Confessions of an angry fat woman, what no one told me about weight loss

I've been thinking up this title for awhile.  I started this blog to talk about my weight loss journey, and despite my posts about book reviews and recipes, the core of this blog has remained the same; it's a blog about health, fitness, and my journey to finding them.

People aren't comfortable talking about being fat it seems, unless they were there, and are actively working towards not being obese any longer.  Lately, I've had the honor of having some really frank conversations about what it's like to be fat, lose weight, and both the psychological toll it takes, along with the things that no one really told us about losing weight. I'll own all of these, but some of of them are also taken from discussions with friends.  And before people start commenting about it, here is my take on my use of the word 'hate.' Being angry, hating something isn't wrong.  Mourning that loss of understanding of who I was, is never wrong.  But I have to get over the mourning, get past the anger, and get to acceptance and moving on.  

• I hate when people say how nice I look since it makes me think they lied  to me when I was fatter. 
• I hate feeling like I'm being lied to. 
• I absolutely hate being told how beautiful I'll look when I hit my 'goal' weight. 
• I hate when people ask how I lost the weight. Taking drugs makes me feel like I cheated to do it. In my case, I took phentermine to help start my weight loss, and the last 40lbs have been been I started taking Vyvanse for my ADD.  Appetite suppression is one of the side effects, as is increased energy.  This is why I need to work on fitness, and getting those healthy lifestyle changes in place for when I don't have the medicine to help me.  
• I worry about how I see myself, and how pretty I feel now, and how I probably got fat to keep potential myself from getting hurt.  
• I'm scared of getting attention from people I don't know, and I really hate getting unwanted attention from men I don't know.
• I'm the same damn person. How dare people treat me differently now. 
• I hate that skinny people watch Biggest Loser and talk about how pretty they are when they are 'normal' sized.  I'm fat, but, I'm still 'normal.'  I almost feel like Biggest Loser watching should be restricted to overweight people, because I'm pretty sure skinny people aren't learning empathy watching it, but rather enforcing the mindset that you can lose this weight really fast, if you just tried hard enough. 
• I hate fitting into someone else's view of beautiful and what that means, and I hate that I want to be that person. I hate that there is a part of me that doesn't care about the healthy aspect of this, I just want to be hot and skinny. 
• I hate how scared I am about losing weight, and how my body is changing.  
• I hate being constantly scared of gaining the weight back.  
• I'm pissed when skinny people assume that I have a shitty self esteem because I'm fat, and treat me patronizingly, telling me to 'love myself.' Thanks, I don't need your brand of therapy.  
• And...I hate that I let myself ever get to the point where I was at, where I let fear, self doubt, depression and pain lead myself, and I forgot to let health and fitness take the lead.  

I've said this before, and I'll say it again; losing weight is a psychological battle, as much as a physical one.  You can lose the weight, but if you don't deal with the reasons you gained it, you'll gain the weight back.  Every single day, we have to choose what we eat, how we move, and what we do. Every day we're given a chance, and simultaneously have one taken away from us that we can never get back.  We have to constantly motivate ourselves, to change our lifestyles, to change our habits, to change our mindset, and to change our hearts. 

Vacation highlights, life updates and blogging confessions

I realized today, while my husband was giving me another HTML/CSS lesson that, in the midst of the insanity of the last week, I had neglected to post much. Some of these updates are short on purpose--I want to expound on them in other entries that I haven't had the time to write yet. I feel bad 'stealing' my husband's laptop while we're out of town, and I can feel his palpable desire to be playing a video game from the other room.

Swap:
I was reluctant to post about this immediately afterwards because I didn't want to come off as bitchy, but here goes. It did not, in any way, go as planned. In the past, I spend a week frantically attempting to clean my house,  begging for tables, and having everything prepared, then on the appointed morning, everyone shows up on time and swaps. At the end, people take all the leftover stuff to charity, leaving me exhausted but with a moderately clean house.  This time though, most people seemed to cancel, show up really late, or just showed up to hang out.

 I can't overstate the awesome of having few enough people in my house that I was able to sit down and have real conversations with people. However,  I have to admit that it was frustrating to spend so much time, energy and money, only to have the swap aspect of it...sort of flop.  I know my husband had an awesome time gathering geeky stuff for his side of the swap, but since none of his friends seemed to show up at the same time, he's going to basically warehouse all of the stuff people brought, and have another event in the future.   I also felt bad for the people that brought things to swap, and took home very little.  I feel like I need to apologize to them, even though so much of this was out of my control.  All ends well though, since the high schooler that scored all of our leftover clothing to give away to our local community, was super psyched. I would also like to give a huge thank you to our friends that came and hung out all day, and made it a really fun time. Also a thank you to my table providers, food cookers, people who moved stuff for me, and everyone that showed up.

Trainer:
Ummm...so I've been somewhat steadily losing weight over the last 15 months, and have realized that I really need to kick up the physical activity aspect of my weight loss, and work on getting muscle tone back and getting some endurance. I'm pretty pitiful in the endurance department right now.  Watching Biggest Loser has actually inspired me to get more active, and in that spirit, I took my friend up on her recommendation of a personal trainer.  This woman is beyond perky. Think...hyper without caffeine, now add in a gallon of coffee to the mix. I have to admit, when I met her at her gym for our first session, the fact that it was filled with skinny fit people...very intimidating.  Just for the record--I was rightfully scared of the hyper one, because my quads were so sore the next day, that I could barely walk.  She failed in the 'taking it easy' aspect of our first session.   This session is short because I'm going to write more about this later.

Vacation: 
Ha...ha...ha. Oh so many stories already.  Did you know this massive blizzard was supposed to hit the DC area last week? Actually supposed to hit the same time yours truly was supposed to fly out of a DC area airport to fly to sunny Florida?  Oh well, it was, but in true DC style, the storm was a dud.  We didn't know that though, so we ended up in Florida a day ahead of schedule, sans a hotel room or car. Here are some highlights so far though:

• It sucks, but you can pack for vacation in an hour. You'll forget your camera, an extra duffle bag, cash and a variety of other things, but it can be done.
• Getting a rental car that I've dubbed 'the dickmobile!
• Buying a vacation package and when we arrive finding out that it's a timeshare.  Kitchen and laundry for the win!
• Finding out that there are two outlet malls in Orlando and we're at the wrong one
• Rainforest Cafe -- definitely about the experience, and the experience is better if you're under 10
• Heated pools are manna from heaven
• 5 story arcades make 40th birthday's awesome
• So does getting a blue handprint on your head
• BUTTERBEER BUTTERBEER BUTTERBEER!!!!! Harry Potter Harry Potter Harry Potter!!!!
• I likey resorts...

Confessional: 
Overall, a hectic, crazy, but fun couple of weeks.  I think blog writing is sort of like exercising, the more you do it, the more you want to do it.  If you stop for awhile though, it's much much harder to get back into it. Consistency is key in so many aspects of life and has always been what I struggle with.  I however, love writing this blog, love getting the feedback, and love having random people I didn't know read my blog, quote it to me.  Yes, I'm a bit of an attention whore and it makes me feel special inside.

I have a confession to make though. I don't ever feel like I can be completely open here. I really struggle with not wanting to hurt peoples feelings, or having stuff that I write come back and bite me in the ass.  The two times I've written and posted opinions about people in here, I was immediately told how wrong my opinions were, or that my recounting of a story was incorrect.  Just for the record--I'm not changing a post simply because you don't like how I perceive a situation.  That would ruin the entire point of blogging for me.

My husband has even given me a strict directive to not make fun of him here, although I may tease, cajole, and regale you with tails of his funny antics, I have no intention of mocking him or hurting his feelings.  I never want to do that, but at the same time, I do want to be open, raw, and honest with my writing.  I have an unfortunate tendency to lean towards the negative in my speech and writing, and I make a conscious effort to keep my blog on the happier sunshiney side of things.  I also have this odd, pathological need to have some conclusion in what I do--in my writings you'll see that I always have to 'finish' a post, or in games (why I can't stand games that take too long to play) or books (I like finishing them in 2-3 sittings max).  This need for conclusion makes it really hard for me to open up about issues that I haven't figured out myself yet.

Conclusion?  We will see.  I'm learning a lot about blogging, myself, growing older...and it will be really interesting to see how this blog evolves with me.  My husband originally named my blog, when he set it up, but I never changed it because it resounded so well with me. We all start on square one, and then figure it out as we go. Here's to attempting to figure stuff out.

Consistency

While I am enjoying writing my religion series, it takes awhile for me to digest, think through and write each entry. I am attempting to condense years of my life into a few hundred words.  I never expected the interest that these entries would bring, and thank everyone that has read.  Today I am breaking from the series to blog about learning to live a healthy lifestyle.

A couple of weeks ago I read this quote from one of my favorite bloggers about consistency;
"It’s not what we do occasionally that makes the difference. It’s what we do consistently."  Ronisweigh

See that is the crux of my problem. I, like many Americans am great at doing something one...maybe two times.  Getting that gym membership on a getting fit high, and then using it like twice.  Yeah, been there done that.  My problem however, is doing things over...and over...and over again.  You'd think that it would be easier for me to do that since I love routines but I have always struggled.  I think I am finally overcoming some of that.

My meetup group goes to water aerobics on Mondays, and three of us go to yoga on Wednesdays.  It is a lot more difficult to cancel if you are accountable to other people.  Having that accountability and routine weekly has helped me shape my routine for the rest of the week.

While I was out of town my husband started to lose weight.  He started being more aware of what he was eating, and when, and also I think was able to have his thyroid medicine fixed.  He has lost at least 20 pounds and either his doctor was hitting on him, or he really does look better when she said 'you're looking really good.'  Mwahaha I'm so getting in trouble for putting that out here, but I really can see a difference.  His face is looking slimmer, and his stomach is looking...well, deflated.  I'm really proud of him, and I try to help motivate him daily.

After reading and thinking about Roni's blog entry, I decided to do 10 minutes of physical (aerobic) activity a day.  Yes, water aerobics and yoga counted, but what about the other 5 days? I've gone on walks with my husband, or worked on the elliptical to get my 10 minutes of aerobic exercise a day.  If I felt like it, I'd frequently go over. The one day I 'cheated' I walked around the grocery store for almost an hour. I didn't sweat, but at least I was moving. That is the goal--to CONSISTENTLY exercise and integrate more movement into my every day life.

This week I'm doing 15 minutes. After I had surgery in December and wasn't allowed to work out at all for a couple of weeks, I lost all of my stamina and my motivation. We'd just moved, I didn't have a trainer, my back hurt ect. All valid reasons but excuses never the less.  I'm working on getting back that stamina and every time I get on the elliptical and that extra 5, even 10 minutes isn't too difficult, every time I can stretch a little more in yoga, run a little faster in 5 feet of water, I see that stamina coming back.  I need to get in shape, I need to get healthy.  No just for me, but for my family.

My husband and I decided that while you are never completely 'ready' to have a baby, that we were as ready as we were going to get.  About 6 months ago we actively started 'trying' to have a baby.  So far, no go.  All the baby books point to one thing.  I'm fat. My cycle isn't always regular, and I'm not even sure I am ovulating. What can I do? Besides go to a doctor and get checked out (that appointment is next week) I can start this routine and start getting into a routine that will lead to a healthy life style.

Every person that has lots a ton of weight using sparkpeople.com has made a healthy lifestyle change. It isn't about a miracle drug, or surgery, or all the sudden running and exercising for a short period of time.  We need to make changes every day. Those little changes lead to big ones.  We need to make exercise, healthy eating and learning about nutrition an integral part of our life.  If I don't, I'll never get off this yo-yo weight gain/loss and may never be able to have a baby.  Rather than trying to go all out in the beginning and losing motivation two weeks in, I want to build up a routine and stick to it. Wish me luck on my journey. I wish you luck on yours!

What is your routine?
How do you integrate activity into every day activities?