In My Head
Ta effing Da!
Yup, here I am again.
If you are reading this entry, I would like to explain the archives of this blog have been pieced together via the Wayback Machine that can show you old archived web pages. Because I have been a bit of a impatient dumbass in the past, I had lost most of my entries when I switched over to a new domain host. Yeah.
It’s nothing that I can change at this point, but I spent a lot of time last week copying the old entries over from the wayback machine and so some of the links and images probably no longer work. I just wanted to explain why.
I have shifted back and forth on different blogs over the years, but I think it’s time to come back to this one. This is a very diet neutral name and it’s one of the original ones if not THE original one that I started all those years ago. I just loved the name and so here I am.
I have resurrected my old YouTube channel by the same name as well, because…might as well keep it all in the same vein right? Back when I started that channel it was primarily for low carb recipes. It was a little show I called Low Carb Cafe and I really enjoyed and miss making those videos. So they will be back, but I’m also expanding the channel to vlogs and weigh ins and such so that it’s all my content in one channel. Much like this blog.
So things have been going meh for me as far as the weight loss. I’ve gone in ebbs and flows like always. I lost about 40 lbs with low calorie and portion control only to gain most of it back when I fell of the wagon.
In December of 2017 my husband had a heart attack and his dr recommended keto so we have been trying that ever since. And when I say that we have been trying that, I mean that we were really good for a few months, he dropped 30 lbs and I 15, but then I just couldn’t stick with it. I kept cheating at work and not telling my husband and pretending I was eating fine at home. We both fell out of the exercise routine and in turn fell stagnant on the weight loss front.
My anxiety and depression have played a really big part in me not wanting to do anything – also I discovered that now when I lower my carbs I get heart palpitations when I don’t supplement with sea salt because I get super low on electrolytes. It makes me not want to do the diet because I just don’t want to deal with that.
The latest set back is that my husbands mother has been in a health crisis. Her kidneys are failing and she has lots f blockages in her heart, but she only has a 10% chance of surviving surgery. So basically she was sent home a month ago to die.
In pulling her off of 15 of her medications however, they didn’t anticipate that she would bounce back. She went from being bed bound to going to Target the other day.
What this has meant for us, is that we have been heading over there most nights after work and cooking food for her…whatever she wants since they took her off dietary restriction. Since we then get home with only an hour or so to relax before bed, that leaves us at the mercy of eating whatever she wanted and also bringing those leftovers to work for lunches the next day.
Let’s just say it hasn’t been Keto, or even moderately healthy.
We made a decision this weekend that we were just going to have to suck it up and either make her meals more towards our diet, or we would have to cook a bunch on our “nights off” to supplement the meals that we won’t be eating at her house.
I’ve just been to the grocery store to stock up, and we’ll see what I can cook up tonight to get us ready for the next few days.
So that is what is going on with me. I weighed in yesterday at 257 lbs. That is up about 20 pounds from my recent lowest. I’m hoping to reign all this in and start exercising again too. Thus dusting off the YouTube channel and this blog.
Wish me luck!!!!
Lot's of good progress so far.
So Friday marked my 9th weekly weight in since I started trying to eat better. I was shocked and amazed to see a 2.2 pound loss when I stepped on the scale. Also, very happy. 🙂
So this brings my weight down to 257 and my total loss to 15.2 pounds.
I haven’t seen the 250’s in about a year so this makes me very very excited.
The weight I was most comfortable at while still being “morbidly obese” was around 220. I was fitting into a size 18 jeans and generally felt really good about my appearance. Of course I was also running on a near daily basis at the time while training for a half marathon, but still…that was my weight.
At this stage in the game though, any loss is a welcome loss. Or even, just not a gain. You see, I’m still not really being super strict or counting calories yet. I’m just cutting my portions down and making better decisions. I’ve got a basic concept of what works for me during the week and I’m just trying to stick to it. Chicken, brown rice and a veggie for dinner. Overnight oats for breakfast and something well balanced for lunch. Veggies and fruits for snacks and I’ve cut out most diet sodas.
I’m beginning to see the loss in my face. My double (triple) chin is getting a bit smaller and my cheekbones are becoming a little bit more pronounced. I really wish I had taken some body shots when I started so I have a real documentation, alas that didn’t happen. I did take some the other day so I will at least have something going forward.
What I am starting to notice are other little things that are changing for me cosmetically. Things I had basically just stopped trying at.
I had pretty much given up on trying to look pretty. My clothes were straight up tee shirts and jeans. Why bother to try and dress nice when everything you wear looks like a sack of potatoes anyway right?
Well, lately I have been buying some new items online. Nothing major, but before I was rotating the same three shirts and the same pair of jeans every day. Now I have a little more variety and some of the things look a lot cuter on me than they would have fifteen pounds ago.
Also, my skin has been a wreck for most of my adult life. I have rosacea, but I’ve never really even attempted to take care of my skin. Turns out that I also have a skin condition I never knew existed. Milia is the name of those white bumps I have scattered all over my cheeks, just under my eyes. I had always assumed they were very stubborn white heads that could only be cured by lancing them and pushing out the small white ball inside it. While you can do this method, they are not whiteheads, but are actually small cysts that are filled with keratin. I had no idea! And I just assumed that I was stuck with these suckers for life. I have had them over a decade and other than lancing them, I have never gotten them to go away with any sort of acne cream – which makes total sense now.
Anyhoo, I gave up on my skin because it was in such a bad way. I would slather on the foundation to cover the rosacea, but the texture of my skin was always off due to the milia. I just learned to live with it. About a month ago, I started using a pretty standard moisturizer. It was just a hydrating gel that I got when we went to Korea to keep my skin from drying out on the plane. I have been using it every single morning after my shower and nothing else. I have found that the texture of my skin is getting better and it doesn’t look so dry and my pores aren’t as prominent.
Yesterday while researching something else, I stumbled upon an article about Milia and found that you can treat it by using raw honey on them. I started that yesterday and we shall see how it goes.
I finally gave myself a much needed haircut yesterday as well. My hair was almost down to my butt and just a mess of straggly split ends.
My point is, that at some point in my weight gain, I gave up on everything else. My clothes. My face. My hair. Even my bra. My stomach was so big that wearing an underwire hurt, so I started buying granny bras and wearing them. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it didn’t do wonders for my self esteem.
I’m now feeling like it’s worth trying to make myself feel that much better by liking other things when I look in the mirror, not just my waistline.
I view this as a huge win. While it is not a win on the scale, I think it is even better than that.
Quick realization…
We are one week out from the play going up. I mention this because at this time in every other play I have ever done, I am stressed to the max. I am bawling on a daily basis, barely keeping my eyes open at work and just in an overall foul mood most of the time.
I am happy to report that is not the case with this play. Part of it has to do with an amazing director that has her shit together, but I am really thinking a lot of it has to do with the fact that I am not eating crap.
It sounds stupid to say that, but I really believe it to be true. I wake up every morning expecting to be just cranky and crying at the drop of a hat and ready to snap at someone for no reason, because that is they way that this normally works for me.
On a normal night when I am not doing a show I am in bed by ten at the latest. This past week I haven’t even been home at that hour and have been averaging bedtime around 12:15 or so. Unheard of for me on a work night unless in a play…where I react like I spoke of above because of the sleep deprivation.
To prove my theory even more, I have to let you know that I am about to start my period. Aaaaaand, I have the WORST PMS on a good day. To the point where I have to apologize to people on a regular basis for my shitty attitude and for biting their heads off.
So….add all that together in a blender and you would think I would be ready to do some serious damage to someone or something right? It hasn’t been so.
I have been a little cranky at things that I feel are justified, but no more so than a regular day for me. I really think that eating more of an actual “food” based diet is totally making me more sane.
Crazy right??
Day Four of the Purification and a sad revelation
So it’s interesting to me, that my “meals” have become more of a variety of snacks than full on meals. For example- this morning for breakfast I had a small bowl of pureed squash, pepper strips dipped in homemade “zucchini hummus” and followed with one of my shakes as desert. Lunch was a small bowl of homemade veggie soup, followed by carrot sticks dipped in the same hummus and a half of an avocado. I never feel stuffed, but I always feel satisfied. And to be quite honest, I was getting sick of the overly full feeling I was getting from every meal lately. The disgust that I felt that I had eaten that much, followed by the carb crash about an hour later and the desperate sodium thirst that happened after. It had been a pretty never ending cycle for me for quite some time recently.
Having said that, I can’t deny that I see all the snacks and food we have at home and I just want to dive in. While I feel “satisfied” most of the time, it would be so much easier to grab a bag of chips rather than cut up veggies. To make a quick sandwich for lunch tomorrow would be very simple compared to prepping all the things needed to go in a salad, or gathering all my “snacks” together to make a meal. Convenience has ruled my life and my diet for a very long time. Even when I lost all my weight initially, it was because the low carb craze had hit and hit big. There were little low carb pop up shops where you could get everything under the sun! Low carb cereal and pizza. Even Cheetos and Doritos came out with low(er) carb options at the time. It was a full on mania and I loved it.
Having to prepare meals every single night just gets old. I know that sounds really stupid, because…well, that is what adults do right? You come home and make dinner for your family. I guess I’ve gotten complacent and quite frankly, lazy. Wow. See, this is why I blog. That was a realization for me right there.
Okay, it’s no secret that I’m lazy, that’s not what I meant. However, I just realized how much I have been doing myself a disservice by thinking that cooking takes up too much of my free time. By wanting the convenience of fast meals for myself and my husband all week, simply so I could watch more TV and play on the internet, I have really been cheating myself out of a healthier body and mind. Not to mention the exercising I could be doing to make my mental health better again. I do realize that isn’t rocket science, and I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I have known this all along. But for me to put it on virtual pen to paper, it hit home really hard right now.
All this week I have been going to bed early – mostly to read and fall asleep. This is because I’m afraid I will want to cheat on my diet if I stay up in close proximity to the kitchen until I “get tired”. I haven’t watched TV at all this week and I haven’t missed it.
I had forgotten how much I love reading until my eyes are too tired to stay open and then closing them. Maybe not falling asleep right away, because I am replaying what just happened in the book in delicious detail in my mind, but loving every second of doing so. That used to be a habit from my childhood. Back when we couldn’t afford cable or phone and there was no internet. I loved that.
Wow. I think I need to go let that sink in for a minute.
265
265 pounds.
Let’s just let that sink in for a second shall we? That was my weight as of Monday morning. That is LESS than forty pounds away from being 300 pounds again. It’s true that I don’t know how far above 300 I actually got at my heaviest because my scale broke (poor overworked thing!), but it doesn’t matter.
I feel every ounce of this weight gain. In fact, some days I feel even heavier than I did at my highest weight. I know that has a lot to do with age. When I was 300 plus pounds before, I was in my early 20’s. No real health worries other than that pesky high blood pressure. Hello? I was put on blood pressure meds when I was 26 years old, and I wasn’t concerned that much? Hmph.
Anyhoo. None of this news should surprise me because it’s not like I’ve been doing a whole lot to try to lose weight, let alone maintain my current weight. I dabbled in low carb again for a minute, but had such a horrible attack of gastritis brought on my my diverticulitis from all the almond flower and broccoli I had eaten, that I didn’t dare to try again. Really, wasn’t that just an excuse though?
Then it was all about the trip to Korea coming up. No sense in dieting because we are going to eat whatever we want while we are there. And after we got home it was just one excuse after another.
Truth be told, after 30 some odd years of dieting, I’m just TIRED of it! It’s hard and I don’t like things to be difficult. I like to be able to eat whatever I want and then lay about on the couch like a big slug and never have to worry about my health or how I look.
Yes, I am fully aware that is pretty much everyone’s dream as well, but at least I’m being honest. And furthermore, I am so sick of working out. I went on such a great stretch of running and training and I felt and looked great. I don’t know where all my motivation has gone. It makes me very sad and kind of disturbed. Like I’m giving in to the depression that has always loomed heavy around me my whole life. I hate it so much, yet I know exactly what I need to do to change it and I refuse. I just can’t get out of my own head!
Having said that, I started the purification diet again on Monday. It lasts 21 days, so I know it isn’t forever and I am familiar enough with it that I could sort of launch myself into it with little prep. Not to mention the first time I did this diet, I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. I’m not expecting the same results this time, but that would be nice. 😉
This time around there are many more recipes to keep variety alive on the SP website, so that is encouraging. Sunday I made some vegetable soup that I have been eating for lunch the last two days. Tonight I made some hummus made from homemade tahini, zucchini, olive oil, lemon juice and a couple other spices. While it isn’t the hummus I know, it will be so nice to dip my veggies into something after eating them plain the last couple of days.
So I’m rounding down day two tonight and it hasn’t been easy at all. In fact, I can’t tell you the number of times I have almost reached for some sort of food not on the diet just out of sheer habit, but I’m doing it. I hope to add exercise soon, but I’m not going to push my luck just yet.
All I can do is keep trying right? I’m still not feeling gung ho, or 100 percent on this, but I’m just putting one step in front of the other at this point. Hopefully I will get where I need to be.
Week Four Weigh In
251.4
-0
But wait!
Okay so there is a reason there was no week three weigh in. Lemmie explain…
Once or twice a year I like to recharge my batteries. The way that I do this is to get a hotel room in a nearby city that has a pool and a hot tub, as well as nearby shopping and I go there. By myself. I bring books, the laptop, my crochet and anything else that I have wanted to do but can’t seem to find the time in my busy day to day life.
I was really run down and burned out the last couple of weeks. I was depressed and angry a lot, and I knew it was time to take that trip to aloneland.
I told myself I was going to stay on my diet. With the bunless burgers and steak and eggs of the world, I would be fine eating out for my meals. I even brought some lunch meat and cheese to snack on since the hotel had a fridge.
The decision to stay on low carb that weekend didn’t even last until I got to the hotel.
Friday night I had Pizza Hut deliver medium pan Ultimate Cheese Lovers Pizza and boneless wings. (You know the kind with the breading!) Also, I snacked on the Ritz crackers I had bought when I got gas earlier that day.
Saturday I woke up and ate leftover pizza for breakfast. I got dressed and went shopping at the local mall where I got a medium Peanut Butter Cup Perfection bowl at Coldstone and ate every last drop. I then proceeded to pick up some Panda Express for dinner when I got back to the hotel. In addition, I stopped on the way back to the hotel and picked up a bag of Cheese Puffcorn to snack on later that night. Sunday morning I hit up their continental breakfast and filled up on half an English muffin, eggs, country potatoes and a blueberry muffin that was more muffin than blueberry.
Yeah, I went a little crazy. I do NOT regret doing it though. It was part of my “let me do whatever I want and feel no judgement from anyone” weekend, and it was exactly what I needed to get my head on straight again. I also hit the hot tub and swam a lot which also helped. 
I didn’t get on the scale again until that following Tuesday and what I found shocked even me, and I KNEW how much I ate that weekend: 258.6
I was very much taken aback and wanted to quit the diet, but I didn’t. Instead, I dusted off my old Myfitnesspal account and started logging everything I ate to make sure I kept my carbs in the 18-22g a day area.
Five days later and I am down 7.2 pounds!
So while there is no “Official” weight loss to report this week, I did in fact lose 7.2 pounds.
What does that tell me? I was way overeating my carbs without knowing it. When I log everything, I am held accountable. Previously I was writing everything down by hand and “guessing” at some of the carb counts. I shan’t be doing that again.
In other news, I found out that I am allergic to pumpkin seeds.
A while back I had an allergic reaction while eating a seasoned, raw sprouted seed mixture. I assumed that it was an allergy to one of the spices because I had eaten all of those kinds of seeds before with no problems.
I bought a bag of pumpkin seeds a couple of weeks ago, and I snacked on them one day last week, I had a handful in the morning and had a couple more early that afternoon.
As I was on my walk that lunch break when I felt my throat start to feel sore, and after lunch I could feel the back of my tongue getting itchy and swollen. Everything towards the back of the roof of my mouth was sore in the same way it was after I ate that other mixture.
That night I had a noticeably fat lip, and everything on the left side of my mouth (the side I predominantly chew on) was swollen and painful. I hopped on the Facebook to get opinions and was quite alarmed by my informative friends responses. I took a Benadryl, and it eventually went away. Took about two days to get back to normal, and it kinda scared the crap out of me. I’ve never been allergic to seeds before. As recent as six months or so I had some pumpkin kernels on the Autumn Soup and Panera Bread and never had a reaction. That leads me to believe that it’s the actual outside seed that I might have an allergy to.
I guess that food allergies develop as we get older, and things that never affected us before can be life-threatening as time goes on. Scary stuff!
I know, I know…
So I know that the last post I put in this blog was in October of last year. And I know that it spoke about going back on low carb. Truth be told, I was on “low carb” for about two months and lost five pounds. Even more truth be told, I had forgotten all about what low carb dieting was.
I was not doing induction. I was not doing much of anything, other than trying to stay under a certain number of carbs and not paying very much attention to that number.
I hadn’t even thought about induction since I started low carb all those years ago and managed to lose 80 pounds. I “forgot” about how important the rules are to this diet/way of eating. Mostly, because I wanted to forget.
In my distant memory, the weight just seemed to melt off back then. And truth be told, it did! Because I followed the diet to a Tee! I didn’t add any of the processed “low carb” items you can now get readily at any grocery store. I ate meat and veggies and cheese and I was good. No nuts or seeds and no peanut butter. No processed snacks other than pork rinds and I was losing every single week.
In fact towards the “height” of low carb back in the early 2000’s I DID start adding those types of things in to my diet and that is when I started to stall. That was when all of a sudden my cravings came back and the cheating started.
Every single time I have attempted low carb since then I have done it half assed. I have eaten lots of meat and veggies but I have also added tons of peanut butter, nuts and “low carb” treats. I have paid zero attention to the induction menu and just eaten whatever was deemed “low carb”.
Thus we have come to today. I am over 250 pounds again and rising. When I was truly dedicated I got down to 210 or so and I was so happy. I was also younger and the body was more forgiving in how it carried the fat.
Nowadays at over 250 pounds and 40 years old, I feel a lot like I don’t want to go out into public. I look at my body in the mirror and even though I have been way bigger than this in weight, I feel like I look just as big as I did back when I weight 350. As you get older, your body distributes your weight differently and that sucks.
I have found that while I weigh less than I did at my heaviest, my body is starting to look worse than it did back then. I have much more back fat that likes to roll over my bra line and make an ever attractive roll in whatever shirt I choose to wear. My core is much more of a barrel shape than it ever was. Back in the day I may have been big, but I had a nice hour glass figure. As I age, not so much.
My mom always told me that if I lost weight when I was younger it would be so much easier. She said once you reached a certain age, it just got hard to lose.
I rolled my eyes and continued being a teenager.
She wasn’t wrong.
However, what I’m hoping that I can do is get back into induction for reals this time and get back to losing. I have a bunch of recipes set up and a shopping list at my fingertips.
I NEED to do this, this time around. I’m far too heavy to where I am comfortable and I need to reverse this.
Running is never bad…
I did not want to run today.
Last night the husband and I attended a lovely low-key BBQ with friends where there was much music, drinks and tasty, but bad for me food to be had. We didn’t get home until late(for us) and then I continued to snack on the bad for me (but seriously, these were some tasty sausages) food and go to bed really late.
I woke up at eight thirty because my eldest dog was feeling left out of whatever was going on in the living room and repeatedly barked at the bedroom door until I got up and let him out. After I peed I realized that my tummy wasn’t feeling super great. Not bad, but more like a tummy that had ingested three Pineapple Sausage Dogs in quick succession not too far in the past.
Since I had put off my run the day before in favor of sleeping in, I knew I had to get it in today or else it would be three whole days with no activity. As I’m sure most of you know, the larger the length of time in between workouts adds fuel to the procrastination fire. The less activity I do, the less I want to do an activity. It’s simple math really.
So I puttered around and played on my computer, trying to justify an excuse in my mind that would save me from running other than I had some bad gas. I found none.
Finally, I put on my running gear and headed out. My first stop was my usual track right at the end of Carmel Valley at the middle school. What I saw was a packed parking lot overflowing onto the lawn because of what I had forgotten was the dog show they were having this weekend. Okay fine, off to my second choice, Carmel High. When I got there, I found it was under construction. There was nothing but gravel where the track used to be.
My only other choice is in the valley at the park and as I drove by that on my way to my other two spots I was made aware that they were having a car show, so that wasn’t an option either.
Well, it looks like the universe was smiling down on me, telling me to take a break. But I still had to go to the store, so I stopped at the Safeway in mid-valley. I realized as I parked my car that this was a relatively flat neighborhood that surrounded Safeway and maybe I could at least get a mile in. I had, after all, slathered on the sunscreen already so I didn’t really want to waste it.
I pulled out my phone and headphones and started out on a journey around the Safeway. Less than two trips around the block I had done my mile, but I didn’t feel too bad so I decided to keep going. By the two-mile mark, I was done but I was super proud that I even got a run in at all. And all the reasons that had kept me from wanting to run in the first place were negated by the run itself. The fatigue, the tummy upset, the overall feeling of ick. All gone with a two-mile run that almost wasn’t.
Weigh In and Thoughts on Exercise and Depression
Weight on 6/12/14: 255
Weight this morning: 250.4
Total loss: -4.6 pounds!
For not dieting, I’d say I’m pretty proud of myself.
Like I said in the last entry, I’m trying to make better choices but I am by no stretch of the imagination counting calories/carbs/points right now.
In the weeks following my birthday(May 30th) I was making some very poor choices and, as a result, I gained those four pounds I just lost, but more than that I felt like total crap, and my blood pressure was the highest it has been in many many years. Like, since I was put on BP meds when I was 26 years old and 300+ pounds. That scared me. A lot.
The good news is that this week of working out for four consecutive days in a row(another mile and a half today!) have brought my blood pressure back down, and I have to say I feel pretty amazing.
This is not new information. I know how great I feel right after I work out. However, it has been well over a year since I exercised regularly enough for it to effect me even longer than the immediate endorphins.
This week I have been going to bed earlier and sleeping better than I have in a very long time. My mood has improved by leaps and bounds. I have been fighting depression a lot the last two years and it had gotten to the point where I just accepted it. I didn’t even notice that it was effecting those around me. I can’t even imagine being my husband and having to put up with me coming home in a foul mood every single day, not wanting to talk only shutting down and wallowing in my own self-pity.
I have felt like a completely different person since I have been exercising. It’s almost shocking. A complete 180 degree turn. I know this sounds like I’m gushing, and I guess I am – but if you have ever lived your life in the dark tunnel of depression, it’s amazing that all I had to do was get out and walk in the sunshine for a half an hour a day.
I’m sure that I knew that back when I was training for the half marathons the first couple of times, and that would make sense because I wasn’t struggling with the depression back then. Not sure if I connected the two things at the time because it’s been a long time since the depression was so encompassing as it has been lately.
I need to make sure I remember this. Hopefully, I won’t need to since I hope to keep on trucking with the exercise.
Here We Go Again…
So yeah, I know. I’ve not really been around this blog and there is a good reason for that.
I gave up.
It all started when I gave myself permission to take the year off from the Vegas 1/2 marathon. I had done it that previous three years and decided I would skip it for 2013 and give myself a break. Apparently, I gave myself a break from EVERYTHING. From exercise to trying to eat right, I have pretty much done NOTHING in the way of trying to get healthy.
Sure, I would start a diet for a couple weeks but even then I was taking little cheats here and here and then complaining because I wasn’t losing any weight. I’d overlook my cheating and get frustrated at my lack of results and quit the diet. Well, you can only be in denial for so long.
My year of denial has cost me an extra 30 pounds, depression, mood swings and the inability to walk a mile without my lower back seizing up like it used to when I was 300+ pounds and I couldn’t walk more than a block.
I’m at 250 pounds. That is the heaviest I’ve been in a darn good long time. A tight size 22 with an uncomfortable amount of girth around my stomach. I feel unhealthy.
So here I go again. I have rejoined weight watchers and started back on the points today. I also took my first walk in forever on my lunch break. I didn’t even make it a mile. After fifteen minutes I had to call it and go inside.
But it’s a start. I want more than anything to get healthy again, definitely more than food.
I know that the holidays are a stupid crazy time to start a diet but I will allow myself to indulge on Christmas with my husbands family as long as I don’t go crazy and get right back to tracking the next day. Working out will become a necessity as I do no like how I feel mentally and emotionally when I don’t.
So here we go again and I look forward to feeling better and hopefully shrinking once more.