WeightAndSee

Nothing, really

2010-08-31T22:27:00.001-04:00

Every single thing we do changes us. Every step that we take, until we're so far away from the origin that we can't remember how we started, what we were then.

I was at my father's house recently for a week of semi-vacation, and my sister had unearthed a lot of the things that my late mother had kept. Things of my childhood, but mostly things from high school. Some things that just made me shake my head and wonder why on earth she'd saved these things (like letters I'd written to her during fights. I threw those away unread.), but mostly things that took me back to a past that I'd mostly forgotten. I still can't remember who she was, the girl who thought she could make music, the girl who was confident and brave even in the face of a lot of reasons not to be. The girl who had never been told that she couldn't achieve anything that she wanted to.

And I look back at that now, and part of me just wants to cringe. How could I have been so young, so naïve, so laughably confident when others must have known that the things that I wanted to do were nothing but fantasy? Another part of me, the part that I'm finding just as I write this, is angry for her, angry and sad and defensive, and mostly I just wonder what happened to her? Where did I go from that kind of confidence to what I am now? When did I stop being brave in that young and foolish way?

These days, I feel like everything is just eroding me, wearing me away until there's little left. I think often that I should just end this blog; it's lost its original purpose, and there's little left but these constant futile musings. And my sadness, which isn't exactly helping anyone else.

A Failure to Fly

2010-08-05T12:56:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I can perform that magic act, walk high on that high wire, see myself for a moment as the person I want to be. And I have this illusion that I'm getting better at it.

And then something happens, and I fall… Icarus flying to close to the sun, all the wax melting and dripping, and I fall hard and fast, and I forget that I could fly.

Things have been close to good lately. Really so close that I could touch them. Michael has mostly been feeling ok, and we've been working on the weight, and I've had the energy to work on getting the house organized… it's been wonderful getting the newly-repaired living room and dining room back to something civilized. Everything seemed… all right. Pretty good. Possible.

And then yesterday… Michael was ok; he said he was feeling happy. But I was low and sad; something set me off, and I would have been ok in a while, but right at that moment… not happy. But I forgot that I'm not allowed to be sad. I forgot that I'm supposed to be the cheerleader, the happy person all the time. I let myself be sad… and I let myself have a glass of wine while I was making dinner, too, and that's always and inevitably a problem, especially if things are already tense. And it all went to hell, quick and fast and hysterically, and you could just smell the wax and burning feathers.

I blame myself, although I'm certainly not the only person at fault. But I know that I need to keep these things to myself. I just couldn't manage it yesterday.

Worse, last night and today, I'm trying to cajole him into some kind of happy, and it's not working, and it's making me feel a thousand times worse. I thought that the balance had tipped for a moment, but it didn't… or something else set him off, and like the marble, I couldn't quite get escape velocity, couldn't quite get him out of the bowl. And so here we are, back in the bottom, clinking against each other, unable to get any kind of momentum up.

I can't bear it. It's stupid and foolish, but it just makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. I need to separate myself from all this, but I don't know how. I don't know how to do anything like take care of myself without doing the things that would sever the bonds entirely, things that truly would be a betrayal. There is nothing that I can do or say that would not make this worse, and trying is ripping my heart out.

And it's two days later now, and things are better on the surface, but they are really no better in reality. I am filled with despair, which sounds melodramatic and pathetic. But I can't find other words.

Complexities

2010-08-02T22:42:00.001-04:00

It's hard to know how to feel about anything these days.

On the one hand, Michael has been well, in a certain sense, for more than six months now. It's the end (maybe) to those years of mysterious disease, of him sleeping most of the time, the weakness, the delirium… all the symptoms of undiagnosed porphyria. On the other hand… we still are only fractionally closer to a way of eating that will allow him to lose weight without losing his mind… in this case, quite literally. And as a result, his weight has ballooned, in every sense of the word. He's about 160 lbs. above his lowest weight, and all of that in the last eight months. It is staggering. In every sense of the word.

Our latest attempt to level things out is working, in some sense… he is eating every 2-3 hours, small meals… and when he does that, exactly that, plus stays pretty gluten-free, his weight starts to go down. But it doesn't take anything much to screw it up. Yesterday, we went to the movies, shared a medium popcorn between three of us and then went out for some Indian food… and today, his weight is 5 lbs. higher. Sure, that's illusory and water and day-to-day fluctuations. But it is still really depressing. Plus the constant, constant, constant degree of vigilance required…any sort of relaxation and fun, and we're back to square one.

But what can you do, really? Except try another day.

Try another day.

It's a summer night, and I want to be outdoors, in a field, listening to a band, drinking a beer, and dancing.

I don't think that this will ever happen in my life again.

I am too old and too young all at once.

Escape Velocity

2010-07-25T09:40:00.001-04:00

Another restless night. Michael didn't sleep well; did back bothers him all the time since he's regained so much weight. Plus the two new kittens, who are living in the bedroom… unbelievably adorable, but wanting to play at the wrong times. Of course. Fortunately they're still so tiny and totally cute that no one minds too much. But Michael got up early, and then I got up, and he wanted to go back to bed… and I feel lousy, so I tried, but my head was just spinning into a thousand unhappinesses and resentments, nowhere good. So I got up and made a cup of tea, and ate some cottage cheese and dried apricots, a combination that doesn't fit into any eating plan that I know of.

And thought and thought and thought. About escape velocity, about that analogy that always hits for me, of a marble being spun in a bowl, never quite getting up enough speed to make it out, always falling back to the center. It's what I feel like… I have a few good days, a few days when the past doesn't seem so real, or I can visit the happy parts, when I get things done here, and it all seems possible and manageable. When it seems likely that Michael will get truly well again, and we'll have a real life, and I'll lose weight, and it will all be… I don't know. Perfect and wonderful, and we will live happily ever after. And then there's a day like yesterday, a morning like this one, when it's all too much. When I see how little things change, and I hit that sure marker of depression for me, that counting of how many days I have left. I want to talk to someone about this. I want to talk to my mother, to say, how do you cope with this, what do you do? But even if it were possible, the words would stick in my throat, and I wouldn't ask for help. I never do. I never have.

In a way, the worst part of all of this is that I feel so stuck. I feel like I'm in this rut, and it's more about the psychology of it all than about the actual physical constraints. I am learning nothing from this; I am feeling nothing but pain. I don't know where to go with it. Other things… I can see how much better I'm getting at some kinds of things, about letting things go, not needing a resolution to every little quarrel, at just existing on my own, not so attached to everything. All the years of not-exactly-regular meditation practice, of breathing and metta prayers has done something for my ability to coast through the day to day without getting so hung up into it.

But instead, I get caught in the past and the future, two meaningless places to be. I run the movies of the past in my head, and sometimes they're entertainment, a connection to a different world, sometimes a way of understanding. But there are deep, dark traps, and there's nothing good once you hit them. They're all about resentment and anger and loss, and it's hard to remember a time when my life wasn't about those things, on some level. And the future… well, who knows? I don't think I have the energy to speculate.

I'm just tired. Really tired.

Light of Heart

2010-07-24T14:10:00.001-04:00

I went last night to see a musical with a friend of mine. The play was called Girls Night Out; I think it's touring this summer, and it was very fun if not exactly a masterpiece of the theater. The plot is basically an excuse for the women to sing a lot of classic songs, I Will Survive, At Seventeen, Cry Me a River… great songs to just belt out. The loose plot is about four women and their dead friend and how their lives have evolved over the last 22 years… which really makes it sound a billion times more serious than it actually was, especially since really they could have just skipped the plot and sang and it would have been equally good. But anyway, there's Kate, the nerdy, gawky kid, and Anita, the depressed one, and Lisa, the insecure one, and Carol, the party girl who never shows her friends the pain inside. And at intermission, my friend asked which of those people I'd been in high school. And really, the answer was, none of those people. I mean, I'm the most like Carol, but I never in my life have had the ability to just be fun, to be a party girl, to cut loose like that. Even with alcohol, I'm mostly morose, and everything I do, everything I am, seems to be about this relentless seriousness.

And I've always been like this. Always too serious as a child, always the one at college parties who'd just be lost and bored, and would go home and read. A little less so in grad school, which was filled with people Just Like Me. And now… well, still that way, no knack for small talk, no knack for chit chat, not good at lightness.

I've been musing about this post for days… started Thursday, and it's now Saturday, and I'm betting on Sunday before I finish.

And it's Saturday again.

And all this time, I've been trying to think of what I mean, about this lightness thing. I don't really know. I just feel so sad all the time, and worried, and when I'm not sad and worried, I just feel overwhelmed. This house, the garden, the pool, my job, the eBay business, my consulting work… and then the things that really come first, Michael and my son, and the day-to-day stuff. Just making it through the next day. You can't lose weight by thinking about losing weight. I mean, it doesn't hurt, and usually there has to be some thought in there somewhere, but ultimately you have to actually DO something. And it's the same thing with everything else. I look around me, and I think, tomorrow I will do this, tomorrow I will clean all this up and finish my work and finish knitting this sweater, and I will be beautiful and strong and dance and laugh. And the next day is the same as this day.

So usually at this point, I do the pep talk thing… how tomorrow really will be different, how I will try harder, how it will be ok. But I don't feel like that today. I feel like curling up and crying and wanting someone to fix it all for me. I want my mother… the mother that my mother should have been, if her life wasn't a lot like this, too. I want a thousand things that I can't have, and today… it all seems too much to even try.

But I will.

Saturday

2010-07-10T11:06:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was another busy day, and a terrible food day… I was off for most of the day with my knitting friends, came back to find Michael in a foul mood, long story short, didn't get to thinking about dinner until about 9, so we went to Applebees, ate far too much food, drank yummy lemon drop martinis (me, not him), and generally had a nice time… and then of course, I came home and felt like death.

And so of course, this morning, I'm thinking and trying to figure out how to get back on track and STAY that way. Plus there's the endless problem of diet and Michael… and I'm not talking about the constant weight gain he's experiencing now so much as the problem of porphyria and what might have an influence on it. In the porphyria group that I've been reading a lot of lately, there's a lot of discussion about eliminating anything that's processed plus wheat and so forth. And anything synthesized, like vitamins and drugs. I'm not so sure that a lot of that is possible… and I'm hoping that if we can ever try the heme therapy, this all may not be go necessary… but it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect eliminating all of this, plus all spicy food and so on, would have. If he could tolerate the boredom, which is the biggest issue, I think. It's particularly hard for him to eliminate wheat, just in terms of it getting rid of so many of the things that he likes (and are good carb sources, too). But I've long said that he's wheat-intolerant. I just didn't know why.

I don't know. I'm buried in work, and everything seems to require a kind of attention that I can't work up. I'm tired all the time. I'm way, way too fat. I'm out of shape, more than I've been in a long time, and my hip is mostly bothering me again. The house is a danger zone, pretty much. And where do I go from here?

I think for today, I'd be happy if I just got my book reviews written and a little cleaning done, and the plants that I haven't planted actually in the ground. That would be kind of a lot. And eat reasonably. And write it down.

Musings du jour

2010-07-08T21:24:00.003-04:00

I keep musing about this "who do I want to be" thing. I've had a lot of musing time lately… we had another long day, doctor and then oncologist this morning, then hanging around all day in Rochester killing time until therapist appointments this evening. With the amount that we've been out lately, you'd think that we were actually having an interesting life.

So… when I was 18, this is who I wanted to be

Kelly Capwell. Actually Robin Wright, playing Kelly Capwell on the now-dead soap opera, Santa Barbara. I thought she was the most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen, and I still kind of think that…you know, in that sense of, if you could pick exactly who you wanted to look like, I'd look precisely like that. Tall and thin with long, straight blonde hair. And Kelly's storyline in the beginning of the show (I actually watched this soap opera from the very beginning, and I'm sure that I'm just trashing all my seriousness cred by even talking about this. But I was about 18, ok?) was that she was the very sheltered innocent daughter of this mega-millionaire, something-else Capwell, and she was madly in love with some poor but gorgeous guy who was trying to win the approval of Daddy Capwell, whatever his name was. Yeah, it's an old, old, old and really trite story. But still a good one. And that's who I wanted to be, the fairy princess. Robin Wright was that, too, in The Princess Bride.

I wanted to be the princess, or the ballerina (we were watching a documentary on Russian ballerinas the other night, and Michael said, I didn't think you were interested in this. But of course. When I was 6, I was desperate to be a ballerina and have pointe shoes and a pink tutu. Unfortunately, I was also chubby and uncoordinated, and they don't start you out with the tutu and toe shoes.)

That was before the days of the Disney Princess franchise, and these days, it sounds beyond silly to say that you wanted to be a princess… and it probably did then, too. And I turned out to be the ogre princess, anyway, like Fiona in Shrek. The trouble is, I've never given up wanting to be that princess. Beautiful and thin and blonde and cherished and taken care of. I think because I never had that… a child with too much adulthood too early, a father never really there, a mother occupied with other things, no one to trust or look out for me. Not a sob story there, just a description of reality. So you long for what you don't have.

But here I am. And in some ways, my cherished dream is not any different from what it was when I was 18, although I would never have admitted it, then or now.

So what do you do next when you wanted to be a princess? There's not a lot of alternate dream choices for "failed princess."

Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty.

Who do you want to be?

2010-07-07T19:14:00.002-04:00

It's been a really tedious day... ALL day sitting at the car dealership waiting for tons of things to be done to the car... about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Michael came with me, which was sweet but unnecessary, really. And we sat, and drank coffee, and did computer things, and chatted with an interesting and nice guy who used to work for Microsoft and just happened to break down near here, and listened to an endless conversation about duplicate bridge... and I like bridge, but eek... and all and all, it went on too long.

But I had lots of time to think. This is what I've been randomly thinking about lately: who do I want to be? And shouldn't I know that by now?

My almost-16 year old niece was here a couple of weeks ago, and I took her to the spa, and we had our toes done, and some other things, and then we went to the mall, and I bought her some clothes, and then we went to Sephora, the make-up/perfume place. And she said, "I'm the kind of person who wears a different perfume every day." I thought... (1) I've always been the kind of person who wears a single, signature perfume, and (2) maybe I'd like to be the kind of person who wears a different perfume every day? And then I thought, ok, this is a trivial thing, but this kid knows more about who she is and who she wants to be than I do, and I'm more than three times her age. And then I thought... sometimes this seems like everything that's wrong with my life, this not knowing what I want to be, or how to be it. Wrapping myself around the latest thing that attracts me. Finding my own identity in these things.

This bothers me, and leaves me uncertain, and makes me wonder when, if ever, I'll get to be who I really am... not the person that the people around me shape me into. Because I am not loving that person all that much these days....

Melting

2010-07-06T14:58:00.002-04:00

The Northeast heat wave continues... 93 at the moment, and humid, and really, really tiresome. I just don't want to do anything. Trying to plod along getting something done. Mostly just knitting and watching stupid TV on Hulu in lieu of actually moving and sweating.

Michael's porphyria attack is worse today... bad neuropathy yesterday, and he woke up this morning and seriously didn't recognize me for a moment. This is scary, really scary. Shades of his last hospitalizations, plus a sign that the neurological symptoms are worsening. And his weight was up, despite having a reasonable food day yesterday. So... we see the doctor as planned on Thursday, and push hard for the Mayo referral, see what we can do to get that in the works. I don't know what else to do.

It's all pretty tiresome. I was thinking yesterday... the greatest truth, in a lot of ways, is that youth is wasted on the young. I've been watching the past series of Greek... if you haven't watched this, it's a pretty formulaic but sort of charming ABC series on fraternity/sorority life at an Ohio university. And I will never, ever admit to enjoying this kind of show.... but ok, I do; it's a weird guilty pleasure. But it's also my childhood and my college days, in a way, or what they might have been if I'd known what I had when I had it. I remember back to that time, and it was so... carefree, although I would never have thought it at the time. That self-absorption of youth, and all the things that hadn't happened yet, and the future holding limitless possibility. And one day, you wake up, and the horizons aren't like that any more, and people around you are aging and dying, and everything is about health and problems and worries. We ought to live backwards, like Benjamin Button (not that I either read the story or saw the movie), living in reverse, having things become better rather than cruelly worse. Yeah, I know, it's all a little melodramatic... but it's hard to keep putting a positive spin on things. Yes, they are better than they were a year ago. But it's a long, long way to something that feels like a normal life.

And I so long for that.

One of those days

2010-07-05T14:40:00.002-04:00

I didn't feel like this yesterday. I probably won't feel like this tomorrow. But today, everything is a little bit much.

Michael slept badly and has been feeling bad all day. I'm sure it's another low-grade porphyria attack... because his weight was actually lower yesterday and the day before. And this is starting to be the pattern, with a nauseating, horrible regularity. As soon as he cuts food enough that he starts to lose any weight, this happens. And what then? No alternative except to carb load, and it's always quick carbs, and the worst things for him, and I have no idea what this is doing to his blood sugar. It makes me cringe. It makes me sad and angry all at once. And the ugly part is that it makes me resentful as hell on a petty, stupid level, too.

Because I'd like to have a legit reason to go have a Whopper and fries and a chocolate shake. (Actually, none of those things appeal to me at all, but it's the idea...) The unpleasant fact, for me, is that in order to lose weight, I have to be eating less. A lot less. On a low-carb diet, I maintain. If I add any real carbs at all, I then start gaining, and that's exactly what's happened over the last year or so. To actually lose weight, I have to watch every calorie. And get the exercise that I'm not getting. The ugly truth is that you can lose weight on low carb pretty easily if you're young, and you haven't done it before, and your metabolism isn't already screwed up. For the rest of us... it's different. It's not so easy.

And I have no choice. I have to be well enough to take care of both of us. There isn't another choice, and that means getting this weight off, so that my hip doesn't hurt all the time, so that I'm not so tired all the time, so that everything is not sure a huge deal all the time. I have to do this.

But I'm hungry. And I hate it, and it's hard for me to be hungry and not be resentful. At least some of the time.

The 4th of July

2010-07-04T10:21:00.002-04:00

It was broiling hot here by yesterday afternoon, and we were both having a pretty bad mindset day... me because I just couldn't work up the motivation for anything, and Michael because he gets up in the morning and feels ok, but by evening, he just feels terrible, and everything is such an effort. So we went out to a movie... the two really good things that have happened, in terms of quality of life in the last few months are that Michael's started driving again (YES! I can sit and knit, plus I really think it makes his mood better, though he says no.), and he's been willing to go to the theater. So we went to see Toy Story in 3-D... FUN movie, nearly as good as the first one, I thought, plus there's a Totoro toy which won my heart. Ate some movie popcorn because we hadn't had time for dinner before this idea, and regretted it... but not a ton of popcorn, so ok.

Anyway... I got out of the theater, and went right back into that wretched headspace that plagues me these days, where everything is about sadness and loss and regret. It was a beautiful night, warm and clear, and you can almost touch what it felt like to be 16 and have all the promise and infinite possibility ahead of you, and these days for me, that's a combination of joy and deep, deep bitterness. It takes me back to missing my mother, to missing someone I loved and lost, to feeling like my whole life has taken these unexpected and awful directions. And it just feel bad. I am working very hard these days on trying to keep myself present, to stay in TODAY and not the infinite past.

I was doing just that leaving the grocery store, chanting to myself, "stay present, stay present...", and I stepped outside, and there were fireworks everywhere. So we sat in the grocery store parking lot, and watched the fireworks, and it was... if not magic, at least it was here and now.

So that's the task for today. Stay present.

Weight the same as yesterday, not surprising with popcorn and late dinner. Michael actually down a little, which is very good.

Summer Saturday

2010-07-03T11:59:00.002-04:00

I miss you, too, lovely anon person. It means a lot that you're thinking of me.

I keep trying to write, but I don't know what to say these days. I don't know where to start, don't know how to focus. So much has happened over the last few years, over the last few months, over the last few weeks... and yet it's all the same as when I started, in a way. I don't know where to start. And really, I think what I need to do is just start over.

When I started this blog, Michael and I had just started on low carb. And in the two plus years since then... well, he lost a lot of weight, I gained a little weight, my mother died, Michael came close to dying, and in the process, he finally got accurately diagnosed with what was really wrong, hereditary coproporphyria. Making him genuinely rare, explaining a hell of a lot of his life story, and, ironically, making him one of the very, very few people in the entire world who really can't eat a low carb diet. Sometimes you just have to laugh. Or put your head through a wall, I guess.

And so since then... we've been trying to adjust. And it has not been easy. There's a lot more to it, and I'll write about it eventually, but the very short version is that he's gained a lot of weight and continues to gain weight, and is, I think, usually having low-grade porphyria symptoms of one kind or another. But not the scary stuff; that's the good part. So he's better, really better... but at the same time, we have to find a way of stopping the escalating weight. We're trying to get a referral to the Mayo Clinic; they have a porphyria clinic, and maybe they can help us. It's hard to know what to do. I've never felt quite so much at a loss about what to do.

Then there's me. The carb-fest that's resulted from Michael needing to eat a high carb diet has not been good for me. It is much more difficult for me to skip this stuff when it's around all the time. Yes, I've gained, and I feel like hell, and I'm not getting any exercise... and all these things aside, it's just been a really, really rough spring. I've been sick and exhausted, and I feel like all the stress of the last couple of years has all sort of exploded... everything I just sat on while I had to be the strong person who coped. And it's taken a long time to get anything like equilibrium back. I feel like I'm just starting to edge there.

So... I don't know where to go. I don't want to spend this blog whining about how crappy everything is... especially because it's not quite so much, these days. But somewhere this stuff needs to be said, and it can't be at home, most of the time, for so many reasons. I'm going to try to be back here.

And on the weight front... I'm trying for compromise. Trying to keep the mostly low-carb, which makes me feel better. But back to food diary, to writing everything down again. It's good for Michael. And it's ok for me, although when I gave up charting food years ago, it made me REALLY happy. It was much easier for me to not be so obsessive about food. But it's what we have to do to try to get back on some kind of track.

We'll see what happens.

Today

2010-04-30T11:28:00.003-04:00

I lay in bed last night and thought and thought about this. I don't know what to do. I'm not losing weight, but that's not the biggest deal... I will be able to get this together and exercise and so forth as soon as the semester is over. I think so, anyway. My hip is better than it was. I'll be ok... or I can be, anyway, if I can stop worrying about Michael.

He is gaining weight every day. He says he wants to lose weight, but he's not doing much that looks like it to me. The problem with the porphyria diagnosis is that it's given him latitude to say "I need more carbs." And to some extent, he does, truly. But he cannot eat this level of carbs and lose weight. It's how we started on all this. There's some balance... and some days, he's there with it, his head's into it. But more often than not, it isn't, and when it isn't, it's all about, what can I eat next? He's not ready to put real effort into this, and if he was just maintaining, I'd be ok will that. But he's not. He's gaining, and every pound is less mobility, and more important, it's a pound farther from being able to have that crucial PET scan.

I am trying to stay the hell out of it, because it does NOT help when I say anything. But I cannot bear to watch this. It depresses the hell out of me. And it makes it harder for me to take care of myself; the only way I can do it is to try to separate myself from him, and that's not good for anything.

Sometimes I feel like I'm building this invisible wall around myself, brick by transparent brick. It hurts. It keeps me safer. And it's all wrong.

Where to go from here

2010-04-25T15:27:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted in ages. Partly because I had the cold from hell for nearly two months straight, but more because I don't know where to go from here.

When I started this blog, years ago, Michael and I were on the low-carb journey. He was losing weight, I was at least maintaining, and it seemed like mostly a matter of patience and so on. Then he got sick, stayed sick, got sicker. And continued to lose weight, down to his low weight of 325. And I mostly maintained my weight, until recently.

But then everything got so much worse, so much scarier last fall. I gained weight again while he was in the hospital, partly because I just didn't have time to eat right, partly because I didn't have the will to do it, and partly because I was comfort eating like mad, burying my head in a book and all the food I could grab. And now, nearly six months later, I'm probably 40 lbs. heavier than I've been in a decade, with a hip that's killing me, and a lot of sadness and anger and frustration.

And Michael? Well, the good news is that in a certain way, he's a billion times better than he's been in years. Alert and lively and himself again. Which is wonderful. The bad news... he's also 100 lbs heavier than his lowest weight, somewhere around 425. The result of steroids during chemotherapy, plus not being able to eat a low carb diet, plus some odd metabolic things... but also because of depression and the lack of will to really work at the weight stuff, because it's hard, so hard, when everything else is so difficult.

I look at him, and I see his mobility decreasing and his weight rising by the day. I see the neuropathy from the chemo, and the joint pain from the excess weight and whatever other reasons... and it breaks my heart, but at the same time, I can't make him do anything. I only drive him crazy by worrying at him about it. He has to get to the right place.

But I can't wait for him. I have to figure out how to take care of me, and now. I have to change the way I'm doing things, how I feel about food, about nearly everything. I have to do this, or in a year, I'll be fatter and immobile and then what will happen? We can't afford to have both of us incapacitated.

I'm scared. And I feel very alone with this, because I can't talk to Michael about it without the other question hanging there... the "why aren't you doing something" question.

So I think I need to be back here. I think I need to rethink what I'm writing here, the focus... less about us, more about me. I can't do this alone. Well, I can do this alone, because I have to. But I'm hoping that some of you will be here with me.

I hab a code

2010-02-12T07:41:00.002-05:00

Woke up this morning to nasal congestion, sore throat, and a kid who missed the bus. AND I have people coming over for dinner tonight. Bleah. Maybe we can just eat them. That would be low carb, right?

So this is Friday of my first week back on hard core low carb, and I'm doing... ok, I guess. I don't know why everyone else in the world gets this whoosh thing and loses something... I am down 1.3 lbs. That's it. But I feel better, and I'm moving more easily. I just need to get through the double challenge of people for dinner and being sick without hitting the bread or something.

I haven't had a chance to really tell the whole long story, but at the moment, the other part of the challenge is eating low carb while living with someone who must eat a high carb diet. So far, this is going ok, because I'm pretty motivated (aka DESPERATE), but I succumbed to tasting the pasta yesterday, and that's not a place we want to go....

Bleah

2010-02-10T06:55:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, ate less than 1500 calories. Weight: up that 2/10 of a pound that I was down yesterday.

I know I'm retaining water like mad for some reason; I'm just beyond bloated, and so tomorrow when I can be home all day, I'll probably take a diuretic and see if that helps any (not today! No fun teaching classes and running to the loo all the time, no way!). But I just have to wonder what in hell is going on with my metabolism.

For the last however-many years, it's been really hard for me to lose weight, no matter what I did. In a way, I didn't care so much, because I was more worried about other things, and I was at a weight that was not exactly uncomfortable for me. But now... I'm way above that weight, and Michael's relative health is giving me a chance to focus a little on me. And whatever's going on with my hip is making it mandatory. So this issue is becoming critical.

Trying to Get Back in the Swing...

2010-02-09T08:00:00.002-05:00

I'm going to write the long update one of these mornings... one of these mornings when I'm not teaching, and I'm not half asleep... in the meantime, I'm just trying to get back in the habit of writing something.

So, the weight front... NOT GOOD. The consequence of having spent most of the fall and early winter with Michael in the hospital was a chain of bad, and to some extent, comfort eating. I find myself at a horrifying 311, about 30 lbs. higher than when last I blogged regularly. I have a pretty good idea how I got here, but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get back, because my body is being incredibly stubborn about wanting to release weight.

But we try. My short-term plan: get back in the habit of writing down everything I eat. No, I'm not going to bore you with this, and I'm not going to get obsessive about it. But yesterday, I ate less than 1500 calories and very few carbs, just salad and green bean carbs.... weight today, down 2/10 of a pound. This is a tad discouraging, but we'll just have to see what happens. Start again, hang in there, try not to get discouraged. Get back to this as a way of life.

It's Been A Long, Long Time...

2010-02-08T07:16:00.002-05:00

I'm back. Hopefully to stay.

There's been so much to say and update and everything else that it's kept me from writing anything lately... just too much; I don't know where to start. So I'm just starting, and I'll tell the stories later.

Michael is ok, and I'm starting to believe that he's going to be fine. And I'll tell that long story later, because I just want to get going.

And I'm ok, all things considered, but I've gained a fair amount of weight over the last six months, and I absolutely have to get it off, because my hip is incredibly painful, and overall I feel terrible.

So I start again. This moment, now, because all I've been doing is saying, "tomorrow I will do this, and tomorrow it will be like this." And so forth. And then tomorrow is always the same. So it's not tomorrow; it's now. Yesterday, today... every moment is about making choices that lead somewhere different. The one thing that it isn't about is tomorrow, because the future, in some sense, never happens. It's all about the choice of the moment.

Very Quick....

2009-12-12T16:15:00.002-05:00

I swear I will tell this story better later, but I've had about 3 hours of sleep in the last 36.

Michael finally got home from hospital/rehab about 4 weeks ago, and was great. Weak, not exactly running miles, but great. And then about 10 days ago, he started getting weaker again, and terribly confused, and long story short, he's back in the hospital as of last night/this morning. He is ok, but they really don't know what's wrong with him. Not cardiac probably. Maybe related to the lymphoma. Maybe related to everything else. I finally got him into a room at 7:30 this morning and came home to sleep.

I am anxious and so sick of this never really knowing what the hell is going on. I'm hoping that maybe this time we;ll get some answers. And he was scheduled for his PET scan this Friday, and then they were going to start chemo, so I'm also scared that they may not be able to do that.

I will tell the story later, hopefully. I will really, really try to update more regularly (and thank you, lovely anonymous person, for asking. It means a lot to me that you care.).

Long-Overdue Update

2009-10-30T20:28:00.004-04:00

I'm so, so sorry that I haven't updated in ages. I've just been so beyond exhausted that I haven't been able to put it together to tell the story.

Seven weeks ago today, Michael got up and was so weak that he couldn't stand. He basically slipped off a chair and onto the floor, and couldn't get up, wasn't making any sense, etc. I called the ambulance and took him to the hospital. When he was first admitted, they seemed to think that it was just a medication adjustment, not probably a big deal though not good.

Two days later, they told me that his heart was working so poorly that his other organs were shutting down, and that there was a 50% chance that he would die, and that if he didn't die, it was probably still only a matter of time, even if they pulled him through this one. And they took him to ICU, and I was terrified.

And then, two days later, everything started improving. His kidneys started working again, they did another echocardiogram and his heart was working as well as it had been a year ago, and everyone perked up and stopped talking about him dying. But he was terribly weak and completely delirious for weeks. After two weeks, he started really getting better... they moved him out of ICU and to the cardiac ward... and he was there for another two weeks.

A lot of other stuff happened in the middle, but there are two important things... the most important is that when they were trying to figure out what was wrong in the ICU, they did a lot of body scanning, and they found some unexplained masses in his lower abdomen. After a biopsy and much waiting and testing, it turns out that he has lymphoma. T-cell-rich large B-cell lymphoma, to be precise. This is treatable but scary. And he will be starting chemotherapy relatively soon, and I am... well, happy that they found this, because if the other things hadn't happened, I don't think that they ever would have caught it, not until it really was too late, because no one was looking. But scared. I have been through too much chemo and cancer and death with people I loved over the last seven years.

The other thing is that he has been in bed for the last seven weeks, and so he is terribly deconditioned. They finally released him to rehab two days ago, so he can relearn to walk. So he can get strong enough to do the chemo.

It's been a long, long haul. I hope we're on the downhill part, now, but it's still going to be a long road.

Whatever Is Prayer for You...

2009-09-13T09:36:00.001-04:00

Michael is back in the hospital, and they are moving him to ICU this morning. His heart is not doing well, and as a result, nothing else is doing well. I can't tell exactly how serious this is, but it is not good.

We would appreciate all the positive thought and prayer that you can send.

And So On....

2009-08-01T11:43:00.002-04:00

Every day lately has just been a matter of wondering what bad things might come along next.

Michael's heart rate is good (and his weight is great; he's 371.6 this morning), but he feels terrible, he's exhausted all the time, he's dizzy, and worst of all for me, he's really confused most of the time. He's been doing things like talking to the remote control instead of the phone and trying to eat his tea (the drink, not the meal) with a fork. I find this a little scary. Everyone seems to think that it's all about low heart function (and his blood pressure is low, too) but this is not exactly comforting to me.

Last night... or this morning, more accurately... he got up, and then I don't know what happened. He fell, fortunately not hurting himself, but we couldn't get him up and had to call the paramedics.

The cardiologist swears that he will feel better next week. We'll see, I guess.

Awfulness, Part II

2009-07-28T15:12:00.009-04:00

My cat died this morning. And it was an accident, and I probably could have prevented it, one way or another, and I am heartbroken.

This morning, early, I heard barking in my backyard, and cat noises, too, but I was so exhausted that I didn't go check it out. I didn't even think that much about it, because (1) there's a dog that barks a lot a couple of yards over, and (2) there's a cat that likes to come by and scrap with my cats fairly often.

A couple of hours later, I woke up and found an actual dog barking and growling in my yard. I was a little scared to get close, so I called the police guy. When he came, he chased the dog farther back in the yard and found the dog... and another dog in my pool... and my beloved Crispin, dead, in the pool.

The gate to the yard was open last night... I didn't think twice about it because there are (before now) no stray dogs in the neighborhood, no small children, it's hard to get to the pool, and my own dog was away with my son, so I wasn't worried about him getting out. The cats never stray beyond the driveway, so I never worried about letting them out. But what must have happened is that the two stray dogs chased the cat and ran into the pool... the dog and poor Crispin couldn't get out.

I could have stopped this. I could have shut the gate. I could have checked out the noises when I first heard them. I could have left the big pool steps in... we took them out because they were causing problems with the liner and Michael was unable to get into the pool anyway. I could have prevented this. Yeah, I had no way of knowing. But I could have prevented it.

I loved that cat like no other. I used to think, I love you so much, something will happen to you.

Something did.

Goodbye, Crispin. I loved you the best and the most from the moment you came to me as a starving kitten. No other cat will ever be like you.

Awfulness, Part I

2009-07-27T13:39:00.001-04:00

So... when last I posted, we were in the midst of trying to figure out why Michael was getting these spells of feeling terrible, plus trying to get him well enough for the hernia/stomach surgery that was scheduled for the end of July.

Leaving out a good part of the middle bit... two weeks ago, he went in for his annual echocardiogram, and they discovered that his heart was pumping at 15% of capacity (normal, FYI, is about 60%). They immediately put him in the hospital and diagnosed congestive heart failure. And we've spent the last two weeks in the hospital... I say, "we" because I stayed with him the whole time.

The good news... I guess, if there is really any great news here... is that they put him on a whole lot of drugs, which he seems to be relatively ok with, and that the prognosis seems... well, ok I guess. He is relatively young. He's lost a lot of weight (and they said, for whatever it's worth, that if he had not, he would probably be dead by now). CHF is rarely completely reversable, but it can get a lot, lot better. And this explains a lot of the weird symptoms that he's had for so long, although no one has at all explained why it has been so cyclical. There's a lot of hope that maybe he'll really start feeling better.

The not-so-good-news... well, the condition in general. And of course, the surgery has to be postponed for some time until cardio clears him. And he's on a ton of medications which slow his heart rate (good) but lower his blood pressure (bad, because it wasn't high to begin with, and very low blood pressure makes you dizzy and confused). I don't know... it's hard to get any perspective about this right now.

I am worried and scared and overloaded and exhausted... so is he. But his weight is the lowest ever (378), and we are home, and we can rebuild.

Saturday

2009-07-04T12:39:00.002-04:00

It's another about-the-same day here, but I'm trying to make it different. I'm trying not to get upset. Im trying not to cry. I am trying to take care of myself.

Part of the problem with this cycle of awful stuff that happens is that Michael is so miserable; he says nothing at all (and those things that he says are mostly disturbing, like "where are all the painkillers") and most of the time, he sleeps. I feel desperately isolated and alone; I lose my best friend and confidante as well as everything else. When he's well, he's everything I need... and so, when things are like this, there's nowhere to turn.

We see the doctor on Tuesday.

And in the meantime, I will do what I can. And I will try to focus a little harder on taking some kind of care of me, too.

I'm Back. Sort of.

2009-07-03T14:32:00.002-04:00

I'm sorry for just vanishing... and not checking email and not updating and not responding to anything and all the other things that I should be sorry about.

It's been rough. And I get tired of posting things that say, my life right now is rough, and I am trying not to be discouraged. But it's all been stacking up, and I don't know how to make it better, and I don't know what to do to get my head above water, and I feel so desperately alone.

But you know, that makes for pretty tedious reading.

Michael is going through another spell of this mysterious crap that no one can figure out, and this time, it's hit him so hard that he can barely stand up. He sleeps all the time. Two weeks ago, we we thinking that he would be finally able to have surgery for his hernia (which is constant pain these days) and to have the skin on his stomach removed, and that's all actually scheduled for the end of July, but unless things get a lot better, I can't see it happening.

He's been having iron IVs to help with the anemia... one reason I haven't been on the computer at all; it's been so much time seeing various doctors and in transfusion centers and so on... two series so far, and whether it's doing any good or not, it certainly isn't stopping this mysterious weakness and associated symptoms.

We see the doctor on Tuesday. And I will say, it has been more than a year, and this is not better. Send us to someone who can diagnose this. Or figure out how we can go somewhere like the Mayo Clinic. This has to stop. We are exhausted and discouraged, and we cannot live like this.

It's almost a year since my mother died. She would have known how to approach this. As it is... Michael can't make decisions; he mostly can't even stay awake. And so it's me. Just me. And I will have to figure this out somehow, alone.

Catching up

2009-05-11T15:20:00.003-04:00

Yes, it's been a while....

It's been a crazy few weeks, mostly because it's the end of the semester, and everything happens at once, but also because we've been running around like mad to doctors appointments and so forth. But all the news, for a change, is pretty much good (although there's nothing really weight-related to report).

Michael finally started taking an antidepressant (Cymbalta, along with me), and miraculously, he's actually feeling a lot better. Not physically, but the scary level of depression that has been characteristic of (and increasing) for the last six months seems to be largely gone. It really does seem miraculous to me.

This week he starts iron transfusions to try to deal with the anemia (which has abruptly worsened again) and, at the end of the week, sees the bariatric/hernia guy to see if anything can be done about the increasing pain from his umbilical hernia. I am hoping that the answer is yes... and that they might want to deal with the excess skin in his stomach at the same time. That would be just such a good thing, even if he had to spend some considerable time in the hospital. But there are so many unknown things about that... we should have a better idea later in the week, I hope.

And I am trying to get refocused on actually losing weight instead of simply holding my own. I think I can do this. It makes such a difference when Michael's state of mind is better... it gives me the ability to think about something else, mainly.

There have been so many other things, too. A sad Mother's Day... the first without my mother. I swear that she made an out-of-season flower bloom for me, though.

And in news of the weird, my ex announced that he and his live-in girlfriend (it is hard to call this woman a 'girlfriend' because she looks 20 years older than him, but what other term is there?) are getting married. Not my business or my problem, but sad in a way. I'd like to see so much more for him; he's a genuinely great guy, although we couldn't make it work. But my son said, I think he's marrying the first girl he was with because he can't figure out how to do anything else, emotionally or financially. This from a 14 year old, and absolutely correct. It's just hard to see people you care about screwing up their lives by making the same mistakes over and over again, but what can you do? And he's screwing up the relationship with our son at the same time, and he doesn't see it, and the last person he could hear that from is me.

But you never know, I suppose.

399.7

2009-04-26T14:21:00.002-04:00

Three years.

220 pounds.

Yay, Michael!

The interesting thing, for whatever it's worth... I have tons of data on all of this, because I've been keeping spreadsheets for the last few years... low calorie, food-pyramid-style, "ordinary" carb sort of regime... total loss, about 70 lbs in about a year and 3/4. Low-carb... and he doesn't eat ultra-low carb, because he eats a fair amount of fruit... year and 1/4, 150 lbs. And his blood sugar is almost normal, without medication or insulin.

The world at the moment...

2009-04-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

I just haven't had the heart to post lately, when you get right down to it. Things have not been very happy here, to say the least. And I am not happy with my response to not being happy, which is, you guessed it, a combination of eating too much and just making myself incredibly miserable.

But it has to stop here. It has to stop now. I realized this last night when Michael went to bed, and I sat here and basically ate everything I could get my hands on in 15 minutes (hey, you can eat really low carb, and still stuff your face! Great....). And then felt sick as anything, and just... I don't know. Not so much angry at myself, but awash in that nauseating sea of familiarity, that knowledge that I've done this a thousand times, and here I am again. Everything I've done, everything I've learned, and still, you get the right combination of stress and unhappiness, and I'm right back at square one.

What can you do, though, but try again, try to do something differently, try not to lose heart?

The situation here is... well, hard to explain, I guess. On the weight side, Michael continues to lose, and with luck will actually be below 400 lbs. this week. Very exciting, very good. But he is so uncomfortable, so depressed, and in so much pain that it is almost meaningless. He has lost nearly 220 lbs. now, and he arguably feels worse than he did before he started. I don't really know why that is. That is, I understand some of the reasons, and I think most of them have to do with a combination of his hernia and the weird collection of symptoms that he gets from time to time, but I have no idea what causes this. Plus I think that his overall level of depression plus just how long this has all gone on contribute to everything.

And then there's the chair saga, which is the only remotely funny part of all of this.

When Michael first came here, I bought a lift chair for him... he was 620 lbs then, and getting up was a huge issue. There wasn't much available then... three years ago... all very expensive. I bought... oh, I've forgotten the brand now, but it was the only company that made really large lift chairs (which are mostly made for tiny grandmothers, I think). It was huge and terribly uncomfortable, and it cost about $1,500. So, after 2 years of it getting more and more uncomfortable, last summer we bought a new chair.

The new chair was a LaZBoy... normally pretty good chairs. They didn't have a floor model, so we had to order one, but the smaller one was almost ok, so we thought, fine, it's a LaZBoy, it will be great. Well, to make a long story short, it is not great. I don't know who this chair is designed for, but not really for someone with a human body, let's say. No one is comfortable in it. No combination of padding and such can make it comfortable. It is just structurally all wrong. Oh, and it cost about $1,500, too. So now we're $3,000 into the chair saga.

Fast forward to something like October. Chair is becoming intolerable. So in a flash of... well, not exactly brilliance, as it turns out... I go out and buy another chair. Beautiful leather recliner, very comfortable... or so I thought. $1200. Very comfortable for a week or two... and then it's clear that this isn't working, either, the size of the chair isn't quite right, plus it doesn't lift. Back to the horrible lift chair.

And back to being incredibly uncomfortable. He's in a lot of pain a lot of the time anyway, so this discomfort thing isn't just a matter of not the perfect chair or something; it's never being comfortable, and being tempted to just go to bed and stay there (which is the last thing I want to see). So last week, I can't stand it any more, and I go buy another chair. $900, and I sat in EVERY chair in the store, I think. (No, I couldn't get him to go pick one out.)

So this chair is wonderfully comfortable until he tries to get up from it, and then it becomes clear that he's not going to be able to actually get out of this chair, because it's too low, and it rocks, so it's tippy. So we put it up on concrete blocks to get it a little higher and keep it from rocking. Which, after about 3 tries, is maybe going to be ok. So now we're $5,100 into the chair saga, and I'm still not sure that we have a chair that is workable. If I even say the word "chair" to my son, he runs screaming because he figures he's going to be dragged into more furniture moving.

I wrote all of the above a few days ago, and then I just stalled out, kind of at a loss for where to go from there.

But since then, things have actually gotten a little better. Michael is on an antidepressant, and, miraculously, it has made a HUGE difference in just a couple of days. And when his mood brightens, the whole world seems like a different place. And he has agreed to see about hernia surgery... maybe still not possible, but just thinking about it is a step in the right direction.

So... well, no brilliant wrap-up, just restart, try again, see what happens.

Tomorrow will be our third anniversary.

Sunday wrap

2009-04-12T21:00:00.000-04:00

I just don't seem to be doing that well lately, not with my fitness goals, not with the rest of my life.

And there are explanations... the obvious one is just that Michael has been so continually unwell and depressed about it and generally testy and unhappy, and I can separate myself from this for a while, but eventually, it wears on me. I try very hard to separate my mood from his, and I try to stay up... but the problem is that, well, it does just wear on me, plus his withdrawal kind of sets off all the needy junk that I tend to revert to under stress, and he can't handle that, and... oh, ugh, it all turns into this vicious circle of unhappy things.

I know this, and I've gotten better at it, but it takes a lot of mental effort for me.

Sometimes, it's really hard to know how to be true to yourself while doing the best for others. And the corollary is, it's hard to know what the best thing for others really is. It's easy to guess, easy to think what you would want in the same situation. But everyone is different.

I know what would be best for me. Or at least I think I do.

I don't know what is best for Michael. I like to think that I do, but the fact of the matter is that I don't.

I spend a lot of time trying to cushion him from things, both literally and figuratively. I'm not at all sure that's the best thing to do. There's a lot on my shoulders, too, but there's no one else to carry it right now, so that's ok, and it's just the way it is.

I need to put some hard thinking into figuring out how to take care of myself better in some way that can be sustained when everything just goes to hell like this.

Monkfish with Curried Lentils and Brown Butter Cauliflower

2009-04-11T21:58:00.006-04:00

This recipe is based on a Bon Appetit recipe that I got via Epicurious, but I modified it to (1) reduce the carb level, (2) deal with some of the blandness issues that the commenters complained about, and (3) correct the very wrong cooking times.

Monkfish with Curried Lentils and Brown Butter Cauliflower

1 small head cauliflower, cut into florets
1 cup heavy cream
4 garlic cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg (use fresh nutmeg and grate it yourself)
salt and white pepper to taste

1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
1/4 cup finely chopped peeled carrots
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup French green lentils
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1-1/4 cups water
1/2 cup white wine
2 tablespoons butter
chicken or other stock as desired
salt to taste

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1 small head cauliflower, cut into small florets
salt to taste

4 6-ounce monkfish fillets (each about 1 inch thick), skin removed
1 tablespoon olive oil
fresh lemon

This recipe is really three (or four) parts, and they can all be done separately. (And, yes, there are supposed to be 2 heads of cauliflower; you use them in different parts.)

1. The cauliflower purée "sauce"

Bring first 4 ingredients to boil in medium saucepan. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until cauliflower is very tender, about 17 minutes. Cool slightly. Transfer mixture to blender (or food processor, or just use an immersion blender); puree until smooth. Season with salt and white pepper. This can be made far ahead of time and reheated.

2. Lentils/cauliflower

Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, carrots, and celery; sauté until just soft. Add lentils, curry, paprika; and cayenne pepper; stir. Add 1 1/4 cups water and wine; bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until lentils are tender, stirring occasionally. The original recipe says that this this will take 30 minutes. I think this depends entirely on the type of lentils that you use, and the wonderful French green ones take quite a bit longer than that... more like 45 or 50 minutes. So start this way ahead of time, and don't start the cauliflower step until the lentils

Meanwhile (see note above), cook butter in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until browned, about 2 minutes. Add cauliflower; sauté until beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Add 1/4 cup water; cover and cook until cauliflower is crisp-tender and water evaporates, about 10 minutes longer (at least). Stir in lentil mixture. Season with salt and pepper.

This can be made ahead and rewarmed, too. In fact, if you were making this for something like a dinner party, you could make everything except the fish earlier and just reheat.

Finally.... sprinkle monkfish with salt and pepper. Heat oil in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add fish; sauté until just opaque in center, about 6 minutes per side. Squeeze fresh lemon onto the fish. (You could use any firm white fish).

Divide sauce among 4 plates. Spoon lentil mixture alongside. Place fish atop lentils.

The original recipe, which you can find here, had a gremoulata for the top of the fish, but I didn't have any parsley, so I skipped it, and I really don't think it's necessary.

The main carb source in this dish is the lentils. I cut them in half (relative to the original recipe), so if this recipe serves 4, it's about 15 net carbs from the lentils (and a little more from the cauliflower). Not induction-friendly, but not excessive.

The vegetable mixture in this is great without the fish, too, just as a side dish for anything. It has a nice curried kick to it. It's also really easy after you do it once; it looks complicated, but it's not.

The hard thing...

2009-04-08T12:12:00.002-04:00

...is taking whatever comes with grace and generosity of spirit.

The hard thing is understanding that not everything is about you.

The hard thing is allowing there to be things that are about you, some of the time, because you can't have a life without conflict. People don't work that way. People have different needs, and sometimes they crash right into each other.

The hard thing is stepping back and giving time to let things sort out. The hard thing is not trying to control the outcome of things that make you unhappy.

The hard thing is not letting things that belong to other people affect how you feel about yourself.

Today, for me, everything is a hard thing, I think. But these things do pass, if you let them.

shrug

2009-04-07T15:53:00.003-04:00

I haven't been posting much lately because I just kind of don't know what to say. Nothing much is happening. I seem to be consistently failing to keep track of what I'm eating, not because I really object but because I just... I don't know. I just haven't been doing it.

I think it's mostly because Michael has been so low lately. The hardest thing I know, on a day-to-day basis, is to stay positive and happy when the person you spend all your time with is visibly unhappy and negative. I really don't blame him; I know that things for him have been unbelievably difficult lately, but this part is hard for me. Some part of me thinks that I should be able to fix it. Some part of me thinks that I should be spending a lot of time in a pretty futile attempt to help make things better. Some part of me thinks that if he's not happy, I shouldn't get to be happy, either (yes, I know, I know...). And then I find it hard to focus on taking care of myself.

I think that both of my sisters believe that this is some unhealthy codependent thing, and it's a natural thing to think, in part because we all watched my mother in a not-so-different sort of situation. But let's just say, it's not like I'm unaware of the potential. It's not like, in a larger sense, I'm not taking care of myself. It's just that some days are a lot harder than others.

The News from Here

2009-03-31T12:41:00.002-04:00

None.

We ended up not calling the doctor. I knew this would happen. We go through this routine all the time... things seem bad enough in the evening to call; by morning he feels better... next evening... well, you can guess. We did decide to give this until the kind of arbitrary date of April 13 to see if it just resolved itself. Again.

He is eating about 1200 calories a day if I push protein shakes down his throat, and every day, his weight is about a pound higher. No, this is not normal. And he complains about feeling absolutely stuffed all the time. And every night, his temperature goes up to 101 or 102 for a few hours.

I am trying to just sit this one out and wait and see what happens. He is so miserable and frustrated, though, that it's hard.

And so far, on my resolve to really keep track of food every day this week... total fail. Sigh.

Sunday again

2009-03-29T13:10:00.000-04:00

Updating...

A thank you to everyone who has been so encouraging about the calorie thing... my plan, which I've been doing in sort of a half-hearted way this week, is to keep a rough count on the applet on my iTouch (have I mentioned how much I love, love, love, love this iTouch? Useful in ways that I never imagined.). This has been going pretty well so far, to the extent that I've been doing it. It's not ideal in some ways, but the ways in which it's not ideal kind of keep me from getting as insane about it as I would be likely to do with a more sophisticated program. I used to use... well, I've tried FitDay (not crazy about it but a lot of people really like it), MyFoodDiary (best of the online programs, if you ask me, but still not fast), SparkPeople (not my cup of tea but again, great for a lot of people), and then ultimately I bought the software for DietPower, which I think is a really excellent program if you want to track every possible nutrient, and you have the ability to do this without spending all your life obsessing about it. (In other words, if you are not me. You don't even want to hear about the Great Selenium Debate of 2008.)

Anyway, this little iTouch applet is great, it was free (Lose It, for anyone curious), it's really fast, and you can easily track the three things I care about, calories, carbs, and protein. And the days that I have kept track, I have lost small amounts of weight. And the days that I have not kept track... you guessed it, I haven't. So you would think that someone with half a brain (and I'd like to count myself in for at least half...) would put this all together and actually do that. Which is my goal for this coming week.

In all fairness, the day that I really didn't track... yesterday... was kind of a Epic Fail sort of day anyway. Michael's been having another incidence of these mysterious symptoms he gets... afternoon fever, edema, extreme fatigue, nausea... and he feels like death, and he's depressed as hell. Part of the trouble is that he gets up in the morning and feels relatively ok, but in a few hours, he's awful again. Anyway, yesterday, I took him for a drive, just to get him out of the house, and it just was one of those ideas that seems good and turned out just bad bad bad bad... he was uncomfortable and miserable, I was miserable because my happy plans had not turned out that way, he was more exhausted than he would have been otherwise... and we didn't exactly eat properly, either, although "not eating properly" for us these days isn't exactly an extreme thing.

The trouble is that I seriously have no idea what the right thing to do about this problem is. We go back to the doctor time and time again; he does tests, and he doesn't find anything. I don't think that he has a clue where to go with this next, and I also don't think that he takes it that seriously... he doesn't see the extent to which Michael is incapacitated; he doesn't see what it's doing to him psychologically, either. I just don't know where to go with it. I'd like to have someone else see him... but who? My sister keeps suggesting that we go somewhere like Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic for a complete workup, but I have no idea if my insurance would pay for it, and the other problem is, doctors take one look at him and they think that it's all about weight, and they want him to have surgery. Yes, he's still over 400 lbs. But he has lost over 200 lbs., and he feels worse. If he were not losing weight, we would consider surgery. But as long as he is... and he is, when this stuff is not going on... that doesn't seem to me to be the right choice at this time. I need for someone to see past the weight and try to get to the bottom of what causes this fatigue, the fevers, the edema.

So I will call the doctor on Monday, for lack of anything else to do, and I will try to get him in to see him, although I have a hideous schedule next week, and doing this will be very difficult.

We will get through all of this. I know that. It just would be nice to be able to see the road ahead a little more clearly.

Calories and Carbohydrates

2009-03-26T06:18:00.001-04:00

When you start reading about low-carb diets, you get the notion that you can eat whatever you want, as long as it's low carb, and still lose weight. I think it starts with the first weeks of Atkins (eat whatever you like as long as you keep carbs below 20) and follows along to the people who argue that there's a metabolic advantage to low carb diets, and it all builds to the idea that if you're counting carbs, you don't need to count calories.

But ultimately, I'm pretty sure that's not true, or not true for everyone at least. (One of the things I've really learned over the last few years is that everyone is a little different, and what works for one person may not work at all for someone else.)

When I started eating low carb, I lost about 20 lbs. or so pretty quickly, and then I've spent about a year plus pretty much maintaining my weight. Which is not exactly what I have in mind. I've proved again and again that if I keep the carbs low, I can eat mostly whatever I want and not gain weight. This is kind of a long-run good thing, I suppose, but it doesn't solve the problem of really wanting/needing to lose more. And, sure, there are many reasons why, for the last year, it's been easier for me to maintain weight than to lose it, but at the end of the day, it still leads to the conclusion that that I have to do something different if I want to get anywhere. The lower carbs have also been fantastic for my blood sugar and general level of energy, and so, particularly because we eat very clean anyway, in the "very little processed food" sense, I'm pretty happy with the general shape of my food choices. But clearly there's too much of it.

I was starting to get somewhere when I was making the photo food diary, but... well, I got lazy about it, and I realized that I eat a lot of the same thing a lot of the time, and that it's hard to get a sense of scale... so it was definitely a step in the right direction, but it wasn't enough. And I got kind of derailed when my son and I went to New York, too, and haven't quite started up on the pictures again, although I probably will.

But I think that when you get right down to it, I have to start counting calories again. I am not totally averse to doing this, but it's taken a while to really convince myself that I need to do this. First of all, I love the idea that I can eat pretty much whatever I want... but "whatever I want" is simply too much for me to actually lose weight, at this point in time anyway, because I have too many bad habits that are allowed free rein with this idea. I graze (moo!). I eat when I'm bored. I think I'm hungry when I'm bored. I don't have enough accountability. And so on. The other thing is that I have been very reluctant to start keeping a food diary, because it tends to make me a little obsessive and weird and controlling about food... about Michael's food, too, and this is not a recipe for marital bliss. I am just going to have to figure out how to avoid doing that. And how to not make myself crazy in the process.

I think that "not making myself crazy" is going to have to mean, keeping a rough tally on my iPod, not spending the hours that I used to obsessing over every micronutrient. I have been trial-running this for a couple of days, and thus far, I'm a little lighter and not much more insane than normal. Yet. :-)

And Another Sunday....

2009-03-22T10:37:00.003-04:00

Somehow, a week has slipped by.

And what have I done this week? Kind of nothing, amazingly enough. It's spring break here, and as always, I'd had all these plans to get caught up with everything in the world, and mostly that hasn't happened at all. Discouragingly enough.

And so that's what I've been thinking about. Procrastination.

I've been reading this book lately about, basically, fixing what's wrong with your life, I guess. And the premise thus far is that we create our own problems/obstacles by the way we think about them. "The way we frame the problem" is the way I'd put it. Which I pretty much agree with. And that change is hard because we are resistant to change, because most of our difficult behaviors serve us in one way or another. Thus we have to be willing to let go of the... the reasons why we've kept the behaviors, I guess.

I have been thinking specifically about procrastination, which is probably the specific behavior that is annoying me the most these days, because it invades about every facet of my life. I procrastinate about doing work-related things, home-related things, exercise-related things, writing down food... you name it. And it's easy to focus on the behavior and say, obviously what you need to do is stop procrastinating. But I guess that my thought from reading this book, to the extent that I have, is that it's not the procrastination that's the issue, it's the underlying stuff, the ways in which not doing these things allows me to... I don't know. Maybe fail to take responsibility for my own successes or failures, because I'm always going, oh, if I'd done this, it would have turned out better. I kind of can't explain that so that it makes sense, but it does make sort of an internal sense to me. "It's not really my fault since I didn't do everything that I could have." Something like that.

I need to figure out how to get past this and, trite though it sounds, allow myself to succeed.

Sunday

2009-03-15T13:25:00.001-04:00

Some days, I sit down to write, and I think, this is the wrong stuff to put here. This blog is supposed to be about something. About weight loss or something like that. But I think... I don't know, I guess that for me, weight loss is about 10% what you actually do and 90% what you learn not to do. And at the end of the day, that's all behavioral modification, and your ability to do that is all about consistent effort... which in turn is all about the rest of your life.

It's a sunny afternoon, Michael's asleep, my son is at his father's, and I'm cleaning the kitchen. Or I'm supposed to be, anyway. I got derailed by thinking too much, as usual. And missing my mother. It's been 8 months, and I suppose that the grief has lost its immediacy. But it's like a wound that scabs over but still hurts all the time. I begin to think that there's no end to this. I can't talk about it, and I can't stop feeling it. It seems to be one of those things that is a marker, after this thing, you will never be the same. It's like having children... it's impossible to understand really what it's like to have kids until you do, and then there's no going back; your understanding of life is different forever. (Yes, I know, Circle of Life; I'm one second from humming Lion King songs.)

And I think, as I do so much these days, about where I am and what's next. About getting to some different place, where I'm not just replaying the same choices over and over again, where something actually changes. I was reading this on Escape from Obesity this morning... and, yeah, I can relate to missing the "happy" binging, to when food, a day of food, was a real source of pleasure. It's not anymore... but there's a part of me that wishes that it still was. Or, more accurately, that there was something that gave me the simple kind of pleasure that I used to be able to get by sitting down with high-carb foods and a good book and just letting the world go away. And, yes, I'm ashamed, in a way, to say that. I have different pleasures now, but it doesn't mean that I miss the old simple ones. Everything these days seems complicated and full of thought and just not easy.

Everything is ok. But some days, I just feel so profoundly tired, tired to the core, and I want to go back to a time when life seemer simpler and the choices less limited.

Not a Happy Bunny

2009-03-14T08:33:00.002-04:00

Somehow it turned into a rough day yesterday.

The good part: we went to see New Knee Doctor yesterday, who said, there is nothing wrong with your knees that losing another 200 lbs. would not mostly cure. (Then he looked like he had very little belief that he could do that, but let's not go there...) So that is good news, or good reinforcement anyway because it's not really anything that we didn't know.

Went to the store, came home, and the day kind of spiraled down. Michael was exhausted and tense and low, and he is still not well. I am pretty convinced that this is not flu but rather a milder version of this thing that happens again and again. The good thing is that his breathing has not been so bad, but the rest of it... rapid heart rate, blood sugar that is out of whack, water weight gain (stomach edema), wanting to sleep all the time... it's all the same. Just not so bad. I am pretty sure that it will pass (and relatively soon, with luck), but it's discouraging for him to watch the scale just go up and up (he's about 10 lbs. higher) when he's eating very little. Hard to know what to do. His weight will not be lower today, I know that... and he will be discouraged all over again.

And I don''t know what happened to me. Started ok, but got tired and tense and anxious, and then all I wanted to do was eat. Which I did. I have seen so many former binge eaters say basically this... I did not binge in any realistic calorie sense, but I could feel that the motivation behind it was the same. I even made an excuse to get up after we'd gone to bed so that I could sit up for 20 minutes and eat more. It is hard to write that. And this morning I feel sick and low and very alone.

But what can you do? It's another day. It's time to dust off the pieces, try to figure out why this happened, start again.

Continuing...

2009-03-13T13:09:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to find the next step.

I've worked so hard... nearly a decade... on the cognitive, behavioral things, and I think because of that, it is hard for me to believe that there really is something biochemical wrong with me that medication does help... or can sometimes, anyway. But I see the things that come back, the things that you don't realize are gone until they return... the ability to laugh more, to just be happier in the moment, to be silly and spontaneous. Michael sometimes complains that I'm not fun anymore... I think he means, not spontaneous... and, you know, he's right. I'm not fun. It's all a balancing act, me on this tightwire between ok and not ok, teetering all the time, trying to keep my ducks all in a row. I beat myself up mercilessly a lot of the time for not getting things done... but I forget, it's hard. It's hard to get up in the morning and put myself together and do the basic things. It shouldn't be. But it is.

I wish that I had the words for the feeling, that inchoate formless longing to be on the other side of this, to be that person I can feel sometimes, the person who I am without the sadness and the regrets and the anxiety and fear. I can see her, sometimes, just on the edge of my vision. Sometimes, just for a moment, I am her. And then I lose my balance again.

But the last few days, I can see the form and shape of it, see the choices that I have to make, see these things as real and possible rather than things that require unimaginable, insurmountable effort.

I think this is all good. But it's tentative and a little frightening, too.

Come ON. Do SOMETHING.

2009-03-12T09:57:00.006-04:00

Ugh, I woke up early this morning thinking I would get all sorts of things done, but I've actually been just napping listening to the news of one sort or another and trying to really wake up. Michael is no better; he dragged himself out of bed a couple of hours later and promptly went to sleep in his chair. He's been sick with something stomachy for days; I think maybe I have a touch of it, too, and my son has a sore throat.

The trouble is that as soon as Michael gets sick, he starts gaining weight... not because he's eating too much; actually he's eating hardly anything at all. But I think it throws off his blood sugar and increases the edema in his stomach, and it's just all really discouraging. You can know perfectly well that it's not "real" weight, but the scale still says ugly things. And it sets him back weeks. He's discouraged and achy and miserable.

I am feeling... better. Tentatively better. I very tentatively, not wanting to put much belief in it, but just kind of sort of... think that this medication is making me feel better.

I have a list a mile long of things that I either need to do or want to do, and I am just sitting here.

Ok. Here is what I need to actually DO today.
Stretching/exercises *done*
Spend an hour in the studio working on glass * done happy happy*
Clean the scary bedroom *started. Very scary.*
Write Phi Beta Kappa letter
Write other letters of reference
Cook chicken wings and soup (not together!) *done*
Freeze or cook chicken breasts

Back later.

Tuesday night

2009-03-10T18:26:00.002-04:00

I feel like I ought to post something, but I have no idea what to say, really.

It's been a busy beginning of the week... it's when all my classes are, and I'm so far behind on everything. Plus Michael has something that is probably just flu (but every time he feels unwell at all, my heart stops because I'm afraid of another recurrence of these breathing issues and mysterious weight gain, still unsolved).

But mostly, I just can't put any thoughts together that make something like a coherent post.

How do I feel? Not so nauseated and drugged as I felt for the first few days. Ok, I guess. Better than without it? Just too soon to say. Maybe. Just maybe. But the nausea and lightheadedness and fatigue make it hard to say, oh, yeah, this is a good thing. On one hand, I feel like springing out of my chair and getting a lot of things done, and on the other... well, I'm pretty lethargic.

I am trying to get it back together to start posting food again, but on top of everything else, with Michael sick, I'm mostly eating leftovers. Tonight was Carnivore Night... everything in the refrigerator was meat of a sort, leftover roast beef and salmon and chicken. There are never any vegetable leftovers. Yes, I could have made a salad... which actually sounds great at the moment. No, I couldn't be bothered.

Mostly, I'm just musing. On where to go from here. On what it all means. On who I want to be. Some days, I feel like everything is falling into place at long last. Others, just no clue.

Someone I loved a long time ago used to say, "I have no idea what I will do next. Watch this space." Not a particularly novel way of putting it, I suppose... but I always associate that with him (that, and England in the spring, and jester hats, and cheap red wine, and airplanes, and unbearable sadness and loss). I feel like that, though. Watch this space. Something will happen next.

Updates

2009-03-08T09:03:00.002-04:00

Good morning. Welcome to Daylight Savings Time... or is it the other way around? I can never remember if this is when it starts or it ends, particularly as it never makes any sense to me anyway.

I think that this is Day 3 of Cymbalta. And mostly I feel weird. It's been a decade since I've taken antidepressants, and so I've forgotten this initial side effect stage. It all feels vaguely familiar, but not in a good way. Intermittent nausea is the worst part. Underneath it, I feel... sort of weird, sort of ok. Sort of just weirded out. I think that a decade ago I was considerably more willing to experiment with the biochemistry of my head. Now... I just don't know. On the one hand, however I feel without the medication is me... I guess. On the other... well, when I started taking Prozac more than a decade again, I felt briefly and wonderfully free of the general irritation and annoyance with life that had plagued me forever. And it didn't last, but I knew that I could feel that way, and so I had something to work at, and slowly I learned how to feel that way on my own, most of the time.

My sister would say that depression and anxiety are diseases, and you wouldn't choose not to treat something like diabetes, would you? (I tried to point out that I live with a diabetic who pretty much does refuse to treat it with medication, but she really didn't think that amusing or appropriate. She totally lacks a sense of humor about this.) I say, sure, it's not like I don't buy into that, but a nice comforting broken leg would have visible symptoms, a clear progression, a point where it was fixed. It wouldn't be this roulette wheel of trying to find a medication that works, of separating the biochemical from the behavioral, of side effects so on.

Anyway, I haven't been keeping a food diary because I haven't really been eating much, so I can't seem to work up an interest. This is not that great really, because I know perfectly well that I can eat a lot without thinking that I am. Still, I'm just about back to my pre-NYC weight, so that's good. And I'm playing racquetball today, if my hip will let me and if my friend remembered to reset his clock. This should be really interesting; in addition to the nausea, I'm dizzy as hell. But I really want to play. Need to move around. Last time around with this kind of thing, I used to put on headphones and go running in the dark... and those of you who know just how much I hate running will understand how really weird that was.

Ok. Let's Give It a Try...

2009-03-06T12:22:00.003-05:00

Thanks, everyone. Your support means a great deal to me.

I'm giving it a try. With HUGE reservations, I have to say. (Come on, make a decision and stick to it rather than second-guessing yourself, ok?) I started last night. I feel awful today. But that's the price, waiting out the side effects. The only good thing about this is that I think that food is not going to be an issue in the short run.

Bleah.

I usually tolerate medication pretty well at least for a while. I need to remember that. I need to not focus on the fact that I feel mega-weird. And I need to get back to my food/semi-workout routine, now. And see where I'm at in a few days.

Accountability. Cymbalta. Whining.

2009-03-05T07:43:00.003-05:00

I've been doing ok at removing the excess weight that I managed to gain in NYC... mostly water, fortunately... but it is really clear to me that I am nowhere close to being able to do this on my own without some kind of accountability. So I'm back to the food diary today, although probably not photos just get because my son swiped my camera for a school project and hasn't brought it back yet!

If you were reading back in January, I'd finally decided that my level of depression had gotten so far out of hand that I was willing to try anti-depressants again, called up Psychiatrist Sis, and got her recommendation... Cymbalta... which my insurance company promptly refused to pay for. I was Not Happy (well, obviously). Since then I've been working on getting approval... or my doctor has... and this finally came through.

But this is my dilemma. I really don't feel as bad as I did in January. Not even close. For one thing, Michael is a lot better, and that increases my coping abilities hugely. Other than this persistent, horribly painful hip thing, I feel physically better. Things are... ok-ish. Most of the time.

But I have a hard time stabilizing my mood at the best of times. I still can't seem to get past the lethargy that's been characteristic of everything since my mother's death. I can't seem to get past the fact that any small thing rattles the foundations of whatever peace of mind I have. And maybe something would help with that. Plus a number of people have put some effort into making sure that I can try this.

I really don't know what to do.

Back. Food. Lessons.

2009-03-02T16:01:00.003-05:00

Back from NYC. A great four days with my delightful son; otherwise, kind of a mixed bag. A whole lot of chaotic weirdness on the professional front, not good news for my student program although how it all works out remains to be seen. Long story.

But we had a lot of fun and ate some really good food and saw some plays and went to museums and got to spend some real time together in a way that we haven't been able to in a long time. He's such a great kid, so fun to be with, and we just get along really well, always have. It's so special to me... especially since I didn't have anything like this kind of relationship with either of my parents.

Anyway, on the food front, a couple of thoughts.

One thing is that it's surprisingly easy to eat reasonably low carb as long as you (1) skip the fast food, (2) skip the bread basket, and (3) skip the desserts. I kind of forget this because we really don't eat out much.

The second thing is that I've still got a long way to go along the cognitive behavioral road. I know, it's a few days on vacation (sort of), and no one is expecting perfection, and those of you who remind me that I'm too hard on myself will say that again. But the fact of the matter is that when I don't eat properly-- that is, when I don't eat the foods that my body is used to eat and skip the foods I don't generally eat-- I feel very bad. Physically. And bread and dessert is not worth nausea and bloating. Ex post, anyway. Ex ante often seems like a different story. Someday I will get this into my thick skull. The problem is that I do know this, but at some point I just kind of wear down, and once that happens, all the "what the hell" parts of my brain take over.

(Interesting side note: NYC now requires that chain restaurants put calories on the menu. We went to the Hard Rock Café for lunch one day, and in general, I don't pay that much attention to calories, but I have to say that having these numbers on the menu is a huge deterrent to eating. Anything, really. I recognize that it's difficult for all restaurants to do this, plus it's not that exact, but there's a lot to be said for it.)

Also, I totally racked up my hip walking a lot and going up and down a lot of stairs in the subway. So incredibly painful. I had to cancel classes yesterday because I basically didn't think I could walk across campus and stand up for an hour. No idea what this is or why it kicks off, although it really is walking and stairs that makes this worse. So maybe bursitis; regardless, it's unbearably painful plus makes it hard to sleep at night.

Now I need to get back to my routine.

And by the way... I sort of mean to write up some NYC review notes, just for the fun of it, but I wanted to put in a plug for the most fun museum thing that we did... the Frick Collection. I've been to all the big museums a million times, but I've never been there before... it is the most enchanting place, the mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, which houses the most staggering collection of (mostly) European paintings, some of which are so famous that you can't believe that you're actually standing in front of them. The Vermeers are stunning (look at the one on their home page right now, if you click the link). It's small, it's beautiful, and there aren't a ton of people there. An absolute gem.

Think Good Thoughts for Me

2009-02-27T07:35:00.002-05:00

Quick, from NYC post... more about things actually related to this blog later... but I found out at dinner last night that the government agency that sponsors the student program with which I'm greatly involved is probably going to stop doing that. This would be a huge blow to me, but more importantly to a lot of students at a lot of colleges in this area... and I would be just heartbroken to see this happen.

Today I get to do whatever I can to save something from the wreckage... and I've spent all night trying to think how best to do this. I have no real idea. But I strongly believe in the power of positive thought and faith, so... send some good thoughts my way this morning, if you can.

Bleah.

2009-02-25T08:12:00.002-05:00

I could tell you what I ate yesterday. It's boring. I forgot to take pictures, and mostly I was so irritated with myself that I didn't pay a lot of specific attention. Sigh. The day all kind of went to hell.

It all kind of went to hell in a flurry of trying to pack to go to NY tomorrow, and realizing that everything dressy that I have to wear looks terrible on me. In my opinion anyway. And certainly not like I want it to look.

I know that probably every woman (and probably man, too) has had that moment when everything in your closet is lying on the floor around you, and you realize that that you just own nothing that is what you want, and that the problem is as much you as the clothes. You have the things that you wear every day, and they don't set this off for you... they're the things that you're already comfortable in, or maybe that you just tune out because you're used to seeing them... in the same way that we don't necessarily focus on everything about what we look like every day (which actually is a Good Thing, of course. It's not like you'd really want to do that.)

But yesterday was really one of those days for me. Everything I put on either looked like a sack or was too tight, and... well, let's just say that it was all as depressing as hell.

And this is what I thought while I was totally being miserable about this. I have spent nearly three years paying incredible amounts of attention primarily to diet. I weigh... well, a little less than I did then, but not a lot. If I had just lost, say, a pound a week during this time, I would be below my goal weight. It's a little disheartening. Or it makes you think that I'm utterly delusional about what I eat and what I do, which really I'm not.

But the problem is this... and it's the heart of every problem for me, in a lot of ways. I have spent three years paying attention to Michael's weight. To what would help and support him. And, wow, in that sense, I've been incredibly successful. I've made him the focus, made choices again and again that were supportive of him, and, you know, I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. But we are not the same person, and the same things do not necessarily work for us.

If I don't do something to change my ability to support him and me, I'll be sitting here two years from now, he'll be at his goal weight, and I'll be writing this again. And my back will still hurt, and I still won't have anything to wear.

Today isn't a life-change day... it's a get everything done before I go to NYC day. But after I get back, I need to spend some hard time thinking about this.

And I still have nothing that I'm happy wearing.

Upcoming Pitfalls. Monday Food. General Chaos!

2009-02-23T15:56:00.006-05:00

On Thursday, my son and I are going to New York City for a few days. I am very happy/excited about this... I used to take him every year when he was younger, but we haven't gone in a while mostly because Michael can't really do it yet, and I feel not happy about leaving him home alone. Doesn't seem fair. But I have a conference to go to, so that means that the college will pay a lot of my expenses, so it's just too good an opportunity to go. We're going to see a couple of shows, and go here for dinner one night, and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and maybe some other museums... and roam around, depending on the weather. (Last time we were there, we walked and walked and ended up somewhere I'd never seen before, and it was freezing cold, and we were starving, and we stumbled into this little Indian restaurant and they gave us tons of food and the best steaming hot chai, and, wow, it was wonderful.) And maybe see a friend of my mother's, if the fact that my total social awkwardness and failure to email her until this morning doesn't screw that up. (Sigh. How old do I have to be before I stop being shy? I'm starting to think that the answer is, "older than you will ever get.")

Anyway. For me, the really big question is, can I go to NYC for four days and still eat like a reasonable person? (Definition of a reasonable person: someone who does not see the "away from home" excuse as a reason to stuff all sorts of crap into her face.)

Last summer, after my mother died and I was flying back and forth to Baltimore all the time to help deal with her stuff, I'd eat the way I should for a few days, and then I'd get sick of saying, "sorry, I can't eat that" to my sisters all the time, and I'd just cave. Which might be kinda sorta fine if I enjoyed it at all. But the problem is that high carb food and too much food of any kind makes me feel sick... after the fact... but that pleasure sensor in my brain is just too stupid to figure that out some of the time. (Vivid memory: letting myself get way too hungry, then caving in and having Mexican food, mostly tortilla chips and sugary margaritas, and just being more sick than I've ever felt in my life.)

This time I have a little more control, in theory anyway, and I can head off the being hungry before it gets out of control, and really I have the tools to be moderate about this if I can just keep focused. This doesn't mean that I have to be perfect, but it does mean that I have to be careful and cognizant, recognize that my real weakness is letting myself get overly hungry, and remember that I choose to eat this way because it makes me feel better.

Plus I've fought really hard to start losing weight again, and I'd just as soon not gain it all back in four days.

Which means I have to not do dumb things. These dumb things include (1) the too hungry thing, (2) getting annoyed at how hard it is to eat low carb at fast food places unless you want to strip the bun off the burger and try to eat the patty without dripping grease all over yourself (ugh), (3) other stuff I will think of later.

____

Food.
Quiche/protein shake
Then I was at school all day and didn't eat anything... note that part above where I said that stuff about getting too hungry? Have I mentioned lately that I am an idiot?
Came home starving and nibbled on random food, violating all rules as I (1) didn't take a picture, (2) didn't pay attention, (3) didn't even sit down. I had some leftover pork, and some cheese and crackers, and probably too much of all of the above.
Then we had tilapia and green beans for dinner. I had a sugar-free chocolate. I had some more cheese. Why, you ask? See above. I am an idiot.

Just to relieve the dullness of all of this, I am throwing in a picture of Mint Julep, my stuffed sheep, who will probably be coming along to NY. It's a long story. And note the cool traveling hat that Michael's friend made for him!

Glass. More is... More. And Sunday Food.

2009-02-22T14:40:00.004-05:00

Wow. Glass makes me happy. I forget that.

I think that everyone's got a thing or two that just keys right into their core, and glass is that for me. Glass and enamel, vitreous things. If I had my life to do over again, I would have apprenticed as a glassblower, I think, or gone to art school somewhere that I could have studied glass working.

It's funny... my mother used to look at me and sigh and say, "I always thought you should have been an artist." This used to annoy the hell out of me, because I heard that as "I don't value what you actually do." Which may or may not have been correct, but still. (Total aside... I've heard people say about people who are dead... "this thing that they used to do that annoyed me; I just wish that they were still here to do that now." I do not feel that way. These sorts of things still make me angry and hurt. Yes, I should just let it go. No, I don't know how to do that yet.) But I'm terrible at the kinds of art that I was presented with at school... drawing and painting and so forth; I have minimal talent for them and no drive to succeed. But this... turning molten glass into solid light... this I could have spent a lifetime doing.

Anyway, another thing that I tend to forget is that when I do more, I feel like doing more, if that makes any sense.

I spend a lot of time screwing around and doing nothing, and then being discouraged that nothing is done (surprise!). I've been thinking a lot about the choices I make about what to do with my time, and I mostly think I could just be spending it better. Today I did a lot of things... made some beads, played racquetball, made food for the week (some of it, anyway), finished Michael's green card paperwork, and so on. And I feel a whole lot better than when I sit here and play games and end up with nothing to show for the day.

Better use of time.

Food. Boring.

Breakfast: quiche/protein shake
Then I went and played racquetball. Came back and had a chicken wing segment and a very small slice of cheese and the 3 ounces or so of leftover seafood salad.
Made soup for the week... more broccoli/sausage (my son: "Mom, can we just have a giant soup dispenser so there will always be soup?" Awwww.) But didn't really eat any.
Then we had curry for dinner, with the leftover pork from yesterday, but all of this looked so boringly like things I've made before that I didn't bother to take pictures.
And I had a sugar-free chocolate.

I feel a lot better about what I ate today, so maybe I'll end up ok for the week.

Everything Wants to Be Round. And Saturday food.

2009-02-21T19:55:00.005-05:00

I was reading MizFit's blog yesterday and thinking about vision and gratitude boards and so forth, and about the amount of time I spend these days in activities that do not get me closer to any positive goal.

And so I decided to just do something that I've been putting off until the stars align properly and all the right things fall into place... setting up my glass working equipment again.

It's been years, literally, since I've done this... working with glass is the one thing that I've wanted to do practically forever, and about 6 or 7 years ago, I started taking beadmaking classes in Rochester and in Corning, and I finally set up a small studio at home. And I was just starting to feel like I was getting somewhere with this, when just about everything in my life changed, and I moved, and it took a long tiime to get things set up again. When I did, it was winter... and I work in the garage, and although the torch itself is over 2000 degrees, in winter here, it was just too cold. So Michael did the sweetest thing ever two years ago and as a Christmas present, hired someone to partition the garage and insulate it, so I could work in the winter. But the guy who was doing it, the son of a friend, turned out to be... well, "less than competent" would be putting it kindly. This was supposed to take a few weeks, and he finished at the end of last July. By that time... well, that was right after my mother died, and about when all the rounds of Michael being really sick started, and it's seemed like about the last thing that I should be doing. And too much effort to dig everything out and get going, and time that I couldn't afford to give.

So yesterday, I made a vision wall, instead. I tacked up all the pictures I had of glass by Kristina Logan, my personal inspiration, hooked everything up, and made a few beads. Wow, it's been a long time. I have forgotten everything. But it will come back.

Working with glass is a very meditative kind of activity for me. You have to be patient, not something that I do well. Lots of stuff goes through your head. Yesterday, what was going through my head was what one of my teachers said... "everything wants to be round." What she meant was, hot glass will always try to be round, so you have to remember as you're trying to shape it.

But to me, that means something else... it is easiest to be what you are naturally.

It's an extension of something I was thinking about earlier in the week, regarding exercise and food... it's a lot easier to try to follow an eating plan that suits the way you like to eat. Exercise for me got a lot easier when I got over the idea that I had to run, like all my friends, because this is not something that is natural for me. And when you get right down to it, most of the things that cause me pain in my life have to do with trying to be something that I am not, but that I have some notion that I "should" be.

Everything wants to be round. Use what you are naturally to make yourself better.

______
Food.

I am not paying as careful attention as I should.

Quiche/protein shake breakfast.

Then I went off to give a makeup exam, and ran by the grocery store to pick up prescriptions. I brought home some seafood salad for lunch, discovered that Michael had already eaten, and so just tossed a little seafood salad and a couple of chicken wing segments on a plate, and couldn't be bothered to take a picture. Also couldn't be bothered to have the green salad that I'd planned. Yes, I know... I will fuss around if I'm making food for other people, and I won't bother to feed myself properly. Not a Good Thing.

Around 5, we had 2 crackers with a little smoked salmon and some cheese that I'd bought earlier, plus 2 thin round of something billed as "Chianti Wine Salami." Good, not great.

And then dinner was pork shoulder, cauliflower purée, and broccoli with a little Parmesan cheese. The red stuff is a cranberry-walnut sauce, not low carb but there's only about 2 teaspoons of it.

But I nibbled on bits of pork as I was carving, and I ate a few of those little hamburgers I made a couple of days ago (and fed the rest to the dog), and I think I had a chocolate, and I sort of feel like I'm getting back to that not paying attention kind of eating. It's mostly, I think, because I've been sick and so haven't really been exercising, and that tends to make everything else kind of fall apart. This needs to be nipped in the bud now.

And today's bonus picture... a very bad picture of six not-very interesting or symmetrical beads. It's a start.

All About Us ; A Recap

2009-02-21T08:48:00.005-05:00

I've been meaning to write a general post that I can link to my profile that tells our story. Some of it, anyway.

We've both found with weight issues all our lives. Ten years ago, I was at my highest weight, around 340, and I lost nearly 120 lbs. then, mostly by spending all my time exercising myself into a stupor so that I could avoid thinking about my disintegrating first marriage. I slowly gained a lot of it back, although fortunately not all of it, and I retained a lot of the good exercise habits that I'd acquired then.

When Michael and I got married in April of 2006, he weighed about 620 lbs., and I weighed 290 lbs.

We immediately started the "perfect" low fat, food pyramid-based diet. We ate about 1500-1800 calories a day, and I wrote down every single thing in a food diary. We ate about 20% fat, tons of fruits and vegetables, whole grains... obsessively and exactly what we were supposed to eat. What we had always been told to eat. And we did this until about the end of 2007.

During this time, Michael got down to about 530, and his weight then bounced up and down and up and down, totally stalling out. I lost 10 lbs, gained 10 lbs, lost 10 lbs... and so on. And all the fat went back and forth into my stomach, which is usually not where I gain weight (let's not discuss my thighs, ok?). Plus I was absolutely exhausted all the time, and we were getting absolutely nowhere.

By the end of 2007, Michael weighed 533 lbs., and I weighed 302. It had been nearly a decade since my weight had been that high, and yet I was eating "better" than I ever had before. And I felt awful.

A friend recommended Gary Taubes' book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and I started thinking about low carb diets. Then I started reading everything that I could get my hands on about low carb diets, most specifically the Protein Power books by the Drs. Eades. And we started eating low carb. This was an extremely hard sell around here... I'd read enough that I understood the science behind the idea, but it's hard to go from a "fat is bad" lifetime to a "fat is ok" way of thinking. It's taken more than a year for Michael to really buy into it, I think, even though his weight loss has been extraordinary.

But it's been a great thing. First of all, I stopped feeling terrible all the time. I had energy again. I lost about 20 lbs. quickly. And then, I have to say that until recently, the actual weight has been a struggle for me, even though I've eaten consistently low carb. More about that in below. But now I seem to actually be losing weight again.

Michael is the huge success story. By the end of 2008, he'd lost over 100 lbs. At this writing (end of February 2009), he's lost about another 20 more, for a total loss (since 2006) of over 200 lbs. His blood sugar improves all the time (he's a Type 2 diabetic), and his cholesterol and particularly triglyceride readings have improved remarkably.

What do you eat?

A lot of protein. Eggs for breakfast, usually, whey protein shakes, meat, poultry, and a lot of fish (because we love it).

Vegetables. Salad stuff, lower-carb vegetables mostly. But really, we don't worry about the carbs in vegetables a lot. And because Michael is a good English boy and can't live without his peas, we have peas (a legume really) in very limited quantity. We sometimes have very limited amounts of other legumes, like lentils and chickpeas.

Fruit: Not so much. We have fresh berries for dessert a couple of nights a week (and I'm still looking for a good alternative that uses frozen berries, because the fresh ones are so expensive. But we are annoyingly picky.) Michael eats apples, although he's cut those down a lot. We eat watermelon in the summer, and cherries because we love them, but that's about it. We never eat tropical fruit, because it's just so high in sugar.

What don't you eat?

Sugar. Bread. Rice. Potatoes (tiny bits very rarely). Sweet potatoes. Most processed foods; I try to cook nearly everything from scratch, except for things like Jell-O and protein bars, which I don't eat but Michael likes. Tropical fruits. Most sweet things. We go light on milk, which is mostly lactose, so adds up the carbs fast.

How many carbs do you eat in a day?

I don't know. I mostly don't count, because I've found that doing this makes me a little obsessive and weird. But I check every so often, and I try to shoot for 30-40, and I'm happier if I'm below that. Michael eats a little more, but even on a really "bad" day, he's probably around 80.

So why haven't you lost more weight?

Because, really, until recently I haven't paid a lot of attention to it. 2008 was all about my mother's terminal illness. And so while I ate low-carb faithfully and consistently, I didn't really pay that much attention to I ate. And it is a myth that you can eat any volume of food that you want on a low-carb diet. But I didn't gain any weight, either, and for me, that's a huge victory. It's the only major life crisis that I've ever been through that didnt result in another 25 lbs. Sometimes not gaining is losing, if that makes any sense.

But the strange thing is, I look like I've lost far more weight than I have. One of the benefits of a low carb diet is that your body tends to reshape. You lose weight around your stomach, one of the signs of insulin resistance, and you just look better. So, sure, I'd be happier if I'd lost more. But I will. So that's ok.

Do you think that everyone should eat this way?

I don't think that everyone should do anything. Except maybe breathe. I think that we are all different; we have different tastes and preferences, different bodies, different genetic predispositions, different behavioral issues. I think that losing weight and maintaining weight loss and fitness are very individual things, and there is absolutely no one formula that works for everyone. The most important thing is to find a formula that fits well for you and that you can maintain for the rest of your life. This one is pretty easy for me, because I like protein foods, and I cook all the time, and I have a strong, strong motivation to maintain it. I also think that it's hard to lose a lot of weight on a low fat diet (although certainly, people do it) because hunger is much more of a issue.

But I suppose that I do think that everyone would be better off with a lower carb diet than is typical in America today. The processed white stuff does nothing good for your body, and a lot of things that purport to be whole grains are not really much better than the processed equivalent. I think we'd all do better cooking more for ourselves, eating out less, eating less prepared food, and eating more locally-grown fresh stuff. (This is hard to do in upstate NY in the winter.)

What is the hardest thing about eating low carb?

For me, two things. One is that it's annoyingly hard to eat out at fast food places. Yes, you can have burgers without buns, but it's messy and fussy. It's hard to find something to just grab at the grocery store, although this is getting easier. There's also almost nothing at a convenience store that you can eat, unless you want nuts and cheese... and that gets a little high-calorie pretty fast. (It's actually pretty easy to eat out at most sit-down restaurants, though... just tell them to skip the potatoes and give you double the vegetables.)

The other is living low carb in a high carb world. People aren't well informed about a healthy low-carb diet (example: one of my students said, "My roommate went on Atkins. She ate nothing but peanut butter." Huh?), and constantly tell you that you're insane. This is tiresome. Package labeling often doesn't tell you what you want to know. Everything comes with bread.

These things actually get easier with time and practice.

What's the best thing about eating low carb?

Not being hungry all the time. More energy. Less stomach. Not fussing at Michael about what he's eating or not eating. Not feeling guilty about eating things that I love, like cheese. Being able to cook wonderful food. Eating in a way that makes moderation and portion control a lot easier for me.

What else would you like to know?

Green Card Madness. And Friday Food.

2009-02-20T17:05:00.002-05:00

We almost have all the green card stuff together, except for things that need copying or updating and one more thing that needs to come in the mail. I am pretty sure that this is all a formality... but I really think that, apart from things like serious accidents, terminal illness, and possibly nasty divorces, about the most stressful thing that you can go through is the whole immigration process. It makes you crazy like nothing else. It's kind of like labor in that everyone's got a long story about it, some of them awful and worrying, and there genuinely are a lot of things that can go wrong. Getting Michael's K-1 visa... the visa that let him come to the US to get married... took more than six months, cost a lot of money, and stressed us both out beyond belief. And this was coming from a country that they don't scrutinize hard (the UK). If you're coming from somewhere like Iraq, or if you come from a country like China where names are similar so background checks can take decades... well, magnify our stress by thousands. And then after you get married, you have to file loads more paperwork to get your conditional green card, and then 2 years later, you have to file it all again, because something could have gone wrong with your marriage, or it could have been fake to begin with... and besides, then USCIS gets to charge you another filing fee and another biometrics fee. But at least after this, you're basically DONE. Another year and he can apply for citizenship, and then no more paperwork, forever. And a lot of other things, like financial forms, get easier too, because to own asset accounts, if you're not a U.S. citizen, you have to fill out all sorts of things.

And we're both assuming that this is straightforward, but you never know, and because you don't know, it makes you a little crazy. Hopefully we can send this off on Monday. And then we just wait wait wait for about six or seven months, I think.

Food. Really boring, and no pictures.

Quiche for breakfast. Must make more tomorrow.
Leftover chicken curry for lunch.
Got home from the statistics exam ready to eat anything not nailed down, and had 3.5 oz. salmon leftover from last night.
And then we had shrimp stir fry for dinner, which looked exactly like the pic I took last week, so I was too lazy to take a picture of it.
A sugar-free chocolate.
And somewhere along the line, I had a couple of the tiny hamburgers I made the other day.

Tomorrow... if I have time... I need to do my big cooking for the week. Make soup and Jell-O and chicken wings and quiche. Which is going to be a little hard to fit in since I have to give makeup exams and maybe play racquetball if I am not coughing my lungs out. The sore throat is gone, I think, so I'm hopeful.

Eek. And Thursday food.

2009-02-19T19:57:00.006-05:00

I have just realized that all the paperwork for Michael's permanent green card has to be in next week. I was thinking that we had a couple of weeks yet. This is a HUGE big deal, and we've kind of dropped the ball on it with everything else going on.

Food.

Quiche for breakfast. Then we spent all morning doing hardly anything and talking about how much we really didn't want to go to Rochester. We finally decided that smart people would have lunch before they went anywhere, so I had this salad with four chicken wing segments.

It was absolutely frigid in Rochester... maybe 27, but -800 with the wind chill. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it sure felt like it. By 4 pm we were hungry again, and I was grocery shopping, and so we had some of these smoked salmon pinwheels, which I have to say turn out to be a good calorie/carb deal if not a great price deal. Half of the package (of 12) is about 130 calories and almost no carbs, and they're yummy. The really great thing about this, in my mind, is that Michael was happy to have something low carb and snacky, rather than something like a sandwich. This way of eating... and the recognition that his blood sugar levels matter, too... have been a very hard sell over the last year, but all of a sudden, he's tuning in to this, and it helps me, too. (We skipped the unnecessary latté that we usually get because he said, we really don't need the carbs. You have no idea what a huge thing this really is.)

Got home and sata around playing with my new toy and arguing (cordially) about why there aren't any good bands any more. Next thing I know, it's nearly 7 pm, and I'm starving and absolutely chilled to the bone freezing cold. Sometimes things remind you sharply that a calorie is a unit of heat. I had a 1.5 ounce hamburger that I'd cooked earlier, and then made dinner.

This is salmon with a maple chipotle mustard glaze, beans, and baby spinach wilted with garlic and a touch of sour cream, and I have to say that it was fantastic.

I had a sugar-free chocolate, but the idea is that I'm not having anything else tonight, so I'm posting this now.

And here's how hard it was to type this morning, with a needy cat who refused to separate himself from my arm....

Food Catch-up

2009-02-18T20:54:00.002-05:00

Ok, I have gotten seriously behind on posting the photo food diary because I have been ~~spending every waking hour playing Jewelquest on the iTouch~~ very, very busy with work.

So I am going to do a quick catch-up here; I realize that it doesn't matter that much, but this accountability thing for me is huge at the moment.

Tuesday: quiche as usual, and then I had a lovely salad for lunch with some of the leftover tilapia from Monday night, and we had chicken curry for dinner, which I have to say was about the best curry I've made in ages. Unfortunately, I realize that I totally can't remember anything else that I ate all day, which just makes me realize how important it is for me to do this right away every day instead of screwing around.

Wednesday we had to get up way earlier than we usually do, doctor's appointments in Rochester for both of us. So we grabbed quiche and tea and had a small latté later at Starbucks, and I had a summer roll for lunch (picture a week or so ago). I wish I knew the nutritional information on those (although it would undoubtedly be better if I skipped the sweet chili sauce). I'm guessing that they're better than the little sushi rolls, my alternate quick grocery store food, but I don't really know that for sure. Anyway, we ran way late, so I only got half of what I needed to do done, and we are probably off back there today. We had skate and cauliflower for dinner, but I think that all in all, I probably did more nibbling on the side than I was really paying attention to. My weight is up half a pound today, which is probably more likely water retention than anything else, but I really feel like I need to be focused focused focused on this at the moment, so I am taking it seriously.

And getting back to doing this every day.

I just wish I'd get really well again; I'm still coughing my lungs out half the time. Doctor says this is nothing and it will go away, but I would like to know WHEN.

200

2009-02-18T14:48:00.003-05:00

As of today, Michael has lost just slightly more than 200 lbs.

Which is amazing enough that I can't think of anything else to say about it right now.

Monday food, and a low-carb cooking show

2009-02-17T08:50:00.004-05:00

The trouble is that I have been spending all my time playing with my new iTouch toy. This is really a cool toy, but the problem is that there are many thing in my life that I should be doing besides playing JewelQuest. Or looking for fun apps. But maybe after I get over my obsession with this stupid game, I'll try the exercise things that I also downloaded. If I every get healthy; I still have this endless sore throat/chest congestion cold. It's been a week... when is this thing supposed to be over?

Anyway, it was a great weight week. Down 4 lbs., and for someone whose weight has been stalled in a major way for a long time, that's paradise. I think that the combination of posting the food pics here and spending some time really thinking about some of the cognitive stuff (plus distracting myself playing this silly game) is actually working. I hope, anyway. I would really like to see this continue.
________
Food.

It was a weird day yesterday.

We had quiche for breakfast, but skipped the protein shake because we are trying to eliminate anything that might be setting off Michael's mouth ulcers... so I make him one without the liquid vitamins, etc., that I usually put in, and I couldn't be bothered to make another for me. So I had 3 chicken wing segments before I went to school, and skipped my usual last-class-of-the-day Not Food South Beach bar.

Came home, and Michael fed me some cold quiche. I also had about 2 ounces of goat cheese (probably not quite that much) on a cracker before dinner.

For dinner we had tilapia, beans, and the rest of the Brussels sprouts (ok, I was getting seriously tired of them).

I had a sugar free chocolate, and just before bed, I had a couple of crackers and two bits of cheese, trying to settle my stomach. Probably could have skipped those. The crackers are not a good thing; they are pretty low carb but they add up.
________

For any other low-carb fans out there... I stumbled across an actual low-carb cooking show last night on FitTV. It's Blaine's Low-Carb Kitchen, and the web site, with recipes, is here. I was partly kind of stunned to see a low-carb cooking show, since the only other one I know of is the Eades' show, Cookworx, which sometimes shows on PBS. Anyway, this show was ok. The host is likeable, and is losing weight on a low-carb diet and talks about it, and the recipes look pretty good, although yesterday he was cooking all desserts. He did say, even though these are low carb, they are treats. Not to eat every day. (It's unfortunate that the recipes list carbs but not calories, too... I mean, most low-carb people don't count calories, but keeping an eye on general ranges is, I think, a good idea.) I am also not a fan of what I think of as pseudo-carb recipes... substitutes for things that you would otherwise eat; it's why I'm not such a fan of the Dreamfields pasta, though we do eat it sometimes. If you have, say, low-carb cake, that send the "cake is ok" message, and personally, I do better with just, "cake is not ok." But not everyone is me, and some people have way more of an issue with not being able to eat particular foods than I do. Anyway, I thought the show (and the site, which has smart recipes that look good) was well worth a look. I'll try cooking some of these later. He uses a lot of soy flour, not something I ever cook with, but I'm game to give it a try.

No-Picture Sunday

2009-02-16T08:03:00.004-05:00

Today just kind of got away from me.

Here's my quickie food list...

Quiche/protein shake

When I got back from racquetball, I had leftover bok choy and shrimp from Friday, just a little.

Then about 4 p.m., I kind of lost it because I was feeling miserable, and Michael had gone back to bed, and I had about 8 chicken wing segments and the rest of the pork rinds, a couple of ounces. I realize that in the grand scheme of bad eating, this is not exactly huge, but it was the motivation behind it... that drive to bury my head in food... that really bothered me. That's the thing I'd like to get past once and for all.

Then we had fish chowder for dinner. And I had a sugar-free chocolate.

And my weight is up 0.7 Monday morning... but I'm still down 4 lbs. for the week, so I can live with that.

I still have this stupid sore throat... I get better and worse and better and worse. Weirdest cold ever. But if my throat doesn't get better, I don't know how I'm going to teach today... and I really have to because there are exams in all my classes towards the end of the week.

Valentine's Food and Things

2009-02-14T14:02:00.005-05:00

I am not on the whole a fan of what I'd call gratuitous holidays that are over-hyped as having tremendous significance and so on. But I have to say that it is absolutely delightful to be married to someone who goes to the trouble to think about doing something really nice for you.

I try not to bitch and moan about my marital past, because... well, it's the past, and we both tried, although not, I have to say, in compatible ways. And he was/is a good guy in a lot of ways. But one of the things that I found consistently most difficult is that he would never make any effort at all about holidays of any kind... birthdays, even. Not even to wish you a happy birthday or something like that. And after a while... you get stuck between feeling really petty for caring and feeling really hurt that he couldn't make the effort to just pick you a flower or something. So after decades of really dreading everything like a holiday because it just made me feel bad, it is such a happy thing not to do that. It's finally getting me to the point where I almost relax about these things and can just be happy with the moment and whatever comes in it... which is really the thing I suppose that I wish I could do to with everything.

Anyway, this year he gave me an iTouch, which I have been secretly coveting for ages despite loving my iPod Shuffle which is tiny and great for walking and the gym. And I mention this mainly because I discovered the Most Great thing that this can do... receive hundreds of public radio stations. I had no idea, and this is something that has just driven me crazy for fifteen years. We live in a valley, and the nearest public radio stations are about 40 miles away and have weak receivers, and you can't pick them up at all at night, especially the AM station that has the news programs that I like. I have tried just everything... better radios. HD radios. Antennas. Internet (doesn't work well because the internet connection is not good enough to stream well, although this seems not to be an issue with the ). Sitting in my car for hours. Screaming with frustration. Downloading podcasts. It's this thing that should be just simple, and every solution I've found has been annoying as hell. So I am just absolutely delighted that it seems like this is going to let me actually listen to NPR again. Intelligent news. Bliss. And such a cool present.

Food.

Quiche/protein shake.
5 chicken wing segments that passed for lunch.
And then I got involved playing with the iTouch (which I can see is also going to be a great way to totally waste time), and didn't eat anything until late... had an ounce of cheese on a cracker before dinner, and then dinner was this...

salmon glazed with mustard, leftover Brussels sprouts from yesterday, and Dreamfield's pasta with a little butter and Parmesan cheese. And I had a sugar-free chocolate. Michael's mouth is still driving him crazy, hence the pasta again. I am not crazy about this stuff... that is, I like it, but pasta is really kind of a trigger food for me, and so I prefer just not to eat it, even if it supposedly has only 5 digestable carbs or whatever. (And I think we're going to be seeing those Brussels sprouts for another day or two... I cooked a LOT of them. I went to the grocery store with my son and explained to him how to pick out Brussels sprouts, and left him there while I was getting some other produce. Came back and he had this huge bag. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was about twice as much as I had in mind, after he'd carefully picked through. It's a good thing we all like these.)

I also kept getting up all night because I felt awful and nibbled on kind of a lot of pork rinds, because, weirdly, they actually settle my stomach. [weight: -1.8]

All in all, a really nice Valentine's. Even better than the iTouch was the card that Michael made himself. I don't think anyone has ever made me a card before.

Friday... Clothes and Complaints and Food and... Everything!

2009-02-13T11:00:00.011-05:00

Ugh. I still seem to be sick. That throat thing that made me whiny on Tuesday has recurred with a vengeance, and so here we are... whiny part II. The sequel. I need to be healthy! At least by Sunday, because I'm playing racquetball with my old r-ball buddy who I haven't really seen in ages. So, cold needs to be gone, hip needs to be ok.

Anyway... all sort of not-exactly-fascinating things are happening. The first one... ok, this is marginally exciting for me... is that I actually found a bra that fits (you were really expecting something better, weren't you?). I stumbled across something the other day that was talking about how something like 6 out of 10 women wear bras that don't fit properly, which made me think about the fact that none of my bras really fit properly... and so I started ordering bras looking for something that Actually Fit. The trouble with bras, as any woman knows, is that you can have exactly the same size, different brand, and it will fit totally differently and probably not right, and this is worse in larger sizes which are harder to fit properly. I am not posting my bra size here, but if you're a full-figured lass, try a brand that I've never heard of... Elomi. They turn out to be a UK company, but you can get them through Bare Necessities, and I have to say that this bra fits better than anything I've tried on in my entire life. Not inexpensive, but I'm thinking, worth it.

Not if I can only find a pair of jeans that fit... this my other issue, because I have relatively fat thighs and a relatively narrow waist, and so things that fit my thighs are far too large at the waist, and this is only made worse by the current below-the-natural-waist styles. Honestly, you'd think that clothing designers would figure out that making a larger size does not just mean scaling up everything in the same proportion. It's not like making a model train. People do NOT get fat proportionately in all the same places. You should see some of the worst t-shirts that we had when Michael was at his fattest. Body fit fine, arms looked like a bat costume.

Another consumer topic... on some cooking show I was watching the other night, someone said that if a customer likes a restaurant, s/he will tell 3 or 4 people, but if s/he hates a restaurant, s/he will tell 7-8 people. You'd really think that this would lead people to think a bit more about the impact of customer service. Here is my "don't go there" rant... but it's furniture, not food.

Last summer we bought a La-Z Boy lift chair at a local (Rochester, NY) furniture store called Furniture Fair. I can't quite tell if they're part of a larger chain or not. The actual buying experience was great; I had nothing but nice things to say about them, and I had planned to go back there soon, when our remodeling is done. About three weeks ago, the chair broke. Just stopped working. It's under warranty, so I called the store for service. They got the (very nice) technician out right away, and, ok, it was going to take a little while to get the part from La-Z Boy, but I was ok with that, not their fault. And then everything went to hell. They promised to call when the part had been ordered. No call. So I called the next week. The part had come in the day before, and no one noticed. They said they would schedule the technician. Technician comes in to get the part, discovers that they ordered the wrong thing. They reorder and assure me that it will be in by (last) Friday. No call. I call Wednesday... no part, but it is expected Thursday. When? We don't know, because they have no idea when their deliveries come. Huh? I know when my deliveries usually come, and I bet they get things more regularly than I do! Finally nice tech guy calls, about 8 p.m. last night, to say he will be coming Friday evening. I am just hoping that he's right about what this is and that the chair actually gets fixed. But the real thing that I have an issue about is the whole attitude of everyone (except the tech guy) about this. "It's not my fault." "We can't do anything." "It's not our problem." All delivered with a tone of "leave me alone, lady, I've heard this a million times before, and I just don't care." Especially from the guy who seems to be the manager. I do realize that they have limited ability to magically acquire parts... although ordering them correctly would help. But attitude... sympathy especially when you have a customer who is frantically worried... says a lot. I won't walk in the door of the place again, because I know how I'll be treated if there's ever any kind of real problem. It's this kind of thing that's the difference between a single sale and repeat customers.

Ok, rant done.
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Food.

Quiche/protein shake breakfast.

I am absolutely starving today.... or at least my head thinks that I am. So after Michael went back to bed for a while, not feeling great, I had this... which is pork rinds and 3 chicken wing segments but should be better titled GUILT because I really don't think I need to be eating this. Which is kind of why I took a picture of it. But, I suppose that it's at least good that I did take a picture, and that I sat down and ate it rather than nibbling from the refrigerator.

Then for lunch, I had this salad, which is all greens and stuff plus some chicken from last night.

Before dinner, I had a cracker with about 1/2 ounce of cheese, and a glass of red wine.

And then for dinner, I had Brussels sprouts sautéed with a little bacon (an idea I stole from the latest Jacques Pépin book), shrimp in a light cream and sundried tomato sauce, and just a little Dreamfields pasta, which is a low-carb pasta. I am kind of wary of this stuff even though it is supposed to have very few digestable carbs, and on the whole I think it's better to wean yourself off this kind of thing rather than replace it with synthetic substitutes, but Michael is having some canker sore issues, and so soft stuff like pasta is a lot better for him.

Weight: +0.4, doesn't surprise me at all
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I have been thinking hard about cognitive stuff about food behavior lately. The trouble with this is that it's very hard to talk about. Not emotionally hard, but difficult to convey in a way that doesn't just sound stupid. It's all kind of like when you have a few too many gin and tonics and realize that you've figured out the secret of the universe, so you write it down... and in the morning, you read the paper, and it says, wow, friends are nice. Or something equally inane. This all kind of seems like this to me.

I've been dieting all of my life. Since I was about 8, anyway (and, yeah, you could well argue that if a slightly chubby eight-year old had not been constantly hounded about weight, she might have naturally outgrown that, and there might have been a far different story). I cannot remember a time, ever, when I was at the weight that I wanted to be, and I'm not talking some unrealistic weight, just, say, what the doctor would think reasonable. I am not a petite little thing; I come of good peasant stock, and the thin women in my family weigh about 160-180 lbs. I have probably tried every diet known to man. I have invented my own diets. I have read about compulsive eating and binge eating and psychological disorders and so on. The last time I really approached my target weight, I was 13 years old... although I came close about 10 years ago, maybe 40 lbs. away. And I've been a lot fatter and a lot more out of shape than I am now. I am probably 100 lbs. above my target weight, but I beat my 20 year old students at racquetball.

But I would like this all to be done one day, and not because I am dead. Because I am at or near that target weight, and because I am done with these constant food issues. I have been working on this hard for the nearly three years that Michael and I have been married, because, let's face it, I do loads better with accountability. But it's only been lately that I'm starting to feel like something fundamental is changing.

I have to say that the thing that really set this change in motion is reading the Beck Diet Solution, which I talked about here before. I have not read all of the book, and I have not done most of the things that you're supposed to do, and I admit it, I am a terrible student. I think I'm smarter than the book, I have little patience with rules, and while I realize that you must practice cognitive change to make it work, I think I've spent enough years on this to have some insights about what I do and do not need to do (I know, you could argue that if I really knew that, I wouldn't be here, but still...). I also think that everyone is different, and that although there are commonalities, it is hard to find a set of characteristics that applies to ALL people who are, let's say, unsuccessful dieters.

But there's this one thing that just slammed home to me, and I said this before, but I'll say it again... it's the idea that people without food issues don't see hunger as a crisis, a problem that has to be solved, don't see cravings as something that need dealing with, don't obsess over food. And sometimes the solution to something is absolutely all in how you think about it... just like, yesterday, I psyched myself into feeling claustrophobic during the massage, even though there was absolutely nothing that should have triggered that. And since I've been thinking about this "hunger is not a crisis" idea, it's been a thousand times easier to recognize this for what it is.... that I can walk away from the need to do something about this thing that is not truly a problem.

This is kind of profound for me, but like I said, it sounds sort of stupid. Like, duh, what kind of revelation is it that you can recognize that you're not starving?
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And this is my other cat, who is neurotic as hell but adorable when asleep.

Massage Update. And Thursday food.

2009-02-12T17:46:00.005-05:00

I'm sure that you're all out there going, awwww, she has to go for a massage that she really doesn't want, oh poor baby. I know this sounds ridiculous. But I have to say that I spent all morning being insanely nervous about this.

And it was ok, mostly.

I have to say, I am probably not going to be down on the list of people who find this the most wonderful thing ever.... although I can see how it could really grow on you. It was nice. My head did not chatter too much, except for the last ten minutes when my claustrophobia kicked in, and I started feeling like I couldn't move, and got kinda sorta irrationally panicky. Honestly... who panics during a massage? Isn't this the absolute reverse of what you should do?

But the really good thing is that Massage Person Christina turns out also to be a personal trainer, and I signed Michael up for a massage next week (I'm not entirely sure that he's going to be able to get on the table, but the only way to find out is to try), and maybe that will turn out really well... and maybe she will have some good suggestions about trying to get him more mobile. I liked her. She was peaceful and knowledgeable. And I do think that people come into your life at particular times for particular reasons, so I'm hopeful.

I still think that this is so not me... but I can see how it would be good for me to become a person who was a little more able to be good at relaxation time. And I have to say that finding a personal trainer really would be me, the me I'd like to be anyway.

Food... the usual quiche and protein shake. On request from Michael, I got lattés on the way home from the massage place, and then I had some seafood salad and green salad that looked exactly like the picture a couple of days ago, so I was too lazy to photograph it. I nibbled on probably too many pork rinds and two chicken wing segments while waiting for Real Dinner to cook.

Real Dinner was chicken thighs and green beans, not exactly exciting. Michael just had a protein shake for dinner because his mouth is bothering him... and yet his blood sugar is, for him, quite high. How can your blood sugar leap up when you're not eating anything? There's clearly something I don't understand here. (And on another note, Blogger rotated this picture when it uploaded again. Why does this happen?)

Anyway, I had a sugar-free chocolate, and now we're off to bed.

Weight: (-0.7 lbs)

Oops! Now the stegosaurus is concerned about his weight, too!

This Is SO Not Me. And Wednesday food.

2009-02-11T16:55:00.009-05:00

I am taking MizFit's words of wisdom to heart this week and trying to either do things that are Not Me or that are What I Want to Be. Mostly I have to say that this has involved making a lot of phone calls that I didn't want to make because I am absurdly phone-phobic. Not about talking on it, just about making calls.

But I came in Monday, and Michael was flipping through the local paper, and he said, look, they're doing a Valentine special at this spa, how about I buy you an hour and fifteen minute massage?

My instant thought: what on earth would I do for an hour and fifteen minutes while someone was massaging me? Couldn't I be doing something useful with this time?

I am pretty sure that this says something fairly significant about my degree of mind/body connection and how poorly I understand the concept of relaxation and how I do badly when I don't have something to occupy my brain.

Then I thought, this is So Not Me. So I should probably give it a go. So I said yes. But this is tomorrow, and now I'm back to thinking, what am I going to DO during this massage? I am kind of nervous about it. Ok, very nervous about it. I think that this is not they way that you're supposed to feel. This seems like a chore that I have to get through rather than something that will give me pleasure. I'm sure I'm wrong about this. Or I hope so, anyway.

Food.

Today was a teaching day. We had quiche and protein shake for breakfast. Then I had a South Beach protein bar for "lunch"... wow, I am SO over how sweet these things are. They were a guilty pleasure for a moment because I rarely eat grains or very sweet things, but now I'm just back to thinking, ick. But the sweetness gives me just enough zip to get through my last class. I bet that says nothing good about what my blood sugar is doing after eating these. Yes, Not Real Food.

And I came home and ate a chicken wing segment and about an ounce of cheese on a cracker and a tablespoon of hummus.

For dinner we had about 8 oz. salmon (too much), baby bok choy sautéed with garlic, and a few green and yellow beans. For some reason that I can't figure out at all, Blogger wants to rotate this image 180 degrees, which makes it look kind of odd, not a big deal but why is it doing it?

And I had a sugar-free chocolate and some blackberries and raspberries.

Weight: (-1.3)

Today's bonus picture.... my cat snuggles up to a stuffed sheep.

Tuesday food. Bleah.

2009-02-10T17:34:00.006-05:00

Bleah. I am sick. I woke up this morning with a sore throat and that kind of feverish feeling you get when you've got the flu. I am not a happy bunny. I'm great at injury and stuff like that, but being sick turns me into a whiny annoyed baby, especially when it's like this, sick but not so sick that you just want to sleep.

And I've been craving junk food all day.

Probably because I've been sitting around all day scanning a novel whose ending I could see coming halfway through, watching bad TV, and reading everything I can think of on the computer. I am so bored I could scream.

So, food.

Quiche and protein shake as usual. But Michael heated up the quiche this morning, and he'd been rummaging in the refrigerator before that, so he added a little of the leftover steak from Sunday to the plate... maybe 3 oz.? A weird combination, I have to say. He has been moving around a lot more these day few days, which from an overall health point of view is great, but he also keeps handing me food, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Today I've had 2 small slices of Cheddar, 2 crackers with hummus, 2 chicken wing segments, and a bowl of soup from Sunday. The soup was the only one of those things that I made. I think I need to start slipping things to the dog...

For dinner, we had beef stir-fry. Light on the beef, heavy on the lower-carb vegetables, so I feel ok about this.

Then we had some dessert. If you read about the great Jell-O pudding experiment, I have an update.... BAD idea. This very pretty dessert picture is the almond milk version of the instant pudding with a few berries.

The trouble is, the pudding, which tasted really ok when I made it, became incredibly bitter as it sat for a day. The runny soy milk version was not a lot better, so I tossed all of it. And had a sugar-free chocolate.

I am just hoping that I feel a lot better tomorrow. I had the day off teaching, fortunately, but I have two lectures tomorrow, and if my throat doesn't feel better, it is not going to be fun.

And here's a bonus picture of the dog, who I think is going to be getting some extra snacks... although what he really needs is a good brushing.
If you enjoyed the Aristotle quote yesterday, here's a related one... "We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action." This week, I am thinking, perhaps I can become more at peace by performing more peaceful actions.

Weight Wednesday a.m. -2.2

Monday food and Aristotelian musings

2009-02-10T09:09:00.007-05:00

Oh, ugh, it was not a good food day yesterday, not really. And I don't have pictures much, either, except one gorgeous dinner pic.

So yesterday was a quiche-making, and I tried making two at once, to save some later in the week time, but I'm not sure that this really was a time-saver. It's pretty quick to make this anyway, and doubling the recipe just made it fiddly and something I actually had to think about.

We had quiche and protein shake for breakfast as usual. This morning I made the protein shake with soy milk instead of almond, which was not a great idea, double the calories and not really a taste improvement. I'd bought some soy milk for the great Jell-O pudding experiment...which I'll digress to tell you about here, on the off chance that anyone else cares about this. Michael likes those Jell-O sugar free pudding cups, but they always seem to me to be a huge money ripoff, so I started making the sugar-free instant pudding at home, really easy. But then I noticed that if you make this at home, it's actually about double the carbs of the cups (the sweetners are different, but I can't really tell why else). So I thought, let's try making this with a lower-carb alternative like soy milk or almond milk. I tested this Sunday with the sugar-free white chocolate pudding and unsweetened vanilla almond and soy milk. Result: Both way taste great, actually better than the original pudding, in my opinion. But the almond milk thickens the pudding about 60% of what it should be, and the soy milk thickens it not at all, so you have yummy vanilla/white chocolate soup. I have absolutely no idea why this happens, and if anyone understands the chemistry, I'd really like to know.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled program...

Quiche and protein shake for breakfast. Then they were having a lunch thing at school, so I had some sliced roast beef (hard to guess how much? Couldn't take a picture. Maybe 4-6 oz.) and two slices of Swiss cheese. Then say through a meeting with a plate of chocolate chip cookies behind me, breathing chocolate aroma. I did not have any cookies (ok, partly because I know that the campus food servce cookies smell great but are actually pretty nasty), but it made me think a lot about how much easier it is to maintain eating the way that I prefer to when I'm not in a room filled with chocolate aroma and people eating potato chips. Got home and was hungry, and instead of eating something sensible, I ended up picking at things until dinner... a chicken wing segment, a couple of slices of leftover steak from the other night, a spoonful of hummus.... and I didn't take pictures...

And then for dinner, we had this lovely curry. Excellent, but I have to say, with chickpeas and tomatoes, more carbs than I'd prefer. And then I nibbled a slice of cheese and a few pork rinds before bed, and that's really got to go. I can't say that I'm at all happy with what I ate yesterday.

So I've been doing this photo food thing for a week, and I'm trying to figure out if it's doing some kind of good. On the plus side... my weight was down 2.5 lbs. for the week, and I've been having a terrible time losing weight at all, so that's pretty good. It's also deterring me from eating extra crap (although we have to give me a big FAIL for that yesterday). And I feel better. But as always, if this makes any sense, I'm having a hard time connecting exactly what I eat with how my weight changes. So I think I'm going to add the change in my weight for the day (Monday, +0.9). I realize that there are a lot of issues about charting daily weight and that a lot of fluctuations are random, but let's see if it makes any difference. I also think that there's a portion size issue here. I mean, look at the curry. I know it's hard to get any sense of scale (plus ravenous teenage boy ate twice that plus rice), and it was my only real meal of the day, but still, I wonder if I should be eating half of that.

On another note... MizFit's comment yesterday reminded me of the Aristotle quote, "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way." (Yes, I had to look that up, and in the process, realized that Aristole said a lot of good stuff that I either didn't realize was attributed to him or I had totally forgotten. Check it out here.) There are, I suppose, lots of ways to read and think about that, but I think about it two ways... first, that when we act in particular ways repeatedly, we reinforce those actions until we become that thing. Secondly, if we want to be something different, we need to behave in different ways... and what we are will follow. I quit smoking years ago by choosing to act like a nonsmoker. I can choose now to act like what I want to be. Although some days, it's hard to know what that is...

Sunday food

2009-02-08T19:20:00.007-05:00

So, quiche and protein shake as usual.

Then we went out errand-running, and had a tall whole milk latté at Starbucks (I stole this picture from them because I liked it). A rare treat, 14 carbs, really too many. This is not going to turn out to be a great carb day.

Came home and had this, which is salad plus about 4 ounces of seafood salad from the store (surimi, mostly).

Somehow we didn't notice the time until about 6 again, and so I started dinner, which took a while, and had a cracker and about 1/2 ounce cheese (same stuff as yesterday except half the amount, about 3 carbs).

For dinner, we had our fussy meal of the week... I've been trying to actually make something new every week; this is miso-glazed steak and oyster mushrooms. With it are some green beans and just a few very thin-sliced roasted potatoes, something we rarely eat at all, but it seemed like the thing to have with this. It's funny... I was thinking as I was slicing the potatoes paper-thin with the mandoline... I used to make potatoes like this, and for three of us, I'd slice, oh, maybe six potatoes. Tonight I sliced one medium-sized potato, and Michael and I each had, oh, maybe 1/4 of it, and my son had the rest, and that seemed like an absolute ton of potatoes. It's funny how things change. The steak, too... I sliced a 1 lb. steak and portioned it between the three of us, again mostly to my son. There was a time when probably we would each have eaten a steak that size. Which, I suppose, explains a lot... but still. We live in a vastly over-portioned world. Go out to dinner here, and the most common steak choice is a New York strip... and it's going to be 8 ounces, or maybe 16, and you're going to eat it, right? Because it's there.

Anyway, this recipe was terrific... it's from Rocco DiSpirito's cookbook, Flavor... written before he became totally commercially saturated. It's a 2003 book, but it looks so weirdly dated that if you picked it up at a flea market, you'd swear that it was printed in the 60s or 70s (something to think about when writing a cookbook... really, pass on the cute graphics and pick something classic!). The steak is seared, then miso-glazed and roasted, and served with a sauce of oyster mushrooms. Very good, and quite easy, although it was about an hour prep time all in all.

I had a sugar-free chocolate for dessert, and since I am planning on not eating anything stupid and nonessential tonight, I'm just going to post this.

Spicy Broccoli and Italian Sausage Soup

2009-02-08T17:04:00.005-05:00

This is an accidental recipe that came out so well that it's worth writing down! I started out with this terribly freezer-burned bag of broccoli florets, and I was trying to find an alternative to just throwing it out.

You will need:

About 2 quarts chicken stock
1 large bag (4 lbs.) frozen broccoli (this is the mega-bag that they sell at Wal-Mart and Sam's)
Parmesan cheese rinds (or grated Parmesan cheese)
1/4 cup medium to dry sherry (optional, or you could use white wine)
1-2 cups heavy cream
around 1.5 lbs. hot Italian sausage
salt and pepper to taste

Put chicken stock and broccoli in a large stock pot, and simmer until broccoli is cooked. Add Parmesan cheese rinds, cream, and sherry. (You can make this more or less creamy depending on how much you put in.) Simmer for 15 minutes. (You could use grated Parmesan, but you can usually get the rinds very cheaply at any store that grates it's own Parmesan, and it's great in soup.)

While the soup is simmering, sauté the sausage. It's best to use patties or to remove the casings from whole sausages, because you want it to crumble. Cook sausage until cooked through and crumbly; then drain on paper towels. (I think you could also use ground pork and season it to taste.)

Remove the Parmesan rinds from the soup (or you could leave them and fish them out when you serve the soup).

Add sausage to soup, season with salt and pepper to taste (cayenne pepper is nice in this).

There are about 4 carbs (or 2 net carbs) in a cup of broccoli, so this is pretty low carb by any measure. I didn't exactly measure this precisely, but even if you use all the cream, it's probably only about 150 calories per cup, if that (a little more if you use grated cheese).

Committing to Yourself. And Saturday food.

2009-02-07T17:21:00.005-05:00

The best post I've read today is here, at Dr. Michael Eades' blog. It's about, among other things, how it's possible to be really good at committing to other people and absolutely lousy at keeping commitments to yourself. And I can so completely relate to this. I've spent the last three years being obsessively committed to eating properly, but the fact of the matter is that 90% of why I do it is all about Michael, because I can't expect him to do this if I don't. Obviously I am more than capable of keeping this commitment, which means so much to me. But I don't lose weight, don't really get back in shape, because the extra bits that it would take to do that are about doing things that are for me alone, taking time for me alone, keeping promises to myself. I haven't much been interested in doing that.

I keep the promises that I make to other people, to the greatest extent that I can. I am the most loyal friend that you'll ever have, the best person to absolutely trust. But I am not a good friend to myself. I'm not even particularly comfortable with the idea of trying to make a commitment to myself, and I think that probably says something.

And it makes me sad.

Some days I almost see through a different window, into a reality where I care a little more about me and a little less about everybody else. And somehow I imagine that it would all be a lot better like that, that caring more about me would actually make it possible to care better for everyone else. But it's hard to do something that seems almost unrecognizable just by knowing that you should.

Anyway. Enough endless introspection for today. Let's move on to food.

So, the usual quiche/protein shake for breakfast.

For lunch, I made this fantastic cream of broccoli soup with a little hot Italian sausage. This was so good that I wrote the recipe down here. I really need to put some notion of scale into this; this is actually a tiny bowl, a dessert bowl, but it looks huge in the picture.

Then the next thing that we knew it was nearly 6 p.m., and we were really hungry, so we had this... celery, and a little less than 1 oz. of Pié d'Angloys cheese on Finn Crisp crackers (7 net carbs for the 2 crackers). And a glass of wine, the rest of yesterday's indulgence.

Yesterday, I made this terrific fish stock, which I mostly froze to make chowder next weekend (I really meant to take a picture of the HUGE cod bones that I bought at the store yesterday, but I forgot, and I suppose that they were a tad horrifying anyway). Anyway, the stock smelled so great that I thought I'd try my hand at making a velouté sauce with some of it. So this is salmon with a lovely dill cream sauce on a bed of wilted baby spinach, plus some broccoli (mainly because my son, who is not on the whole a picky eater, is not a fan of greens or crunchy things, so we needed a supplemental vegetable).

And I had a small piece of cheddar cheese and about an ounce of pork rinds before I went to bed.

One thing that occurs to me in looking over these food diaries is that nearly always, there's some food I really could have skipped. I mean, yesterday... I could have skipped the cheese/pork rinds. I was going to bed, I wasn't that hungry, and I wouldn't have noticed in a half hour when I was asleep anyway, so why add the extra calories?

Gratitude. And Friday food

2009-02-06T11:11:00.005-05:00

I am thinking today about gratitude. This is not something I am remotely comfortable thinking about. Not at all. The last few years... well, the last decade... have been so difficult for me that it is the hardest thing in the world some days to be grateful rather than resentful. And it is the bad thing about me, that I can be filled with resentment and anger for all the ways in which my expectations about people, about life, have not been met. And I forget to be grateful for the good things that have come rather than mourning that things that have not come or have been different than expected and desired.

It is hard.

I'm trying to think grateful things without the caveat on the end. You know what I mean... "I am so grateful to have this excellent job that I love and that is secure.... BUT wow, I've done a really good job of screwing up my academic career because my head was far more involved with the rest of my life than with work." I am so grateful to have people in my life who care about me... BUT why don't they see how much I need help? Why was no one there during the ten years when my first marriage was falling apart, and I was alone and desperate?" The trouble is that, whatever the truth is, putting those caveats in takes positive things and makes them negative. It takes things that are good and makes them bitter. It makes it impossible to rebuild things because they are so weighed down by the past. And the past doesn't matter... well, it does, in a way, but more because it's how we got here than anything else.

So, maybe for today, I could practice leaving off the "BUT" on the end.

And, now, the food part...

So we had the usual protein shake and quiche slice, the latter quite late in the morning because it is quiche-making day.

And then I went off to Rochester with my adorable son, partly to order doors and such for the renovation project we're working on, partly to buy him something respectable to wear when we go to New York City at the end of the month (happyhappyhappy looking forward to this), and partly to go to the Better Grocery Store. All of this took pretty much all day, and when we got done at 5, I had this...

which is a summer roll that is mostly lettuce and a little smoked salmon. I have no idea how one eats these things slowly and gracefully because I always seem to be stuffing them in my mouth before they fall apart. And, yes, I stole a little dumpling and a bit of squid from the Chinese food he'd gotten.

Didn't get home until 6, and then had to run out to get some wine for the fish stock I wanted to make... I bought fish bones at the store, and they needed to be made into stock now, because in this part of the world, fish is never as fresh as you'd like it, and I want to make chowder later, so I'll make this tonight and freeze it. This put me in the mood for a glass of white wine, something I almost never have, and so I had a glass and a half and felt very happy. These days I drink so rarely that I'm a very cheap date.

For dinner, we had skate, a bit of cauliflower purée leftover from yesterday, and fresh green and yellow beans. Ate really late, though, which is not such a good thing. Haven't had skate since I was last in the UK, so really a great treat.

This photo food diary has been a very interesting thing for me, so far. First of all, I have to say that feeling like you need to take a picture AND that you're going to post it somewhere public is a big deterrent to picking up small things to nibble on, and this is my big downfall in general. I have lost a little weight every day that I've done this, except Friday (writing this bit first thing Saturday morning), and that day may be because we ate so late in the evening. It's also making me see think harder about portion size, which is one of the things that I have the hardest time getting a handle on. So we continue on, for the moment. It's interesting, for me anyway (I have no idea at all whether it's interesting for anyone else!).

Thursday food

2009-02-05T19:22:00.009-05:00

No teaching today, so a little more time for making food.

We started the morning with the usual protein shake and quiche slice. Yes, we're boring.

Then I had three of these chicken wings I made this morning plus a green salad (arugula and field greens, cherry tomatoes, scallions, cucumbers, a few walnuts, a bit of feta cheese, and a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar). Yum. The chicken wings are about 50 calories a segment. And I had a sugar-free chocolate. (Scale is just ridiculous in these pics; the wing segments look just as big as the drumsticks on the chicken below.

I had another of those segments just before dinner, well on my way to chicken overdose for the day, since dinner was this....

....which turned into this on the plate. What looks like mashed potatoes is cauliflower puree with garlic... just the best way to have cauliflower ever, with a just a touch of butter (the boys had the chicken version of the "culinary" gravy, two thumbs up from them, more lack of enthusiasm from me).

This is one of the last chickens from ChickenQuest... our September excursion to a farm about 70 miles from here in search of free-range chickens. Which is one of the idiotic things that you do when your husband has a weird sense of taste and decides that everything packaged is probably evil. I have to admit that I kind of secretly thought that this was silly, but I have to admit that these are absolutely the best chickens that I've ever eaten... and that I did nibble on the crispy roasted skin, not shown in the picture.

And I had about 1/2 oz. pork rinds and a small slice of Cheddar cheese before bed.

And here's a bonus picture... the beautiful cardinal on my backyard feeder. I always feel like the whole day is better if you get to see a cardinal.

Wednesday food and some behavior thoughts

2009-02-04T21:10:00.006-05:00

Not adding photos for the things I've already pictured....

Breakfast, protein shake and quiche slice
"Lunch"... teaching day, so one of those Not Really Food South Beach protein bars
And then when I got home, I had half an Italian sausage (see hideous food pic from Monday), 150 cal.... and all of the sausage that was left after Carnivorous Teenager hit the refrigerator, apparently. (The big mystery is why he left any at all...)

Then we had this lovely shrimp stir fry for dinner... shrimp, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, zucchini, bean sprouts, a few peas... no rice. Really good, although the picture doesn't do it justice. It's funny how you really don't miss things like rice after a while... there was a time when the idea of stir fry or curry without rice seemed impossible. Or inconceivable, anyway. But you stop eating these things and after a while, you notice that things like rice and noodles actually just detract from the fresh taste of vegetables. That's my take on it, anyway.

I am seeing that my new obsession is about to be, figuring out how to take food pictures that look good. Like I really need to be doing this, sigh...

And we stayed up a bit later than usual to watch Top Chef, so we had this bowl of blackberries and raspberries with a tablespoon of light cream. A little heavy on the berries, but they wouldn't have lasted another day... and that's always a good excuse to eat up all the fruit, right?

So here is what I've been thinking about today. I've been reading the Beck Diet Solution. I have to note that when I say, "reading", I mean, I've gotten through the chapters up to where you have to do actual work, and then I've stalled out because I haven't had time to do what you're supposed to do on the first day. Well, energy, I guess, more than time, but still... And I have read the beginning part very slowly because I have to keep getting past my irritation level, because I really want to do the cognitive things in this book. But I have kind of a love/hate relationship with this kind of book... that is, I want to think that someone can teach me how to do something that I don't know how to do. But I'm just beyond easily irritated by anything that is overly simplistic or talks down to me or is really cutesy. Actually, I have a pretty hard time just getting past the fact that the cover of this book is brilliant magenta (not picky or anything, am I?). And I keep getting just annoyed as hell because the first part of this book talks a lot about how "fat" people are different from "thin" people. Yes, I do understand what she's trying to get at, but I think that a lot of the reasoning both misses the boat totally and smacks of, "I have never really had a weight problem, and so I'm going on observation rather than knowledge." No, I don't think that you have to have had a particular problem to be able to empathize and understand it. But it does help, and it's a lot easier to be wrong if you haven't walked in those moccasins. It's very easy to observe behavior without really understanding what it's about.

But I do think that there is one "characteristic" of people with weight issues that she's got on the nose, for me anyway, and I have to say that I've never thought about it in this particular way. It's the notion that "thin" people don't really focus on hunger and cravings while "fat" people tend to think of these things as important. (Ok, I have to say, she doesn't say "thin" and "fat" people; she says "thin people" and "YOU", so I suppose I'm reading between the lines.) In other words, thin person goes, "oh, I'm hungry... guess I'll get something to eat laster..." and goes back to doing whatever s/he was doing. Not-so-thin person goes... "oh, I'm hungry. Crisis. What will I eat? When can I eat? What do I have to eat? There's some pizza in the refrigerator. Oh. Pizza. Don't think about pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Crisis. Must do something about this." In other words, hunger and cravings for food take on an importance that they really need not have.

I have to say that for me, this was one of those oh-so-simple things that people say, and you suddenly realize that you have never thought about it like this before. That hunger is maybe something that does not have to be paid attention to. That cravings can perhaps just be ignored. (I have to say that I'm not a big cravings person, but M. will get it in his head that he wants something in particular and will just obsess about on some level for days.) This sounds like sort of a "duh" kind of thing, but here's how it translates to for me... I start making dinner, and usually by this time, I am really hungry. So I'm cooking, and I'm thinking, hungry, have to eat NOW. And so, despite the fact that I'm cooking something that will be ready in half an hour, I start nibbling on cheese or whatever is leftover from some other meal, and by the time dinner is ready, I've picked up some significant number of calories just in random nibbling. And it's those marginal calories that keep me from losing weight.

So last night when I was cooking, I said, hey, I'm starving.... but I'm not starving. This is not a crisis. You do not have to eat NOW. You can eat in half an hour when the food is done. I did not nibble on anything. And this was ok. This was not a crisis.

I always feel kind of silly writhing this sort of thing down because I imagine someone reading this and saying, "well, of course you idiot. This is not a crisis. How could you not understand that?" And I do understand that, but the things that we do below the surface, the lifetime behaviors, are really not so obvious when you're in the middle of them.

Tuesday food pics

2009-02-03T21:43:00.009-05:00

Welcome to Tuesday! I'm going to skip repeating the pics that I posted before, especially since we eat about the same thing for breakfast every day... yes, the protein shake, and a piece of low-carb quiche.

I had my really long teaching day today, and managed not to nibble until I got home for lunch, when I had this.... isn't it pretty? That's the only picture I've taken that I really like. It's shrimp (from a can) with about a teaspoon of mayonnaise, salad greens, and a few cherry tomatoes. And I had one of those sugar-free chocolates pictured in Monday's stuff.

By the time I got home from my last class, I was really hungry and had this... it's a skinless teriyaki chicken thigh leftover from some dinner, plus some celery. That was about 4:30... we usually have dinner about 7:30... and I nibbled a few pork rinds (see Monday), about 80 calories.

Which takes us to dinner, which was shredded Brussels sprouts sautéed with a little bacon plus a 6 ounce pork chop braised in sherry and chicken stock. Awful picture. I suddenly really appreciate everyone who has beautiful food pics on their blogs.

And quite possibly because I couldn't be bothered to take pictures and/or because this all makes me feel a little accountable, the only other thing that I ate was a thin slice of cheddar cheese which probably weighed 1/2 oz.... but I didn't photograph it, and I'm not going to because if I cut a sample slice of cheese I will just eat it. I know myself quite well enough to know that...

Today's bonus picture... Michael's stuffed stegosaurus.

Monday food pics

2009-02-03T07:16:00.014-05:00

I've been trying to figure out a better way of getting a handle on what I'm doing, and I have to say that I'm totally resistant to going back to a conventional food diary because I get a little obsessive and weird about it. To say the least. And it's hard for me not to bug Michael about food when I'm writing down everything, and believe me, this is Never A Good Thing. Dr. Mike Eades did this a while ago on the Protein Power blog, so I thought I'd give this a shot... partly because it's different and partly because I found it kind of fascinating in some strange way to see exactly what someone else was eating.

This is kind of fiddly, and I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, but I'm going to try to do this for at least a week.

I should say that I try to keep carbs below 40 at absolute max, and I try to keep calories around 1500 or so because if I'm much below that I become a little crazy hungry, and it is not pretty. And I eat a little more weirdly on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday when I teach and thus can't do as much food prep. I also drink a LOT of tea with a little whole milk or cream.

First we had a protein shake... whey protein, almond milk, liquid vitamins. I know that this totally looks like an ad for Almond Breeze (which, I have to say, is genuinely a great product if a little pricey... low calorie, low carb, and gives you a little protein).

Then I had 1/8 of this beautiful quiche (recipe here), which is a bit less than 200 calories a slice. No crust, almost no carbs.

This was a teaching day for me, so I didn't really eat lunch... instead I had this, which I have to admit that I like but is too high carb for my liking and is also Not Real Food.

When I came home, I had half of a sausage that I'd cooked the night before (125 calories) and a little cabbage that I'd stir-fried. It's hard to tell portion sizes on these plates, but that's maybe 1/2 cup of cabbage. One of the things that I've learned doing this is that it's hard to take good food pics (I have to say that this looks revolting), and that it's impossible to get any sense of scale.

Dinner was the big meal. This is a rib-eye steak, about 8 oz. (and that's where I really could have had only half), cauliflower puree, broccoli, and the brown stuff is a couple of tablespoons of this strange "culinary" gravy that we'd gotten a free sample of from the store (the boys loved it, I was not crazy about it, and isn't calling it "culinary" kind of redundant? Unless they also sell, say, floor-cleaning gravy?)

And I had one of these, also Not Real Food.

In the middle of the night I got up and had a small handful of these pork rinds (about 80 calories, and yes, I could have skipped that...).

All of this, fine from a carb point of view. Without carefully counting the calories, I'd say, this is over the range that I shoot for though not a lot, and you have to call the culprit the steak. And to be honest, I knew at the time that it was really too much, but I was hungry and had eaten little all day, and thus I let its low-carbness outweigh its size.

And now I will leave you with a bonus picture of my adorable cat sleeping.

Intention. Action.

2009-02-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

We all have the best of intentions. The trouble is transmitting intention to action.

I think about this every day. I get up in the morning, and I think, today I will.... . And some of the problem is that my reach is sometimes greater than my grasp, as they say, and some of the problem is that the rest of the world doesn't always want to cooperate with what I think the day should bring, but as much as anything, I see it as a failure to transmit intention to action.

You can't lose weight by intending to. You can't get more exercise by intending to. You can't meditate by intending to, and at the end of the day, you don't get any credit for intentions.

I started writing this post days ago, and I'm still trying to finish, in part because I don't know what to say. I'm tired, and I'm discouraged by my own failures, and I guess by something more that that... that even my best efforts don't seem to have measurable results these days. I feel as if I must be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure that I am. And I am just low and sad, and I have a hard time shaking that for very long.

But what do you do? At the end of the day, you dust yourself off and try again. There's not a lot else that you can do, because the only other option... just giving up... isn't really an option at all.

So, this week I work on turning intention to action.

Recommitting AGAIN

2009-01-25T12:53:00.002-05:00

It's been a rough week or so, here. Yeah, I know, I always say that, but... well, it has been. It's been just over a week since Michael's last bout of whatever-the-hell-it-is weakness and edema and whatever. This one has been worse but considerably shorter. As of today, he's stronger, though not back to where he was, and the edema is going, and he's acting a LOT more like himself. The conversation that we've had approximately 10,000 times over the last ten days is, was this a reaction to drugs (his theory) or was this round 3 (at least) of the same thing (my theory). Either way, (1) I am sick to death of talking about it because I just don't know, and (2) we have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday, and maybe he'll be able to think of some new tests.

Anyway, as I've said about a billion times, Michael gets sick, and I stop taking care of myself. Mainly, although I still eat low carb since it's such a habit, I eat way too much and the wrong food balance, and I don't exercise. Sigh. This is a pattern that just has to stop. So yesterday I went and played racquetball with my students for a while, which was just great, and today I'm menu-planning and class-planning for the week, and hoping to get myself reorganized and back on focus. And tomorrow I will weigh myself, which I haven't done in a week, either... and this is never a good thing.

So let's see where I'm at in a week, whether I can actually balance ME with everything everyone else need from me. At some point, I really have to learn to do that. And then, too, maybe I can post something more entertaining than this constant complaining about how I'm not doing what I should.

I think that I need to set some goal for the week... but I'm not sure what, yet, so I'll think about it and write it out tomorrow.

Taking Care

2009-01-21T14:45:00.004-05:00

When I was a kid, no one talked about things like emotional intelligence in terms of life skills. Of course, I was kind of raised by wolves.... my father is so introverted that he wouldn't know a life skill if it bit him (actually, his idea of a life skill is, if you drink enough, you can talk to people). My mother... I loved my mother, I miss my mother deeply and painfully every day, but we didn't have the greatest relationship. It was a funny thing, really... everyone loved my mother, because she was wonderful to people. Kind and generous and giving and accepting and genuinely interested in other people... except that when it came to her daughters, me especially, most of that went out the window. It's not that she didn't genuinely love me or try her best, but her best, when it came to me, was more often the absolute worst thing you could do. And what she taught me in terms of emotional skills.... how to manipulate people emotionally. How to put everyone else's interests ahead of your own and then resent them for it. That the world will come to an end if everyone is not happy with you. Things like that. Sorry, Mom. Really. But it's the truth.

Some days I feel like we spend the rest of our lives unlearning the stuff we learned as kids. I know that's not true for everyone; that some people grow up functional and healthy and understanding the important things... but I guess I know way more people who wouldn't describe themselves that way.

Being healthy is hard for me. As soon as things get a little off balance, all of my "healthy" habits go out the window, and that happens remarkably fast. But I'm working on it. And it gets easier. A little.

And then I look at my son, and I think, what are the things that he needs that I'm not giving him? How could I teach him the emotional intelligence, the balance, that has been so hard for me to learn? I always argue that he's the most balanced person I know, and always has been... but that doesn't mean that he doesn't need help with these things. And one answer, of course, is that you need to model the behavior that you want children to learn.

His father and I didn't do a terribly good job of that. We were never hostile, but our marriage disintegrated into polite roommates nearly as soon as he was born. And that doesn't teach you anything about relationships, interpersonal skills, etc. I thought that Michael and I might be better role models, but it hasn't exactly worked out that way... mostly because there have been so real hardships, mostly medical, ever since we've been married, that a lot of the time we seem to live in this fraught, anxious atmosphere... not the way that it should be. And maybe it won't always be that way... I hope not... but it's the way things are a lot these days, and it doesn't leave a lot of room for my son and what he needs. I wonder sometimes if thirty years from now, he'll be typing these things into his blog... or whatever we do in thirty years. And he'll say the same sort of thing... my mother, I know she loved me, but she could not give me what I needed. I seriously hope not. But you never know.

So it's a good question. How do you teach these kinds of life skills, emotional sanity, appropriate boundaries?

Kicking and Screaming

2009-01-20T10:50:00.002-05:00

It's just one of those days.

I can't find something I really, really need; my new semester starts tomorrow, and I have no energy, plus I'm buried in tons of little stupid things that I need to do. It's been a hell of a few days, spending every day trying to decide whether this is the day that Michael's breathing problems will be bad enough to go to the hospital. And endlessly going over the symptoms again and again, trying to figure out what the hell the problem is, because no one else seems able to do that.

The good news is, he really seems better today, and I think that we're going to avoid the hospital this time. The bad news is... well, the bad news part 1 is that there's still no way of knowing what leads to this collection of symptoms... extreme weakness followed by breathing problems associated with rapid heart rate and so on. They've checked out all the ordinary stuff. Doesn't seem to be any of those things. But this is the third time this has happened, this time possibly kicked off by 10 days of antibiotics although I'm not sure how that could be, and every time it is more severe, more scary, more frustrating.

The bad news part 2 is that I really don't deal with this well. I'm great in a crisis. Fabulous. But in the aftermath, I'm exhausted and whiny, and I just want someone to fix it all for me, and little things kick off all the spoiled child in me... not being able to find the data CD that I desperately need is making me want to kick and scream until someone fixes it all for me. And Michael, though better, is nowhere near well, and still needs me to be pretty much doing everything for him. This isn't exactly the moment to be coping badly.

So, the question is, how do you learn to take care of yourself when there's no one to take care of you? In a healthy way? I know loads of unhealthy ways, but I also know that, these days, they really wouldn't make me feel any better.

All the Wrong Messages Part 2.... Oprah's Pictures

2009-01-19T15:04:00.003-05:00

Back in October, I posted about those irritating Electrolux ads with Kelly Ripa and the misguided messages that they send. My candidate for today is Oprah's magazine or, more specifically, the cover photos.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm a big Oprah fan. She's smart, she's kind, and she seems like a real person. Plus she's done a lot to get people reading some great books, always a good thing in my mind. And her magazine is pretty good, in the ranks of women's magazines.

But unless you've been living under a rock for the last month or so, you have to have heard her confession that she's gained 40 lbs.

So why is her picture on the magazine cover this month (February) exactly the same as every other one? Heavily air-brushed and photoshopped, looking exactly like she looks at her lowest weight. I was trying to find an online copy of this, and the best I can do is direct you to the magazine site, which is here, and note that it's the pic that's on the bottom of the page where it says Hormones 101, the picture where she's dressed in yellow and holding cards (probably this direction won't work after a week or so). Small, but you get the idea.

It's not like I don't have some sympathy about this. I mean, if I were going to be on a magazine cover, I'm sure that I'd like to be as beautiful as possible (although being on the cover every month might lessen that desire a little). But the problem is, I think this just sends all the wrong messages. Primarily the message that you can't be seen in public unless you're thin. That being fat makes you less socially acceptable.

I'm not a fat of the idea of embracing your fat, of fat acceptance, particularly because too much body weight is, in general, not that great for you, and we should all be striving to be more healthy. But that's different from having to look like some ideal, and of hating yourself or finding yourself somehow socially unacceptable because you've put on some pounds. All of that just leads to the same wrong messages, the same self-esteem issues, the same social problems that so many of us have battled. And maybe I'm wrong or too idealistic, but it seems to me that someone like Oprah, someone who has been through these battles herself, should be the poster child for loving yourself at whatever weight you're at, not at airbrushing it away.

And Here We Are Again....

2009-01-18T11:29:00.002-05:00

Michael is having another recurrence of his breathing/weight gain/fever/weakness symptoms. Almost right on schedule, about every six weeks. Except that I'm not absolutely positive that this is the same thing all over again, because it comes on the tail of 10 days of a very strong antibiotic which might have interacted with his diabetes meds, and it's all a little different... so, very worrisome, unclear whether he should go to the hospital or not (he's a little better today, and the hospital so far has not done anything except monitor him, so we're leaning toward wait until tomorrow and see), and everything in life is on hold again.

And so I'm worried to death, and I wish that someone would sort this stuff out once and for all, and that he would get well and stay well, but what I really wanted to talk about today is how hard it is to take care of yourself when you're taking care of someone else.

I look at my lack of weight loss or fitness increase over the last year, and I get irritated with myself, and then I remember that most of what I've been doing for the last year is taking care of him. Or my mother, earlier. And it is just so difficult to focus on me when everyone else needs me to focus on them. I get some period of stability, and I start working on things, and I think about making plans to head back to the gym, and I start practicing new habits... and then everything falls apart, because it's easy to nibble on the cheese instead of eating properly when you're in a hurry. I don't "cheat" exactly... I hate that word... because I'm so used to eating in this particular way that it's not a nose dive into ice cream or something, but I eat too much and too often. And, surprise, I end up right back where I started.

Change requires application. Change requires doing things in a different way until they become habit. And when they become habit, it is not so easy to dislodge them when life unravels. The things I eat... food types and groups... are like this. Low carb is autopilot. But exercise and portion control are not, and neither are the thousand things that would help to make me feel better and less stressed.

I'm trying, though, in simple silly ways that seem to get derailed half the time. Yesterday I went to the store for a minute, and instead of going straight home, went to Starbucks for a coffee. Ordered a grande sugar free vanilla whole milk latté... waited a really long time, sitting in the drive through and noticing all the bird nests that you can see this time of year, with all the leaves gone... and they eventually arrived with a size smaller. Should have just taken that, but said so.... and the barrista came back remarkably quickly with a larger one. So I drove around to the parking lot and sat in "our" space... where we used to go to cool off and take a break when it was a little easier for Michael to get in and out of the car... had a sip of the coffee, realized that they'd just dumped more milk in the original coffee, decided I didn't need the carbs anyway and tossed it. Alternated between feeling smug and irritated that even when I try to do something simple to get a break, it tends to backfire!

Ah, well.... reset, start over again.

Food Anxiety

2009-01-16T09:16:00.003-05:00

It's a beautiful, sunny-but-frigid day in upstate NY. My poor son, who has been betting on (and praying for) a snow day all week, in light of the bone-chilling temperatures, evidently isn't going to get one. I kind of miss the wonder of being a kid in this part of the world... it's always possible that every winter day just might bring the magic of a snow day. A totally free and unexpected day off. We should all get snow days, really.

Michael is napping in a chair, dappled with sunshine. And "dappled" always makes me think of this poem that my mother loved. My quiche is in the oven, and I'm sitting here doing what I always do, thinking.

And I'm thinking about food, which unfortunately is not a rare thing around here.

I've come to a conclusion lately, which really is a no-brainer, I suppose, but still... at this point, if I am ever going to get my weight down, I have to actively work on the behavioral things. At this point in my life, the reality is that I eat very well from a nutrition point of view, I don't do a lot of things that I used to do (like binge eat), and I am reasonably active, even though I'm still not back to the gym. But I don't lose weight. Barring something physically wrong with me (which seems unlikely), it's all about eating too much and too often. But it doesn't seem to me that I eat too much and too often because, well, it's the way I've always eaten (yeah, that really should tell me something, shouldn't it?).

So I started reading Judith Beck's book, which is really about congitive therapy and diet, and while I haven't gotten that far in it (partly because I'm in the middle of three books at the moment), it's made me think about just paying attention to eating. Paying attention to the difference between hunger and boredom, and all that stuff that you've heard a thousand times on every list of diet tips.

But here is the thing that I really noticed since I have been trying to be more mindful about eating. Eating makes me really anxious. I wolf food like someone is going to take it away from me, and I don't notice what I'm eating, and at the same time, I am profoundly anxious. Which, when you think about it, is the strangest thing ever. I mean, if you look at the things that cause eating disorders (of the overeating sort, that is), it's usually said to be about the calming effects of food, food as comfort, etc. And there is some aspect of rapid eating that genuinely is comforting, I think... it lets you shut off and zone out. But this shovel-it-in-your mouth, fast eating neither lets you enjoy food nor is... peaceful, I guess, for lack of a better word. And when I slow down and really think about food, I feel this lessening of tension, this release of anxiety.

It's all very strange really, and I'm not sure how to put this together with anything just yet.

Quiche. Yum. Low-Carb Quiche

2009-01-15T08:54:00.004-05:00

It's the low-carb breakfast problem... cereal is pretty much out, fruit is hard, and sure you can have leftover dinner food... but mostly it leaves you with bacon and eggs. I think this is why there's this huge myth that Atkins is all about eating bacon and eggs and nothing else. Anyway, we've been fighting the egg battle here for a long time, because I (the not-picky person!) don't mind eggs in any form and bacon or sausage is fine, too. Michael, on the other hand, is not an egg person really. So I started making quiche... and, yeah, I know that quiche is bacon and eggs in disguise, but for some reason, the disguise works. Michael doesn't complain about it, it's a perfect thing to eat in the morning, and for the two of us, a quiche lasts 4 days, so that's breakfast taken care of, just reheating rather than cooking.

So I've been experimenting... doing what I almost never do with recipes, trying them again and again, fine-tuning the proportions, fine-tuning the taste, and so what I have for you is what I think is the perfect low-carb quiche recipe.... and it's easy to fiddle with or substitute things depending on how you want your quiche to come out.

This is a crustless quiche... that's the low-carb part... which takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it's hard to imagine why you would want a crust. Takes a LOT less time, too.

And best of all, it takes about 5-10 minutes prep time, and then you can go drink tea until it's done.

You will need...
2 eggs
2 egg yolks (or you could use them whole; see below)
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk (any kind)
about 2 oz. Jarlsberg cheese, grated (can substitute an ordinary Swiss)
about 1 oz. Gruyere cheese, grated (can substitute more ordinary Swiss, but better if you don't)
2 leeks, white parts only (can substitute onion)
3 slices bacon, preferably thick-cut pepper bacon (but you can use anything. Use a little more if it's regular slices.)
salt and pepper to taste; a little grated nutmeg if desired

Preheat oven to 350 F. Use a 9-10" pie plate, preferably ceramic or Pyrex. Spray with a nonstick spray like Pam (this is not essential but makes cleanup easier.)

Finely chop the leeks. Snip the bacon into small pieces using kitchen shears, or dice small. Sauté the bacon until it releases some fat, and then add the leeks. Sauté until bacon is browned and leeks are soft. Drain on a paper towel.

While the bacon and leeks are cooking, mix everything else in a bowl. You probably don't need salt, because the bacon is salty enough. Put the leek/bacon mixture into the pie plate (spread it out), pour everything else over it, and bake for 30 minutes. Allow to cool slightly before cutting.

Refrigerate leftovers... this will keep well for at least 3 or 4 days (we've never had one last longer); reheat about 1 minute in the microwave (for 2 slices).

There are lots of ways that you can substitute... onions for leeks in the beginning of the recipe is an easy one. You can also add mushrooms (be sure to cook them pretty well, though, because otherwise, they release a lot of water when baking and make the quiche soggy). You can use 4 eggs instead of the eggs/yolks combo... this will make a quiche that is firmer and less custard-y... we don't like the texture as much that way. You can use diced ham (or turkey ham) instead of the bacon. You could use more cream instead of the milk, which would give you a few less carbs, but I was trying to cut the fat content a little. I don't recommend using less cream, because it makes the quiche watery, which is an issue if you don't have a crust.

And I experimented a lot with cheese. I had two goals, great taste and NOT buying a lot of really expensive cheese for something that I cook about every 3-4 days. So... tried all generic store Swiss cheese. Awful. No taste. (But this is the cheapest option. Also, buy block cheese and grate it; it only takes a minute and is a lot cheaper.) Then I tried a really expensive Swiss variant that we had leftover from the Christmas Cheese Indulgence (moment of insanity when I bought about 8 very expensive cheese varieties at the gourmet cheese counter) plus Gruyere... fantastic. But really expensive, because both cheeses are in the range of $16/lb. After some fiddling around and compromise, I've found that the best thing is to use about 2 oz. Jarlsberg... which has more taste than Swiss but much the same consistency, is easily available, and is not that expensive, plus 1 oz. Gruyere, which IS expensive but you don't have to use that much. Other suggestions welcomed.

As written, this recipe is about 200 calories for 1/8 pie, and maybe 4 carbs if that. The carbs come mainly from the leeks or onions... and you could omit them... and from the milk. Definitely induction-friendly if you're an Atkins person. And not so bad on the calories, for a breakfast choice. Although a slice looks small, it's got a lot of fat from the cheese and cream, so it makes you feel full (for a loooong time), and all ready to start the day!

Resolution Wrap-Up

2009-01-14T19:00:00.004-05:00

Not like I've actually done all these things... hahahaha, you must be kidding! Just that I've realized that trying to do a post about each of these things is totally stalling out, so I'm wrapping the rest of them plus some updates into this post.

Here's what I've got left to talk about...
5. Get my finances in order
Eek. This one is the "I have no clue where to start" one. I think we're going to have to shelve this until summer. By then, a lot of things should be more clear. But as sort of a backup resolution... I'm keeping meticulous receipts. Usually it occurs to me when we finally do our taxes (as in, October 14th, the day before the extension runs out...) that I should have kept better records. It's too late for 2008, but let's start 2009 by being methodical and organized about this from Day One. (Then maybe I can get an accountant this year; it's hard to do that when you're piecing a lot of things together at the last second.)

6. Get some more social relationships into my isolated, pathetic life.
This one is hard, too. I'm honestly not sure how to do it. But maybe I could start by being less defensive and less tied in to being resentful about what people are not doing for me. Maybe instead of being eternally annoyed that my aunt forwards me junk all the time instead of sending me a real email, I could just tell her that. Maybe instead of resenting that my best friend doesn't call me, I could just call her. Maybe I could start by being a little braver and a little less protective of myself.

This is hard.

7. Go back to the gym.
This is hard, too. Not so much because it's intrinsically difficult, but because Michael is still not able to do this, and I feel bad leaving him home. He says, go. He says, I will come with you and watch, if you want. But he says this when he's feeling ok. When he's not, it's all really frustrating, and it's even more frustrating when you have to watch someone doing something that you want to be doing. So I don't know. But I think that somehow I have to do this.

I have to think about how to make this work. I will get back to this.

8. Get the house organized.
I did something about this. I hired someone to come help for about 2 hours every week. I think... hope anyway... that this will help a lot. Just having someone else to do a few things once a week will take a lot of pressure off of me.

I feel very guilty, on some level, about hiring someone to do something that I think that I should be doing myself. I still have a hard time realizing that I truly can't do everything. I still think that if I just work hard enough, I can... and that it's some sort of failure if I don't.

And some updates.

It looks like my insurance company is probably not going to approve the antidepressant that I was willing to take... since it's the one that my smart psychiatrist sister recommended... unless my doctor can work some magic. I don't think that's going to happen. So... I think I'm on my own with this. But maybe that's not such a bad thing, or at least I'm hoping I'll think so after I get done being irritated and upset; I think I was kind of hanging on to the idea that a magic pill would make me feel better (and in the process, I forgot all the reasons that I don't really want to work on this through medication).

But long-term solutions come better to me through thought and cognitive strategies than through medication, anyway.

I got my hip x-rayed and so far no one has told me that my leg is about to fall off, so I guess that's good, and I need to think physical therapy. Which will also get me back to the gym.

Oh, and I've discovered that an average day is about 3,000 steps for me, the magic of the pedometer (although I don't think it's perfectly accurate). So I need to be tripling my motion, essentially, if I've shooting for 10,000 steps. Some of that will come when the semester starts.

Ok, enough dull introspection and problems. It's time to figure out the solutions.

One Year of Low Carb, and Eight Lessons

2009-01-11T15:46:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me today, as I was out battling all the stupid people in Wal-Mart who insist on leaving their carts in the middle of the aisle like they are the only person in the universe.... ok, that has nothing to do with anything, really... it occured to me today that it's been about a year since we really started eating low-carb.

It's been a hell of a year, with everything else that's happened. In some ways, I feel like I'm not exactly the poster child for a low carb way of life, because in the last year, I've lost (and kept off) only about 20 lbs... but on the other hand, Michael lost nearly 100 lbs. last year. And a way of life is just that... the way that you eat all the time, when you're "dieting" (a word I never use these days) and the rest of the time, too. It's long-term changes in eating habits that really change weight, not temporary things.

Anyway, I was thinking about what I've learned, and it's a LOT.

1. There is NO food group you "can't give up"....
People used to say to me that you get used to eating very low salt or low fat diets, and I kind of never believed them. And I hear people say all the time, "I could never give up bread." Or potatoes. Or pasta. I used to be a pasta junkie; these days I never eat it (maybe the occasional ounce of Dreamfields every other month or so), and I don't miss it at all. Same thing with bread and rice. When I started low carb, I used to salivate at the idea of potatoes... really, literally. We each had six tiny baby potatoes, the size of your thumb, the other night with dinner, and we both thought that was was too many potatoes, and we just weren't that interested. After a while, these just seem like things you don't eat. You get really, really used to it.

2. ... but it will take your head a long time to get used to this idea.
When I get very hungry or very low, I crave things that I no longer eat. It's all in my head. I still think of these things as the "good" things, on some weird level. It takes a lot longer to adjust your head than it does to adjust your tastebuds/stomach.

3. Fat is not your enemy...
I still have an awfully hard time convincing Michael of this... and it really is hard to wrap our head around, after years of being indoctrined in a low-fat, food pyramid world. But it's not fat that makes you fat; it's the interaction of fat and carbs when you have too many calories. And fat is satiety. When we at low fat, we were hungry all the time, even when we ate a ton of vegetables and such. Now we're never hungry... and we almost never fight about food.

4. ... but fat is not your friend, either.
Not your best friend, anyway. You can eat a lot of calories on a low-carb diet, but if you want to lose weight, you still have to create a calorie deficit on some level. I think that I am the most dramatic proof of this that there is. I have, as we all know, not lost a lot of weight this last year. Why? I eat too much. I eat too many calories to lose weight. But I haven't gained weight, either, despite having spent nearly all of the last year paying no attention to portion size or fat quantity or whatever. But now that I'm starting to do that, I'm losing weight. You can eat a diet that is not low fat without piling on the excess fat. Moderation, balance... these are good things in every phase of life.

5. People who haven't tried a low carb diet don't know what it is. Some people who have tried a low carb diet don't know what it is...
No, you don't eat only meat on the Atkins diet. Or bacon and eggs. Or no vegetables. Or no fruit, ever. Yes, vegetables do have carbs in them. Yes, some fruits are laden with sugar and are not that great for you even though they are fruit. And so on. One of my students told me that her roommate had gone on the Atkins diet and ate only peanut butter. What??? The misconceptions about the Atkins diet and low carb diets in general are do huge that it becomes tiresome at best to even mention that you eat this way.

6. ... and there's more than one way of eating low carb.
More accurately, there's a billion ways of eating low carb. I've read about every low carb book that there is, plus a lot of blogs, plus a lot of forums. I recommend Protein Power when asked, but when you get right down to it, everyone is different, and there's no perfect way of eating that works for everyone. It is easier for me to think of guidelines rather than absolute rules... and in doing that, we've adapted a way of eating that works well for both of us. There are things that we virtually never eat... bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, sugar, tropical fruits or grapes, and just about any processed food. But we do eat legumes in great moderation; Michael eats a lot of apples and berries, and I don't freak out if he has the occasional Starbucks biscotti. We don't worry too much about condiments used in very small amounts, and mostly we don't count carbs. After a while, you don't need to.

7. Junk is junk, low carb or high...
This is my particular soapbox, but if you want to feel healthy, you have to eat well. Eating well does not include a diet heavy in processed food, especially things like Atkins bars and substitutes for high-carb food. There's lots of fake stuff out there. None of it is good for your body. Even though I have a guilty love for Splenda in my tea, I'm pretty much totally with all the people who say, if it wasn't something that people ate 500 years ago, it's probably not good for you now.

8. ... and so life is better if you cook.
I know not everyone is a cook or wants to be a cook or whatever. I know that there are time issues, and I know that sometimes the last thing you want is to spend any time at all putting together a meal. But cooking is a skill like any other, and if you practice, you get better and faster at it. I cook 2-3 meals from scratch every day. I am lucky enough to have a flexible work schedule much of the time, and I've been doing this all the time for nearly 3 years now, so I've gotten pretty good and very fast at it. And it is a lot easier to eat low carb when you cook. It is hard and frustrating to eat low carb if you are trying to do it out of the frozen dinner section, because there's just about nothing suitable.

The one other thing that seems profoundly true to me is that, for me, this way of eating has been better than anything else that I've done. Although I've lost little weight, I look better... my body has reshaped considerably... and I have more energy than I've had in years. This is probably not for everyone, but it's a forever change for me, for medical reasons, scientific reasons, and because it just works with the way that I prefer to eat.

Now, if this next year can bring some real weight loss and fitness increase, I'll be really happy.

Resolution Days, Day 4, Hip

2009-01-09T09:31:00.002-05:00

4. Figure out what's actually wrong with my hip and what I need to do to fix it.

My hip/thigh/whatever has been occasionally just beyond painful since last June when I pulled something playing racquetball... although there have been bits of this problem for some time. It kicks off when I do certain kinds of things... push a grocery cart is the biggest one that clearly does it, but sometimes just moving around a lot, and certainly anything that twists it kicks it off. Very, very painful. I've been to the doctor about this a bunch of times; he moves my leg around and says, there is nothing structurally wrong here, go to physical therapy.

And I was going to do that... but you know, it's a time thing... yes, and that's an excuse thing, but true.

So Monday we went through this again, and he said, let's get it x-rayed, and Go To Physical Therapy. So, ok. I will try to get the x-ray done next week. I will. Really. And I guess that I will check out the physical therapy. Ugh. I am reluctant about this, not so much because I am reluctant to do it in general, but (1) I hate to make phone calls; I am stupidly phobic about this if I give myself a chance to be, and (2) there's a long boring story here about the physical therapy place up the street and how much Michael hates everyone there. But I need to do it. So... I guess I need to put some accountability timeline on this.

Try to get the x-ray next Monday since we have to go to Rochester anyway.
See what happens with that.
Call about physical therapy on Tuesday.

Ok.

Resolution Days, Day3, Feet

2009-01-06T08:44:00.000-05:00

3. Get a pedometer and shoot for 10,000 steps.

This is the easy one... well, the pedometer part. I got one from Amazon, and it came yesterday... I have to say that this thing is pretty cool... much smaller than the last pedometer I had, and the neat thing is that it will register in your pocket or purse or whatever, doesn't have to be clipped to your waist. So we'll see, first, what my average daily walking is, and then I guess we'll see how hard it would be to make 10,000 steps, which is the real goal.

I'm not entirely sure how dead serious I am about this... I mean, I kind of hate walking as a form of exercise... but I'm thinking that if I just try to go for upping my number of steps, then I have some incentive to do the little things like park farther away and take the stairs and so on.

Resolution Days, Day 2, Food

2009-01-05T10:53:00.002-05:00

"2. Focus on thinking about what and why I'm eating."

This is the other hard one. I am not losing weight. I don't keep a food diary these days, so it's hard for me to know exactly what I'm eating from a calorie point of view, but I stay very low carb, and it doesn't seem to me that I'm eating a lot. So, why don't I lose weight?

I've been spending a lot of time over the last weekend watching fat shows. You know, it's the beginning of the year when everyone is stoked on the idea of losing weight, so every channel runs all the weight programs it can find (and, I suspect, gyms top out on members who will be there for a month and never appear again). Anyway, Discovery Heath has been running all its morbid obesity programming.... something I find a combination of bizarrely fascinating, inspiring, and depressing as hell. Michael and I have been there with a lot of the indignities that come with super obesity, and it is not a good or kind thing, but that's a whole different topic. My real point is that it is staggering how many really fat people say, "but I don't eat that much!" And then you see what they do eat, and you think, wow, you are kidding yourself. And, paragon of virtue though I am, at some point I have to say, maybe that's exactly what I'm doing.

The low carb way of life has been a great blessing for me... I feel better, I look better, I don't really gain weight... but at the end of the day, you still have to create enough of a calorie deficit to lose weight, and either there is something physically wrong with me, or I'm just not doing that.

Also, bad habit creep is coming back. Nibbling on things because they're in your hand. Licking the spoon. Eating the leftovers rather than putting them away (or making the dog happy!). And eating at night. Yes, I do get hungry at night. But I would probably survive just fine without that extra piece of cheese, wouldn't I?

So... what am I going to do about this. 1.5 things... the 0.5 is because I am not exactly sure that I'm committed to the first thing. The first thing is start keeping a food diary again. I have very mixed feeling about this because I tend to get a little compulsive about this, and stopping doing it was incredibly freeing. But maybe I need to do it again. Possibly with a camera. The second thing is, I've sent for the Judith Beck behavioral books that I've seen recommended a lot lately. And I'm going to have a shot at really working on some of the cognitive things.

I quit smoking years ago, and I mostly did it by learning to think of myself as "not a smoker." I think that same kind of cognitive trick might help a lot here. We'll see. I'll report back.

Resolution Days... Day1, Happiness

2009-01-04T08:40:00.004-05:00

The trouble with resolutions is that you can't just make them, not if you really want them to happen. You have to have a plan, some way that you're going to put some structure in place to make sure that there's some chance that it will happen. Otherwise, it's not a resolution, it's a wish.

So I wrote down my eight resolutions, and now the question is, what can I do to make these things happen?

The first one, "work on happiness", is actually the hardest and most painful one. I was going to do it last. But it's probably the most important one... and so, well, let's be brave, I guess.

I have been, lately, just beyond unhappy. I have been crushingly, overwhelmingly sad in a way that I just don't know how to deal with (and I've had a lifetime of dealing with depression and so forth). It is becoming incapacitating. I get up every morning and spend two or three hours just getting to the point where I can do something besides cry. I think it's fair to say that this is not normal.

Michael says, well, what do you expect? Your mother died last summer. The process of grief takes time. And so on. But it's not that. I mean, it is that in a way... I miss my mother every day, and I am still filled with anger at the unfairness of it all. In some ways, it's hard for me to imagine that there will ever be a day when I say, "I'm over this now." Some losses you never get over. But I understand this. It's not my first loss. It's part of life. I can deal with it. If it were only this, I think I would be all right. But it's the proliferation of a thousand small things, not so much this one big thing.

It's been nearly a year since Michael has been really well and mobile. It's hard on him; it's hard on me, and it hasn't gotten easier. There's little to break up the endless medical problem after medical problem; we can hardly go anywhere, and when we have, it's most been a mistake. And I do everything. This is not a complaint... just a fact, and over the last year, nearly everything has become my responsibility, and it wears on me. I am afraid that these things will never get better... although I believe that they will.... and at the same time, I have to try to be the optimistic and encouraging one. And the weight of all of it... I don't know. I mean, I am not a complainer. But I have so little time to do anything that might make me feel better, and I'm so isolated, in a way, and the combination of all of it has, I think, tipped me into a kind of depression that's beyond anything I've experienced before.

And I have to do something about this. I've been trying to wait it out, but it's getting worse rather than better. So I think that this is taking me back to the place I've been trying to avoid, going back on antidepressants. Don't get me wrong here... I am not at all anti-medication; I was on them for years, and they are lifesavers for a lot of people. But let's just say that the end of my antidepressant experience was a lot worse than the beginning, and left me with considerable reluctance to try this again unless absolutely necessary. I haven't wanted to deal with the whole adjustment and side effects thing... and in some silly way, to whatever extent this is all about grief, I wanted to feel it, not have it numbed (even though I know that it's not the way that it works). As some bizarre sort of tribute, I suppose. And because I just think that I should be able to cope with everything in the universe.

But this is wrong. It's wrong partly because I keep telling Michael that he has to try medications that might help him even if he doesn't want to, so it's just flat-out hypocritical for me to be unwilling to do the same thing. And my state of mind affects him as well as me. I've started to call my doctor about this five or six times over the last few months... and every time I talk myself out of it. And that's the point of talking about it here, really, to make that commitment to actually doing that. Monday.

Things are not supposed to be like this. And so maybe if I could deal with the biochemical bits of it, maybe some of the other things that will help... the rest of my resolutions... will be possible.

The Inevitable Resolution Post

2009-01-02T09:00:00.002-05:00

I've been putting this off.

My adorable son, when asked about New Year's resolutions, either says, "I don't do that because there's got to be one holiday you ignore", or "I don't do that because if you're going to resolve something, you should just do it whenever." And, ok, he's right about the last bit.

But it's a little hard not to see the old year ending and the new year starting as a moment to assess and evaluate and plan.

Goodbye, 2008. You were an awful year for me. Probably the worst ever. If we could just get through 2009 without anyone getting sick or dying, it would pretty much be an improvement. It's hard not to be bitter, looking back. Very few bright spots. Probably the only one is that Michael ends the year having lost 102 lbs. in 2008 (173 overall). Impressive... though I have to say that even this has a dark side. He was actually more mobile at this time last year, which is just another of those endlessly ironic things.

And roll on, 2009.

There are so many things I want for this year. And I'm just going to write these down and think more about each of them later.

1. Work on happiness.
2. Focus on thinking about what and why I'm eating.
3. Get a pedometer and shoot for 10,000 steps.
4. Figure out what's actually wrong with my hip and what I need to do to fix it.
5. Get my finances in order.
6. Get some more social relationships into my isolated, pathetic life.
7. Go back to the gym.
8. Get the house organized.

I think just writing these things down is enough for the moment.

Two Days After Christmas

2008-12-27T13:15:00.006-05:00

I don't think I've ever had a Christmas that was such a mix of nice and just a pile of things that made me feel irritated and resentful and frustrated.

On the nice side... everything got done. Christmas Day was pretty relaxed. My son spent Christmas Eve with his father, and I have to admit that it was actually kind of pleasant to be able to lounge around Christmas morning and not have someone pushing to open presents now now now now. And when he came home, he was delightful... his best self, not so much his surly uncommunicative teenage self. It was nice to see my father, who is not as unwell as my sister thinks. Or at least I don't think so. And Michael actually enjoyed having my father here, which is a rarity. And my big silly present for Michael was very successful and funny. Lots of nice stuff like that.

On the dark side...

1. Physical things large and small continue to plague Michael. Same story. Doesn't get easier.

2. This is, I think, me being stupid and petty and falls into the category of Things Better Let Go. I sent both of my sisters a very special sentimental thing, because I knew they would be missing my mother this Christmas. My sister said, "you always think of the special things." Yeah, I do. Because I think about other people. But who thinks about me? Most of the time, I am pretty ok with this. It is never a good idea to give anything... gifts, love, time, whatever... expecting something specific in return. Or expecting it in the form that you want it. I really do believe that what goes around comes around, that when you pay it forward, you get it back, one way or another. But the small and sad bit of me would like some of that back now. In a form I could recognize.

Just let it go.

3. Food issues (you knew we'd get there, right?)

We didn't have such a bad Christmas, food-wise, not really. But I have to say, most of it I really could have skipped, and it just makes be wonder when I will learn the following lessons...

I really can't have bread in the house. If there's one food that I will just eat beyond all sense, it's good bread. It is better not to have it around at all.
Things that I have always thought of as treats are no longer things that I like particularly. We had two indulgence things for Christmas dinner... Yorkshire pudding with the roast beef, and sticky toffee pudding for dessert. Both of these things have always ranked high on the favorite foods list for me. My mother used to make Yorkshire pudding only on Christmas (it's a popover-type of thing, if you haven't had it, sort of like a roll with an different and delicious kind of consistency). And when I first traveled to England, I discovered Sticky Toffee Pudding, an insanely delicious dessert if you like caramel-type things, a date cake covered with a toffee sauce, hot, served with cream or custard or ice cream. Not good things, either one of them, from a calorie or carb or just sensible food point of view. We had both. I enjoyed neither. I fed most of both to the dog. (He enjoyed them.) If you eat in a particular way for long enough, your tastes really do change. But it takes a lot longer for your brain to catch up.
Eating this way makes me feel like death. It is not worth it. It is not so much about weight and fitness as it is wanting to just feel better.

All in all, I think that this has to be the year that I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I will finish this year at about the same weight I started. This is not exactly what I'd call a success story, although certainly it could be worse. And I've put in a great deal of time learning to eat (and cook) in a different way. This coming year needs to be the time when I put all the rest of the pieces together and actually get fit again.

Mostly Happy Updates...

2008-12-22T18:29:00.003-05:00

Somehow the last week or so has gone by in a mad blur. No idea how exactly. But the grades are done, and the tree is up if not completely decorated, and some small parts of the house are sort of clean-ish. I'd be happier if it was about a week until Christmas rather than a couple of days, but that's always the way...

I'd be a LOT happier if the frigid weather + loads of snow + daytime sunshine wasn't causing huge ice dams on my roof. Which in turn drips inside the house by some magical and horrible process, soaking the bedroom carpet, soaking the mudroom, making me really irritated especially since this happened two years ago, so, yeah, I should have done something about it. Hopefully it will warm up later in the week, get rid of the snow, and we'll have a change to do something preventative.

But the great news is that Michael is actually feeling better. I have no idea why, but he's been almost his old self the last couple of days. Which makes me mega-happy... and his weight has gone down 30+ over the last 10 days as the edema in his stomach and legs has reduced (which kind of makes me jealous). He's now at his lowest weight ever. (Well, not EVER, as he keeps reminding me, but in this weight cycle. We'll start posting weight again in the new year.)

My father comes in tomorrow night... it will be a sad Christmas for all of us, with Mom gone, but we're trying. So now I just have to wrap everything plus finish putting together the most complicated practical joke Christmas present that I've ever given anyone... impossible even to explain... and hope that nothing goes awry. Fortunately, my father won't even notice if the house is filthy....

Sort of Better News....

2008-12-11T10:29:00.002-05:00

On the brighter side... it seems like Michael is feeling a bit better. He's still not doing much, but that's partly because his knees are still unbelievably painful from the Sleep Study Experience From Hell. (I am thinking that he should probably have x-rays, actually, although it's unlikely that there's anything big going on... we see the doctor next week, so we can find out then.) But he seems better. More alert. More himself. A little happier, although impatient as anything and easily discouraged.

One of the worst bits for him is that during all of this, he acquired a huge amount of edema... fluid gain in the abdomen and legs. He's lost so much weight in general that he has a tremendous amount of loose skin on his abdomen, and when all this started, zoom.... it all filled up with fluid. He gained about 30 lbs. in about 2 weeks (while eating almost nothing, I should add). And every doctor has looked at it and gone, hmmmmm, but no one has seemed particularly interested or bothered. But for him, this is a Huge Big Deal. I mean, think about it... overnight you get 30 lbs. just hanging off the bottom of your stomach. Makes it hard and painful to move, and if you're a guy, makes it pretty hard to pee, too, which is probably too much information. But it's this huge catch-22... you have to get rid of the fluid somehow, and that's basically how you have to do it.... but it's a little tricky. And painful and irritating to your skin.

Anyway, 10 of those surplus pounds disappeared in 2 days, and another 2 today! So this is a really good sign. Of course, I've been feeding him all sorts of herbal diuretics and so forth, which is helping, but one way or the other, just seeing that go down is lifting spirits. And his heart rate has been ok, if still a bit high.

So here's hoping that when we see the doctor next week, his iron levels are still up, and maybe he'll actually agree to try the other heart medication.... and things will keep looking up. If the edema keeps going down, he can do some lower-body exercise, which will further help it decrease... so, fingers crossed!

Here Today, Legume Tomorrow....

2008-12-08T13:55:00.006-05:00

I just can't talk about any more of the dismal stuff for a while (although I think it's getting better), so for a change, let's have a recipe... and this is a great one.

The basis and inspiration for this recipe is from Jacques Pépin's Fast Food My Way, which is a fantastic cookbook for simple dishes, every one delicious. I've made this for years, and evolved it into a more-or-less low carb dish. But the beauty of it (see below) is that really you can modify the carbs, modify the fat, and still have something that's both easy to put together, quick, nutritious, and just great comfort food. (His recipe is Chickpea Ragout, p. 91, and it's a side dish. Mine is a one-dish meal.)

This is a very forgiving recipe, and thus the proportions are all pretty vague.

Chicken-Chorizo Autumn Stew

1 package boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about 6 thighs. Don't use breast because it will dry out.)
about 4 inches spicy chorizo (the Spanish style... a hard, pepperoni-like sausage, not the Mexican kind. I prefer the hot kind, which adds a kick, but you can use the regular kind if you prefer)
olive oil
1 red onion, roughly diced
2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
1 head cauliflower, cut into florets (discard any tough stems or dice small)
1 14 oz. can chopped tomatoes (I like the fire-roasted ones.)
1 legume choice... see note below... a can of chickpeas or a package of lima beans or butter beans, etc.
choice of optional vegetables: fresh mushrooms, zucchini, fennel, etc.
salt and freshly ground pepper
about 1 cup chicken stock
finely chopped flat-leaf parsley, if desired

Finely dice the chorizo and cube the chicken thighs. Heat the oil in a (preferably nonstick) large skillet (with a lid!), and sauté the chorizo, onion, garlic, and chicken over high heat until lightly browned. Add all of the rest of the ingredients except the salt and pepper and the parsley, cover, and reduce heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are done, about 1/2 hour. Season to taste, and sprinkle with fresh parsley if desired.

The prep time is very quick, and then you can pretty much ignore it while you relax and have a glass of wine.

This is a hearty and delicious fall/winter meal. Serves 4-6, depending on portion size and how many vegetables you use. As listed above, with chickpeas and mushrooms, 4 very generous servings.

A note on legumes: the carb content of this dish is almost entirely determined by the choice of legume. You could leave out the legume entirely, and it would be lower carb, but I think that they really add something... so I've tried to just cut the proportion way back. I make this usually with chickpeas, but lima beans are really good, and an alternative might be just a few green peas. (Suggestions welcome!)

A note for the low-fat crowd: We don't pay much attention to fat proportions these days, but I first made this dish when I counted calories, not carbs. If you go very easy on the oil and use about half the chorizo, diced very small, this is a pretty low fat dish as well.

Oh, and if you like your food very spicy-hot, a dash of chili oil is excellent in this (I add this to my bowl, at the end, so that the rest of my family doesn't gasp and run for the water!).

Adding Insult to Injury....

2008-12-05T09:53:00.002-05:00

First, a thank you to everyone who commented on my last post... I am having a hard time not feeling unbelievably isolated, so it really helps.

Anyway, in today's update on what's becoming World's Most Dismal Blog... Michael went for this sleep study on Wednesday night. I had called ahead and talked to the scheduler for quite some time about whether he would be ok there... and I'd really thought that this would probably be all right. Which goes to show you just how incredibly wrong you can be. First, the rooms were not set up to be comfortable for anyone, much less someone with mobility issues. No comfortable chair. Nothing you could grab onto. A bed with no headboard and a flimsy frame. And, ok, I know that the idea here is that you go and SLEEP, not that you are in a hotel room, but... first you have to hang around for about two hours before you can sleep, and so it's kind of necessary to be at least a little comfortable. Then, after he was all hooked up and went to bed, the technician came in about every ten minutes because he couldn't get the electrodes working properly. This was pretty much like the hospital experience with the beeping monitor... how can you do a sleep study if the subject doesn't actually get to sleep?

By about 1 or so, he was annoyed as hell, and needed the bathroom, so he sat up and called the technician to unhook him... and then I'm not sure what really happened. I suspect that the frame of the flimsy mattress gave way, but I never saw this, so I have no idea. Next thing he knows, he's on the floor... and he can't get up. It's been a long time since it's been easy for him to get up off the floor, but it's always been possible. However, he's been so incredibly weak lately PLUS he has this 30+ pounds of abdominal edema that's making it hard to move PLUS there was nothing stable to balance on... Anyway, he couldn't get up. He asks the tech people to call the paramedics. They are too concerned about their electrodes to do this. They spend half an hour taking things off him, while he sits on his knees before they will call an ambulance. Eventually the ambulance shows up, can't get him up (I suspect that he had no feeling in his legs at all at this point) and take him to the emergency room... back where we were a few days ago. Eventually he phones me... it's now about 4 a.m.... and I come pick him up.

His knees are beyond painful. And he's shaken up to hell. And angry and discouraged. It's hard to blame him.

And I am trying to figure out what I need to do to take care of both of us. I know that things will get better. But it is a little difficult not to get unbelievably discouraged, especially since he is so clearly miserable. I know that I have to try to take care of myself... but how do you do that when the person you love is so unhappy and so uncomfortable?

Free At Last

2008-12-02T08:16:00.002-05:00

Yay, as of 7:30 last night, we have been sprung from the hospital. There is just nothing like 4 days in the hospital to make you appreciate the joys of being home. On top of everything else, by the end, we were so seriously sleep-deprived that it was like some bizarre form of torture... more about that later.

And the end result of all of it... kind of nothing, weirdly enough. Why is Michael severely anemic? No idea. Nothing showed up on any test (no matter how invasive!). Why has he has this whole collection of weird symptoms? No idea. What are we doing next? Well, not much idea about that, either.

He goes for a sleep study on Wednesday night, poor baby... I really wanted to reschedule this, but the doctor convinced us (probably correctly) that it's best to do a sleep study when you're really tired anyway. The last night of hell in the hospital, they hooked him to a CPAP machine (keeps your airways open if you have sleep apnea) but also to a monitor with an alarm that goes off if your oxygen levels drop. Well, every time he really fell asleep, his oxygen levels dropped... and so the alarm kept going off about every 15 minutes, all night. Finally at 5 a.m., we insisted that they take it away and got a whole two hours of sleep before some relentlessly perky nurse woke us up a 7 for absolutely no reason that I could tell (not checking vital signs or anything else, just randomly came in to wake us up?). I have rarely so completely just wanted to swat someone. Anyway, so possibly the sleep study will correctly diagnose his degree of sleep apnea and resolve this, and that might help the heart rate issues.

And we're going to try to get life back together. And get him well. More about that later.

Hey.... if you're following along with this, and you want to do a good deed today, leave me a comment. Just a "I hear you." This has been a very long and grueling thing, this whole autumn and the steady progression of these physical things getting worse for Michael, and I feel pretty alone with all this. So... it would make me feel a little better to know that you were out there.

Update and Confessions and a Hospital Food Rant...

2008-11-29T20:12:00.002-05:00

So, Friday morning the doctor phones, and he says (to Michael), I want you to go to the emergency room NOW and check in to the hospital, because with these blood tests plus breathing problems, I'm worried that you're getting blood clots. So we do. And that's where we've been ever since. It's been a wild ride.

And what's happened, really? Not, in a way, very much. There have been a lot of tests. They have all come back negative. Michael's heart rate has been really high, and they've been trying to get it down. They gave him three units of blood to try to deal with the anemia. And he has been sleep-deprived, and uncomfortable as hell, and earlier today, he was hell-bent on checking himself out. Which, to make a really long story short, he didn't do... but in the process, he managed to really make everyone furious with him, some of which is fair, and some of which is not. I went home and slept for a few hours last night, but tonight, I'm staying with him... I think that will make it easier... and so I'm expecting a rocky night.

The trouble is, he's a terrible patient. Just the worst. He hates sitting and waiting. He hates being hooked to monitors. He hates taking medication. And it's not like any of us are crazy about it, of course... but some people have a little more grin-and-bear-it tolerance. Plus he takes it all personally. Really personally, in a way that I can't relate to at all. I mostly figure that hospital staff are trying hard to do their jobs, jobs that are really not easy, and that basically it's mostly not about me. The peak of it all... well, peak number 1... was them trying to give him a new heart medication without discussion about it beforehand. I think that it if it had been the other way around... if the very nice doctor had explained it first... it might have all played out differently. But as it was, he was through the ceiling furious, refused to take it... and everything went downhill from there. He insisted on leaving. The doctor said no. He said yes. And this went on and on, with and without other people.

Eventually, the physician's assistant came in and told him his options, and said some things that actually made sense, and went off to check him out with or without the doctor's consent.... or, rather, to see if he could get the doctor's consent. And then we waited. Which gave Michael time to cool off. And when the PA came back, with all the discharge paperwork done, Michael was ready to change his mind and stay. So I went out and talked to the PA... who, unbelievably, was rude as hell, made it clear that he'd gone to all this effort, and that he was not happy, and that he wasn't going to do anything to faciliate rescheduling any of the things that had been cancelled. And was just totally obnoxious about it. Kept saying, "I'm not willing to do any of these things because he keeps changing his mind. I have done everything that I can do." I said, "You have not done everything that you CAN do; you have done everything that you are WILLING to do." And he said I was wrong, and reiterated the same thing again.

I am a pretty reasonable person. I understand that patient noncompliance is really a problem. I understand that this kind of thing creates tons of problems for all of the staff. I really do. I am not unsympathetic about this at all. But Michael only changed his mind because of what this guy said... and then he is an absolute total jerk about the whole thing. I am angry. Still. And hopefully I will stay angry for long enough to write the letter of complaint that I fully intend to write.

Anyway. Here we are, as I said. Still on one heart med. With three units of blood that appear to have done no real good. And hopefully scheduled for a colonoscopy on Monday, oh joy. At least, that's the notion behind staying here, to get that done rather than waiting until January as scheduled.

So here is my confession: last night, I was both so hungry and so upset that I stopped on the way home and bought a loaf of forbidden wheat bread plus some cheese and some chocolate, and ate most of it. No, clearly I'm not done with emotional eating. You think you've gotten past that particular bad habit... and things get bad enough, and it all comes right back to bite you.

And here is my hospital food rant. The food here is atrocious... but that's not the issue. When we were in the emergency room, I asked the doctor if I could go out and get us some food. She said, sure, but it has to be diabetic-appropriate. Then the nurse offered us the box lunch from the hospital cafeteria. Contents... two slices of turkey on a HUGE white roll. A container of peaches in syrup. A container of apple juice. And a sugar cookie. WHAT exactly in this meal is diabetic-appropriate? (Answer: the turkey, which was also salty as hell.) Every single meal in this hospital has been just like that. French toast. Turkey and gravy on white bread. Mounds of stuffing. Pudding. Sweetened juice. Absolutely unreal. At least now he's on clear liquids, in preparation for the scoping, so food ceases to be an issue, for him anyway.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T13:31:00.002-05:00

Some years, it's harder to give thanks than others.

I'm having a hard time.

It's the first Thanksgiving since my mother died. A little over four months, and it's as raw as ever. My father is really not well. I am absolutely swamped with work, and I see no end in sight. And worst of all, Michael is only getting sicker, and no one seems to really know what the problem is. His anemia continues to be severe, his blood tests show all sorts of unexplained things, his breathing is so bad that we now have an oxygen concentrator, his heart rate is about twice normal... in a good moment... and he's exhausted and confused a lot of the time. Right now, he's gone back to bed, to sleep. Hooked to the oxygen, in a way that's all too reminiscent of the last few days of my mother's life. It's not the same situation, I know. But it's hard not to be scared to death. And it's hard not to feel desperately alone. Which, let's face it, I am.

I only make things worse by being frightened. I only make things worse by not taking care of myself because it's so hard to take care of me and him. And my son gets the short end of the stick, as always... he's at his father's today; I sent him there because I knew it would be a grim holiday here.

So. And now what? How do I put the pieces together? How do I see the good in all of this? How do I see the way through this and to the next thing?

I don't have the answer yet. But I will, somehow. And right now, I have a turkey to cook. Plus under all of this, there are things to be thankful for. I just have to find them. .

Food Diaries

2008-11-15T07:37:00.002-05:00

I have to say that almost at the top of my list of things that I don't want to do is start keeping a food diary again.

I did, for a very long time. I did it obsessively for a year and a half right after Michael and I got married, before we were eating low carb. I have to say that one of the extreme pleasures of low carb for me was that I felt like I could stop keeping a food diary, after I got the hang of it. And it just made everything better, in two ways.

First, it always takes me a lot of time. I eat almost no prepared foods, so all the components of every recipe have to go in there somewhere, and it can take ages if its something complicated. I can get around that with recipes that I prepare often... but that's not a lot of things. So it forces me to spend a lot of time and get obsessive about measuring and, all in all, put a lot of much-needed brain cells into an activity that doesn't thrill me. And I hate all the software, too, to varying degrees.

Secondly... although I suppose that it doesn't really have to be this way... it causes a lot of marital friction, or at least it did when it was "our" food diary and not "my" food diary, because I had to keep careful track of what Michael ate, and I am not that great about keeping my mouth shut about things that I think he shouldn't eat. Which is a whole different post, I think, the different ways that people relate to food. And I don't want to go down that road again; we have entirely enough stress going on already.

But let's face it. I am not losing weight at any great speed. Or, really, at all. Just bouncing the same few pounds back and forth. And I'll regain them next week when I go to NYC with my student team, if I'm not VERY careful anyway. I'm feeling fitter since I've been doing the Wii (more about that some time in the future), even though it's been kind of intermittent, and I've been eating a better balance of food lately. And everyone who's commented is right, and I do eat too much salt, and so on... and I know that I'm stressed, etc.... but at the end of the day, I need to do something to change the current pattern. And much though I hate this idea, I think that I'm going to have to go back to a food diary, at least for a while, and make sure that my carbs AND calories are where they should be. I think that my carbs are ok, but that really, I just eat too much to actually lose weight.

And so I'm just going to have to go back to doing this, at least for a while.

Get Back on the Stupid Horse

2008-11-08T08:11:00.003-05:00

It's just a world of weight-loss angst out there. It seems like almost no one is doing well with their weight loss goals at the moment. And this time of year... in the Northeast anyway, you just want to curl up by the fire, hibernate, and add on a few layers of fat to get through the cold winter. (Ok, reality check...: we still don't have a fireplace, and it was 78 degrees in upstate NY yesterday, but this time of year makes me feel that way anyhow.)

I''m not losing weight, and I feel really lousy. Michael is not losing weight, not eating properly, and feeling really lousy. The theme here... general misery.

I don't think that this is the same problem. We used to eat pretty much all the same things all the time (yeah, Nina, get a clue... if you eat pretty much the same thing as someone who weighs nearly twice as much as you do, you are not going to lose weight). Over the last few months, we've pretty much given that up, for a whole variety of reasons but mostly because Michael's been feeling so lousy that the foods that he can tolerate are a small (and variable) subset of things that I'm willing to eat, plus some more carby things that I'm really not willing to eat much of.

My problem, on the whole is that, let's face it, I am eating too much, and I am eating too much fat, and I am occasionally just mindlessly eating things that I have no business eating. Let's take yesterday's botched eating attempts...
1. started the morning with smoked salmon and cream cheese on multigrain, high fiber crackers. These crackers are not the worst thing in the universe, but that's about 16 carbs right there, and usually I skip them. But this particular salmon was not the best, and it's really better on a cracker, so that was my "reason"... and it "needed to be eaten." Sigh. Nothing "needs to be eaten."
2. Came home for lunch. Had some cottage cheese and leftover steak that I'd made last night. This would have been kind of ok, but I ate about twice as much as I needed to. Why? No idea. The one clear idea was that I needed to have some proper lunch before I went to my student meeting... and that didn't work out at all because...
3. Went to student lunch meeting. Ate two revolting slices of pizza, quickly and like there was no tomorrow. I have no idea why I ate this. I am usually pretty good at skipping this kind of thing, but it was like a reversion to some earlier, more compulsive time.
4. Came home. Ate the rest of the leftover steak "because I won't be back for a few hours and I might be hungry."
5. Went and gave a two-hour exam (would I have starved in two hours? Very likely not.). Came back and had dinner about an hour later... pork roast and salad. Ate most of the crackly skin off the outside, which I have to say was really yummy, but nothing but a ton of fat.
6. All of the above doesn't include the cream in my coffee, and the other bits of cheese or whatever that I probably picked up as I was cooking. And a few sugar-free chocolates.

I am actually quite embarrassed to write that all down. I was not eating like this a few months ago.

I need to do some major rethinking about what and how, and probably most importantly, WHY I'm eating like this. I am eating too much fat... and, yes, you can of course eat far too much fat and far too much food, even if it's a low carb diet (actually, I did ok on carbs yesterday). There's just some point where you're eating too many calories for weight loss, and where you're providing your body with far too much easily accessible fat to make it burn the stored fat. I need to completely retool what I'm eating, because I am simply Not Getting Anywhere, and I feel just awful. Not surprising really.

Too Many Carbs, Too Many Calories?

2008-11-01T07:46:00.005-04:00

I am not losing weight. Actually, I'm gaining weight. I am about 3 lbs. higher than I started the week. And I can't for the life of me figure out why or if I should be doing anything other than noticing that it's weird and moving on. The strange thing is that this weight gain has coincided with the last three days, which have been different only in that I've been doing the Wii Fit program.

I have a feeling that I should just be ignoring this and letting it sort itself out, but really... I mean, I've been paying NO attention to what I've been eating for months. And eating far too much, though still low carb. And my weight pretty much hasn't changed. I start getting my head together to really pay attention to this again, and what happens? Not only can't I lose weight, but I'm gaining. Arrrgh. I am just really annoyed.

Yesterday I ate... cottage cheese and some cold fish for breakfast, eggs and smoked salmon for lunch, a Starbucks latte, swordfish and broccoli and a few carrots for dinner. 2 glasses of wine. Tea with milk. Oh, and some Jarlesburg cheese that I was nibbling on, and 2 Russell Stover sugar-free chocolates. Carb sources... the carrots, the milk, mainly.

I just don't know. My short term plan? Nothing in particular, I guess. My important student competition is Monday, and there is just too much to do to spend a lot of time focusing on this, unfortunately. Keep up the Wii, and try to not get totally stressed by this because I have way too much other stuff to be stressed about at the moment. But I am really puzzled and annoyed.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

2008-10-30T12:07:00.002-04:00

So, I need to get more exercise. Lots and lots and lots. And I'm really having a problem with this. One part is a time thing... this is my seriously insanely busy part of the year... but that's a short-term issue. The biggest problem is that the kind of exercise that works best for me is a little difficult for me to be doing right now. I just don't exercise well at home. I know, if I were a better person, I would buy a treadmill or something, and I would do the billion exercise DVDs that I own. But I'm not. A treadmill would become an expensive clothes rack, and the DVDs are just getting dusty. I am terrible at self-motivated exercise. Put me in the gym, and I'm happy as a clam, because I'm there to work out, and I don't get distracted. Put me on a racquetball court, and I'm really, really happy. Leave me at home with a DVD, and I'll sit on the couch curled up with a book. I know, no self discipline. I should be able to do something that bores me out of my skull and makes me miserable for a lousy half hour a day, right?

I can't go to the gym right now, and I'm having a hard time fitting in racquetball. And it sounds like an excuse, but it's all about Michael. He can't do these things, not yet. And every time I leave the house, it's a slap in the face for him... it reminds him that he still can't drive, that he still can't walk really, that he is stuck in the house and I am flitting around like a butterfly (ha!). He doesn't say this, but I see it very clearly. And so he says, go to the gym, but I can't. Not yet. Not until he can come with me. Work is not negotiable, but this kind of thing is.

So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. Can't do the exercise I want, too... lazy or unmotivated or intolerant of boredom or whatever... to just DO the things that I could do at home. So this week, in a "let's do something even if it's stupid" move, I bought a Wii Fit balance board. We had a Wii anyway (also gathering dust, I might add), so it wasn't a huge investment. And I've done this the last couple of days, and I have to report that this thing is really kind of fun.

So, here is a report based only on a couple of days of use.

Pros:
1. This is the big one for me. It's interactive. Every exercise requires some kind of paying attention... focusing on where your balance is, that kind of thing. So you have to pay attention, and there's something that gives you some kind of feedback on whether you're doing well or not. Those DVD fitness instructors never notice if you sit down and drink tea instead of following along! I really like this part, and I suspect that this is what might make this work for me.
2. There are "rewards." Do a certain amount of whatever, and you unlock new games/exercises. I like rewards.
3. If you are way out of shape, like me, even the fairly simple exercises really are a workout of sorts. I am sore. A little anyway.
4. There are a variety of things to do, and some of them are pretty fun. The basic step thing is fun. The balance games would probably be fun if I had any sense of balance. And there are four different areas... balance games, yoga, strength training, and aerobics. Some of these would clearly not be very challenging if you were already in great shape, but just about everyone needs to work on balance.

Cons:
1. What I said above about difficulty level. But I'm a long way from there.
2. Response time is pretty good, but there are a lot of screens you have to flip through. Makes it take about 25 minutes to do 14 minutes of actual workout time. Haven't found a good way to streamline this yet, if there is one.
3. I get the impression from other reviewers that there isn't really a great workout disc for the Wii Fit yet. Like all startup Wii programs (like Wii Sports, for example), there's a lot of good stuff here but some clear limits. As far a I know, the only other disc for this is by Jillian Michaels, and it does not seem to be getting good reviews, in part due to poor response time.

All in all... definitely worth it at the moment. Let's see where I'm at with it in a few weeks.

Discouraging days

2008-10-22T17:05:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I try to think about what the theme of this blog is, and I mostly think it's about trying like hell to get yourself healthy again all odds and in the face of a lot of really discouraging life stuff. It is hard, like my little Sisyphus gif to the left, not to let yourself get worn down by this stuff. Really hard. And the trouble is that health is not about one huge burst of effort; it's about day to day to day to day small incremental choices. It takes a lot of effort to make the right choices again and again, especially when it's hard to see that they're getting you anywhere. Sometimes you just want to quit and go get a pizza. Sometimes you do quit and go get a pizza. But the trouble is that you just have to get back on the horse, every time, because at the end of the day, there aren't any other choices.

It has just been hard here lately. I don't say this in the rest of my life because... well, I don't know. Because there's no one to say it to, I guess. Because I don't feel comfortable saying, I can't shake this ocean of sadness. Because I don't feel comfortable saying, life, at the moment, is hard.

Michael is losing weight, which in the grand scheme of things is great, but it's slow (although actually pretty fast by any reasonable standard). But it hasn't made much of a difference to his physical problems, not yet. And he is so discouraged because he's really no closer to being able to walk without terrible pain and feeling unstable all the time. This has only been aggravated by the rounds of doctors that we've been seeing lately... the regular guy (conclusion: Michael's iron count is really low, take some iron, see some more doctors), the lung guy (conclusion: everything is ok; it's just hard to breathe when you're fat), and the two doctors we see on Friday. He's tired of being poked, and the walking and getting up and down and up and down doesn't help his knee. He's just so low, and it kills me to see him like this... plus it doesn't help how I feel, either. I really realized this last week when he started taking iron and suddenly, wow, he was a little like his old self again. And I felt light; I felt like maybe I could cope with everything.

This week hasn't been like that.

There's no conclusion here, nothing upbeat at the end. This all will pass. I hope.