A new mindset

As of this morning, I've lost ten pounds, or looked at another way, have only put back on 23. (A pessimistic view, but one I felt I needed to represent).

The big difference this time, though, is that I'm whole-heartedly into this. I'm not afraid, I'm not of two minds, I'm here. It's a marvel to me that I lost any weight at all two years ago, what with all the doubt.

Another big difference this time is that I have my eyes firmly on the prize. WW tells you to break it down, into small increments, but I need to keep the long view. I need to think about, if it feels this good at 238 (and I have to say, even though it's probably obese by any normal person's standard, it feels good to even be in the 230's. How telling is that?) how truly wonderful will it be at 145? I intend to get there this time. I intend to reach it. I don't have a we'll see, or I have a long way to go mindset this time, I believe.

Of course, I'll need to look back on this when I've hit a plateau, when I've lost a point or two and there's not so much wiggle room any more, when it feels like I haven't had an uncounted or unconsidered bite in months.

But honestly, except for the wedding, and Easter, I have nothing big on my horizon for months. I can go on like this for a long time, I think. It helps that I get to eat real food, it helps that I can have the occasional Quarterpounder and egg and bacon breakfast. That helps. But what helps more is the knowledge, won over these last two years, that weight is just weight. It didn't affect how much people loved me or didn't love me--passion and uproar and indifference continued on their usual courses, whether I was at 250 or 215, I was just wearing different clothes for all of it. It made my joints hurt and my feet ache, but it didn't alter heartache or joy one iota. I was me, no matter what. And that's what scared me so bad the last time, that some weird thing was going to happen to me, that those who matter to me were going to love me more thin, and thus prove that I was worth less heavier, or that they were shallow sons of bitches anyway, and I was wrong to care about them. None of that happened, none, none, none.

So, she said, shrugging, it's okay. Weight has been stripped of, well, its weight. Its freight. Its baggage. It's all about how I feel this time, with how I look thrown in, but only the positive side of that. It's whee! I get to wear cool clothes, not, oh my God, here I am in a short skirt, men are looking at me, what the hell is wrong with them?

So here I go. Ten pounds down, 93 to go.

Getting dressed

We've been here before, but apparently this is the point where getting dressed ceases to be what can I wear to cover the bulk and starts trending to, what nice thing do I get to wear today? I'm not nearly into what are, sadly, my skinny clothes (women's 16) but things are starting to look better.

I'm so much less conflicted this time. It's amazing. I'm not sure why, either, maybe because I did this and the world didn't end and then I gained weight and the world didn't end, so I finally believe that it's safe to do either? Not sure, but feeling sane about what I'm doing is certainly helpful.

I wish that I could strip away all the nonsense from losing weight. That it's not morality or immorality, it's weight. That your weight is not a reflection of the value of the soul, tops of the way you value your soul.

I still work in the bead shop. We've moved, so I don't get to see people come down the stairs belly first, but I still see some very overweight women. Sometimes, I have to be honest, I'm repelled, by the ones that sort of seem like they could be me, utterly out of control, and sometimes I just feel bad for them. As I said before, I wish I could tell them how much better they'd feel, how much simpler life would be.

Oh, well. I can't, can I? And there's nothing worse than a reformed drunk!

...and the mental work

Since the last great weight loss attempt, something else happened. (A lot of something elses happened, but probably only one big one that pertains to this).

My uncle died. He was my mother's brother, and his daughter, my cousin, is my best friend as well. Once he was gone, we spent many, many hours talking about our childhoods, our mothers and our weight issues.

I am emphatically not blaming all this on my mother, but I will say without her influence, I might not be having as hard a time with this as I am. Not with the physical aspect of losing weight, which (and don't shoot me) is honestly not THAT hard for me. I absolutely get the eat less, exercise more thing and when I put that into action, I lose weight. It's as easy as that. (Don't hate me).

What I'm more concerned with here is the psychological issue. I hit a wall, and it's not just a physical plateau, though of course it's that, too--I hit a wall when I start to feel too good. My mother has been gone for more than 25 years and I didn't come here to malign the dead, but let's just say that when I felt good about myself growing up, I generally got snapped back to my mother's version of reality pretty quickly. Those things die hard, very hard. So hard that all these years later, I'm still dealing with them.

So my task this time, I think, is to learn that it's okay to feel good. It really is. It's okay to be proud of yourself (your physical self, there was a big mind-body disconnect going on there) and that no giant hand is going to come down and smack me when I feel really good.

I lie in bed sometimes, at thinner points, wondering, what will/would it be like to be even thinner? What would it be like to feel good all or most of the time? To be really physically active? To have unbounded (more or less) energy? And....do I deserve that?

I think the key this time will be to realize that, yes, I actually do deserve that.

Sundays

This being the third time I'm attempting to lose weight via Weight Watchers, I've figured a few things out.

On the advice of a friend of mine who works for WW, I made Wednesday my weigh-in day. The reason? Everyone is all gung-ho to start a diet on a Monday, but then weigh-in day follows the weekend and its excesses. Not good. My excesses usually involve salt, so it's especially not good.

So I started on a Wednesday. Yee-hah! That means that I can pretty much pick my way through Sunday, if I so desire, and today I so desired. I did last Sunday, too, but I learned some things last Sunday.

Last Sunday night, after I had eaten my way through the day (punctilioiusly noting everything, I might add) I went to bed feeling not as well as I could have. A little over-stuffed, in fact. I managed to learn from that this time, which in itself is an amazement. It didn't affect my weight loss; I lost five pounds the first week, and I am well aware that a good bit of that was water. Whatever. I'll take it.

Today, I picked my way through, though I didn't start with bacon and eggs. I had a few things that I thought looked appealing. I find that if I find a way to eat a thing, then I don't have the problem of craving it any more. I'm trying to adopt the philosophy that enough is as good as a feast. For now, not quite two weeks in, it seems to be working.

More stamina. Fewer aches.

You know, when you're older, as I am now (0lder than I was yesterday, and older than I was the last time I did this) I think that the whole health and comfort issue becomes more pressing. I'm a good solid girl, no matter what, and I can carry a lot of weight and not look horrible. But my joints, industriously aging, no matter how much I color my hair and grease my skin, tell me the truth. This time, I think this might make it stick: I'm going to look better with less weight, that's a given. But I'm going to feel better, and honestly, having an easier time climbing the stairs (and believing that I'm going to be able to climb those stairs for another thirty years) is going to make me stick to this far longer than the notion that someone is going to look at my legs.

And, oh, yeah

I can't live without breakfast any more. I used to hate it, it made me retch, but now I get up and I'm prowling around the house saying, what am I going to have to eat this morning?

I eat some strange and some not-strange stuff. My stand-by is a piece of that dark-brown chewy German bread with smoked salmon (also known as lox) on it, with a little of the Gravlaxsas from Ikea. Failing that, a soft-boiled egg with an English muffin and some butter. (I'm not giving up butter). Or, what Al calls the Breakfast of Champions, Arabic bread and baba ganoush. Cold pizza has long been a favorite, but unfortunately not WW-friendly.

I got actively cranky last week when Al shoveled the driveway before making breakfast, because my weekly indulgence has become a bacon and egg breakfast.

So I guess I did make some progress, after all.

Back on the Wagon

Well, here I am again. In the interval since July 4, 2007 and now, many things happened, most of them not suitable for a blog. Suffice to say that I ate back on all the weight that I lost, every last pound of it, except maybe for two.

My foster-daughter is getting married in just over a month. I don't want to be the whale in the pictures (especially since I'm wearing gray, a whale color) so I'm back on Weight Watchers. My success has been stellar--in just under two weeks, I've lost around eight pounds. I'm back in those size 18 jeans I was so happy to buy, and truthfully, I'm happy to be in them again. A jacket that I bought in a fit of optimism in November needs about five more pounds to be right, so that's good, too.

How do I feel about this? Well, something interesting happened during the weight loss. Not only did I give away all my big clothes, leaving me with not much to wear once I gained the weight back, I realized that for all my kicking and screaming, I had gotten used to being the smaller me. I was no longer comfortable at my higher weight. I hated it, in fact, more than I ever hated it before.

That's without even talking about the physical toll it was taking on me. 250 pounds seems to be the top weight my particular body can take without breaking down, without quitting, without setting me firmly on the road to being the mother in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape". It's good, in a way....I know I'll never weigh 300 pounds, say, because I couldn't stand it.

I also lost the first five pounds very quickly, quickly enough to notice what a huge difference even the five pounds made. I can be pretty dense about stuff, but boom! five pounds gone! makes even me take notice.

Fewer aches. Fewer pains. My 6 Advil a day habit seems to be down to 2. (Maybe 4. I have a cold and a lot of attendant aches from that). I can make dinner without my lower back screaming for mercy. I hope to be not so knackered, to use that handy British term, after a day on my feet at work. I need (NEED!!!!) to get back into my high heels. I'm not giving up high heels!

So, class, what have we learned? You can get used to a lower weight, too. You can find out how much your body can stand, and then back off from that point.

You can always come home again, at least to Weight Watchers.

A Glorious 2nd

Last night was Rockville's fireworks. Rockville is the next town, and towns, here in New England, are the basic unit of --well, anything. The county, for instance, is subsidiary to the town, even though Rockville is the county seat. There are no such things as townships. So the next town probably doesn't even have a clear border.

Rockville, however, is considered "the ghetto". It's a fading mill town, one working mill left, out of at last a half a dozen. (They sometimes burn down rather spectacularly. The states all have programs in place to use the existing buildings for something useful. They are, after all, a part of the history and the landscape of New England). However, for a fading mill town, they have a fairly wonderful fireworks display. They fundraise for it all year long. Not only do they have fireworks, they have live music, and not any old live music, either, they have our little corner of the world's answer to the Boston Pops. The Rockville Community Orchestra, and the Windham Concert Band joined forces last night for a free concert. I was extremely hormonal in any case, plus the good kind of patriotism makes me cry, so I spent a large part of last night sort of dripping. (Kind of like when the boxers cry when they play the National Anthem at the Olympics. Big tough guys, sobbing away to "...and the rockets' red glare....").

The first thing that struck me was that here were all these people, giving their time and their talent, all for a love of music. They weren't good enough to make a living at it, they probably didn't major in it, but somewhere along the line, someone instilled a love of music in them that took root enough that here, years, later, they were sitting on folding chairs, on a blocked-off Main Street, playing Sousa marches. For the love of music, for the sheer love of music.

And they are talented musicians! They play a wide range of music, from patriotic standards, to just plain standards, to Motown (!) to classical. The patriotic medley was stirring and touching. The Motown medley was not only not embarrassing, it was downright good. And their performance of the "1812 Overture" was as stirring as any I have ever heard.

While the music was playing, I watched people. (When I wasn't enjoying the sheer novelty of sitting in my folding chair where I had been jockeying for a lane position not five hours ago). To make this fit in this blog at least a little bit, I will say that I looked particularly at the women.

The women of Rockville are, to be honest, a not an especially edifying sight. They have the body type of the lower middle class, for want of a better term. I saw an awful lot of them go by. I'm not sure what conspires to get them that way--but their posture is poor, they are mostly overweight, and their entire presence more or less telegraphs a lacking sense of self-esteem. My daughters commented on the depressing number of young girls with babies. My guess is that were looking at different parts of the same cycle. Lacking self-esteem, coupled with America's curious attitudes toward birth control, got them pregnant at an early age. Lower socio-economic status didn't entitle them to the niceties an older, better-educated mother might have had. You can be sure these girls are not going to Mommy and Me exercise classes. Low-paying jobs, all they can get, with little education and saddled with one or more children, are not conducive to stellar nutrition; see also the lacking education on that point. So there they are: bodies sprung by having too many children too young, unable, really to improve on the situation, whether because of lack of money, lack of time, or lack of inclination. (Fried dough tastes good. Dunkin Donuts donuts are relatively inexpensive, as is McDonalds).

However, having said that, other parts of my people-watching made me happy. I think it's partly because people like to hear things go bang, but I love the number of people who turn out for fireworks displays, and the variety. You get a real cross-section. Old people, young people, every shade of skin that exists on the earth, and just about every ethnicity and national origin. I got a particular bang out of the lady in a sari, nose ring and nine pounds of high-karat gold jewelry, happily tapping her foot to the Marine Hymn. Or, the tall young man (a father far too soon, too, but one who was involved and participating) carrying the little girl, who could only have been his--just as tall and lanky as Daddy, fitting together like a hand in a glove. The young Sikh boy, about 14, wearing a full turban, ushering along his two little brothers, little round pre-turban knots on their heads, with his clearly Hispanic friend for company.

It was one of those nights where I love America. I love the national holidays the best, really, because as nice as Christmas and Easter are, they leave someone out. Fourth of July? Watch fireworks. Eat the summer food of your choice. Include everyone. Thank the people who fight for freedom, even if they are fighting a misguided war--they didn't start it. Think about freedom. Think about the idealists who went to Philadelphia in July to write a document about freedom and the rights of mankind. Be glad that even if things aren't perfect, we're allowed (in spite of the Patriot Act--it profanes the name of patriot, and those men who were in Philly all those years ago are whirling in their graves) to talk about it. Eat ice cream!

I thought about all the places I've watched fireworks. My first ones were in the Washington DC area, and I'm willing to bet we saw the ones from the National Mall, from some other vantage point. Fireworks in north Germany, on an Army base. Fireworks at a golf course. Fireworks seen against the backdrop of the World Trade Center (you could see the Twin Towers from the front windows of my apartment in Brooklyn). Fireworks in Hartford, in Springfield, Mass (viewed from a bridge over the Connecticut River). Fireworks in Charleston, WV. On a flatbed truck, watching them being set off over a Louisiana bayou. The 4th of July in Munich, at a friends' apartment--four sparklers, and three of us sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and were happy to do it. In Vermont, in the field behind my husband's aunt's house, against the Green Mountains. I've also been to a Guy Fawke's celebration, stood in a damp English field on November 5, and thought how the Americans definitely chose the right time of the year for standing around at night shooting off fireworks!

Well, anyway, that's my take on the Fourth. Not a lot to do with losing weight, or body image, or anything like that, but really, the biggest thing on my mind at the moment.