Archive for January, 2010
I’m a creative mind. And as such, I have an infinitely difficult time making decisions. Of all kinds.
Coffee, tea?
Sugar, Splenda?
Blow dry, air dry?
Clean undies…ok, I never travel that route, much to my mother’s relief. Because you never know when that often-talked-about car will come out of nowhere and hit you…
It should be no wonder I can’t decide what form I want my WLR (weight loss resolutions) to take. Do I want to lose pounds? Inches? Sizes? Spare tires? (I do think the Michelin Man and I have far too much in common). Better eating? More exercise?
My god, it’s truly overwhelming to decide what I want. Even if I could make up my mind I wouldn’t know what I wanted.
Yesterday, I slummed around and thought about this goal. I’ve actually had a couple of ideas bouncing around on the brain cave walls, along with those cute monkeys playing the cymbals, for a few months on things I’d like to do:
1. Give up french fries and real pop (soda to you New Yorkers)
2. Work out 30 minutes a day, 5 times a week
3. Walk the dog 20 minutes per day
4. 10 minutes of yoga and/or meditation per day.
These sound like huge time-suckers, but what’s nifty in my life is that, for the most part, I have the time to do them.
I just don’t. Obviously I don’t or my ass wouldn’t be approaching a size where every cartographer I meet on the street does a double-take. I really have no one to blame but myself on this one. My lazy-ass self. Do you hear that, self?
I like these goals. Not resolutions, because resolutions suggest forever–and who’s to say I won’t be shipwrecked sometime on a remote desert island with a spear-toting band of natives and a case of Coke? But the goals themselves lend credence to the thought that I can do something, however small, to get this body at rest into motion. And we all know that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion (or, at least you should if you’re married to Mr. Science like me).
Now, to get to a section of this post relevant to the title…
These goal-utions (my word, goals + resolutions) have not been on paper (or, if you’re getting technical, pixels) until this very post. But, me in my big-mouth state, has been lamenting my fatness for some time. I make all kinds of mouth-promises I never keep: exercise, eat right, develop a stronger Spanx, etc.) One that I’ve said for a while is that I’m giving up fries.
I don’t even like fries. Ok, that’s a little lie: there are a few (two and a half) places who serve fries that I like. One is the little corner bar at the end of my street. They’re exactly like fair fries, not complete without salt and vinegar. Always piping hot and palate-blistering. Love ‘em. The second is Roosters, where the fries (not all that great) come slathered in cheese and bacon (all that great). I suppose I don’t even like the fries–I could technically get a dish of the jalapeno cheese sauce covered in bacon and keep to my goalution. And yes, there’s a .5 place where I like fries–like all red-blooded Americans, I love McDonald’s fries–but ONLY when palate-blistering hot. And getting them that way is a literal crap shoot. More often than not I eat a few and save the rest for the dogger. She loves her some fries!
I can give up McD’s no problemo. I don’t eat there but once a month at most. Roosters…pretty easy. I actually like their salad. Those aren’t words you hear every day. Or ever. I just feel nice today. But Memories’ fries are better than anything on the menu except the reuben. I could just eat a basket of those and no food. I’m going to have a hard time giving those up–not that we eat there a lot, either. (I can’t help it if the waitresses–and owner–know what we want without asking. They must have good memories or something…)
So, while I hadn’t written down these goal-utions, I’ve still blabbed enough about a few of them that even stoneheads like Mr. Science take notice. I’ve stopped ordering fries at Roosters, instead choosing to pilfer a few from the kid. So when we went to Memories last night with the in-laws, I wasn’t paying attention to myself or my goal-utions. I ordered a burger straight up and, without hesitation, the fries. After all–it wasn’t in writing anywhere. I didn’t technically screw up my goalutions if I didn’t actually set them, did I?
About ten minutes into our wait, Mr. Science turns to chat me up. “What did you order?”, he asks.
“Blue Cheese burger and fries.”
His gaze turns slightly thoughtful, slightly smug. “I thought you were giving those up for the new year,” he informs the table. Nothing says “I love you” while attempting to prove you wrong in front of parents.
“Oh, I thought about it,” I recovered. “I’m not starting officially til Monday.” I feel the need to slap the sneer off his face. “Besides, if I didn’t write it down yet, it’s not an official resolution. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Well, since today is tomorrow, and I’ve put it down in writing, I guess I’m giving up fries forever and ever. and ever. I just hope when my plane crashes, it’s nowhere near Idaho. And Mr. Science isn’t around to rub it in.
I’m thinking that since I’ve just made two bold proclamations of my resolutions this year, I should actually come up with the aforementioned resolutions–for both you and me.
Plain and simple like a cake donut without glaze, I need to lose weight. In the past, that means I say I’ll lose XX number of pounds by XX date and go from there–which gets me nowhere, in reality. It’s too easy for me to say that and skedaddle. There’s never a time crunch or a real reason to follow through because, for one, I never tell anyone else. For two, if I don’t lose it, I still like myself enough to overlook the fatness.
But these last few months–even upwards of the last year–I’ve noticed some health issues associated to what I presume is my weight gain and basically lethargic and more sedentary lifestyle choices. (If I move around on FarmVille, my second favorite Facebook game, I really should burn real-life calories. I’m just sayin’…). My right knee, which I damaged when I fell on ice almost 15 years ago, shoots with pain when I climb stairs. My muffin top went from a mini-muffin to a Perkins oversized banana nut muffin. My back aches occasionally when I’m on my feet, due to the lack of yoga and core workouts I used to do religiously. And that’s to say nothing of the size of my ass, which may someday in the near future serve as a land bridge between the US and the UK.
And, more simply, the fact that when Christmas shopping this year, I thought I’d buy myself a new pair of jeans since the price was ridiculously low (and I really don’t buy myself new clothes more than once every two years or so)–but instead of picking up a 14 in the misses, I ended up across the great tile divide at Kohl’s…the women’s section…only comfortable in a 16W. That was the defining moment for me. Yes, big can be beautiful. But not if it’s embarrassed to buy something off the rack that has a second use as a table cloth. My commentary on bigger sizes is against me, not the bigger girls–because bigger for my body is unhealthy. (that may not be the case with other 16W).
Enough with the PC of my 16W. Needless to say, those pants are comfortable but they make me feel crappy that I’ve let myself get out of shape to this extent. For all the insurance charts that get shoved in our faces from weight loss companies, I know my “right” weight for my 5’8 frame is nothing in the 140s. I’m much more realistic about that than most people. I could be happy with something in the 160s or even low 70s. The lowest I recall since high school (where I was a svelte 140 in my senior year and still looked like a chunk of dough compared to my waif-like friends in the 110s) has been in the 190s. In the 190s I felt good. Strong. Solid. Skinny–although to be honest I hate the word skinny.
So, ultimately, I’m still wavering on whether my goal will be pounds lost, sizes shed or something else–possibly workout minutes per week or some such variable–but the final goal is my 40th birthday–April of 2011–in a size and shape never witnessed before in the adult years of Beth’s life.
And I will refuse to consider the fact that a land bridge between the US and UK might financially secure me for the rest of my natural-born life…even if it would be easier.
Like the hype of a crying quarterback from a swamp who led his team to a whomping of a team (sold out by their coach) that should have stuck with playing the small schools they were created to play, starting resolutions on January 1st is overrated–and here’s why.
Part of the reason annual resolution-making sucks is because we start on the wrong day. Hey, in case you missed it, January 1st is a holiday. Now, no big deal to some of you, but to us college football fans, it’s a pigskin-related excuse to eat all kinds of junk we wouldn’t normally eat on a regular day. Plus, there’s the prerequisite good luck food for the new year, based on whatever culture you associate yourself with: cabbage for the Germans, beans for the Mexicans, spicy chicken wings for the Buffaloeans. Being of Heinz 57 ethnicity, as mom likes to say, we go more for the Germanic cultural heritage than the Irish and Scottish on January 1st and require our family to eat some type of pork and cabbage-based product. Mom’s is roast and sauerkraut; mine is sausage and cabbage egg rolls. Who, in their right mind, wants to start of the new year by shunning the food that will bring them loads of luck in the upcoming year–only in the name of weight loss.
Not me. Plus, each time I ate an egg roll, the Buckeyes scored against the Ducks. What kind of person would I be to make my team suffer by not eating those yummy, home made egg rolls in the name of being skinny? I didn’t eat them for myself, I ate them in the knowledge that we’d finally improve our bowl record under Tressel and shed the misconception that the Big Ten-Leven can’t play with the big boys. A bowl win based on egg rolls…you’d better believe it. True, our quarterback can’t walk on water and heal the blind like *some* quarterbacks, but he’s a star in my book any day.
So, back to the original thought–January 1st is a holiday. It’s convoluted to start a resolution drive on the first. I did the sane thing and waited til today to officially throw down the gloves for the duel. Now that the gloves are down, what are my plans? Guess you’ll just have to tune in for the next blog post to find out…(I promise, it won’t be long.)
I’m not the resolution type. I mean–of course I’ve set resolutions in the past. I’ve resolved to be nicer (but I still hate certain people from my past who locked me in a closet at a Girl Scout meeting), resolved to be a better mom (and I have–I bought the kid a Wii after listening to his complaints for over a year, only to have him save his money and buy himself a PlayStation 3), resolved to clean the house more often (sometimes holidays just aren’t enough).
I’ve had differing amounts of success with resolutions. Some come and go, some stick around for a few years until I shed the need for them like a snake sheds skin. But one of them–ONE of them–that got started back in the mid 80s still hangs around my head in the New Year stretch of the holiday season like a buzzing gnat that refuses to die off in the cold, Ohio winters. Don’t act like you have no idea what I’m talking about here–you do. You just won’t admit it yourself at the risk of realizing you’ve been doing the same damn thing.
Weight loss.
If you’ve lived our American consumeristic, infomercial-based capitalistic society for any length of time and haven’t set a goal to A) lose weight , B)eat less, C)exercise more, or D) replace two meals a day with a powdered mix that tastes like a combination of cocoa, saccharin and sawdust, then my post does not apply to you. Consider yourself excused. Go flit around someone else’s blog–what we discuss here will bore you senseless. (But, if you’re lying to me and yourself by saying you’ve never set a diet resolution because you’re going to feel the guilty sting of a goal not accomplished and you don’t like feeling like a failure, read on at your own risk).
I really don’t set resolutions anymore, much. I have learned, through trial and error and failure, to set my writing goals by the quarterly change of the calendar. This keeps them fresh for me. It really does work, too. But in adopting this plan for my writing, I’ve left my weight loss goals in the dust. I don’t set them anymore because I know I’ll fail them. I’ve been working harder to accept myself–my overweight self–the way I am, and that’s not cutting it, either. So, as I pondered the new year, the fact that I am now into 16W pants again, a place I SWORE I would never be again in my life after eight months of carrot sticks and skim milk, I have to shift my thinking. Not into setting a resolution to lose weight so I can finally be the girl who fits into Jordache jeans (hey, I told you this started in the 80s. Don’t make me bring out the rest of those fashion memories…), but the adoption of a mindset that will lead me into facing my 40s (16 short months away) in a healthy body. I’m not after size or scale number (liar, but seriously), but instead a mentality that will have me searching for ways to cut out the crap and leave my life only with the good stuff.
And since I’m so easily embarrassed by social media public humiliation tactics, I figured–where better to start this journey and blab it all over town than my blog? I debated changing the name, but hey, I may eventually be in a size 12 but I’ll still love me some donuts. Plus–I am soooooo done with fad diets and all that stuff–I want to learn to be healthy and still sneak in a donut or two. Look at Homer–he scarfs them regularly and still leads a (semi) active life. I’m not talking cramming in a half-dozen at a sitting like I’ve done in the past, but everything in moderation.
Except my blogging. Once I realized the potential for publicly humiliating myself into action via blogging, I jumped at the chance. I suppose, like all writing endeavors, I will start strong and dwindle later, but with the addition of my new iPod touch (and a strong wifi connection), I may be able to blog more often. Shame they won’t be as rambling as this post, I know, but at least you’ll know I didn’t fall down a healthy, whole-grain rabbit hole on my way to skinnydom.
With all that said..erm…typed…let’s get this show on the road.