Nadia

Today, I thought it would be great motivation to buy some new clothes.

Okay, that is not really true. I got a little crazy this morning and went on a bit of a shopping spree online. It is so easy to just click click click! Anyway, I ended up with a fair amount of clothes. So _then_ I decided to use this as motivation. I am not going to even look at the clothes until I am down a few pounds to 155 and make up the cash I spent by extra hours at work (15 extra hours eep!). Anyway, so that is how my spending spree turned into some motivation to get more hours in and stick closer to my calories/work out more. tee-hee.
Happy Friday!

I have watched a lot of shows about losing weight and/or getting healthy, and most of them show a period where the people have to face the reality of how they got to where they are, in order to learn how to prevent getting back there. So, although I get the general idea - ate too much, exercised too little - of how I got here, I thought perhaps there is something to this and I should write it all out.

So, okay. The first time I remember being “fat”, I was probably around 8. My mom & I were in the bathroom doing something, maybe cutting my hair. She looked at my belly and said something like, “Oh, honey your stomach is growing a bit too fast” or something to that effect. I remember at the time being pretty upset by that but not showing her. I figured that it was karma from looking at a pudgy girl in my class and thinking, “why would she want to be fat? why does she not want to look like the rest of us?”. I mean, I specifically remember where I was in the playground when I had thought that. Anyway, for a very long time I figured it was God or something paying me back for being ignorant.

After that, that little extra belly got bigger and bigger. I was a kid, there was not exactly much I could control. When I was around 12, I remember going to visit this friend of my mother’s with her. She was an older lady, like 70 or 80. She had said something to my mom like, “Oh, my granddaughter is a little fatty, too”. I am not sure if she thought I would not hear or if she was just that rude, but my poor mom talked really quickly about something else, I guess hoping I would not have heard. Until that point, I think I was a bit in denial. I felt fat, but was hoping that no one else noticed it. That really confirmed it for me.

I was a poor child. I was raised with two siblings by a single mother who most of my childhood did not have a job. She was overweight, and I am not sure when that came, because photographs of her as a teenager, 20, & 30-years old, she was always lean. Perhaps her metabolism caught up with her after pregnancy. Regardless, with little money to buy us toys and the like, she often rewarded us with food treats. Good grades? Have some cake. Finished your homework? Time for dessert. Et cetera. I think it is proven that people in poor areas generally are more likely to be overweight because of the quality of food that is regularly available. This is still the case. Even thinking on a low scale, I can buy a frozen “dinner” for about $3 that is filling, tasty, and only about 300 calories. For 99 cents, though, I could buy a value menu cheeseburger, running about 425 calories. For only a quarter, I could get a snack cake that is 350 calories. Of course, that is just one set of examples, but you get the point. Perhaps if we had more money, we would have had a lot more chicken, vegetables, and fruit, instead of red meat, pasta, and potatoes.

Unfortunately, food also was used as a bandage. Hit your funny bone? Poor thing, how about and ice cream sandwich? Did bad on a test? Oh, that is okay, how about I make you some cookies? I have come to notice this more and more now that I am back home, because my mother still does it. If anything goes bad in her life, she eats. If she wants to celebrate, she eats.

If I am within earshot, she will constantly be suggesting foods to me. “Honey, you have that ground turkey in there, don’t forget” “Okay, not now, thanks” “Okay, we have pizza too” “I am not hungry” “Okay, well we do have ice cream if you want some” Ugh. Even when I am eating, she will be suggesting more food and/or desserts. I do not spend much time directly with her, but it is apparent when I do. Seeing it now, I feel like a pig that she is trying desperately to fatten up to win the blue ribbon! Anyway, my childhood was a lot like, but I would continually say “yes” not knowing. I think I was almost 14-15 before I even realized that too much food=fat.

At that time, my mother went on a diet. She had been to a few programs before, but this one she was very vocal about because she wanted us to keep her on track. Her diet really hurt the rest of us. She lost a bit of weight but gained it back because she kept going on and off and on and off. But when she was on it, she would eat vicariously through the rest of us. She would buy prohibited foods and then give them to us so “at least someone can enjoy them”. My big sister and I kept getting larger and larger. My little sister has a great metabolism so she was fine. Then at about 16, being one of only a handful of teenagers at my school with a potbelly, I tried to go on a diet of my own. It did work okay, but I think it was like any diet and I just went back to eating the same things and got it back.

A lot of my teenage years were spent trying to “sneak” a diet. Throwing buns of burgers to the dog when no one was looking, pretending to use dressing and not really, et cetera. I was like a kid trying to hide their vegetables in a plant, except I was trying to hide the “bad” things. Why? Because of my weight, my mother was worried (I guess) that I would develop an eating disorder. Bulimia & anorexia were very popular issues on the news and such around then. I remember anytime that I felt I was losing a bit of weight, she would like come over and kind of viciously grab my wrist and make sure she could not touch her thumb to her finger around it. When I asked her she just said “I want to make sure you are eating right.” Newsflash, if you want to make sure I am eating right, cook a vegetable once in a while and stop with the pizza. My siblings were also pretty bad about making fun of me, whether it was to say I was fat or to say I was trying to not be fat.

We also drank a lot as kids. I am talking 2-liters of pop (each!!) every day. I guess they were cheap. Not sure why. I think I had also heard that drinking a lot of water was good so figured drinking lots of pop which has water in it was just as good. How terrible now to realize I was consuming over 800 calories everyday just by trying to make myself less fat.

I was not active at all as a kid. I mostly stayed inside like a hermit. Video games helped. I got excited about volleyball for a bit and became very passionate about it. There were other things that happened, but somewhere I caught and article in a parenting magazine that said something like, “if your child is overweight, volleyball might be a good choice for them, because it is a very easy sport”. That really hurt. Here I felt like I was doing good and helping myself and that really was a setback to make me feel like I had been playing pool.

Because of the money issues (I guess?), we were terribly unhygienic kids. I had no friends and I thought it was because I was fat, but I can not imagine that the hygiene did not play a part. I remember wearing the same jeans and underwear to school everyday for at least a month. Showers/baths were something reserved for special occasions. My mother actually wanted so badly to keep the water bill down, that she did not keep towels in the bathroom. We would get out of a bath or shower and put our clothes directly on. It was an awful feeling. When we stayed at hotels, she would explain the big towels were “pool towels”. I was 19 before I knew any better. My husband laughed at me when I came out of the shower soaked. At first he thought I was joking around, but when he realized, he got his towel and “taught me”. How foolish did I feel? Anyway, because of the hygiene issues, I very rarely saw myself naked and I very rarely spent time outside of school with anyone else.

When I moved out, I had a lot, lot of issues. It was about two years after moving out, that I moved into an apartment with an exercise room. I was very excited and used it a lot. I would go down at 2 in the morning and use the rower. I would go up and down the flights of stairs. I would get up in the morning and use the treadmill. I also found an aerobics class on television that I would do and tape and do again and again. If I remember correctly, I was still under the skewed impression that you needed better eating habits OR better exercise. I often made sweets and did the same as my mother to use food as comfort. If my husband had a bad day, I would make sure to cook something. If he was upset, I would find some food, et cetera.

After 18, I never did a “diet”. I realized from my mom alone that it was stupid to eliminate something temporarily. I cooked a lot of rich foods until about my third year with my husband. Some overweight friends at my job helped me because they were doing Weight Watchers. I never joined, but started using the points to make better choices and mind fat and calories. I would have Special K instead of cookies, one serving instead of 4, et cetera. That year was good for me. I had some friends, a stupid job but a job anyway, a car, a husband, and a house. The next year, not so much. Divorce came, car gone, house gone, job gone. That all went down in a way that is a whole other thing, so I had better not get into it right now. Anyway, I eventually moved into my own place. It was a really awful apartment in a terrible part of town. I never felt safe. When I was moving in, there was someone in the bus shelter selling cocaine. I could not believe my eyes. I had only ever heard of such things from television. I remember the mover like taking me by my shoulders and turning me. He told me that I had better be careful and such and not look when I see things like that. He was a really nice guy, actually, but anyway. That town, that section of town, the job I got there, and the people I knew there just crushed me. It hardened me so much and I hate that in a way I lost “my innocence” to that city about so many things. Again, that could be a whole other story. Regardless, divorce not fun, being on my own the first time, not as fun as it should have been. There my eating habits got a little worse. I was not snacking all the time or eating a lot of sugar, but the issue came to money. I had very little and I could buy a pound of beef for $1. I bought lots of beef and usually had beef and potatoes or beef and macaroni. Lots of red meat that year. I also bought a treadmill with intention to change. That caused a lot of problems externally, but I was proud of it. Shortly after, I had to move back home.

With the move back, came the mom consoling again. I embraced it for about 6 months. I was sad and at a low point in my life, and did not mind so much being comforted with food. I finally decided to step on the scale and have been exercising and watching what I eat since. I started with some Tae-Bo videos and then started watching calories. Now I still watch calories and do treadmill/elliptical at the Y. Soon, I hope to be taking kickboxing classes and maybe some others. I have also done wonders in terms of vegetables. For someone who used to only eat potatoes, I now like (and want!) almost all vegetables. So, I still have a long way to go, but that is where I have been. That is why I am fat.

Last night, I got the urge to see some past weights.  I logged onto my old Fitday account and was actually surprised to see that in-and-out I had weight entries basically all the way back to 2002.  I was almost disappointed to see that most of my weights were lower than I am now.  I guess because I have lost so much, so it is frustrating to know that I am still not to the point where before I felt I had to lose weight.  Bah.  The lowest I ever recorded on Fitday was 145.  So that is a little goal for me to push toward.  I think I could achieve that by May.  We will see.  I am going to push.  Really hard.  I want this. 

So, I have set a goal date for that for myself of May 18th.  Now, that actually gives me a relative ton of time.  It gives me 16 weeks to lose 14 pounds.  That is completely doable. 

I have plans to start visiting the Y a bare minimum of 2 days a week.  This alone will kick my water habit back into gear.  I also hopefully hopefully hopefully will also have a kickboxing class once a week and think I will do a Tae-Bo hour at least once a week. 

I think it might be feasible to go for my ultimate goal of 132.2 by then.  It would be about 2 pounds a week.  I will certainly be pushing toward that, but I will not set my hopes on it, because 2 pounds a week is pretty high for me and I know that getting closer and closer to my goal, it will be harder and harder to lose weight.  So, I will shoot for 132.2, but will make sure to get to 145 if possible.  :)  I think I can do it.  I really do! 

My night was going okay and then the subject of my one sister came up.  She wants to get together soon and this upset me very very much.  She has become increasingly difficult to deal with and her boyfriend always has been.  The last time I saw her, she called me “Grimace”.  It took me many tears to let that go and thinking about seeing her again so soon just got to me.  I took comfort in pizza, but had already budgeted it earlier, so it was okay.  I just do not know why she gets to me so much.  I think part of it is because she does not even seem to be intending to get to me, and I think the other part of it is because she should very well know better.  In her mind, she has been “fat” and has through drastic measures to change that.  I do not think she was ever technically overweight, but she started cutting out pretty much everything-meat, vegetables, fruit, rice, flour, sugar, most dairy, so many things I can not even list.  So she eats only like beans and sugar free chocolates every day and takes all sorts of diet drugs and things.  I mean, she really has a bad mindset and probably should see a psychologist.  She is tiny and it is a terribly obvious eating disorder.  So, who is she to be calling me names?  :(  Grr.  I would like to just get over it, but it will just be a matter of weeks before I see her again, apparently.  There are so many issues I have against her-it goes way beyond mean names. 

I hate to say it, but at least I will have someone to picture as a target when I start kickboxing.  If I can get the aggression and animosity out there, perhaps I will not crumble to tears every time I see or think of her. 

Last night, through odd reasons, I went to look at the YMCA program guide for this winter and discovered that they have kickboxing classes!  This is something I have been interested in doing for quite some time.  I just adored Tae-Bo, and am really excited about signing up.  There is a bit of hangup because there will be other people there, but I am assuming mostly it will be other women.  They will probably be much more of the “fit” type, though.  That does sort of intimidate and scare me, but I will be there for me.  Anyway, do not want to think about the other people to much because it will scare me out of doing it.  Besides, I am much much better off now then when I started doing Tae-Bo videos and was so glad no one else was there.  I am freaking forty pounds less!  It is a weird thing, but especially with daily weigh-ins, it is hard to realize just how many overall pounds that is.  I mean, I go through the oh okay well first 10 pounds is just water weight and then the next 10 pounds was probably due to hair cuts and trimming my nails and shaving my legs and such over a year and then another 10 pounds well I was probably bloated from my period or something but after 40 pounds it is getting increasingly hard to not just accept it heh. 

Anyway, kickboxing!  Woohoo!  So excited.  I had looked into kickboxing a few months ago but found the only place to offer it was $60/month with a maximum 4 classes a month, early hours that I would have to drastically schedule around, and was a good 35 minutes from work which is already an hour away.  It, unfortunately, was just something I could not do at the time.  I had been pretty pumped about the possibility but eventually had to rule it out.  So to find out yesterday that the place I already go to has a weekly class that is a very reasonable price, wow!  I will still have to work around it with my job but not nearly as much as the other one would have been. 

If the class gives me 30% of the feeling that Tae-Bo used to leave me with, it will be awesome!   Also, it will obviously help me do more because it is a set time and date, so if I miss it I know it is a wasted week and can not go again until the next week.  I think this will really help me keep on track.  It will encourage me to go regularly throughout the week so that I can do better and better at the class.  Totally psyched! 

There are certain things which will pop into my head every once in awhile. They can appear and just as quickly disappear, or they can linger for a bit of contemplation and then I will hide them away. Where will I put them? I do not know. Somewhere far away, but they come back from time to time.

I am lonely. So lonely. Usually it is okay and I kind of live for today and figure tomorrow things will change. But from time to time the thought comes into my head I am not a very young person and I have no friends. I mean no friends. I do not know if I ever will. This thought comes and I cry and cry and wonder and think of reasons and excuses but nothing definite. And then I lock it away into that far place and hope it will be some time until it comes back into my head.
I do not have a “man” in my life, and am not sure if I ever will in the future. I could play the “out-of-a-long-relationship” card in my head for a good deal of time, but that time has passed. I realize it is not like I am against relationships, I just have not had any “offers”. I would feel a bit uncomfortable if I started getting close to someone right now because I am not happy with my life and there are a lot of things I want to change or complete before that. But time keeps moving on. So I put that into the far away place.

No one knows me. No one. I am a different person to everyone I meet, and for every group I know, there are four or five majors pieces of me which I hide or straight out lie about. I sometimes almost suffer identity issues from all the secrets I keep about myself and it is hard to keep track of what I have told whom. People at my work no nothing about my personal life, my family does not know what I do for a living or about my marriage, et cetera. No one really knows all of me. I am private, but like any secret, it always feels good to get it off your chest to at least one person. But I do not have anyone whom I trust enough. So off it goes into the safe.

There was a very traumatic event that happened last year. I put it away immediately before I can think too much about it.

I live with my mother now and we are fine with each other, but she did some terrible things when I was younger and even when I was not-that-much-younger and I still have not forgiven her for them. But instead of forgiving, I forget them instead and put them in the back.

My marriage failed. I tried and there were things I could or should have done. And there were good things and bad things about the divorce. A lot of what pops up and I put back have to do with negative things about my ex. I often push them away and only think about the good things, which I guess is good, but then I feel it was all me, which it was not. But there is no point in dividing blame now, so I put it away along with all the immense hurt that the breakup caused me.

I once was justifiably evicted. I did the wrong thing and knew it everyday and just could not bring myself to make things better. This is something important to remember and to learn from, but I can not deal with it, so away it goes.

I think about death and disasters _a_ _lot_. Not about taking my own life or anything like that, but just like “What was the last thing I said to my sister in case I get into a crash? /// If I have a heart attack today I will feel bad that I am still fat for the funeral. /// If I fall on the ice, will my mom be overwhelmed with expenses from services? /// I will feel bad that I never uploaded my pictures if the house burned down today” et cetera. I do not think that it is normal at all, but such things never stay in the far away place. They constantly pop up. 5-6 times a day.

I had a really bad year. It changed me in probably some pretty bad ways. It hardened me. Pretty much everything about that year goes far away and no one knows much at all about it, except the basic parts.

Why did I type all this out for only myself and strangers to see? Because they all popped into my head at once tonight out of nowhere at all and it was overwhelmingly sad and I just had to get it out.

I have a feeling I should see a therapist to work through a lot of things, but have no idea where to go or how to go about it or how much it would cost. At least my water is back on.

The last few days have sucked. I have been without water in my house for three days. The first day was no big deal, I went to the gas station for the bathroom and to wash my hands and brush my teeth. No biggy, it was a weekend anyway. Had nowhere specific to go or people to see. I did find, though, that I was not drinking any water (because I did not want to have to go out to use the bathroom) and this made me feel sluggish and eat more. The second day was pretty miserable. I planned on waking up and driving to the Y then going to work. This way, I could get some exercise in and use the nice, hot shower. I got about fifteen minutes into the drive, though, and could not make it any farther. The roads were terrible and I should have recognized and accepted that before getting as far as I did. I turned around and came back home - to no water. This was getting uncool. The gas station bathroom is only so clean and two days without washing my hair was definitely taking its toll. I avoided all liquids and did not want to go inside anywhere. Today I woke and the water still was not fixed and I threw a royal hissy fit to myself. I looked in the mirror and decided not to be the hobo at the gas station again. I spent about an hour scooping snow from the yard into pots, heating those pots on the stove, pouring the miniscule amount of water that a pot full of snow produces when heated into the back of the toilet, and repeating. Not exactly the workout I had in mind. Then I had to get enough water for the sink to wash my hands and then more water for a bowl to rinse. When all was said and done and I could flush, I ended up using chunks of snow with the water to be able to really scrub my hands. It seemed to work very well. They smell really nice, anyway. Someone is trying to fix the water now, but I just feel my whole 3-day weekend was quite a letdown. I actually had big plans for today. But obviously, I could not face another human being with three days of filth in my hair and on my body. I just hate this. Saying it is unfair seems kind of obvious and kind of pointless. But I had to vent. Here I sit. Dry and filthy.

Well, I have been myspace blogging for some time now, but decided I need to add another blog to increase my accountability.  My highest weight was 199.8 and I started counting calories, adding a bit of exercise, and drinking more water.  I am now at 162.  Right now, I am a bit offtrack because of a lot of things that have happened over the last two weeks, but want to get right back on.

Right now, though, I am pretty discouraged.  I mean, I lost almost 20% of my weight and yet I see no difference.  I see no difference in the mirror and see no difference in photographs.  People who have not seen me since the “before” weight have not noticed.  One such person recently referred to me as a “blob”.  I am 5′5″, so I am about 8 pounds from no longer being “overweight” by technical terms.  I know 8 pounds will not make any big difference.  I will still have a huge gut/potbelly, fat legs from top to bottom, a doublechin, arm fat, et cetera.  I guess I was just hoping 30+ pounds would make a difference.  It is not like I “cheated” and took magic pills or starved myself.  I did it the way I thought was “right”.  I guess I need to work on toning, but can you tone away a doublechin and a belly?