Major Updates
Well, I figured it’s about that time of year again. Yep. The time where I write an update truly befitting of an online journal. Something informative, with some depth and insight into the mind of its author. Something I can look back on 5 years from now and say “Oh, so that’s what was going on in my life then.”
First and foremost - because I am immensely proud of myself for actually managing to do it - I’ve lost weight. 43 pounds, to be exact ( that translates into 19.5 kg or 3.07 stone for those of you using the metric and traditional British systems ). Since I have spent the better part of my life ( from the age of about 9 on up ) overweight - sometimes borderline obese - I’m very happy about this; I’ve not felt this good in years! I can move about much more freely, I have more energy, everyone’s been commenting on how nice I look lately, and I no longer get depressed when I look in the mirror. Now the weight charts are kind to me, and with the exception of the Anorexics’ Ideal Weight Chart they all classify me in the “healthy weight” range. *does happy dance*
And just because I’m feeling especially pleased with my progress, here are some recent pics of me taken in mid-October in that lovely Chinese dress I bought in Hawaii and could never fit into until I lost about 22 pounds from what I’d weighed then:
The hairstyle I’m wearing is called “Witch Under a Brushpile”. Yes, I know I need to have something done with my insanely-frizzy wild-woman hair. Any suggestions? I’m not quite sure what to do with it. And I apologize ahead of time for my parents’ messy room. My dad owns the camera and he insisted on taking the pictures in there because he happened to be in there at the time and didn’t feel like walking into a more flattering room. He and my brother are some of the world’s biggest slobs. The rest of us can’t keep up with them. ‘Nough said.
Since these pics, I’ve lost another 6 pounds, bringing me to my 43-pound grand total so far. I still have another 8 pounds to go before I reach my ideal dream-weight, but I’ve come so far I just can’t help but to run around spreading my joy to everywhere. I did it! I made it! It’s FANTASTIC!!
One thing I’d like to point out, because SO many people out there are pushing rapid-loss weight plans ( that usually fail ), is that this weight didn’t melt off all at once. I started in April this year after having seen my mother successfully shed 30-something pounds, stepping on the scale myself, and hating the number I saw. I’ve been at it ever since, and there are good days and bad, but it’s taken me 7 MONTHS to get where I am today! That works out to a loss of about 6 pounds a month. Yes, you can safely and effectively lose weight at a bit of a faster rate ( 8-10 pounds per month, especially if you don’t want it coming back ), but not if you love food and detest exercise as much as I do.
I did this without a gym membership and without any forbidden foods, eating what I wanted, including pizza and chocolate.
My secret? The first thing I did right away was eliminate sodas and other needlessly-fattening drinks from my main diet and elevate them to “treat status”. One 20-ouncer of Coca-Cola ( one of my favorite sodas - I hate the “Diet” kinds ) has about 240 calories, and that’s just self-defeating when you’re trying to lose weight. I waged an all-out war against fat and calories, pushing the most fattening faves of mine to “treat status” and watching my caloric intake, eating far more salads, rice, low-fat pre-made foods, and whole grains ( I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian and have been for the past 17 years, so meat wasn’t an issue for me ). I am not crazy about fruit, and the kinds I do like tend to be too expensive to enjoy very often, so to the dismay of dietitians everywhere my fruit intake didn’t change. I decreased my portion sizes to meager levels and drank more water and tea to feel more full. Sometimes I’d substitute meals with a Slimfast shake. Overall I’d say my caloric intake was - and still is - between 1,000 to 1,200 calories most days. Some days I had less, some days more, but I always tried to make up for overeating by eating less the next day. Whenever I went several days being “good” on my diet, or if I felt I was making exceptional progress, or if I just needed it, I’d help myself to a treat, be it a bar of chocolate, some pizza, french fries, or a Dairy Queen Blizzard. It tasted really good and helped me feel less deprived. Also, you’d be surprised at just how relatively low-fat and healthy Hershey’s “Special Dark” candy bars really are.
I also started drinking at least a cup - oftentimes two or more - of green tea daily because I’d been reading and hearing constantly from many different sources over the years that it’s one of the key fat-burning ingredients in most weight-loss pills and has almost endless health benefits, including slashing your risks for all types of cancer by greatly reducing free radicals in your blood, calming your nerves, and boosting your metabolism. This took some getting used to - I didn’t care much for green tea at first; I greatly prefer chamomile. Now it’s second-nature to me. It never will be my favorite beverage, but at least now I’m used to the taste, and I DID notice that it made me feel better and perkier. All those things you hear about it - they’re true. But I would say that you need to drink at least a cup a day for a week or more before you’ll start noticing the effects on a large scale.
Of course, everyone knows that diet alone isn’t enough when you want to lose a significant amount of weight, so I also made some changes to my exercise schedule. I changed the plan from “walking around in the store every other day or so” to “walking on the local country streets with the dog for an hour round-trip every single day barring illness or emergency”. Needless to say, that made a HUGE difference - I think I dropped 8 pounds that first month - just by walking! In addition, I started doing a set of crunches and arm push-ups using the couch for leverage every day as well. When I started I was doing 12 crunches and about 8 or so arm push-ups. Now I’m up to 20 crunches and roughly 10 arm push-ups, so, not much of a change. But then, I’m much less adamant about them that the daily walks and skip them too much. >.< *sigh* It’s been helping, though.
Basically, I get out and get extra exercise whenever I have the chance and feel like it, and for better or for worse I still walk for an hour EVERY DAY even if it’s storming like crazy outside ( my sister will attest to that ) or super-cold ( luckily, it rarely drops below 28 degrees F out here, even in the dead of winter in the evening, staying in the 30s most of the time ). Rarely do I miss a walk, but it does happen. When it does I generally eat fewer calories that day.
Back from Weight-Loss Land, my life has gotten quite busy in other areas as well. In case I didn’t mention this before, or in case nobody can remember, I’ve decided to major in biology and make scientific research my career of choice. To these ends, I’ve managed to get my financial aid in order and accepted into Washington State University Vancouver ( from here on out known as WSU ). All I have to do now is meet with my advisor on-campus on Dec. 4 to get my classes reserved for Spring Quarter, which starts on January 12.
Of course, it wouldn’t be my life if there weren’t some problems to go along with this.
WSU is a great 4-year university with a very strong catering to science majors, but the city it’s located in, Vancouver, is exactly ( by MapQuest’s reckoning ) 85 miles from where I currently live. I love Vancouver to death and never wanted to leave when I lived there before, but fate intervened and moved all of my family to Watery Hellhole and the neighboring communities of Depressed Armpit and Suckville. Why, you ask, did they move from an area that had things to do and jobs to an area depressingly lacking in both? Something about not liking crowds and the traffic. Yes, I think it’s stupid too, but alas, I had as much say in the matter as I did when Bush got elected. At any rate, I have no family anywhere near Vancouver, which means I’m going to have to rent an apartment.
By this point you might be thinking YES! Good for you, Steph! You’re finally getting out on your own like you’ve wanted for so long! but I’m kinda of scared of getting my own place reserved for January. Okay, change that to worried. Very worried. Not because I’ll be alone - I have a very independent nature and will be able to handle that just fine. Not because I won’t have enough equipment and/or furniture: I can get by on the bare minimum, I told my family to get me household items ( like pans, a coffee maker, vacuum-cleaner, etc. ) for Christmas, and I know I have some furniture coming from family. The problem is the money.
Yes, I’m getting financial aid ( which includes a government-subsidized Stafford Loan [ meaning the government pays my interest ] as part of the package ), and they factor in living expenses. The catches are that they don’t let me have any of this money until the first day of class, and they use the cheapest %^$*-ing figures they can possibly find, which more closely mirror figures for living in a third-world country where everything is cheap for Americans. And I can’t borrow any more than what they think my estimated “Cost of Attendance” ( this includes both school-related expenses and living expenses like rent, food, transportation, and even miscellaneous ) should be for the given timeframes.
Mom says she and Dad can probably help me out with money towards deposit to reserve an apartment for me ( she and Dad are doing a little better now - at least they’re caught up on their own rent and making a little bit of headway ), so we can ignore that dilemma-waiting-to-happen.
Now, I did the math and estimated that I’d have almost exactly $1,000 a month to spend after school fees for the next 6 months ( the semester-system I’m being awarded for ). Rent alone is going to be about $500 per month, being conservative, since I REFUSE to roommate with anyone who isn’t my sister ( we’re still waiting to see if she‘s accepted…not looking too promising at the moment ), and my university doesn’t have dorms anyway. This may or may not include some utilities/a few basic services, but most places do. I don’t need fancy things like cable, since I don’t watch TV much anyway and wouldn’t miss it at all if it suddenly vanished. I have to have electricity. Not sure how much that will cost, but we’ll say $100 monthly just to be safe. Internet and phone is something I have to have: we’ll guess it a $40 a month, since that’s roughly what my mom’s paying. Driving only when I have to and taking no extra trips I can get away with probably $40 a month or so for gas, assuming prices don’t double again ( it’s currently a refreshing $1.99 a gallon here in Rochester ). I’ll add another $100 to the total for miscellaneous bills. Assuming I get most of my food from the foodbank, we’ll say $100 for food as well. This leaves me about $120 left over for necessities and anything else I may need.
Fine so far, right? Money’s tight, but I can manage.
That’s what I thought.
Then I read my award letter over more carefully. $1,500 of the $9,734 they’re allotting me for 6 months is what I’m allowed to get through work-study, ASSUMING they ACTUALLY HIRE me. When you consider that $3,360 of my $9,734 is taken off the top immediately for tuition, and books/supplies are estimated to cost around $374 ( using a medium figurehead ), this leaves me $4,500 left over, or $750 a month for living expenses. So I had DAMN well better get a work-study job FAST. Too bad I’m not guaranteed one.
Suppose I don’t get one. Then what happens?
I hear all of you shouting “part-time job”, but the problem with that is that I seem to have a hell of a time actually getting hired anywhere. I don’t know. Maybe if not getting a job meant losing my apartment I’d work harder at it, or maybe future employers would be more sympathetic. In any case, jobs are more plentiful in Vancouver, and as large as the area is it’s not an everybody-already-knows-everybody-else community so finding a job is probably easier by default.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m worrying needlessly. After all, I’ll have a pool of $4,500 to start with guaranteed on the 12th, not counting work-study money at all. It’s already in place. Maybe it could tide me over for a few months until I could get something going. And I know my family would help me out whenever they could, even if it wouldn’t be very much since they are struggling themselves.
If anyone reading this has any ideas on how I could improve my situation, or a smart strategy, or even words of reassurance, I could use them now more than ever. I’m kind of in panic-mode.
While we’re on the educational front, I’m also in the process of applying for the SMART Scholarship For Service package offered to science and math majors by the U.S. Department of Defense. I don’t feel like getting into all the details here, but the gist of it is that this is a very elite group that few qualify for. If I’m accepted I’ll have to forfeit my financial aid, but I really won’t need it since they’ll be paying me at least twice as much to live on, plus all my school expenses, plus book allowances, plus a benefits health-insurance package. They’ll require me to attend paid internships in the summer and once I’ve attained my degree I’ll be contractually bound to work for them for at least 2 years, preferably more, as a civilian scientist. Go here http://www.asee.org/fellowships/smart/ for more information.
I meet or exceed all of SMART’s core requirements, and my GPA is very high ( I transferred to WSU with a solid 3.8 ). Still, it’s not a sure bet. For one thing, it took me until the last 2 quarters of getting my AA degree to decide that Biology was my calling. As a result, I don’t have a strong scientific background in this field and neither of my references is a scientist or even science-teacher, which they strongly encourage ( Sorry Jen, in this case they DID stipulate that the references had to be U.S. citizens. Probably because it’s through the government and the Department of Defense. >.< ). I did use two teachers though, so that should count for something. They required a résumé, and since I have done painfully little worth bragging about ( aside from getting good grades and good reviews on Fanfiction.net ) I didn’t have much to impress them with. I just had to give it my best and now I’m hoping for the best.
So, that’s in the works. Even if it goes through and I’m accepted, it won’t kick in until August ‘09. I’m not factoring it into my plans just in case. I learned long ago never to count your chickens before they hatch, and I always have backup plans and safety nets for everything, just so I don’t end up royally screwed if my Plan As and Bs fall through. If SMART doesn’t accept me, I’ll still have financial aid.
Don’t even ask me which specific field of biology I’ll be getting into, or which I’m going to pursue the most doggedly - I haven’t decided yet. Pretty much all of it appeals to me on some level: cell theory, evolution, genetics, microbiology, zoology, biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, and gene theory are just a few of the specific fields that hold my interest. Some questions I have are: how do nerve cells organize into communicating networks that allow thought, language, memory, and creativity? If nuclear pores allow RNA to pass through, then how do they prevent smaller molecules and ions from going through at the same time, and why is there a potential difference across the nuclear membrane? In diseases believed to be auto-immune, either organ-specific or tissue-specific, why doesn’t the body reject the specific tissue or organ, as it rejects incompatible transplanted hearts or blood of the wrong type, making people sick or even killing them? What exactly is the cause behind the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer cells? To the best of my knowledge, these remain unanswered.
Heterochromia is cool. And genetics are behind it ( except in cases where it was brought on by injury or contact lenses )! Sorry, just had to blurt that out. ^_^
Well, this is getting quite long, my fingers are getting tired, and my mind is beginning to wander, so I think I’ll save my “Twilight” rant and the latest scoop on my original story for another post.
Until next time,
~Shady