Hiding from the Sun

Oh my gah! What a gorgeous day it was today...sunny and 72 degrees. I went out to get my hair done---got it colored and trimmed. I left with my jacket on, but soon realized I wouldn't need it. I felt so uncomfortable. I like winter, except for the cold part. I can be covered up from neck to toes. I was tugging at my t-shirt all day, trying to cover up my fat. As if I could. I hate this so much.

Funnel-headed Dog

Took Josh to the vet yesterday because he's been limping for a couple of days. He cried once when he was "playing" with Heidi, so we thought maybe she had hurt him when jumping on him. Turns out he has an infected toe. Actually he has TWO infected toes. It turns out this is common in German Shepherds. They get some weird toe fungal infection. Yuk! So since his licking the foot constantly has made it worse he has an Elizabethan collar on. He does. not. like. it. Heidi has this habit of licking his ears (the vet said his ears were really clean! LOL). When we got home she ran up to him and started licking the plastic. She couldn't figure out why she couldn't get to his ears.

Someone at work asked me if I was losing weight. I don't know...haven't weighed myself. My eating has been considerably better, so it is a possibility. But I am not going to jinx myself by getting on the scale (yes, I have a scale phobia). Yesterday at work I had to do an environmental walk-through. It took over an hour and a half (actually I had to leave before it was over to take Josh to the vet). Everything hurt! My knees, ankles, back. I still haven't started exercising, that has to be my next step. I know that when I exercise it really helps my back and knees, so why do I hesitate? I think maybe it's the commitment. Once I start I know I really need to do something every single day. If I skip one day, it makes it somehow easier to skip 2 days, then 3, then 3 years. When I think that it has been 3years since I exercised regularly I am ashamed.

Things have been okay at work. The new manager and I are working well together, so maybe I overreacted to what happened last week. We'll see.

A quote for the day:
“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.” -La Rochefoucauld

Sabotage/Flabotage

Summer over at Mommy Needs Coffee wrote a great post about how we sabotage ourselves in our weight loss journey. I started to reply in her comments, but I then I thought it would be a good subject to blog about myself.

I have sabotaged myself so many times. In 1994 I lost a hundred pounds. I didn't see any difference in the mirror for the longest time. It took seeing pictures of myself that were unrecognizable to realize how far I had come. My best friend at the time took one look at a picture of me on a field trip with my class and blurted out, "Wow, you look normal!" And she was right, I did. Even though I was still over a hundred pounds from goal, I looked really good. I managed to lose a bit more weight before my first Cruise to Lose in 1995, but once that was over, I slowly began to gain the weight back. By the time I went on my next cruise in 1996 I had gained about 30 pounds back. It seems that whenever people start complimenting me and paying attention to my weight loss, I sabotage myself. I lost between 80 and 100 pounds several more times, only to shoot myself down again.

There is definitely some kind of fear there...but fear of what? Why am I afraid of losing weight and being healthy? Is part of it fear of disappointing people who believe in me? I do think that part of it is that when I was very young, like 12 to 14 years old, I looked older than I was (and I was quite thin at the time) and I received a lot of confusing, scary, and inappropriate attention from men.

My mom was a fat kid who got teased a lot, and she was determined that I not be fat. She had me on diets from the time I was seven. When I look back at the pictures I wasn't a fat kid. She will say this is because she controlled what I ate. I don't blame her anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for me. Although I do think that in the past a lot of my eating was rebellious, I can't blame it on that any more. In one of Geneen Roth's books, she says, in essence, "I will never have a happy childhood." It's time to get over that and get on with my life. I was beaten as a kid, but I long ago forgave my father for that, and he has been gone for almost 18 years, so there's no need for fear there.

But yet, still the fear persists. I wonder if I will ever understand the fear or if I will just have to combat it for the rest of my life.

****************************

After what happened at work on Thursday, I feel my days there are numbered. I need to prepare myself for finding another job, and one of the first parts of that, for me, is getting some weight off so I feel more comfortable and more confident about meeting new people. I know they will keep me around at least until June, because that is when our audit will be, so I have a couple of months to get a good start on making the lifestyle changes I need to make.

Ms. Undastood

Warning: This may be a very whiny post.

I got in trouble at work today.

My boss called me into her office and said that I was too negative, rude, and asked me if I was passive aggressive. She then brought up all these other times that I have apparently been negative and inappropriate. What do I call the fact that she saved all this up instead of speaking to me the first time she felt this way about what I said? This was in reference to meetings with other departments in the same agency, where I felt I was being honest, not negative. I don't really remember what I said specifically, so I don't know what she construed as being negative/rude. I can be very blunt, so I can see how this might be seen as being rude to someone who doesn't really know me, but, damn, I felt so ambushed and soooooo frustrated. I tried not to be defensive, but really didn't know how to respond. I felt tears welling up, so I just concentrated on not crying. Just kept nodding. I don't know what to do now. I am going to be afraid to open my mouth. I always felt it was okay to voice my opinion, but obviously it's not.

On the plus side, I managed not to cry until I got in my car and off the property.

Calling Dr. Doolittle!

My old dog, Jake, when it thundered, would curl up back by the closed bedroom doors. It was like a little cave where he would be protected from the lightning. This was only a problem when I needed to leave my bedroom and he refused to move. Climbing over a 75 pound dog when I had to pee was not easy. Josh, however. cowers by the stove--the place where the most electricity comes into the house, as far as I can figure. It's really hard to work around a 95 pound dog shivering in the middle of your very small kitchen. Sigh. The girl dog, on the other hand, could not care less. We think she's not the sharpest tool in the shed, so is she too dumb to be afraid???

The late, great Jake "helping" me exercise, circa sometime in the '90's---






The cats are not allowed on my sheets or up near the pillows. I am mildly allergic to cats, so I really cannot be inhaling cat dander all night. Now they are both smart enough to know I don't want them on the sheets or at the top of the bed. How do I know this? Because as soon as I walk into the bedroom, they get up and move off of the sheets (if I have left the bed unmade--this can happen in the 2 minutes it takes me to, again, pee) or move down to the bottom of the bed. Beyotches. Sigh...

Richard sez

Be my own best friend.

That's kind of an interesting concept. I mean, really, would I ever treat my best friend as badly as I treat myself? Would I call my best friend failure, ugly, repulsive or stupid? Would I give my best friend things I know are not good for her? Would I put my best friend last?

Food for thought. (heh, food!)

Spring, my ass!

So, yesterday was the first day of Spring and it snowed. At least it didn't stick. Today it was freezing again. I got myself a new Spring pocketbook, but I refuse to wear it with my winter coat!!!

I don't plant anything directly in the earth in my yard. I've always had problems with moles and they ate everything I planted or moved it around. So now every year three rogue surviving crocuses come up in different areas of the front lawn. I start looking for them a few weeks before Spring starts. So, yay, Tuesday I see the first crocus!!! I took its picture with my cell phone. And Friday it snows. Poor little crocus. It's still there but not looking too healthy. I can't wait until it's time to plant flowers in all my planters. Then I will know it's really Spring!

So, this is my blog issue. I'm on the computer so much at work that when I get home I don't want to even look at a computer any more. So I don't go on the computer for a few days. Then I realize I am going to have a ton of mail to deal with, so I don't want to go on the computer even more! 'Til finally, 2 or 3 weeks later, I say, "I've really got to go on the computer." Whereupon I spend 2 and 1/2 hours reading e-mails. And those are only the ones I consider worth reading. Out of 380 I read 102.

So, this is my issue with American Idol. The contestants have to sing songs from a different genre each week. This week was country music. I like some country music, especially Garth Brooks, but I digress. This is supposedly so the judges and the American public can see that the contestants can perform at least adequately in all genres of music. So why is it that when the contestants take a perfectly good country song and sing it in a non-country way in a non-country arangement they get the highest praise from the judges? Is a puzzlement. Maybe I am getting over reality TV.

So, this is my issue with work. I don't want to do it anymore. Most of what I have to do is such an agonizing bore that I cannot force myself to focus. I wander out of my office looking for other things to do. But if I don't do my work, no one else will. And, yes, of course, I know I am lucky to have a job. So the papers just continue to pile up on my desk, and I still need to write an annual in-service to give the week after next.

So, this is my issue with weight. Once upon a time, I lost a hundred pounds in 12 weeks, and I wasn't even on The Biggest Loser. And I didn't do it in an unhealthy way, either. I just got up one morning and it all clicked. I started exercising that very day, even though I could only manage 15 minutes, and started eating right. In about a year after that I managed to lose another 50 pounds. I was no where near goal, but felt awesome. I'm the opposite of what usually happens, I lost the weight fast and gained it back really slow. So slow that I almost didn't notice it. I'm noticing it now, and hoping for another "click," but it just doesn't seem to be happening. I'm starting to realize that it may never happen again and I will have to slog my way through kicking and screaming, and probably crying. I do remember how happy I was then, but it seems so far away...