Cardio pls

Pilates has potential, but I can't live on flexibility and strength conditioning alone. I need to reintroduce cardio. So I think next week I'll run in the morning on Monday and Wednesday, or at least Wednesday, and the week after that my Bikram package will be done and I'll start running Wed-Fri-Sun: an ordinary 2-mile-ish run just for a little cardio maintenance on WF, and a long run on Sundays. I expect to formulate some more specific goals for running fitness as the weather gets warmer and the school year winds up, which I will be able pursue in a targeted way over the summer.

Pilates

I didn't love my first Pilates class. It was largely an issue that happens with any fourth-quarter class: so many of the students have been there earlier in the year, the teachers start glossing over stuff, and as a new person you can get lost in the terminology you've never heard before and the difficulty of looking at the teacher who's demonstrating while doing the exercise. However, I could detect that a small sliver of what annoyed me was that some of the things were not just hard to understand, but hard to actually do, and so I think there's potential for me to build some strength. I will go to the next one on Wednesday and if it becomes more tolerable, I'll keep it. I still have two weeks to decide whether to drop it.

Monday plan

Here's my planned eats for today:

2 poached eggs, buttered toast, 1/2 sliced grapefruit, and cafe au lait (140+90+50+30+65=375)

Salad with sunflower seeds and dressing and a can of tuna (50+50+50+150=300)
Chunk of cheese (110)

Snack in class?

Chicken spaghetti casserole (and veggies?) (about 550)

This is projected at 1335, not including the possible class snack (you never know if someone's actually bringing one). My target is 1600. Therefore, if I'm under 1500 by after-dinner (allows 165 "extra"), then I get an ice cream bar.

Plan/strategies for Hum snack: either JUST SAY NO or take a small amount. Drink water or coffee. Prefer juice and hard candy to solid snack foods.

Go figure

So I go away for a week, have positive calorie balance most of the days, have virtually no daily activity, only do one run the whole time, eat chocolate pie with whipped cream one night, breaded chicken strips the next day, and binge on Easter candy... and come back to new lows in both weight and fat percentage. WTF body.

This morning, 132.6 (-1.0 from when I left) and 24.2% fat. If it was just weight, I'd chalk it up to my period ending or being dehydrated from travel, but then you'd expect the body fat to go up. I don't really know what's up with that seeing as I basically sat on my ass the whole time.

Still, it strikes me that it's been a month since I reached my 50-pound goal, and I've only lost 2 pounds since then. Not that it's a big deal, but I'm enthusiastic about getting back into gear this coming week, with daily exercise and low-calorie meal plans and ice cream bribes. I, or rather my boyfriend while I was on airplanes, got a box of Skinny Cow ice cream bars and my plan is that at least some days this week, if I am within my target for the day minus 100 calories by the end of dinner, then I can have a 100-calorie ice cream bar for dessert. Ice cream is one of my favorite foods, so I think this ought to be pretty motivating for being judicious about food offered to me during the day and not overeating at dinner.

So I need a plan

Yep, definitely need a plan. The last two days have been an unmitigated disaster of sitting around my dad's house doing next to nothing and eating everything tasty in his kitchen, including a lot of bread, cheese, peanut butter, and chocolate. Which, come to think of it, is what I've ALWAYS done at my dad's, and might have had something to do with the development of those eating habits that kept me around 165 for so long. But that is neither here nor there.

Two not insignificant issues are fundamentally biological and can't-do-anything-about-it. One, it's very dry here, easy to get dehydrated, which leads to low energy and empty-needy feeling in the stomach, which mimics hunger, and since it's SO much dryer than my usual environment plus the water doesn't taste very good, it's difficult to even keep up with my basic hydration needs, let alone use water as an appetite suppressant as I'm accustomed to doing. Two, I'm in a place I can't navigate where everything is very spread-out and outside is all compacted snow and ice, so the ways of getting out and active, whether for casual activity or a run, are very limited. Not being active causes one to burn fewer calories, and also to feel somewhat stiff and low-energy, and lack endorphins.

Mental issues include boredom, which is highly influenced by the middle-of-nowhere-ness of this place and the lack of exercise. The other thing is not knowing what to expect, having no structure to my day. These are somewhat intertwined issues. When I am at home and easily eat little, it's pretty much because I have an idea of what times I'm going to eat and am absorbed with other things in the betweentimes. I only think of eating at other times than I planned if my body is really insistent about it, or if I feel the need for a distraction, but my environmental conditions usually make it inconvenient to indulge the latter case.

So tomorrow, there is going to be a dinner type thing at 5:30. There might be some other stuff earlier in the day. I am planning to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast, then drink coffee (I haven't been drinking as much coffee either, which might have something to do with it) and snack on clementines, hot cocoa, and skim milk throughout the day, with a can of beans for a filling but rather low-calorie protein source to back me up if I need it. At dinner and also throughout, one thing to remember is not to give in to munchy pleasure, the swallowing and filling up your stomach kind of enjoyment. Instead focus on the taste enjoyment, pleasure at the front of your mouth, tip of your tongue. You can get by on less that way, eat slower, and wait for satiety signals.

probably gain half a pound instead of lose it

At least I got out for a walk today, even if I ate two dozen Reese's peanut butter eggs while doing so...

Adverse conditions

The conditions here are really terrible for weight loss. We have:

- Junk food readily available and visible

- Not much to do and 20 minutes' drive into town

- Dry climate that makes you constantly thirsty even if you drink a lot of water

- Icy roads that make running tough

- Unfamiliar, non-gridded roads that I might get lost on if I went running by myself

So I'm only earning a sedentary 1750 or so calories a day, and am constantly fending off the behavioral availability of eating. Well, life is life. When I get back I have low-calorie, lower-carb meal plans, careful scheduling, and environmental control strategies to lose a couple more pounds before my birthday and the end of phase 3. By the way, I'm not taking aerobics next quarter but instead pilates on Monday and Wednesday. I can keep going to yoga on Tuesday and Thursday and this will improve my evening load a bit and also spread my exercise out so there is some on all four days of the fully-booked week. My Bikram package expires soon and since we may be moving soon, I can't afford to get another one. So I'll be mostly relying on those school classes, and maybe I'll take advantage of the weekends to get back into regular running, since the weather's getting warmer. I could see doing a short run (2-3 mi) on Fridays, a little yoga at home on Saturday, and a longer run on Sunday. That would give me approximately 150 calories of lifestyle activity and 200-300 calories of exercise over my sedentary expenditure each day, so if I kept my calories down to my sedentary expenditure or less (I checked again and actually it's about 1730 right now), I'd keep losing around 3/4 pound a week. If I stayed below 1600 four days a week I could have two 2000-calorie days for the same results, in theory. I think I have 4 Bikram classes left to use up before 4/11, so I will have to either take 2 each of the coming weekends or 1 on of the 8th, 9th, and 10th, unless I'm able to make it to one on Sunday, but since I'm now staying an extra day, I will have a lot to do when I get back.

My dad's diet

My dad is such a dork. He has no milk in his fridge, only half-and-half. He puts it in his coffee and also on his cereal, which he doesn't eat in the morning, but rather at night if he gets hungry after dinner. One of his favorite ridiculous snacks is Fruity Pebbles with half-and-half.

He also revealed that his usual eating routine involves no breakfast, a constant supply of coffee all morning, then for lunch fast food, or more recently turkey and vegetable wraps that he brings from home, or on a bad day, a string of chocolate bars until the end of the workday, and finally a huge dinner. I know from experience typical dinner is pasta or frozen pizza, although I think he eats meaty, higher-protein options without me. And admittedly, there are more vegetables in his fridge now than I am accustomed to seeing.

Incidentally, he's pretty in-shape. He runs fairly long distances (5 miles easily, marathons on special occasions) He's 5'11" and has usually been between about 165-195, and he's looking like he's on the fit side right now. I don't really know how this works.

When we go into town later, I will buy myself a quart of skim or 2% and maybe some apples or lettuce. He has juice and chopped-up peppers and onions and celery, but I don't think I saw any whole fruits and I'd have to go check again to see if there's any salad greens. There was dressing, but that doesn't mean he uses it often. It might even be for the wraps.

goin away blah

Well on Saturday I weighed in at 134.2 and 25.2% fat but today the reading's down to 133.6 and 24.7% body fat. Go figure. It would be nice to lose half a pound to a pound over my trip, I think. Which means I'll mentally be aiming for more than a pound, but be satisfied as long as I'm down 0.4 afterward. Unless I change my mind about whether I care before then.

So I'll be back Saturday. I might actually post while I'm out of town, since the internet doesn't really care about things like that. But I won't have a scale and won't be counting my calories carefully, if at all, until I get back.

Bad times and chocolate coping

It's been tough recently.

A loved family member died this morning. He was diagnosed with cancer only about a month and a half ago, nobody had any clue before then, and we made plans for me to go visit him over Spring Break, and guess what, today was the last day of my quarter. My flight there is on Monday. His wife's birthday is tomorrow. It just all sucks.

Having to watch this happen over phones and internet during the last two weeks of my quarter when I had all kinds of papers and midterms and play performances was pretty rough. I've eaten quite a bit of brownies, candy, nondairy ice cream the past couple of days. I sort of know this is an excuse. I'm about 60% sure I wouldn't be responding to stress/grief by eating if it weren't a total trope that I've read about so much over the course of my weight loss journey. But I don't care that much. Probably, when this Lent thing ends, I will go straight back to smoking pot and do that instead of eating. That's not a great coping strategy either and kind of kills the point of abstaining for a bit - kind of, not entirely - but I don't really care about that either. It's all about not caring. About dropping all the put-togetherness and saying fuck it, I'm just going to throw myself into something I feel like doing, something that's supposed to be comforting, because even if it's not, it's at least distracting, and it feels like... like a certain kind of power to allow myself not to worry about, not to constrain and control myself. Because shit fucking sucks and one way to reduce the stress is to not hold myself to high standards about stuff that isn't that important in the short term.

I talked to one of my classmates yesterday about it and she said that last semester she had someone important die too. I made a joke about chocolate and she said yeah, she gained about 2 pounds in brownies when that happened. That really brought me down to earth about the food thing. 2 pounds, so what if I gain 2 pounds? I've lost 50. It's not as though a week or two of throwing caution to the winds is going to ruin my whole project. It's not as if I won't be coping with this through exercise, too. It's not as if I can eat 500 calories in excess several days in a row without feeling yucky. Even if I'm logging quite a few positive calorie balances these days, it's not going to have a huge impact immediately.

So there's that. Oh, and I won't be counting calories next week because I'll be away and because fuck that and because it's another "test" although based on what I said above who cares if I "fail" it. Meh.

Weigh-in, body fat goal, gotta go

Oh, right, I have a blog. No, I'm not avoiding you. I've just been insanely busy this week.

Yesterday I was 133.8 and 25.2% body fat which is what, -0.8 from last week? Not bad for a week when I only had two workouts at all. Yesterday I broke my pseudo-Lent-fast slightly, as I had decided in advance I was allowed to for that particular day, by drinking some wine with my cast-mates. I made these super delicious vegan chocolate coconut cookie bars and also these things that are like mashed potatoes and vegetables in cups of pie crust, ate a lot of them, and had wine, but actually, the cast party was way less intense than I thought it might be, so I didn't do any other drugs or even eat anything off-Lent. Just the wine.

Anyway, this morning I was 24.7% fat, which means I've met my second body fat goal. Awesome sauce. And now I gotta go - lots of schoolwork still to do this weekend.

First post-goal weigh-in

Today I still weigh 134.6 pounds and I clock in at 26.4% body fat. I'm not thrilled that my body fat has apparently gone up while my weight has stayed the same. I was a little lax this week, but I still had some deficit each day, and I was hoping to lose a little, if not the usual 1-2 pounds.

Bought new pants today. I hate shopping for pants. You put one tiny little constraint on the kind of pants you want, like "black jeans", and suddenly the whole world has turned against you. You walk in wearing 6P jeans that are getting a bit loose, so you look for 4P in the same brand, and they fit alright, but they are all a stupid shape. All the brands that have black jeans in an unstupid shape are sized so big that even the 4s are just as loose as the pants you're already wearing, but there aren't any 2s on the rack to try on. The only brands that have any 2s are the ones sized the opposite direction so that you'd have to weigh about 90 pounds to fit into them.

I found some pants eventually, but it was a huge pain in the ass. I was almost ready to give up. Fortunately, they were clearanced, so that was a little spritz of happy at the end of the whole affair. They are 4's and they are nice and snug around my hipbones, which I really enjoy because it reminds me to feel skinny, but they're roomy/stretchy enough everywhere else to allow free movement. They're nice.