Bad Good Decisions

I've been trying to eat my 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, and I've hit a horrible snag: I hate vegetables. Well, I don't really hate all vegetables, but I resent the fact that most of them take adding on salt or butter or cheese or dressing or oil before they taste good. I think there's a spectrum of vegetable value that ranges from carrots, at one end, to eggplant at the other. Carrots are great--full of vitamins, they're portable and not juicy, they store pretty well, and they taste fine, even if you don't put anything on them. You can even mix them with other vegetables to make them all go down better. Eggplants suck. They're a great color on the outside and they look like alien pods, but that's the only thing they have going for them because the best way to eat them is probably eggplant parmesan, which is probably the nutritional equivalent of sticking an eighth of a multivitamin inside the molten filling of a chocolate lava cake, sucking the whole thing down and then patting yourself on the back for eating a health food. AND, if you try to stick eggplant in with other vegetables to mask its horrible taste, all the others become tainted by its awfulness. 

The point is, if I'm going to eat vegetables, which I think I should, I can't take myself seriously if I dip them in fat. So I eat them plain. Even if it sort of kills my soul. As my cousin Jamee once said, "Pain is beauty." 

I've been trying to increase the amount of vegetables I eat relative to fruit. Ideally, I'd eat more vegetables than fruit each day. But that's gross, so for right now, I'm just trying to do the best I can and break even--which results in an overall higher amount of fruit/vegetable intake. 

Wednesday was a rough day for this plan. I ate carrots and celery and a banana and an apple, but I didn't want any more vegetables. I toyed with whether a tomato was a fruit or vegetable for a while, and I couldn't fathom trying to choke down radishes without any dressing. Finally, the answer came when my husband told me about work that day. I had packed him leftover chinese food with a big handful of green beans on top. I was hoping that in microwaving the food, the beans would get sort of steamed by virtue of being in there with the rice. (I was totally right, by the way). He said, though, that a co-worker saw him with his lunch and was adamant that my husband was doing it wrong--that uncooked green beans were poisonous. For some reason, this inspired me to eat the rest of the green beans. In fact, I ate one raw, but it was gross and awful. I'm pretty sure (well, now I'm really sure, because I didn't die) that raw green beans aren't poisonous, but they definitely taste like they are. 

As my husband watched my face contort in agony at the horrible flavor, he kindly volunteered to steam the beans for me. He's so nice. 

When they were done, I dumped them out onto a plate. There were so many. I looked on the bag to see what a serving size was because I thought it had to be fairly small--certainly less than was on the plate. To my horror, I learned that a full serving of green beans is 3/4 of a cup. I steeled myself for the painful process of crunching one bean after another, over and over, until green bean poisoning really did kick in and I died. But I found I couldn't hack it. There's no way I could eat all those beans one at a time. So I didn't....

they still tasted awful, but on the plus-side, I finally found my long-lost pearl earrings!

...and I made it to 5 servings after all!

Pre-Weigh in Jitters

Today my scale broke. Not in the sense that I was too big for it and it exploded, crushed to tiny smithereens by my immense bulk, which would have been moderately awesome, but instead I think it was resting on a tiny plastic ball from one of my dog's much abused toys. I moved it and things went back to where they should be. It was pleasant enough while it lasted though, because when I first stepped on, I had "lost" approximately 13lbs from last week. And because I was skeptical of that result, I stepped on again after it reset, and I had "lost" approximately 37lbs from last week. I was actually kind of bummed out by this point because I knew I hadn't really lost a leg and an arm over the past week, and it's important to me to at least have a reliable reading from week to week, even if it's not really accurate relative to all the other scales (I can't remember if I've said this before, but this scale displays your weight at about 5-7lbs heavier than doctor's office scales--the best scale is the wii fit, which shaves off 5-7lbs from doctor's office scales. I'm using the heavier-reading one this time around because it's the easiest of the three to set up and use. Despite being heavier, it has good test-retest reliability and, unlike the wii fit, will not zap my little cartoon mii with fatness and make it sad at the end of every weigh-in).
Oh, I want to mention at this point that I don't really think I have immense bulk or could smash scales or anything--though probably a kitchen scale wouldn't stand much of a chance (the ones I've shopped for only go up to about 12lbs).
So...the moral of the story is that the scale is back to reading approximately what it usually reads when I stand on it (actually, this week it weighs a little less but tomorrow's the final weigh-in so I'd better not jump the gun).
The bigger story this week is the failed cleanse. My husband and I decided to do this cleanse because we thought it would be a fun challenge. It's a 21-day challenge. The first week, you could eat fruit, vegetables and three 1/2 cup servings of brown rice, wild rice or lentils a day. The second, you added some lean protein, and the third, I can't remember what happened. Anyway, so day one we start--I'd done a lot of prep work the night before--but my husband ate a donut first thing in the morning . He did it again on day 2, and on day 3 he ate two donuts.
Ultimately, we abandoned the cleanse because I was sooo hungry all the time and I knew that I was losing weight too fast. I didn't want to go into starvation mode and pack on a ton of weight as soon as the cleanse was over. It was also the kind of restrictive diet that would make me fail. If I want to have ice cream, radishes are not a good substitute--I need to have a diet with some flexibility. Eat a little ice cream now, but make up for it by eating more vegetables and fewer calories later. It's one of the things I like so much about WW. There's nothing that's off-limits on WW, but the program trains you to work within the real world and make good choices despite all the pressures you normally face that would make you emotionally eat. For weight loss to be successful, you need to work within your regular life and make a fundamental lifestyle change. It's not just "be good for a couple of months and then do whatever you want when you're skinny," but maintaining a healthy and happy lifestyle.
But--the cleanse has brought a lot more vegetables into our diet, which is something to be grateful for.
Back to the title of the post: I get nervous before my weigh ins. I want to know NOW what I will weigh tomorrow. I usually have a rule that there can be only one weigh-in per week, but I've broken that a bit lately. I don't want to become obsessed with the number--so I need to get more firm about that. There's a lot more to life than worrying about the number, so I should let it go and concentrate on feeling better and better!

I'm BAAAAAAAAAAACK

So...I decided to take about 10 months off and regain all the weight I'd previously lost on WW. Ouch.
BUT--Now I'm back. I'm ready, and I'm committed, because in recent memory, I've experienced having lost weight and I felt a lot better about myself, my life and everything. I had a friend in high school who liked to conclude every day with, "Well, I'd like to think we made a difference today," in homage to every ridiculous movie ever made. When I eat right, I feel my own sense of self-righteousness that helps take the bitter sting out of not eating everything I want whenever I want it.
So...after my first week, I lost 2 pounds!! Go me!! (people also said I looked like I had lost weight)--who knew that losing 1/100th of your weight could be so rewarding?!
Right now I have an ingrown toenail. When I was little, I feel like I always heard about people dying from their ingrown toenails. And now I understand exactly how that could happen.
My husband and I worked out our budget last night. I also understand how people could die from that, too. But, we have our goals clearly in line now, and despite the terror I feel about my jobless situation and everything, it's better to have control over what little you have then just have your mind go blank in sheer terror when you think about it.
Anyway, with my ingrown toenail--I soaked a cotton ball in rubbing alcohol and then shoved a bunch of it between the offending toenail and my super-sensitive toe skin. I hope that will ease the drama a little bit, though it's still surprisingly painful.
I talked to a friend today about how growing up is the pits. At some point, the problems that result from your own lack of self control are just your own problems, and can't be blamed on anyone else. When we would go on trips I would think how I never wanted to grow up because my parents would do all the packing and cleaning up before and after the trip--with a little bit of our "help" of course, even when we were all so worn out from traveling and having fun. Some lingering vestige of that feeling might explain why it took me a week to clean up after Christmas dinner.
Anyway, today I've done the dishes, worked on cleaning up the house a bit, have been looking at jobs to apply to, have made decisions to improve our financial stability, tracked everything I've eaten so far, had three servings of fruits and vegetables by lunch and crudely attempted to treat my own ingrown toenail. And now I'm taking the dog for a walk. Well, I'd like to think I made a difference today...