summer

I was good. Then I was bad. Not too bad, but the occasional slip of 2 brownies and and apple pie while Aunt Flo was visiting, put me in the guilt factor big time. The scale stopped moving last week, and even though I know it was Flo’s fault, I still wanted to send her packing. And since I couldn’t, ok I admit it, apple pie and whip cream. I won’t lie! So then I went to my work out tapes. And being a huge fat person myself, getting up to do those workout video’s you see advertised on tv, buying it online because you don’t want to be seen buying it at the store, and then tossing it into your dvd player, it’s wide amusement time at my house as my kids pile up on the couch and want to watch the newest circus freak in town, their mom, play with the multi-steps and weights, and weird positions she is doing, to even stranger drum pounding music. Sure, the lady on the tv looks gorgeous as she bends down and 1-8 counts several reps and leg lifts. When I do it? I move like the blubber tidal wave my legs are. How does ANYONE feel sexy like this? I ban my husband to another room and lock the door! Luckily, my kids get bored after 10 minutes, and slither away to find other entertainment. I almost feel like excercising as a fattie, is like the sacred passage of childbirth. You go through a lot of humiliation, to get to the big prize.

But there’s still the problem of keeping up with those excercise videos. I started with The Firm, because it seemed geared to many Mom’s who need help getting back into shape after birthing babies. OMG, it was a killer. The steps were so high, and each segment you have to dissassemble and re-assemble the 2 piece steps, what felt like every 5 minutes. I got more excercise picking it up and moving it to the side, and re-attaching it. After 40 grueling minutes of this, with sheer willpower moving me slower than the people bouncing on the tv, I wanted to die. Let’s face it, we need excercise guru’s selling us better stuff. We need 200 to 300 pounds+ videos, that start you off at a level that won’t give you a heart attack. And THEN you can progress in your program to something more inclined as the weight comes off. If anyone knows of something like this? PLEASE, let me know. Until then, I’m settling with beginner Yoga stretches, and simple walking.

Sometimes, I wish people were just more realistic to the real problems at hand for overweight people.

As some of you know, I’ve kept my diet a secret from my family. 20 pounds down now as of this morning, and I’m cheering. But I’m also running into a few problems, keeping my secret. It is empowering to keep silent, so no one can put me down or judge me how I’m doing it. My husband doesn’t have the power to tempt me, because he doesn’t know! So here it is… My hubbie keeps eating all my food stash.

Ok, maybe this is a rant. Maybe this is a cheer. I dunno yet. I take a bit of happy time to prepare in my kitchen a week’s worth of snacks like, sliced cucumbers, peppers, celery, broccoli, etc and I prep them in ziplocks. These are great to throw together in salads for the week with no work or effort, or to steam them up for sides with meals. I started making hard boiled eggs for breakfasts where I’m too busy to cook as well. My family loves this. They dip in and the kids can make ants on a log by themselves, or the hubbie steals my hardboiled eggs and eats ALL of them. I make double what I cook each night for dinner, whether it be fish, or turkey burger since it is leaner than ground beef, or lean chicken. I cut up chicken or steak strips for my salads, and box those up too in containers. I do this because I don’t want to be left with a panick attack of binging on something, when I have no time to cook, and I need to eat. I’m watching my blood sugar to keep it on track. BUT My Hubbie keeps eating everything!

I guess my complaint is when I go to the fridge to have the 2nd half of something I cooked the night before and it is GONE, I get a bit irked. I have to repeat my fridge storage process to keep myself on track. My hubbie never cooks. His idea of cooking is bringing home fast food, or picking up the phone for take out.

I’m happy my husband is eating something healthier than he has been though. This is the guy who constantly eats Fast Food, carries a 16oz pop from room to room to chug it every day, and doesn’t drink water, EVER, and everything else on his basic diet is boxed food you buy in the store.

In the past, he’s tempted me to fail. Not intentionally, but I believe it is sub-conscious guilt. How tempting is it to be in a restaurant, and have him offer you things on his plate you know you can’t have? Things like that. One bite, and yer done girl!

Anyway, back on track. Is it possible my eating habits would begin to change his and my kids? I’m trying to adapt here! I’m contemplating making kid/hubbie containers of snacks that they can have, without dipping into my ‘panic’ reserve. In the kids containers I’ve put sliced oranges, apple wedges cut up in the morning, carrots, and their own celery pieces. The eggs they can have, I’ll draw smiley faces on them with a marker. Plain ones will probably be ‘DO Not Touch’. I had no idea that they’d start to want what I’m making. My husband used to complain he’d never eat rabbit food! (A supposedly REAL MAN’s complaint that they refuse to eat vege’s and salad. I say this with much sarcasm.)

And it’s not like I don’t make them their usual meals they are used to each day either. I DO make them their pre-boxed stuff out of the freezer they like, and add some vege’s. I’m not a horrific mom! But now they are starting to look at my food, and not eating theirs. Or they eat theirs, and THEN want mine too later for snacking. Heh.

How do I tell them hands off my loot, without spilling my secret?

I see my hubbie going to pick up fast food less and less each week. Is it because he lost his chow down buddy? Is he under suspicion of my lifestyle change, and is eating my stash to force me out? Hah, this may seem like war. Perhaps. Maybe or maybe not. Or maybe it’s easier for lazy people, to just eat whatever other people put in front of them. He’s always been such a picky eater, and stubborn, and refusing to change anything that he does. A really loving guy, and family man, just set in his ways. I dunno if any of you ladies are living with a guy like this.

Perhaps it’s just a man eating whatever, cause you know… he’s a man. GULP. Food gone. More? But it really bites to lose my food stash and to stare into the freezer and only see a pre-packaged boxed fat-fried meal left to make. And you KNOW you can’t eat that.

I used to be a lazy, fast food, soda pop junky…. so I can’t judge him too harshly. I’ve been there. I’m not sure if my secret should come out yet. No one knows but me still. Everyone thinks I’m in a ’super mom’ phase, and all these goodies in the fridge are for them I guess. But this past week alone, I’ve had to hit the grocery three times to stock up the foods I can eat. I’m not sure what to do other than coming out, and compromising what they can have, and can’t have. It’s a bit of a bummer to spill my secret earlier than intended.

Or maybe I need to re-plan how much food I’m making each night, and re-evaluate my shopping plan. I never thought they’d be eating my organic foods. Either way, I’m at a crossroad of choices to make now. I think my family is changing.

Summer

Some things I am doing to change my lifestyle of eating has mostly been with education. I couldn’t do it with fantasizing about a thin body, or buying cute clothes in stores and pretending I’d lose weight to wear it while it hung in my closet, or even laying in bed at night, thinking about which of 10 diets I might try that will help me along.

Those didn’t work. I dreamed on it for a long, long time, until I decided to find a nutritionist that would help me learn what my eating habits were. We’re conditioned to ignore quite a bit. Especially if you lie to yourself that your snacking is okay, a fry from your kids meal here. A few gummies from the snack pack your other kid has later, and snacking adds up calories, fats, carbs, and salt. I had to have an outsider look at me, and tell me to my face the bold truth. And this took weeks of cataloging my habits, with no pride. I was a starving female binger, that repeated these patterns over and over and over!

But the nutritionist didn’t know everything. Things she recommended I later found out were very, very unhealthy. I had to go to work on my own, by going to a library, (Hey, It’s free.) and truly looking up other people’s research on what I was putting inside my body. I had to understand how eating certain foods made me feel!

I am a total Carbohydrate Addict. I smell anything like bread, pasta, cheese, and OMG I have to have it. And an hour later, I have to have more. Why? WHY? Why was this happening to me? Our bodies get biologically dependent on this stuff, because it causes our blood sugar to rise quickly, and carry us on that ‘Feel Good’ High, until we crash. And then I’d feel guilty, barely eat anything the following 2-3 days, and then binge on day 4. It was a cycle that caused my body to store fat as a preservation technique for famine. Heh.

So in order to make everything easy to make the new transitional process of changing these habits, I started the first few weeks eating mostly organics. Meats and vege’s. No more boxed stuff or anything that comes in a plastic sealed wrapper. I wanted a system reboot of my body, and I wanted to cleanse and de-tox, not just my body, but my mind too. I wanted to start from scratch and re-learn everything, and I wanted to understand blood sugar, and the emotional wreck it has made me for the past 10 years.

This was empowering. I had control, and not the food this time.

I conducted my own experiment. 4 weeks later, I stopped having mood swings. My skin cleared up as I introduced 64 oz of water a day. I’ve always had terrible acne before as a teen and even in my 30’s. It was extremely embarassing. Now I understand it was caused by my imbalance of PH. My body didn’t have the flushing system that it needed.

The next thing I had to understand was trigger foods. Foods that would make me crave to eat something that I smelled that was really yummy to me, like bread. I swear if I smell a single piece of banana bread coming out of the oven, I’d have to eat the whole loaf with melted butter. And why? Trigger food effect, feeding into my addiction to feel good. And it was all caused by a rise in blood sugar. It was a natural high. And in turn this made me want to binge on other junk food, and fast food too, because the hunger just never ended as my blood sugar went up, down, up, down, etc. No wonder I couldn’t lose weight!

And I discovered that diet soda’s with aspartame does this too. Diet Soda is a trigger food. Anything that raises your blood sugar with a spike to get it revving, is a bad bad thing, when you are a carbohydrate addict. And I was quite sad to learn my Crystal Light, which was my staple drink for the past 3 years, had plenty of Aspartame in it.

Aspartame disrupts liver function by overloading the de-tox pathways, resulting in decreased fat burning. It stimulates fat promoting insulin too. #1 rule on tossing my Crystal Light containers into the garbage? It inhibits weight loss. And here all this time, it is marketed as a diet alternative. And yeah, I learned this in a book from a nutritionist that’s been in the field a very long time. It makes me want to give the middle finger to the marketing department that pawned this crap on women. Someone was making money on my misery of being fat.

So… I’m drinking water with a slice of lemon now. Add some ice, and it is quite refreshing. Lemon is a natural de-tox. I dunno. There’s something to be said, that if God made it… It’s going to be honest with my body. But hey, I do watch the carb counting in vege’s, and so far, it is working. I’m not a total pig! And I can control my portions, and I feel full now when I’m supposed to feel full. I’m in control. I feel good about myself more now than ever. I know I can say no to Trigger Foods, because I realize what it does to me. It turns me into an emotional monster. I never want to slip on that path again. I’m on my goal now, and I’m losing for the first time in a decade.

Conspiracy. Ok, well not. Every other diet I’ve tried, I’ve asked my husband for help. Hey, I asked my kids for help in not touching the potato chip bag. And I was always doomed because my DH would feel guilty about his eating habits and would bring me evil surprises like fast food french fries I love so much. Or … ahem, specialized chocolate goodies from the bakery. So this time, I’m not telling anyone what I’m doing and kicking the habit of ‘thinking’ and ‘rationalizing’ that I need to depend on someone else to get this weight down. I know dumb, but I think a lot of people do it. We’re too scared to do things ourselves. Plain and simple, that is my problem. And then I stopped lying to myself, that ‘Oh, I’ll just drink this coca cola bottle because it’s in my fridge. And um, yah, next time I go shopping I’ll ask DH not to buy it, or I won’t buy it for the kids. I’ll drink the 6 pack this week, because then it will be gone, and no one will buy it again. We don’t want it to go to waste, right?” Wrong! After about ten years of this behavior, where there was constantly a string of wrong foods inside my house, I realized I had the wrong mentality going on all along. Hell, this is America. We have more Fast Food chains and Soda Pops then anywhere else in the world. There are ALWAYS going to be wrong food choices all around us. DH is always going to buy whatever the heck he wants. It’s not a matter of willpower to say no to what he brings to the house, it’s a matter of OMG, I want a healthy life change, and stop being so disgusting that I have to keep buying fat clothes in the plus sized ladies store. So I then figured out, I don’t need willpower to say no to chips and cookies, and McDonalds, and the ‘insert random fizzy beverage here’. Maybe I don’t know what happened, but something awoke inside of me that the change happened overnight. So my big secret? Not telling anyone what I’m doing. It is empowering. No one has to know I’m dieting. It’s my secret!  I still don’t want to make other people feel bad about what they eat, so I plan on keeping quiet to my family. I just want to do what is right for me. Of course, I’ve gotten weird looks as I came home from the store with a kitchen that exploded and looked like a vegetable garden. But hey, I got on the scale this morning, and I’ve lost 17 pounds already. And you think I’m going to tell anyone? Nope. I don’t want anyone to talk me out of my goals, who give the guilt. And you know what? I think this secret is giving me success. And I don’t need anyone else’s approval. I’ve stopped trying to control what everyone else eats, and eat what I want to eat. It was a matter of letting go, and ending the ‘This isn’t fair’ mentality.  I’ve never gotten this far before, and I feel wonderful. And hopefully, 6 months from now, someone will ask me what the heck happened? Heh. Thanks to my Friends here for keeping my Secret.

I’m losing weight. The scale doesn’t lie! For 2 weeks now I’ve been drinking 64 oz of water with a wedge of lemon. That’s what I really want to note on here. And dang it, my skin looks good! My eyes and hair look shinier, and I can see the results already from the effort I’m putting forth here. It’s been so hot this summer, and my plants are all wilted looking. I sort of feel that’s how I used to look before when I was consuming soda pop as my only source of liquid. Yes, let’s admit it. Soda pop is evil. And after learning that the caramel coloring in it is extremely bad for lactose intolerant people, I was glad I kicked the habit. There’s nothing like destroying all the other good nutrients your body needs, by constantly purging and not knowing why. I’m getting informed, hit the library, researching and re-learning how to eat, and I am SO inspired! It is liberating to awaken, and no longer continue to eat whatever I felt like. It is like sleep-walking isn’t it? A cookie here or there, 5-8-10 cookies? OMG, the whole bag? No more, I’m taking a conscious effort to appreciate the body I have, and treat myself so much better. I will no longer abuse my body. And hey, the capri’s I put on this morning looked like clown pants. Need I say more? Water. Amen.

After reading about Dr. Masaru Emoto’s work on water and how it changes its expression from thoughts impressed upon it, I knew I had to make some changes. So eight, 8 oz servings of water a day seems to be the recommended amount for everyone. But after you chug all of this and measure it out in containers, then what? I don’t want to go from tap to container without a little bit of expression of my own, so I’ve started to magic marker the bottles in ink with different ideas I’ve wanted to impress upon the water. Why should dieting be without the fun? So far, I now impress some creativity on the scheme of drinking all this water, which was not easy to do within the first week. I now drink 4 water bottles of 16 oz each, which are labeled Beauty, Joy, Energy, and Peace.