Scaling Friends (I wrote this a couple of days ago, just publishing it now)

This is what they call a bad start. Well not that I am starting my weight loss journey but that I've just started this blog to catalogue The Journey itself. So I've eaten pretty terribly this week, especially just now because I went to a restaurant and completely ignored the good for you parts of the menu and went for the dirty greasy parts instead. But I have to tell you it was delicious!

I think it's time for some shock therapy. I haven't been on the scale in about a week, and I guess I'm basically avoiding it. Terror thy name is scale. I will go on the scale though. When I get home. I'm at my parents house right now doing laundry because my apartment is ghetto and doesn't have laundry facilities and I can't afford the ridiculously priced laundromats.

But I digress. Why this fear of the scale? Scales (unless unjustly tampered with or have fallen ill due to age and pass away) are notorious truth tellers. They will never lie to you. If your scale was a person and the two of you went shopping for the perfect dress, the scale would tell you whether that number makes you look fat or fab. So why avoid this truth-telling friend?

Because although a truthful friend is what you really need, it's not always what you want. Sometimes you want to be naive and have a friend who will tell you that you look great in that 2x too small top that's designer and has an awesome screenprint on it, just so you can feel good, even if you don't look it.

But that's not the friend that gets you to the point where you actually are 2x smaller than you were the first time you tried on your fav designer shirt. Scale is.

At this point I'm not even sure if I'm talking about me going on the scale tonight when I get home or the friends I thought I had way back when. I was naive and that's what got me to that 302 lbs. And I did have friends that were okay with me being naive and went along with it telling me my designer fav was fab when really it was more like ghetto-hideous. Haha. (Not saying that being 302lbs is hideous [because it doesn't matter how much you weigh, weight has nothing to do with beauty inside or out] but being 302lbs in a size XL baby-tee is.) So having the right friends on your side, like the scale, can be a huge help in losing weight.

I no longer have my non-scale friends and I'm quite satisfied with that. I'd rather have no good friends than a few bad ones. And right now I have a good scale at home, that I'm sure is going to tell me that french fries don't count as a vegetable and that chicken fingers are bad for you especially when converted into buffalo fingers.

You know, I think me and my scale are going to start hanging out a little more often. See what kind of mischief we can get ourselves into.  Or out of I guess.

Epic Fail

YUP! I fail. Epic fail. I ate (not all by myself mind you) a box of chocolates. Chocolate covered cherries, which next to chocolate covered strawberries and peanut butter and chocolate cups, is my ultimate chocolate weakness. My nemisis.

If I'd just had one or maybe two, that'd be okay. But I'm pretty sure I ate close to seven. O_O!! I know terrible. Weightcare talks about how you have to do instinctive eating which is a skill we are all born with but that we lose over time. Sometimes this can be caused by the fact that parents won't let their kids leave the table until they've eaten everything on their plate. Or it's just that we've over-indulged one too many times and soon enough we don't know when we're hungry we just eat because we're bored or depressed, or even happy.

So allow me to analyze. My day up until the Epic Fail, was a pretty crappy one. I called in sick to work for the third day in a row because of this migraine, my migraine turned into an ear ache, and my anxiety was high. I haven't left the house in more than a few days and so the thought of going outside was/is getting high up in the stress category. So what we've got here is a low mood and that can lead to eating out of boredom/depression. What did I do about it? I ate the chocolate. What should I have done about it? Anything else. Anything else to get my mind working and away from thoughts of chocolate. I could've knit, read, updated this blog. I could've even cooked myself a healthful meal because I hadn't actually eaten in a while and that could also be a trigger to eating that box of chocolates.

I know the warning sign but I didn't see them. I'll have to talk about that tomorrow when I see the dietician at the clinic.

The positive side to all of this? I realized what I did wrong and I can work to change it for the future.

Weightcare Plan

I want to be able to run

So this fancy fandangled plan that I'm on is at the local clinic and I believe it's located at other clinics in Canada. It's called weightcare. Basically I have a team on my weightlosing side. I have a doctor, a dietician (not a nutritionist), and a personal trainer. All three of them work with me in half an hour increments so many times in the month. Say one week I'll see the doctor, then the next week the dietician and the trainer, then the next week just the dietician etc. Also they have this metabolic rate analyser machine thing. You breathe into this mask for just over ten minutes and then it calculates how much you burn when you're resting. Like sleeping or doing the dishes or watching tv. When I started mine was really high and I was like what? Because I'd always figured that my metabolism was crap. Nope apprently I just eat too much crap. lol. Last time I was at weightcare they did another one of these tests and my metobolic resting rate thing has gone down, they said that I can get it back up just by exercising/doing muscle work more.

Exercise has been the hard part for me. I just don't like it. I did do 45mins on Friday of last week which is amazing because that's like more than I did all of last month! Like I said in my last post I have to step up my game. I've had a migraine for the past three days though, so I haven't been exercising much. Hopefully I will feel a bit better later tonight and can at least get ten minutes of muscle work in. Any little bit helps.

I've been doing it for 12 weeks and so far have lost a pound a week, so 12 lbs. I'm down to 258lbs. They were aiming for 2-2.5lbs a week but a little lost is better than a little gained.

I also have to work on the eating portion of the process. There's these little daycards that I'm supposed to use. When I first started I used them all the time and now not so much. I don't know why. I just forget! I'm such a bad loser lol.

I'll go fill out one of those cards now.

History Of A Fat Chick

This is my first post so it's allowed to be terrible. Let's start off with a history shall we?

I wasn't always fat. Throughout grade school my weight fluctuated and it was exaggerated by the group of girls in my class who were born skinny. You know the types that can't help no matter how much they eat they can't gain weight? Ya so compare my 5'6" 150lbs frame (in grade six) to their 4' nothing 96lbs frames and you get yourself a case of body dismorphia.

So I took that body dismorphia with me into grade seven and eight where I grew another two to three inches and thinned out. But you must realize that I didn't realize that I hadn't gained weight. I didn't like to weigh myself much and when I went to the doctor he rarely weighed me and when he did I didn't really want to know.

To make this a little clearer, let's look at a picture of me before my grade eight graduation where I was pretty sure I was going to be the biggest girl there.

See? Not exactly the biggest girl in the world, actually as I look back now at the pictures from that night, I'm pretty sure I was the skinniest looking kid out of my group of friends. I bought a pair of jeans that year and I think they were a size 36. (Holy crap I thought I was so fat in a size 36!)

Fast forward to my sophmore year of high school and you have what happens to way too many kids suffering from this body dismorphia - anorexia. Luckily that didn't last long but I did get very skinny. At first people didn't notice, they just complimented me on how much weight I'd been losing and how skinny I was getting. But then they started to notice my "lack of appetite" and the comments began to change into why won't you eat and you're too skinny. (I have a picture of said too skinniness but I haven't scanned it onto my computer yet.)

So I'm too skinny now? Well I guess I better eat. And so I did. I ate and I ate and I ate and I ate until I was at about 250lbs for my grade 12 prom.

A few years go by and I balloon out to a what they call "Extremely Obese" 302 lbs.

The thing was, I didn't feel 'Extremely Obese'. I didn't even feel 'Obese'. Maybe somewhere deep inside the workings of my brain I knew that I was unhealthy, that I was fat, that I was killing myself with food. But I didn't face it I guess? I'd spent those few years of gaining those last 52lbs hearing that I need to lose weight from concerned parents and doctors, and I "tried" personal trainners and diets and weight watchers etc. But nothing worked, because I didn't want to lose the weight. I wasn't concerned with it. I was young and I thought that everyone else around me were allowed to eat what they wanted and not gain weight and not have people telling them to join a gym so why should I?

And then, my boyfriend of 6 years (okay so in those six years I'd gone from anorexic 130ish lbs to 302lbs but I'm not sure if it had anything to do with him. Maybe he was an enabler, but I'm not going to blame him. At least not completely. lol) broke up with me. (That's a whole other drama that I'm not going to get into here.) So now I'm fat and alone and I decide, well I don't want to fix the alone part just yet, I'm going to enjoy being single for a while. But then I think, "last time I was single I was skinny and happy to flirt singly. Somethings off... Oh I'm fat, right." So I start walking and eating well and it's starting to work, I'm down fifteen pounds, but I know this won't last unless I get some outside help. So I go to this weightloss place but it closes down when I've only lost 20lbs or so. So I go a year or so trying to maintain this weight that I've lost so far on my own and through them. I think I gained back about 10lbs, because when I started the program I'm on now, I started in at 270lbs.

So my miracle plan is through the clinic in the next town over. And it's working! I'll write about it in my next blog. With them I've lost 12lbs. So about a pound a week. Not bad. Time to step up my game though. Got to have my freedom.