Been There, Done That

This past week Kirstie Alley has been the target, punching bag, object of ridicule, etc., because she came out on the Oprah show and admitted she regained the weight she very publicly lost. God bless her, I know what she's going through on several levels, although I consider myself lucky that I don't have paparazzi following me around calling me "fat a**." People are probably thinking it and muttering it to themselves behind my back, but at least it's not being yelled at me in airports or malls.

This came at an interesting time for me. I have another doctor's checkup this Friday, and I know it's not going to be fun. I haven't done well at all lately with the weight loss and exercise, and I totally expect to have gained when I step on the doctor's scale. I'm already trying to prepare myself for the fallout I'm going to get for it.

The sad thing is, when I get this way, even an upcoming doctor's appointment doesn't seem to give me the incentive to get myself into gear. "This way" includes major moodiness, prone to tears or anger, and a major lack of energy. Add a hectic schedule to the mix, and I'm reduced to getting the very basics done (work, basic housekeeping) and not being able to muster the motivation to attempt anything else. That means exercise for sure.

As far as eating, I do my best with breakfast and lunch to be a "normal" eater, as far as portion sizes and healthy food goes. It helps that it coincides with my most orderly and routine part of the day. After that, however, as my life goes chaotic, so does my eating. Definitely way too much night time snacking! I guess I should focus on that chaos=eating relationship and figure out how to combat that. Recognizing it is the first step. Doing something about it is the second. And sometimes that even goes well. At first. But then I lose motivation, the stressors of my life get the better of me, and I'm realizing more and more that I need help and support to keep it from collapsing once again.

I'm quickly coming to the realization that things really need to change in my life. It hasn't congealed into a formal plan, but I think within the next month or so, I have to come to some conclusions and make some real decisions. I'm sure Friday's appointment will contribute to that. And I have to realize that I can't do it all by myself. It's always been exceedingly hard for me to ask for help, but if I ever want to get some real progress in my life, it has to be done.

AWOL again!

I have been absent again from the blog, and I give my apologies. Part of the reason was the time of year: as a church secretary, Holy Week and Easter are one of the busiest times of the year for me, and there were a couple weeks when I hardly had time to think straight, let alone blog. It's finally starting to slow down now that I've mailed my monthly newsletter (I'm the editor, type in all the copy, design all the pages, fold and label them, plus handle all the bulk mailing duties!) I can take a little breather. In fact, summer is really slow for me at work, and I have to admit I'm looking forward to the lighter schedule.

We also had some upheavals in my home routine. At the beginning of April, after debating over it for the past year, we made the decision to move my daughter from one gymnastics team which was 10 miles away, to another gym that is 40 miles away! In addition, we're bumping up from three days a week, at three hours a pop, to four days a week, with the Saturday class clocking in at four hours! It's meant a lot more running for me, although once we get settled in, I think some of the other parents and I will set up some turns at carpooling. It's already obvious it was the right decision to make; I know my daughter has learned more in the last three weeks than she learned in the last three months at her old gym. Her form is better, and she's definitely increasing her strength.

To add to all this "busyness," I've been dealing with some issues with a medication I take. I take a generic form of Ortho Tri-Cyclen, and last month my pharmacy switched the generics on me. Well, the last couple weeks have been rough. The PMS was rough with major moodiness. Then, when I was supposed to have my "visitor," it was nowhere to be found. And I'm usually as regular as clockwork. I was freaking out and even got a pregnancy test, which did turn out negative. A few days after that, a week after it was supposed to come, it arrived with a fury, with cramps from hell and moodiness that made me feel like a crazy woman. I was near tears three times that day!

It was weird that this "scare" happened right now, because I've been surrounded by a lot of babies recently, and I have to admit I've caught a little baby fever. Even my husband caught a bit of it from me. So we both were really doing some heavy thinking and talking during those days when I wasn't sure. Although in the midst of my hormonal breakdown I ranted to him, "If I had a baby right now on top of all this I'd jump in front of a truck!" So I don't know what will happen now.

To make matters worse, my daughter and I caught some kind of stomach bug, so while I stayed at home with her yesterday and tried to work from home, I was also making frequent and urgent trips to the bathroom.

Needless to say, add this all together, and I haven't been doing that great the last few weeks with my eating and exercising. But it hasn't been a total backslide. I will backtrack a little bit here and say that as of March 27 I had lost almost 20 pounds since January, and on April 8 I got weighed at a different doctor's appointment and was still at that weight. I can't even guess what it is right now, though, after these last two weeks of insanity. I didn't want to weigh myself and bum myself out more. However, my husband did mention yesterday morning that he could tell I've lost weight, so apparently I haven't undone all the work I've done. I have until May 8 until my next check-in with my doctor, so hopefully by then I can regroup and get myself together again.

The biggest bummer is that my exercise is almost nonexistent this month. It's not about using it to lose weight: I've got a 5K race in June and I really want to be able to do it without collapsing! That's me on the right in that picture over there from last year's race, with my friend Jen and my daughter standing in front of us. I've GOT to get myself back to walking regularly and at length, because I don't want to make an a** out of myself. It's just been so darn tough lately to find the time. There are days I'm up at 5:50 a.m., get daughter to school and be at work by 8; out at 3, make an early dinner for my daughter so we can leave by 4:15 to get to gymnastics; run errands during her practice, then get home at 8:45 p.m. and hope to be in bed by 9:30 so I can start it all over again the next day. The good news is, some of the other gym moms want to start walking together when the weather improves (it was snowing here today!), so maybe that will help.

I will do my best to stay more up-to-date here, but I've recently been bitten by another fever: Facebook! It's hard to stay away from it and I've tracked down a lot of friends from my college days, which is v.v. cool!

Out of the Ashes

“The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.”

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Six months. It seems both like a long time and hardly any time at all. Where was I all that time? Good question. Under the wet, heavy blanket of my depression, a blanket soaked with a good deal of stress, burn-out and mental exhaustion from a variety of issues going on in my life.

When I saw my general practitioner in January and he looked at the sorry state I was in, I tried to explain that I spent the majority of the past year fighting depression. His frank reply: "You've been battling depression most of your life, haven't you?" And I couldn't argue with that. I've had anxiety problems since I was 10, and suffered my first serious bout of depression around 14 or 15. It's been a lifetime of struggling.

I apologize to those friendly bloggers who left messages over the past six months. I left off here so positive, and I was nowhere near that mental state and couldn't collect myself enough to even explain. I wasn't only cut off from blogging, I was cut off from myself.

And in that process of cutting off, I ate. I must say, thank goodness, that it wasn't the compulsive, crazed binge eating I was doing at the end of my dieting days -- that was a scary time of hoarding binge foods, sneaking off to eat this "contraband" and mindlessly consuming it until I was often physically ill. I think the combination of the information I've learned from studying Intuitive Eating and the Wellbutrin I was taking kept me from that extreme.
Instead, it was just a "f#!*-it" attitude. I ate whatever I wanted and didn't think once about health or nutrition; it was all about comfort. I made lousy choices all day long. And exercise flew right out the window; other than housework and a little snow shoveling I was living a completely sedentary existence, escaping into TV, movies and reading books from the library.

I guess you could say my doctor's appointment was my wake-up call, my "hitting bottom." I finally realized the dark place I'd fallen into and knew I had to do something to pull myself out of it. I was in a sorry state and not just emotionally. My weight went up, and so did my blood pressure (it didn't help that I was fighting off a panic attack about the appointment before I even walked in the door, plus almost hitting a telephone pole on the icy roads getting to the office!). Fortunately it wasn't dangerously high -- yet -- and my other test results came back okay. My doctor wasn't mean, but he woke me up to the fact that I'm not getting any younger, and the time is quickly coming where my body won't be able to tolerate the excess weight, lousy diet and sedentary lifestyle without serious consequences.

So then I got home, cried, and tried to figure out what in the hell I was going to do with myself. The doctor brought up the idea of Lap-Band surgery, and I actually considered it for, oh, a day. But I realized once again that my problems have little to do with the size of my stomach -- it's about the beliefs in my head combined with my health issues, which include hypothyroidism and PCOS. I don't know if I'd put the depression in the mental or physical column -- it definitely runs in my family, but is that nature or nurture? The same thing goes with my body -- both sides of my family are made of up stocky, German and Eastern European ancestors. But is that genetics or the way our families ate and dealt with food? In any case, it adds up to the fact that I'm never going to have a body like a runway model. I don't think that's a negative belief, just a realistic one.

Putting all that aside, I looked at what were realistic goals and what I could tackle without making myself crazy(ier).

Dieting in the typical sense is out for me. I caught myself in the first couple weeks after the doctor's appointment falling into some dieting mentality (restricting too much, wanting to weigh myself obsessively, etc.) and quickly falling into an anxiety attack. I was lucky in a sense that I had an appointment with my therapist that day, and I was able to talk about the extremes in my thinking. This past year it's either not caring about anything (i.e. depression), or obsessing to the point of anxiety. And my question that day was, how do I find the balance in between these two points?

The biggest things were getting my blood pressure back to a healthier level, which tied directly into getting more physically active again. My doctor gave me a very basic walking program, and even though it seemed ridiculous to start off at 5 minutes a day for the first week, I realized that was my extreme, black or white thinking rearing its head. I looked at it in different, more positive ways: instead of being intimidated by a program that looked really hard and difficult, this was something that sounded very easy to do, and I'd be more apt to doing it because it would be over quickly! But more importantly, those 5 minutes a day would enable me to establish a habit. And it worked. I slowly crept up to 10 minutes a day, and now it's 15.

As fate would have it, a week after my appointment I once again became captain of my church's team for our local newspaper's fitness challenge, which wraps up with a 5K/10K walk and run in June. You keep track of your exercise and weight loss which are converted to points that are added in with your race result. In our case those points go towards a competition with other churches for a "Pastor's Cup" trophy. All of this benefits various charitable organizations in our area. This is my third year as captain of our team, and there is something to be said for having a chart to keep track of your exercise to keep you motivated to keep it up.

As for the food and eating? I'm doing my best with IE and its basic rules: eat when you're hungry, eat what you want, eat until you're satisfied. I am making an effort to make healthier choices, but only those foods that I really like. There have been some instances that I don't make the healthiest choice, or else there's nothing else available, but I took them in stride and didn't attach any bad feelings or guilt to them. I have had a couple instances of stress-eating, but they were limited and did not snowball into a feeding frenzy. I think it's because I was conscious of my actions, which cut down the intensity of my need for it.

Tomorrow I go back to the doctor to find out a) if I've lost any weight and b) if my blood pressure has gone down. While I've tried to stay away from the scale these past six weeks, I did take a peek this morning, just so I'd be prepared for tomorrow's appointment, and it appears I've lost somewhere between 10-15 pounds. I just hope the blood pressure has gone down, too.

I'm not getting too excited about the weight loss. My main focus right now is not about that. My main goal right now is taking care of myself, and that means physically and mentally. I can't go back to sacrificing my sanity for a smaller dress size, yet I can't sacrifice my health, either. So I'm doing my best to achieve balance -- balance in what I eat, balance in putting movement in my life, and balance in finding satisfying "me" time in the midst of working, housekeeping and being a wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend.

My biggest concern right now is the fear of the return of that blanket of depression. Even though I'm feeling better now, how long until it once again takes over and takes all the joy out of life? I'll end with another quote from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra:

"Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."

I Have Returned

After several days of recovery and catching up at home and work, I'm finally finding the time to report in on my incredible trip to England.

This is me on the left with two of my travel companions on our first day in London. We are standing in front of the fountain at Picadilly Circus, which over the course of our week became our hub and reference point. From here we could walk to Soho, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, to name a few. There were lots of shops, restaurants and theaters and of course, plenty of people! Although I've been told the crowds we encountered were paltry in comparison to the throngs that appear in the summer tourist season.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast on Lillie Road, Fulham, although we were very close to the Earl's Court expo centers, and our closest Underground station was West Brompton. The four of us stayed in a basement "flat" that was quite roomy. This was my bedroom for the week. I have to admit I found it odd that my bed didn't have a top sheet, just a bottom sheet and a duvet (what they call comforters over there). I also wasn't thrilled with my feather pillows and was fortunate that I brought my allergy medication along to reduce my reaction to them.

The picture at right was our little kitchen, but from what I gather it's fairly typical of an English kitchen. Compared to us Americans, they have tiny little refrigerators, which was fine for us since we weren't doing much eating there. Also located in the kitchen (behind the cupboard door between the sink and the white water heater) was a small front loading washing machine. But this was very similar to the one my sister had when she lived in the U.K. When I showed this picture to my sister she looked at the stove and recalled fondly having a similar small broiler section in the middle of the stove. In a little coincidence, our kitchen had a plug-in tea kettle that was very similar to the one my husband bought me recently, and it felt a little bit like home.

I won't get to all my journeys in England in today's post, but I will get to them in the next few days, with accompanying photographs. I have so many pictures from my trip! I borrowed my daughter's new digital camera which can hold up to 1500 photos, and I wound up using more than 500 of them! There's no way I can post them all, nor would anyone want me to, because I took a lot of extra shots of plaques and displays at museums to help me remember what certain buildings or items were once I got home. However, if you would be interested in seeing them, send me your e-mail address and I can invite you to see the entire album at Snapfish.

Being a Gemini, I always seem to have two opposing opinions or feelings on most things, and this trip had them, too. There were things I loved about England: the pop culture, the interesting foods, all the museums and historical sites, even just hearing the British accents and their colloquialisms. But there were things I missed, too: my American bathroom, my electrical hair gadgets (we couldn't get them to work), and of course missing my husband and daughter.

Having said that, there were things I didn't miss back home: all the endless housekeeping; chasing after my husband and daughter and reminding them of all the things they forget to do; being covered in dog hair 24 hours a day; and the crappy, wintry Appalachian weather which seemed to come full force while I was away.

As for England, my biggest problem was in the end my own fault, so I have no one to blame but myself. We had so much we wanted to see in a limited amount of time, so we crammed in as many activities and events as possible. This meant a LOT of walking, and I just couldn't keep up with my fast-walking travel companions. I don't blame them; I admit I'm out of shape because of my recent weight gain and falling woefully behind on my exercise. I had all these plans of getting back on track in December and January, busting hump on the treadmill and having myself ready to trek all over England, but then I got sick -- twice -- and I found myself barely able to get my daily chores done, let alone exercise.

I wound up spending the majority of the week in some kind of pain, whether it was my feet, knees, ankles or hips. My body just couldn't handle being on the run from 8 in the morning until 10 at night. My friends didn't have these problems, but let's face it, I weigh a lot more than they do. Perhaps if I had strapped on big, heavy backpacks on them and had them walk 12-14 hours a day they may have had a similar experience.

But, in true Gemini fashion, I did find a positive to all that walking! For the first time ever I didn't gain any weight on vacation, despite eating heavy meals like fish and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, drinking pints of cider and treating myself to desserts like a Cornish high tea (scones with clotted cream and strawberry preserves) or British biscuits (cookies). Being on the run all the time meant I didn't have time to mindlessly snack, and I pretty much stuck to three meals a day and maybe one snack.

This reminds me of a restaurant advertising campaign I saw everywhere in London and had to take a picture of it to share with you. If you can't read the caption, it says, "DIETS ARE SAD. Instead, enjoy proper food, three times a day. (Not too much, not too little.) Eat With Your Head." I saw this on the very first day in London, and I actually wound up practicing it while I was there. And the great thing was, I've been pretty much continuing it here now that I'm home. I realized on this trip that so much of my overeating has to do with boredom, filling up time, procrastinating, and of course the old attempt at comforting myself. And whether it was the busy schedule, the change of location or removal of my home triggers, it just didn't happen. As proof, I had taken a bag of candy bars along on the trip and I wound up bringing it back untouched. In addition, I brought home some British candy, biscuits and crisps (potato chips), but so far I've barely touched them. So far this "Eat With Your Head" plan is working, and I'll do my best to keep it going.