It's been a while, hasn't it?

Yeah... so, everything has been fine for the last month or so. After I hit my 5-pound goal, I basically decided I was cool with my body, cool with the number, and I wasn't going to try to change my weight anymore. For the first couple of weeks I bounced between 127-130. Then I got my period around the same time I had a wisdom tooth bothering me and dropped down to just under 125 in a few days, then hovered around 125-126 for somewhat over a week. I kept counting calories for a bit and figured that, eating intuitively, I take in about 1600 calories/day during the first half of my cycle and 1900 calories/day in the second half, and a 2500 or so day about a once a week - all averaging out to about 1850/day. Then I dropped the calorie counting, and pretty soon after that I dropped the exercise tracking because I know whether I'm doing enough exercise without looking a spreadsheet of it. The reasons I exercise have nothing to do with weight anymore and everything to do with mood regulation. Finally when I hit the middle of my cycle, I shot up to 129 in a few days, and have dropped back to 126-128. So, I guess I lost a pound or something on average during that first month "maintaining". I'm still writing down what I eat, and weighing every day - not so much because I need to monitor it that closely, but to establish a baseline and to assess when I've "really" stabilized at a static average weight, which may take a few months.

I figure as long as my weight stays below 130 it can do whatever it wants. Past 130 I'll start paying attention, 135 I think is my definite action level, and 145 should be about my max. Of course, this could change if I actually get into some strength training and it pays off, or further in the future when I get pregnant, but for now those are the graduated ceilings I see for my weight.

Anyway, I'm actually thinking of quitting this blog. Nobody's reading it, I'm doing fine, and it's been suggested I create a web-based presentation of my weight loss process, but I don't really want to just open this anonymous blog to all the people who know me. So I'm going to take the data, re-work it up, and start a new blog that will actually be associated with me and have readers. 

Adios, amigos!

Goal

At 128.8 yesterday and 127.6 today (yeah, I dunno either) I have met my goal of losing 5 pounds from the 133 range. At this point I can really say I'm totally satisfied with the number on the scale and the shape of my body. Or at least, I'm torn between thinking I could lose a few more pounds from my stomach and I ought to put a little back on my ribs. I've been eating cookies.

I want to do more strength training, and more yoga (I've hardly done any since the end of the academic year). I went and got some pants today that are long so I can wear them at work (a chemistry lab) but are flexible enough I can do yoga on my lunch break without changing clothes. Gotta find some way to motivate myself to do strength-building calisthenics, like pushups and bicycle/leglifts, on a regular basis. Also, with my full-time work, and some extra stuff I'm doing related to my work last summer, my running frequency isn't great and when I do run I feel I'm squeezing it in. I'm thinking of maybe setting my standard at fewer times a week but trying to do really good quality workouts that have a full spectrum of exercise types - a run and yoga-stretches and calisthenics.

On that note, it was nice this morning to go for a run just because I thought it would feel good, and without caring at all about how many calories it would burn. With my experience intuitive-eating in the last week or so, I'm pretty confident that the amount of exercise I need to stay mentally sane is at least as much as I need to maintain my weight given how much my body tells me to eat. What my mind nags me to eat can sometimes be another story, but there you go with the mental sanity, and also, it's much less of an issue due to my work right now, where I get very absorbed in what I'm doing and have to specifically change location from lab to office in order to eat.

129.8

A moment of appreciation for my first-ever-since-sixth-grade weight in the 120s.

Drinking ice water really does burn calories

We've all heard that line, but to me, at least, it always seemed like the scale must be so small it couldn't possibly be perceptible. Then I was reading a description of the phenomenon today that said if you drank all your water ice-cold, it could be equivalent to adding a workout a week.


So I got interested, and calculated it.


It's actually fairly easy to calculate. The specific heat of water is 1 calorie per gram per degree Celsius (little calorie, not food kcal), and its density is 1 gram per milliliter. (A lot of things are defined in reference to water.) If you drink ice-cold water, it is at 0 degrees Celsius, and the temperature your water is probably usually at is around 20 degrees Celsius.


What this means is that to warm up water from 0 degrees Celsius to 20 degrees, you have to put in 20 little calories for every milliliter of water you have. When it goes into your body, it actually has to warm up further to around 37 degrees, but your body is already doing that when you drink room temp water, although that also means if you just drink more room temperature water in a day it will burn more calories too. Anyway, if you drink 2 liters of iced water a day, that's 2000 x 20 little calories = 40,000 little calories = 40 kcals, or food calories. 40 calories a day! In a week, that's 280 calories - a light workout, an extra pound every 3 months or so. Not so negligible.


What's neat about this too is that this is non-negotiable calorie burn. It's just heat transfer. It's not something your body can do more efficiently, or kind of do a crap job on to save energy. By the laws of thermodynamics the water will suck heat out of your body, and your body can either compensate or tolerate hypothermia. Granted, anorexics who try to practice this trick probably will reap more hypothermia than calorie burn from it, but for the rest of us, I doubt our bodies are desperate enough to refuse to heat up ice water. Cheers!

Intuitive eating

I did an experiment today. I practiced intuitive eating and deliberately shut off all my quantifying and arranging mechanisms until nighttime. I refused to tally up calories in my head until I was done eating for the day. I refused to plan my food more than was necessary for practical purposes (i.e. lunch and snacks to bring to work tomorrow). I dismissed thoughts of what I could eat later in the day with "that's nice, but I'll see if it's what I want when I actually get hungry." I wrote down what I had eaten so far in the day if I was at my computer, but didn't spend much time looking at the pattern, and didn't let myself interrupt other activities to do so. Let me tell you, this food and weight-loss thing has become a great procrastination technique for me. Just plan what to eat for breakfast tomorrow, or all week, read about the USDA's new dietary recommendations and what counts as an ounce of grains and make up a day's menu that has just so many servings of each thing, think of hypothetical ways to arrange calories in the week and lose at X rate... and avoid working on that presentation I don't really want to give. Because I know "listen to your body" isn't quite THAT simple, I asked myself "am I thirsty, bored, stiff, or want a distraction?" before deciding to eat. I drank a LOT of water today because it was hot, and I also went for a run, a short 2.3-mile jaunt. Oh, and I made sure to have a treat. That's right, not just allowed, but actively attended to having a treat. I will have a treat every day until the idea gets old and I don't feel like one. Today it was a piece of lemon poppyseed cake, and some other time it could be chocolate, ice cream, a cocktail, a cookie, whatever I want that day.

The results:

Sunday 6/5

Grits with a fried egg, 1/2 orange and 1/2 banana (330)

Apple (100)

1/2 Tofurky sausage rolled in a slice of bread (210)

Lemon poppyseed cake with coffee (maybe 400)

Celery sticks and cream cheese herb dip (100)

Salt and peppered boiled potato (100)
Raspberry-redwine sorbet (50)

Ginger candy (10)

Rice and beans with tomatoes, onions, and a dollop of cream cheese (330)

Iced tea (35)

Est. 1665

I'm pretty pleased with that.

You're too skinny, eat a cookie!

So my mom just came over to drop off a gadget for me, and she said that after I let my stepdad practice a new form of massage on me recently, he told her I shouldn't lose any more weight. Ain't that a compliment! The word "skinny" came up in the discussion too, and I dunno. I probably will never be describable as skinny by my own definitions - even though I'm reasonably thin, the flesh distributes around my bones in curvy, round shapes. It might just be a loose skin issue, but my belly is also still quite squishy. I pretty much figured 10 pounds either direction from here is probably fine for me, though of course, I don't really feel like gaining back 10 pounds. My boyfriend doesn't seem concerned about my weight being too low, but then again, he is the 120 pound dude with 8 percent body fat, and his ex-girlfriend had a BMI of 40 before getting bariatric surgery, so maybe he doesn't know shit about healthy weights for average-sized people.

Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead with this 5 pounds (2-3 left), but once I'm in the high 120s, I may decide to go ahead and stop purposefully losing weight, get my intuitive eating on, and address any body image issues I've developed. If I'm really honest with myself, it's a little concerning the way my body image has developed over the course of this process. I was the least concerned with my body around the end of high school/beginning of college, when I weighed between 150-165. I hardly ever thought about it and I wasn't dismayed at mirrors (as would happen when my weight crept into the 170s), and that was when I weighed 20-35 pounds more than I do now. I'm fairly sure if I showed my current body to myself back then, let alone a year ago, I would've said "hot stuff, I'd love to look like that". But now I look at my squishy, foldy belly and wonder if losing 5 more pounds would improve it, or if there's some cream I could use to tighten up the skin.

I have to admit two rather silly contributions to this. One is that I feel like I had a kid body and now I have a womanly body, but I never got the chance to have a girl's body - a body that is sexually differentiated in shape, but still lithe and narrow. During the phase when that would have happened I just looked kind of awkwardly stocky. I know the window for that girl body is past, but in some ways I still want to approach it, get a little more streamlined, etc. The other thing is I kind of wish I could weigh less than my boyfriend. I know this is really tall order in my particular case, but women usually weigh less than men, and I've been heavier than every guy I've ever dated or slept with, except for one who was morbidly obese and one who was 6'3". On the other hand, my boyfriend can pick me up and carry me easily because he's tiny, dense ball of muscle, which is what I used to say was the reason for wanting to be lighter specifically relative to men. And now that I'm thinking of it, my mom. My mom weighed about 120 in her 20s, and she's an inch taller than me. She also (as she often points out) has a smaller bust, but not that much smaller, and altogether I really don't see why 120 shouldn't be a good weight for me too.

But you know, you absorb what you expose yourself to a lot of, and I've been reading stuff about weight loss lately, a lot of which is saturated with explicit or implicit body image messages that aren't very affirming. So I just Googled body acceptance, and found some perhaps more appropriate reading material...

Two food mantras with nearly identical cadence:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - Michael Pollan
"Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want." - Michelle of The Fat Nutritionist

Body Image Meditation:
I am distally thinner, and proximally fatter. My shoulder bones, clavicle, and jawline are prominent, and my wrists and hands are markedly slight. My hands and feet have veins that swell and become highly visible after exercise, especially the big ones on the backs of my hands as I reach down to tie my shoes. My upper arms are shapely with some definition, but soft, as are my thighs, and my calves are substantial in size but all muscle. My bum and breasts are largely fatty, as is usually the case for women, with a little bit of sag because of previously being heavier. My belly is my squishiest part, though there's muscle not far underneath, with folds that still fall in the shape of where I used to have rolls, though they are smaller and stretch flat when I lay on my back. I have a smallish bone structure, like my mom's side of the family, but the way my flesh is shaped around it is more like my aunt and female cousins on my dad's side. I'm moderately bottom-heavy with a narrow waist, and bust size and shoulder width averaged large on one side with small on the other to give medium-small on both counts.

That's enough for now, I think.

One year (well, almost)

It's been a year. Okay, it's been 52 weeks. Okay, it's been 13 4-week periods since the nearest Saturday before I started counting calories and weighing, which means my June-to-June weight graph is full, which is I why I chose today.

And lucky of luckies, I have a new low today: 130.2

Here is the the weight graph. I'm pretty proud of both the graph and its contents (click to see a more readable version):