing the whole package of an ingredient into it makes it a lot less damaging when I do make it.
The aha effect being that I had, at a time when I didn't own a freezer and had to do with a rickety mini refrigerator, gotten into the habit of using the whole content of a package of an ingredient if it was something that would not keep if stored at room temperature once opened.
Rather than throwing it away, I would use it up. What I literally never did was think about just how many servings there were in that pack.
Again and again, what it comes to is portion size. And daring to dispose of food that is too much for myself.
Which is actually a problem for me. There are still two dinner's worth of potatoes in the pantry, and I acually caught myself on a train(wreck) of thought that went like: I have to use these up before Wednesday, darn, if I eat that many potatoes I'll regain lots of weight and be thrown back in my weightloss effort- that was how far I got before stopping myself and realizing that there was absolutely no reason for me to eat those potatoes. If I want them out of the house, I can serve them to DH in small portions. I may even just throw them away.
What made my reluctance to dispose of the potatoes in any other way than by eating them myself even more stupid is that I actually don't even like to eat potatoes. If things were up to me, we would not even buy them at all. DH now, he likes some potatoes with his meat sometimes, so I buy them for him. Then why did I believe it was my responsibility to eat them, too?

And if anybody wants to chide me for having had lasagna at all, I had had nothing but two eggs and two strips of bacon all day because my workday was so darn busy that I didn't even get around to having a protein shake. So, in the toned-down version, it was well within my calorie allowance for the day.

And tonight, it will once more be big salad day.


Julia

Out of shape

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


Julia

Explanations or excuses?

For the first time in several weeks, I am back below the limit of obesity. While that is in and of itself good news, it is the third time I've been crossing that invisible border, after two ugly-looking upward bumps in my weight curve.
Looking at that graph is, of course, something that makes me try to analyze the reasons why, for over a year now, I have stopped recondensing.
The usual suspects?
I had a shitload of work and plenty of stressors in my life. I had too little sleep. I stopped exercising. I kept having cravings for things that were no good for me.
I stopped journalling what I ate and measuring my portions.
And I kept slipping back every time I started to get back to doing it. Too fucking tired was my usual excuse.
Those abortive attempts at getting back on the wagon did, at least, keep me from gaining it all back. It would have been entirely possible for me to go off the rails completely and regain all seventy pounds in a year- after all I did manage to gain 44 pounds in three months once already.
Still, being stuck between 72 and 61 pounds lost (my lowest/ highest point during that year) is not something I am patting myself on the back for when I still had 26 pounds to go to goal even at that lowest point I had reached.

So what happened ?
I started on this journey extremely motivated and single-mindedly sticking to my plan.
One big motivation was wanting to get to normal weight before last January's family reunion because I wanted to be slim when having to meet my relatives.
That date has passed, and with it the motivation attached to it.
My physical limitations brought on by morbid obesity have been greatly reduced.
Quite simply, close to just overweight doesn't hurt as much as being morbidly obese.
And the next target date, being normal-weighted by the time I turned fifty, was too far in the future to keep me sticking tightly to the original plan. I am a terrible procrastinator, and I was also procrastinating about weight loss.

All of the above might be the reason I got stuck.

And all of the above are just excuses. Lousy ones at that.

I did not stick to my plan. I ate too much and moved too little. And I started looking for excuses why I did that.

That are the facts.

I can, of course, keep wallowing in excuses.
And remain stranded at Grand Central Station with the other trainwrecks.

Or I can pull myself back up on the rails by my bootstraps, and continue my journey where I interrupted myself.

It's a choice.
One that I make with every bite I eat.

I want to be back to normal weight by next March. It is still doable.
So I'd better ditch the excuses fast and get back to work. Immediately.


Julia

April fool

What I felt like when I realized that one year ago I weighed three pounds less than today...
While that may be the momentary result of too many carbs over the Easter weekend, it is most annoying. Especially as the time I gave myself to get to goal is running out if I don't reverse that upwards trend soon.
As DH is out of town I am taking advantage of that and putting in two days of protein shakes to get back into weightloss mode.
And then I plan to make good use of my new refrigerator's vegetable drawer.
I refuse to accept that this might be where my weight stalls for good. Protein shakes, no carbs, and as soon as the weather gets warmer, back to my nordic walking regimen. It did work two years ago, it ought to work now.


Julia

Perfect Shitstorm

Sometimes, things just seem to go along fine. Business is slow (I'm not paid by amount of work, so that is positive) , what work is to be done can be done easily, everyone in the family is healthy, the weather is fine and the eating is okay.
And then there are the times when everything hits the fan at once. Caseload exploding, having to do all of it alone because my estimated colleague has called in sick, plus everything going wrong at once, necessitating lots of unnessecary mop-up operations, plus several cases of sickness in the family. The double caseload has me working overtime every day, so I didn't get around to do any substantial grocery shopping for the last weeks, which meant having to live off our stockpiles of non-perishable or frozen food. Luckily, the pantry was sufficiently stocked. Still, most of it was rather carby and low in fiber. Think rice or pasta, pepped up with half a pound of frozen veggies and some chicken breast from the freezer. For the long days at the office, I mostly stick to protein shakes. Nothing out of the ordinary, and no excessive portions, either. Still, my weight has gone up by about five pounds, sending me back to quite exactly where I was one year ago.
Part of it is from eating the wrong things, part of it is stress-induced (even though I have managed to escape bingeing on cookies or such, I tend to eat more carby stuff when stressed out, such as having a slice of full-grain rye bread for a snack).
With a rising stress level, I think there are some changes in the way my body operates when it comes to food. None of them are, unfortunately, conducive to weight loss.
If only the colleague were back...


Julia

Time is running...

... and I missed my two-year blogoversary on March 1st!

So, it's been two years by now that I tentatively hit "send" on my first post. I was still some thirty pounds heavier than I am today, with a BMI of 34.6. Still, the weight I had reached on the way down was one I had not been at for over seven years. In between those dates lay my fattest ever point, at a BMI 41, loss of mobility, loss of self-respect and complete loss of hope. I hated what my body had become, but after several failed attempts at losing that blubber, I did not believe in my own ability to ever come down from that weight again any more.
What, in the end, really started me off on the way down was the day when I put my back out so badly that I could barely walk and suddenly finding myself face to face with what my body had become in the mirror, without being able to twist myself around so I wouldn't look as bad. So, I started walking. On the first few days, it was rather dragging around myself with a pair of trekking poles, having to pause every 200 meters because I was completely breathless. Even then, I did not believe I'd lose a substantial amount of weight. I just wanted my back muscles to work better so as to avoid recurrence of that immobilizing back pain. But, for curiosity's sake, I wanted to find out, too, if I could lose any weight at all. So, I changed what I was eating, too.
And I started recondensing. The first couple of pounds, I was expecting the losses to stop at fifteen to twenty pounds down. When I reached 25 pounds lost, which in kilograms also meant getting down to two-digit weights (still about 220 pounds, but as my scales are metric, seeing that number was a big psychological motivator), I did, for the first time ever, dare to hope I might be able to continue recondensing.
Around that time, the idea for this blog was born.
I wanted to share what had worked for me, and I also wanted to keep myself accountable.

Like almost everybody, I have not been perfect. After losing in total about seventy pounds and reaching the limits of morbid obesity, I stopped exercising. You might say I let life get in the way. As my back has been re-starting to act up, I will have to restart my exercise as soon as the weather allows.
As to food, I have found out that it is harder to stay on plan when work gets stressful, and I also found out that some things to me are a surefire trigger for cravings and binges. Harmless-sounding things, even, like a slice of bread.
I have been maintaining- or perhaps rather preventing major regains- around that limit of obesity for about a year now. For my looks, that might even have been beneficial, as I think my skin has been reconstricting a bit during that time. But still, it's not where I want to stay. If going from class three morbid obesity to overweight makes such a difference, then coming down to normal weight from the upper limit of overweight should be even better.

Time to get back on track, if I don't want to join the ranks of the trainwrecks for good...


Julia

There but for fortune...

When I visited the USA with my parents in the late seventies of the last century, I was astonished about the number of people I saw who were decidedly obese. People who were lumbering instead of walking, people who were looking like fifty-year-olds(or what sixteen-year old me thought fifty would look like), but probably were not even thirty. People who were chewing on junk food or inhaling liquid junk food. People who, on top of being fat, were dressed in absolutely tasteless gaudy-colored polyester garments that accentuated their fatness.
Back home in Europe, at that time, true obesity was rare. There were some people who were overweight, mostly older ones, but very few were obese. The kind of obesity I saw in the US was, to us, an American thing.
But then, in Europe, most people lived mainly off unprocessed foods. Most meals were cooked from scratch at home. Fast food restaurants in the American style were few and far between, and visiting them was a rare occurence.

Today, there's at least one of the "American specialty eateries" in every city. Supermarkets have shelves and shelves of processed and prepared food-like substances.Many young people would not know how to cook a meal from scratch if their lives depended on it.
Which they probably do.

When I go to the mall today, or wait at the tram stop, a sizable number of the people I encounter are morbidly obese. The most shocking part being how many of them are relatively young. Sixteen-year olds with quadruple chins that make them look like forty, and who are carrying packages of fast food.
Fifty-year olds who are barely able to walk, or use crutches or electric carts. Women who look as wide as they are tall. Men who take up a whole two-seater bench on the bus.
I cannot help comparing their lumbering, painful gait to that of the normal-weighted persons next to them, or their drawn, downturned mouths to the smiles of their slimmer counterparts.
Been there, been that.
Don't anybody tell me these people are completely happy with what they are.
Because they are not. Not even if they try to hypnotize themselves into it with so-called fat acceptance.

I'm feeling sorry for them. Sorry, and thankful that I have been allowed to find a way out of that prison.

But for fortune, that woman on the cart might have been me. But for fortune, I might still be that woman on crutches.

The most tragic part being that the key to the prison door is within everybody's reach.

Watch your portions.
Don't eat crap.
Eat for fuel not for entertainment.
Don't eat your feelings.
Move your ass.

For most of the obese, following these might mean freedom.

As simple as that.

But, of course, that would require them to own up to the fact that their obesity is not a mysterious curse fallen on them, but mostly the direct result of their own actions.

Owning up to that was the first step for me on the road back to being normal-weighted.

I still have quite a distance to go until there. But the actions that brought me below morbid obesity already should get me there, too. It's just a matter of time and perseverance.


Julia

Things happening at the most inconvenient time

The mysterious fatigue has finally shown its true face, namely, that of a flu-like infection. I had been having generalized pain plus a whacking headache on Sunday, and this morning I woke up feeling weak, exhausted, with stuffed sinuses and a persistent cough. Astonishingly, I'm not running a fever. On any ordinary day, I would have called in sick. Of course, now of all times the colleague who would have to do my cases were I to call in sick is away on vacation. Guess who has to do his cases, too. So, I'm hanging on till Thursday. Either I am well again by then, or I'll have a chance at calling in sick.

On a different topic, did I mention that I own two different bioimpedance scales? Reading Norma's advice about those on the forum, I decided to do a test of their accuracy and weighed/ measured myself on both of them within a space of two minutes, so, the subject to be measured was quite identical.
Result? The weight measurements were identical to a t. And the body fat measurements? They differed by almost fourteen per cent. Now the scale that had the lower BF reading was the one I had owned first, so, the same one that had given me a 52 percent reading at my starting weight. Yesterday, it said 40 percent, so, the numbers would be less glum-looking were I to take that value for reference.
Namely, 55.64 kilos of fat at five kilos below my top weight, 32.4 kilos at my present weight. Meaning, if those readings were more accurate than those from the other gizmo, a loss of 23 kilograms of fat. 51 pounds, out of 26 kilos (57 pounds) lost from that point on. It was not my top weight because at my top weight the bioimpedance scales would give an error reading. Only when I had already recondensed about five kilograms would they work again.
And, if I put those numbers into the calculation of what I still have to lose, at a BMI of 25 and a BF percentage of 25 I'd statistically have 15.6 kilos less fat on me, which is actually quite close to what I thought I still had to lose.
And, if I take these numbers into account, it doesn't look as if I had lost that much muscle, either. Which is reassuring.


Julia

Too tired to boot

I still do not know what has been making me so extremely tired those last two weeks. I get up in the morning, ride the tram to work, do my eight-hour workday, ride home, fix dinner for the two of us and then fall asleep in my easy chair. Basically, I might be better off if I were to go to bed for real, but DH's already annoyed about me dozing off every night instead of talking to him anyway.
So, the good intentions about exercising have for now stayed exactly that. And my weight is following a sad pattern of gaining two or three pounds in a single day-without me being able to spot a dietary culprit for the gain- and then losing said pounds over a space of weeks, only to be hit by another regain. It's almost as if my body were actively refusing to permanently go to a weight below morbid obesity. Not that I get far above that point, one to two pounds at most, but still this is beginning to feel like Groundhog Day whenever I step on the scales.A whole year now, gone by with a net loss of zero. Without those pesky regains, the sum total of the weight I had lost during that year might have brought me almost to goal.
It's frustrating. Especially since the sum total of sweets and such that I ate over that year would probably amount to less than three pounds' worth of calories. Spread out over 365 days, that's on average 28 calories a day- which shows just how rarely I eat that stuff.
One thing I have as per now done regularly is having a glass of beer with dinner. But that cannot account for those massive upwards fluctuations in a single day, because I do it daily. Besides, it is accounted for in my daily calorie allotment.
So where does that leave me? From a top weight of 112 kilograms- 246 pounds for the metrically challenged- I have come down to 81 kilograms (178 pounds), with a low of 79 kilos (174 pounds). So, I did manage to recondense roughly thirty percent of my starting weight. The four-pound regain is well within the scope of normal variations, as long as it doesn't get any higher.
If I were to believe the statistics that go around the web, a thirty-percent reduction in weight would mostly be achieved only at the cost of a surgical intervention, which I did never have. Statistically, thus, I am doing okay.
Except that I am still fat. Borderline morbidly obese.
To be normal-weighted again, I'd have to lose another 14 kilograms(31 pounds)or, in other words, another twelve percent off my starting weight. Or sixteen percent off my present weight. I still drag around one and a half buckets of fat too many. One and a half out of four and a half.
I am not ready to give up on getting rid of these, too. But I am afraid that that ole enemy, my body, might not be persuaded to give them up.
If only that weight curve were going downwards again.


Julia

Planning (not) to fail

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

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

Even if it takes awhile.


Julia

That's not what I wanted to happen...

I usually try not to be a coward when it comes to Facing Up to Reality.
So, I dug out my bioimpedance scales this morning and, after inserting a fresh battery, stepped on them. The last time I had done so was when I had recondensed by about five kilograms, which brought me for the first time below the limit up from where all that thing would give me was an "error" reading.
Back then, my body fat percentage was 52 per cent, which meant that there were, in total, 55.6 kilos of fat on me.
Since then, my weight has gone down by another 25 kilograms, which I had hoped had brought down the amount of fat, too.
Today's reading: body fat percentage 54 per cent of total weight.
Worse than before.
Which means that I still carry around some 43 kilos of blubber.
Which in turn means that only twelve of those kilograms I was so glad to have recondensed were actually, you know, fat.
And thirteen were something else, which means either water weight or lean tissue, i.e. muscle.

No wonder I'm plateauing. And perpetually exhausted, too.

What this means is that what I have been doing is not working.
I had thought that keeping my protein intake at about thirty per cent of total calories would suffice to prevent loss of lean tissue even without exercise.
Boy was I wrong.

So what to do?

Rebuild that lean tissue, logically.
Which might mean gaining weight before losing any more of it.

At my goal weight, a body fat percentage of, say, twenty would amount to about thirteen kilograms of fat that I would not mind keeping on my body.
Thirteen. Not forty-three.
The other thirty kilograms are what has to go.
Except I am only fifteen kilograms above goal weight, which in turn means I would have to regain fifteen kilograms of lean body mass if I don't want to end up with a BMI below twenty.

So, what I need to do is build muscle without gaining fat.

And without spending inordinate amounts of time on it. I have a life outside of weight loss, after all. A very busy one.

Back to the library for information and back to the drawing board.


Julia