Half-Assed, the Viral Video Contest

Jennette Fulda, of the blog Half of Me and book entitled Half-Assed, is having a contest, and the embedding of this viral video is part of it.

Shrinking Suzy

As much as I hate to do it, I really have to stick to the McDougall food plan if I want to stay healthy. I also have to cut back on the amount of foods I eat, including the healthy ones.

Why?

Well, at age 50+ I've got to admit to myself that I just cannot eat the way I was and stay healthy. If I eat too many salty foods my blood pressure is going to go up. If I eat too many sweets (from the bakery, especially), not only will my arteries get clogged but my blood sugars are going to go crazy again. And if I eat meat, my gut is going to rebel, as well as my blood sugar and arteries.

And I've got to exercise regularly. I simply must treat it as if it's a medication I have to take daily if I want to live without pain and cardiac problems. It might also help in achieving weight loss, too.

Weight loss dieting. Those 3 most dreaded words in a fat woman's vocabulary, especially if the person has been on weight loss diets for her entire lifespan. But as much as it goes against every fiber of my being, it must be done.

Over the weekend I started getting those weird heart palpitations again. My doc once told me they were totally benign, but still, they're scary! And I had some chest discomfort with them this time, something that never happened before. Well, the discomfort also could have come from the half an apple pie I ate before bed. Or the turkey burgers with onions and cheese I ate about 3 hours before that. Or the peanut butter and jelly muffin 3 hours before that. At least I had a healthy breakfast and lunch yesterday! It still doesn't erase the bakery items hubby brought home and I helped eat Friday and Saturday, either.

Looking back at that paragraph, no wonder my body is rebelling right now! It's time for a serious detox again!

And another serious weight loss effort. The difference this time is that hubby is going to go along with it, as opposed to trying to sabotage it, like he usually does. He's three years older than me, and although he still weighed the same the last time he got on the scale as he did back in high school, he's not as fit as he could be.

So it starts again today. Each day I might post on either or both of my blogs not only these rambling thoughts and whines, but my daily food intake and exercise. Then again, I might just keep that info on my private, off-line journal and just do a summary now and then. I know I secretly smirk to myself when reading others' diet journals when they post their failures, and get angry and jealous of them when they're succeeding, so I really don't want others to do that when reading my blog posts.

Exercise: Each day I plan to do an exercise video from my stash to the best of my ability. With the arthritis, neuritis, fasciitis, CFS, and whatever else is wrong with me medically, I'm certainly not going to be jogging around the city for miles or doing anything as strenuous as tae bo, but I'll do what I can with Leslie Sansone, Richard Simmons, and a few others.

Food Plan: It's back to strict McDougall, and as soon as I get some off-plan foods out of the house, I'd like to go back on the Maximum Weight Loss Plan 100% of the time.

Same Old Song and Dance

Nothing to say, really. Still obsessing over food and calories, yet my weight is still the same as it was in previous posts, +/- 5 pounds either way.

Kid is preparing to graduate magna cum laude in a few weeks with his MS in Electrical Engineering. Too bad the only job offers so far have been an unpaid internship for the summer in Rhode Island and working a register in Target.

A few more weeks and I get my thyroid lab work repeated, and the week after that I'll see if I get to go back on Synthroid or just remain in this fatigued state for the rest of my life. Since my pulse is still dipping into the 40's I'm sure to go back on at least a low dose of the med.

And it took almost a month but I finally sewed the City Bag from Lazy Girl Designs. One of these days I'll take a photo of it. This is the one from the web site, but I used a similar color scheme.

Oh, well

Forget about the reference in the message below to the widget graphic on the lower right - it seems to have vanished. I'll have to see if I was able to save it to my HD at the time and if I did, I'll post it in the future.

Nothing happening on the food and weight loss front. My doc is weaning me off my hypothyroid supplement so I was told to expect a slight weight gain. It's been 2 days and already the scale is up 3 pounds. Then again, yesterday was Valentine's Day and hubby brought home chocolate fudge brownies (mine), cream filled donuts (his) and sprinkle donuts (the kid's). I ate 2, hubby ate 3, and the kid ate 6. There are 2 donuts left and I already told my boys that they better have them finished by this evening's garbage run or they're being tossed. The kid assured me they'll make a nice dessert to his lunch today.

My rosacea is getting worse. It started within a week of my first dose of Synthroid and its severity was independent of the dosage. Hopefully when all the synthetic thyroid is out of my system in a few days the skin will start to clear. The doc gave me a script for Metrogel ointment, but with all the warnings and side effects I'd rather stick with washing in clear water and using the aloe vera gel, especially since a lot of the pustules are so close to my eyes and mouth. When I hit the HFS tomorrow I'll look for an all-natural cleanser and moisturizer and make sure it's fragrance-free so it doesn't start aggravating the asthma like some other products, like Noxema, do.

See the gadget/widget on the bottom right?

The one with the virtual model in the red dress? I'm a bit pudgier than that, even though I popped my height and weight accurately into the page.

Notice how the model's shape doesn't change until it loses 48 pounds.

Now THAT is accuracy! I had to lose 50 pounds before I saw any change in my body shape when I went down from 296 to 245, and it was still barely noticeable. I wore the same size clothes, they were just a bit looser. Now that I'm 30 pounds higher, 8 years older, menopausal and officially hypothyroid, my clothing size is larger than it was at 296 because the weight didn't go back where it came from, it went to the butt and waist, instead.

I should have left well enough alone.

Next Contender, Please

Oh, fuck it!

I was about to write a long post once again about the futility of dieting for weight loss, yet I still wanted to try, try again because I looked in the mirror and saw not me but a tub of lard.

It's SO FUCKING DEPRESSING when I try, try, try and get so damn frustrated because I go 2 steps forward, 3 steps back. (And don't give me that Yoda bullshit "There is no "try," just do. I DO "do.")

This post I read this morning made me feel a bit better, but that was before I looked in the mirror.

I wish I could find - and afford - a therapist who is aware of Overcoming Overeating . In the meantime I keep hating the way I look, keep restricting my eating and hope that some day the weight will magically - and healithy - leave my body and make me acceptable to society.

The Extermination of Fat People

It's got to be done. Weight-loss, that is. Hospitals & doctors are refusing surgery to people because they're merely overweight; life-saving organ transplants refused until BMI's are brought down under 35 - an impossible task for people on dialysis with kidney failure or full of fluid because of heart and/or lung failure; refused joint replacements if BMI is over 30!! To think that I might be refused to be allowed to live until my weight is down to 170, a level I haven't seen in over 40 years, or even lower!!!

So what can I do?

Well, I already know I have to eat under 1000 calories a day if I want to loose even 1 pound a week, so I guess I'm going to have to stop eating full meals and just eat a 200 calorie "meal" every few hours. To prevent the nutritional deficiencies that will certainly occur by depriving this body of food I'm going to have to invest in some super-duper multi-vitamin and minerals, too. And why not an occasional trip to the hospital for some IV fluids now and then?

Forget exercise - my blood sugar will be so low, my bones so brittle, that anything I try to do will only harm me, if I even had the strength to do an exercise video or hop on the treadmill.

And I'll no longer be a good wife or mother, as I'll have no strength to care for this apartment or do any basic cooking or cleaning - I'm already weak and fatigued due to my 25 years history of CFS and now the still un-treated hypothyroidism. Sooner or later the doc will get the dosage right, but in the meantime being deficient is harming my metabolism a bit more each day so it'll never be considered normal. A slow metabolism isn't going to lead to any great amounts of weight loss, so I'll most likely have to eat even less way than the 1000 calories I needed to lose weight as an active pre-teen, over 40 years ago.

So I'll be obsessing even more about food in the future. Oh, joy.

But I really should have a more positive attitude about this. So what if I won't be able to eat again for the rest of my life. Food - and living - is highly over rated, don'cha think?

Nah! Did you (or *I*) really think that was gonna happen, that I would cut back my already trimmed-down list of allowable foods, the ones on the McDougall Plan for something less? Sure, I can go back to eating meat and dairy and count every quarter teaspoon that I use and maybe lose a pound or so a month. Then I would be feeling like I predicted above. Or I can just continue to eat healthy low fat vegan foods and let my lab work and blood pressure show the results better than the scale could.

Yeah, I think that's what's gonna happen instead.