stupid pants

Everything hurts. I'm not exactly sure why everything hurts, and I fear it is because I am old, because I haven't really done much except walk. I have aged to the point where walking breaks me. That is a little depressing.

To be fair, I've walked a lot more often, and up hills, and faster and longer than I have in a long time, as part of my Everyday Active Plan, which is a plan I just made up in my head. But that's what I've been doing – making a conscious effort to not just stand and wait for the bus, to take a line that leaves me further from where I'm going or at the bottom of a big hill, to not ask passerby to carry me up the big hill, or burst into tears when faced with one.

It's been a pretty good way of doing things, especially since I'm temporarily breaking up with the gym. This is a smart thing. Because the gym has been impossibly, horribly unpleasant. I have tried every cardio machine in the place and on all of them, the twenty minutes I tell myself I can get through is killing me. Just killing me. This is tragic and stupid and ashameful and it is more than I can do to make myself go and so I don't go and that is a bad thing. Bad thing! Bad!

So I am concentrating on being Captain Everyday Cardio, and I'm eating rightly, and I have made a deal with myself that I will walk to and/or from work (which is about two miles each way) several or three times a week and that will, for now, be the exercise I do until I am in a shape where the gym is not a horrible torture place. It makes me laugh and also cry small tears that I need to get in shape in order to go to the gym.

This Alternate Fitness Plan is, however so far working. If my scale is to be believed, I have lost a further four pounds, making me losing of twelve pounds in total, and filled with all kinds of glee. My pants still fit stupid, though. Stupid pants.

progress report

It’s been a week and a half on the Sad and Lonely meal plan, and I am happy to cautiously, delicately, quietly say in a voice just above a whisper that I think it is working, and then duck beneath a table waiting for the Fat Bomb to drop.

I stopped following the meal plan to the letter the day they wanted me to put more goddamn cottage cheese on something else – I think it was a plate of cottage cheese – and I started to get all analytical about it. I said “well, they are encouraging the consumption of good milk proteins. Ben and Jerry’s for breakfast it is!”

It isn’t. But it’s yogurt or whole wheat toast or egg whites, and fruits for desserts, and staying away from sugars, and allowing good fats, and eating when I’m hungry, and using the Sad and Lonely plan for jumping off points that Guy mostly has been the one jumping off of. There was this tortilla thing they wanted me to do with cheese and, uh, stuff? And he, using all the proscribed ingredients, made it indescribably delicious.

“Diet food rules!” I shouted. He eyed me doubtfully and took another bite of his chorizo quesadilla, and as the juice ran down his chin, I killed him with my fork and ate his heart. Dipped in guacamole.

The first week, I lost eight pounds and that’s all water weight, for shizzle and other things like that. But I am happy and eating okay and exercising, even, despite the stupid faux elliptical thing I climbed on this morning almost fucking taking a leg off, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things go this week, and then eating someone’s heart to celebrate.

and lo

I pulled on a pair of pants - my sexy, sexy fat pants - that have been snug, that have been the impetus for all this wacky dieti- er, healthy eating, I've been doing. And I haven't noticed a change, one way or the other, in the way they've been snug around the tops of my thighs in a Fat Girl fashion. Until this morning.

I pulled them up, and I buttoned them, and I struggled to zip them. Struggled. I looked down in bewildered disbelief. I grabbed ahold of the tag, and sucked in, and yanked, and looked down at the bulge of my stomach and I said "why! Why the fuck do you not fit, when I've spent almost two weeks dietin- er, eating healthy, you motherfuckers? WHY?"

And then, I burst into tears.

And lo, the answer had descended upon me in the ethereal form of a big throbbing zit.

I hate it when my period surprises me.

one can of tuna in water, drained

So I printed out the meal plan, the one with 1200 calories in, and with 2% cottage cheese on top of everything –- I’m not kidding. Everything. -- and four ounces of various types of meat.

Then, I went grocery shopping. And I stocked up on tuna and various types of meat and more cottage cheese than a girl should really own, and I lugged it all home and stuck it all in my fridge and stood back and I said there! I have a fridge full of healthy food! And then I ate some ice cream.

Then, the next day, I woke up, and I prepared one packet of oatmeal and a half of a cup of 2% milk and a banana and I ate it all slowly and I sat and looked at my plate and said “That’s it?” And I was sad and lonely.

But lunch! Lunch was coming! And at lunch, I would have lettuce and tomatoes and other vegetables and a cucumber (except that my fridge froze my cucumber into a weirdly mushy mass of slush, and that was really interesting) and a can of tuna, all topped off with cottage cheese. I shook it all together (except the cottage cheese) and I sat down and I ate it slowly and I said “Wow. That was kind of disgusting.” And I was sad and lonely.

Dinner was a whole-wheat tortilla with low-fat cheese on, and then microwaved because that's the kind of gourmet I am, and also because I could not bring myself to assemble the fauxrito with spinach and lettuce the nice people at Good Housekeeping wanted me to assemble. And my cheesy tortilla, that was pretty tasty. But underneath, I remained sad and lonely.

Today, today was another sad and lonely day, from the two frozen waffles with fruit spread to the cabbage salad topped with (you guessed it!) cottage cheese, it has been nothing but sadness and loneliness.

I know that the Sad and Lonely diet is kind of ridiculous and overprescribed and undercalorated. But I needed guidelines. Soon enough I'll graduate to big girl eating (that was an unfortunate pun. huh.)

But right this second, right now? I was not going to get back on track without reading a sheet of paper that said “today, you will eat the following [sad and lonely] things.”

I have not been ridiculous about it – if I need more food, I have been eating it. But that has meant, these past two days of sadness and loneliness, eating an apple between meals, or snacking on some pretzels before I go to the gym.

Because I totally went to the gym today! And it was all I could do to spend twenty minutes on the elliptical before bolting at the shower, and I did not even care that the locker room was filled with girls equipped with piercing shrieks. But I swore I wouldn’t do any less than twenty, and I fulfilled my Solemn Promise, and that feels okay. I’ll get back to where I was soon enough. With cottage cheese and four ounces of salmon by my side.

raaaar!

So Guy's moved about a block and a half from his old place. His roommate and his roommate's boyfriend, they went and bought a (big)(beautiful)(gorgeous) house (with a library! They have a library! And? And! A blue jay! And a lemon tree. Not that I'm bitter) and Guy decided that The Time Had Come for Him To Have a Room of His Own, Except By "Room" I Mean "Apartment," But Had I Said "Apartment," You Would Have Missed Out on the Funny Virginia Woolf Allusion.

He moved on top of a hill. No, I'm sorry – a Hill. No, wait - A HILL. This is a city of Hills, and this is a Hill that stacks up to all of the other Hills. This is a Hell of a Hill. It's a Hella Hill. It's Hill Hell.

The first time I came to visit, I got off the bus and walked to the bottom of his street and stood looking up the sheer cliff face and I said "Oh, honey. It was very nice to have known you," and then I took a taxi home.

That is not actually the actual truth, as such. What I really did was bitch, and moan, and bitch and bitch and moan and trudge all the way up to the top of the hill, and then down a few more blocks, and then up the stairs into the lobby and up the lobby stairs and then up the stairs in the lobby to the landing and up the stairs to the first floor and then, I died.

Which would be fine, all the dying every time I come to visit him. I will get used to the sobbing and the dying and I will look at it as a Challenge which I will Masterfully Overcome as I begin to become Fit and Healthy and someday you will see me chung up that hill, just like a little fat train.

What was less fine was doing all that with everything he owns in boxes. The boy owns a lot of stuff. A lot of heavy stuff. He collects boulders, and bowling balls, and blocks of gold is what he does. And I moved it all and went raaaargh! And was powerful and tough.

Then, I moved another friend and her new live-in lover to their beautiful little one-bedroom Love Nest, which also involved a lot of heavy shit. What the fuck is up with people owning heavy shit? Wasn't there a run on inflatable furniture a few years back? My god. But I helped move bookcases and beds and tables and more tables and chairs and boxes, and I went "raaaaar!" and I was very powerful and tough.

And there is a final person to move, this afternoon, and this is a sad move instead of a happy move and I wish I could do something more than lift things for her (and you know, I bet they're heavy things). But lifting things is something I can do, and then go "raaaar!" and then be all powerful and tough.

But I am very, very, very, very tired. That sentence would be totally one hundred percent a reflection of me if it had a paragraph more full of "very." It is nice to see that I am capable of being raaaaar! and strong and accomplishing stuff. It makes me feel a little less hopeless, a little more hope-full, and also really fucking tired.

But I think tonight, after the move, all I will be capable of is going to be watching Invader Zim on DVD (aw, I want to watch the scary monkey show!). Hooray!

okay, then

I have not been posting because it's hard to type when you've got a Christmas turkey nestled under your chin and a pint of ice cream in each hand.

Well, not really. But I continue to be out of control and hating it. I eat whatever (and whatever sure ain't low-fat, high-fiber and rich in nutrients) and I forgot what the inside of the gym looks like and I am a tired old person who feels tired and old and I don't have time to make changes, I just don't. Please pass the bacon.

I've been thinking about it, though. It's hard to not think about it when all your clothes fit poorly and there are lumps where there never have been lumps before and you have before you at all times that image you accidentally caught in a plate glass window when you were chunging down the street all slouchy and butt sticky-outty and rumpled with your shirt riding up and you know that's for certain what you look like, not the image in the mirror where you are standing up straight and tugging down your blouse and squinting a little bit and thinking you look actually kind of respectable.

It's all very depressing, and really, you don't want to hear about it.

(X Y and Z are bad. So change X Y and Z, you say! But I caaaaaaaan't, I whine.)

Things have been crazy, and I can't, I whine. I have friends and loved ones with major life changes, three of which include major apartment moves. I moved three people! Furniture is heavy and makes me tired. And I have papers to write and work to be at for extra hours, now that we've lost a staff member, and assistants to train and an apartment to keep from being condemned and laundry and sleeping and you know all that eating right and exercise stuff? We're not thinking about that so much. The "we" in the previous sentence is not so much royal as enormously fat.

I can't. Not just in the "I don't have time" sense and "here are my excuses" sense and the "but oh, don't you feel sorry for poor me, delicate flower that I AM" sense, but in the "I just. Can't. Think about it right now" sense. I can't. It makes me sorry and sad and angry and upset, but I can't. At night, when everything is over, it is all I can do to crawl into bed with Guy and an order of sesame chicken and watch Iron Chef until we both fall asleep with our mouths open and our teeths unbrushed.

In the meantime, however, however, I have been thinking about goals, in mad dashes from work to bus to moving van to third floor walk up to truck to bus to school to work to etcetera. I printed out a silly meal plan from Good Housekeeping, I made a grocery list, and put together a cart full of stuff to order online as soon as I figure out when I'll be home to accept delivery. And I've come up with a list of rewards, as some of you guys helpfully suggested, for following my stupid meal plan week by week. Little things like an eyebrow wax the first week, a manicure the second, a pedicure the third, a haircut the fourth.

I think I'm going to need diamond-plated rewards for getting to the gym, though. And I think I'm going to make that goal slightly littler. Can you get to the gym two times this week? I'll give you an album from iTunes if you do. How's that? That sounds kind of okay.

Well, okay then.

So when I'm ready to do this, when things quiet down and I can focus again and breathe in deep and out slowly and say okay, then. It's time to start. Everything will be in place, and I will begin. Until then, though? I don't know.