in which i go on about my weight loss
I'm down to 160. One-hundred sixty pounds. Sometimes it says 162, sometimes it says 158, so I'm going with a nice round 160.
At the beginning of this year, I weighed 187 pounds.
I've lost twenty-seven pounds this year.
Four inches off my hips. Seven inches off my waist. Three inches around my arms.
I can lift more (when I've not got a fractured bone, that is). Do more crunches. Feel better, altogether.
I'm not where I want to be yet; the tone is just beginning to show in my arms and I think the last thing to go is going to be this extra around my middle that has been plaguing me since middle school. But I'm getting there.
I have been 'trying' to lose weight for, oh, a decade. Each year saying I was going to do it, looking at myself in the mirror, not liking what I saw, out of breath running for the bus to school, eating an entire bag of cookies then feeling sick, starting all over again, saying I was 'trying' to lose weight. But it wasn't something real. I wouldn't stop myself from eating because it was 'just this one thing'. I couldn't tell the difference between being hungry and thirsty, between being hungry and just being sad.
This year, or I suppose in the past year or so, I've become more attuned to what my body actually needs and not what my mind thinks sounds good. I can tell when I'm dehydrated. I can tell that one or two cookies was all I really wanted. I've been walking everywhere since I was young, but now when I walk I pay attention to what muscles are being worked, and do my best to work them more - swing my arms, stand up straight, walk faster. Instead of piling on the blankets when I'm cold at home (and I get cold all the time), I exercise. I found exercise that I like to do - dancing to music, jumping jacks, crunches. If I spend a lazy day watching Buffy, I do crunches and hand weights while I watch. I do my best to get in at least a half hour of hard, out-of-breath exercise a day.
I still snack. I can't not snack, but I've cut it down considerably. I no longer have to eat when I: read, go online, watch a movie, etc. And subsequently my tolerance for junk food has gone way down. When I walk past a donut shop, I actually feel faintly sick. I can no longer finish an entire Ben + Jerry's pint in one sitting. More importantly, I don't buy pints of Ben + Jerry's. If I can stop myself from craving it in the store, then it won't be there to tempt me when I get home.
Chocolate, yay! But I've finally become the sort of person who can eat part of a chocolate bar, and save the rest for some other time. I think about what I eat. I know my body needs potassium right now, for instance, and it will help with the bruising.
Let's see. In general, I don't drink soda. I used to just drink it, like everybody else, with my fast food meals, at parties, whatever, because it was there. Then some years back, I stopped. I thought, hey: cola is gross. I don't even like Pepsi or Coke, and it's all bad for me. Now I'll have a Sprite sometimes if I go to the Hofbrau, and I will of course have a root beer float or two in the summer. But mostly I satisfy my bubbly craving with fizzy water from Safeway. So that's probably another helpful little thing.
Anyway. Though I still have this poochy belly (and not a cute one like Fabienne talks about in Pulp Fiction, just extra flesh that must go away), I can see definition is places and it makes me happy. In my jawline. The muscle in people's necks that you can see when they turn their head, I've never had that before.
Though having already lost half the weight I need to lose is certainly the best booster, I have completely unrealistic goals that help me along. Like Katee Sackhoff. And Lena Heady in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Really, I just always wanted to dress like a guy, with those low-slung belts and wife-beaters. Not in some transgender way. The look just appealed to me. Dressy shirts with skinny mod ties, or how Chino dressed with the striped shirts and Dickies, that whole thing. And sure, mod girls in dresses and stockings, I wanted to look like that, too. And then, wonder of wonders, the girls I watched started dressing like guys, like Faith in BtVS sometimes, and now Starbuck, and I thought, that is what I want to look like, with the flat stomach and arms that don't jiggle, like I can run and not tire, like I can sit down and not worry about how my belly looks. But when I tried I just looked like a tubby girl in a tank top. All this extra flesh.
The Browncoats happened. I was happier than I'd ever been, not blaming my unhappiness on how I looked anymore (what a cop-out that was), because I was happy now and even with this extra flesh I was beautiful and happy and loved.
It's like the end of a movie, or some inspirational article in a women's magazine. Once I began to love myself how I was, not be disgusted every time I looked in the mirror, find a boy to love me (and some boys and girls along the way to just want me), once it became something other than the biggest deal in my entire life that supposedly held me back from everything else... well, that was when I was able to actually change my lifestyle and do something about it.
Evidently.
To be honest, a lot of this happened without my conscious knowledge. It didn't fill up every second of my day, I didn't count calories when I went out with my friends, I didn't actively stop eating all that is tasty and good. It just sort of gradually happened. I didn't even buy a scale until my pants started slipping down my hips and my shirts seemed too big. (Good thing I have a lot of stretchy shirts. I'm not buying new clothes for another ten or twenty pounds.)
I write this because I can get up and look in the mirror and only see the extra twenty or so pounds that still need to go away. It's silly, but I don't see as much of a difference as other people seem to, people who haven't seen me in a while, or even Cash, who says he can tell the difference and he sees me every day. I can choose to see that remaining weight and fret about it, or I can be happy about what I've accomplished thus far, and I'm going to go ahead and choose the latter.
In conclusion, I don't have a set 'goal weight'. What I want is to be in shape, toned, able. The BMI chart tells me that I should weigh 120-130 to be healthy, so that's a good number to try for, but if I manage to look like Katee up there in my icon and still weigh 158, then so be it.
At the beginning of this year, I weighed 187 pounds.
I've lost twenty-seven pounds this year.
Four inches off my hips. Seven inches off my waist. Three inches around my arms.
I can lift more (when I've not got a fractured bone, that is). Do more crunches. Feel better, altogether.
I'm not where I want to be yet; the tone is just beginning to show in my arms and I think the last thing to go is going to be this extra around my middle that has been plaguing me since middle school. But I'm getting there.
I have been 'trying' to lose weight for, oh, a decade. Each year saying I was going to do it, looking at myself in the mirror, not liking what I saw, out of breath running for the bus to school, eating an entire bag of cookies then feeling sick, starting all over again, saying I was 'trying' to lose weight. But it wasn't something real. I wouldn't stop myself from eating because it was 'just this one thing'. I couldn't tell the difference between being hungry and thirsty, between being hungry and just being sad.
This year, or I suppose in the past year or so, I've become more attuned to what my body actually needs and not what my mind thinks sounds good. I can tell when I'm dehydrated. I can tell that one or two cookies was all I really wanted. I've been walking everywhere since I was young, but now when I walk I pay attention to what muscles are being worked, and do my best to work them more - swing my arms, stand up straight, walk faster. Instead of piling on the blankets when I'm cold at home (and I get cold all the time), I exercise. I found exercise that I like to do - dancing to music, jumping jacks, crunches. If I spend a lazy day watching Buffy, I do crunches and hand weights while I watch. I do my best to get in at least a half hour of hard, out-of-breath exercise a day.
I still snack. I can't not snack, but I've cut it down considerably. I no longer have to eat when I: read, go online, watch a movie, etc. And subsequently my tolerance for junk food has gone way down. When I walk past a donut shop, I actually feel faintly sick. I can no longer finish an entire Ben + Jerry's pint in one sitting. More importantly, I don't buy pints of Ben + Jerry's. If I can stop myself from craving it in the store, then it won't be there to tempt me when I get home.
Chocolate, yay! But I've finally become the sort of person who can eat part of a chocolate bar, and save the rest for some other time. I think about what I eat. I know my body needs potassium right now, for instance, and it will help with the bruising.
Let's see. In general, I don't drink soda. I used to just drink it, like everybody else, with my fast food meals, at parties, whatever, because it was there. Then some years back, I stopped. I thought, hey: cola is gross. I don't even like Pepsi or Coke, and it's all bad for me. Now I'll have a Sprite sometimes if I go to the Hofbrau, and I will of course have a root beer float or two in the summer. But mostly I satisfy my bubbly craving with fizzy water from Safeway. So that's probably another helpful little thing.
Anyway. Though I still have this poochy belly (and not a cute one like Fabienne talks about in Pulp Fiction, just extra flesh that must go away), I can see definition is places and it makes me happy. In my jawline. The muscle in people's necks that you can see when they turn their head, I've never had that before.
Though having already lost half the weight I need to lose is certainly the best booster, I have completely unrealistic goals that help me along. Like Katee Sackhoff. And Lena Heady in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Really, I just always wanted to dress like a guy, with those low-slung belts and wife-beaters. Not in some transgender way. The look just appealed to me. Dressy shirts with skinny mod ties, or how Chino dressed with the striped shirts and Dickies, that whole thing. And sure, mod girls in dresses and stockings, I wanted to look like that, too. And then, wonder of wonders, the girls I watched started dressing like guys, like Faith in BtVS sometimes, and now Starbuck, and I thought, that is what I want to look like, with the flat stomach and arms that don't jiggle, like I can run and not tire, like I can sit down and not worry about how my belly looks. But when I tried I just looked like a tubby girl in a tank top. All this extra flesh.
The Browncoats happened. I was happier than I'd ever been, not blaming my unhappiness on how I looked anymore (what a cop-out that was), because I was happy now and even with this extra flesh I was beautiful and happy and loved.
It's like the end of a movie, or some inspirational article in a women's magazine. Once I began to love myself how I was, not be disgusted every time I looked in the mirror, find a boy to love me (and some boys and girls along the way to just want me), once it became something other than the biggest deal in my entire life that supposedly held me back from everything else... well, that was when I was able to actually change my lifestyle and do something about it.
Evidently.
To be honest, a lot of this happened without my conscious knowledge. It didn't fill up every second of my day, I didn't count calories when I went out with my friends, I didn't actively stop eating all that is tasty and good. It just sort of gradually happened. I didn't even buy a scale until my pants started slipping down my hips and my shirts seemed too big. (Good thing I have a lot of stretchy shirts. I'm not buying new clothes for another ten or twenty pounds.)
I write this because I can get up and look in the mirror and only see the extra twenty or so pounds that still need to go away. It's silly, but I don't see as much of a difference as other people seem to, people who haven't seen me in a while, or even Cash, who says he can tell the difference and he sees me every day. I can choose to see that remaining weight and fret about it, or I can be happy about what I've accomplished thus far, and I'm going to go ahead and choose the latter.
In conclusion, I don't have a set 'goal weight'. What I want is to be in shape, toned, able. The BMI chart tells me that I should weigh 120-130 to be healthy, so that's a good number to try for, but if I manage to look like Katee up there in my icon and still weigh 158, then so be it.