Of course, it was the shittiest Christmas ever, and there was no giant feast. But there were lunches with the girls, way too much hot chocolate, no-bake chocolate cookies and Costco shortbread, and I still managed to pull it off.

So I decided to simply not make any choices at all for awhile. I sat down and figured out a diet that I could eat every single day that would not give me scurvy, not leave me starving, and not have me consuming 4000 calories a day. It had to be totally easy, totally repeatable and not require any thought or effort.

What I ended up with was a granola bar and yogurt for breakfast, a Subway roasted chicken sandwich for lunch, and a frozen dinner and a spinach salad for dinner, with a couple of ounces of almonds for snacks. If I felt otherwise hungry, fresh fruits or vegetables were allowable. Along with a daily multi-vitamin, this hit all the major nutritional requirements. It was a little on the high side in sodium, but I’ve never really had blood pressure issues.

And other than when I was dining out with friends, this is what I’ve eaten every day for a month. I made it through some things that would otherwise have been quite difficult for me, by simply asking myself “Is it on the list? If it’s not on the list, you don’t eat it.”

Since the answer was invariably ‘no’, there were a lot of things I didn’t eat.

Not that I was depriving myself. I see friends for dinner 2 or 3 times most weeks, so I got plenty of good food — including one of the best meals of my entire life.

It was just that on a day in and day out basis, I wasn’t consuming an endless supply of empty calories worth of food that I didn’t even particularly enjoy. 3000 calories worth of beautiful comfort food consumed in the company of friends is one thing. 3000 calories worth of kind of gross deep fried crap shoveled down alone at the cheap asian buffet near my house is totally different, and the latter was the kind of bad choice I had been making.

And in the end, even though I’ve been punking out on the gym because of various injuries and illnesses, I lost 12lbs on the ‘no choices diet’.

I’m not sure if I’m going to continue it from here — it is a little boring, after all, and probably not all that healthy, and definitely kind of expensive.

But if nothing else, it’s a new trick in my arsenal. Because maybe, if I can’t make good choices, no choice is the next best thing.

So, more from swimming lessons.

Today I managed to swim some 29/32 down and back laps with kicking, which are *excellent* numbers for me. 29 isn’t my best ever single lap (that’s 27ish), but 1:01 might be my best ever double lap.

Of course, I was swimming straight pairs with a lot of heavy breathing in between, which is sort of a problem. On the one hand, it’s good that I can now swim just as fast while kicking as while not kicking, but it’s still taking me a lot more effort to do it than it would if I was swimming arms only.

Also, in case you’re curious, here’s the weight circuit Katya gave me for days when I don’t see her. Yes, I have no upper body strength.

I lost the first 90 pounds about three years ago, and it took me about two years to do it – and it was plain, old fashioned, “eat less, move more.” In my case “eat less” meant adhering to the “serving size” that’s listed on everything here in the USofA. If I want a cookie, I can have a cookie – two if that’s what the serving size is.

That’s an intriguing idea. I mean, it’s part of what I tend to do anyway, if I’m weighing and measuring thing. But it’s so simple and uncomplicated.

And by “decided” I mean, “after several months of not tracking tickies and thinking about which tickies to track and changing my mind and still not tracking tickies, I logged into Joe’s Goals, saw the three tickies that are actually still set up on my Joe’s Goals account, and figured they’d do.”

So, the three tickies are:

• Drinking 3 glasses of water
• Going to the gym
• Tracking food in Daily Plate.

And hey, today, I’m 3 for 3.

Of course, the women’s shower room is being renovated at the gym tomorrow, so prospects for continuing that streak are limited, but we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll go and walk on the treadmill for a bit and come home and shower.

When I first started trying to lose weight seriously, I was 337.5, and I lost a bunch of weight (down to about 260) and then gained it all back and then some. The single fattest I’ve ever been was September 3rd, 2008, when I weighed in at 369lbs. Then I lost a bit of it again and got back down to 315 or so, before letting it all go to hell.

Well, this morning, after months of avoiding it, I stepped on the scale.

369lbs.

Right back at the worst it’s ever been.

I could tell you how much that made me cry, but then I’d start crying again.

In order to swim 50y/min, I need to be able to swim the 20y pool in 24seconds, and my best times to date have been 27seconds, but my average time is more like 35-40.

I swam one set of 2 laps tonight, then checked my lap timer and it was showing an average lap time of 24 seconds. I felt totally triumphant! Woo! 24 seconds!

Or, you know, I’d accidentally recorded a third lap that was 2 seconds long and it dragged down my average from 35 seconds.

Triumph averted.

I actually had my first swimming lesson this evening. The instructor is not, in fact, the heinous bitch who hates me, so that was good news.

I had originally signed up for Adult 3, which might have been a little more advanced than I actually needed, but as it turned out, Adult 3 was cancelled on the grounds that I was the only person who signed up for it, and I got bounced back to Adult 2.

Adult 2 was overpopulated by my presence, and some other woman got really, really huffy about that, and completely steamrolled the instructor’s suggestions that she stay for this week and give the gym a chance to come up with a solution. The woman got totally bitchy and walked out on the class to go demand her refund. Uh, good riddance, I guess.

The remaining three people in the class were two youngish girls who are really just learning to swim. They’ve had a couple of rounds in Adult 1, so they can swim, sorta, and are too advanced for ‘and now you lay back on my hand and float while I hold you’ of Adult 1, but they don’t really feel particularly comfortable in the water. Go them for making the effort.

Go them doubly for telling me they thought I was a great swimmer and they were really impressed. That made me feel good about myself, so yay! I told them I just had a few years experience on them, what with having taken my first swimming lessons when I was 2, and all.

The other guy in the class can swim, but not with his face in the water. I don’t know if that’s a nervous thing or just a bad habits learned over many years thing.

Basically, there are only three levels of adult lessons, versus about 12 levels of kids lessons. So Adult 1 is ‘I do not know how to float or blow bubbles’ and Adult 3 is ‘I am a very a good swimmer, and I’d like to swim further and faster’ and Adult 2 is absolutely everything in between. There’s no way the four of us would all be in the same class if we were kids swimming at the levels we swim at, but I guess the demand for adult lessons probably doesn’t justify the additional striations.

I did make a little progress on kicking, I think. I found it quite exhausting, so that may be part of the problem — I may just need to build up more endurance at kicking since it takes so much more energy.

I need to remember my lap timer for next week, since having the instructor time laps for me really doesn’t work — she has too much else going on to watch the clock.

I stayed after and swam a single set of 14 laps, since the pool was open for Adult Lane Swim after my lesson ended anyway.

So, okay, the handy chart probably isn’t actually all that handy. But a detailed reading of it will reveal why I’m taking swimming lessons, despite the fact that the chart covers off my ability to swim a kilometer.

I swim in sets of 14 laps (250m give or take), with backstroke laps on the 4th, 8th and 12th laps. Those are essentially resting laps, and they’re quite slow, and I don’t care.

More interesting is the crawl laps. Normally when I do front crawl, I swim arms only. But sometimes, on the return laps that aren’t backstroke, I try kicking. And those laps are much slower than the arms only laps, which is, uh, bad.

Now that return lap is almost always the slowest of the crawl laps — I think that mainly has to do with the currents in the water, but it may also have a bit to do with how the turns get timed into the laps. But even taking that into account, in the first two sets of the time above, I was kicking on my returns, and in the last two, I wasn’t.

In the first half, that return lap was an average of 6 seconds slower than the one that followed it. In the second half where I was never bothering to kick, the return lap was only an average of 2 seconds slower than the one that followed it. 4 seconds, when you’re talking lap times between 30 and 45 seconds is a fairly significant percentage.

So, that’s why I’m taking swimming lessons. At the very least, I’d like to be able to kick my legs and not have it hinder my progress.

My long term swimming goal is to get my crawl speed up to 50y/min, which is what’s considered ‘moderate’ swimming speed. I don’t think I’ll be able to get there if I continue to swim arms only. It’s just under 30y/min in the set above, but would be a little better without the kicked laps.

Since the last update, not much has happened. I’ve pretty much failed to do any of the things I was supposed to be doing and along with my blog, I abandoned my ticky boxes, my food tracker and having a waistline. And that’s not so good.

So I was whining about that on LSG the other day, and one of the other members suggested I make a list of all the things I want to do. And I thought, hey, well, that’s something I can do. I like lists. It’s low commitment.

Except here’s the the thing I’m having trouble with. When I think about things I want to do, what I actually get are:

1. things I want to do, but don’t do
2. things I feel like I should do
3. things I should want to do, but don’t, really
4. things I want to have done, but don’t particularly want to actually do
5. things I want to do in theory, but not in practice
6. things I don’t really want to do, but tend to do anyway
7. things I do actually want to do, but don’t really know how
8. things I want to want to do

Some things don’t fall neatly into those categories, either.

Take, for example, editing the first draft of my novel. It falls into category 3 — I feel like I should want to do it. But I don’t want to do it. Which makes me feel like I’m a bad writer (which I might well be) which makes me feel like a bad person (which I try not to think I am). So maybe it’s more in category 4 — I want my novel to be edited. I even want to have been the one who edited it. What I do not want is to actually sit down and edit it. Which is partly related to category 7, in that I don’t feel confident of my abilities to edit.

Going to the gym is pretty much all of those things, depending on how I’m approaching it at any given moment. Mostly, it is 8.

So how do I decide what I want, when I don’t know what I want?