Snack Attack

I have a problem with snack food, and the problem is this:

All snack food comes in single serving size.

Even when it doesn’t.

On the surface, my inability to control portions makes me seem like a perfect candidate for those 100 calorie packs. In reality, 100 calorie packs almost always come in a box of 6 or 10 packs, which actually makes them 600 or 1000 calorie packs, because I will simply eat them all.

Case in point:

I bought some Pocky today, because a) I *love* Pocky and b) Pocky comes in handy little snack packs of relatively few calories each. The lovely, wonderful Dessert Pocky, for example, has three extra chocolatey Pockies per pack, for a 100 calories. But there are 4 packs in a box. Which was 400 calories when I ate the whole fucking box.

Even while I’m doing it, I know that I shouldn’t. I try to tell myself that the 12th Pocky is going to taste exactly the same as the first Pocky. I remind myself that not only am I not particularly hungry, I am in fact, very full, having had much dim sum earlier in the day. I point out that my plan for the afternoon is a nice long nap and that I don’t really need to carb up for that. I get up and put the rest of the box away in the kitchen so it’s not near me. And then I eat them all anyway.

So, I try not to keep anything snacky in the house. Even good, healthy snacks like nuts and such, are a problem — I’ve been known to eat so many Trader Joe’s sesame almonds in a sitting that I actually threw up.

I wish I knew what to do about this, because it’s one of the things that most easily defeats me.

337.5

337.5 is a very significant number to me.

About 8 years ago now, I was 337.5 pounds, and it was the fattest I’d ever been, and I felt disgusting and gross, and none of my clothes fit, and I resolved to lost some weight. And for about 2 years, that’s what I did — I went to they gym 3 days a week, and I went to Weight Watchers, and I worked my way down from 337.5 to about 259 pounds.

And then I had one very, very bad week — a week in which I was robbed by a man with a crowbar in my own home and had my car nearly destroyed by an idiot who couldn’t park.

And then it all fell apart, and I stopped going to the gym 3 days a week. I’d still go sometimes, but not, you know, every time. And I stopped writing down my food. Not all the time, but sometimes, you know?

And 8 years later, after several attempts to start and stop and restart and blah, blah, blah, I was at 369 pounds, which was the new winner for fattest I’d ever been, and I felt disgusting and gross and none of my clothes fit and I resolved to lose some weight. That was about a year ago.

And there have been more ups and downs and downs and up and ons and offs since then. But now, today, I’m 337.5 pounds, and the last 8 years, whatever they might have meant for the rest of my life, are, weight-wise, a complete wash.

It’s not a victory, it’s kind of an anti-milestone, but at least it represents having recovered from the damage, and that, I suppose, is something.

Food Betrayal

[12:00] Easy: Okay, how is it possible there are 400 calories in a normal sized muffin?
[12:00] Easy: I get that if you eat those giant costco muffins, you get what you deserve
[12:00] Easy: But this was a perfectly average sized muffin from tim’s.
[12:10] Friend: heh
[12:10] Friend: muffins are evil
[12:10] Friend: cakes masquerading as “breakfast”
[12:12] Easy: I managed to find the third most evil muffin on their menu, too
[12:12] Easy: The only ones that are worse are the blueberry and the chocolate chip
[12:13] Easy: Actually, no, wait, that’s 2 blueberry muffins
[12:13] Easy: So, the only thing worse is the chocolate chip
[12:13] Friend: see, chocolate chip… what breakfast has chocolate chips in it?
[12:13] Friend: i would prefer to just have real cake over a muffin
[12:14] Easy: Yeah, see, and I wouldn’t order a chocolate chip muffin
[12:14] Easy: But this was whole wheat carrot
[12:14] Easy: It sounded … healthy
[12:14] Easy: Whole wheat! Vegetables! What’s not to love?
[12:14] Easy: Besides, you know, *19* grams of fat.

Food that’s masquerading as healthy pisses me off.

Frustrated

I haven’t been updating this journal in awhile, partly because I have a new blog that’s sucking up my time and attention, and partly because I’m just frustrated with this whole side of my life. I don’t feel like things are getting better, I don’t feel like I have any part of anything under control, and the whole thing just makes me want to pound my head against things.

I keep wanting to add new things (or, rather, old things back in), but I can’t even get my shit together to do the three things that are currently on my list — walking, water and charting my calories.

I’ve been getting my three glasses of water most days, but some days it is only two, and often those come late at night when I already feel dehydrated, and I’m not tracking it, so I couldn’t say for sure how many days it is of each. I haven’t been tracking my calories or measuring my food.

I have been walking, most of the days I’m supposed to — though not yesterday since there just wasn’t time other than in the heat of the day, and I had already spent an hour and a half on my feet at the farmer’s market anyway — but it’s really not going well. I seem to make it okay through the first lap around the house, but the second lap is constantly bringing with it problems — I can’t breathe or my feet cramp up or my sides cramp up or something. I don’t think I’ve made it properly all the way through any of my last 5 or 6 walks, and it’s pissing me off.

Add to that I just feel fatter than ever, even if I’m still hovering around 350, and I’m just not happy. I went to a plus-sized clothing swap today, and nobody wanted any of my stuff, because my skinny clothes from when I lost weight a few years back were too big for all the other women there. That was depressing. Even if I lose all the weight I’ve gained in the last 5 years, I’ll still be the fattest person I know.

Blah.

Some days, I tell you.

Woot! Woot!

5 pounds lost since I started tracking my food consumption.

WTF!?

I’ve assumed that the reason I didn’t manage to lose any weight the last two weeks is that I was eating out too much, but as it turns out, the more likely culprit was a box of stale crackers that’s been sitting on my counter gradually being consumed.

Whole Grain Stoned Wheat Thins are 30 calories each! So the four I grabbed as a tiny snack to make my stomach stop rumbling over the smell of my lunch cooking were 120 calories total. Which makes them nearly 20% of my total lunch calorie consumption, despite the fact that the rest of my lunch was two entire servings of beef stew. For 4 crackers! And they’re even Whole Wheat crackers!

I haven’t felt this betrayed by a food since I discovered how many calories are in a falafel.

This may also account for most of my fatness as a child, when I ate stacks and stacks of Stoned Wheat Thins on a regular basis. Who would have guessed?

Well Fuck.

Yesterday, I met some friends for drinks and then we went out to a karaoke club (why yes, I did sing, badly, yet not so badly that I was the worst singer there). Then I came home on one of the last trains, and basically fell into bed.

And nowhere during all of that did I drink my third glass of water.

It was my unbroken streak, and I’m pretty bummed about breaking it.

On the other hand, I’ve lost five pounds since returning from Vancouver, without even trying, so that’s nice.

Non-Non-Scale Victory

My weigh in this morning was 355 all of a sudden. Not sure where that came from, though, historically, I have always lost weight like that. I’ll be rolling along for a few weeks at the same basic weight give or take a pound, then drop 5 all of a sudden, then roll along at the new weight for a few weeks.

I’m not really dieting so I’m not really losing weight, but it is gratifying to see a little weight come off.

Hrmm.

I’ve been feeling out of sorts all day. I wonder how much of that is because it’s 5pm and I just started on my first glass of water?

My new water routine

One of my things with drinking water is that I don’t like it too terribly cold.

The temperature it comes out of the tap is just about right. Unfortunately, the flavor it comes out of the tap is not right at all, so I have a water cooler with a filter thing on it.

The filter makes for yummy tasting water and not chlorine. Unfortunately, the temperature it comes out of the water cooler is not right, so I tend to leave it sitting on my desk for hours to warm back up.

Leaving it on my desk gets it nice and warm. Unfortunately, unless I remember to drink it at just the right point, it gets it too warm.

It’s a problem, as you can see. Not, like, oh my god, a Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt problem, but still, a problem of personal significance. Fortunately, as problems go, this one is not NP-hard.

My new routine is thus:

I filled a glass of water 2/3 full and left it sitting on the cooler overnight. By the next morning, it was very warm.

Filling the glass the rest of the way to the top with icy cold cooler water made it just about tap water perfect.

As soon as I fill one glass up to the top and take it away, I fill another glass 2/3 full and leave it sit there to get warm.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thus, there is always a warm glass of water sitting on my water cooler, waiting to be topped up and made just right.

Sometimes the simplest problems have the most complex solutions… I mean … oh, never mind.

Grr.

I know I’m not ‘really dieting’ and that I spent Tuesday night at a giant festival of eating lots of things, but it still irks me to see my weigh in number go up!

Reason #17: Because one also shouldn’t wish one had an eating disorder…

This is a genuine IM conversation log. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the not so innocent.
[15:55] theinnocent: how hard is it to be bulimic?  from the outside, it seems like it’d be easy.
[15:56] easy: Heheh.
[15:57] easy: God knows, I have had those thoughts.
[15:57] theinnocent: thank you! i thought i was the only one.
[15:57] easy: “It’d just be a little vomiting, I mean, really, why not?”
[15:57] theinnocent: i really hate vomiting, though
[15:57] easy: But then I remember that a) I hate vomiting and b) bulimia is an actual, like, disease thingy
[15:57] theinnocent: yes, it’s a very serious disease.
[15:57] easy: and also that its anorexics that are skinny
[15:58] theinnocent: oh, right.  damn.
[15:58] easy: Bulimics don’t lose that much weight, I don’t think
[15:58] theinnocent: cartoon bulimics do.

I’m in no serious danger of developing any kind of eating disorder, but you have to admit that it’s a little bit sick that I think about it ever. It’s one of the reasons I’m aiming for slow, longer term lifestyle changes. I just don’t think another ‘diet’ is going to work for me. At least not until I can mentally redefine diet back to what it’s supposed to mean, instead of what it’s come to mean.

In which only some things went to hell in a handbasket…

See that? I’m not saying it all went wrong. Mental progress!

So, last weekend I went out on a pub crawl with friends and didn’t crawl into bed until close to 4AM, then got up and went to this giant food event where I ate way too much in the stunning heat, and came home and napped for 2 hours (or, more specifically, napped for 1 hour twice) and this has completely fucked up my sleep schedule.

I’m finding it hard to get to bed and hard to get up in the morning and ARGH.

I have made it to the gym 2 days this week, but in the late afternoon, rather than the morning, like I should.

I’ve also not been doing my neck thing, as last week was that time of the month, and this week I just haven’t bothered. But I got grumped at by the chiropractor this morning, so I guess I should start that up again.

I missed a couple of days of writing, too, because Serena and Lance are trapped in a frigging hospital room and I can’t write them out of it no matter how hard I try because it’s not in the nature of Serena’s character to just leave her Little Sister alone in the hospital, no matter how hot the guy who wants to take her to dinner is. In fact, she’s probably less likely to do it for a hot guy, because that’ll just make her feel more guilty. Stupid characters and their stupid internal consistency issues.

I did do some work over the week on my good in concept less good in execution stories for my writer’s workshop that I didn’t end up going to anyway, because of extreme scheduling confusion and the need to go to the gym yesterday evening since I hadn’t gone yesterday morning. I might post those later.

And yesterday I forgot to eat a vegetable. I mean, there were some vegetables in some of the things I ate (tomatoes, mainly) but nothing your mom would look and call eating your veg. It was a find day nutritionally otherwise, just duh on the veggies.

…I would know who I am

As I said on my calorie tracker comparison chart, they say you are what you eat, so this must be the path to self-discovery. Thus far today, I’m a spicy caramel apple. For breakfast. Yeah. Good thing I’m just tracking what I do eat and not trying to be on a diet, yo.

I’ve been tracking my calories fairly regularly for the last couple of weeks as I’ve been experimenting with the different calorie trackers, and now I’m making it officially this week’s thing. The goal is to track everything I eat throughout the day, every day. Some things, obviously, will be simply estimates in terms of volume and nutritional values, but I’ll make a good faith attempt on stuff I eat that other people (restaurants, friends, etc) prepare and measure the stuff I make myself.

I didn’t track my food yesterday, as I was at an event with more than 50 different bits of food to try and I tried nearly all of them. That sort of thing is going to be impossible to track, and I’ve decided in advance that I will still give myself checkmarks on those days as long as I don’t take one overblown meal as a reason not to track anything else I ate that day. It’s part of my meta-goal of learning to not give up quite so easily on all the other goals when they go a little bit awry.

Small Victories: Pants

I put on a pair of my favorite pants today, and they fit noticeably looser than they did last time I wore them. Not quite as well as they did when I bought them in November, but still, that’s a few months worth of crappy living reversed!

…I wouldn’t carry this weight alone

I still haven’t picked a calorie tracker, so I’m not making calorie tracking my thing of the week as planned.

Instead, I’m going to pick weighing in every day as my thing of the week.

Some people argue for not weighing in more than once a week, and others not more than once a month, but I used to do the hacker’s diet thing and weigh in every day, and I actually found that I obsessed *less* about the weigh in differences when I was doing that than when I was doing weekly weigh-ins.

The everydayness of it meant that fluctuations were going to happen, and they didn’t need to be a source of stress, whereas when I’ve tried weighing in weekly, if I didn’t lose weight (even if that was because I had forgotten to weigh in until after I drank a glass of water), then I would stress out about that.

So, every morning, shortly after I get up, and before I get dressed or eat, I will weigh myself and enter that data into whatever software program I eventually choose for weighing in.

This morning, I weighed 361lbs.

Calorie Tracker Comparison

I’m doing a kind of running tally comparison chart as I use the three different calorie trackers this week.

…I would take my vitamins

As I mentioned, I’m adding ‘take your vitamins’ as this week’s thing.

This is not something I have terribly much trouble with when I think about. I actually take children’s chewable vitamins, and I keep them in a candy dish on my kitchen counter. Since I find them kind of tasty, as long as I keep the candy dish filled, I probably eat more of them than I need to. But I’d gotten out of the habit, so now I need to get back in.

I may add some other vitamins — C, and a calcium tablet, and possibly iron — in the future, but for now, just remembering to eat my candy vitamins is enough.

Reason #13: Because dessert should be a pleasure but not a guilty pleasure

I like cake. I prefer my cakes moist and rich and covered in ooey-gooey icing, and caramel sauce and whipcream and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time.

When you’re on a diet, or fat enough that you’re supposed to be on a diet, that’s not the kind of cake you’re supposed to want. You’re supposed to content yourself with little sticks of dried out, pre-packaged cake-like substance topped with not-even-icing-like substance. Since it’s dessert (really, it says so on the box!), you’re supposed to enjoy it and view it as wicked and decadent. X-like-substance ain’t decadent.

On the other hand, if you do actually eat some of that moist, delicious, decadent cake, no matter how small a slice, you’re supposed to feel guilty about that. You can sneak it into some diets only by shedding high volumes of actual food, which is not exactly a healthy trade off.

I’d like to find a mental place where I can eat the occasional piece of good cake and not feel guilty about it, and never feel obligated nor interested in eating one of those faux-cake sticks ever again.

100 Days of Water

Yesterday marked 100 days in a row that I’ve drunk 3 glasses of water. I didn’t even notice until I was looking at my Joe’s Goals page and noticed it.

Go me!