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.
Showing posts with label body image. Show all posts
Showing posts with label body image. Show all posts
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Phase 3 conclusion and new directions
It's finally the final day. My 21st birthday. The end of phase III, the projected end-date of this entire project.
Today I am 130.8 pounds, 23.9% body fat according to my scale, measurements (inches): waist 26 1/2, hips 36 1/2, thigh 21, arm 10 3/4. This means since the end of phase II I have lost:
13.6 pounds and 6.0% body fat (though as we know, the scale is not necessarily reliable)
1.5 inches off my waist, 2.25 off my hips, 1.5 off my thigh, and 1 off my arm
About 1 pant size (my best-fit pants are a 4, though the 6s still work)
And in the grand total I have lost:
53.8 pounds
7.5 inches from my waist as well as 5 from my thigh
4 pant sizes
So I did it! I'm 21, have met my rather arbitrarily chosen goal, and I believe I'm within 10 pounds of my ideal weight. Also, my pants are tiny - before this whole thing I really never thought I'd get smaller than a size 8. I'm happy that I went to that fitness testing and got the alternative body fat measurement, because it tells me I am not just-barely entering the recommended range, but rather that I'm well within it already. It also helps that my belly seems to have gotten noticeably tighter in the last week or so. At this point, I think my personal perception of my body is the best indicator of my progress, followed by weight and inch measurements, and lastly the body fat guesses of my scale.
Where do we go from here? I think I will cut back significantly on my weight-related regulatory behaviors. Specifically, I'll stop counting calories, weigh myself less often (once to a few times a week) and use my scale's body fat function a lot less often (once a month to once a week). What I'll keep doing is writing down qualitatively what I eat in the day and tracking my exercise. I'm going to set up a new spreadsheet that has cells to record weight, body fat, and inch measurements, though none of those will be recorded daily, and exercise in the cardio, strength, and flexibility categories, which will be recorded daily. Calorie intake, expenditure, and deficit estimations will be absent. However, I'll continue with the food journal at least for a bit, and do a weekly reflection on the following questions:
How many days did I eat 5 or more fruits and vegetables? Fewer than 3?
What percentage of my meals included significant protein? What about snacks?
Do I feel that my diet was satisfactory overall this week?
Did I have any negative outcomes this week that I feel may have been related to my dietary choices?
I figure I have stop counting calories sometime, and I know even when I went on vacation I tended to think about the calories, so just not recording them will be a way of slowly phasing out that mindset. Hopefully, just mindfulness and my acquired experience with portion sizes will be enough to keep me on track, and allow me to maintain or lose as I please without being quantitatively rigorous. I'll still probably look at calories and serving sizes in order to make decisions about what I eat, but that's something everyone who's ever had a weight problem should do. If I start to gain without clear cause, I can always go back and audit my diet. My main focus for a while will be exercise and finding a balance between the different types. Overall, the goal is to find an equilibrium where I feel nourished, have treats sometimes, and do exercise I enjoy, in such proportions as to maintain my body in a state I'm happy with, without interfering with my other priorities.
I'll be redesigning this blog, including changing the background (probably immediately after posting this), re-titling it, moving and updating my caption, goals, and weight loss ticker, over the next few weeks. I'll also post some before/after/transition pictures soon, and maybe a weight graph. I have a master, long range weight graph, but it doesn't want to cooperate right now, and it might be nice to wait until I fill up a year of weight records before posting it. I will definitely have a post for my "fat-iversary", although I'll have to decide if that's June 7th (the day I started counted calories) or June 11th (the day I weighed myself).
Until I post again, adieu!
Today I am 130.8 pounds, 23.9% body fat according to my scale, measurements (inches): waist 26 1/2, hips 36 1/2, thigh 21, arm 10 3/4. This means since the end of phase II I have lost:
13.6 pounds and 6.0% body fat (though as we know, the scale is not necessarily reliable)
1.5 inches off my waist, 2.25 off my hips, 1.5 off my thigh, and 1 off my arm
About 1 pant size (my best-fit pants are a 4, though the 6s still work)
And in the grand total I have lost:
53.8 pounds
7.5 inches from my waist as well as 5 from my thigh
4 pant sizes
So I did it! I'm 21, have met my rather arbitrarily chosen goal, and I believe I'm within 10 pounds of my ideal weight. Also, my pants are tiny - before this whole thing I really never thought I'd get smaller than a size 8. I'm happy that I went to that fitness testing and got the alternative body fat measurement, because it tells me I am not just-barely entering the recommended range, but rather that I'm well within it already. It also helps that my belly seems to have gotten noticeably tighter in the last week or so. At this point, I think my personal perception of my body is the best indicator of my progress, followed by weight and inch measurements, and lastly the body fat guesses of my scale.
Where do we go from here? I think I will cut back significantly on my weight-related regulatory behaviors. Specifically, I'll stop counting calories, weigh myself less often (once to a few times a week) and use my scale's body fat function a lot less often (once a month to once a week). What I'll keep doing is writing down qualitatively what I eat in the day and tracking my exercise. I'm going to set up a new spreadsheet that has cells to record weight, body fat, and inch measurements, though none of those will be recorded daily, and exercise in the cardio, strength, and flexibility categories, which will be recorded daily. Calorie intake, expenditure, and deficit estimations will be absent. However, I'll continue with the food journal at least for a bit, and do a weekly reflection on the following questions:
How many days did I eat 5 or more fruits and vegetables? Fewer than 3?
What percentage of my meals included significant protein? What about snacks?
Do I feel that my diet was satisfactory overall this week?
Did I have any negative outcomes this week that I feel may have been related to my dietary choices?
I figure I have stop counting calories sometime, and I know even when I went on vacation I tended to think about the calories, so just not recording them will be a way of slowly phasing out that mindset. Hopefully, just mindfulness and my acquired experience with portion sizes will be enough to keep me on track, and allow me to maintain or lose as I please without being quantitatively rigorous. I'll still probably look at calories and serving sizes in order to make decisions about what I eat, but that's something everyone who's ever had a weight problem should do. If I start to gain without clear cause, I can always go back and audit my diet. My main focus for a while will be exercise and finding a balance between the different types. Overall, the goal is to find an equilibrium where I feel nourished, have treats sometimes, and do exercise I enjoy, in such proportions as to maintain my body in a state I'm happy with, without interfering with my other priorities.
I'll be redesigning this blog, including changing the background (probably immediately after posting this), re-titling it, moving and updating my caption, goals, and weight loss ticker, over the next few weeks. I'll also post some before/after/transition pictures soon, and maybe a weight graph. I have a master, long range weight graph, but it doesn't want to cooperate right now, and it might be nice to wait until I fill up a year of weight records before posting it. I will definitely have a post for my "fat-iversary", although I'll have to decide if that's June 7th (the day I started counted calories) or June 11th (the day I weighed myself).
Until I post again, adieu!
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Photographs
I'm happy with how I look in photographs.
It's pretty cool. I could look better naked, in front of the mirror, but when I look and see public-eye documentation of myself, I look fine. I look nice. I don't look fat anymore. And especially when you stick a picture of me leaning on a fence against the backdrop of Paris two weeks ago next to the picture of me leaning on a stone wall against the backdrop of Aix-les-Bains nine months ago, the difference is ridiculous.
It's pretty cool. I could look better naked, in front of the mirror, but when I look and see public-eye documentation of myself, I look fine. I look nice. I don't look fat anymore. And especially when you stick a picture of me leaning on a fence against the backdrop of Paris two weeks ago next to the picture of me leaning on a stone wall against the backdrop of Aix-les-Bains nine months ago, the difference is ridiculous.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Skinny fat and the next two weeks
I'm still fat.
I don't mean that I'm big, wide, or round. Definitely not. I look thin enough that overweight people tell me I shouldn't lose any more weight, my mom told me I carried 150 pounds very well, and would probably start looking skinny by 135. Shirts that fit my B cup chest hang loosely over my abdomen and I wear "petite" pants. I'm relatively small, apparently, and shapely enough - it's just that a lot of that shape is made up of fat.
I think "skinny-fat" is the appropriate term for my condition. It's odd that it's easier to see how fat you are when you're actually less fat. It's not a body image distortion, either - it's the fact that you can actually feel bones and muscles, so you can tell where the texture changes and you have a fat roll. When no matter where you poke there's an inch or two of fat cushioning, held in tightly by the skin, you don't realize how small your lean core is.
I have 10 pounds to go before the end of this weight-loss project. I suspect that when I get to 135, though, I will just switch my focus from straight weight loss to finer tuning of my body composition. The next two weeks, there are at least four undoubtedly high calorie days: Solstice (bread and cheese and wine), Christmas Eve (likely celebration dinner), Christmas (lots of chocolate), and New Years Eve (alcohol). Since two weeks from now will be New Year's Day, I don't expect the reading to be terribly reliable. So I want to say in the next 17 days - until I leave on Tuesday the 4th to travel - I want to lose between 1.0-1.8 pounds, for a leaving weight of 143.6-142.8. That keeps me making measurable progress while allowing for the season, y'know. Then I'll probably set something like 1 pound for my vacation loss goal, but we'll see a little later about that.
I don't mean that I'm big, wide, or round. Definitely not. I look thin enough that overweight people tell me I shouldn't lose any more weight, my mom told me I carried 150 pounds very well, and would probably start looking skinny by 135. Shirts that fit my B cup chest hang loosely over my abdomen and I wear "petite" pants. I'm relatively small, apparently, and shapely enough - it's just that a lot of that shape is made up of fat.
I think "skinny-fat" is the appropriate term for my condition. It's odd that it's easier to see how fat you are when you're actually less fat. It's not a body image distortion, either - it's the fact that you can actually feel bones and muscles, so you can tell where the texture changes and you have a fat roll. When no matter where you poke there's an inch or two of fat cushioning, held in tightly by the skin, you don't realize how small your lean core is.
I have 10 pounds to go before the end of this weight-loss project. I suspect that when I get to 135, though, I will just switch my focus from straight weight loss to finer tuning of my body composition. The next two weeks, there are at least four undoubtedly high calorie days: Solstice (bread and cheese and wine), Christmas Eve (likely celebration dinner), Christmas (lots of chocolate), and New Years Eve (alcohol). Since two weeks from now will be New Year's Day, I don't expect the reading to be terribly reliable. So I want to say in the next 17 days - until I leave on Tuesday the 4th to travel - I want to lose between 1.0-1.8 pounds, for a leaving weight of 143.6-142.8. That keeps me making measurable progress while allowing for the season, y'know. Then I'll probably set something like 1 pound for my vacation loss goal, but we'll see a little later about that.
Friday, November 19, 2010
An inflection point
The title is a little bit of a math reference. When a graph changes from concave to convex or back, that is, when its second derivative changes sign, that's an inflection point. The function itself may not go from positive to negative, and it doesn't even change from going-up to going-down, but it's still a perceptible, subtle change.
That's what it's like lately. Things are changing about this weight loss process, just a little.
The first thing I've noticed is that, before, I was losing about 2/3 fat to 1/3 lean mass. For the last 7 or so pounds, my lean mass has remained constant on average. This makes sense because I'm now past my lowest previous weight. When I was coming down from 185 to 165 and even to 155, I was losing excess skin, superfluous vascular tissue, weight-bearing muscle that was no longer needed. But the amount of lean mass I have now (about 99-103 pounds) is an amount my body has had for a LONG time and has good uses for regardless of my fat level.
Thus it makes sense that I'm also losing weight more slowly. When my average deficit is about 500, I scrape off a pound in a week, because I'm not getting extra credit.
And who knew that exercising could make you more hungry? Not me! Until now, that wasn't the case. Unless I pushed myself hard all day like on that bike trip, a good workout wouldn't make any difference for how much food I wanted to eat. Now, I'm noticing that I am hungrier on days when I exercise a lot. If I exercise not at all (maintenance intake ~1975) I can deal with eating only 1500-1600 calories. If I burn 200 calories (MC 2175) I'm good for 1600-1700 calories. If I burn 600 calories (MC 2575) then I feel okay on 1800-1900 calories. Obviously this is still a net benefit, but there was a time when I would eat the same number of calories whether I burned 0 or 600 in exercise.
Being hungry after exercise makes it harder to push the same kind of deficit I could before, as well as the fact that I'm burning fewer calories to begin with. You can only scale back your intake so much - for me, between the mental demands of school and the social occasionality of meals, it's not practical to eat fewer than 1500-1600 calories on a typical day. It's starting to strain a little. I haven't had ice cream in almost a month (I don't count the spoonful on spice cake at my parents' dinner, that's not the same), or many other treats recently. All the time I put it off, saying I won't have ice cream today, I'll have it some other time, because that would be 150 or 300 calories cutting into my deficit, which is certainly not 800, and even if it's 650, wouldn't I rather have 650 than just 500?
And mentally, my body image is in a strange spot. I feel SO skinny some respects, yet I observe the fat that remains. My collarbone is concave above, concave below, and sticks up a little around the shoulder. I go to massage my neck and feel one, two, three, FOUR vertebrae protruding in what almost seems like an unnatural way. When I lay on my back, my hipbones feel scarily close to the surface of the skin. Yet I'm still 32% fat. My belly still squishes into rolls when I slouch. My thighs and butt still ripple when I walk (not that you can tell when I'm wearing pants, but there's a full length mirror in the locker room).
Just have to have patience and perseverance. 5 more pounds by Solstice. Take what I get for January. A few more by the end of February, and 5 more before spring break, brings me right up to goal, right? Part of me wants to go on some sort of extreme diet, say, Slimfast and super caffeine pills, or at least a highly regimented, planned diet. I probably would if not for social concerns. But my boyfriend already thinks I'm too inflexible about food. If he would offer me high-calorie food at 8am instead of 8pm when I've already eaten most of my calories for the day, he might get a different impression.
That's what it's like lately. Things are changing about this weight loss process, just a little.
The first thing I've noticed is that, before, I was losing about 2/3 fat to 1/3 lean mass. For the last 7 or so pounds, my lean mass has remained constant on average. This makes sense because I'm now past my lowest previous weight. When I was coming down from 185 to 165 and even to 155, I was losing excess skin, superfluous vascular tissue, weight-bearing muscle that was no longer needed. But the amount of lean mass I have now (about 99-103 pounds) is an amount my body has had for a LONG time and has good uses for regardless of my fat level.
Thus it makes sense that I'm also losing weight more slowly. When my average deficit is about 500, I scrape off a pound in a week, because I'm not getting extra credit.
And who knew that exercising could make you more hungry? Not me! Until now, that wasn't the case. Unless I pushed myself hard all day like on that bike trip, a good workout wouldn't make any difference for how much food I wanted to eat. Now, I'm noticing that I am hungrier on days when I exercise a lot. If I exercise not at all (maintenance intake ~1975) I can deal with eating only 1500-1600 calories. If I burn 200 calories (MC 2175) I'm good for 1600-1700 calories. If I burn 600 calories (MC 2575) then I feel okay on 1800-1900 calories. Obviously this is still a net benefit, but there was a time when I would eat the same number of calories whether I burned 0 or 600 in exercise.
Being hungry after exercise makes it harder to push the same kind of deficit I could before, as well as the fact that I'm burning fewer calories to begin with. You can only scale back your intake so much - for me, between the mental demands of school and the social occasionality of meals, it's not practical to eat fewer than 1500-1600 calories on a typical day. It's starting to strain a little. I haven't had ice cream in almost a month (I don't count the spoonful on spice cake at my parents' dinner, that's not the same), or many other treats recently. All the time I put it off, saying I won't have ice cream today, I'll have it some other time, because that would be 150 or 300 calories cutting into my deficit, which is certainly not 800, and even if it's 650, wouldn't I rather have 650 than just 500?
And mentally, my body image is in a strange spot. I feel SO skinny some respects, yet I observe the fat that remains. My collarbone is concave above, concave below, and sticks up a little around the shoulder. I go to massage my neck and feel one, two, three, FOUR vertebrae protruding in what almost seems like an unnatural way. When I lay on my back, my hipbones feel scarily close to the surface of the skin. Yet I'm still 32% fat. My belly still squishes into rolls when I slouch. My thighs and butt still ripple when I walk (not that you can tell when I'm wearing pants, but there's a full length mirror in the locker room).
Just have to have patience and perseverance. 5 more pounds by Solstice. Take what I get for January. A few more by the end of February, and 5 more before spring break, brings me right up to goal, right? Part of me wants to go on some sort of extreme diet, say, Slimfast and super caffeine pills, or at least a highly regimented, planned diet. I probably would if not for social concerns. But my boyfriend already thinks I'm too inflexible about food. If he would offer me high-calorie food at 8am instead of 8pm when I've already eaten most of my calories for the day, he might get a different impression.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Skinny
I feel skinny today. My pants are sagging a little and my shirt shows off my collarbones, which are now prominent from most angles and in most shoulder positions. My hair is pulled up, both the large part into a messy ponytail and my bangs into a clip on top of my head, because it's a warm sunny day. The summer weather is ending though, so the most dramatic part of my weight loss will happen while I'm covered in clothes! Next time I'm this exposed, I will feel throughout my whole body and radiate in all directions the slimness that right now I feel about 10%.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Mindsplat
170.4 today. Slowly but surely. Hopefully I break 170 and 15 pounds before next weigh-in. I'm pretty sure I gained a pound of muscle on the bike trip, which makes me feel weird - I shouldn't mind because it's muscle, but it sets back my numbers and that annoys me.
Did well on calories yesterday, 1675. I've been more hungry since getting back though, and also craving junky foods. I blame the cravings on the energy bars and enriched-flour tortillas we mainly subsisted on during the trip (along with rice and beans, a split can of tuna each day, and intermittent cheese). I ate an energy bar for breakfast the day after we returned because we had no groceries and although it was calorically appropriate, it was like eating cookie dough for breakfast. We still have the enriched-flour tortillas and I'm inclined not to eat them. I know they would be tasty and provide a complex-carb base for any number of meals, but after whole-wheat there just seems like there's something empty and oversimplified about them. I do really want to eat the leftover energy bars though, so I've been limiting myself to one a day. I know something's off in my brain when I think couscous and black-eyed peas sounds boring (it's in fact delicious), am strangely drawn to the salt and vinegar potato chips (I hardly ever eat potato chips), and I am driven to go get a cherry Coke Zero as a substitute.
The quantitative hunger could be an indication that my metabolism has been sped up like I expected, and so 1600-1700 calories now is like if I'd been eating 1400-1500 before - but it surely doesn't help that I've been smoking pot a couple times a day since I got back. Frankly I'm rather amazed that I can keep my calorie intake sub-1700 while doing that.
I'm now running 3.0 miles in the mornings, which is about twice what I was doing a couple of weeks ago. It was great this morning after breakfast to say "well, I've consumed about 400 calories and burned 300 so far."
Went shopping for pants at Goodwill yesterday - not fun. The horrible fluorescent white lights undoubtedly had something to do with it, but I also wonder if I should take a break from reading ED blogs. Starting to get into my head, maybe. Goodwill never has any good pants in size 10 anyway, and clearance sales usually don't either. It will be so nice when I'm an 8 or a 6 and I can actually find decent pants without buying them brand new and expensive. But I need to buy a sturdy pair of 10s at least before school starts because I need to have ONE pair of pants that is not broken, almost-broken, or significantly too big. When I shrink into 8's I have those pants I found in a free box, but frankly, that's not gonna happen for at least a month or two.
My boyfriend is patient but seems to have some low level anxiety about my weight loss. He said a while ago that he hopes I don't count calories for the rest of forever. Yesterday he asked if I thought I would stop measuring my food when I reached 135, and in a different conversation he hinted at not setting a number like that, but just stopping at a point where my body is comfortable and I like how I look. Well... at 165 things are not terrible, but I'm definitely overweight. At 150, which I've been, I look/feel pretty good, but can still use some work. I have about the same amount of lean mass currently as a 135-pound person with 22% body fat. So 135 is probably a good guess. 120 would be on the skinny side, and I'd have to lose muscle as well as fat to get there, but on the other hand, a lighter person needs less muscle power to support themselves and move around, so I think it would not be unhealthy if I went that far. As far as calorie counting and measuring... I don't want to count calories forever, but I'm not just going to stop as soon as I reach my goal weight. It'll take time to train myself to automatically eat an appropriate amount. I'll probably start by recording and counting at the end of the day, without trying to keep track as I go along, and then drop it to a weekly or so audit, and finally leave it as a diagnostic tool if I start unexpectedly gaining. With measurements, I can already estimate if I need to, like when I eat out or at somebody's house, but the more times I see exactly 1 cup the better my estimates will get, and while I'm calorie counting the precision is helpful.
Did well on calories yesterday, 1675. I've been more hungry since getting back though, and also craving junky foods. I blame the cravings on the energy bars and enriched-flour tortillas we mainly subsisted on during the trip (along with rice and beans, a split can of tuna each day, and intermittent cheese). I ate an energy bar for breakfast the day after we returned because we had no groceries and although it was calorically appropriate, it was like eating cookie dough for breakfast. We still have the enriched-flour tortillas and I'm inclined not to eat them. I know they would be tasty and provide a complex-carb base for any number of meals, but after whole-wheat there just seems like there's something empty and oversimplified about them. I do really want to eat the leftover energy bars though, so I've been limiting myself to one a day. I know something's off in my brain when I think couscous and black-eyed peas sounds boring (it's in fact delicious), am strangely drawn to the salt and vinegar potato chips (I hardly ever eat potato chips), and I am driven to go get a cherry Coke Zero as a substitute.
The quantitative hunger could be an indication that my metabolism has been sped up like I expected, and so 1600-1700 calories now is like if I'd been eating 1400-1500 before - but it surely doesn't help that I've been smoking pot a couple times a day since I got back. Frankly I'm rather amazed that I can keep my calorie intake sub-1700 while doing that.
I'm now running 3.0 miles in the mornings, which is about twice what I was doing a couple of weeks ago. It was great this morning after breakfast to say "well, I've consumed about 400 calories and burned 300 so far."
Went shopping for pants at Goodwill yesterday - not fun. The horrible fluorescent white lights undoubtedly had something to do with it, but I also wonder if I should take a break from reading ED blogs. Starting to get into my head, maybe. Goodwill never has any good pants in size 10 anyway, and clearance sales usually don't either. It will be so nice when I'm an 8 or a 6 and I can actually find decent pants without buying them brand new and expensive. But I need to buy a sturdy pair of 10s at least before school starts because I need to have ONE pair of pants that is not broken, almost-broken, or significantly too big. When I shrink into 8's I have those pants I found in a free box, but frankly, that's not gonna happen for at least a month or two.
My boyfriend is patient but seems to have some low level anxiety about my weight loss. He said a while ago that he hopes I don't count calories for the rest of forever. Yesterday he asked if I thought I would stop measuring my food when I reached 135, and in a different conversation he hinted at not setting a number like that, but just stopping at a point where my body is comfortable and I like how I look. Well... at 165 things are not terrible, but I'm definitely overweight. At 150, which I've been, I look/feel pretty good, but can still use some work. I have about the same amount of lean mass currently as a 135-pound person with 22% body fat. So 135 is probably a good guess. 120 would be on the skinny side, and I'd have to lose muscle as well as fat to get there, but on the other hand, a lighter person needs less muscle power to support themselves and move around, so I think it would not be unhealthy if I went that far. As far as calorie counting and measuring... I don't want to count calories forever, but I'm not just going to stop as soon as I reach my goal weight. It'll take time to train myself to automatically eat an appropriate amount. I'll probably start by recording and counting at the end of the day, without trying to keep track as I go along, and then drop it to a weekly or so audit, and finally leave it as a diagnostic tool if I start unexpectedly gaining. With measurements, I can already estimate if I need to, like when I eat out or at somebody's house, but the more times I see exactly 1 cup the better my estimates will get, and while I'm calorie counting the precision is helpful.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Not fat enough to be a fat girl
Today we went on a day trip and I had my boyfriend take a picture of me at one point. It looked terrible. I deleted the picture and reminded myself that I've lost almost 15 pounds which is awesome, and so it's still much better than it could be, right?
Yet, in some ways, it seems like being 15 pounds fatter WAS easier. Oh, of course it wasn't better, I was getting some physical and lots of anxious health symptoms because of it. But just in terms of my appearance - at least there's kind of a niche for fat girls. At 185 I was starting to think of myself as a fat girl and while it wasn't my top choice of how to be, there was a certain kind of comfort in it. Now I'm not really fat anymore, but I'm certainly not not-fat. I'm in the awkward middle zone where I just sort of look swollen sometimes.
'Course, I could never really get comfortable with being a fat girl anyway because I don't have an excuse. I'd stand out. My boyfriend's super lean, my mom's slim, my dad's slim, my stepdad is big and tall but quite fit and always concerned about us kids getting enough exercise. I'd be the only fat one, nobody to validate it, you know? But that's probably a good thing.
I think it'll take about another 10 pounds before this starts to turn around again and get comfortable from the thin side.
Yet, in some ways, it seems like being 15 pounds fatter WAS easier. Oh, of course it wasn't better, I was getting some physical and lots of anxious health symptoms because of it. But just in terms of my appearance - at least there's kind of a niche for fat girls. At 185 I was starting to think of myself as a fat girl and while it wasn't my top choice of how to be, there was a certain kind of comfort in it. Now I'm not really fat anymore, but I'm certainly not not-fat. I'm in the awkward middle zone where I just sort of look swollen sometimes.
'Course, I could never really get comfortable with being a fat girl anyway because I don't have an excuse. I'd stand out. My boyfriend's super lean, my mom's slim, my dad's slim, my stepdad is big and tall but quite fit and always concerned about us kids getting enough exercise. I'd be the only fat one, nobody to validate it, you know? But that's probably a good thing.
I think it'll take about another 10 pounds before this starts to turn around again and get comfortable from the thin side.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
The "other scale"
After a series of gains the past few days and random bouncing around of the body fat number, I was feeling rather frustrated this morning, so I pulled out my ribbon and measuring tape for a second opinion. Since it's been a while and I may not have posted the last time I measured, here were the previous data (all in inches):
6/12: waist 34, hips 43
6/26: waist 33, hips 42, thigh 26, arm 13
7/11: waist 32 1/2, hips 42, thigh 25 1/2, arm 13
My hips haven't changed, but today my waist was 31 3/4 and my thigh was 25 even. I got varying measurements of 12 1/2 - 13 1/2 inches for my arm, even though I thought I was measuring in essentially the same spot. I therefore conclude that I can't measure my arm precisely enough to track at this juncture, and I probably shouldn't be looking for losses in girth there anyway because it's the part I'm working out for strength.
I suppose I'm lucky that my waist is one of the last places my body wants to store fat and the first place it shaves it off. It keeps me under the "danger line" of 35 inches even when I'm quite heavy. And even if your butt is the size of a planet (not quite the case here, more of a small asteroid) and your boobs clearly exemplify why you never wanted them to exceed a B cup (definitely the case, grar!), a skinny waist goes a long way toward making a girl feel sexy.
6/12: waist 34, hips 43
6/26: waist 33, hips 42, thigh 26, arm 13
7/11: waist 32 1/2, hips 42, thigh 25 1/2, arm 13
My hips haven't changed, but today my waist was 31 3/4 and my thigh was 25 even. I got varying measurements of 12 1/2 - 13 1/2 inches for my arm, even though I thought I was measuring in essentially the same spot. I therefore conclude that I can't measure my arm precisely enough to track at this juncture, and I probably shouldn't be looking for losses in girth there anyway because it's the part I'm working out for strength.
I suppose I'm lucky that my waist is one of the last places my body wants to store fat and the first place it shaves it off. It keeps me under the "danger line" of 35 inches even when I'm quite heavy. And even if your butt is the size of a planet (not quite the case here, more of a small asteroid) and your boobs clearly exemplify why you never wanted them to exceed a B cup (definitely the case, grar!), a skinny waist goes a long way toward making a girl feel sexy.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Yay new toys!
Got my new yoga ball yesterday and I'm sitting on it right now! I can see how these burn energy, it's really easy to just rock back and forth, roll side to side a little CONSTANTLY. And when I get music going (very helpful when your job is computer coding), my instinct is to bounce!
I just ordered a digital scale on Amazon (along with a few other things) that was very well priced and fits all my requirements: it is accurate to 0.2 lb (biggest criterion), measures body fat by bioelectrical impedance (bonus, didn't think I'd find one for a good price that also does that), runs on AA batteries (easier to replace than lithium) and has visible foot-pads (so I don't wonder if I'm messing up the reading by standing on it wrong). Next week when I get it I will RECALIBRATE and see how messed up my analog scale really is.
The shape and feel of my arms keeps changing, and my collarbone, though not easily visible, is getting prominent enough to notice by feel. Also, I wasn't too tired getting up at 5:30 today for my run. If I run every weekday in addition to my strength workouts and weekend exercise, that's 2-3 extra runs a week which should speed this up nicely.
I just ordered a digital scale on Amazon (along with a few other things) that was very well priced and fits all my requirements: it is accurate to 0.2 lb (biggest criterion), measures body fat by bioelectrical impedance (bonus, didn't think I'd find one for a good price that also does that), runs on AA batteries (easier to replace than lithium) and has visible foot-pads (so I don't wonder if I'm messing up the reading by standing on it wrong). Next week when I get it I will RECALIBRATE and see how messed up my analog scale really is.
The shape and feel of my arms keeps changing, and my collarbone, though not easily visible, is getting prominent enough to notice by feel. Also, I wasn't too tired getting up at 5:30 today for my run. If I run every weekday in addition to my strength workouts and weekend exercise, that's 2-3 extra runs a week which should speed this up nicely.
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