ballin!

lost 3 lbs since Friday.  Please excuse me while I am COMPLETELY unoriginal (see this amazing blog) and toot my own horn.  TOOT TOOT!

yayyy presents!

After I lose 10 lbs, I will get myself-- new nail polish

25 lbs- iPhone

40 lbs- wayfarers!  but if it's winter by then (hope not) then i'll get a massage

50 lbs- tattoo with the date i hit my goal weight, hopefully XII IV MMXI, and my weight, hopefully CXXV...plus obvi a vacation somewhere

wompwomp

Pretty sure no one is following my blog at the moment, which isn't totally unexpected because the last time I posted was almost a year ago.  Anyway, to any weight loss veterans it will come as no surprise that after doing Ideal Protein (a crazy starvation diet) I lost about 25 lbs in 2 months...and proceeded to gain it all back in the next 6 months or so.  Whoops.  I kind of want to beat myself up about this, and I spent the last few months doing that.  In fact, I was too terrified to weigh myself until just now because I was sure that I had gained 500 lbs.  I faced my fear of the scale, and found that I had gained exactly 20 lbs since my last real weigh in, back in November.  So, I feel kind of bad about that.  I mean, I felt a lot worse about it in the last few months and thought I was absolutely terrible, but I've made peace with myself recently.
I knew I had gained some (and was pretty sure it was in the 20-30 lb range) and made a plan to lose 40 lbs by the end of the summer.  I thought this was totally realistic and that I could just not eat and exercise my ass off and it would happen.  So after two weeks of frustration I went to the nutritionist yesterday and whined about how I did't think I was losing any weight (of course I had no way of knowing because I was too scared to weigh myself).  I told her what I'd been doing and she said that I wasn't eating enough calories, that my goals were unrealistic, and that the only way I would be satisfied would be to adjust my expectations.  I literally almost cried.  And for anyone who knows me, I absolutely never, ever cry.  The last time was over a year ago.  Anyway, this was a huge blow to my ego because I was sure that I could starve my way down to the 120s-130s by August.  As the co-director of an on campus eating disorders prevention group, I know this is a terrible idea.  Sometime in the last 24 hours, I've made peace with all of this, and decided to give myself permission to lose the weight at my own pace, in a healthy way.  I learned two really important lessons from Ideal Protein back in the fall:
1) I can lose weight!  Until then, I had spent 20 years believing that I absolutely cannot lose weight, and that I am defective in some way, so all of my efforts just seemed like wastes of time,
2) I cannot keep the weight off if I lose it that fast, in a way that involves starving and eating nothing!  Again, as an intelligent person, I know this is true, but my ego still tells me that I'll be the exception to the rule.  Whatever.  I now know that I'm not.
So, as of today,  I'm about 2.5 weeks into what will be my LAST WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY EVER. I've learned so much over the last 14 or so years of dieting (yes, this translates into dieting since age 6) and I think I'm finally ready to say fuck the diets and do it the way I know I'm supposed to.
So I'll be weighing in every Friday morning (that way I can drink away the sadness over the weekend haha), and hopefully as the weeks go by, the pounds will go bye!  (so lame)

Anyway, today my weight is 175.6
Here's to never seeing that number again.

IP and Pottery

I recently started doing pottery out of boredom, and discovered that I love it/am obsessed with it.  I spent 8 hours in the pottery studio in the last two days.  It’s been a really great stress reliever and an outlet for me.  School hasn’t been that stressful, but ideal protein has been really emotionally difficult.  There are constant up days and down days, and the process of creating art from a lump of nothing helps me deal with this emotional roller coaster.  Also, now that I actually have some concept of what I’m doing  (after a week of constant practice) pottery gives me a lot of confidence.  Today, I made a really nice, and somewhat difficult bowl in about 5 minutes.  I loved the bowl at the end, and did it in a really short amount of time.  I’ve spent a lot of time (when I’m not actually doing pottery) thinking about it and how it’s enriched my daily life and weight loss journey.   It wasn’t until today that the analogy between sculpting and molding my body and sculpting and molding clay.  When I first started last week, I would get really frustrated.  The main barrier of pottery (for me) has been mental.  If you do something to the clay, it will respond, but you have to believe that you can make it respond, and not that it’s controlling you.  This is really important for working on the wheel; any tiny movement of your hand can make a huge difference: positive or negative.  The most difficult part of throwing on the wheel is centering, which is basically turning a misshapen lump into a smooth, perfectly round shape.  This is difficult because it requires keeping the hands absolutely still in one position while the clay spins around haphazardly bumping into them, until it eventually adopts the shape of the hands.  This can take 30 seconds, or 5 minutes, depending on various factors like the moisture level of the clay, how still you actually keep your hands, how misshapen the clay is, how fast the wheel spins, etc.  The biggest hurdle in learning how to center correctly is maintaining the position of the hands no matter what and knowing that eventually, the clay will yield to their shape. I think my frustration (and eventual accomplishment) with learning how to center clay is really similar to the frustration that I’ve had with losing weight.  Results are happening, I’ve lost 25 pounds (the most I’ve ever lost), but I still feel frustrated and want it to happen faster.  As with throwing, I need to believe that if I keep up with my program, which has worked amazingly thus far, I’ll continue to lose weight. A huge mental barrier for me is the fact that I’ve never seen myself not overweight, so I can’t really wrap my head around the concept of myself at a normal weight When you begin centering a lump of clay, it’s impossible to know what the finished product will look like.  All you can do is move your hands through the right motions at the right time, and if you do everything correctly, you end up with a piece of art.  It’s never perfect, but it’s beautiful.

Ideal Protein

Day 6 on Ideal Protein, 9 lbs lost so far.  The first 3-4 days sucked, but they're finally becoming worth it.  Cheating has become much less of a temptation, and my answer to cravings is reading Paula's Home Cooking recipes and fantisizing about which one's I'll be making once I'm done with the program.  Not that I'm gonna go on an out of control junk food binge (at least not a huge one).  As we all know, every diet tells you you need to "change your lifestyle" to see permanent results.  The thing is, my lifestyle has always been great, so why is my weight such that I need to be on a diet in the first place?  Actually, a lot of people at Ideal Protein shared the same predicament before staring the program.  They've eaten well and exercised (some obsessively, myself included) their entire lives, but have always been overweight.  Whenever I would see people like this on infomercials for overpriced diets and exercise equipment I was the first to call bullshit.  If you're fat, it's your fault, right?  For most people, that's true, but my first week on Idea Protein, in addition to reading about the science behind it, has made me start to believe that this isn't always the case.  For some of us, a shitshow of a pancreas is to blame.  Now, a lot of people have a shitshow of a pancreas because of their shitshow of a diet (hence the type-2 diabetes epidemic in this country).  However, there is a small minority of people who were born this way.  My brother and I recently discovered we were part of this unfortunate group.  Being born with a sluggish pancreas makes it nearly impossible to lose weight without a program such as Ideal Protein, and causes the body to store everything as fat from a young age.  I'm no expert on physiology, but I will say it's known that complications during pregnancy can lead to this problem.  I always knew that 1) I have a weight problem that seemed impossible to correct and 2) my mom DID have complications during her pregnancy with me.  Enter Ideal Protein.  It feels like a miracle, because, for once in the 12 years that I have spent being on some kind of diet, my efforts have finally begun paying off.  Talk about a godsend.