Forks Are For Eating!!! (But not THAT kind)

Sometimes, I think Fate just can't help itself.

I'm simply too much of a temptress!!! Really, I can't blame it most of the time.

I've been whining to dear bf lately that I havent' had anything interesting to blog about. My days all go more or less the same...

(That's a stability ball, not a giant hemerrhoid. Thanks a lot J - same J as later in this blog, btw)

Follow that up with eat, bad reality tv, and sleeping, and you've pretty much got the summary of my day to day.

So finding the blogworthy isn't always easy!

So here is our actual text conversation about it while both of us avoided doing any actual work:

C: Work = Balls

L: Big ones!
I'm trolling the internet for funny blogs to help me feel funny so I can come up with something for mine. But now I just want a 5ft metal chicken named Beyonce!!
(Not part of the actual convo, but inspiration courtesy of theblogess.com)

C: You could blog about how balls work is?

L: It's usualy a weight loss blog...

C: I know, but work is still balls : /

L: Work inspired a new one for my luluintvland blog (www.luluintvland.blogspot.com), but still drawing a blank for the one that a couple people actually READ.

C: Have you blogged about that bitchy lady that got mad at you for taking a yoga mat and called you out, then you kicked her ass at exercising?
That'd be a good one.

L: Of course!

C: How about the dangers of showing off your sweet exercise moves when you're [really drunk]? ( He didn't say 'really drunk,' but I hesitate to swear on here, and I'm already pushing my luck with how many times I said balls...)

So, an aside from the conversation, this is an excellent example of how I'm just way too tempting for Fate to ignore. My eldest brother recently turned 40 and so had a really big party this past Saturday, complete with keg and live band... Late in the evening (or very early in the morning) I was chatting with a few people asking how I've lost weight and saying I look like I've been exercising, so I ATTEMPTED to show them what a spider-man push-up is. Attempted being the key word. I am now covered in bruises and have no skin on my left elbow. Luckily after that much rum I was still pretty convinced I looked badass.



Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the influence of an adult beverage gave me the both liquid courage and an inflated sense of badassedness, causing me to demonstrate 'sweet exercise moves' and injur myself.

Not even the first time this month.

But back to today's act of temptressitude:

L: I might go there, but people might judge me...

C: How about how you manage to be cheerful, bitter, sarcastic person who's nice to strangers.
Until they get in your way or drive dumb.
You're so complex!

.... 15 minutes later:









L: How worried do you think I should be about swallowing a prong from a plastic fork?

C: *shakes head and walks away* (he actually texted me that, in my time of crisis!)

And then he ignored me. So, still being the same hypochondriac who was pretty convinced my ab muscles were the offspring of one of those face-suckers from Alien who was going to rip out of my chest at any moment and take over CA in an alien apocalypse, I was pretty convinced I'd die from it.

So I texted THEWIFEINATOR

L: My plastic fork suddenly has only 3 prongs... I think I swallowed one...

J: F*$@.. Seriously???
Oh my god
I did however submit that text to tfln.com

(you can always depend on your oldest friend to be supportive in a life-threatening situation)

L: Now I feel bad for judging [that girl from high school] when she swallowed a pin

J:What do you do now?
A pin is different than a fork prong

L: At least i can blame it hiding in the guacamole
And I have something to blog about now!

More convo about the blogging....

Time passes...

J: you'd be surprised how many people have articles online about swallowing fork tines

(See? she's a good friend, just VERY used to this kind of stuff happening to me over the last 15 years)


So while I'm dealing with a pretty persistant concern that the fork tine is going to rip out of my esophagus or puncture a lung or something, I'm also totally aware that I'm very dramatic, and am now putting fiber powder in the rest of my water for the day....

Do and Feel and Be Better

I've seen a lot of blogs and message board posts all the time, but especially over the last couple days where people say they're "starting over" or "back again" or "on the bandwagon," whatever. If there's a phrase or metaphor for it they're doing it.

I've done it myself plenty of times.

I was thinking just last night, during turbo, that after all of this hard work I'm back to my initial starting weight the first time I used SP in 2008, and how somehow that makes the weight loss from here on in count more, but not as much as it will when I reach my previous lowest weight with SP, and how it REALLY counts when I get down to a size 7 because I've never been smaller than that ever.

But you know what, that's STUPID.

I've also read and told myself probably 5983 times that it's not starting over because I didn't lose any of the knowledge I gained, blah blah blah, you all know the drill. And don't get me wrong, that's true.

But I have a new strategy!!!!

You know what I see somewhere in every post about 'starting over'?
Hope.
Determination.
Frustration.
Taking responsibility for our actions.
Goal setting.
An attempt at an attitude adjustment.
A deep felt desire to do and feel and be better.

So I'm proclaiming today that I am STARTING AGAIN.
And then I'm gong to do it again later this afternoon.
And when it's time for bed.
And when I get up tomorrow.
And maybe even again when I'm brushing my teeth or blow drying my hair.

I don't want to be stagnant.

I don't want to lsoe this positive feeling I've been riding or get so used to it I don't appreciate it or get too comfortable and find myself slipping.

Every minute of every day is a chance to 'start again'.

I think I'll do it again right now...

Probably One of Those Face-Suckers from "Alien"

Sometimes I have just a touch of hypochondria.

I usually figure out pretty quickly that I am, in fact, fine (or mostly fine) and just a drama queen, but the fact remains that for several minutes to a few hours I often freak out and get pretty convinced I'm dying.

This happened to me several times over the past week or so.

The best was on either Thursday or Friday. I was just finishing up in the restroom and as I buttoned my pants I felt something. Something hard.

I didn't have a large lunch and things have been moving pretty smoothly down there, so it's not a food baby.....

I just got over-paranoid that I was pregnant 2 days ago and took a pregnancy test even though there was no actual reason to believe I might be pregnant other than finding out that someone I KNOW is pregnant, on purpose, and therefore panicking that I was growing an unexpected fetus while drinking a cuba libre, so it's not a real baby...

Oh god it's a giant tumor and I'm dying of cancer.

Poke poke poke....

A huge, uniform tumor that fills like my whole stomach....

So, okay, not a tumor. It's probably going to be one of the worm-offspring-things that come from the face-suckers in Alien and it's going to burst through my chest and prance down the diner counter singing show-tunes. I'm definitely dying, and now I'm also going to be responsible for an alien outbreak in CA and everyone is going to curse my memory up until the inevitible take-over and apocalypse type ending to American society.

Damnit.

Somehow I alwyas knew it would come to this!!!




So, long story short, after jabbing at myself for several minutes and coming up with really strange possibilities, I sneezed. At which point I discovered what I was actually poking were abdominal muscles under a rather plush layer of squishy fat.

Woops!

I also became pretty convinced I was going to die all because BETTERJULIA doesn't know better than to link me to things I could potentially do that involve fire. Or mud, and this included BOTH.

"Would you do a Warrior Dash with me?" She so innocently asked.
"Well it certainly has the kind of spiffy name that appeals to me... What is it?"
"What is it?" she laughs, "you'll have to google it"

And then I saw this:

http://warriordash.com/

It's like all my Ninja Warrior dreams come true! Only you get to keep going even if you fall off the obstacles! And there's BEER!!!

So of course I said yes.

I'm sure it seems pretty harmless (I mean, aside from the flames and barbed wire), but what you may or may not know is I have the lamest knees ever. Of all time. I have no ACL, not even ONE!! I have only the most tenuous connections of most of my other major knee ligaments. My knees will randomly up and decide to bend in a direction nature never intended for humans at a moments notice while doing nothing more strenuous than standing still, or trying to scratch my leg with my toe while laying in bed, and cause excrutiating pain.

I am that person in all my aerobics classes who has to do the low impact moves.

But here I was again, thinking running sounded like something I can do and do well. I mean, so many of my spark buddies do it... And, no offense meant, their knees are taking just as much pressure from excess weight... I have 4 months... I'll start slow... It'll all be okay.

I had so many daydreams of prancing like a gazelle through the mud, leaping over those obstacles like some sort of super hero, and then consuming a beer covered in mud and surrounded by friends.



And then I actually did week 1 day 1 of the Spark People rookie runner 5k program.

All the treadmills in my gym have been replaced since the last time I used one, so right away I was out of my comfort zone.

Where the hell is quick start? Who thought it was a good idea to put this many buttons on something that only does 2 things?

Oh. There's a giant green one right in the middle that says "go," that's not so bad...

I can walk for 4 minutes at a time, that's not even challenging, I mean, if I can handle so much in my cardio classes this is going to be a joke. I'm going to be totally advanced and end up just skipping ahead to like week 3 and then doing iron-man style triathalons in a month, 3.15 miles of mud with obstacles will be a joke. I'll make that run my b*%@ch!

And then the running part happened.

And once again I was pretty sure I was dying.

Why the hell did I think I could run? This sucks more than anything has sucked ever in the history of sucking!


As the treadmill counted down the seconds to each running interval I glared at it so hard I was pretty convinced lasers whould shoot from my eyes into the control panel, blinding me in the process.



The mysterious burning in my shins is shin splints already, I just know it. I'm going to cripple myself for life all because I was deterimend to finish this stupid work out rather than quitting like a responsible fat person and making excuses to go do something more fun and lower impact and possibly eat a cheeseburger to reward myself.

But I didn't die, and my shins were fine after an hour of zumba.

But I hadn't forgotten how bad Thursday sucked when Saturday rolled around. I knew I needed to run first thing or I wouldn't get to it. So I 'slept' for another 2 hours after I initially woke up (the book doesn't count, I was in bed, therefore sleeping).

Then I HAD to eat something first, right? Can't exercise on an empty stomach.

And then I had to let that digest. FOR AN HOUR. I mean, that piece of whole wheat toast might make me feel like I'm going to barf, I better watch 2 on demand episodes of a bad reality television show to prepare myself.

Oh but I have so much planned for today... Can I really justify taking ALLL that time to do the running work out? I don't think so, I better just skip it. I shouldn't run anyway, I have bad knees.

But I went.



And if I thought I was going to shoot lasers at that treadmill on Thursday, I was pretty sure ti would be more like space aged anti-aircraft weopans from a sci fi movie on Saturday.

Here we go treadmill.
You and me.
Wo-mano a machine-o.
You can't beat me.
I'm gonna kick you in your stupid face.
I'm going to run, and I'm going to be craceful as some sort of African planes animal with really pretty fur, and you're going to lose, and it's going to be awesome.
I'm even going to do the running parts at 5.TWO instead of 5.0 today.
That's how confident I am that you are going down.

I was pretty sure I was going to die. I had a huge trash-talking session with the treadmill before every running interval, and I almost stopped and got off the treadmill at least 10 times in that 20 minutes.... But I didn't. I finished the work out, I kept the speed where I told myself I would, and

I ran

Dressing Like a Grown-Up

Does still refering to being an adult as a 'grown-up' automatically disqualify me from being one? It might...



So I found out about this time last week that I would have to go to that fancy luncheon on Tuesday (of the infamous fancy chocolate heaven cake mousse contraption). My first thought of "oo, neat, lunch and networking" was cut into before I even finished the "neat" part with "wtf am I going to wear?"

Pubic access television isn't exactly a business dress industry. Just yesterday, for example, I found myself unexpectedly using a plunger to pry up a floor tile and then crawling under the floor of the building from the room where our servers are to go emerge in the lobby (all the way down the hallway, so a good 9000 yards by crawling in the dark measurements, or about 50 feet aboveground) with a coax cable to run to a new monitor I had just mounted on the wall using power tools. All by myself. And it's even mounted straight.

In brand new sling-back 4inch wedge sandals.

It's moments like that that lead me to wear flats, jeans, and machine washable sweaters most days.

There are spiders under there. Lots of them.

And I may or may not have seen a badger. I remain pretty convinced, but google and wikipedia both disagree, seeing as badgers are not indigenous to the central California coast.


It was at least an unusually large oppossum with an intimidating glare.

Or a reflection.

But I'm going with giant angry badger.

I like to tell myself that a cardigan is one step higher on the 'business appropriateness' scale while simultaneously usually being cheaper than a comfortable hoodie, and therefore justify owning approximately 5,472 cardigan sweaters. And jeans come right after nude and sweatpants on the clothing preference scale.

So when I found out I'd have to dress like an actual, respectable professional in order to effectively network with ACTUAL actual, respectable professionals, I was pretty much SOL. Dress pants are somewhere between shoes that pinch my toes and bras that are a tad too old whos underwire tends to creep out of the seam and poke out of my sweater without me noticing.



I ATTEMPTED to find just one pair of dress pants long enough to wear heels with along with perhaps a cute business type jacket in time. I even drove 45 mintues with a friend to a ginormous mall 2 counties away in my attempts... but I have a budget and a 33inch inseem... in flats... those don't mix well. So that didn't work out...

So then I just tried not to think about it.

And then it was Tuesday morning. I do OWN dress-ish pants. Well the Target version of dress pants anyway. I just don't like how that button that faces the inside of the pants sticks to my spare tire and leaves a weird circle on my skin and the general lack of stretchiness.



So when I pulled a pair off the shelf and slipped them on, I wasn't expecting much. I definitely wasn't expecting for them to slide down my butt every 5 minutes all day. The last time I wore this particular pair of dress pants, on April 21 (I know because it was for that event I organized), they didn't really fit either... but in a totally different way. After breakfast I had to do that crafty maneuver where I slip the little metal tab do-hickey through the button hole instead of through the corresponding metal bit about an inch or so further over on the waistband. They were tight on my thighs and wrinkled unflatteringly whenever I moved from sitting to standing.

On Tuesday they were fastened properly and would slip several inches lower than the waistband of my underpants pretty regularly. I was able to sit up straight in them without a muffin top. They still wrinkled a little unflatteringly in the thighs, but now it was because the shape of my thigh muscles is very different than the shape of the pants.

I've considered myself a size 16 for quite a while now, but it means so much more to put on one of my smaller pair of size 18 pants and have them be that obviously too large. Pants I could BARELY fit into just months ago.

I NEEDED that. In generaly I always feel pretty positive about my progress, but it's HARD to work so hard and progress so slowly, even if it's steady. I'm sure you all know exactly what I'm talking about.

Well I better go, the day is gloomy but it hasn't rained in a while so I have to go climb out on the roof and wipe all the gross stuff off of our sattelite dishes and probably re-point at least one of them for a better signal.... Good thing I'm wearing jeans and flats!

I Swear it's Like a Plague of Cookies!

It's like the plague of locusts only with a lot fewer legs and a lot more calories.

Everywhere I go this week there seem to be delicious, gooey looking chocolate chip cookies. Or big fluffy chewy cookies with tiny peanut butter cups in them instead of chocolate chips...

I've been incorporating them into my calories, but there are WAY better uses of my calories than cookies!!!

I've also had 2 days in a row of lunches I had to attend for work. Monday was pizza and salad (and cookies). I only had 2 slices but still felt gross all day. I'm just not used to greasy food anymore. Yesterday was a fancy schmancy one at a luncheon for our local hospitality association: salad (which was tastey and had a light dressing and I scarfed all of quite gladly), wine (I had a small tasters glass of one of them), grilled chicken (with skin... which I ate...) with some kind of risotto and grilled vegetables. It was so delicious there wasn't a scrap of food left on my plate. The serving sizes weren't very big but I'm sure there had to be all kinds of hidden calories from butter, etc. in there. And then the dangerous part. A chocolate mouse layered with chocolate cake with raspberry stuff hiding in the chocolate...

It didn't look that fancy on the plate. I expected it to taste like cheap store-bought cake. I thought for sure I could just have a few bites.

It was not cheap store-bought cake. It was chocolate heaven!!! I tried to convince myself to stop... but it was FANCY chocolate heaven. At a restaurant I could never afford to eat in if it weren't for a work event, so I ate every bite and only barely managed to stop myself from licking the plate.

So Blobby McFlabface definitely scored a direct hit with that one....


Oh well. Sometimes I get to eat a fancy piece of cake, right? No big deal. I knew I'd get off work an hour early since I worked through lunch, I could just fit in a walk on the treadmill for a good 45 minutes before my RIPPED class and have a light dinner. It wouldn't make up for ALL the calories, I'm sure, but it would certainly help.

Well when I went home to change I let the cat out into the yard for a few mintues. It was nice out and she was just BEGGING to go lay in the sunshine, so I couldn't say no. I left the front door cracked and went upstairs to get ready for the gym.

When I came back down she just looked SO CONTENT out there in the sunshine and was giving me her best "but I only just got out here and it's so nice out and the sun feels so good on my ancient kitty bones" sad kitty cat face...

I couldn't make her budge!!!


I mean, I'm not heartless.

So I found myself standing in the living room, all dressed up and ready to go, staring at the clock and trying to figure out the best thing to do.

I could wait 15 mintues and then make her come back in, feel less guilty, and still have 30 minutes for the treadmill.

Blobby McFlabface pointed out that I could just settle into the couch and watch one of my shows on the dvr and then get up for the gym in time for RIPPED... IF the cat was ready to come back in...

But then I had the lightbulb moment!! I own turbo jam dvd's for a reason, damnit! So I popped one of them in the playstation and kicked and punched around my living room AND the cat got to stay outside for as long as she wanted (she usually comes back in to sit on something squishier after about 45 mintues)!!

And with the blinds open, which I didn't think of until I was well into the work out, I'm sure the neighbors got a good show of my spaztic attempts at kickboxing on display!


Ahhhhh!! MORE cookies in the building!!! What is this? I'm promising you guys and myself: NO MORE COOKIES!

Die Fat, Die!!!

I'm feeling significantly less angry toward my fat now, but still holding on to my desire for its death!!!

I just want to reassure anyone who read yesterday that this is good anger, and only at my fat. There's a tiny bit of anger at myself for making myself fat, but I'd say that's maybe 2% of it and the rest is at the fat itself for refusing to budge.

It's like Blobby McFlabface, the chubberchaun who hides in my rolls and does everything he can to expand his flab mansion, has found some way to fortify his defences...

But I'll figure it out!! Somewhere in my constant bombardment of sprays from my freggie cannon and barrages of strength training bombs and intense cardio heat seeking missiles, I will find the weak point in his defences!!!

I'm not Depressed, I'm ANGRY!!!

Sorry it's been a while since I checked in, there's been a whole lot of LIFE over the last few days, and no time for blogging!!

The one thing that I really hate in my work out classes at the gym happened on Thursday. There weren't very many people in the class and so there was no one to hide behind so as not to see myself in the mirror.

There was just no avoiding my reflection.

I HATED it. Especially in work out clothes with my face all sweaty and everything jiggling about and generally in the way of some of the ab moves. It's just not fun.

At first I got totally depressed and overwhelmed. How was I EVER going to get to a place where I wasn't three times bigger than everyone else in my classes when it's taken me SO LONG to lose just 20 of the 120lb I want to lose. And that's the first 20, when I'm at my biggest, and it should technically go the fastest...

Needless to say I was not in a good headspace when I left the gym.

But something happend on the drive home, I stopped feeling sad and defeated and didn't want to cry and take pity on myself anymore. I got MAD. Like really mad.

F@%K all this fat!!
Screw it and the way it controls my life and my mood and my wardrobe and activities and self-estime and seemingly everything else.
I'm not letting it be in control anymore.
I get to be the boss.
I'm gonna kill it!! Die fat die!!!!

So I anger cleaned for a bit when I got home because I was too upset to sit still and, thankfully, binging when I'm upset doesn't really hold any charm anymore. Honestly it didn't even occur to me to binge. I was upset and needed a way to vent all my anger and frustration so my kitchen got really clean... My microwave is SPARKLING and no longer smells like a burnt bag of 100 calorie popcorn, by the way.

Normally I tell my friends that anger is a wasted emotion and to let it go, but this time I think I'm gonna go ahead and hold on to it. At least for a little while

Facepalm.

Sometimes I remain totally mistified by the completely and utterly obvious.

Even though I broke up with my scale around Christmas time and consider us "just frienemies" now rather than using it as the definition of my success, I still tend to check in with it fairly regularly. I mean, who can resist the intoxicating pull of a frienemy? I just LOVE to hate that scale. Usually it's just a jerk-face, but then every once in a while it tells me something nice, so I'm just not ready to cut it out of my life completely.


(If you don't get the reference, good for you for having standards!)
Well for the last week or so it went UP about a pound and then got stuck there. I haven't been upset by it or anything, but it's annoying. I wasn't surprised, because the same thing happened at the beginning of April: up a pound out of no where, hovered there for 2-3 weeks, and then like 7lb disappeared pretty much overnight.

Well why the reason didn't occur to me sooner I honsestly can't tell you. It's so obvious it's like it was literally slapping me about the facial regions and I just couldn't see it because it was so darn close to my eyes!

On April 1 I switched from 3lb freeweights to 5lb freeweights in my classes at the gym.

On May 30 I switched from 5lb freeweights to 6lb freeweights in my classes at the gym (and they're already starting to feel easy! I might be able to move up to 7's in July instead of August!)...

So let me guess... you've figured it out! I know you're all so smart!

Sometimes I just have to do things that cause me to facepalm...

The Tofu Hulk

The original plan last night was to follow up Turbo Jam with leftover burrito fixins and some steamed veggies for dinner. But when I got out of Turbo my tumbly had a rumbly, and it wasn't for burritos (for a change)...



I wanted nothing so much as a wide variety of vegetables!!!

So I decided to make a stir fry. I made a stir fry last week and loved it, so I got all the same veggies. I was so looking forward to tons of broccoli cooked up with celery, carrots, snow peas, and cashews in a home-made sugar-free teryaki type sauce over some nice brown rice...

My only concern was that it was lacking in protein, and I've been trying out being a "weekday vegetarian" thanks to a cool video spark budy BETTERJULIA showed me...

So I decided to get some tofu! I mean, what could be better? It'll just absorb the flavor of the sauce, it's not very expensive, the store by my house carries the good brand of the lite tofu in extra firm that's great for stir fry....

Could I be any more clever?



When I got home and pulled out the block of tofu, it looked rather tiny sitting next to my big pile of produce, so I decided to go ahead and chop up the whole thing for the stir fry.

I don't know if I got magic tofu or what, but I swear that slimey brick had regenerative properties!! It seemed like no matter how many little cubes I cut, there was still so much brick...

My pile of tofu in the pan just kept expanding...

and expanding....

Pretty soon it covered the whole bottom of the pan!! And I'd alreayd heated up the veggie broth and garlic I was cooking it in, so there was no going back...

As I added more and more veggies to the pan it became clear... The tofu had completely taken over my veggie stir fry.

Oh well, it was still delicious, and now I have a lot more leftovers!

Sometimes I Over-Estimate My Hawtness...

Sometimes with all these dratic changes happening on the inside, I forget that the outside progress is a bit slower going...

I'll discover that I can do some new maneuver in one of my work out classes and suddenly think I look like a gymnast or ballerina!

It's like my brain sees my new-found ability to actually pull my leg up without my knee bent in front of myself to stretch something like this:



Only to discover that to the rest of the world it's really something slightly less graceful...

Usually there's really a lot of straining and a tongue sticking out for better concentration (you know it helps!) and various bumps and rolls and things in the way...

It's much like when I have too much to drink and suddenly, after wearing out both of my dance moves, I decide I am, in fact, capable of dancing like a sexy pop star...

I'll spare you the illustrations on that one. No one should have to see it and I'm sure you can picture it just fine...

But that's okay, the outside is bound to catch up eventually, right?

I'm a Legume

You know how magazines and tv shows will always recommend styles based on what fruit you're shaped like? Pear, Apple, etc...

Well I haven't considered myself shaped like any fruits OR time keeping devices lately. Even an apple didn't really describe my body type... I consider myself more of a legume of some kind.

Here's an 'artistic' rendering of me being legume-shaped: (for reference):

It's no fun being a legume.  There is no such thing as a designer who pictures a bean stomping down the runway in this season's looks.

I'm hoping to soon find myself a pear, or, you never know, maybe a stick of fruit flavored gum!

But I'm working on it, and I'm creating this blog as a place to work it out in words, so it's like the mental leg room for this legume.