I'm just your average, everyday, divorced 38 year old girl -- overweight, tragically unhip,
and trying to make a life for myself. I live with two furry beasts, Dave and Abby, whose
feline mission in life is to choke me with their fur. Nothing special.
Friday afternoon. No, that's not the name of a NaNo attempt at pornographic writing, nor is it a reference to anyone's anatomy. It's just that it's very odd to be eating in a way that's contrary to what I've had drummed into my head since I started my first diet at the age of 12. I can eat as much as I want of everything except processed carbs and some fats? Here's part of the conversation I had with myself last night, before dinner: "Wait a minute...you mean I can have a steak, grilled veggies, and grilled shrimp on the side, along with a Caesar salad with dressing, and I'm still on plan?" That was followed shortly by my imitation of the Snoopy happy dance. I have to say today, though, that I'm getting a little sick of meat and veggies and I'd nearly sell my soul for a piece of bread, some rice, or a baked potato. I know it's just the second day, and I'm not a terribly patient person, so I'm definitely not panicking or anything of that sort. (OK, so I had a minor freak out this morning on the way to work when I realized that I felt like a big ball of meat and grease.) Funny thing is, I'm not finding myself eating a ton of added fat even though I can. I'm actually supposed to eat the good fats every day and I'm getting that in through the salad dressing last night and oil that I topped my salad with for lunch, but I don't have an overwhelming desire to much through an entire field of peanuts or a grove of avocados or anything of the sort. Perhaps my long held theory that deprivation and being told exactly how much I could eat of everything really is at the root of why I binge eat? It will definitely be interesting to see my results. I'm giving it a month, just to see how I like it once I've adjusted, and see how my body reacts, so I'll keep you posted.
My friend, Tracy, is coming down tomorrow morning and we're going to Orange County (not to be confused with LA, which is entirely different) for a Matchbox 20 concert tomorrow night and a Mighty Ducks game Sunday night. One of the very coolest things about Tracy is how supportive she always is, no matter how wacky the ideas I float past her. Nothing ever fazes her and she'd be a fantastic mom if she weren't totally opposed to the idea. Anyway, she's already doing South Beach, so I've got a built in support system which is always nice for a road trip. She's even offered to do (some part of) my eight mile training session Sunday morning in Santa Monica (which is in LA), which I really think is above and beyond the call of duty. She's a super duper friend and I'm lucky to have her. (No, she doesn't read this site, so I'm not sucking up!)
What can I say about my NaNo efforts? I'm still stalled and I won't get anything done over the weekend because Tracy's here, so we're just going to kick it back off on Monday and see what happens. I know I'm just letting myself get hung up on how crappy it is and how I've written so many plots into the cursed thing that I'm never going to be able to keep track of all of them, much less tie them up. I let Chris read it (he's the only one) and he says that it seems very autobiographical (so much so that he got really angry at the Introduction...seriously, I had to reassure him several times that it wasn't me talking so much as the character, who just happens to be similar to me in a lot of ways) and that the lack of dialogue seemed in keeping with the narrative style. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I'm going with it. I wonder how my NaNo buddy is doing? I'm sending positive energy (and an encouraging email) your way because I know you're swamped with school and dealing with all of the work stuff, and I know that your novel is going to be fabulous.
Oh yes, before I go, a mini rant about my car. It's still not finished. They didn't even "realize" that the stereo needed to be replaced until yesterday, and the stereo place can't come out until Monday. Now I've had to cancel the rental car I was going to rent for the road trip and I'm going to have to take the current rental (on it's 10th day with me) to the car wash because it was filthy inside when I rented it and it's not improved any since. Even the seats are stained, which I can't do much about, much to my chagrin. I really thought no one would ever see the inside except me, so I didn't worry about it. I'm worried now. Grrr. Maybe the car wash can shampoo the seats tonight? Would everything still be damp tomorrow morning, though? I don't want Tracy to get a wet butt on the way to Anaheim. Decisions, decisions.
Weeks until LA Marathon: 18 Weeks until Christmas: 7 Exercise since forever ago: None. Zip. Nada. And I'm not obsessing on it, either!
Friday morning. OK, I was so going to rant in today's post about people that don't post to their blogs regularly. Then I didn't post yesterday. Hmmm. Well, you know what? I'm still going to rant, I'll just be self ranting, too.
When I click on my link to one of my favorite reads and it's the same wonderful post that's been sitting there for a week, it's such a let down. I know it's just because you're all terribly busy with your fascinating lives, heck, that's why I read you every day. I'm not asking for a chapter from your new book (although you could get off pretty easily if you did that), just a pithy, clever sentence about life or love or work or your car. (Sorry, I'm sort of car obsessed at this point because mine's still in the shop!) With that, I will leave you alone forever. Feel free to grumble under your breath about annoying readers, "who does she think she is?"
I started the South Beach diet yesterday and I'm feeling pretty darned good about it, too. It's got some of the same ideas as Atkins, but without the frightening inability to eat fruit ever again. There is simply no way I'm giving up apples or peaches or blueberries forever. Not going to happen, and that's always kept me from trying Atkins. With South Beach, you can have most fruits after the first two weeks, unlimited veggies, monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats (yes, I can actually eat salad dressing without guilt), and even a glass of red wine once a day. I'm not doing it as a quick fix, because I know it's not going to be; I'm doing it because I think it's a more feasible way of eating, and one that I can live with long term. Only time will tell, of course. I'll keep you posted.
Wednesday afternoon. Just hours after my last whining, self pitying rant, I received a card from my hair dresser with the above quote from Eleanor Roosevelt on the cover and the following note inside:
"Hey little woman!
Just wanted to drop a note. Keep up the hard work, you have come so far and I know this experience is going to be great!
You have made a big impact on my life with support, encouragement and by seeing what you have and and are doing.
I want to do the next marathon with you, it's one of my goals.
My love and thoughts, N
p.s. I love this card because I feel like you are a true testiment to it."
OK. I am humbled. Humbled, saddened, and shamed because she has such faith in me and is so inspired by me and I can't even pull my unmotivated self out of this funk long enough to get this show on the road.
In which our heroine confesses that she's discouraged, disorganized, and exhibiting few signs of self control
Wednesday morning. No more writing last night, so I'm still at about 5,800 words. I'm not sure why, but I just didn't feel like it, either last night or this morning. I even got up early, thinking I'd get a few thousand cranked out, but, well, it didn't happen. I think part of the problem is that I'm so displeased with the plot(s) right now that my mind is tossing around all of the editing that I need. I know that I can't delete a bunch of stuff right now because of the word count but it seems to be blocking me from moving forward. I might just have to cut and paste everything I don't want to keep down to the end of the document and then keep going. That would allow me to keep the word count (I mean, I did write it, it's just superfluous) without stressing about how bad it is and trying to wrap that/those plot lines up somehow. I've got a choral concert to attend tonight, so it will probably be tomorrow morning before I do anything about this.
I'm feeling strangely ambivalent about my life and myself right now. On the one hand, I'm writing a novel, something I've always secretly wanted to do. No matter that it's pretty much unreadable, I'm doing it and that's the important thing. On the other, I'm eating everything in sight, unrepentantly, and I haven't walked since before the fires started (around 10/24, I think). Yikes!
The walking thing, I think, is that I'm scared. I know, it sounds lame, but I'm actually scared to start back up. It's as though there's some sort of scary thing out there waiting for me if I step back on the treadmill. (I told you it sounded lame, didn't I? I wouldn't lie to you!) There is also something about it which is tied to the whole eating thing, too, and that gets a whole lot more complicated.
Eating, and, consequently, being fat, have always been a little bit of a security blanket/comfort thing for me. It's all about using the extra weight as insulation from the world and eating so that I can block unpleasant thoughts from my head. Weird, psycho stuff for sure. Anyway, the fire and my car being broken into really threw me, more so than I had previously suspected. My sense of well being and invincibility (as misguided as those feelings are) has been totally shredded and I feel as though I'm hurtling through space with nothing to grab on to in order to stop. Perhaps if I weren't such a damned perfectionist, demanding either complete and utter exactitude in my diet and exercise or absolutely no attempt at being healthy at all, this latest development wouldn't have me in such a nosedive? I don't know. What I do know is that I'm waking up every few hours to go to the bathroom, my feet are starting to tingle and hurt, the skin on my face is getting dry and flaky in patches, and I feel nauseated when I wake up in the morning...all classic symptoms, for me, of out of control diabetes. And yet, she says with a great deal of frustration, I don't seem to be doing anything to turn that around. Which leads to...
I am so ashamed of myself for my lack of self control. Here I've sent out all of these letters telling people that I'm going to do the LA Marathon and asking for donations to the American Diabetes Association (which you can still get in on, if you're interested...just click on my name underneath this post and it will open up a mail window with my email address) in consideration of that achievement. How totally humiliating if I can't pull this together! Grrr. Arrrgh. Damnit.
It's been sort of a frustrating day. Perhaps I ought not have posted at all, or left it at the NaNo discussion. Ah well, I've never claimed to be wise.
Whose bright idea was it to try to write a novel in 30 days?
Tuesday afternoon. "It seemed like a good idea at the time." How many tales of woe have contained that famous line? I have, as of 1:30pm PST, 5,800 words finished toward my NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words by November 30. Doesn't that sound like I'm doing well? And yet, sadly, I really think I'm just churning out meaningless, pointless drivel. I have nearly no dialogue, too much internal monologue, and multitudinous plot lines dangling all over the place. I'm not really certain of where I'm trying to go in the short run, although I do know where I want it all to end up. At least, I think I do. This being a writer stuff is harder than it looks, you know? I keep telling myself to just let it flow and not worry about editing or continuity (or grammar, frankly), but it just isn't working. I think it's partly because of how detailed I have to be with my communications at work. I can't just "let it flow" when I'm crafting an email or documentation, I have to write it, then read it all through, then edit, then read again, and then, sometimes, have a second set of eyes read it through, too, before I publish. This is just making me feel very slipshod and lackadasical. Frankly, given my bent toward being overly concerned with details and being perfect, perhaps that's a good thing.
Here are a couple of excerpts: "I just love mornings, don’t you? I wake up, smile ebulliently, and bound up the stairs to my kitchen. Then I wake up. I am most assuredly not a morning person. Some of my happiest days were in college when I managed to work my schedule so that none of my classes started before noon – heaven! Now that I’m (purportedly) a grown up, it’s up at five, one hour of walking, breakfast, newspaper, shower, get dressed and out the door by eight thirty. I’ve heard people talk about women who manage to roll out of bed half an hour before leaving for work and still look gorgeous, but I think it’s just another fantasy created by society to make the rest of us feel badly about ourselves. As though I needed any help. I am the queen of self-loathing and I wear my crown proudly."
And "As with most things in my life, being healthy is an all or nothing thing for me. It’s the same with housekeeping: either I’m perfect or I just don’t even bother trying. I know that moderation is the key to everything, but I’m just not a moderate kind of girl. Anyway, I followed the diet site’s plan for eating and exercising to the letter, not allowing myself any deviations, and the weight started to fall off. It was so exciting to be able to post exciting entries on my blog about the new clothes I was buying and the nice things people kept saying about me. I knew that I had a long way to go because of how fat I was, but at least I was on my way.
After a month, I found a flyer advertising an upcoming 5K race. I had been walking regularly since the start of The Plan, so I signed up, showed up, and finished the race in a respectable (for someone of my size) 48 minutes. I really liked the camaraderie with the other walkers and runners, and I completed two other races in quick succession. I told myself that this was what it felt like to be happy and healthy.
It wasn’t until I was at the registration center for my fourth race that everything came crashing down on me. I was standing there, waiting patiently in line, when I heard two women behind me talking. “Look at the size of her,” one woman said. “I know, isn’t it sad?” the other replied, “Why don’t they have special races for fat people? No one wants to see all that fat and all that sweat.” I didn’t even have to turn around to know that they were talking about me. I’d noticed in the previous three races that I was consistently the largest person but I’d been feeling so good because of my weight loss that I hadn’t given it too much thought. I was still a Fat Girl, but I was trying, and that made it “OK”. Suddenly, I realized how ridiculous I looked, how monstrously huge I was in my spandex bike shorts and oversized t-shirt. I put my head down, headed back to my car, and started to cry.
On the way home, I drove through a fast food joint and ordered half of the menu to go. I ate until I felt sick, then I ate some more. I ate until it was all gone, long past the time when the food had still tasted good to me, and then I beat myself up mentally. “Why don’t you have any willpower?” “If only you weren’t so weak and pathetic, you’d be able to lose weight.” “If you weren’t such a fat cow, people would like you.” “You’re so stupid, what’s the point of even trying to lose this weight?” Most hurtful of all was, “You deserve to be fat.”
As quickly as it had come, all of my motivation for losing weight and being healthy went right out the door. What walked in the open door were shame and fear: shame because I knew I’d have to write about what I’d done and fear because I wasn’t sure how my readers would feel about my revelations. I hated myself and I knew that wouldn’t make good material, so I covered by writing fluff pieces about goings on at work and funny things my mom had said to me, even as I knew that my day of reckoning would not be denied forever."
So, the basic story so far is this: Fat Girl has OK life, terrible self esteem, and a fantastic friend (a facsimile of my friend, Tony). Fat Girl takes up writing innocently enough and begins to keep a web journal. Fat Girl puts herself on a strict diet and exercise regimen, only to be tripped up by her own obsession with perfection and the cruelty and intolerance of others. Sound faintly autobiographical? Um, yeah. Boring? I'm afraid so.
Monday afternoon. OK, this is so completely inspirational to me. I especially love her comment, "I think that's really the ultimate lesson, you just keep going until you get it done." This lady is incredible, dear readers. She's got MS and diabetes, she does the whole thing on crutches, and she finished. I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly very humbled. Humbled and inspired.
Sunday morning. It is so completely gorgeous here today. This is the sort of day that the Convention and Visitors' Bureau wishes they could clone and adequately represent to every soul in America. The sky is that robin's egg blue that I've never been able to find in a dress and there are puffy clouds out over the mountains. On a practical level, the clouds over the mountains are a very welcome sight because that's where the fires are still burning and the clouds, and rain, are helping to bring them under control. I, however, am secure enough to admit that I'm loving it for the pure aesthetic joy of it. It's been such a crappy week and I just need things to remind me about beauty and what it can do for your soul.
I woke up this morning, walked upstairs, fired up the laptop, and started writing. Yes, NaNoWriMo has begun for me. I did over 1,500 words in two hours this morning and it felt so good, so right. Last night, I was still unsure of the exact direction I wanted to take my protagonist, but, as I talked about it with Chris, it came together in my mind. Once the skeleton was in place, the actual writing this morning just flowed. I'd forgotten how much I wanted to write a novel when I was younger, before I sold my soul to the small company that would become VLSCI. Writing was my life, unsurprisingly, given my English Lit major and Poli Sci minor, and words just sprang forth on demand. Once I settled into corporate life, though, the need for business writing choked the creativity and inventiveness out of my writing, replacing it instead with clear and concise professionalism and the ability to translate highly technical engineering documents into documentation for non technical people. I think that, at some point, I stopped fighting that transition, even began to embrace it with the same passion I'd once held for my creative writing, and yet...something inside me always yearned for the feeling of creating something beautiful, something that stirred emotions and created pictures in the readers' minds. As I talked to Chris about it last night, I realized that this, too, is one of my life's dreams, just like the marathon. How many people can say they've got the opportunity to knock two of their "Things to Do Before I Die" off in one year? If all goes well in the next four weeks, I very well may be able to.
I also had an epiphany about the marathon this morning. (Note to self: Perhaps I should get up early more often?) I've signed up as a member of Team Diabetes, which uses the marathon as a way to raise money for the American Diabetes Association. I've talked here before (see October 14th) about the money I'm trying to raise, but I don't think I ever mentioned that Team Diabetes actually has their own training program that walks around the same area as the Roadrunners do, but on Sunday instead of Saturday, which is far too crowded with all of the training teams doing, essentially, the same routes. Anyway, I finally opened up the binder they'd sent me and looked at the schedule for Team Diabetes' training, and I think it's far more viable as an option for me than the Roadrunners program I've been trying to do. With an entire week off for the fire and the pain I'd been feeling on the long sessions lately, I think that the Diabetes program will allow me to slow down a little and yet, still finish. Where the Roadrunners are already doing 13 mile sessions, Team Diabetes is doing seven miles today. I can do seven miles. I can do eight miles next week. I can do this schedule, and that's very exciting given that I was contemplating having to give up my dream just yesterday, even as I started shopping to replace all of my stolen training gear. So, with my shiny new shoes, and my neat-o new hat, I'll set off tomorrow morning on the treadmill at work and rebuild my endurance. I can do this. I will do this! (Thanks, Georgia, for the tip. No more trying to force it, I'm going with the flow. This schedule just feels right for me and the other one was just too much. My body knows what it needs, what feels good, and the only thing I have to do is listen.)
Weeks until LA Marathon: 18 Weeks until Christmas: 7 Exercise yesterday: None, and that's OK
