Friday, January 18, 2008

Oh, so breakfast IS important??

Huh. Who knew? I've only heard that about eleventy billion times. But I thought they meant for OTHER people, not for me. I mean, my body is composed of something entirely different from everyone else, isn't it? So the rules of good nutrition can't possibly apply to Meeeeeeee. I'm special; I don't need breakfast. Those are a couple hundred calories I can definitely cut out. I will drop the pounds left and right if I just avoid that first meal of the day.

Oooooor, I can stare at the scale every day, watching it say the same thing over and over again because I snack all day because, what do you know? I'm HUNGRY!

So today I started eating breakfast. Sigh. Three egg omelets, pancakes and sausages rock. Just kidding. I had 2 egg whites on a high-fiber english muffin with a piece of low fat cheese melted on it. For its serious lack in fat and calories, it was surprisingly tasty. I'm kind of looking forward to having it again, which I didn't think would be the case. That, along with my skinny cinnamon dolce latte makes my sparkpeople nutrition tracker VERY happy.

And on top of being tasty, are you ready for this? I ate breakfast at 8:30 this morning and now, at 12:15, I am JUST starting to think of food again. As a chubby breakfast skipping girl, I assure you, I generally spend a LOT of time each day contemplating food. They say that men think of sex every 9 seconds, right? Food is usually kind of like that for me. So to go almost 4 hours without having to talk myself out of eating a handful of this or a piece of that is pretty major.

Sigh. I guess ALL the nutritionists can be wrong. I'm sold. I eat breakfast.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

When you start a blog to keep you honest...

and then you don't write in it...um. Dumbass.

So here I sit. Almost a week into using www.sparkpeople.com. I had used it in the past but what with my stellar record for commitment to weight loss and all, I grew tired of the whole accountability thing and let it fall by the wayside. But I've been good this week, writing down everything, researching nutritional information and searching for the sources of my stagnant weight loss.

Can we say "mindless eating"? Oh my. A bite of Ethan's french toast at breakfast. A bite of his cheese stick at lunch. A nibble from his bagel in the afternoon. You want some Teddy Grahams, Ethan, because Mama does!!! Woot! Cinnamon flavored. Super. If mindless eating was an Olympic sport, my friends, I would be medaling on an hourly basis---ALL events would be owned by me. I would be the Bodie Miller of mindless eating (except I'd actually win something instead of toking up before events--although....toking up might actually help me eat even more mindlessly, huh? Anyway, I digress....)

So yeah. There's that. Tsk. Tsk.

And then there's the whole idea of calorie intake versus where the calories come from. I barely make my minimum calorie intake for the day (yay, me!), but I never hit my daily protein goals, either. And while I cringe at the idea of anything remotely Atkins-y, I know that protein staves off hunger and blah blah blah. So I need to start drinking skim milk or something (insert gagging sound here). And so the search for a sugar-free chocolate syrup that doesn't taste like ass is on. I can't even fathom drinking a glass of skim milk without it, but I neeeeeed those 8gms of protein, damn it.

On a positive note, can we all take a moment to stand in awe of the marvel that is the new line of *skinny* lattes at Starbucks. For years I have had to stand there, at the counter, taking up valuable time, energy and oxygen ordering a: "tall skim, sugar-free, no whip cinnamon dolce latte". Now I can replace everything before "cinnamon" with the word "skinny", and voila! The tall? NINETY calories. That's right--something at Starbucks that isn't just steaming lard in a cup. Ah, the joy.

So to sum up: sparkpeople, protein, skinny lattes. It's all good.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Did anyone see a wagon going by?

Because I fell off of one recently and should probably find it and hop back on.

Which brings me to something I've been pondering in the past few days as my hand automatically reaches for crap I shouldn't eat and my brain does absolutely nothing to stop the process. Why do we sabotage ourselves? Why is it the second I start to hear, "You look fantastic!" "You're definitely losing weight!", and I start to not loathe pictures of myself, I feel the need to open the fridge and begin to eat. Why is that?

It happens all. the. time.

The past week or two have been a bit of a free fall for me. Not that I have been surrounding myself with piles of Krispy Kremes and eating my way through them. I'm not driving-thru Taco Bell ordering 15 chalupas and choco-tacos. I don't do stuff like that. Ever. I don't eat shitty crap foods like that. I eat relatively healthy foods; sadly, just too much of it. And in the past week or so, I've not really done anything to check myself.

"But, FatSarah," you say. "You were going to start writing down everything you ate. You said so just the other day. It's been over a week. You should have over a week's worth of food journals! What happened?!"

What happened was I wrote down breakfast that first day. Then I snuck a few bites of Ethan's lunch, along with my own lunch. Then I mindlessly popped a few of his Goldfish that afternoon. Then I was too tired to cook so we had take-out Thai that night. At the end of the day, I couldn't face the long list of "you should know betters" that would have been staring back at me had I written it all down.

So I have that first breakfast, and then I have today's breakfast. Because I might still eat like crap here and there, but I have to hold myself accountable more. I know that. And I don't know why I'm afraid to do it.

Perhaps it is the expectation and anticipation of others that makes it easier to just backslide. A very well-meaning friend said to me the other day, "It's so great that you're doing this for yourself. And you know, now that people are noticing it, you have to just keep going! That's great!" I know it was a compliment, but I cannot put into words the fear that gripped my throat when I realized she was right. People were starting to notice my weight loss. They were going to start looking for more of it, less of me. It's far less pressure to just be the chubby girl who everything thinks is funny and has a pretty face.

I remember it happening last time as well. After spending most of my 20s in this same weight range, I distinctly recall the barrage of compliments as I neared 15-20 pounds of weight loss. I stopped being me and became the pounds I was losing. It's all anyone talked about. It's all they wanted to hear about--how was I doing it? How was I feeling? Did I know how great I looked? The pressure to keep it up was tremendous. When I stopped losing at 140 and stayed there, gradually the attention receded and I felt like myself for the next 5 years.

It is such an irony. I want to lose weight, but I don't want people to notice. I don't want them to talk to me about it, or compliment me on it. Maybe because when they do I have to admit that I am/was fat and that it is/was enough of a detriment to my appearance that the absence of a few pounds becomes noteworthy.

But is it fair to ask people NOT to notice? Not to compliment and comment? I think it's one of my biggest hurdles on this path because it is such a contradiction and it is such psychological barrier for me. I will actually find a way to eat more right after someone has pointed out how good I look. I've caught myself doing it on more than one occasion. I can't expect people to know how it makes me feel to be in the spotlight for this particular "accomplishment". They only mean well when they say flattering things. I need to get past it.

Which is why I'm back on the blog, back on the wagon, poised and ready for the next compliment that comes my way to make sure I don't use it as an excuse to take another superfluous bite.

Oh, and skim chai tea lattes taste way better than soy chai tea lattes and they save me 20 grams of fat. Fabulous.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Ah, the sweet smell of

failure.

161.

Better than 165 or 162. But still, 161. Not 160. I suppose I could step on the scale in 3 hours and it would say 159, but at the moment this morning that I decided to face the numbers, it said 161, so that's what I have to go with, right?

It sucks. The old FatSarah would throw her hands up and say, "See?!! I can't lose weight! Why try? I'll just embrace my tubbiness and forget about trying to get rid of it!" But I can't this time. There's too much at stake this time and for the rest of my life for me to do that anymore.

So I start the new year with a new goal. I have no idea how long it will before I find myself staring at the business end of a pregnancy test, so I can't say that "I will lose 20 pounds this year," because honestly, I could lose another 5 and then gain 30.

The goal, instead, is going to be to eat more healthfully, losing weight for as long as is possible, whether it's 2 more weeks or 12 more months. Pregnancy, if I'm lucky enough to find it this year, will not be an excuse to gorge myself like it was last time (that's an exaggeration, but not by much). I'm going to start by using the fancy, "all the bells and whistles" food journal I got the other day.

Welcome to the world of "if you bite it, you write it--2008".

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Ignorance is bliss...

I have no idea how much I weigh. I know I haven't gained a ton (even a tiny ton) because my clothes still feel the same way they did two weeks ago. But with the exception of a few errant hops on the scale since my last post, I have allowed myself to be oblivious to the scale.

But not oblivious to my eating habits. That being said, I am not sure I want to step on the scale tomorrow. Today was the first time I've actually been kind of bad and I hate the idea of how I'm going to feel tomorrow if I see anything higher than 160, what with my big old boast-y "i'm not going to gain anything blah blah blah" bragginess in my last post. Blech.

I'll be here to face the music, though. With bells on. And hopefully no extra fat.