Day 104: Surprise

Today I had to wear a belt to keep a particular pair of jeans from falling off my butt.

Lest I take full credit it may not be due me, I will just say that these jeans have always been a little bit big in the waist. When I bought them they were "comfortable" but after wearing them (and not having a clothes dryer to shrink the fibers a bit), they get a bit TOO roomy sometimes.

Well, following my over-the-weekend gastro weight drop, I got tired of constantly having to pull my pants up all day long. After all, I'm not a 16-year-old wannabee rapper and no one needs to see my underwear.

So I found a belt. I actually only have two belts and one of them came with a pair of jean shorts I bought this summer, and it's narrow and made of fabric. The other belt is thicker, less comfortable and made of black leather and I think I've only ever worn it once. I went with the cloth one because it would be more comfy and less bulky under my sweater (oh, I also put on a sweater I haven't worn in a while because it was getting too tight and didn't look right on me. Now it looks much nicer).

Because fat girls don't usually DO belts, do we? At least, not often, and not with the same effect as a nice belt can have on a skinny girl's outfit.

So we all know that feeling when we can FINALLY start wearing belts again!

I have a long, long way to go and belts won't be a regular part of my wardrobe for a while yet. But putting one on today gave me a glimpse of what kind of fashion fun I can have, somewhere down the road a bit.

Day 102: Silver lining

There are many things in life on which we might disagree if we knew each other in "real life", but I think we can all agree on this one critical point: It sucks to have a stomach bug.

This one hit me over the weekend, some time late Saturday morning. I know it wasn't food-related as my husband and I had eaten the same thing for dinner and breakfast, and he was fine. (Well, he said he felt a little "off" but fortunately for him it didn't amount to anything.) I spent the day running back and forth to our tiny WC cabine. No amount of Immodium or Pepto Bismol seemed to do much good. And oh, the nausea! (I've always said that I would make a lousy bulemic as I absolutely can't stand to vomit.) It kept me up all night long as well, which meant I only got about 4 hours of sleep total, and of that 4 hours only about 2 were what I could call "quality" sleep. Sunday was spent recuperating slowly and it ended with a headache that was probably a result of having to lie down in bed too long.

What I most resent about a stomach bug (outside of the obvious) is the massive inconvenience it brings to my life. Here it was, the weekend, family time, on top of which I had a huge list of things that absolutely must be done. We had guests checking out of our rental apartment (cleaning, inspection, and preparing for next guests who arrive on Wednesday, and who happily will stay for a full month). I did a lot of laundry (it seems all I do anymore is laundry, between the two apartments -- and we have no clothes dryer which means either I have to hang-dry everything and our apartment looks like a tenement, or I have to haul it all, wet, down to the laundromat to spin dry at a cost of about 3-4 euros per load). And somehow I even managed to get out of the apartment on Saturday afternoon long enough to do the food shopping... and then just afterward the stomach bug got serious about beating the shit out of me. I was grateful for one thing during that long 30 hours of illness: that I was the only one in the family who seemed to have it. We have only one toilet in the house.

However, there is one part of a stomach bug that can almost -- for a chronic dieter like me -- make it seem worth the agony. And that is the sometimes massive weight loss that follows a couple of days of being unable to eat and your body releasing a lot of, well, stuff.

I dropped 4.1 pounds. Bringing me to a new low weight (since I started this journey 102 days ago) to 217.5, a 7.5 pound total loss.

Believe me, I realize there may be a boomerang effect and that at least half that will probably come right back as soon as my body stabilizes itself. But I can also use this to my advantage and try to build on this -- well, I can't really call it a "success", more of a "situation" -- to get some momentum going again. There is something about seeing a new lower number on the scale, no matter what disgusting things occurred to get you there, that can suddenly make you want the numbers to drop even more.

So, I wouldn't have asked for a stomach bug as a means of restarting my weight loss efforts but since I had one anyway, I might as well look for the silver lining and get on with things.

Paused

I seem to have inadvertently pressed "pause" on this blog. And on my attempts to lose weight.

I'm embarrassed to say that the past couple of weeks I have not even bothered to weigh in. And we all know what THAT means.

I could say that I've been juggling a lot in my personal life. I could say that I'm up to my eyeballs in paperwork to attempt to get French nationality. I could say that the back-to-school period required some unexpected shifts in our family schedule. I could say I've been under additional stress.

All of that would be true. It's still no excuse. Life happens, and weight loss shouldn't stop cold because of life happening. But somehow, it does.

I know I'll come back to it sooner or later. Hopefully it will be sooner. I have a doctor's checkup next month and he's going to want a report on my cholesterol level; it would be nice to show him I am making some efforts to improve my overall health. I'm not enthused about taking another medication for cholesterol but it may come to that if I don't lose enough weight. (On the other hand I do have a genetically low "good" cholesterol and that's the kind of thing that is difficult to fix without medication unless you're able to exercise a lot. And right now extreme exercise is out of the question for me.)

I know you've been wondering why the radio silence, and now you know. I'll be back, though.

Days 85-89: Ups and Downs

First, I'll just report that last week when I weighed in, I did drop 1 lb. I kind of "felt" a little lighter that day, so it was nice to see that my sense of my own body was accurately reflected on the scale. We all have days where we feel fatter or thinner, but sometimes I think that's more in our heads than the reality. Body awareness is important.

I've been reading Valerie Frankel's 2008 memoir, "Thin is the New Happy", about her challenges with what I think could safely be called an addiction to dieting (more than simply calling it "struggles with losing weight". Her fat-phobic mother started her on a diet when she was something like 11 years old because she was a little bit pudgier than her siblings. The woman monitored her food intake and berated her beyond belief for years. Then, as an adult in her early 40s, Valerie realized she'd spent her entire adult life being Valedictorian of Dieting... and she decided to STOP. I'm only about 1/4 of the way through the book so I can't tell you how it turns out, but I must admit I see glimpses of myself within the pages (although unlike Valerie, I could not tell you the precise calorie count of any food other than a 1-calorie Tic-Tac).

I spent the weekend with my husband and young step-son, visiting my step-daughter in the French city of Lille. It was my first time there, and I love going anywhere new in Europe for the first time. I found the city delightful, and my step-daughter and her boyfriend found a great new apartment just at the center of the city, where there are many pedestrian shopping areas, a huge square, beautiful architecture (that seemed more Belgian than French, but as Lille is on the border with Belgium I can understand the influences must overlap).

Food traditions in France vary greatly from region to region, and in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, you can forget about that heart-healthy Mediterranean stuff. (Georges says there is an invisible border that separates the north of France from the south, and that border is the dividing line between butter and olive oil.) There was cheese and great beer and bread everywhere you looked (I had one meal that contained all three in one bowl). However, we did try and eat most of our meals at the apartment, and since my step-daughter is also on Weight Watchers and doing quite well (I could definitely see a difference although she has more she wants to lose), she made an effort to prepare lots of salads and things that were a bit better for all of us.

Still, we had a birthday to celebrate: my step-son's 11th! So, there was a cake on the table for lunch yesterday, one that had lots of meringues in it so it SEEMED lighter, although I'm sure it was very high in sugar if not in fat. It was delicious, though. (What? You didn't think I was going to turn down birthday cake did you? I did ask for a smaller slice, though.)

I gave up trying to track points after Saturday's restaurant lunch where I tried a local specialty that was swimming in cheese, oil and salt. It was very good, but I don't think I'd order it again unless I was trying to warm up on a very frigid day; Lille has lots of those in the winter, but this weekend it was like summer! And after that meal, all I wanted to do was sleep.

The good news is, there was lots of walking if not a lot of actual sleeping (we slept on an air mattress, and every time one of us moved, the other bounced around too). Plus on Friday I got in my usual rental apartment-cleaning workout, and today I had to hike up to the rental apartment and back again, deliberately NOT taking the bus. So hopefully I managed to mitigate some of the calorie-intake damage.

On the balance, though, I had a great weekend. It was fun to see what a nice apartment our girl and her beau have found, fun to see them with their first real home (instead of the tiny studio she'd been renting before, and he was living at home with his family until they moved in together last month), and fun to experience a new part of France. It's only an hour away on the fast train, so I'm thinking I could run up there once in awhile and spend the day with her, shopping, when she doesn't have a lot of school work to do. Lille is a lovely city and we've only explored a small portion of it. I can see why she likes living there (lousy winter weather notwithstanding - but I'm from New Jersey and I'm used to bad winters).

We'll see how the scale reads this Thursday when I weigh in again. Meantime I can do some more walking and eat more moderately this week, and that's all I can do.

Days 80-84: This sucks. That is all.

I am sitting here drenched in a river of my own sweat. My hair looks as damp as if I had just jumped out of a swimming pool. But I am on dry land, fully dressed. Yet I am sitting next to an open window with a nice cool breeze blowing on me. It's not even a hot day.

Welcome to my latest hell: hot flashes.

I have always been a lady who unfortunately schvitzes like a heavyweight prize fighter after a match. The menopause years are just bringing it (or perhaps I should say wringing it) out of me tenfold. And it comes from out of nowhere sometimes, from little or even no physical effort whatsoever. What did I just do to trigger the latest cascade? I covered my step-son's school book with plastic.

I know a lot of women go through this at this phase of life. I also think being overweight makes me sweat even more. All that extra body fat generates a lot of additional heat, especially when I'm eating or moving. Another reason I would like to be substantially leaner would be to hopefully reduce these episodes of very unfeminine perspiration.

Here's someone who looks exactly like I feel right now (except for the cancer part, fortunately). It's when Samantha's chemo threw her into early menopause, and it's one of my favorite menopause scenes ever, as well as being a bold statement for cancer survivors:

I've got my period this week (yeah, not totally in menopause yet, but the periods are getting more "hit or miss") so weigh-in tomorrow may be impacted. Although I put on a pair of jeans this week that I hadn't worn in a few months, and they zipped right up comfortably on the first try. So that's something to feel good about.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go stick my head in the freezer.