dianaschnuth

The Lane Bryant catalog arrived yesterday.

I pulled out the coupons and leafed through the pages, coming to a stop at the swimwear section. My first thought was, “Why would I buy a zebra-striped swimsuit? It just screams out, ‘Look at my rolls!'”

Then, of course, I felt guilty. Big women are beautiful, too, and I shouldn’t be projecting my feelings about my own body onto these plus-size models.

I realized at that point that the LB swimsuit models seemed to run the gamut of sizes. Without knowing how tall they are, they seemed to go from the low end of Lane Bryant sizes (12 or 14) to maybe a size 18 or 20 — again, depending on height. I’m relatively tall for a chick — 5’10” and a size 14/16 at 197 pounds — so I’m no judge on sizes. Some of the women didn’t look “plus-sized” at all, while others… well, I just wished I could stick a pin in them and let a little air out, and then they’d look just about right.

Which led me to realize: I don’t know which of these women I most resemble, shape-wise. Am I really that fat? I don’t know! I can’t tell. When I look at the thinner plus-size models, I think of them as “normal.” Not stupidly skinny. They have some meat on their bones, but no rolls. But I don’t think I look like them; I must be fatter than they are. Then I look at the larger models, and I hope I don’t look like them… except, well, they look good, too. Sure, they’ve got rolls, and thighs, and upper arms, but they’re pretty and confident and they fill out their clothes well. They don’t look sloppy, just big.

It wasn’t until I did my own private swimsuit photo shoot in the basement this evening that it occurred to me: plus-size models get airbrushed, too! It felt like the biggest “duh” moment ever. You can’t make me believe that none of those big and beautiful ladies has any cellulite on her thighs.

Still, though, I’m having trouble with the mixed signals I’m getting. The Health At Every Size/Fat Acceptance movement would have me be perfectly OK with being a size 14/16, as long as I’m healthy (which, as far as I know, I am) and not eating unreasonably. Weight Watchers says that my health will improve significantly if I lose just 10% of my body weight. The Wii Fit tells me I should be some skinny damn weight I haven’t seen since elementary school.

I just want to feel comfortable in my own skin. I want to stop feeling self-conscious and embarrassed around fit people. In addition to the social aspects, though, I’m curious what I’ll look like when I drop another 20 pounds (on top of the 50 I lost a few years ago).

I think I have some psychological fine-tuning to do, beyond the physical and behavioral that I already knew was ahead of me.

I started writing the outline of a blog entry this morning at work, while I was waiting for my computer to process some reports I was working on. My Piccadilly notebook now contains a page of notes that say I should start this year off with a graph of my weekly weights, a report on miles walked this week, and some other stuff. It also says I need to take time out to pamper myself, including getting exercise and plenty of sleep.

That was this morning. My weigh-in was at noon.

I weighed in at my heaviest in a year and a half: 200 pounds.

That set off the weirdest emotional rollercoaster I’ve experienced in quite some time. Shock, disappointment, depression, anger, motivation, and did I mention anger? Finally, I got an infusion of Get Over It from various sources, both intentionally and indirectly, and I started to feel less pissed in general and more focused.

The last time I weighed in at or over 200 was on July 29, 2008. At that point, I’d already lost close to ten pounds in the three months I’d been on Weight Watchers, and I would continue on a steep decline for another two months before hitting The Plateau.

First thing this morning, long before The Dreaded Weigh-In, I got an e-mail from Weight Watchers. Seems that my eTools (which I get for free with the At Work program) have expired. I’d already known about this; we’d had to have a special extension of our session to get us past the holiday season, and our eTools didn’t extend with us. What I hadn’t known was that, back in April 2008, I gave WW a credit card number that apparently expired in the interim, so they couldn’t automatically charge me the minimal charge for eTools.

When I went to the WW website, I saw that I actually have six months to reactivate my account. Since I’ve been saving my daily food tracking logs to my home computer, and I’m completely and thoroughly anal-retentive about tracking my weight locally (see graph, above), I wasn’t concerned about losing my historical data, so I decided to switch things up for a week and track on SparkPeople instead.

I think this is going to be a helpful switch-up for me, even if only for a week or two. I’m being especially mindful of what and how much I eat, since SparkPeople tracks actual nutrients, not Points. Today, I ate what I knew were normal meals, then calculated the Points values at the end of the day. I did pretty well, eating only two of my 35 Weekly Allowance Points (which I know won’t mean much to anyone outside of Weight Watchers).

I’ve also been doing the cardio I’ve always known I need to do. On Sunday evening, and again this evening, I did a 30-minute kickboxing workout on DVD. It kicked my ass in a Very Good Way, and I’m glad I didn’t skip it this evening, like I was tempted to.

Honestly, I think that this 200-pound weigh-in might be the best thing for my weight-loss regime right now. What got me off the couch and into my kickboxing DVD tonight was that number, rotating in my head, taunting me. I don’t want to be this weight. I don’t want to feel like this — physically, I mean. Frumpy, doughy.

I mean, sure, I used to be over 250 pounds, and this is definitely an improvement over that… but I can do so much better.

I deserve better.

Every year, in early January, I post an entry about what’s gone on in the past year. Major life events, vacations, tragedies, what have you. This year, I’m planning to do things a little differently, and present a Feltron-esque display of charts and graphs and visuals to sum up 2009. Seems only natural, being that I’ve been working in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for the past two years, and reporting is what I do.

Reporting on one’s own life can be a strange and tedious thing, depending on how OCD one is with oneself. Since I’ve been tracking my weight on either a daily or weekly basis for the past seven years or so, in the same Excel spreadsheet, I thought I’d go for the “low-hanging fruit,” as they say, and create a simple graph of my average weight by month:

Granted, December is far from over, but still. This graph isn’t pretty — or, rather, the data it’s showing isn’t pretty. (Whether it’s aesthetically pleasing enough is beside the point at the moment.)

This isn’t a plateau. It’s worse.

I have three weeks to get my average December weight down below where it’s currently hovering. We’ll see how that goes. I’m hoping to revise this graph for the better for inclusion in my official year-end retrospective.

The good news: I’m down 0.6 pounds this week!
The bad ambivalent news: I’m up 3 pounds total this year.

Today was the annual Thanksgiving meeting, and it was actually more helpful than I’d counted on. Linda, our leader, passed out pieces of paper and had us write down what we were going to eat for our Thanksgiving meal.

At first, I wrote, “Whatever Uncle Pete serves us.” Then I decided that maybe I should play along and actually do the exercise, so I wrote:

• Turkey, probably smoked, 4oz
• Stuffing, 1 cup
• Carrots and veggies with low-fat dip
• Acorn squash (I hope!), 1 cup
• …with butter and brown sugar
• Green bean casserole, 1/2 cup
• Sweet potato
• 2 butternut squash cheesecake cups
• Pumpkin pie, 1 piece

When I totaled everything up, I came up with a whopping 41 Points. For those not familiar with Weight Watchers, a full day’s food for me is 24 Points, plus I get a weekly allotment of 35 Points to use whenever I want.

Looks like I’m going to be using them on Thanksgiving Day next week.

I unashamedly shouted out the total Points value of my meal when Linda asked. Later on in the meeting, I shared that my battle plan is to eat only one plate of food, and not go back for seconds. Which is totally true. Although I’m still going to eat appetizers (OMG Nate’s spinach dip!) and dessert (accounted for above, for the most part).

So, this week is a dry run. Can I get through an entire week and not use ANY Flex Weekly Points? Evenings and weekends will be the test; I won’t have the buffer of Weekly Points when I eat them all on Thanksgiving. And, yes, I think I’ll probably just assume that I’ll use them all, in lieu of actually counting and tracking my Thanksgiving meal.

Not going to gain 10 pounds this holiday season. Nope. I didn’t gain anything last Thanksgiving, although I did gain a good five pounds the Thanksgiving before, and the Thanksgiving before that was in the middle of a slow five-pound gain over the end of the entire month of November. Something to keep in mind: it’s so, so easy for me to go off the wagon for a long weekend and undo months and months of progress in one fell swoop.

CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

Apparently, my Weight Watchers leader has taken a bit of an interest in seeing me succeed. Which is cool, except for when I come into a weigh-in knowing that I haven’t been applying myself for the past week, and I end up stepping on the scale feeling like I came to class without my homework.

This week wasn’t such a raging success — I gained two pounds in one week, from succumbing to doughnuts during training and from failing to track my late-evening “snacks.” The sub-par tracking I did over the weekend might have had something to do with it, too, although we ate fairly healthily: Korean, Mediterranean, our usual dim sum Sunday brunch.

During today’s meeting, I accepted Linda’s challenge to follow all of the daily Good Health Guidelines, including:

• six 8-oz glasses of fluids (anything except alcohol)
• five 1/2-cup servings of fruits and veggies
• two 1-tsp servings of healthy oils
• two servings of dairy
• one daily multivitamin
• 30 minutes of daily activity
• two 3-oz servings of lean protein
• whole grains

I didn’t get my exercise in today, but I’m doing great otherwise. Committing to following the Good Health Guidelines means a decent amount of planning will have to go into my meals, and that’s a good thing. I can’t just go throwing frozen meals and sugar-free puddings into my lunch and call it done. I also need to plan dinner around what I need: veggies? protein? grains?

So, the good news is that I continue to be 15 pounds lighter than when I started WW about a year and a half ago. The better news is that I haven’t quit after a year-long plateau. The best news? I know I can break through this plateau if I can just stick to program for more than a couple weeks at a time.