Happy Pre-Halloween!!
Yes, I am the girl who dresses up for Halloween at work – even if nobody else does, even if it’s the Friday before Halloween when Halloween falls on a weekend.
I can’t help it – I love dressing up!! How often can you wear a scarf as a belt, and a scarf as a headband, and a hat, and a ruffly shirt, and still look good.
I don’t know if I love or hate stretch jeans. It isn’t anywhere in the middle. I am definitely not ambivalent towards stretch jeans. On the one hand they tend to look really good because of the way they cling and lift the right places. On the other hand they feel like they don’t fit because the first time I put them on they haven’t had a chance to stretch yet and so are really hard to button.
In other news, right now, this moment I’m wearing the smallest jeans I have ever owned as an adult. I dressed up as a pirate to go to the office today because Halloween is on a weekend and I wanted to dress up at work sooooooo … yeah. Nobody at work is surprised at all that I dressed up. Nobody else dressed up. Of course, there is only one other person in the office today. (Posting on my break). I left my phone/camera at home today but Shondar is stopping by to get some measurements for my real Halloween costume which isn’t exactly finished yet and she’s bringing my phone so I’ll post a picture then.
This article is really thought provoking. Right now I really want a piece of Lindt Intense sea salt and I’m going to go get some in a moment (obviously, see yesterday’s post) but this article made me stop and think. Junk food is supposedly as addictive as heroin. That is pretty intense. Also probably an overstatement, but junk food has an obvious proponent — which would make it really hard to get over — that Heroin doesn’t: You need to eat.
The third hardest thing I have done in my life is give up high fructose corn syrup. (I’m big on lists. 1. My father’s death. 2. Going without picking for 21 days. 3. Giving up HFCS. 4. Graduating college.) Though in the modern world it is pretty much impossible to completely give up HFCS, I don’t drink soda anymore and I very seldom eat processed food. I am planning on getting a small bag of candy corn for Halloween but before that, the last HFCS I’ve had….ages ago. Especially if you are a binge eater like me, junk food is engineered to go beyond tempting to irresistible.
On the one hand, I get why companies like Mars or Frito Lays do it, and obviously HFCS isn’t the entire issue, profits are king in a capitalist system. Not complaining, the system works for most. But, and this is a big but, I really hope that some day profits stop outweighing karma, or the golden rule, or whatever the heck you want to call the human drive to do the right thing.
When it comes down to it – large companies are intentionally addicting the population to harmful substances for profits. People think that obesity is a matter of will-power. It isn’t.
Or can I?
Deprivation diets don’t work. Say it with me: Deprivation diets don’t work. Once again: Deprivation diets don’t work. I can’t hear you: Deprivation diets don’t work.
Glad I got that out of my system.
Now I’m not advocating for you to go out and eat whatever you like and call it a diet. Oh wait, actually I am. I’m not advocating for you to go out and eat as much as you like of whatever you like. The trick, of course, is moderation. The less cliche trick is quality.
I’m serious about the quality thing. Two squares of Lindt 70 or 85 will satisfy me more than an entire bar of Hershey’s Special Dark. And then two squares of the good stuff has 110 calories, the full bar of the waxy yick stuff has 180 calories. Of course, if you were to eat the whole bar of the Lindt chocolate you’d have a problem (550 calories) but you won’t do that. Because that would be far too much chocolate.
The same thing goes for pretty much any unhealthy food I can think of. Jonesing for a burger? Get one! But don’t go to McD’s, head over to your nice little sit down place, eat half the burger and substitute salad for fries. Unless of course you want fries, in which case you order a side of fries and split it with a friend. Let the friend have most. That way you get less calories and your friend gets fatter, making you look thinner in comparison.
If you bake make cupcakes instead of a full cake and then bring them to work. You’ll be instantly popular and you won’t overindulge. Make cookies for friends or lovers. So long as it isn’t spouses because spouses tend to live with you. The idea is to indulge and then get it away from you.
Whatever your method is, I cannot stress it enough: Do not let cravings sit. They will just intensify. Satisfy your craving at first opportunity and you will eat less.
If any of you are sci-fi geeks (like me) who dug the show Firefly (like me) go on Hulu and watch the first five minutes of tonight’s Castle. Trust me.
This is the back yard at my office downtown. We finally finally finally got some snow! I woke up this morning in the winter dark but instead of black pouring in from the window, or maybe a sliver of silver moonlight, the entire sky was sulfuric orange!
Ugly I know, but a sign of one specific thing: SNOW!!!
And it’s about bloody time! We got maybe an inch today, but an inch is enough when it covers the flaws a post-fall Fairbanks. My poor little phone can’t take pictures nice enough to describe it.
One problem.
Every winter the first snow fall becomes a sort of Winter Driving 101 course, and even if you (me) happen have decent winter driving skills, there is always a good chance the people around you don’t!
I’ve never yet been in an accident but I’ve had a couple of really close calls. Once I ran out of momentum going up Ballaine hill (very steep, but very straight on the side I was going up) and ended up going into a slide. Went 180 and ended up facing straight ahead…in the wrong direction. So I went back down the hill and took the long way home.
Today was nothing so dramatic. I lost control of my car for a bit on Farmer’s loop, well, lost control is a bit strong. I was going into a slide but I didn’t change directions or fishtail or anything. Actually I’m rather proud of how I controlled losing control.
Later though there was a very near miss, could have been a multi-car pile-up. I was on the steese heading in towards town and some truck speeds ahead of me in the right lane. Not too surprised, my lane was going under the speed limit. But a few seconds later he fishtails out of control, a state truck in front of him has stopped abruptly. The car in front of me swings wide. I had to brake rapidly without sliding. Thank goodness its a busy road and was pretty clear, I was able to stop in time. But if the fast truck had hit the state truck, or the car in front of me had hit him, or heck if the guy behind me wasn’t giving me enough room……..
We get a lot of accidents.
Starting Weight: 280
Current Weight: 199.2
Total Loss: 80.8
I did it! I did it! I did it! I did it! I did it! I did it!
I cannot describe how ecstatic I am. I mean, according to pattern my weight is going to rebound a little bit and then settle down below the current low. I’m still realistic about my weight loss pattern – I’m lucky I hit bottom when I did (okay, maybe not true, I can’t guarantee I’ve hit bottom yet) because all signs point to a small increase over the next couple days and then a really gradual drop for the second half of the cycle. But none of that matters because today I am under 200 lbs.
http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-twitter-the-new-diet/
This article comees from the Frisky. I can see how tweeting every single thing you eat can add a level of accountability that a lot of people (me included) need when first making a lifestyle change. However, I do not like the concept as described “food shaming,” you should never be ashamed of what you eat. It is so hard to disassociate emotions from food but the more time passes the more I realize it is so necessary.
Verdict: Tweeting what you eat is great if you want to have real time accountability for what you eat and track your calories as such. Tweeting what you eat is horrid if you use it as a tool to feel bad about your choices as it will only lead to binging later.
Not my official weigh in day but I don’t give a damn. 200!!!!!!!!!
80 lbs lost!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Skin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
So this is all over the intarwebs in the past few days. I have to say I am really not impressed. I mean, seriously! The one thing people have to realize in order to lose weight and the one thing that our strange American culture will not admit to is this: There is no frickin’ magic bullet!!
The writer, Abby Ellin, has it exactly right when she says:
“Or, in blunter terms: Consume a substance whose ingredients and nutritional value are somewhat vague and drop weight, because how can you not when you’re only consuming 800 to 1,000 calories a day?”
The thing with losing weight is that it has to be a lifestyle change. No diet will work forever if you can’t stick to it forever. In order to lose 79.8 lbs (yes, I am at 200.2 this morning!) I have had to literally change my life. Now you don’t have to change all at once and you don’t have to change anything. In fact, deprivation diets are proven to be ineffective in the long run because once you start not allowing yourself, say, doughnuts then you will start craving doughnuts and then one day you’ll be in your office staring at a plate of doughnuts unable to walk away until you take one. Five minutes later you go back and grab two more. You have a stomach ache from all the sugar but it is so good. You can no longer resist.
That my friends is what kills diets.
So back to the absurd cookie diet. I like food. I got up to 280 lbs liking food far too much. In order to lose all this weight I cut out processed foods and learned how to cook awesome flavorful dishes without a lot of calories. I think I would have failed long ago if I had simply started eating six “cookies” a day (which I’m told by a reliable source taste like cardboard) I’d be depriving myself of so much of what makes life great: carrots and cauliflower, buffalo and brussel sprouts (yes I’m weird), funky mushrooms, whole wheat pasta, home made bread, coriander, cumin, saffron, zucchini, garlic, those amazing waxy potatoes I get from my CSA, Al Fresco chicken sausages, halibut, olive oil, lindt intense chili chocolate, my beloved winter squash and god damn it, maple frosted doughnuts!!!
I do not feel deprived. Ever. I wanted barbeque, I eventually got barbecue. I ate a reasonable serving and tossed the left overs. I eat mostly vegetables but I have chocolate every day. And when a coworker brings in doughnuts (or I am generous and actually driving that day) there is always a maple frosted doughnut, my favorite kind, which disappears under “mysterious” circumstances when I walk through the room. I always, always have a cocktail when I watch Mad Men.
I’d say that I’d probably weigh less if I eschewed the doughnuts, held up strong against the barbecue and never touched a drop of alcohol. But I’d be lying. Because if I totally cut out all the “bad” stuff when I started then eventually my will power would have eroded and I would have binged and I wouldn’t be here today writing about weight loss. Because I wouldn’t have lost that much weight.