Since You Asked…

Why yes, I have lost some weight! And totally without trying! In the past two weeks, I’ve dropped five pounds entirely without intention. Here are some possible explanations for this miracle:

• Giving blood totally threw off my regular eating schedule for a few days – I felt ravenously hungry at every point of every day and therefore only ate a very little bit because I wasn’t sure if it was real hunger or not.
• I only purchased the most basic of food items the past few times I’ve been shopping and haven’t been particularly interested in eating them afterward.
• Yoga! 2.5 times in the past two weeks! I’m sure it’s done something!
• The stresses involved with meeting new people and impressing folks surely caused a dip in my appetite.
• In approximately three seconds of googling I found some conflicting research that proves that laughing may or may not burn a ton of calories. If it does, then I’m burning about a gajillion calories a day.
• I don’t walk a ton during the day but surely more than I walked during my unemployment.
• I’m less content these days since Hubby is in Birmingham, another decrease in appetite.
• The refrigerator at work is a hike and a half away, and contains mostly other people’s food. Two birds, one stone.
• I’m not yet cool enough to get invited out to lunch every day (for real, fellas, I’m totally kidding. You are helping my figure and I don’t feel excluded in any way!) so I can bring my lunch and eat healthier things.
• I’ve done yardwork things lately. Out of necessity.
• I’m hungry. And I just ate dinner. Because I don’t feel like fixing anything else, the most I may eat before bed is something liquid. Tea, milk…etc.

So I’m pleased with this miraculous turn of events, obviously. I would like to continue the trend and so will probably try to give blood again next week.

Just kidding 🙂

 

Disordered Eating

I have always passionately loved food. Taste and smell are my two favorite senses (unless what I’m smelling and/or tasting is disgusting, then they suck) and I revel in the experiences of preparing and consuming a meal. Cooking is almost as enjoyable as eating in many cases, and I should probably just limit myself to cooking and trade the eating part for celery sticks.

Not that celery sticks aren’t delicious in the proper context, but I can’t think of anything that more completely takes the joy out of life than dieting. Dieting gives me a food complex that I don’t normally have. I think about food all the time. Deprivation doesn’t help me lose weight, it just makes me imagine all the different cheese-based dishes I am capable of preparing. I think of food so often that it becomes unhealthy.

Dieting, however, isn’t the only thing that makes my relationship with edibles less than ideal. Sometimes I fantasize about food when bored or upset, will spend an inappropriate amount of time planning my meals when I’m working a job below my mental capacities or with people I’d like very much to spend two hours at lunch to get away from. I don’t think this is exactly what a nutritionist or psychologist would refer to as an eating disorder – I suspect it’s fairly normal, all things considered. Especially the dieting thing. I mean, when a person is hungry, who doesn’t obsess about food? That’s sort of the point of a diet – to think it out to the point of absolute control over what you ingest. I suspect I’m also not the only person out there who is totally miserable while dieting too.

So I guess I’d say I really lack the qualities associated with a person with a true eating disorder. I do consider my eating habits to be semi-disordered, but that’s an entirely different thing. That just means I need to organize more than my closets if I ever want to enjoyably drop a few pounds. Enjoyable diets…someone’s gotta tell me how that’s not an oxymoron.

 

To Coke or to Diet Coke?

That is the question;
Whether ’tis healthier in the end to suffer
The icks and ewwwws of disgusting aspartame,
Or to drink happily that sugary soda,
And by drinking, get fatter. To drink, to gain;
No more; and by a gain to say we bloat
On bubbles and the thousand delicious calories
That Coke is filled with — ’tis a consumption
Always to be preferr’d. To diet, to lose;
To lose, perchance to gloat. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that loss of pounds what gloating may come,
When we have reached that perfect weight,
Must give us pause. There’s the drawback
That makes the lazy feel justified,
For who would bear the walks and aching muscles,
Th’ trainer’s goals, the skinny girl’s judgement,
The pangs of unfulfilled hunger, the scale’s mockery,
The hours on the treadmill, and the commercials
That advertise th’ cheesy goodness of pizza,
When she herself might become the enemy –
A skinny critic? Who would willingly diet,
Grunt and sweat under a torturous regimen,
But that we all desire that advanced adoration
That comes with malnutrition and muscled abs?
And is someone, once fat, not more free,
Now thin, to say as they please about others
Than those skinny chicks who didn’t work to get there?
Thus justification does make couch potatoes of us all,
And thus the need to be thin
Is bowled o’er by the nicest part of me,
And allows me to drink the “real thing”
Without regret or secret guilt;
I remain pudgy, friendly and self-loathing,
so as not to be tempted into judging 
Those more lazy than myself.

Let’s hear it for Shakespeare, bloating, and lack of sleep, the interesting combination of which produced a lovely (if slightly confusing) soliloquy on dieting.

Cheers!

:::::::::Liz takes big gulp of her Diet Coke, then cringes::::::::::