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.