In which I am not sidelined by summer

I've fallen off the wagon about posting here weekly, but here I am again. I'm having a great summer, but it's actually busy -- not the kind of busy where you tell your friends "Oh, I've just been so busy" to explain why you didn't call them, but the kind where you're occupied five or six nights a week with social stuff or projects, and it's almost a relief when your weekend plans get canceled.

I'm down to 29 dots, from 31. You wouldn't think this would make much of a difference, but I'm having to change the way I think about things a bit. When I started out, I heuristically divided the day into 10-dot units -- breakfast, lunch, dinner, with some wiggle room in between -- and used my weekly dots for largely hedonistic pursuits. Which worked great! Now, though, if I do that, I'm already one dot over -- so the weekly dots are going away faster, and I don't have as much leeway to indulge in the evenings. Couple that with All The Cookouts and my friends who love booze, and I'm struggling a bit to stay within the guidelines.

I'm benefiting a lot, though, from our summer of kitchen renovation. ... which apparently I haven't posted about here! Long story short, it became clear about three weeks ago that our long-planned but oft-postponed kitchen renovation needed to be knocked out this summer, and preferably by the end of July. So we've taken it down to the studs and subfloor, knocked out a couple walls (in sensible ways with new support beams -- my husband knows what he's doing, thank god), and are rebuilding it with insulation in the walls (yes, there was literally not any), new raised floor in the former mudroom, new and slightly reconfigured windows, new drywall to replace the WTFplastersandboard-secured-with-metal-mesh, new tile floor, new cabinets built by a family member, and -- hallelujah! new countertops. (Protip: two-inch-ceramic-tile countertops built over non-water-resistant chipboard are not a long-lasting design choice.) So our routine has been thoroughly disrupted, and we're eating largely from grill, carryout, and microwave for the summer.

There are definitely pitfalls, like running out of propane in the middle of grilling dinner, but the level of activity I'm doing is much higher than usual, and I'm really seeing the results in the numbers (and feeling them a bit too). We removed 2.28 tons of debris from our house in a dumpster load over the course of a week (drywall, cabinets, windows, 3 layers of linoleum), and I muscled a good portion of that into it myself. Saturday I moved around twenty 2x4s onto a cart, off the cart into the car, and out of the car into the house... in 100-degree weather, that totally counts as a workout. I'm trying not to overcount my activity dots-- in an average evening, I'm counting an hour of low-intensity activity, although I'm probably doing more like three hours with breaks -- but also cutting myself some slack if I'm a few dots over for the week, because I know I'm being way more active than normal. I tried a few days not counting food dots a couple weeks ago, but that didn't pan out well. It's still a helpful tool for me in terms of retraining my expectations and food-choice decisions, and I'm ok with that.

One thing that's kind of awesome is that I've come to realize that most of my close friends are in the same boat I am -- moderately healthy but somewhat overweight, and trying to eat better and be more active for health reasons. It makes it a fuckton easier to bring the fruit salad to the cookout when you know people are gonna say "fuck yeah, fruit!" and eat it all. I can't tell if this is a broader cultural shift or just one that's local to me, but I'm digging it.

One thing I'm unhappy about is that I'm finding myself very aware of size and attractiveness of the people around me, and making judgments about things that are really not my business to judge people about. I find myself buying into assumptions about size and activity in ways that I know I don't consciously support or believe in, and it's problematic. I really need to bump up my radical acceptance skills. 

Oh, and the leader who obsesses about dot values and value-judges food, who I stopped going to the work group because of? She's running the Saturday morning groups now, because the new regular leader (I should probably come up with a shorthand for this) is on medical leave for a couple months. I've decided to grin and bear it, because the timing of the particular group, and the energy, work so well for me; in particular, there's an awesome semi-retired leader who attends several meetings a week and hands around stickers to everyone every week who shows up. Part of me finds that a little sad, but another part of me kind of adores her.

Something I've been thinking a lot about. As a lapsed Unitarian Universalist, I am highly attuned to and amused by the way the weekend morning Plan meetings feel like church to me. To the point where I've subconsciously made it a ritual to go get coffee afterward. So the rotation of different leaders I've experienced so far is familiar (I mostly went to small fellowships where many of the services were led by laypeople), and I find myself adopting similar coping strategies when the existing leadership doesn't meet my expectations. I absorb myself in the bulletin, psychoanalyze the leader based on their problematic statements, observe the interpersonal chaos and awkward moments around me, and try to offer well-worded, cogent observations at crucial times that advance my own agenda (of changing the language and perspectives I find problematic). I wonder to what extent the Plan patterns itself off church/religious gatherings? Or whether the similarities in group dynamics are simply those that are found when people of diverse backgrounds voluntarily construct a meeting group based on a single common interest?

Someday maybe this blog will be a little less navel-gazing and a little more organized. I really do want to get to some of those posts I mused about earlier this spring. But hey. This is where I am, and it's pretty good for now.

In which I maintain equilibrium

Hey kids! I'm back from vacation. As that last post details, I was intending to track food and possibly even weigh in while in Columbus for Origins, but it quickly became impractical due to time constraints, and also I am lazy. However, I made better choices than I would have without my two months of Plan experience, and far better choices than I did last year at the same event -- despite the fact that I kept getting windfall drinks bought for me, had tasty dessert several times, and am incapable of not eating all the pad thai that is placed in front of me. SO, I was happy to come home to only being up a pound or two, and am looking forward to getting back to being active (probably starting with the three-mile walk to work tomorrow).

A few things I did well:
-- Not bringing cookies or crackers for snacks. In fact, most of the snack food we brought didn't really appeal to me, which made it a lot easier to only eat when I was hungry. This also curbed my urge to snack while driving, other than a shared roll of Bottle Caps on the way home.
-- Limited candy/treats. Rather than buying a candy bar, I bought a roll of individually wrapped hard candy. I turned down a few proffered cookies and snacks, though I took several too.
-- Limiting desserts. I had lots, don't get me wrong, but I didn't fall into the something-sweet-with-every-meal habit I'm slowly kicking.
--Choosing salads. I was actually disappointed with the amount of vegetable-based food I could find, despite the awesome market nearby, so salads were my best options several times.

A few I can improve upon:
-- Eating only delicious food. I did ok on this, but I had some ice cream and cake that were social rather than desire-based choices, and due to time constraints I had a mediocre gyro, some meh mozzarella sticks, and the only chocolate croissant I've ever met that was honestly too buttery. My desire for superlative pastry, something which my town does not seem to contain, remains unabated.
-- Splitting restaurant portions. I didn't do this, but sort of on purpose -- it is much easier for me not to snack when I'm genuinely full, and getting to genuinely full takes me closer to 2/3 of a serving. Plus, carrying leftovers around at a gaming convention is piss-ass annoying.
-- Skipping fried food. I'm already giving myself a pass on carbs, and there's a ton of delicious non-fried options available. What I did have was fine, but for the most part I can eat just as happily without it.
--Moar fresh fruit and veggies. This is something I can pack for the road and the first few days, and I have at least one con-going friend who will totally be my fresh-food snack buddy. GenCon, in Indianapolis, is my next major challenge -- and convention-center-area Indianapolis is a freaking awful place to eat affordably -- but I'm planning to meet it head-on with a stockpile of berries and bananas and jicama.

Today's my last day of laziness, and I'll be tracking again starting tomorrow. I've decided to switch to the Saturday morning meetings for good, assuming that the new leader doesn't suck (the old one that I liked got promoted). I hope everyone reading this had a great week! I definitely did.

In which this is just to say...

... that I'll be on vacation starting Friday, so the blog will probably be quiet for a week or two.

I made my 5% goal last Saturday, but it's likely that the scale won't be so pretty this week; I planned to spend all my weekly dots on weekend festivities, and did, but I didn't track them assiduously. There was a bunch of alcohol involved, and also cake, and basically my weekend was super fun but probably inadvisably louche.

I'm tracking again as of Monday, but went over yesterday due to an unexpected social dinner (friends in from out of country) at the Unhealthiest Mexican Restaurant In The World. (No, not really. But there were items conspicuously missing from the descriptions of the salad I ordered, specifically "refried beans" and "taco shell", and it turns out I do not actually have the willpower to not eat a deep-fried taco shell when it is presented to me, because I am not a robot.)

However, we actually managed to have some healthy options at our cookout, including a gigantic bowl of awesome fruit salad and a bunch of jicama sticks, and so I have been noshing on zero-point leftovers for the last couple days. I would be utterly shocked if the scale number weren't up this week, and I accept that as a consequence of my profligacy. Life is a rollercoaster, as they say.

So vacation looms, and I'll be faced with some significant conundra. Specifically, how to go to my personal culinary mecca (North Market in Columbus, Ohio) and manage to not eat All The Things. There are a ton of healthy options there, mind you -- far more than in other convention locations -- but a lot of them involve copious piles of rice and noodles, which are, of course, high in dots. That said, I'm kind of excited for the challenge! And it will be a good prep for the late-summer trip to Indianapolis, which does NOT have All The Things to eat, or for that matter, any of the things.

[Apparently this didn't post before I left! So here it is. And we'll see if I can figure out how to back-date it.]

In which I pick myself up, dust myself off, and move into the future smiling

I'm tempted not to blog about the last couple days, but I will anyway, because if this blog is all sunshine and roses then it's just going to be an overexposed photograph of what's really going on with me. For the past week, I've been drawn very strongly to eat All The Things -- both emotionally and physically -- and the last couple days, I've basically just let myself.

There are obvious triggering factors going on: my birthday and some not-so-great work stuff and falling prey to that whole marketing-driven "treat yourself" mentality, yes, but even more prominently, where I am in my menstrual cycle. I've had cravings and stronger than normal emotion-body interaction during my period and the few days before it for as long as I can remember, and I'll spare you the boring minutiae of how and why, but my cycle length varies between 1.5 and 2 months, so this is my first period since starting on the Plan. And it was, as they say, a learning experience.

So what did I learn?

• I crave dairy and protein far more than normal during this time. I need to arrange things so that I can meet those needs.
• I also crave sugar/chocolate on a more emotional level.
• I fortunately don't typically have physical symptoms that limit my exercise, so keeping my activity levels constant or even increasing them seems like a Very Good Idea.
• I'm particularly prone to forgetting my antidepressant during this time, so I need to be extra-vigilant about that. (I'm on a medication with an irritatingly short half-life, so missing a dose causes emotional upheaval and makes me way less able to deal with stresses and make thoughtful choices.)
• I'm also particularly given to "fuck the rules" thinking, so it's much easier for me to say things like "well, fuck it, I'm just not going to track this."
• Oh, and something fun and psychological: I eat WAY less food if I look at it more closely and change the shape of container it's in before deciding how much to eat. I was eating dark chocolate pieces compulsively out of their opaque bag; I took them out and put them into a different container, and damn if I didn't get a much stronger sense of their size and shape and number. 

And taking all that information in hand, I feel like there's actual meaning behind my getting up this morning and saying "ok, back on the wagon now." Yes, I broke my tracking streak of almost seven weeks because of a couple days of petulance. Yes, I probably won't make my stupid 5% goal this week either (turns out it was listed in my online tracker incorrectly). Who the fuck cares? The question of "am I changing the way I live my life in positive ways" is way bigger and more important than the niggling details of "did I follow semi-arbitrary rules perfectly every single day" or "did I, on a particular week in May, manage to make a scale register a certain number".

So on that note, here's some awesomespiration (there's got to be a cleverer portmanteau than that, but i haven't found it yet, so we're stuck with it for now). So here are some words from Stephanie Vincent about the intersection of self-acceptance and self-improvement. I don't agree with all the language she chooses, or all her ideas in general, but I'm glad she's being another voice in this uncomfortable but exciting space I inhabit.

My outlook for the next week is as follows: it is summer and it is BEAUTIFUL and I will return to enjoying in moderation the delights of food, particularly of summer cookouts with the assistance of my four-dot turkey brats. And they may have canceled my water aerobics class, but they can't cancel my good mood.

In which I celebrate and talk about cake and am COMPLETELY digressive for no good reason

Good morning, y'all! I'm feeling gooooood. It's my birthday; overall it's been a good year, not one of those "wow, I just spun my wheels all year" birthdays like the year before it; one of my dear friends proposed to his best girl last night; [y'all aren't cleared for that, but rest assured it was tremendous fun]; my day so far has been full of good food (coffee and an omelette and a bitchin' fruit cup) and good conversation and, frankly, goofing off instead of working; and overall I'm feeling pretty damn good about my life.

[Side note: I'm always rather suspicious of feeling gooooood, as I'm prone to being what they call in the psych world "emotionally labile" (which sounds WAY dirtier and more fun than it is), and what we call in the real world "mercurial", but I'm doing my best to enjoy the awesome of my life without getting all manic. And while I'm still working on a lot of stuff, and am also expecting some, er, "challenging" work-related news to come down the pipe in the next X hours/days/weeks/months, I'm still feeling pretty aight about life.]

(Also apparently my lifelong obsession with parenthetical remarks is coming to a middle. Sorry, y'all, Blogger doesn't seem to have usable footnote functionality, so you're stuck with it.)

So I decided to skip my Plan meeting today, because I am really, really not in the mood for being told what a "bad" food cake is, or whatever bullshit would be coming up today.

So anyway, yeah. Oh! There was this pretty good post about fat hate on Jezebel today: "Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility." Which, um, exactly. The quote from the article that made me giggle the most is this:

Maybe being kind to fat people (and, really, I mean all people) isn't a perfect system—maybe you're going to be uncomfortable on a plane once in a while, and it's possible that some fat weirdo somewhere is going to, uh, game the system and get hella free open-heart surgeries ON UNCLE SAM'S DIME (or whatever stupid con you think we're running in the name of cake).

Speaking of cake....

(Warning: this entry gets wayyyyy more tangential below the cut, and also there are celebratory discussions of weight loss.)

In which I get food demonization fatigue

Another week, another meeting. Down a bit, which surprised me a bit since I had a haphazard weekend and seriously didn't exercise at all, but not complaining.

I had to leave the meeting early today, and WOW was I glad to. See, since I started the Plan, I've been alternating between two meetings -- one at work and one at the local center on the weekends. I'm not a huge fan of the leader of the work one --she's got this self-hating thing going -- but have been going because it's both somewhat convenient and close to not having enough members to be sustained. Now, the work meeting is in a conference room in a building above a cookie shop. So this is occasionally a topic of conversation. And the leader decides to use it to segue into the day's topic (restaurant food and portion sizes).

First, let's go through what I would do if I decided that I couldn't live without the cookie:
1) Pull out my smartphone and pull up the Plan app
2) Search for "X cookie", X being whatever kind I wanted
3) Use my (admittedly embarassingly large) knowledge of the size of various establishments' baked goods to come up with an equivalent. I'd guess between 8 and 10 dots for one of these particular cookies, having eaten many of them, so if that seemed to be accurate based on the comparisons I'd probably list 10 dots if I was feeling like I'd maybe given myself a couple free passes earlier, or 9 if I was feeling virtuous.
Total time expended: maybe a minute?

Apparently not everyone is hep to the ways of the smartphone, though, including this leader, because she pulls out the Restaurant Book and starts trying to figure out the dot value of the cookie. (Spoiler alert: if I had to look everything up in a book everytime I ate, I would be failing horribly at the Plan, too.) Her initial guess is "14 dots." [Cue gasps from the group.] "They're just full of grease and fat and lard." She tries to come up with comparable restaurants, but has trouble. Someone suggests Au Bon Pain, and she initially has trouble finding it: "Oh, if they're really bad then they don't even want to be in the book." She finds it, after two or three minutes, and 8 to 10 seems like a reasonable comparison. She looks vaguely disappointed, and uses the word "lard" again.

In which I try not to get starry-eyed

I got a star today. The Plan awards them after you lose a certain amount of weight, and I did. And I'm not going to lie, from a numbers game perspective, I found this really satisfying. 

Less satisfying is the fact that while I can feel a subtle change in the way my pants fit, I can also feel a not-so-subtle change in the way my bras fit. I am actually perfectly happy to lose weight from my breasts -- any of your friends who've posted links to Busty Girl Comics can tell you why -- but bras that don't fit are fucking uncomfortable, and bras that do fit are fucking expensive.

I also found myself describing the Plan today in positive terms to someone I know who had noted a pattern of weight gain and lack of fitness that she wasn't happy about -- with my usual caveats about there being free tools that one could get to do basically the same thing, and not being a huge fan of giving money to the weight loss industry. (I'm not. Truly. I no longer buy special reduced-calorie foods or bars, as a matter of principle as well as taste. I pay for the Plan, and that's it.) It felt weird. But the truth is, god help me, I think if you approach it healthily, the framework does have value above and beyond the number-on-the-scale thing.

Anyway, that's all I've got in the way of links and thoughts today. If you need me, I will be avoiding the temptation to continuously reload the comments section on this article about self-portrait photographer Jen Davis, to which I posted a comment in response to a doctor who admired the photographs but "sees the unfortunate problems [the photographer] is likely to run into and it makes [him] sad".   

[I'm not likely to develop the habit of posting trigger warnings on everything I post or link here, but like any comments section about weight, contains the usual bullshit about "condoning obesity."]

Oh, one other link. A writer friend of mine posted her thoughts on the current Plan recently, and since they are largely compatible with mine and I felt she expressed them eloquently, I thought I'd share them.