Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

What, you thought you’d be rid of me so easily? I thought so as well. But it seems I still have a few things to gab about, after all.

I decided to focus on health/fitness goals only. I’m still sticking to my “no counting calories” policy (and hoping that soon will come the day when I don’t look at an apple and immediately worry about how many calories it contains–seriously, it sucks big time). And I don’t need a food journal these days to realize when I’ve been overboard and when I haven’t. So that leaves me with exercise. Believe it or not, I don’t care about exercise for weight loss, I care about exercise because having your ass glued to a chair all day long is boring! No kidding. Besides, I have to move to avoid that lovely blood of mine clotting in my veins, right? I might as well like moving, then, it makes everything easier.

So. What does it have to do with this blog? Simply that: I caved in two weeks ago and bought a new pedometer, with a couple nifty functions such as letting me know what time it is, how many steps I’ve walked, or how many kilometers I’ve walked, too. I had remembered the famous “10,000 steps a day to ensure good health” thingy, and decided that since I go everywhere either on my bike or on my two little feet, why not have fun with that? (I must add that I don’t obsess over a number of steps like I used to on a number of calories, and it’s all good this way.)

To add more fun to it, I signed up for the Eowyn Challenge. Basically, it’s all about selecting a starting point and a destination in the world of The Lord of the Rings, and adding the miles you walk until you ‘reach’ it. I had done it a few years ago, but had kind of fallen behind without a pedometer to track my progress, and then completely lost track. Things are a little different now, if only because I actually have reasons to go out, compared to a couple of years ago. I don’t use the BMI/calories tools on the website, but I appreciate the kilometers-to-miles converter, and how I can log in what I’ve walked every day and it keeps track of it for me. I just find it more interesting and funnier to tell myself that I’m biking along the road from Hobbiton to Rivendell, rather than from home to work. Once I’ll be there, I’ll push further, to Lorien or Gondor, and this will probably keep me busy for a couple of years.

I’m not being ‘perfect’ with food and I’m not dieting. The hell with that. I’ve realized that 10,000 steps a day is actually the bare minimum in my current life–what I walk when I don’t do anything else than going to the campus for a 2-hours class and then buying some groceries. Most of the time, I walk more than 10-11 kms a day. And just for that, I am happy.

- K.

• The Eowyn Challenge main website
• Signup (it’s a little hard to find at first)

I have decided to seriously tune down the amount of weight loss-related forums and blogs I read. Not because I don’t care at all. Not because I’m planning on denying my meager support to anyone (as if it was that useful to start with, haha). Simply because I feel that I cannot find my own ‘peace of mind’ as long as I’ll be in such intense contact with anything even remotely linked to ‘dieting’.

I can make healthy food choices. I can choose to walk instead of taking the bus. I am wise enough in terms of lifestyle to know what works for me and what doesn’t, and I haven’t lost natural hunger cues and other similar body sign. Nowadays, I know that I dont need some plan to tell me how much I can eat, nor how many glasses of water I should drink every day.

But what I can’t do is recovering from a newborn eating disorder while being surrounded all day long by ‘lose weight’ messages.

I did my best to prevent myself from obsessing about calories and the likes, which is a set of habits not that easy to lose, once you’ve taken it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just snap my fingers and decide that voilà, there it is, the obsession is gone. If my binging problems have been getting a little better (meaning I binge like once a fortnight instead of every two days… guh), I’m still far from being rid of this particular issue. From what I’ve observed, I do better when I’m not focused on weight loss matters, and therefore not being constantly faced with the underlying pressure of “you know, K., not worrying about these things is what’s best for you right now… but you still need to lose weight, so get to work on it, I mean NOW, m’kay?“.

Yup. It’s not easy at all to get rid of such a mindset when it has become to overwhelming…

So, for the time being, I’ll be stepping down from 3FC and other places from some time. Even if I didn’t post a lot. Even if all I did was to read threads, and answer a few PMs. Because right now, at this very moment, I swear that if I see one more “OMG I’ve eaten one cookie I’m SUCH A FAT PIG” thread (why so much hate for ourselves…), or any question about how much gas or crap weigh in one’s intestines (so that this weight can be substracted from that on the scales, of course…), my wires will seriously get crossed. It’s just not possible anymore. It’s not… not healthy. At least not healthy for my mind.

Now, I don’t think I want to give up on this blog. I like it, and I do want to lead a healthy, balanced life, after all–which is exactly why I also want recovery, and won’t bury my head in the sand claiming that my binging problem is ‘only overeating in front of the TV sometimes’, or anything to that extent. This said, I don’t know yet if I’ll rather talk of walking, exercise, that kind of things, or if I’ll stop writing for some time. Honestly, I don’t know.

What’s sure, though, is that hating myself for binging and obsessing about having to buy new clothes and all that shiz is no good. Therefore, I’ll be removing the weight loss-related triggers. These ones, at least, I may be able to stay away from, contrary to my stressful life and the fact that I’m a little too lonely these days for my own good. (Yes, I know there’s also the media and its twisted messages. Maybe I can just avoid buying magazines? It’s been years I haven’t had a TV, only a monitor to watch DVDs, so I could probably push it just a little further?)

*sigh*

(I wanted to write a post about this before, but my host seemingly deleted some files for this blog out of the blue, and when I finally had the opportunity to fix them, it was a little too late too blog. So here it comes now.)

I should probably have griped about this during the week-end, since it was at that time that things were the hardest for me; I suppose I was too busy actually taking care of myself to find any desire to blog. What amazes me is my ability to go through strenuous activity and get out of it unscathed and perfectly healthy, and then one week later I pick up some greasy paper on the ground and hurt my back in the process. Really, I don’t understand. The result was there, though: there was no way I could do squats and generally lift anything heavier than a small pan not filled with water, because I became the ‘happy’ owner of a lumbago.

At least my positive reaction was: “Oh, it’s only in the muscles, so it doesn’t mean that my vertebrae are all broken? That’s good news!”

The bad news, of course, being that every exercise save from walking (not too fast) was out of the window. A couple of helpful people on 3FC suggested swimming, which was an idea I loved; alas, it wouldn’t be very nice from me to spread my foot fungus in the city pool. I can probably thank one of my nice neighbours from last year, for having left that in our shared bathroom for 13 people. Bummer.

Which brings me to this… I’m certainly not an intense exerciser. A lot of what I do actually involves everyday actions, such as always taking the stairs instead of the elevator to go to the fourth floor where I live. Or biking to wherever I go, including work, which is a good 10 kms away or perhaps more. This said, I also like lifting weights, and I especially wanted to run on Sunday. Finding myself stuck in my apartment, unable to properly move, was extremely frustrating. (Keep also in mind that with my Factor V problem, I’ve been made even more aware of the necessity to “keep moving on a regular basis” to avoid clotting as much as possible.)

If you had told me, ten years ago, that I would actually felt bummed, frustrated and almost angry at having an official reason to skip the gym, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Now I do

Fortunately, the pain is subsiding, I can walk normally again, and in a few days, it will probably be gone for good. It’s just so annoying, even if I know I wouldn’t have run a marathon this week, nor gone on anything very intense. I especially miss lifting, to be honest, and when the doctor tells you “well, just lift with the arms, maybe?”, you feel like snickering a little. I don’t know what kind of lifting doctors do, but as far as I’m concerned in terms of personal experience, it’s hard even on a machine to NOT use any of the back muscles, if only to maintain proper balance and form. Let’s not even talk about free weights.

On a totally unrelated side note, it’s 7:30 am and it’s snowing here. When the official date for Spring is only but two days away. Beats me.

Or so I think, of course, because I know plenty of people who would disagree with me.

This all stems from my general feeling of being fed-up with people’s commentaries about my meals. Especially at work, where we all eat together and everybody gets to analyze what the neighbour is eating, probably because our lunch room isn’t that great and being there is boring. Yes, that’s where I got remarks about how ‘diet-like’ I eat, just because I had more vegetables and protein than starches on my plate. Seriously, most people can’t recognize healthy eating anymore when it stares at them in the face.

But I was wondering. Maybe I do take it too far? Maybe I can afford eating regular yogurts, instead of fat-free fruit yogurts, or low-fat chocolate mousse? Just maybe. (It’s a whole other matter that I started buying those because at the time, they were on sale for weeks on end, therefore cheaper than ‘normal’ ones, and then I simply got used to it…)

So I tried. And the result wasn’t great. I don’t know if it’s because I’m used to my favourite little desserts now (I use that kind of dairy as desserts, it can’t be worse than tiramisu ;)). I don’t know what gives. But the fact is that I now find a lot of the regular stuff icky. A regular mousse doesn’t taste more chocolate-y than my low-fat one. And the regular strawberry-flavoured yogurt tasted more like chalk, whereas the fat-free version, at least, had some strawberry aroma to it. Then I went to Germany to pick some desserts that were yummy according to everyone I know… and I didn’t find them terrific at all. (They were cheap, at least. That’s one of the great things about living next to the border. Moreover, I get to bike 7.5 kms just to go there!)

My rule of thumb is: I don’t eat what I don’t like. I agreed with myself to make an effort when it comes to what I know is healthy–that’s how I taught myself to like a lot of vegetables, in the end–but it’s an effort I’m not ready to make for desserts or junk food. If that stuff tastes foul, then I leave it aside. It’s not like someone is putting a gun on my nape demanding that I eat that chocolate muffin at the campus restaurant. Besides, it’s just a chocolate muffin, it’s not the last one of its kind on Earth, and if I really want one, then I can go and buy a really flavoured version. Anyway. You get my drift, I guess.

I don’t eat what I don’t like, including these foods. Especially these foods, in fact–I don’t see what would be the point. I find it easier to go by this rule nowadays than to obsess about every single calorie, to be honest.

Conclusion: maybe I’m not such a freak. Maybe I just eat certain specific brands of fat-free foods because I like their taste.

That said, give me a yummy-tasting regular food, and I’ll eat it as well.

It took me more than one week to come back to this blog, but since I’ve done much worse in the past, I probably don’t need to apologize. Besides, I needed the time away. I also needed time, a lot of time, to work on an oral presentation that I finally went through on Monday, and given my general state of exhaustion last week, finding the strength to do school-related activities was no small feat. I think the presentation went well. But it’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

In general (and perhaps also due to my young age), I think I can consider myself as kind of blessed in terms of health. Although the period when I was the most overweight made me quite miserable, I still wasn’t plagued with serious illnesses. My worst moments, I knew them in my childhood, when I caught every cold, otitis and other nose/throat-related ailments. Even this has subsided by now, and I suspect that the Power of Fruits and Veggies®­ had a lot to with that. Therefore, overall, I’m a happy camper.

But I have a Sword of Damocles over my head–one that I’ve always had, without being aware of it until now. The result of a genetic test I made in February arrived in the mail yesterday, and it’s official: I’m heterozygous Factor V Leiden. I already suspected it. I prepared myself to it (if you’re expecting the worst, then the worst cannot crush you as much as it could if you were full of hopes, right?). Now it’s simply been confirmed.

It’s a blow, alright. I had hoped no matter what that I’d pass through it. Tough chance. Now what?

Well, I can live with it. This is my decision. I can and I will live with it, and if it can be another reason to go on pursuing a healthy lifestyle, then I’ll take this positive side of things over all the negatives. The major change right now for me will be to go off my BC and take another one. Or not take any; it’s not like I really need it at the moment anyway. I just went on taking it for the really nifty benefits of not bleeding to death five days a months and cramping like crazy for three. If I lose this, I don’t need the pill for the time being.

I have no control over my genes, that’s a given. This said, there are things I can do. Moving, not living a sedentary lifestyle? I can bike to work and school instead of taking the bus, and have a walk after lunch and dinner, and go on exercising several times a week. That was on the program anyway. Controlling my weight, because obesity increases the risks? Already doing it. Mention it if I need to get surgery? Tell my doc to temporarily put me on blood-thinners if I ever have to fly for ten hours straight? Sure, I can do that as well.

For what it’s worth, I may not have any problems at all during all my life. It’s just a risk. A more important risk than for a normal person, but a risk, not an absolute given. I’m the only one who gets to decide if I want to let this make my life rotten with anxiety, or if I want to go on leading the life I’ve started to carve for myself.

Is there any need to say that I haven’t chosen anxiety? Remember the benevolent wolf…

I guess it’s a shame that it takes a health problem to make most of us realize what is good for us and what isn’t. But it’s the way it is. In the end, it alway goes back to our choices. So I’m seizing all the reasons to never let myself fall back into my old, wrong habits. Because now that I know for sure, and not only theoretically, that they could be akin to me playing Russian roulette with my veins, all of a sudden that McDonald’s meal doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.

• Factor V Leiden

I’m going to start writing this post by being straightforward: the ’stop restricting’ way is supposed to be paved with good realizations, but also with bumps. Yesterday, I ran into one of these bumps. Today, I didn’t. Saturday, Friday, Thursday, I didn’t either. I knew and had already accepted that it would be this way.

However, in doing so, I’ve realized something else.

It’s like I see it everywhere now. As if I couldn’t see it before because I was part of it, and now that I’ve taken a step backward, or aside, or forward (pick whichever you deem more appropriate), my eyes are wide open And somehow… it hurts.

It’s the guilt-trips, the guilt upon eating a cookie, the guilt of not having stayed on plan for a day, the guilt of not having been perfect, of not having followed all the Dieter’s Holy Rules.

It’s the abuse, the hate toward ourselves, calling ourselves “fat cows” in front of our mirrors, berating ourselves for a meal turned a little too heavy.

It’s the obsession, the obsession with the scales, the obsession of wondering if we might have weighed one less pound on that goddamn scales if only we had crapped or let out some gas right beforehand.

It’s the food, the food turned enemy, the food viewed in terms of ‘good foods’ and ‘bad foods’, as if it was a battle of morality when all it is, in the end, is fuel for the body.

It’s the days when we say “I feel fat”, use this adjective as an epithet, reduce ourselves to that simple word however laden with so many wrong echoes. As if “fat” was a feeling. As if we were unable to say “I feel lonely, sad, angry, whatever”.

It’s all of this and more. It’s all that heap of negative feelings linked to dieting.

I know. We gain on weight easily. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here, as members of the blogosphere writing daily or weekly about what a challenge it is sometimes, or about our goals and victories. Nevertheless… do we really have to abuse ourselves? Do we really have to make it a battle of guilt, of worry, of negativity? Aren’t we worth our own self-love, not as something easy to do (because it’s not always easy to love one’s body the way it is), but simply in some of our words? Why ‘feel guilty’ about a cookie? It was a cookie, not another human being you shot down in the street. We’re not little girls (or little boys)

Oh yes, it’s not easy at all. I too have felt guilty. I’m still battling those feelings nowadays, because I’m so used to them, in spite of knowing they’re not appropriate, that I wouldn’t know what to replace them with. I just don’t want to tread that road anymore. I am not a piece of crap that deserves such emotional abuse, as inoffensive as it may appear at first. Neither are any of us.

Willpower, yes. Dedication, yes. Empowerment, hell yes. Not the rest. Not the insults. Not the hate. Not the abuse.

Sometimes, somehow, reading some of the things I read around here… My heart weeps.

I’m still not done with my binging problem, but in the past days, I took some time to reflect in depth about all of this. In a way, it was easy: I’m on sick leave for the week, so I had lots of time on my hands, and a real need to think of something else than “what, you’re not taking advantage of this week to do MORE homework? You stupid lazy girl!” (See, how I’m kind with myself. A-hem.)

So I thought. I also got Overcoming Overeating in the mail, so I read. And I thought again.

The truth is, since I’ve started ‘really dieting’–religiously counting calories, fat grams, etc.–things have gone down the drain. Voilà. There it is, and there it had to be said. I don’t know what got into me the day I started to do that.

When I came back to this blog in April 2007, determined to lose weight again, my motto was: “I want to eat like normal people do”. That was my big secret. I kept a food log, but I didn’t count calories. I weighed some foods, like rice and pasta, but I didn’t fret out about whether I had weighed 40g or 42g of dry rice. It worked, and I wasn’t even doing that much exercise, mind you! That’s also when I decided that I would try a vegetable several times before claiming I didn’t like its taste. That’s when I realized that I’m not such a big eater, actually, and that the glutton I was thinking of whenever I mentally pictured myself was just a mere shadow from the past.

The weight I lost? I lost it during that period, between April and June 2007. Naturally, painlessly.

Then diet mentality set in, insidiously. I moved, I decided to “do even better” by counting calories, logging everything into FitDay, weighing even my vegetables. Oddly enough, my problems with binging started some time in August, probably triggered by my birthday (I celebrated it three times in the same week, each time with different people). It didn’t stop there. It got gradually worse during the school year, and the more I tried to white-knuckle it, count calories even more thoroughly, berated myself for letting the binges happens… well, guess what? The more I did this, the worse it became.

Which brought me to this conclusion: apparently, diet mentality doesn’t work for me. Not to say that it set me on the course of an eating disorder that I barely suspected. After all, all I was doing was “eating normally”, right? All I was doing was “eating like normal people do”?

Except that “normal eating” very likely does not entail counting calories, nor feeling guilty about eating an apple because “it’s not the least caloric fruit”. And “being normal” doesn’t entail looking at a cookie as if it was the spawn of Satan. I mean, it’s just food. It does not hold any power, nor does it have to.

I’m going to be rude and say: fuck diets. Screw calories counting. I don’t ever want to look at a food and have its caloric intake pop first into my mind. That’s abnormal. That’s destructive. Maybe it works for some people, but after months and months of desperately trying, it’s clear that it doesn’t work for me. (Remember what I was saying, long ago, about having lost weight without realizing it ten years ago, when I first went to college? I didn’t count back then. I didn’t even attempt to lose weight. It happened because I was finally the one who could make her own decisions about food, and those decisions weren’t as silly as I feared.)

I’m not going to go gung-ho on pizza, ice cream and cookies. I’m not using these thoughts as an excuse, simply because I know it won’t be an excuse. Weird and preposterous as it may seem, I have to word this out loud: I will trust my body. For instance, the fact that I naturally, unconsciously started to eat less starches (not as part of a diet or a “must do” mentality: it just happened, is all) tends to make me think that my body is not the black hole I thought it was when it comes to food. Maybe it’s time I stop fighting it. It’s the rebellious streak, in a way: consider a food as ‘bad’, even unconsciously, and you’ll end up craving it.

There’ll be faux-pas. I already know it. I’m prepared to face them. But this time, I won’t berate myself and call myself names about them. I’m not in this world to abuse myself and my body this way. This behaviour has to stop.

I always have that stupid feeling that people think ill of me about that… like, “well, she’s fat, she must eat a lot, no wonder she’s such a wimp about not eating her oh-so-holy-breakfast first thing in the morning”.

I caught myself writing this in a post on the 3FC forum earlier on. Well, to be honest, I caught myself after it was done, and decided to not edit it, because it got me to think. That’s Fat Girl Thinking in one of its incarnations, you see.

The story behind that: I was basically saying that I had a hard time this morning due to having a blood test to do on an empty stomach–and I don’t work well on a stomach that’s been empty for the last 12 or 13 hours (light dinner, as usual, and I generally don’t eat after 7-7:30 pm either). Having blood drawn in such conditions leaves me weak, with a spinning head, when I don’t simply faint.

And yet, all I could think of when it came to having breakfast was that I shouldn’t complain: after all, I’m just a fat girl, I should toughen up and not moan as soon as I have to delay a meal by one hour or two, right? No thin person would complain, because they are thin and therefore perfect. (Sarcasm much here, hm.)

Does that sound like a screwed thought? Yes? My take as well, now that I’ve reflected upon it.

Why do such things keep on crossing my mind from time to time? I don’t know. I’m not obese anymore, lots of people now tend to consider me ‘average’ and not ‘fat’, but I’m still plagued by such ideas. Maybe it’s because I’ve been overweight for so long that I just don’t know what it is to be average. Maybe it’s also because of my weird relationship with food these days–I binge, so the whole world must know about it and whisper behind my back.

Yeah. It’s indeed screwed up. And I’d better start looking for a way to stop these thoughts, because they really don’t help.

I’ve been mulling over this thought for the past days, and am wondering if I’m just kidding myself, or if this could actually be of help for the time being.

I haven’t reached a point when I weigh compulsively every day (once a week is fine enough), but I kind of have a weird relationship with my scale these days, in that seeing a lower number causes me to think that “it’s okay, see, you can lose easily as soon as you eat sensibly… so now you can go have that pizza”.

No need to say that “have that pizza” turns into a 4-days binge, and then it’s back to square one losing those pounds again. Pretty screwed-up way of doing things. And I wonder why I can never get past 132ish… Silly K.

Of course, I know I need some accountability–if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got fat to start with. But maybe it’s time to focus on a healthier kind of accountability. For instance, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that logging a day full of vegetables, fish, fruits, healthy oils and some complex carbs is a sign that I’m doing things right (contrary to logging a day full of bread, pasta and cookies). Or maybe I can just focus on how my clothes fit; I have a few pair of jeans that won’t let me gain two pounds before starting to get snug, so I know I can ‘trust’ them. I should probably also take measurements, see how that works; I don’t know why I’ve never really done it, probably because stepping on the scale is faster and easier?

The reason why I also want to stop focusing on numbers (scale AND calories) is because, let’s be honest… I am developing an eating disorder right now. There’s no way of denying it, you can see it from my posts, and I can feel it as well. Sure, I’ve always had a weird relationship with food, with all those money problems and eating cheap junk packaged food, with overeating at times… but binge eating? No. Never to that extent, never to the point of actually planning binges. I’m also tired of worrying about numbers, and then of having these weird thoughts about “being able to afford crap, now that you’ve lost again the weight you had regained again“–it’s like all this worry stresses me even more, and aggravates the problem at hand. It had never happened to me in the past, and I don’t want to let it spiral out of control.

Can this work, or am I just kidding myself once again? I know I have to resort to any tool possible right now, and “dieting”, being obsessed by my weight, is certainly not a healthy tool in that regard.

But…

Everybody in our corner of the blogosphere knows that silence means falling off the wagon, and I decided that I’d still go on blogging even when things aren’t all rosy and positive. Well, alright, don’t expect me to blog about my bingeing problems every day either, because it’d be very boring in the long run and wouldn’t help anyway; on the other hand, reflecting on problems instead of on good things from time to time is helpful.

As you have probably guessed by now, the beginning of the week wasn’t good. I don’t think I’ve been in such a foul and angry mood in a long, long time, and I wonder if what I was fearing isn’t crashing on me now–too much work, too much homework, school, too much stress, and only 24 hours in a day to tackle it all. Too bad that this couldn’t have waited for two more years, at least by then I’d be over with school and wouldn’t have to worry about giving up two months before obtaining my B.A. (No, I won’t give up, I don’t want to! I’m just so mentally and physically exhausted that things are very, very rough right now.)

(I’m also aware that this post–a sort of message in a bottle, if you want–seems very different, inconsistent with what I was writing about last week. That’s probably normal. I am a cyclic person, and my moods generally tend to cycle rapidly, so I can be alright on Monday and hate the whole world on Tuesday. It’s crap, but it’s the way it is.)

So. Bad week so far, foul mood, being despaired, reaching for food to cope. And I’ve been wondering and trying to analyze that shitty situation. I gained on way in my childhood and teen years mainly because we had the wrong foods at home and I was clueless about portions, but I’m confident in saying that at the time, I did not reach for food as a comfort tool. Things weren’t different when I first went to college either. Food wasn’t my friend and only comfort.

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