A Dumbbell In A Home Gym

Reset.

(The above is why we're probably not going to be invited to any more gingerbread house decorating parties next Christmas. Or ever. It summed up this season really well for me, though.)

Hiatus over. See? Told you I'd be back.

So this is why December sucked: I spent my birthday having my elderly cat put to sleep. I'd had Rascal for almost my entire adult life; it's hard for me to think of a time when he hasn't been around. He was my buddy when I lived alone and was desperately lonely; I'd come home from a shitty day at work, hear him howling before I'd even turned the key in my apartment door, and think "Well, someone missed me." And even though he'd been declining for a while and I knew his time with us was growing short -- and that given the various illnesses he had, I got far more time with him than I had any right to expect -- his death still broke my heart. This wasn't like the last time one of our cats died; Rascal had a good long life and we have no regrets about any of the medical decisions we made for him. But it still left me completely gutted. We came back from the vet and sprawled on the sofa and watched the first Harry Potter movie (the most innocuous thing either one of us could think of) and drank hot chocolate and cried.

(I think that since my 39th birthday was so shitty, I get to be 38 for another year. That seems only fair, right?)

That pretty much knocked every last bit of joy out of the holiday season for me. After that, I was just going through the motions. Neither one of us was in the holiday spirit at all. If you're generally on my snail-mail Christmas card list and didn't hear from us this year, I apologize; we meant well, but we just didn't get to them.

If it weren't for my husband I probably wouldn't have gone to the gym at all for the rest of the month; I just couldn't care less. I had very little energy, and no inclination to spend what little energy I had exercising. And my eating went completely to hell, too.

2007 had its occasional high points but was, on the whole, a rotten year, and I guess I'm not surprised that I really struggled with my eating and exercise habits. I'm afraid I've still got some real work to do when it comes to the whole "Not abusing food when things get bad" issue. I always will, it seems.

But that's over. It's 2008 now. Time for me to get back on the stick. When things already kind of suck, letting my eating and exercise go to hell until my clothes start pinching only makes things worse.

As far as I'm concerned, this year is a totally new start. I'm going to try to think as if the last three years didn't happen and this year's effort is an entirely new one. For reasons I can't quite articulate, I feel like I've been coasting on the previous weight loss for too long. It's as if I assumed that the good habits I developed would just kick back in eventually without any actual effort on my part, and that's Not Good.

I've already blown all my old plans and stats out of Spark People and started my tracking there anew. And I'm going to try to restart by doing exactly what I did in the beginning: going slowly, instead of trying to make too many radical changes at once. I need to remember to keep doing the small things that add up: Taking the stairs more often (I'd been slacking on this a lot since my company's move to the Hellmouth earlier this year). Measuring my portion sizes with actual measuring cups instead of my eyes, which were starting to become very unreliable judges. Entering my food into SparkPeople. I hate, hate, HATE doing that, but it really does help keep my eyes open about what I'm eating.

And I bought myself a little gift for the new year, suspecting I might need it: an "All is forgiven; move on" rubber bracelet from Our Lady of Weight Loss. No more beating myself up for whatever I failed to do last year.

My husband and I went for a nice long trail walk today. It was brisk and windy out, but the walk felt great. A very good start for a new year.

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.

Going Old School.

So I was checking out the thread on Big Fat Deal about the diet drug Alli. The brochure's claims that Alli might cause you to, um, excrete stuff that looks like "the oil on top of a pizza" did the seemingly impossible -- it utterly killed the queen-hell pizza craving I've had all month. Wow, Alli's already working for me and I haven't even taken it. That stuff rocks!

Everyone good and grossed out yet? Great!

On to less grody subjects: On Monday, I hoofed it over to Barnes & Noble and picked up my third copy of The Ultimate Workout Log. I love that book. I used this book faithfully during my first year and a half of regular exercising. I came within two weeks of completing the logs in the second book before deciding to forsake the paper journal for SparkPeople's workout logs.

Shame on me. There's something to be said for dancing with the one that brought you. Sometime this weekend, it occurred to me that I've been missing that book. I like all the handy little spaces to tick for cardio, yoga, weight, nutrition, and the overall daily rating. Yeah, it's decidedly low-tech compared to Internet fitness sites, but somehow it feels more personal, even if my handwriting is getting virtually unreadable.

And I'm hoping that using one of the same tools I used religiously at the beginning of all this will help me to regain some of that killer focus I had.

So far so good. Today got a rating of "5" on the old "scale from 1 to 5" system. It's been so horribly hot that I'm amazed I got my ass in gear to do anything, but I actually walked on the basement treadmill tonight. That's yet another relic of my fitness past, and something that's very worth reviving.

Are We There Yet?

Stop me if you've heard this one:

"How to figure out your ideal weight: A five-foot woman should weigh 100 pounds, so add five pounds for every subsequent inch, and maybe five more if you have a large frame."

Does anyone know where this formula came from, and if it has even the remotest scientific validity? (And really now, is anyone not going to claim that they have a large frame?) I see it repeated everywhere. It seems forbiddingly low to me, but maybe that's because I'm in a society where so many people are so overweight that "normal" is being redefined upward. I don't know.

According to that formula I should weigh 125 pounds at the most, and even at my goal weight of 135 I'd be overweight. And at my current weight of 168, I must be a heart attack waiting to happen. No, I am not exactly streaking cometlike to that "In the Thirties by 39" goal; at the rate I'm going, "In the Fifties by 50" might be a stretch. I know that I need to cut the calories and ramp up the exercise if I want to reach that goal; I just haven't been able to do this on a consistent basis, and part of the problem is that I'm tired of it. Tired of watching my calories; tired of feeling guilty if I want to spend an evening quietly rather than working out; tired of thinking of my weight every damn day.

It's causing a lot of dissonance. I'm not unhappy with where I am now. I could be thinner, yes, but after being Extra-Value sized for so long, I'm reasonably content with being on the high end of average. I like how I look in pictures (well, usually). Most days I feel fit and strong. My blood pressure and heart rate are good. Fitting into "regular" clothes hasn't been an issue for a long time.

The day after my Old Navy trip, I took a trip to Hecht's-which-is-now-Macy's. And I tried on a few more Smalls that fit me fairly well. I almost bought a $99 size S skirt before sanity and financial responsibility prevailed and I asked myself what, exactly, I was trying to prove.

But somehow, I've gotten the idea that where I'm at still isn't good enough. The BMI charts and that odd formula would say I'm way too heavy. Do I listen to that, or do I let my body decide where I'm meant to be?

And while I fixate on the sacred 135, I sometimes forget that the last time I was at that weight, I got there because I engaged in a whole series of unhealthful habits; it started with starvation and smoking as an appetite suppressant and went downhill. And that goes double for when I was at 120, the weight I'm "supposed" to be. (And by that point, people were yapping at me that I was too thin, hard as it is to believe.) Undoing the physical damage to my body from that regimen took years. Undoing the mental damage ... well, I'm not even sure that's a past-tense thing.

I suspect I'm also at something of a loss because I cannot remember a time when I was exercising regularly and eating reasonable portion sizes as a matter of course (yeah, boo to the bad pun). In terms of weight I've always been either on the way up or on the way down. Maintenance is the one trick I've never mastered. I just plain don't know what I'm meant to weigh when I'm neither attempting to lose weight nor mindlessly gaining.

Maybe it's 168. That number only seems unreasonable if I start comparing it to the "You should weigh 120" formula or the BMI that puts me at around 135.

It's a tough call. It's something else for me to mull over.

Many of us talk about this whole weight loss thing being a journey. How do you know when you're there?

Two Years: Sequelitis.

A side note: I thought for sure that the first commercial to annoy me this year would be one of those "Kamikaze New Year Weight Loss" ads, but nope: I just saw a Burger King commercial telling the viewer to "Eat like a MAN," where eating like a MAN means eating triple-decker crapburgers with cheese. Barf. I know this isn't a new advertising trend by any means, but this is the first time I've seen that particular ad. Oh dear ... my husband doesn't eat like a MAN. But the good news is that I might get to have him around a little longer because of his preference for unmanly fare like beans and fruit and nuts and tofu. I can live with that. I bet he can too.

Anyhow.

You know how it's almost a given that the second movie in a series is never as good as the first one? Doesn't it seem that for every "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," there are about 10 "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dooms"?

That's kind of how it was with my second year of lifestyle change. (I was feeling a lot cheerier after my first year.)

Okay: This year was not a failure by any means. Far from it. I lost more weight, and my husband and I continued to seek out new and different ways to exercise. I rediscovered swimming, which added a lot of joy to my summer. We joined a rec center. I regained about four pounds at the end of the year, but this is hardly a tragedy.

But there's no denying that I started to derail around midyear. Word to the wise: No matter how much weight you lose, never, ever assume that you've got this weight loss shit figured out for all time. It's much easier to backslide than I ever would have believed.

This year I learned some unpleasant lessons. I learned firsthand that the closer you get to a weight goal, the harder you're going to have to work to get there. This still seems profoundly unfair, somehow. I was dimly aware of this little wrinkle, but perhaps in my smugness I believed it wouldn't be a problem for me. Like I'd get extra credit because I'd lost so much already. Nope. It's an awful feeling, especially when you've been at this for a while and tend to think "UGH -- I'm so tired of this!" in your darker moments.

I also found out that the "small changes" theory of weight loss can work in reverse. Giving myself an extra night off from exercise; getting a grande instead of my usual tall skim mocha; treating myself to junk food (even the baked kind) in the afternoons ... it really is that easy to start backsliding no matter how firmly entrenched you think your new habits have become. I still don't believe in cutting out all "bad" food for all time; that's not a life I'm interested in, thanks. But there's a very fine line between "occasional treat" and "habit", and last year I spent a little too much time on the wrong side of that line.

But you know what? "Last year" is just that. "Last." 2006 is over. What matters is what's ahead of me and what I do in the new year. The good news is that I didn't put on any additional weight over December. Being mindful of my "In the Thirties by 39" challenge kept me balancing my meals and moving my body just enough to stave off tightening waistbands. And now I'd like to get the scale moving down again. I'm ready.

So let's hope that Year Three is more of an "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," and less of a "Godfather Three."

Same As It Ever Was.

I like mashed potatoes. A lot. I was careful with just about every other Thanksgiving food last week, but the potatoes got a bit out of hand. Oh well. They were delicious. I don't regret a thing. So there.

I just have to say that my body has remained pretty much the same size for the last couple of months, but my head is getting big and fat and bloated from all the nice compliments you guys have been posting lately. I'm blushing over here!

So one of the nifty things about having an ongoing weight loss blog is being able to go back and read about where you were several months ago. Or a year ago. Or even longer.

And you know what? At least once a month since I started this thing, I've written an entry in which I whine about having to get back on the stick and use the treadmill and be better about exercise. In fact, that was the subject of the third entry in this blog back in July 2005. And here's one from August 2005. And September 2005. I could go on, but I'm sure you've got the idea. I myself was muttering "Oh, god, not this again" as I read my archives and came across yet another whinefest.

Apparently, this magical sparkly time period in which I was saying "Oh BOY! I just can't WAIT to get on that treadmill!" and banging out perfect workouts day after week after month existed only in my mind. Or at least in the time period before I began keeping this blog.

That's oddly comforting. Back when I started this blog, I weighed around 220 pounds and anything under 200 seemed like an impossibly far-off dream for me. And even back then I was whining about having trouble keeping my motivation going. But yet, I'm still here and still working out. So I know I can push through the pokey times.

And British TV just may rescue my home workouts. On Friday I was lazy and sluggish for most of the day. But finding a "Doctor Who" rerun on BBC America at 5:30 inspired me to hop on the treadmill while I watched. Gotta love the Doctor -- it all worked out perfectly.

Happy Monday, all.

Whatever It Takes.

I think I've mentioned recently that the "Home Gym" part of my blog's title is getting increasingly obsolete. Ever since we joined the rec center, I just haven't been able to get my ass motivated to get on our treadmill, or to lift the boring dumbbells in my basement (I've gotten terribly spoiled by the rec center's weight machines). I'm still riding my bike and going for walks, but what I think of as the home workout seems to be going the way of the dodo. This is a problem because we don't go bike riding or rec-centering every night, which means I'm skipping more workouts than I should.

The solution: Buy the DVD of the second season of "Black Books" and tell myself that I can only watch it in the basement, and only if I'm on the treadmill at the time.

That finally got me down on the treadmill on Saturday morning. I'd had an odd burst of energy anyhow, and I didn't want to go bike riding because we were planning to swim later in the day (and did). I did a decent rendition of Week One of the Couch to 5K running plan. I even did a few stretches afterwards. And I saw a couple of episodes of the show. It all worked out.

I don't know what my problem is with the treadmill. I like it, and god knows it's more convenient to just go the hell downstairs than it is to get my stuff together and go to the rec center.

Gah. I guess I'm going to have to get used to the idea that I'll keep hitting these weird patches when I don't want to eat well or don't want to stick to my home workouts. And all I can do is keep devising new ways to get through these mental roadblocks. I've been at this for almost two years now; that's far and away the longest time that I've ever stuck to any kind of regular exercise. Whew.

Needed: A Kick In The Pants.

So as of tomorrow I'm off to Connecticut to watch a skating competition.

It's seriously a relief to not have to wonder if I'm going to fit into the arena seats. When we first started going to this competition a few years ago, I couldn't take that for granted. (Turns out that I'd always squeeze into the seats, but I had to either pray that my seatmates would be skinny -- or even better, just not show up -- or sneak into an aisle seat where I could stretch out a bit.) As I've said before, while losing weight rocks and it's nice to experience improved health and smaller sizes, it's the little things that make the biggest differences for me.

I'm also happy to report that at long last, I can fit into a pair of the non-plus-sized 16 Levi's I won on eBay what seems like a lifetime ago. (Yes, I still take large pants sizes. I've got wide hips and a big butt, and even in the wild days when I was down to 118 pounds my jeans size was still in double digits.) They're black and close-fitting and very slimming, and I can feel a new progress picture coming on soon.

This is the kind of progress indicator I've needed, because I've been having one hell of a time staying on track lately. You may have already suspected as much from both my conspicuous lack of updates and the conspicuous lack of fitness and healthful-eating talk in the entries I have posted. I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's as if some part of me has decided we're done here. I pretty much had to march myself down to the treadmill at gunpoint last night, and then my husband broke out the Dance Dance Revolution game for a little extra jumping around. This shouldn't be that hard. It never used to be that hard. I don't get it. I'm not pigging out or anything like that and I haven't gained any weight, but that 135 goal seems almost impossibly far away.

Maybe spending four days around craptacular arena food while watching beautiful, lithe skaters practicing lutzes and axels and star lifts will give me some kind of jump-start. I obviously need to start moving in some kind of new direction. I just don't know what that direction should be.

Anyhow, have a great rest-of-the-week.