A Dumbbell In A Home Gym

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.

Summer Setbacks.

First things first: Thanks for all the kind comments from people who stopped by from various Kimkins-related blogs and forums. I hope that those of you who got ripped off find justice and that the next time I write about our "friend" Kimmer, it's to say that she's headed to jail at last.

(I also kinda hope that I get my very own email threat from a Kimmer acolyte, because wow -- if you needed any more proof that the ship is going down with a 16-ton weight tied to it, there you go.)

And as some of you discovered, the comment function on this blog appears to be going a bit screwy. For whatever reason, it may look to you as if your comment has posted with the name of the person who posted before you. I have no idea why it's happening; all my favorite Web hangouts seem to be going buggy this week. Maybe it's the full moon.

So I must admit that this summer was a complete and total failure from any kind of weight loss standpoint. As in "disaster". I went from trying to lose more pounds to desperately trying NOT to regain. My motivation to exercise went out the window. My motivation to not cram gooey pastries in my face in the afternoons followed it. I could feel some of my smaller outfits starting to pinch.

And I was falling into the trap of absolutely *hating* myself for all this. And that's the worst thing that could probably happen. First I'd hate myself for overeating and underexercising, and then I'd eat and laze around because I felt miserable and didn't know how else to comfort myself. But the indulgence wasn't at all comforting and made me feel even worse ... and so on.

And then all of a sudden, as the weather started getting cooler at last, everything started clicking back into place. I've been working out regularly without even setting a goal to do so; I just *want* to. I'm falling in love with weight lifting again.

The eating has its good days and bad days, but at all times I'm being much more mindful. I'm getting better at trying to strike a balance rather than just giving up if I have a "bad" lunch and pigging out for the rest of the day.

Sometimes I wonder if I have some kind of reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder -- while others are depressed in the winter due to the cold and the lack of sunlight, I find that I get listless and uninspired and just plain sullen in summer's oppressive heat.

I do know that fall is absolutely my favorite season. The smell of burning firewood on a chilly autumn night makes my heart sing, and riding my bike through the trail on a cool morning with the smell of the leaves around us is so pleasurable that it seems like cheating to consider it a workout.

I don't dislike summers as much as I used to when I was an obese hermit, but once the community pool has closed for the year, I just don't see the point of extreme heat anymore.

(Which sucks, because we've had a return to the 90s this week.)

Oh well. Favorite season = more reason to be outside and moving.

Hello, autumn. Feel free to linger a little longer than you usually do.

Kimkins: Caveat Freakin' Emptor.

As I've said before, I try to stay away from blogging about Internet trainwrecks. But sometimes, one of them gets under my skin and I have to say something. And this isn't even just an Internet trainwreck; it's a full-blown fraud, in my opinion. More after the jump, if you're interested. And believe me -- even though this entry is long, there's a lot I've left out.

Well, Phooey.

It seems as if just a couple of weeks ago at the most, I was writing this cheerful entry.

And today we visited the community pool for the last time this summer. Already. Damn.

I didn't get nearly enough time there this year; we had a spate of weekends that were either too cool or too stormy for a pool visit, and I didn't go much on weeknights because the pool was invariably taken up with swimming lessons or swim team practice. It seems I'm not going to get away from the swim teams or classes hogging the pools unless we get our own pool, and since our backyard is the size of a postage stamp, that ain't happening. Oh well.

You cannot accuse me of slacking off on the exercise this weekend. I got the afternoon off on Friday and promptly hopped on the subway to ride back to my old DC haunts and walk around Georgetown. I logged about 13,000 steps according to my pedometer.

Saturday morning was too cool to go swimming, so we went on the first bike ride I've been on in ages.

Man. Oh, man. That was painful. But it's something I really needed. As I was chugging along sucking wind and feeling my thighs burn, a voice in my head spoke up: "There's no faking it on the bike. If you get on this thing, you better be ready to work."

And for me, it's true. I suppose that for people who ride hundreds of miles in a weekend, they could do an "easy" 50-miler. I guess I could find a ride that's all downhill ... but then I'd have to ride all uphill on the way home. Which is pretty much what I do anyhow; I never realized until I got the bike that our house is at the highest point of our development. And boy, do I feel it when I'm churning my way home after a long ride.

I can half-ass it at the gym; I can lift weights I know are way too light, or I can just sit on the stationary bike with the difficulty set to the lowest level. As for swimming, I can cut the laps short, or just splash around and do handstands.

But I can't goof off on the bike; even when I'm doing a relatively easy ride on a mostly-flat part of our trail, I can really feel myself working. And again, there's that whole "The way home is uphill" thing.

Anyhow, we went to the rec center and lifted weights on Sunday, and this morning we went on another arduous, ass-kicking bike ride; by the end of it I was so exhausted that it took me two tries to raise my foot high enough to put the kickstand down.

And then we went to the pool this afternoon. I didn't do any real lap swimming, but I "jogged" up and down the length of the pool several times. Because I was determined to have some fun, I also went off the diving board, did handstands, and then simply floated on my back for a little while, enjoying the sun warming my poor sore body while the water buoyed me up.

I still smell like sunscreen and chlorine. I'm going to miss that smell. May 2008 seems like a long, long way off from here.

Baby, It's ... Spew.

So over on Big Fat Deal, I read about the Baby Food Diet, the latest thing celebrities are into. I don't think the idea is that new, really; I have a vivid memory of a skinny, pretty blonde girl at my high school eating baby food for lunch, and me looking at her with a mixture of envy and intense disgust.

Eating baby food? YUCK YUCK YUCK. I really don't understand these people. I'm sure that's partly why they're all size zeroes and I'm fighting to stay in a size 12; somehow, I can live with that.

Now, I admit that I am not an expert on baby foods, but we keep a stash of jars in the cupboard for my elderly diabetic kitty; there are times when he refuses his canned Hill's Science Chunks 'n' Parts and baby food is the only thing he'll condescend to eat. And he absolutely has to eat, so Gerber's it is.

And my husband and I both hate giving it to him because when you unscrew the jar and the first blast of Turkey Mush or Chewed-up Chicken hits your nose, it smells exactly like the stuff that comes out of the other end of the baby. No wonder babies cry all the time; I would too if I had to eat that.

I haven't tried the superfancy expensive Organic Shade-Grown Carrot brand that the article was touting (and why do I suspect that the company that manufactures this stuff probably paid Marie Claire to write the article in the first place? "How to market baby food to people who don't have babies ... oh, yeah -- the celebrities all eat it!"). Maybe that's because if I wanted carrots, I'd just eat some carrots. That's what my teeth are for.

Okay, I gave into my curiosity once last year. We bought a jar of banana custard baby food for our kitty who was dying of cancer and simply wouldn't eat; because he was sometimes drawn to lick up non-food things like my moisturizer, I reasoned that maybe if we got him some food that didn't smell like his usual food he'd eat it, or whatever I was telling myself in order to keep denying the hell out of reality. The kitty wouldn't eat it, of course, and I doubt he would have even if he'd been healthy. But I thought to myself "Hmmm. Banana custard, eh? I like bananas ... I like custard ... how bad could it be?"

The answer is "So horribly foul that I thought the top of my head was going to blow off." It was like eating banana-flavored Elmer's Glue. Remember that scene in "Big" when Tom Hanks tries caviar and then actually wipes his tongue off with a napkin? It was like that. I do think that shortly after that, the sick kitty consented to eat some actual cat food. I bet he didn't want me sticking that under his nose again. "Okay, okay ... I'll eat, already. Damn."

I don't deny that it could have value as a quick snack, or if you're ill and it's the only thing you can eat. But as a meal replacement? I'm relieved to know that there really are things I won't do to be thin.

Addendadadannum ...

... or whatever fancy Latin phrase means "Ooops, I just got new information that changes things a bit."

Anyhow, I owe Au Bon Pain an apology about the last entry. I went to their restaurant in Pentagon City Mall today and found that their Jamaican Black Bean Soup is both low fat and lower in sodium than their usual offerings. Hurray! I don't know what makes this soup Jamaican, exactly, but it was tasty. And I did not miss the 600 milligrams of salt in the least. Well done, ABP.

Addendadaded yet again, 8/26: Okay, I looked through the soup menu on ABP's site and see that they actually have plenty of reduced sodium soup options. I don't know where my head was stuck the first time I reviewed the menu, but it obviously wasn't stuck anywhere good. Sheesh.

Would You Like Some Human With Your Salt?

(That line's from one of my favorite Futurama episodes, if you were wondering. I'm not planning to go on the Cannibal Diet anytime soon. The line popped into my head because of #1 below.)

It's almost Friday, so it must be time for one of my random roundup posts.

1. Note to chain restaurants: It's great that you're all making efforts to come out with tasty, low-fat soups. Really, it's very cool of you. Soup is good stuff, especially on cool, rainy days. For your next project, how about developing some soups that are less salty than, say, the Dead Sea? I bought a cup of Au Bon Pain's pasta e fagioli soup the other day and nearly had a heart attack when I looked up the nutrition information. All the other numbers were okay, but the sodium? It was in four digits. Holy mariah. Nothing needs to be that salty!

2. My latest recommendation: Trader Joe's line of "instant" rices. I've been meaning to praise their brown rice for a while: cut the bag open, microwave for one minute, and it's ready for dinner. It can get a little clumpy and doesn't taste quite as good as brown rice cooked the old-fashioned way, but it's ideal for those nights when we've just rolled in from the gym -- or if I'm just feeling lazy or really hungry -- and don't want to wait for regular rice to cook.

And if that wasn't awesome enough, I just discovered their pre-cooked wild rice. I love, love, love wild rice, but hate the lengthy cooking time involved. Well, TJ's to the rescue. As with the brown rice, the quick wild rice isn't *quite* as good as wild rice done the slow-cooked way, but I'm willing to deal with the small sacrifice in quality. I made it for dinner with some sauteed portobello mushrooms and a balsamic vinegar reduction the other night; it couldn't have been simpler and tasted like something I'd spent hours preparing.

So if you've got a Trader Joe's nearby and you're a fan of different varieties of rice, check those out. I should really just buy the store's entire stock of this stuff in anticipation of TJ's annoying habit of discontinuing my favorite items; it's the one thing I dislike about that store.

3. Apropos of nothing, I like this picture of myself a lot even though I was having a hair day from Hell:

My husband snapped it on Sunday afternoon; we'd taken his parents to Gravelly Point park and I was sketching National Airport as a plane came in for a landing right overhead.

Happy weekend, all.