A Dumbbell In A Home Gym

Au Revoir!

So updates for the next several days are going to be nonexistent, but this time I actually have a good reason. The husband and I are off to Quebec City; I'll be checking out Skate Canada and we'll both be taking in ice hockey, plus the beautiful sights of the city.

Hope everyone has a fantastic week and I'll see you next week! Oh, and Happy Halloween.

Brick By Brick.

I wrote the following piece almost two months ago. I was in a very bad weight loss place at the time; I felt like I'd almost completely lost my focus and, worse yet, didn't even know if I *wanted* it back. Yes, you read that right. The combination of being uprooted from DC and being mired in my usual summer doldrums really wore me down this summer; I was depressed and grumpy and just sick to death of all that healthful eating and exercise stuff.

I think I understand now more than ever that in the past, I've fallen off the wagon and gone back to my wicked old ways because I just got tired.

Then I decided not to post this; it seemed too gloomy and doomy, and besides, reading it over made me realize that I did too want to get my focus back. Even if I don't lose any more weight, I sure as hell don't want to put it all back on.

I'm just having ongoing trouble with the whole concept of "Yes, you have to keep doing this for the rest of your life if you don't want to go back to the way you were. That's the tradeoff, toots."

Anyhow, I hung onto this piece. And because there ain't a whole lot else going on at the moment, I've decided to post it anyhow. This isn't a plea for encouragement; I've since pulled myself back from the brink and am in a much better frame of mind now. But if nothing else, I need to remind myself that I can't ever take all these lifestyle changes for granted; it's scary how easily I can slip back into bad habits. And know that if you're in the same boat I've been in, you aren't alone.

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How To Backslide.

As always, I'm not speaking for anyone but myself and my own experiences here. Your mileage may vary. I truly hope it does.

First, your weight loss stalls; you hit a point at which you will have to either really crank up your exercise or significantly drop your calories in order to continue to shed the pounds. You stare at the calorie range SparkPeople has given you for your goal weight, and you tell the computer that it simply *has* to be kidding you. You feel like you're barely eating anything, and yet you're still landing above the high end of the range. C'mon -- that's nuts. You and food were supposed to be friends now. You weren't supposed to be depriving yourself anymore.

And the frustration starts gnawing away at you. When the hell do you get to move on with your life and think about things other than weight loss? How is it that the closer you get to your goal, the harder you have to work, even after you've put in more hard work than you ever knew you were capable of? How is that fair?

That's when you start pulling the bricks out of the Healthy Living House you've built over the past couple of years; you do it so gradually that at first you don't even see that this is what you're doing.

You start adding an extra serving of pasta here, a post-lunch muffin from Starbucks there. You rejoin the Clean Plate Club, ignoring hunger and fullness signals in favor of eating everything on your plate. You start ordering the Large serving instead of the Small again. You tell yourself that you're only doing what you've been doing all along, or that "once in a while" isn't a big deal, even as "once in a while" is turning into "every day". You tell yourself that it's fine to overeat as long as you're aware of what you're doing instead of just mindlessly stuffing. You tell yourself that you've come so far and worked so hard and dammit, you deserve a break.

It's as if that little voice in your head that gave you all the right cues in the beginning -- "Just ten minutes on the treadmill" or "Measure out a real serving size and eat it slowly" -- has changed her mind; now she wants to sabotage you. And you're all too willing to let it happen.

And then you start skipping workouts, even though you thought you'd left the Couch Potato lifestyle behind for good. That lifestyle wasn't dead; it was only sleeping, and a few nights of lethargy woke it up. Bodies at rest want to remain at rest.

So you're taking in excess calories and you aren't burning them off the way you used to, and the inevitable happens. The pounds start creeping back on; all they were waiting for was one crack in your defenses. You tell yourself you're retaining fluid from the salty food the previous night, or that you're close to your period and shouldn't weigh yourself again until Aunt Flo has left town. You tell yourself the same things when your spiffy "skinny clothes" start to pinch around the middle. But you know what the bottom line is: The scale, previously the bearer of joyous tidings, is no longer your friend. You know you won't like what you see anymore. You know that you don't deserve to like what you see.

On your "glass half full" days you congratulate yourself for at least being aware of the problem, instead of being in denial until none of your clothes fit and you can't even figure out where you were while all this was happening. But being fully aware of what you're doing and how destructive it is doesn't make things better, really. In fact, knowing that you're sabotaging all your hard work makes the guilt that much worse.

The real hell of it is that this makes no sense. You lost 100 pounds; faced with a task that seemed impossible, you did it with only a few stumbles. And now you're struggling just to lean on the rudder and get the ship turned back in the right direction. It's ridiculous.

You think of all the forums where you've seen people smugly assert that 95% of all diets fail (often with an implied "So why bother?" tacked onto the end); that people who lose weight almost invariably regain it, often with interest. You want to prove them wrong, but it seems that you've forgotten how to do it. Maybe that' s not quite right: You know the way to do it. You just need to find that will again.

Dresses and Jean Blues.

Here's the Little Black Dress I mentioned. Although I already had a wedding outfit in mind, I popped into Dress Barn the Friday before we were due to leave. And there it was. It fit, and it wasn't even terribly expensive. I've seen some other photos from the wedding and noticed that the dress has a real "Hi, I'm Nicole and here are my boobs!" effect, but ... eh, the heck with it. I didn't hear any complaints.

And yes, it's sleeveless. My upper arms are far and away my least favorite body part, but that day? It was way too hot and humid for me to give a damn. And the wedding was outdoors. I brought a wrap, but the wrap sat forgotten for most of the evening. I felt terrible for the people who'd bought long-sleeved dresses in the reasonable but ultimately incorrect belief that October would be kinda chilly.

The picture doesn't really do the dress justice; there's a sort of satiny black waistband running around the middle and a glittery circle pin and a bow in the middle. Black on black doesn't show up well on film, I guess.

So here's a new one. Tonight I was at the rec center. (That's not the "new" part, smartass.) While I was over using the weights, one of the guys who works at the center came over and told a nearby kid that he couldn't work out wearing the blue jeans he had on; he had to wear "athletic clothing." This set off quite the series of events. The kid went over to tell his dad, who was on an elliptical trainer. The dad stopped ellipticizing, walked over to the employee, and pretty clearly said something like "Whaddaya mean, my kid can't work out in jeans?" I couldn't hear the employee's reply, but Dad ended up chewing out his kid so loudly that I could hear it from across the gym. Geez. The poor kid should've just stayed home and blown up monsters on the Xbox.

But anyhow, am I missing something? I'd think that working out in jeans would suck for many different reasons (the heaviness and moisture factors, seams digging into tender places during certain moves, etc.), but why would there be actual rules against it? I've seen people at the rec center work out in the damnedest clothes; I even saw one guy running on the treadmill in what had to be Casual Friday work finery (including loafers). It strikes me as uncomfortable and kinda gross, but against the rules?

So that's what distracts me when I'm sweating it out on the assisted pullup machine. Happy weekend, everyone.

Very Late Friday Roundup.

Couple things:

1. I'm very flattered that my blog is listed as one of the Nursing Online Education Database's Top 100 Health and Wellness Blogs. This is a pretty comprehensive listing and covers a full spectrum of health, diet, and fitness sites. It's worth checking out.

And I found their description of my site very cool in an offbeat sort of way: "She definitely has some strong opinions about diets and about exercise, and you can take them or leave them. But, she has a certain charm that seems almost unavoidable." Yeah, you -- just TRY to avoid my charm. I dare you.

2. If it's October, someone in my family must be getting married. (And here I thought my husband and I were being all unusual by getting married in October. I said that to the lady who did my hair for last year's family wedding, and I swear that every hairdresser in the salon cracked up simultaneously.) I'm not a bridesmaid this time, but I think I found a smokin' hot dress to wear anyhow. It's a little black cocktail dress and it's tight where I'm tight and loose and flowy where I'm loose and flowy; I can't ask for better than that. If I can pin down my husband and his camera, I'll try to get a nice full-body shot of it to replace the October 2006 picture on my About page. It's way past time for a new photo there.

3. There were a couple of intriguing developments on the Kimkins front this week. First of all, a Los Angeles TV station did an excellent two-part series on Kimkins. Aside from calling Kimmer "The Kimmer" (which I found kind of awesome), the station really nailed the story. You can view both segments by following the links here, if you're interested. The first part features a particularly entertaining clip of "The Kimmer" skedaddling like a scared kitten when she's confronted by the reporter and a phalanx of TV cameras.

And if you ever wondered if all those success stories that appeared on the Kimkins site were genuine, the answer is largely a big fat NYET! Although a few were legit, it turns out that a staggering number of those "after" photos were ganked from various Russian mail-order bride sites (the pictures in that link are merely the tip of the ripped-off Russian iceberg), including the very picture that Kimmer sent to Woman's World magazine as her own "after" shot. (Edited to add: Oh, snap. The Low Carb Friends just found a match for Kimmer's infamous red dress "after" photo, the one that triggered my suspicions in the first place.)

After a week of stellar publicity like that, Kimmer sent out an email to members claiming that Kimkins is now under new ownership. There's no word yet on who the lucky new chump bagman owner is; this is quite possibly another steaming load that's meant to get the pressure off Kimmer. Time will tell; I can't believe how much this mess has snowballed since I started following it.

Have a great weekend, all.

(Not) Born To Run.

Over the last couple of years, I've occasionally tried to turn myself into a jogger. (I'd say "runner," but I don't do anything that remotely resembles running. I've seen people who walk faster than I "run".) I don't know why I want to do this, exactly. I've seen people get really hooked on running, to the point that they get cranky if they don't run, and I've heard about the bliss some runners feel when they're really in the groove. And, y'know, it's exercise and good for fat-burning and all that. I guess I wanted to see if I could get some of that bliss for myself.

So far, it's been hard work. With the onset of somewhat cooler fall weather, I've been going out on Saturday mornings and trying my hand at a semi-Couch to 5K Week One program.

While I can do this on the treadmill very easily, running outside is an entirely different proposition, and by "entirely diffferent" I mean "Ohmigod, how the hell do people do this every day!?" Couch to 5K becomes Couch to That-fencepost-up-there-if-I-don't-die-first. I certainly get that pavement is much harder on my legs than the treadmill belt is and makes jogging harder, but the breathing is tougher too, especially if there's even a drop of humidity in the air. I see people jogging by me looking serene and not at all as if they're going to collapse at any second, and my hat would be off to them if I wore one while I was out not-running. I don't know how they do it.

I'm still trying, though. If nothing else, it's nice to get out on the trail on a crisp fall morning. However, I think I'm going to be one of those people who's more likely to go into some blissful Zen state when I'm on my bike. That's okay, too.