I have decided to add one more thing to my Vacation Gameplan.
Every day I am going to note at least one Small Victory.
We are faced with hundreds of food choices every day (plus a bunch of activity ones too). Sugar? Cream? Supersize? Cheese? Mayo? etc etc etc.
By focusing on some of the good choices I make hopefully I will make more of them.
I’ll try to update my blog from time to time on the road, but no guarantees…
I probably won’t have this much fun on my walk today, but at least I get some fresh air!
We are going on vacation for 3 weeks beginning on Sunday. We’ll be back in the USA, hitting New York, the West, and San Francisco. There are restaurants, buffet breakfasts, and celebratory parties for our wedding dotting the landscape. I also have a bad history of gaining weight when I go back to the US, a combination of the ridiculous portions and my eyes and taste buds calling out for all the “can’t-get-that-in-France” foods I see. (And often accompanied by another week or so in France when I’m back from the US for all the “France-has-great-bread-pastries-desserts-crepes-sauces” foods here.)
So this time, I am thinking ahead. My objective is to come back at about the same weight as I’m leaving.
My plan to do this has two components - Behavior and Motivation
BEHAVIOR:
MOTIVATION:
I am from a family of raging liberals but I’ve always been pretty middle-of-the road (well, compared to them, at least). But I think I’ve found an issue that just might turn me into an activist - this idiotic media-created IMPOSSIBLE image of what is supposed to be “Beautiful”.
This is a photo-montage showing Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook - from the original image to the computer-manipulated final result. Thank you, fish biscuit of Let’s Try This Again for posting this.
Startling. Disgusting. She is a talented, beautiful woman, who is photo-shopped into the media dictates of age, weight and imperfection.
Good daily patterns are developing and I feel like I am starting to get into a healthy groove. A few weeks ago healthy habits were a real battle, so this is pretty good progress.
I only have 4 items I am working on right now (water, fruits & veg, daily walks, and food journal), and all of them are running smoothly. I am starting to get confident that I can keep them up on vacation (starting Sunday!).
Last week the walking was still a big challenge, and I skipped a few days. This week has been easier (in part because I busted out the iPod) and today topped it all. I needed to go to a French Bureaucracy office (way way worse than American Bureaucracy in my experience). The office is about a 15 minute walk from my house, so I figured it was perfect for the daily walk (which is supposed to be around 30 minutes, although I’ve been pushing it a bit). I walk over there and I’m told that the service I need to see are not available until 2pm. It is, of course, 10am. I was super-annoyed, especially since all the paperwork & website info says 8:30-5, but what can I do? I want this handled before vacation. So I go home, do some other stuff, and head back for my SECOND walk of the day at 3pm. Errand accomplished, and a second walk snuck in!
Plus, on the way home (the second time), I picked up some nectarines & a melon to make sure I’m eating enough fruit today & tomorrow (no excuses about an empty fridge because of vacation).
I am hungry but we won’t have dinner for another 45 minutes, so I am eating celery.
Celery has it’s positives : it’s crunchy, fresh, cold, chewy, keeps well in the fridge for several days, it’s also low-calorie.
Did I miss anything else good about celery?
I have just been reading several weight loss blogs for the past hour, and I was saddened to see how many people are beating themselves up, hating something about their bodies, feeling like failures, etc.
I’ve been there, and I honestly can’t say how I got out of that space. I go there from time to time, but now it’s brief visits — most of the time I live in a much nicer place, more accepting. I am FAR from perfect. All of the negative things I could say about myself are probably true on some level - but so are all the positives, and that’s where my focus is.
So, just to put my mind in a better place (and then take a break from the computer!) here are 5 things I love about me, and forcing myself to limit to the physical :
Whew, once I got past my face that was not-so-easy, but I think it is a good exercise… I’d like to be able to say something positive about every part of my body… maybe in the future.
Do you know what sciatica is? 3 months ago I didn’t, I would have known pain, in the leg, vaguely connected to the back, but that’s about it. Now, I can debate treatment protocols with university professors. Sciatica is a condition caused by pressure on the sciatic nerve, which is usually caused by a problem with the disk in the low back. Although people may have low back pain at the same time, sciatica is the pain caused by the pressure on the nerve, and it runs down your leg and foot. As it’s nerve pain, it is often severe and unrelenting. I always had an image in my mind that sciatica was a condition of old people, but actually it is most common from 30-50 years old.
I had severe, incapacitating sciatica beginning 3 months ago. I started to have pain in my leg for the first time in my life in late April, and 2 weeks later I was on medical leave w incapacitating pain - couldnt walk, and neither the pain pills nor the epidural steroid injections were helping much. We kept upping the doses of everything, repeating the epidurals, but I ended up w surgery in late June. I had a clear, severe, disk herniation w fragmentation at L5S1 visible on MRI & x-ray, and all the symptoms coming in one after the other - pain, numbness, loss of strength, impaired reflexes, etc. We waited maybe 3 weeks more than I would have liked for the surgery because of my wedding - and my doc was a hero to find ways to keep me on my feet and enjoying the big day & time w my family.
The surgery was a success — I woke up w no pain in my leg at all, after weeks of living on morphine. Right now I’m recovering from the surgery, and taking it REALLY easy because the risk of recurrence is highest the 6 weeks after surgery. I am doing my daily walk and nothing more, careful about bending, twisting, sleeping positions, and no lifting above 5 lbs. More info on my sciatica on the page “My Back…”
Losing weight is hard.
Somehow that fact gets lost or hidden among all the fancy media and diet industry. It’s always “lose weight the easy way” and “isn’t it a shame…” discussions about obesity.
When I have managed to lose weight it is always with enormous effort and focus. Almost an obsession in my life, often crowding out other interests. I have been successful with this approach at multiple periods of my life . A kitchen stocked to the gills with whole foods and fresh fruits & veggies with nary a junk food in site (nor in hiding). A workout schedule that has me at the gym almost every free moment of the week, and sore more days than not. Material to keep me motivated all over the house (books! magazines! websites!). You get the picture.
This approach has worked for me several times to lose a significant amount of weight (see my About Round page).
But this approach is no longer what I want, and it’s no longer compatible with my life. I am not willing to make my weight the center of my life anymore — for good or for bad. That means my diet plan needs to fit my life now, not what I did before, when I made my life fit my diet.
Being healthy is a big priority in my life - definitely in the top 3. Nurturing my marriage and my husband, friendships and other interests are all important to me too. I have a relatively demanding job which most of the time I really like. Losing weight needs to fit into this context now.
Over the past few years, where I have learned to manage my weight within a certain range (although it is higher than I’d like) I’ve still tended to cycle through obsessed and free-for-all periods, instead of a healthy middle ground.
My pursuit of Zen Weight Management began about 9 months ago, after some gentle teasing from my husband (who is very supportive of weight loss efforts, but less supportive of my mono-mania). I was counting every calorie in and out, and frustrated by the slow progress of the scale. I was making myself feel miserable about the process and my results. Slowly, I came to see that the pressure I was putting on myself was crazy. My husband and then later my doctor both made the same suggestion a few weeks apart - to make a few smaller changes and lose a small amount of weight slowly, like 10 pounds a year.
I have never managed my weight this way - but it is incredibly appealing to me now. Cut out the highs (free-for-all eating) and cut out the lows (very strict dieting & crazy gym schedules). I’ve had some experience with this in my 5 year maintenance period for my current weight - I would say I have spent more of my time maintaining than in the gain-lose cycle. There are certain things I just don’t do anymore that have become my rules of eating - I don’t drink my calories (occasional glass of wine excluded), I don’t eat fast food, I don’t eat fried anything, I don’t keep ice cream in the house, I don’t eat dessert every day, I eat lots of fruit & vegetables, etc.
My goal for my upcoming weight loss (in September) is to do it Zen. It will be a big challenge, because the only way I’ve ever done it is Stressed. Just because one approach has worked for me in the past doesn’t mean another approach won’t work in the future, and if my last diet attempt taught me anything, it was that. And if it takes a while? So what.
I am working on building my self-esteem & self-acceptance. Like many people I compare myself to an imagined ideal, to what could be, what I think I “should” look like. I think it’s important to build self esteem separately from weight loss, because what you weigh is not your net worth.
Somehow, when I was a workaholic I had less trouble with this issue (or maybe I just had less time to think about it?). I had lots of applause & approval in my professional life, so even though my body was not ideal I felt pretty good about my mind. Now that I have managed to beat workaholism and keep work as only a part of my life, I don’t get the same kick from being told I do a good job - probably because I just don’t care that much about what I do at work. I’m much more concerned with being a good person, a good wife, a good friend. … and, I guess, good-looking.
Recently I’ve been trying to think critically about where these ideas of what I “should” look like come from.
I’ve found a number of sites on the internet that really help to unravel the idiotic pressure from the media, and build a better vision of reality.
There are 2 great videos to check out :
Dove “Evolution” video, where they show a normal-looking woman modeling & being transformed via technology & professionals to a knockout
Fat Rant, where a beautiful, larger woman fights for her right to not be skinny
I am not totally comfortable w the fat acceptance movement, in that they tend to deny or downplay health risks of obesity, but I do believe we need to accept beauty and health in something other than a 120-pound body. Here are some sites that are in line w what I think is reasonable
The Campaign For Real Beauty : a ton of interesting sections, including “Real Women Have Curves”
Love Your Body Campaign : the NOW campaign on body image. Has pages of bad & good ads, plus poster contest.
Jamie Lee Curtis without makeup, without airbrushing - from 2002, one of the first articles I read that got me thinking about how much influence the media has on how I feel about myself. This woman is gutsy, authentic, and fabulous.
I still read women’s magazines, but less and less. I still read fitness magazines, but I especially appreciate Self & Fitness, who put in real-size models from time to time, not just the fitness models of Shape & others.