" I'm not going to look in the mirror and get disappointed that I don't look the way I want to now. It will come. But it will take a while. And you know...that's ok. I'm changing. When the changes come and are visible...then great, but it's ok if I don't see them yet. I just know that everyday I'm going to make better decisions." from a post on SparkPeople message boards.
I want to get into the groove of the above poster. I want to not be so frustrated and disappointed in myself because I still have a belly. I want to be able to eat one serving of food and be satisfied.
But let me state that this can, and will happen, its just a matter of time and a battle of wills with my passionate self.
I'm a sensualist, in that I love tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing and seeing beautiful things, and even ordinary things. I find joy in the sound of the creek in our backyard, the smell of fresh concrete and the sound of children laughing. I adore the feel of velvet and satin, combed cotton or fluffy chenile against my skin.
And I love the taste of food.
I have no problem eating healthy, mainly because I grew up eating healthy foods that my mother prepared. She also managed to bake a number of great treats in her kitchen, and I indulged my sweet tooth often, because the steroids I had to take for asthma left me with no feeling of satiety. I was always hungry, didn't matter if I'd just had dinner or not. But I did eat something from the four food groups at every meal, and I learned to love the flavors of fresh food. We got all our meat from my grandparents farms, so I also grew up with real Angus beef that wasn't fed any hormones or antibiotics. Yet I wasn't very fond of beef, and for the most part I ate small amounts because I wasn't all that fond of the taste of steak (though I always loved roasts and stews). We always had a truck patch in our backyard, and grew a lot of our own veggies, as did our neighbors, so we'd swap pounds of tomatoes for pounds of pole beans and cucumbers for beets or muskmelon (anyone outside of Iowa calls them cantaloupes). Since moving to Seattle, a whole world of seafood tastes have opened up to me, and I've come to adore sushi and salmon, tilapia and tuna.
My problem with eating good food has been that I love it too much...I eat more than one serving of blueberries, more than one serving of fish, more than two servings of broccoli.
Now that I'm in boot camp, Janice is having none of this excess portions, and came to my home yesterday to show me how much I can eat.
She showed me that in making a cup of my pinhead or steel cut oatmeal, and then eating the resultant several cups, I am eating somewhere around 8 servings of food, which isn't a good idea calorie wise or belly-wise. She grabbed a small plate from my cupboard and showed me that I could eat a fist-sized serving of each food, protein, carb, veg/fruit, for each meal, but that was all. No seconds or thirds of pasta, no 3 cups of salad.
I am going to have to get used to not being so enamored of my taste buds that I keep eating until I am full. I will have to be a bit hungry until my stomach shrinks up, something I am not looking forward to at all. The sensualist who is passionate about beautiful food and all the other senses is going to have to tone it down when it comes to my lust for taste.
Ah passion, its such a double-edged sword, especially for someone with an Italian heart.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Discouraged about Veg
I've enrolled in Janice's very tough 4 week boot camp, mainly because she's been kind enough to give me a free ride, (because I'd written a story about her bodybuilding journey) and because Carol says that I have graduated from the easier 6 week boot camp and I'm ready for a good pounding from Janice.
The first week started out on the wrong foot, when I ate a cup of Kalamata olives the Sunday night before and bloated up with 6 extra pounds of water weight. I was astonished at the number on the scale, but was being processed so quickly that I didn't say anything to Janice about it. Then I noticed that there were 8 or more men in the group, and that many of the women were hardbodies who didn't look like they really needed any kind of fitness challenge. I was only able to jog and walk in intervals for a mile, and my time was a wince-inducing 18 minutes. Almost everyone else did the mile in 9-14 minutes.
Then Janice made it clear that she's not Carol by having us do tons of push ups for even small infractions, such as being late or, as one guy in the class found out, eating pancakes for breakfast on a Sunday with his wife. He had to do 140 push ups, poor guy, and Janice refused to allow us to break up the push ups into smaller increments and do them over several sessions. I got 40 extra push ups for eating two mini-Luna bars and then, the next day when I only ate 1, she gave me 60 push ups because she said I should have known better than to eat one again. ARG!
But despite that one set back, I thought that I was doing okay, until Janice drove me home Friday after boot camp class (it was too hot to be outdoors) and told me, after I related what I was eating, that I can't have more than one cup of lettuce salad or steamed broccoli. I generally have two cups of salad with a can of tuna mixed with hummus atop it, and I love broccoli so I tend to eat at least a couple of cups of it. "You can't be full," Janice told me. "You can eat until you are satisfied, but not until you are full." When I tried to explain to her that those are the same things to me, she said that they aren't the same at all. Apparently I am supposed to still be hungry all the time, I am assuming so that my stomach will shrink in capacity.
When I was in my 20s, I didn't mind going hungry, and in fact I got used to it after awhile. But now, 20 years later, I don't feel the same about being hungry. I don't really know if its worth it to me to starve myself again, just to lose a few pounds.
I also struggle like crazy in boot camp. I am nearly always the last in line, and it takes me more time to get through the exercises than it does anyone else. Plus, in last nights boot camp at Cedar River Park, we did an obstacle course that involved a lot of jumping and leaping, which is really hard on my left knee (which tends to hurt and give out on me) and by the time we had finished an hour of it, I was so wiped out I felt like I was going to keel over.
I find myself being discouraged, exhausted and questioning whether or not I should stay in this boot camp, or quit and just keep going with my regular WIO schedule of classes 5-6 times a week.
I do have a goal, and that 65 pounds is bound to come off of me at some point, but I just don't know if I can gut this out. The stress is terrible, there is only one person in the boot camp whom I can relate to, and she doesn't come to the camp but twice or three times a week, and not always on the same nights that I do. Everyone else in the camp seems to be keeping their distance from the lone fat gal, and when I tried to make a joke last night about my boobs jiggling too much, no one even bothered to laugh or act like they'd heard me. I felt invisible. And that's another problem, I can't seem to find a decent sports bra that allows me to do all this jumping around without having my big breasts flap and flop all over the place, which is embarrassing.
So I feel fat and stupid and like I have failed, and I am only 1 week and 1 day into boot camp.
What should I do?
The first week started out on the wrong foot, when I ate a cup of Kalamata olives the Sunday night before and bloated up with 6 extra pounds of water weight. I was astonished at the number on the scale, but was being processed so quickly that I didn't say anything to Janice about it. Then I noticed that there were 8 or more men in the group, and that many of the women were hardbodies who didn't look like they really needed any kind of fitness challenge. I was only able to jog and walk in intervals for a mile, and my time was a wince-inducing 18 minutes. Almost everyone else did the mile in 9-14 minutes.
Then Janice made it clear that she's not Carol by having us do tons of push ups for even small infractions, such as being late or, as one guy in the class found out, eating pancakes for breakfast on a Sunday with his wife. He had to do 140 push ups, poor guy, and Janice refused to allow us to break up the push ups into smaller increments and do them over several sessions. I got 40 extra push ups for eating two mini-Luna bars and then, the next day when I only ate 1, she gave me 60 push ups because she said I should have known better than to eat one again. ARG!
But despite that one set back, I thought that I was doing okay, until Janice drove me home Friday after boot camp class (it was too hot to be outdoors) and told me, after I related what I was eating, that I can't have more than one cup of lettuce salad or steamed broccoli. I generally have two cups of salad with a can of tuna mixed with hummus atop it, and I love broccoli so I tend to eat at least a couple of cups of it. "You can't be full," Janice told me. "You can eat until you are satisfied, but not until you are full." When I tried to explain to her that those are the same things to me, she said that they aren't the same at all. Apparently I am supposed to still be hungry all the time, I am assuming so that my stomach will shrink in capacity.
When I was in my 20s, I didn't mind going hungry, and in fact I got used to it after awhile. But now, 20 years later, I don't feel the same about being hungry. I don't really know if its worth it to me to starve myself again, just to lose a few pounds.
I also struggle like crazy in boot camp. I am nearly always the last in line, and it takes me more time to get through the exercises than it does anyone else. Plus, in last nights boot camp at Cedar River Park, we did an obstacle course that involved a lot of jumping and leaping, which is really hard on my left knee (which tends to hurt and give out on me) and by the time we had finished an hour of it, I was so wiped out I felt like I was going to keel over.
I find myself being discouraged, exhausted and questioning whether or not I should stay in this boot camp, or quit and just keep going with my regular WIO schedule of classes 5-6 times a week.
I do have a goal, and that 65 pounds is bound to come off of me at some point, but I just don't know if I can gut this out. The stress is terrible, there is only one person in the boot camp whom I can relate to, and she doesn't come to the camp but twice or three times a week, and not always on the same nights that I do. Everyone else in the camp seems to be keeping their distance from the lone fat gal, and when I tried to make a joke last night about my boobs jiggling too much, no one even bothered to laugh or act like they'd heard me. I felt invisible. And that's another problem, I can't seem to find a decent sports bra that allows me to do all this jumping around without having my big breasts flap and flop all over the place, which is embarrassing.
So I feel fat and stupid and like I have failed, and I am only 1 week and 1 day into boot camp.
What should I do?
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Baby Got Front
We listen to Sir Mix ALot's "Baby Got Back" in several of my spin classes at WIO, and two of the instructors have favorite lines they like to sing out from the song. For adorable Angela, who claims she has a "ghetto bootie" (I think her bootie looks just fine, myself) always sings "You get SPRUNG!" at the top of her lungs, while Laura, who looks like an Amazon warrior woman, all 6 foot red-haired and hour-glass shaped, sings out "My anaconda don't want none less you got some buns hon!" and does a little bike dance while she's singing it.
But one thing I've noticed lately is that there are no paens to chubby bellies--no guys grunting about how they can't wait to "get the friction on" with those of us who have Winne the Pooh abs, upholstered bellies or even a small paunch-pounch, like a kangaroo.
I think that's horribly unfair.
After all, just because my avoirdupois sticks more to my middle than my butt and thighs, why should I be considered less sexy, less gropable than my pear-shaped sisters? So I got some serious "front" instead of "back"--I still can have it goin' on, can't I?
So I've got abs of marshmallow instead of abs of steel--it doesn't mean I don't work very hard 6 hours a week to try and strengthen and tone my body during a variety of exercise classes. I grunt and groan and lift and jump and run with the rest of them, and I don't complain, I just DO it, but even though I can feel my core muscles getting strong, you can't see them because they have a layer or three of spongy fat over them.
And unlike Janice, who had three c-sections and doesn't have more than a teeny-weeny scar to show for it, I have a scar that looks like I was operated on by Freddie Kruger...it goes from one hip to the other, and up towards the doughnut hole that is my belly button. I also have a silver-dollar-sized scar from having a Jackson-Pratt drain inserted into my c-section to let blood drain off after I had Nick. So there's no chance I'm ever going to wear a bikini, even if I do lose another 65 pounds.
Still, I want to get down to 165 by next summer, and I figure most of that weight is going to have to come off of my belly and back and upper arms. I have no idea how I'm going to get the weight off, especially since I can't live without carbohydrates. High protein diets are for people with very sturdy livers and hearts. I don't have a sturdy liver, and I just know that ketosis would slay me and set my Crohns into long-term spasm mode. I am also averse to starving myself, or eating only one kind of food, or giving up on anything that tastes sweet for the rest of my life. What kind of life would that be, never eating food that tastes good?
I'm a sensual person, with a passion for tastes, smells, touches and sounds that are pleasurable. I do not want to have to shut down my sense of taste for a year so I lose any interest in food.
Hence, I am praying for a miracle, a genuine solution to come to me in the nick of time, one that will help me get this last 65 pounds off in a way that I can easily live with for the rest of my life.
It's going to happen. I can feel it.
Meanwhile, I am waiting for the universe to send me a fun workout buddy who won't mind holding me accountable and being a good friend at the same time.
There's a part of me that's been whispering that I really don't need to lose more weight. I work out, after all, and I fit into a size 18-20, which isn't outrageous, and I have a husband, so I'm not out to find a man that I need to be svelte for, obviously....he loves me just the way I am.
But I keep thinking of that high school reunion in 2009. I dream of seeing the handsome guys I had crushes on, of watching them drool over my fabulously fit body, and enjoying the revenge of seeing them as bald and pudgy old men, so I can reject them as they once did me...of course I could never treat them with as much contempt and cruelty as I was treated to for four long years at Ankeny High School, but still. And I dream of having a sultry affair with an old high school flame, of enjoying the play of athletic, toned muscles during sex. I am sure the fantasy is much richer than the reality, but it calls to me.
At any rate, I need to keep going and not take so many steps back as forward. I need to appreciate how far I've come, and allow myself to get the body I want within the next year. As the lovely Suzanne always says during the more grueling moments of Pilates class, "Yes YOU CAN!"
But one thing I've noticed lately is that there are no paens to chubby bellies--no guys grunting about how they can't wait to "get the friction on" with those of us who have Winne the Pooh abs, upholstered bellies or even a small paunch-pounch, like a kangaroo.
I think that's horribly unfair.
After all, just because my avoirdupois sticks more to my middle than my butt and thighs, why should I be considered less sexy, less gropable than my pear-shaped sisters? So I got some serious "front" instead of "back"--I still can have it goin' on, can't I?
So I've got abs of marshmallow instead of abs of steel--it doesn't mean I don't work very hard 6 hours a week to try and strengthen and tone my body during a variety of exercise classes. I grunt and groan and lift and jump and run with the rest of them, and I don't complain, I just DO it, but even though I can feel my core muscles getting strong, you can't see them because they have a layer or three of spongy fat over them.
And unlike Janice, who had three c-sections and doesn't have more than a teeny-weeny scar to show for it, I have a scar that looks like I was operated on by Freddie Kruger...it goes from one hip to the other, and up towards the doughnut hole that is my belly button. I also have a silver-dollar-sized scar from having a Jackson-Pratt drain inserted into my c-section to let blood drain off after I had Nick. So there's no chance I'm ever going to wear a bikini, even if I do lose another 65 pounds.
Still, I want to get down to 165 by next summer, and I figure most of that weight is going to have to come off of my belly and back and upper arms. I have no idea how I'm going to get the weight off, especially since I can't live without carbohydrates. High protein diets are for people with very sturdy livers and hearts. I don't have a sturdy liver, and I just know that ketosis would slay me and set my Crohns into long-term spasm mode. I am also averse to starving myself, or eating only one kind of food, or giving up on anything that tastes sweet for the rest of my life. What kind of life would that be, never eating food that tastes good?
I'm a sensual person, with a passion for tastes, smells, touches and sounds that are pleasurable. I do not want to have to shut down my sense of taste for a year so I lose any interest in food.
Hence, I am praying for a miracle, a genuine solution to come to me in the nick of time, one that will help me get this last 65 pounds off in a way that I can easily live with for the rest of my life.
It's going to happen. I can feel it.
Meanwhile, I am waiting for the universe to send me a fun workout buddy who won't mind holding me accountable and being a good friend at the same time.
There's a part of me that's been whispering that I really don't need to lose more weight. I work out, after all, and I fit into a size 18-20, which isn't outrageous, and I have a husband, so I'm not out to find a man that I need to be svelte for, obviously....he loves me just the way I am.
But I keep thinking of that high school reunion in 2009. I dream of seeing the handsome guys I had crushes on, of watching them drool over my fabulously fit body, and enjoying the revenge of seeing them as bald and pudgy old men, so I can reject them as they once did me...of course I could never treat them with as much contempt and cruelty as I was treated to for four long years at Ankeny High School, but still. And I dream of having a sultry affair with an old high school flame, of enjoying the play of athletic, toned muscles during sex. I am sure the fantasy is much richer than the reality, but it calls to me.
At any rate, I need to keep going and not take so many steps back as forward. I need to appreciate how far I've come, and allow myself to get the body I want within the next year. As the lovely Suzanne always says during the more grueling moments of Pilates class, "Yes YOU CAN!"
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