Bite me

Exercise.  I get it.  It is next to impossible to lose a significant amount of weight, or to keep it off, if exercise isn't part of your daily life. Period.  And I even like it.  I'm not talking about the donning a lycra suit and making macho with the hard bodies at Gold's Gym kind of exercise.  I mean walking at a determined pace, or dancing my #ss off to some 80's tunes.  A 2 mile walk to the 7/11 with my kiddo (sugar free Slurpees?  Come on!) is the most fun EVER. The things that a 7 year old will say, notice, try out while walking are infinitely varied and amusing. And I still work up a sweat climbing our neighborhood hills.

I completely get it when Michelle, our group leader, and supposed diet Nazi, makes assignments that are designed to push us out of our comfort zones. "Include 10 minutes of an activity  you have never tried before." "Do something outside instead of indoors - or vice versa." These mandates are meant to assist we the round in embracing movement as a part of life.  Hurray for new things!

HOWEVER. The assignment this week is to get up early to exercise.  Great!  I already get up at 5:15am every weekday to participate in "Walk Club" with my daughter at her school before class. And when asked to share my plan for incorporating early rising into my life? I lay out this fact for the group members, who nod appreciatively. Right up to the moment Michelle asks, "So what are you going to do this weekend to meet the assignment?" Um...SLEEP THE F**K IN? Roll over on my pillow and thank the Supreme Being that I can remain in bed until my kiddo wakes me at the luxurious hour of 7am? What do you THINK I am going to do - given the fact that I get up before some farmers every other day of the freaking week?

It would seem, from the audible gasps, and looks of veiled shock that a rejoinder to your group leader consisting of the words "Bite me!" is not considered an appropriate response. Good to know.

The Long Good-bye

How did all my resolve melt away into to pretty much nine months of heavy eating and, yes, MORE pounds? No ready excuses, except to say that I? Love. Food.  My faithful diet pal and loving sister, Melissa, and I decided in July that it would be wise to re-visit the land of medically supervised weight loss - if only to keep from dropping dead and leaving our children motherless - but due to the endless hoop-jumping required to get into the program, we celebrated the end of eating real food with a series of what can only be called Roman Food Orgies.

If you have never been overweight and have never felt the need to diet, well first let me just say...DIE. NOW. But seriously, if you have either been blessed with some sort of miraculous metabolism that actually allows you to eat yummy, cheesy goodness in mass quantities without also exploding out of your jeans, or you are one of those rare persons who has an internal meter that says, "Hey!  You know, you have eaten enough now. The salad and three kidney beans you just consumed has made you full and happy - so stop eating!" you may not understand the need to bid adieu to every one of your favorite food haunts before beginning a serious diet. Let me lay that out for you...

Imagine, if you will, a party at which there is an international group of friends gathered to shout bon voyage as you prepare to sail off to a distant land.  The tall, slim Italian is there. The creamy skinned Greek. The burly Southerner.  There are representatives from every food culture on Earth, as well as one for each of the regions of the US. And you feel, deep within your soul, that you MUST bid each and every one of them a personal, and heartfelt, good-bye.

Yup. I personally ate my way through India (farewell creamy vegetable dish that I cannot pronounce!), Greece (Oh hummus!  How I love you!), Italy (okay, we had to part company more than once - Alfredo! I will miss you!  Stuffed shells!  Don't be a stranger! Tortellini, keep in touch!), Thailand (Pad Prik Chicken, farewell!)...well, you get the picture. So the long good-bye from July to September 1st resulted in 10 more pounds of which I must now rid myself.  Oh, but it was bliss while it lasted!

It is safe to say that I...might...have a small food addiction.

Pearl's Curse

A lot of fat people don't know why, specifically, they are fat.  Oh yes, they can say with some authority that it is because they eat too much cheese, or they last exercised during some tenseness over Y2K, but they can't say for CERTAIN that they know why they have grown to maximum density.

Unlike those poor sods, I can say with some alacrity that I have more than a good hunch as to why I have packed on so many pounds that I once again shop in the Micheline Tire Person department at WalMart. There is definitely some cheese and lack of exercise involved, but really for this fat girl it is all due to my cousin, Pearl.

No, seriously.  I have it all figured out. This hideous slide into fatdom is a direct result of a family curse placed upon me by a jealous relative.  That kind of curse, is of course, both the most powerful and most permanent you can cast. Without doubt, I have Pearl to blame.

I remember the moment so clearly...my sister Judith had died quite suddenly and without warning, of a cardiac arrest in January of 2007. My remaining siblings and I traveled north to Bremerton, Washington to clean out her apartment, close her dealings with this world, to have her memorial service, and to bury her in a country cemetary one snowy day. It was during the winter of thinness, the only time in my life when I could wear a size 10 and actually liked being photographed.

After the memorial service, we all gathered for a family dinner at the bed and breakfast belonging to our cousin Ellen.  Pearl, who is my um...second cousin, by virtue of being my great aunt's daughter, yelled out to her husband, "Hurry up Clank! Take a picture of Anne-Elizabeth...while she's STILL THIN!" I turned toward the sound of her voice, and I SWEAR TO GOD my thighs grew bigger by two inches that very moment. I didn't eat a single huckleberry crepe that trip, but Pearl's curse caused an immediate, and continuing weight gain that is still evident on my person. Bitch.

I would gladly stuff Pearl's mouth full of brie and duct tape it shut in hopes of suffocating her if I could bring myself to go north again. And really? Clank?  Who has a husband named Clank? Pearl's prediction that I would gain back all my weight within a year hung over me like some mythical sword - waiting to drop fat from the heavens the moment I let my guard down and mistook a pound of sirloin for a veggie burger.

So now, I have to take all this off again. I plan to use Pearl for that too. They say living well is the best revenge. Perhaps, but walking into the the next family reunion a size 10, and then stuffing her face with brie wouldn't feel too badly either.

Leaving the field...

or lessons learned from a freshman football player.

Today my nephew Ryan played the last game of his freshman football season. If this was a Disney movie, his team would have won the day with just enough points not to have made the other team look like a bunch of snotty-nosed 14 year olds. Ahh, Disney.

But, as we all know, this is NOT a Disney movie, so naturally Ryan's team lost. 16 to 6. And at times they really did look like a bunch of snotty-nosed 14 year olds.  They were gawky. There were errors. The ball was thrown WAAAAY over the head of the kid "receiving" it, and, when you could see through the legs of the players on the sidelines, it looked like a pretty dismal game.

But. Our boys put every muscle into this game. They fought hard, they fought with heart. And when the whole thing was over they faced the crowd of family that had turned out to cheer them on and performed their own cheer. They left us with the understanding that they did their best to make us all proud.

It is going to take me a LOOONNNGGGG time to get the extra weight off. I did the Disney thing once. The weight came off like magic, leaving me thin and bewildered as to what to do with that new body. I went through all the stuff that you go through at 14 - hormones, and new love, uncertainty about my place in the world, hormones, feelings of being rejected for not staying the same, and hormones. It frankly was less like becoming the Barbie I had always imagined my thin self to be, and more like morphing into a 41 year old version of a preteen. Not pretty. Not comfortable.

So now I have to fight my way back to thin. And, like Ryan's team I am not going to win every game. I am going to make "I ate the entire box of wheat thins" choices sometimes. But I have the option to lay down and give up without a fight, or I can stand up and give a cheer even when the crowd is disappointed. I can choose to move on, look to another season, and know that at the end of the day I won't be perfect. I will have chosen to give a cheer at the moment that I needed one myself. And I will have done my best.

Comfort food

Something really awful happened yesterday. We found out that my sister Stephanie's boss was killed at Ft. Hood. Stephanie loved this man. He was not just her boss, he was her friend. No words to explain this thing.

When something happens for which there are no words food seems to speak very loudly. I went off plan in a big way. I told myself that I would not weigh this morning, would just jump right back on track and let things settle out on Monday at my self-imposed weigh-in. I didn't keep my promise. I weighed. Up 2 pounds. Well, duh. But it hurts to move backward and so, naturally, and because it always makes things better to repeat bad behavior, I ate a box of reduced fat Wheat Thins and a carton of lowfat cottage cheese to make myself feel better. Yikes!

Part of me is hanging on to being the fat girl. Part of me needs to know it is okay to run to food for comfort, part of me is reassured by the thought that food will always be there, even when I lose someone dear. That is of course, if I live through the diabetes, infections, high blood pressure, and general ill health to survive someone dear, to actually out live them. Highly unlikely if food continues to occupy this role in my life.

So I made a terrible choice at breakfast today. I can take more steps, eat right the rest of the day, make my mind up to continue forward without dwelling on the past. I can. I will.

Signs

As if I needed more impetus to get going on the weight loss, the universe decided to send me a couple of signs.

First, my oven broke.  Not much of a sign you say?  Wrong-o!  I am the baking queen, she of eight types of cookies in one mass session gearing up for Christmas. The gal with dough under every nail. Having no oven, in fall no less, is like having a hand removed.  The one that stuffs home-made goodies into my mouth.  So...having no oven is most definitely a sign that the stars (or at least the kitchen appliances) are aligning favorably for me to eat more healthy.

Then my Disney Days calendar had this to say, below a picture of Monsters, Inc.'s Sully doing push-ups: "Hey, less talk, more pain, marshmallow boy!" Okay, this is more weak but still, even Disney is telling me to work out more.

One day down - good eating, walked over 10,000 steps, and ready to take on tomorrow!  Just, well, my entire life to go. We can do this!

Is it Monday, again?

I do a lot of dieting with my sister. Though there are four of us sisters, plus one in heaven, and a brother we conscripted into the family along the way, it is just the two of us with kids who seem to worry about our weight.  Not that we are the only ones who should be worried mind you.

I call us the wide-angle lens family.  Dad weighed on average about 400 pounds for most of his life. Mom was heavy, and the rest of us range from 75 to 150 pounds overweight.  Except the conscripted brother - I am convinced that genetics really do play some part in this struggle.  Having avoided the Powell genetic pool, my brother remains slim and healthy.  He also eats well and works out.  Go figure.

ANYWAY...my youngest sister and I tend to do a lot of our eating, and dieting, together.  And we are headed out on another foray into weight loss land tomorrow morning.  Weighins at our respective homes, solemn vows of healthy eating and exercizing, accompanied by encouraging phone calls along the way to ensue with the rising MONDAY sun. Yeehaw!

I have no readers at this point, not even family. I may never have readers.  But, if you somehow stumble across this blog you are now a part of my accountability entourage. Melissa is the first, but you are welcome to join too.