Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

Got you, huh?

Here’s a little update on things. After a good six months without focusing on weight matters, I realize that taking a ‘break’, if I may say so, was a good solution. A break from forums, websites, blogs and the likes, I mean, not a break from being reasonable when it comes to feeding myself with the right stuff. Anyway. It was a good thing. It has allowed me to take a step backwards, breathe a little, and stop defining my life in terms of food and such, whether I wanted it or not.

As I mentioned in my previous post (back in July… my, how fast time flies!), I passed my License degree, and I am now attending what I hope will  be my last school year. It’s going to be tough, since it’s a national competitive exam, and therefore I cannot just get away with very average grades. However, it’s also been going in an interesting way so far, and I’m amazed at how things have turned out.

I thought I would be depressed. I am not.

I thought I’d get crappy marks. I don’t. Not so far, at least. Rather the contrary, compared to the rest of the class. In a way, it’s mind-boggling.

I thought I’d start piling on weight, due to being overall inactive (I have to cram about 70 hours of work/school/homework each week, and I should probably be doing even more). I don’t. In fact, it’s the first time in my life when I seem to be eating all the time and losing weight instead.

I thought studying so much would be a chore. It turned out that the program is very interesting: King Lear, Jane Eyre, The Grapes of Wrath, the ‘imperial presidency’ (cf. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) in the United States… Therefore, it’s not a chore, it’s a pleasure! Last year, I had to take some of my classes just because they fit in the schedule instead of others, not out of vague personal interest for them; this year, it’s totally different.

I thought all that stress would make me fat in no time. Actually, I’m so excited about learning more and more about those subjects that I don’t dwell too much on eating, because spending a lot of time eating would reduce my time spent on studying. And so I eat in a sensible way—no “oh, let’s find something else to eat, just so that I can finish watching that episode on my DVD of Series X”. KWIM?

And I love that. Not because of the weight thing, just because I have that feeling that I’m doing something with my life, that my days aren’t spent in idling. Maybe that’s what I needed: that feeling of completion. Maybe not having it was part of my bingeing problem. I don’t know.

Oh, I won’t pretend that I’m doing everything ‘perfectly’. I don’t exercise that much, for starters: a stretching class, lots of walking, but no time (yet) for resuming weight-lifting. I try to eat vegetables/proteins/non-refined carbs, but I can’t do that all the time (campus restaurant, for instance), and sometimes, well, I do like the other students and eat cookies. But I do all that because I’m hungry, not because I want some comfort, which is a huge step forward, and away from the behaviours that had plagued me for months.

Due to that work load, I won’t be able to post much on this blog, so don’t expect daily or even bi-weekly updates. This said, I felt that it was high time to blab here a little again.

And I haven’t regained the weight I had lost. If anything, I’ve lost the few pounds that remained after my bouts of bingeing. Perhaps I’m not such a desperate case, after all.