White shirt

Hey folks, kind of got through the plateau. I think. I'm not enough below that I feel safely under it, so I am going to get through the weekend and see if I don't spike back up to it. Fingers crossed.

Kitty, in answer to your question, I'm way too superstitious about my weight to post it on here. It's stupid, I know. But I can't bring myself to do it. But, If you're wondering about how I look, I will go out on a limb and post a couple of shitty pictures of myself that I took this morning. Because last fall I tried on this shirt and it was too small. Now it is hanging off of me, which is nice.

Sorry I don't have a shot from the side. I have massive arms and small tits so any time I see myself from the side, that's all I see. Massive arms. Small tits. Can't bring myself to share that.  No matter how flat my stomach is.
(In related news, I always suspected I look fatter than I am because of my large arms, and then last month a magazine I was reading was talking about "faking a hot body by having great arms". And it's true. Your arms can make or break you)

I'm still a whale compared to where I was in high school and the beginning of college (until I quit the ballet company I was in and got super fat) but I'm headed in the right direction. And I will get there.

Also, there is a good chance I will freak out and take these down pretty much immediately, so, they might not be up for long.
(Also, in the second picture, there is a wrinkle in my shirt off my right hip that totally looks like a fat roll. It's not. But it's driving me crazy in this picture. Ugh)
Also, also, in the second picture, my legs are kind of spread apart, but there is no light shining between my thighs so it also looks like my hips are even more massive than I distorted-ly think they are. These pictures are terrible. What was I thinking. 

Also, I no longer have dread locks. I don't remember if I blogged about that a couple of months ago when I combed them out. Maybe I'll post about that later.
I miss them though. Husband misses them even more. He keeps bugging me to put them back in. Maybe this summer. We'll see. They're a lot of work. 

Plateau

So, this is probably my longest plateau without a binge. I was losing weight pretty rapidly for the past month and then this past week I didn't lose a single pound. Not even half a pound.

I'm sure this is largely due to glycogen, which is why I haven't gotten distraught. I have increased my running distance by about two miles and have been pushing myself to run a little faster. I may have even gained a little muscle because I have been consuming some protein and carbs post-workout so I'm pretty sure I've just increased my muscle and glycogen. Because I have gotten smaller. My clothes are yet a little looser. In fact, if the weather gets nice soon here I will need to shop for some new summer clothes because I have nothing. I only have one pair of jeans that I can wear. They were a pair of "oh, I'll hang onto these and maybe one day fit into them" jeans. Which is nice that I fit into them, but I kinda need more than one pair of jeans.

I almost binged on Wednesday night. I was definitely in a binge mood. Then husband came home and asked if I wanted to go out for wings. YES!

I actually was a little nervous because I love wings and I was in the mood to feast.
Fortunately, when I still had a few wings leftover, the waitress came by and asked if I needed a box. I said no. I was totally prepared to eat all of the wings. Then Husband interjected that I should probably get a box and not finish the last few because her could tell I was plenty full and would only wind up feeling sick if I ate more. (He knows me so well)

So, thanks to my husband, even though I did eat more junk than I should have, wasn't a huge binge.

And thank goodness I didn't binge on wings.

What I have been eating lately has been super healthy. Mostly nuts and seeds and veggies with a little meat or yogurt or fruit here and there.

Well, the wings were definitely a shock to my system. I went to bed with a bit of a stomach ache and woke up in the night with the most violent stomach pains. After some water and praying I would have a BM or something, anything to relieve the pain, I went back to bed. Had a stomach ache most of the next day too until having a very unpleasant BM that night.
That'll teach me to eat that garbage. Bleah.

So, I'm hanging in there. Just trying to hold on until I get past this plateau. It's bound to happen, right? Ugh. I hope so.

(I do actually recall being stuck at this weight for a looong time a few years ago.... I think it might be a weight that my body just "likes" to be at. But I say no, body. I will press on. I will get smaller.)

Dresses

Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned a classmate asked if I had lost a bunch of weight?
I sort of brushed off his comment.

But I have continued to lose weight.
A few days ago I had a practical exam which required me to wear clinic attire (which is typically dress pants and a button down shirt).

Well, I didn't realize just how much weight I had lost. Until I went to get dressed the morning of the practical. All of my clinic clothes: too big.

Had I realized this a day or two sooner, I would have been ecstatic, but not realizing until the day of meant I had to wear over-sized clinic clothes. None of my dress pants have belt loops so I couldn't wear a belt and my pants kept falling down and my shirt kept coming un-tucked. It was awful.

The classmate who made the previously mentioned comment saw me and said "I was right. I knew you had lost weight".

The part that sucks is that, obviously, I don't see it. I think I look the same. All of my clothes are just too big.

The numbers have gone down a lot. Again, I'm sorry I'm too superstitious to share them with you. I want to. I want to tell you what I weigh because it's the lowest I have been since I got married. But (as long time readers will know) I feel like every time I post my weight on here, the numbers go up immediately after. Maybe if I reach an "underweight" BMI, I will let you know. Then at least I have a little room to go up in case my stupid superstitions sabotage me.

Either way, since I finally saw a number this morning that was down to around what I was when I got married, I figured "Hey, I wonder if I can get into my wedding dress".
Tried it on. Too big.

What?! This means I'm actually SMALLER than I was when I got married. Which of course is another small annoyance because I look at wedding photos and think "Man, I wish I was that thin again"
But I'm actually thinner.

I wish I could actually see it.

What is wrong with me?

First off, thanks for your comments. I feel the same way. I always think "I don't want to be doing this forever, maybe I'll grow out of it" but realistically that probably won't happen. At least not any time soon.


Also, would you like to hear how fucked up my head is?

So, I have this classmate who has the same class schedule as me and we have spent a good deal of time together since starting grad school over a year ago. Not once in this time have I ever been attracted to him.
But he's been dieting and working out lately and has lost about 20 pounds sometime in the past 6 months or a year or something. It's been gradual, and he's of pretty average size so I haven't really noticed it.
But.
He's been talking about it lately. He hates to miss a workout. During finals week, the school gives out these bags of snacks to students (cause we're five and we love snack time) and mine had pretzels and his had cheez-its. He asked if I would trade him because the cheez-its had 210 Calories and the pretzels had 160. (I said yes, I wasn't going to eat them anyway. I always give those snack bags to my husband)
Yesterday was our school founder's "birthday" (he died a long time ago) so the school was giving out donuts. He turned them down.

But here's where it gets fucked up. I found myself totally attracted to this behavior. And not just a little. We're talking sexually aroused. By his dieting.
And it's only the dieting. When he's not talking about dieting, I feel nothing. He's not my type. At all. But his calorie restriction and working out? Soooo turned on.

Then, two nights ago, this happened with basically a stranger.

So, I have my first round of national board exams next weekend so I am taking a board review class. Big room. Full of people.
The guy sitting directly in front of me was a good looking guy. Decent face, great body (rugby player).
His friend sitting next to him opened up a package of those Chex Mix muddy buddies. He offered them to Rugby Guy.
Rugby Guy turned them down.
I got turned on.
A few minutes later, Chex Mix guy pulled out a handful of the snack and placed them in front of his friend. Rugby Guy ate one. Let the rest sit in front of him. About an hour later when we all got up to take a bathroom break, Rugby Guy scooped up the rest of them and threw them in the trash.

Holy shit. Again. Incredibly sexually aroused. I had to basically bolt in the other direction to stop myself from grabbing him and doing him right there in the crowded hallway.

What. The. Fuck.

Fortunately, I am still very much in love with my husband and have more sense than to act on any of these impulses. But this is fucked up. A psychiatrist would have a field day with this.

This shit won't make you happy

I'm not delusional. I know this isn't going to make me happy. It never has.

There are all the reasons in the world for weight loss. And yours are fine, but don't kid yourself.
This won't bring happiness.

I've been searching around for new blogs to follow, as so many people no longer post. And it seems like every one says the same thing.
"I'm doing this so I can be thin and happy"

Well, I've got some bad news for you.
Have you ever read one of these blogs? Is any one happy?

Sure, there are moments of happiness. The number on the scale went down, the clothes became looser, that one day you didn't eat all day and you felt fine.
They're all small victories, but they don't bring real happiness.

As I've mentioned many times, I grew up around this. I've seen it last lifetimes. My grandmother and her sisters are around the age of 80, and they are saggy bags of bones. They've always been thin because it's their obsession. But not one of them is happy. They take comfort in their exercise and their perfectly portioned "meals" (even when they go out to eat, they take their meals in Tupperware which is horribly embarrassing).
But never are they happy.

Happiness has a lot of of biological factors, and nourishment is one of them.

In Marya's book (which most of us have read) she references a study in which a group of young, healthy men were put on a diet of just under 1,000 Calories "they began to: stash food surreptitiously, talk about food constantly, chew gum and mints perpetually, read recipes for dishes they couldn't make. As the study went on, they were frequently caught digging through garbage cans, sneaking into the hospital kitchen to binge. They began to purge and - interestingly enough - they became incredibly worried about their weight, the shape of their bodies, and began to diet. They worried about getting dirty, got disgusted with their own biological functions, and didn't want to touch food anymore"

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment might be that study. Hard to say because some of the facts sounds little different. I would have to read more into it.


But the bottom line remains the same.
I'm not intending to criticize. We all have different reasons for behaving the way we do.  And if you want to be thin, this might work. But it won't make you happy. So, if that is genuinely your goal, I suggest you find something else.