Charlemagne

I ate horrendously this weekend, mostly out of moping and boredom. I didn’t even have a good excuse like an excellent party or a restaurant dinner. I ate cheetos, for heaven’s sake! Ugh.

My boyfriend and I were supposed to hang out this weekend but he canceled on me due to a family emergency. His grandmother was in the hospital so he spent much of the weekend at her bedside. Of course I didn’t mind that he couldn’t hang out (obviously I miss him, but that is an excellent excuse and even I can recognize when something categorically isn’t about me) but I also didn’t quite know what to do. When someone says, “I think this would be a bad weekend to hang out” my inner Wonder Woman wants to swoop in and bring takeout sushi and hugs anyway, even if it’s just a ten minute visit. Part of me wanted to assure him that I was there for him and that he wasn’t alone. But at the same time, I feel like it’s better to respect his decision and not try to give him any surprises or extra perks. It’s better to admit that he’s an adult and would ask for help if he needed it. So I just went home and had a pretty boring weekend.

On the plus side, I did work out both Friday and today (Sunday), so even if my diet wasn’t great I wasn’t abandoning myself to gluttony AND sloth. And lately, those two things have gone together. Breaking the cycle is good. Now, I need to get way more serious about avoiding carbs (which are very bad for Lyme patients). I adore carbs. I basically lived exclusively on carbs from 11th grade until I graduated from university. It isn’t easy to give up on your first love, but it’s going to be worth it. I will just keep telling myself that, shall I?

Today went well, considering. Lyme Disease was really getting to me early in the day. I could barely get out of bed from exhaustion and pain. Boo. But I rallied by late afternoon and made my breakfast protein shake. By evening I actually did some exercise (40 min DDR on difficult). Throughout the day I kind of grazed, which is not my usual style. I ate cheese and crackers, sushi, a pear, and coconut milk* ice cream. I didn’t eat a lot of any of this, though, so I’m content. I’m going to sleep with my stomach empty and was never more than 80% full whenever I ate.

I like the Japanese concept of Hara hachi bu, or “stomach 80%”, which I think is a good policy to get used to when it comes to eating. I’m trying to teach myself that there’s really just no excuse or reason to get overfull, ever. It’s greedy and counterproductive to my goals and it doesn’t actually feel pleasant. I’m not going to start counting calories unless I really have to. It makes me kind of crazy and compulsive whenever I do that, and I try to check my craziness if possible. I prefer to just pay attention to hunger cues and stick to better choices if I can actually DO that, which is obviously a big question and hopefully not a big fat one.

This evening I actually wanted to eat more just recreationally but decided not to, which is something I’d like to see more from myself. I need to stop eating for comfort when I don’t feel well. It’s a terrible habit.

*I try to put coconut oil or milk into my diet daily, so I usually incorporate it into dessert. It’s supposed to be good for one’s immune system.

I’m feeling yesterday’s resistance band training. My thighs and butt are that borderline good/bad kind of sore. Next: make the upper half whimper!

I had a casual breakfast-for-dinner dinner party with my boyfriend at his friends’ house. I normally only see him on the weekends, so it was nice. Sometimes I feel like I don’t see him nearly often enough.

Damn, that boy is skinny. He’s under 150 lbs and a few inches taller than I am. He’s also wiry-muscular with gorgeous lats and an Apollo’s belt. Unfair. I wish I were an ectomorph (although, two in a relationship together… yeah, talk about a rock and a hard place). I don’t want to say I’m an endomorph. And really, I’m not, although I’m sometimes scared that I am and that I’m doomed to be pudgy and round forever. If we’re buying into the whole ecto/meso/endomorph paradigm I’d say that I, like most people, am a blend of two if not all three. Which obviously makes the whole thing useless. It’s like horoscopes, really.

I think I’ll create an astrology diet. That would be fun and all I’d really need is to have one person lose weight on it (or I guess ideally twelve) and I’d have marketing gold (see also: Taco Bell drive through diet :P) As an Aquarius I think I should eat pizza and gummy bears and lose weight anyway. We are a privileged people, we water bearers.

Wednesday Progress:

Exercise: 40 min yoga

Food: I’m bored with documenting all the food I eat. I’ll just admit it here when I overeat. How about that? Today I ate rich (but not sugary) foods. The portions weren’t crazy so I’m letting it slide although it wouldn’t do to eat this every day. You know, I take “perfect food” pills instead of eating vegetables. This probably makes me a bad person, or at least a very bad dieter. But honestly, I will take the pills and I’ll just let spinach rot in my fridge after trying to eat it daily for all of three days.

My waist/hip ratio is .74, which means I have a huge butt, but also means that I’m the healthier kind of chubby. Oh good.

Tuesday:

Exercise

2 lower body strength training circuits w/resistance bands (about 1 hr)

35 min elliptical trainer

Food

Breakfast: Charlemagne’s Special Protein Shake

Dinner: Polish sausage on bakery bun, 5 cups popcorn w/ 1 T butter, 1/2 cup coconut milk ice cream made with lo han sweetener

…big dinner! But calorie-wise, not too crazy.

I did wii fit today for the first time in 253 days. Literally, the game announced “I haven’t seen you in 253 days!” Oh, the shame. Also, I’d gained 13 lbs since then. Suck.

Of course, I’ve exercised in the last 8-ish months. But I’m going to admit that I think I was exercising more regularly back when I was doing wii fit, and mostly in non-wii fit ways, actually. I don’t find that the wii fit provides the most spectacular or challenging workouts, but the regular weighing and gentle shaming that the game employs were actually very motivating to work out in general. So I’m going to try to keep that up.

Starting Measurements: bust: 38.5″/waist: 32″/hips: 43″/upper arm: 14″/body fat percentage: 33.5%

Monday Progress:

Exercise

20 min wii fit

35 min wii DDR on Difficult (great physical therapy for balance, believe)

…55 min total. Gold star.

Food

Breakfast: Protein shake made with undenatured whey, 2 raw eggs, and 7 frozen cherries

Dinner: 2 beef tacos w/cheese, 12 corn chips, coconut tapioca pudding made w/lo han sweetener

…Not too shabby. I don’t eat lunch because I sleep too much to fit three meals in the day.

I turn 29 next month. It’s going to be awesome: a bunch of my friends and I are taking the train to Chicago and having a big two-day party to celebrate my and another friend’s birthday, and I can’t wait.

But still, there’s that minor matter of getting older.

My uncle told me once that nothing counts until you’re 30, and I liked that theory when I was 22, so I took it as gospel. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everyone, but it was going to work that way for me, dammit. I’d just gotten out of an abusive relationship and I was drifting. I was only too happy to think that I had 8 more years to pull things together before any of it started counting.

But now I have, like, a year left.

When I was 24 I got Lyme Disease, and that’s taken a lot of power away from me. It makes it extremely hard to function day-to-day, and I’ve been fighting it a long time now, not making much progress. I would have never imagined approaching 30 with constant headaches, arthritis, loss of motor control, and exhaustion. When it comes to my health goals, beating this illness is first and my weight is definitely second. If I never lost a pound but felt healthy, could start working full time and having some energy left over again, I’d ask where to sign; I’d sign in blood.

But it really, so very, doesn’t work like that. The more fit and healthy I am generally the easier it is for my body to fight. The harder I work, the more energy I will eventually have. In a lot of ways my “second priority” has to come first chronologically. My poor body shouldn’t have to cope with two enemies: bacteria and a heap of extra adipose tissue. It’s been through enough.

So even if my life isn’t going to be what I was hoping in the next year or so, there’s something I definitely have control over. Screw Lyme Disease. I’m going to work around it and get into the best shape of my life. When I hit thirty and things finally start counting, I will be the strongest I’ve ever been. Hopefully, I’ll also be the healthiest.