Diet
So I doubt I will make this post public, but I’ve got to get it out of my head.
In the span of the last month, we have taken two small vacations and I have treated both like a fat kid in a candy shop with unlimited money.
The first was my birthday trip to Solvang/SLO that was mostly centered around eating anyway. I anticipated gaining a good chunk during that trip. It was my 50th birthday and I’d been so good for so long that I didn’t care.
What I didn’t take into much consideration is that I hadn’t really allowed myself enough time to lose the weight that I gained before heading straight into another vacation.
The Laughlin trip was booked simply because we got such a great deal on it. At $350 total for the two of us for four nights, hotel and airfare included it seemed too good to be true so we booked it right away. The problem was that the dates were immovable. I didn’t much care at the time of booking because we hadn’t had our Solvang trip yet and I was still very much in vacation anticipation mode.
Having said that, three weeks was really not enough time in between vacations to either lose the weight I gained in the first trip, or really build up enough excitement for the second trip.
While we had a good time, it felt forced.
I was looking forward to not having to go to work, but since we had just come off a fantastic trip a couple weeks prior, I knew it wasn’t going to be matched.
Because I have been on a diet for so long now, my vacation mindset is to just eat like a crazy person the entire time I am there. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, we had a few trips to Vegas where I embraced the challenge of eating within maintenance calories and working out daily — coming home from a couple trips having lost a half a pound! I still had a great time and indulged in thing I wouldn’t normally, but in moderation, like you are supposed to.
I’m not sure exactly when the switch flipped for me but at some point vacations turned into “eat all the things, as much and as often as you can” and it has really kind of taken over the whole vacation mentality. Instead of planning things to do, I plan things to eat.
Don’t get me wrong, we still do things, but once the plans are in place it all becomes about the food that can be obtained in those settings. I know it’s not healthy and I know that it stems from depriving myself for so long, but I’m not quite sure how to stop it either.
When I said it felt forced in Laughlin, part of that was the food. As dumb as it sounds I felt like I was forcing myself to eat all the “bad” things as much as possible. Even if I was craving a salad, I ordered fish n chips. At Starbucks I wanted an oat milk shaken espresso but instead I got a white chocolate frap with extra drizzle on top and lined in the cup. At one point in the little cafe by the pool I couldn’t get an iced decaf latte (they had a machine that made the lattes from beans and had no decaf beans, just grounds for drip coffee) so instead of asking for a regular drip decaf poured over ice and making my own, I got a large milkshake with extra whipped cream. These things that I ordered where not what I wanted, but my brain screamed at me that I had to get the “bad” items because I wouldn’t be able to get them when I get back from vacation.
This is a form of self sabotage, yes. However, it’s coming from a deeper issue and that is that by being in a caloric deficit for so long, I have set something off in my brain so that it no longer knows how to do things in moderation. That’s not true…it knows, it just doesn’t want to.
We got back yesterday and since we were still technically on vacation, I was forcing myself to eat all the things we had leftover from my snacklebox and the room snacks. I was so full I really could have skipped dinner but instead I had the dinner and then a big bowl of ice cream too!
I got on the scale this morning since Saturday morning, I have gained 13 pounds. Now I am aware that a lot of that is water, however, I am also aware that none of my clothes are fitting properly. I gained 13.8 pounds during the Solvang trip and only managed to lose about 8 of that before setting off on this trip and gaining more.
My size two jeans are way too tight to wear and I feel so very puffy and gross.
The good news is that I have no other trips on the horizon right now. Rob is talking about a short trip to Santa Cruz but that’s not until September, so I have quite a bit of time to buckle down and start shedding what I gained but to what end?
Putting myself back into a significant deficit is only going to make my head that much worse isn’t it? If I don’t though, won’t I just keep gaining?
The thought of getting fat again scares the living shit out of me.
I was doing pretty good at the reverse dieting thing before the Solvang trip so I know that I can do that again once I get back down to where I was. I just need to remember that the deficit is not forever. I can raise my calories again and will, once I get the rest of this off.
But whatever I do, I cannot let this weight gain get away from me. I will NOT let myself spiral out of control and gain all my weight back!!
Ugh, I hate this.
Things have been puttering right along here at the casa de Shrinking Kelly. I finally got a new job at the end of March and I’m really enjoying it for the most part.
I’m just an admin assistant, but they met the salary that I was at on my last job so that was unexpected and nice. It’s mostly stress free and I really enjoy the people that I work with.
I’m not sure I ever touched on how stressful my last job was. My office manager back then was a total headcase. Like, no joke, she needed to be on medication for her mental illnesses. She would scream and yell and throw things on the daily and you never knew what you were in for when you showed up at work.
It really ignited my PTSD from my childhood in the worst way possible and for about the last year or two it REALLY messed with my mental well-being.
Having said that, this job has NONE of that and it is so freeing. To come home from work and not bring major emotional damage with me is just so amazing I can’t even put it into words.
It did however, take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things as far as actually putting on clothes and leaving my house. 🤣🤣
The first two weeks I was completely exhausted and could barely function when not at work, but that eventually sorted itself out and I seem to have found my groove.
I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to maintain my level of exercise once I started working again. In fact, I told myself that I would keep at it for a week or two and then move it down to a more “reasonable” level.
Since I lost my job at the end of November, I’ve been managing to get in at least an hour of cardio most every day. Let’s face it, I had nothing better to do at the time and it was really helping with the mental stress I had at being stuck at home 24/7 for four months.
It was that very reason that I wanted to continue it for at least the first week or two of the new job. I knew that I would be nervous and that working out in that capacity would leave me clear headed and less anxious about the new position.
I’ve never been a morning person. Like, ever. It has always been a major struggle for me to get up and get going in the morning, be it school or work. If given my druthers I would sleep until early afternoon and then stay up all night. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That just simply isn’t an option in the real world, so I would settle for sleeping until the last possible second before getting up and doing the bare minimum (shower, brush my teeth and get dressed) before getting in the car and heading to work. No make up, no time to gather my thoughts and certainly no exercise.
With the new job, I just didn’t give myself any other alternative. It helped that I don’t have to be to the new job until nine whereas my old job I had to be there at 7:30, but I just didn’t let myself slide at all. I woke up every morning at 5:30 and was working out by six. No excuses.
After a couple of weeks, I realized that I hadn’t died from lack of sleep and actually enjoyed going to bed early for the most part. Once I reached that understanding with myself, it was fairly easy to just keep going and now it is just habit.
I even incorporate it on weekends too if I have to be somewhere, I just do the backwards math of when I would have to get up in order to be able to get my workout in and then set my alarm. There is no question (a couple of minor exceptions being 5:00 AM departures for whatever reason – mostly travel related) in my mind and therefore I just do it.
There is no way that I would be able to have done any of this if it weren’t for losing my job, so when they say that everything happens for a reason, there is a certain amount of truth to that.
With this level of exercise, I’ve been able to take off and keep off almost 45 pounds since my old job closed its doors without killing myself with super restricted calories. That’s a total of almost 70 pounds since starting this weight loss reboot back in January of 2021 (with 5 months off in the middle there somewhere).
Don’t get me wrong, I do keep myself in a calorie deficit for the most part, but nowhere near as restrictive as I used to be in the past. I don’t really feel deprived at all and I enjoy eating my maintenance calories on the weekends to allow for the big calorie items I might be craving. It’s a formula that *knocks wood* is working so far and I’m thrilled.
It no longer feels like a diet and it finally feels like a lifestyle.
I know, I know. I am a horrible blog owner. This is not new news, I’ve always been bad at keeping up to date. It just takes so long to write out what is going on sometimes.
So while it is not new news, it is not bad news like it normally is when I take a break from writing on here.
If you are following my youtube channel (and if you’re not, why aren’t you??) than you already know this. I took a five month break from the diet in June after a trip to Vegas derailed me and I let myself spiral out of control as far as eating was concerned.
It’s been my pattern for years, so why should it have been any different this time right?
Welp, I reeled it back in late October and started implementing exercise in mid December. Aside from the occasional cheat weekend I’ve been on track ever since. I even went to Vegas for 11 days this month and stayed on track, losing a half a pound (you can check out my youtube vlogs on that trip here and here)!!
The unfortunate thing that has really helped with my weight loss was losing my job in November. It was sudden, mostly unexpected and it really threw me for a loop. Having said that, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to get me focused on my health and allowing me the time to put into my meal plans and exercise that I had been wanting to do.
I’ve been enjoying the time off but I have to say I’m reaching the point where I’m kind of needing more stimulation than I’m getting. I envied my husband when he got to work from home for a year during the first lockdown but I now see why he said it was taking a toll on his mental health.
Not having much social interaction other than my husband is getting to me. I never thought that would happen because as a general rule I pretty much hate people and prefer to stay in my house. Having said that, I can see why we as humans need some sort of emotional and mental connection with other humans. The problem is that I have been without a lot of it for so long that just being around a group of people for a couple of hours just exhausts me and takes me a couple of days to recover. It’s a double edged sword, but I know it is something that I have to work on if I expect to get back into the working world soon.
The other problem is that I feel like I have lost all my friends. I didn’t have that many to begin with, but I feel like I have isolated myself so much (starting with the pandemic and really intensifying the last few months) that I think that everyone has just given up on me. I don’t say this to solicit sympathy, I just feel like it’s a fact. It does get me quite down and I really don’t know what to do about it.
The truth is, I’m a pretty shitty friend. I don’t mean to be, but I’m aware that is a true statement. I hardly ever respond to texts or messages within the same day let alone right when I get them. I unintentionally ghost people and I really don’t know how to stop that. I get so caught up in my own head and all the crazy that is swirling around in there that I forget to put in an effort into my friendships. Why would anyone put up with that? I sure wouldn’t. And so I feel like they have all (justifiably) given up on me.
My few token efforts to try and rekindle friendships have mostly been met with indifference and I really can’t say I blame them. That is the worst part of it. I really have no one to blame but myself on this and that is a shitty thing to realize about yourself. I used to pride myself on being a great friend and now I feel like a failure. It would be nice to be delusional and put the blame on everyone else but that wouldn’t make sense. One or two people not wanting to be my friend anymore would be one thing, but everyone? Not so much. It’s a really crappy feeling when you realize you are the reason people don’t like you. People that used to actually care about you, really can’t be bothered with the way you are any longer. That stings, because I can’t deflect that.
It’s a lot to deal with and it’s been weighing heavy on my brain the last couple of weeks.
I suppose I could just start fresh and try to make new friends that aren’t aware of that icky side to me yet, but what good would that do? They would find out eventually and it would happen all over again. Besides, I LIKE my friends and I would really like to work on winning them back and becoming a better friend again.
My husband mentioned that his work offers five free counseling sessions. I’m seriously thinking about it. I’ve always done well with therapy when I’m conscious of the effort that needs to be put in and I actually do it. Maybe it’s time to realize that I’ve been in a slippery downhill slope mentally since the pandemic and mom dying and that I cannot handle it on my own any longer.
Exercise helps me on a day to day basis as far as keeping me functioning, but I think I need more.
Welp, it’s been a minute since I wrote in here.
Things have been going along swimmingly. If you follow my youtube channel, you will know that the last two weeks I had fairly large losses for me, and that made me happy.
I have been exercising regularly and that has made a huge difference. I started with Walk Away the Pounds DVD’s but in the last week and a half, switched to the treadmill – which we just got back up and running.
I’ve been doing really well on it. The last couple of days of last week and this past Monday, I managed to do 2 miles a day. Pretty cool.
Cut to Tuesday morning. All is well, I shower and drive to work. I get to work and sit down at my desk and something … doesn’t feel right. I have felt this sensation before, many years ago. It kind of feels like my thigh bone has somehow disconnected a bit from my hip bone.
It was familiar and uncomfortable but not yet painful. However, as the day wore on it went downhill rapidly. By 12:30 I was unable to sit in that office chair any longer and came home to lay on ice in bed. I called my current chiropractor but she was unable to get me in until Wednesday at 11:15 AM.
I rested all evening and it just kept getting worse. The pain would travel from my hip to my outer thigh, to the back of my thigh to my inner thigh. Sitting down on the toilet was UNBEARABLE.
I managed to get some sleep and it was the same if not worse the next morning.
The one and only other time this happened to me, it happened over the course of a couple of days not suddenly like this one. And my chiro at the time (sadly, now retired) was able to give my leg a swift pull when I least expected it and the leg popped back into place. I remember it feeling better instantly.
This time, not so much. The onset of the worst of the pain happened in hours and and my new chiro didn’t quite know what to do other than make some adjustments even after I told her what happened last time.
A bit of a backstory–
–Last October my husband and I drove to Vegas for a socially distanced trip to renew our vows for our 20 year anniversary.
I wasn’t in Vegas more than fifteen minutes when I fell down an escalator. See, I’m afraid of heights and escalators are bad for me on a good day when they are going down. My husband has to stand in front of me and I have to hold onto the railings for dear life. Well, we were trying to check into the hotel and we couldn’t find an elevator to get down the one floor to the registration desk. There was however an escalator. My husband and I both had two suitcases and a backpack on, so I would have to get on the escalator while it was moving with both suitcases and not be able to hold onto the railings. I’m cringing now five months later, just typing this.
You can see where this is going right? As soon as I stepped on with the luggage I went cross eyed from panic and immediately fell onto my left hip. I’m not a small woman and when I fall, I fall hard. This was no exception.
A wonderful man saw me eat it and followed me onto the escalator to grab one of my suitcases and help me up. My husband was on the other side begging me to get up before we got to the end of the escalator as I was wearing a dress and there was no way he could lift me up before the escalator ate my clothing.
I laid there wide eyed, clutching both suitcases handles in sheer panic for what felt like fifteen minutes but it was just a matter of seconds. I finally pulled myself up and made it to the end with no further incidences.
I was not unscathed however.
Long story short, I had a GIANT hematoma on my left hip that lasted about …well, it is still there, but now it’s really tiny, but the worst of it lasted like, three months. It was the size of a grapefruit.
I was sure that I had broken something (would never admit that to the hubs and ruin the trip) so even after we got back, I refused to go to the doctor because I didn’t want to know if something was critically wrong with me (that is how my brain works). I didn’t go to the chiro even though I knew every part of my hips and spine were out of alignment, because I was scared that if I HAD broken something, her messing around might make it worse. Eventually the pain got better (months later) and I just wanted to forget about it.
Back to the present —
— My chiro told me yesterday that by her calculations, I had really thrown my body out of whack in the fall, but since I never got it checked and I wasn’t really that active, my body just adjusted and got used to the body being out of alignment. However, my recent foray into exercising and more importantly walking on the treadmill had made my body revolt and say: “ENOUGH!”
So, that is what happened to my right hip … or something like that.
As soon as she laid me down on the table she took one look at my back and said: “Oh wow.” before she even touched anything. And I have a pretty large layer of fat over my bones that isn’t easy to see through. She said my pelvis was so far pushed to the back on my right side that if she put a marble on my back it would roll immediately to the left and fall to the floor.
She adjusted me a lot and told me to give it 48 hours.
I came straight home from the appt and laid on ice.
It was even MORE painful last night but I knew that it would be as I had just been put back into place after being out for five months.
This morning it felt a bit better so I went into work, but left by 10:30 because sitting in that office chair was unbearable again. Also, I didn’t want to screw up all the work that she had done the day before.
I got up and got something to eat a few minutes ago (3:00PM) and it is feeling a LOT better. Still sore and noticeable, and sitting on the toilet still hurts a lot, but much better.
The reason I tell y’all this story is to explain that I am fully expecting to gain on my weigh in Saturday. I haven’t been able to exercise since Monday and being stuck in the house on “bedrest” has made me want to eat the world out of boredom. I’ve been doing kind of okay keeping the eating in check, but there has been an increase in snacking … Not gonna lie. Also, I haven’t been drinking much water because sitting on the toilet hurts so bad. So I will not only be gaining weight, but also water. 😒
I guess I’m okay with the gain. It’s not like I could do anything about the fact that my body rejected my idea of getting fit (at least at this point, five months ago would be a different story).
I will not be as hesitant to go see my chiro from here on out though if something happens, because I am NOT happy about getting sidelined from exercise just as I was getting to love it again.
It’s funny how actively doing something to improve myself makes me feel so much happier.
It’s no secret I’ve been in a slump. A funk. A serious risk of falling into another pit of depression, and it seems like I just crawled out of one not that long ago.
Last week we attempted to start Keto again on my husbands insistence, he loves keto. Me, not so much. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, my body just hates low carb now. It’s so weird because I used to do so well on it. I lost 80 pounds on it many many years ago and felt and looked great!
Over the years however, I have seemed to develop an electrolyte imbalance and doing low carb or keto makes it so much worse. Within days I start getting heart palpitations and those are no fun.
Also, I have diverticulitis and because of the foods we eat on low carb I inevitably wind up with some serious bouts of gastritis…also no fun.
So I finally sat down with The Hubs last week and had a frank discussion about how I just cannot do low carb any longer. He was not pleased but he understood that I wouldn’t ask him to do a diet that hurt him, so he shouldn’t do that to me either. He begrudgingly agreed to go on the diet that I chose…so what exactly is that diet?
Well, it’s kinda like I was doing before in 2017-18 when I lost 40 lbs. Basically it is making better decisions. We will be incorporating more carbs but less processed foods. So more fruits and veggies, more chicken than beef and using portion control. I know! What a concept!!!
He’s skeptical but pleased as the last two nights I have cooked dinner.
He still doesn’t quite understand it, as tonight when he cooked dinner he made the omelet I asked for but also made some fried brown rice cooked with pork belly to pair it with. I waited until he wasn’t looking and swapped the fried rice with some canned green beans. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do! Also, I saved the fried rice for this weekend when I will have more calories to spare. It’s not off limits, but I had eaten most of my calories already and wasn’t prepared for the rice when he offered it.
Anyhoo, to get back to the original topic, I had basically been a lump for the last year…probably longer if I were to really think about it. I had given up on myself. It didn’t start that way, I’m sure.
I do remember when the pandemic hit and we started our first shelter in place here in California, that I treated it a lot like a snow day. When I was growing up in Maine and there was a big snowstorm brewing, my mom and I would take a trip to the store and get all kinds of comfort and junk food to get us through the next few days that we would be snowed in.
This was the mentality that I went into the shut down with in March. Only instead of it only being a few days it went on for months and months. And somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to care about what I was eating and how much weight I was gaining.
In addition to that, the whole pandemic thing really messed with my head. I was never actually allowed to shelter in place as my work deemed themselves essential and so I had to go into work every day and I was very paranoid as I felt everyone else should have been too.
Since my husband has per-existing conditions, I put him on lock down and so I was the one to do any of the essential going outside things. He started working from home and I did all the essential errands in addition to going into work five days a week.
All of this took it’s toll on us in different ways. My husband was craving socialization when I got home and I was up to my ears in it and only wanted to be left alone.
So all of this in addition to constant fighting back and forth on social media on whether COVID was a hoax or not, really put me in a bad spot mentally. I’m an empath and this and then the political state of the world was almost quite literally making me crazy.
To add more fuel to the fire (literally) we had to evacuate our house in August due to wildfires (thankfully, only for five or six days and our house was not harmed) and my mother passed away that same week (her illness had started in May and I wasn’t able to get to her during any of this due to the pandemic as she lived in Maine and was under strict lock down in her facility).
I pretty much stopped any activity and ate my feelings for the better part of the year.
I’ve been trying to reach a balance and claw my way out of the depths of depression that I was in and I feel like in the last couple of months I’ve done a pretty decent job. As well as can be expected I suppose.
This week when I started actively planning my new diet and following through with it, I felt a weight lift. That constant nagging in the back of my head that I was slowly killing myself, started to lighten up. I feel like at least I am now trying to help myself and that is a pretty good feeling. Especially after not having that for so long. I told myself that I was just doing what I had to to get by, but I was being lazy and had basically just given up.
That was a very long winded way to say that I’m feeling really good this week and I attribute it mostly to the fact that I am starting to take care of myself again. It feels really nice and I’m excited to once again be on a weight loss journey.
