The First 100 Pounds (51 - 60)

I'm not a doctor. You're all clear on that, right? Get medical advice from a professional, um, medicine person. Not from a poet. Also, there's more swearing. Because I can.

I also want to remind you (and myself) that some of these realizations/developments/changes were 16 months or more in the making. Process, process, process.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 51 – 60:

51. I SMILE

If I can't smile when I'm working out, I am working too hard. It's not that I always want to smile, don't get me wrong, but if my face is locked in a grimace and my hands are so tightly fisted that I'm leaving fingernail dents in my palms, I'm taking energy that could be going to my workout (usually my run) and putting it into the wrong places. I slow it down if I have to, but often, just smiling is enough to get me to relax. Just because it's work doesn't mean it has to be agonizing. If nothing else, I smile during the last tenth of a mile or so of every run—fast runs, medium runs, long runs. I smile at the end of hard runs because they're almost over. I smile at the end of easier runs because I feel good. It sounds stupid, but it makes a difference, truly.

52. I SWEAR

I am mighty. My runs reinforce my mightiness—and not just the easier runs. It was the difficult runs that made me first declare my mightiness. I finished them despite their difficulty—that's what made me mighty. I don't have to be mighty to do the easy stuff, right? So when I say I swear, I don't mean that I swear in anger or frustration, although I suppose I probably do. I do, however, almost invariably swear in satisfaction at being the conquering heroine. When I finish a run at a higher speed than I've managed before, I swear. When I add a mile to my long run and get through it, I swear. When I have a tough run and muscle my way through it by sheer force of will, I swear. And that swear is almost inevitably the same every time: That's right, motherfucker. That's right. Don't question the swear. Don't ask who the motherfucker is. I don't know. But I have showed that motherfucker who is boss, and that boss is me.

53. I LISTEN

This is part of cutting myself a break, and it's how I'm starting to learn what my body needs: I listen. I know, for example, that an egg over root vegetable hash with some toast makes a good pre-run meal, as long as I give myself time to digest it. Hot sauce? Bring it on. I know that I can eat huevos rancheros the night before a 5K and be just fine. I also know that I never, ever want to eat tuna fish before a run, even several hours before. I know that I need to pour a little Gatorade into my water for long runs (or when it's really hot) and that coconut water and I don't get along well. You live, you learn. If I listen, I can avoid injury—I know when my shoes are losing their shape, when I need to invest in a couple of new running bras (and trust me, they're an investment, but totally worthwhile), when I'm fighting off a cold. It's experience, yes, but it's also paying attention to that experience. One isn't much good without the other.

54. I DISTRACT MYSELF

If I'm inside, that means Netflix. Instant Netflix is the savior of my treadmill workouts. I put my iPad on the treadmill and go. If I'm outside, it means music (kept at a volume low enough that I'm aware of my surroundings) or talking to Jed or having something specific to think about. But really, the outside world is distracting enough for me; it's the treadmill workouts that require entertainment. I recommend finding something with enough action (however you define it) to keep you occupied and enough of a story to keep you wanting more. This is not the time for Masterpiece Theater (not for me, anyway). It's the time for Alias. Or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Extra points if it's funny. Double-extra points if it's funny and has a good soundtrack. When I was watching Alias, I waited for the fight scenes (I never had to wait long). The soundtrack would pump me up, and I could get through a rough patch and come out the other side.

55. I TAKE INVENTORY

Speaking of rough patches, they used to be enough to get me to quit for the day. If my head wasn't in the run, I could use a rough patch to stop. But I read somewhere (who knows where) of a runner who said she (he? The research for this post is pathetic. Why are you reading this?) talked herself through rough patches by taking inventory. Mine goes something like this: "Legs? Okay. Breath? Okay. Shoulders? Okay. So quit whining, you're fine." The first two items are self-explanatory: if I'm not in pain and not having trouble regulating my breathing, I'm good to go. I've also learned (by listening…see what I did there?) that I slump a little when I get tired, and I can feel that slump in between my shoulder blades. So I check to make sure that my shoulders are okay. If my spine is in place and my shoulders are relaxed down (not forward, just not bunched up at my ears), I'm not slumping. And if I am slumping, I can tell myself to knock it off. During some runs, I don't take any inventory at all. During others, it seems like I never stop.

56. I SPEED IT UP

I have found, strangely enough, that some of the days when I'm just not feeling it are the perfect days to take the difficulty up a notch. I don't know why this works, but I suspect it's a matter of focus: I'm not feeling the run because I'm not paying enough attention. One day, I decided to use my "bad" run for speed work, and ran intervals—periods of hard running followed by periods of jogging for recovery—instead of jogging the steady pace of what I think of as my "regular" runs and damned if it didn't work. When I can't bear the thought of running five miles, I can often handle running a quarter of a mile (about 400 meters, if you measure that way), and if I set the pace to something challenging, I force myself to pay attention. Who knew? I'd say this works maybe three-quarters of the time—it's the first thing I try when I'm having a tough time, and if it's going to work, it usually starts showing signs right away. If it doesn't work?

57. I SLOW IT DOWN

Yes, it takes me longer to get the miles in, but really. The difference is minimal, and it's better to run five slow miles than to quit during the first. I should add that five miles is pretty much the shortest distance I run these days—and if none of my tricks get my head in the game, I make it my five-miler day and save the mid-length or long run for another day. The world isn't going to explode if I do 7 miles on Thursday instead of Wednesday, or if I shift my long run (right now between 10 and 12 miles) from Saturday to Sunday. This is, for reasons that should be obvious, my last resort—slowing down is better than quitting, and running a short distance is better than running no distance.  And it doesn't matter if you're running the same distances that I am (or if you're walking, or rowing, or elliptical…ling). The theory's the same. If you're scheduled to walk two miles and you can't seem to get into it no matter what you try, maybe you just need to slow it down. Or walk a mile (or whatever your light workout is). The road will still be there tomorrow.

58. I PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT WORKS

I listen to my body before, during, and after a workout and before, during, and after a meal. I pay attention to what I ate before a really good run, to what schedule of light and heavy days works best for me, to what time of day I'm more comfortable working out. If it seems to to work, I do it again. If it keeps working, I keep doing it. Am I setting up false corollaries? Probably. If so, they'll work themselves out in time. Or they won't—am I setting myself back at all by believing that a day off before my long run feels better than a day off after my long run? I seriously doubt it.

59. I DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO ANYONE WHO SAYS I'M DOING IT WRONG

Because fuck them. I've lost 100 pounds. I've done it without injury, in a way that feels sustainable to me, and in real-world conditions. Could I have lost 130 pounds by now if I'd used someone else's methods? Maybe. But so what? I've. Lost. 100. Pounds. If someone is that desperate to tell me I've done it wrong, I think that probably says more about their insecurities than my process.

60. I KEEP MY PHONE IN THE OTHER ROOM (OR LEAVE IT AT HOME)

Not only that, but I keep it on vibrate. As much as I talk about how helpful it is to keep myself distracted, outside distractions can derail me. I will take a workout-ending distraction if I can get it, so I make it so that I can't get it. Simple as that.

Five Things that Don't Suck, Visitors from Far-Off Lands Edition

1. seeing much-loved, geographically distant relatives
2. having much-loved relatives, no matter where they live
3. getting the long run in early
4. cookies
5. whoever made the cookies

The First 100 Pounds (41 - 50)

The standard warnings still apply: I'm still not a medical professional, and I don't pretend that this is some sort of program. It's what I did, what I do, and what has worked for me. It doesn't even necessarily make sense. Your mileage may vary, and your doctor should have a say in the matter. What the hell do I know about this? I'm a poet, people. Get professional advice.

I also want to remind you (and myself) that some of these realizations/developments/changes were 16 months or more in the making. Process, process, process.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 41 – 50:

41. I COUNT

Remember yesterday's post when I said that sometimes I have to count off quarter miles to keep myself going? I do that kind of thing all the time to keep my brain occupied. I check my math and figure out how long it will take me to finish (or get halfway, or get through the mile…whatever it takes). If I have to, I count down the minutes. Much like I know I can run five miles, I also know I can run for a very long time. Sometimes, I have to tell myself that I'll be all right if I can make it to a certain point—an hour from the finish, half an hour from the finish, five minutes from the finish.  Most days, it's not an issue.

42. I TRACK MY NUMBERS

I don't do a lot with this, although I'm thinking about buying myself a running journal. I just have a small notebook, and I jot down the date, the approximate calorie burn, the duration of my workout, the distance, whether it was walking or running, and, for treadmill workouts, my highest speed and incline. If I also did some yoga, strength training, or a significant amount of other activity (like a day of yard work or hauling a ton of pellet fuel into the shed, for example), I'll note that, too. It takes way longer to explain than to do. Each week gets its own page, and at the bottom of the page I add up the calories and the miles run and walked (I track running and walking numbers separately). At the top of the next page, I write the year and the total miles run and walked since January 1. I also note how far ahead of my yearlong running goal I am, a figure that started as a negative number. The day my yearlong goal number went positive was a very happy day. I'll also put little happy faces or some other notation if I exceed expectations in some way—faster than usual, farther than usual, etc.

I want to make it clear that calorie counts are almost totally arbitrary—no two calorie counters online figure the burn in the same way, and the burn is affected by all sorts of different things, like weight and muscle-to-fat ratio. When I was at my top weight, I was burning more calories than the readout on the treadmill claimed. Right now it's pretty close to accurate, but twenty pounds from now it will be too high. It doesn't matter. I use the calorie count as a guideline—it's an obvious, clear indicator of progress. If the weekly number was 3,500 a couple of months ago and it's 6,000 this week, that's one more piece of data I can use when I need to give myself a pep talk.

43. I MAKE VERY SMALL GOALS

This is not unrelated to being patient, and similarly not unrelated to how much I count. My weight loss goals are five-pound increments (and are not tied into a specific time frame—I just like numbers that end in five and zero, and it's easy for me to keep track of them). My mileage goals, for a long time, consisted of increasing my weekly mileage by a mile at a time. That's right—one mile per week, and not every week. I increase my medium-run speed by maybe twenty or thirty seconds per mile at a time, and then I'll stick to that speed until it starts to feel too comfortable (often  months). My long runs are slower, and the speed on those increases even more slowly. It can feel tedious at the time, but when I look back, I can see that I've cut almost 2 ½ minutes off my medium-run mile and a minute and forty-five seconds (or thereabouts) off my long-run mile. Over the course of a single year—especially when I remember that at the beginning of that year, I could only run for a minute at a time—that's pretty impressive.

44. I PUT BIG GOALS OUT OF MY MIND

The thing is, if I started this process by saying that my goal was to increase my speed by as much as I have, or to lose 140 pounds, or even this first hundred, I would never—not in a million years—have made it even this far. I mean seriously. One hundred and forty pounds was close to half my weight. It's an entire person. I can't think about that sort of thing all the time. That is, I can, but I try not to allow myself to. It's self-defeating. But there's another thing I do.

45. I KEEP BIG GOALS IN MY MIND

I do know where I want to be. I know what I want to weigh, how I want my clothes to fit. But mostly, I know how strong I have become, and that I want to hold onto that strength. I want to keep improving on that strength. I want to find new challenges and beat my goals into the ground. It's fun, and it makes me feel mighty, and I like to feel mighty. RAAAAAAR!

46. I REEVALUATE MY GOALS

You know how just now I was saying that I made both big and small goals? The other part of that is evaluating those goals, and then evaluating them again. For example, my big goal for 2013 is to run 750 miles and walk 250 during the year. The walking goal is a piece of cake, and I knew it when I set it—I deliberately set a goal that I knew I could blow out of the water, and I attached it to the bigger, more meaningful running goal by making the total miles come out to a nice, even number: 1,000 miles on my feet sounds pretty, right? But the running goal is tougher: it requires fifteen miles a week from me (with a couple of weeks off for injury/illness/scheduling built in as a buffer), and when I set that goal, I was only running about ten or twelve miles a week. Ambitious, but do-able, I thought.

And here it is the end of June, and for the past two weeks, I've run thirty miles. I'm more than 100 miles above where I should be to hit my goal of 750, and I passed 250 walking miles last week, and we're not quite halfway through the year. Also, I'm running twice as much weekly mileage as I need to, so I'll surpass the running goal as well—barring injury—sometime in late summer/early fall. In my head, I've set new goals (1,000 miles running and 500 miles walking), both of which are totally manageable. I haven't made them official, even to myself, but they're there, so much so that I realized while editing this post that my discussion of the original goals was all in past tense. Whoops. Yes, I've done the math and know how many miles I need to run and walk every week to make the new goals. But my original stated goals stand. It would be easy for me to keep increasing my goals until I get to ones that are unrealistic, and that would allow me to quit. So the original goals stay.

I've added new ones, though: goals for increasing speed, for doing more speed work and other directed workouts, for increasing my upper body strength. Even though we're only halfway through the year, I'm starting to think about goals for 2014—what a reasonable mileage goal is, what other goals I might have.

I try not to make goals that are out of my control. I don't have a goal to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain time, because while there are some things I can control, like my diet and exercise, my weight is also affected by factors like hormonal shifts, muscle-to-fat ratio, and salt intake. Similarly, I don't have a goal to be a certain size within a certain amount of time. My goals are health-related, not size-related. If I knew how I learned to be satisfied with goals like that, I would tell you. But I don't.

Finally, I'll reevaluate my goals should my current goals no longer be realistic. If, say, I'm in some sort of accident and break my leg, my goals are going to have to shift to ones that support my healing and regaining strength during recovery. If I break my leg the day before the run that was going to put me over the 750 mile mark, it's not going to do anybody any good if I beat myself up over my inability to meet that goal. I'll mourn, I'm sure, and be really pissed off, and then I'll regroup and move on.

47. I HAVE A TRAINING PLAN.

I started with this C25K plan, then, when it became clear that I wasn't doing a very good job of setting my own goals, this half-marathon plan. Now that I've been at this a while, I feel comfortable adapting a plan to fit my own needs, but I always have something to strive for. It's usually a series of smaller goals inside a larger, more long-term goal (like increasing my long run weekly while I train for a half-marathon), but there's always something going on. At the moment, I'm pretty happy with a long run between ten and twelve miles, so I'm adding a mile here and there to my medium runs and working on speed—I alternate weeks between adding miles and adding speed work. I probably need to register for a race to keep myself focused.

48. I OBSESS A LITTLE

I have to be careful about this, because I tend toward the obsessive as it is. But I find it helpful to run through my game plan for the week as I'm getting ready to fall asleep—what's worked for me so far? What does the rest of my week hold? What new little goals might I want to set? I make Jed (and too many other people) feel how strong my quads are. I'm making this list. I'M BORING AS HELL ABOUT IT. It keeps me on track.

49. I MAKE PREDICTIONS

I think about where I want to be in a month or six months. I think about how I'll feel when I hit a goal (like these 100 pounds). If I'm on the treadmill, I do the mental math to see how far along I'll be at the end of an episode of whatever I'm watching. I play games with myself to pass the time on the long runs. I try not to get hung up on whether I make these—temporary, pointless—goals or not. I just make them and see if they come to fruition. Am I right about how far along I'll be after 20 minutes? No? Okay, then, where will I be after the next 20 minutes? Maybe it's practice for adjusting my real goals as my body strengthens. Maybe it's just a distraction. It doesn't much matter. It keeps me entertained.

50. I COMPARE MYSELF TO LAST YEAR

Or last month. Or last week. Whatever it takes. I have weeks where I'm at a specific weight, often a couple of pounds higher than the lowest I've managed, and I just hang out there. Once, I stayed there for more than two weeks. It didn't matter if I ate nothing or everything. It didn't matter if I worked harder or eased off. For whatever reason, my weight was just where it was. And I got through those two weeks by reminding myself how far I've come. Sometimes I can calm my emotions down with intellectual knowledge. Look, I can say. Look at this evidence of how much you don't suck. Understanding something intellectually and understanding it emotionally are often two very different animals—if I can use facts to make the animals talk to each other, I usually end up in better shape all around.

Five Things that Don't Suck, Nice Tangent Edition

1. cinnamon
2. checklists and the checking-off of items thereupon
3. the word "thereupon"
4. the word "forthwith"
5. blueberries

The First 100 Pounds (31 - 40)

More swearing today! Yay, swearing!

The standard warnings still apply: I'm still not a medical professional, and I don't pretend that this is some sort of program. It's what I did, what I do, and what has worked for me. It doesn't even necessarily make sense. Your mileage may vary, and your doctor should have a say in the matter. What the hell do I know about this? I'm a poet, people. Get professional advice.

I also want to remind you (and myself) that some of these realizations/developments/changes were 16 months or more in the making. Process, process, process.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 31 – 40:

31. I SHUT MYSELF UP

I am still obese. I am, right now, three pounds away from being simply "overweight," depending on if I want to believe the BMI calculators or not. Based on those same calculators, I'm about 35 pounds away from being "normal weight," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. I'd like to be the equivalent of 40 or 50 pounds lighter than I am, but I try not to put too much emphasis on the scale. How far did I run? How fast? How did I feel on my hill workouts? How many pushups can I do (not a lot)? I try, but I am not always successful. And even if I manage, I can still veer off into darkness: why aren't I faster? Why is it so hard to tone the insides of my thighs? Will I ever find running shorts comfortable?

It is tempting to focus on what I am not. It would be easy for me to complain about the rolls I still have in my midsection or the skirt I love that is still too tight in the waist. It would also be easy for me to beat myself up when I don't meet whatever bar I'm setting for myself at the moment (and in those moments, I am often not at all interested in setting a bar I can reach). But when I catch myself doing that, I try to shut myself up. I try to speak to myself as kindly and encouragingly as I would to someone else. It's more difficult than it should be. I'm getting better at it.

32. I TURN THE NEGATIVE TALK AROUND

The other day, I did not want to run. I just didn't. My schedule said I should run seven miles. Granted, I have some flexibility—I can mix up the order of my Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday runs, or switch one of them out for one of my cross-training days—but I don't like to do that unless I have to. I did all the things I should have done to get and stay on track (I'll talk about some of them in a later post). And somewhere before mile four, I found myself thinking about how I could just stop at five miles and I'd be fine. I thought about the different mileage I could run on Wednesday and Thursday (and even during my long run on the weekend) to make up for it. I asked myself if my legs were tired from their first 30-mile week last week, and convinced myself they were (they weren't).

And when I figured out that my thinking had been headed down that path for a while without me really noticing, I made some changes. Get to five miles, I said, and see how you feel. Because at five miles, you'll only have two miles left. I knew what I was doing. There was no way I was going to give up with only two miles to go. I can run two miles on my worst day. And while it was the ugliest run I've had in a long time in terms of my thinking, it was a perfectly fine run—seven miles, 20 seconds per mile faster than I'd ever run that distance. It was, by most measures, an excellent run. By changing my thoughts from get to five miles and quit to get to five miles and you'll be able to finish, I was able to stop the negative talk. I finished that run mighty. Those are not the fun runs, but they are often the most satisfying.

33. I AM AS PATIENT AS I CAN BE

This is, I should state up front, not very patient. And sometimes I end up using all the patience I have for the day by being patient with myself. It took me years to put on this weight, and a lifetime to be as out of shape as I was when I started working out. I needed to start at what felt like a glacial pace. I needed to give myself time to improve. And even now there are days where I don't feel like running, where I have to count off the quarter miles to keep myself going, where five miles feels harder than twelve. But I know—I know for a certainty—that I can run five miles, even on a bad day. So I do it, as patiently as I can. If I get sick or injured (which, thankfully, hasn't happened yet), I'll try to give myself the patience to take the recovery time I need. Fingers crossed.

34. I MOVE ON WHEN I'VE SCREWED UP

If you listen to me talk, I can make it sound like I'm a one-woman health-improving machine. I present myself that way on purpose, because I need to hear myself talking that way. I try to focus on the good runs, or the strength of getting through a tough run, or the smaller clothes—the positive, specific, affirming aspects of this process. Do not let this fool you into thinking I don't screw up, or even that I believe I don't screw up. I screw up in spectacular fashion at times. It's how I learn, if I'm lucky. I ate a Greek salad wrap with chicken and sweet potato fries for lunch and then ran 6 miles a couple of hours later. BAD idea. I tried to get my second pair of running shoes to last a few more weeks. BAD idea. I've overscheduled myself to the point that I've had to miss workouts. I've found myself unable to talk myself through a tough run and given up and felt crappy for doing so. And you know what? I survived. I didn't puke, I didn't do myself irreparable knee damage (although I could have), I got back to the workouts the next day, I've started to learn how to talk myself through AND how to recognize when I just need a day off. Any of those things used to be enough to derail me for good. Now they're just what they are: mistakes that I can learn from.

35.  I GIVE MYSELF PEP TALKS

You are doing great. Feel the muscles around your waist. FEEL THEM. You have strengthened your obliques just by running, because you are a fucking machine. Look in the mirror when you're done. You look like a fucking Gatorade commercial, with all that sweat beading up on you. LOOK AT YOU, you athletic wonder, you. This is why you do this.

It's not why I do this, although I do enjoy the swearing. But it's okay to lie a little bit when I'm busy convincing myself that my frizzy ponytail and sopping wet clothes are evidence of my mightiness rather than simply evidence that I need to hit the shower. Because they are. I do need to hit the shower (and probably do some laundry), but I will do so mightily. Because I am a fucking machine and an athletic wonder.

36. I ROAR

Try it. RAAAAAAAR! Try it while bending your arms a little bit at the waist and pointing your fists at your belly button, like you're Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1975. In fact, I just did so simply for being able to spell Schwarzenegger correctly on my first try. Go ahead, try it. RAAAAAAAAAAR! You are mighty. (Please note, you are not a baby dinosaur: the calls of baby dinosaurs include a "w" and are much less determined and thus, less mighty. So no RAAAAAWR unless you are a baby dinosaur. Which you are not. Unless you are.)

37.  I CUT MYSELF A BREAK

Look, I know how it goes. You're gung-ho for the first week or two of a fitness program, be it exercise or diet, and then you start making excuses. I get it. I've done it. One bad workout—can't get my breath, my heart's not in it, my legs feel like lead—and I'm done. Well, I used to be done. As I've mentioned before, I needed to build. I'm not sure how I understood that this time around—I wish I knew, because I would totally market that plan and then take all of you out to dinner with a fraction of the first royalty check, but I don't. So I'm just going to tell you so that you hear it again, and maybe if you're in the place that I was in, this will be the time that you really hear it: you have to build. That means that sometimes you're just not feeling it. Maybe your nutrition is off. Maybe you didn't get enough sleep. Maybe you haven't given yourself enough time to recover. I don't know. But I do know that just because I tank one workout, it doesn't mean that I get to quit. I give myself a break, and then get back to it the next day.

38. I FIND WAYS TO TELL MYSELF IT'S EASY

Another time when it's okay to lie to myself a little bit. It's not always a lie—it's not, in actuality, difficult for me to run a few miles at this point, for example—but sometimes it is. I say, for instance, that when I gave up Diet Coke, I didn't miss it at all. I conveniently ignore the fact that I went from a habit of drinking more than a liter a day to drinking a single Diet Coke at lunch to skipping a couple of them a week, and after THAT, I didn't miss it at all when I gave it up. Still don't. I find myself saying things like, "If I can manage seven miles today, I'll only have to run five tomorrow," as if the concept of "only" running five miles is one that makes any sort of sense whatsoever. And when tomorrow comes, I'll be all, "Phew! So glad it's an easy day!" It boils down to equal parts determinedly Pollyannaish looking-at-the-bright-side and flat-out self-deception. But it works.

39. I THINK I'M A PAIR OF SCISSORS

When I'm having trouble with feeling tired during a run, it helps to think of myself as being hinged in the middle like a pair of scissors—my right arm is attached to my left leg, and my left arm is attached to my right leg. The pairs move forward and back at the same time. They hit the most forward point in their swing at the same time and they end their backward movement at the same time. Other people think about other things—being pulled forward by a balloon attached to the top of their head, for example, to keep them upright and moving forward. I think I'm a pair of scissors. Laugh if you want, but I will cut you, bro.

40. I KISS MY HUSBAND BEFORE AND AFTER A RUN

If he's around. Otherwise, I just choose a random neighbor or passerby. Okay, so maybe not that last part. I don't know that it's advice, exactly—and for the record, you're not allowed to kiss my husband (you'll have to find your own smooch-ee). But it's a positive way to start and end a workout session, so why not?

Five Things that Don't Suck, Surprising Turn of Events Edition

1. being able to be grateful for some rain this month (as opposed to a week or so ago, when I was just wishing it would STOP already)
2. waking up chilly
3. not having "Hungry Like the Wolf" stuck in your head (this hasn't actually happened to me, but isn't that nice?)
4. fruit salad
5. watching the dogs scare the crap out of the squirrel that was breakfasting on our compost bin this morning

The First 100 Pounds (21 - 30)

There's a little more swearing in this post than usual. If that sort of thing bothers you, you probably want to skip this post. And, you know. The rest of this blog.

The standard warnings still apply: I'm still not a medical professional, and I don't pretend that this is some sort of program. It's what I did, what I do, and what has worked for me. It doesn't even necessarily make sense. Your mileage may vary, and your doctor should have a say in the matter. What the hell do I know about this? I'm a poet, people. Get professional advice.

I also want to remind you (and myself) that some of these realizations/developments/changes were 16 months or more in the making. Process, process, process.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 21 – 30:

21. I MADE SMALL DIETARY ADJUSTMENTS

Not huge ones, not all at once. I dropped down from 1% milk to skim. A chip fiend, I started looking at what was in chips, and choosing ones made with ingredients I could pronounce. I also started getting the individual bags, which goes against everything I believe in from a packaging standpoint, but is a necessary step in teaching me about portions. Once those portions are ingrained, I'll go back to bigger bags and divvy them up myself (please note that in no way am I promising to give them up), but at the moment, I don't trust myself with big bags of anything but pretzels which, for some reason, don't trigger the kind of mindless eating that potato chips or tortilla chips do. Basically, I identified troubling parts of my diet—that is, parts that troubled me, that I was unhappy about—and I changed them, one at a time. I'll talk about more of them later in some detail, but the point here is just that I made them and, more importantly, that they were SMALL.

22. I MAKE MY OWN FOOD

Well, a lot of it, anyway. I know this sounds like the exact opposite of a "small dietary adjustment," but it came in stages. My big shift in thinking started with bread. I'm not sure why I wanted to learn to make bread. Part of it was that I found it intimidating, and I'm sometimes contrary that way. Part of it was that I was following a food blog written by a woman who was making a lot of bread at the time. I started making most of our bread products (loaves, English muffins, pizza dough, bagels…you name it), and I was feeling proud of myself for eliminating much of the high fructose corn syrup from our diet. I don't think I'll immediately get diabetes if I ingest a milliliter of HFCS—I just think that if I'm buying whole wheat bread and using it to make sandwiches with locally-sourced cheeses and organic vegetables, maybe it shouldn't be full of preservatives and sugars of…let's call them questionable origins. I switched out the Miracle Whip (which I grew up on—no need to go hating the Whip) for mayonnaise. I started reading labels. And at some point, I realized that continuing to buy, say, a bag of jelly beans and eating myself into a diabetic coma might not be congruent with worrying about how much HFCS was in my bread. It took longer than that, and it went through several stages, and I still eat some processed food (not a lot, as it appeals to me less and less), but that's the gist of it.

I didn't make it a black-and-white issue—I already have too many rules like that in my life, and the problem with them is that when I fall off the wagon, I've got a built-in excuse for staying there. If it's an all-or-nothing situation, it's easier to go with "all." But if I make it a priority to make our food, then it doesn't matter if my schedule gets busy and I have to buy a loaf of bread. It's okay when we lose power for a week (like we did after Hurricane Irene) and we actually (gasp!) order out for pizza. The world doesn't end, and neither do I. Making this change in my thinking is, I'm starting to believe, the most important step I took in this process. And I did it by accident.

23. I EAT THE YOLKS

There will always be someone telling you that some kind of food is unhealthy (and I'll tell you that, later, too). I like egg yolks. I like them solid, I like them runny. Yes, they have cholesterol. Yes, they have fat. They also have Vitamin A, calcium, and iron. And both B-6 and B-12. A little fat can help keep me satisfied longer. And they're fucking delicious. I don't eat 27 eggs a day (I eat maybe 2 a week), but when I do? I eat the damn yolks. There are plenty of other foods like this, but you get the picture.

24. I THINK ABOUT WHAT I EAT

I try to eat mindfully these days. That means thinking about why I want what I want. It means shopping well and keeping healthy food in the house, but it also means considering a menu when I go out to eat. Do I want sweet potato fries today? Do I really want them? When was the last time I had them? Do I want them enough to make them worth the calories? What has the rest of my diet looked like lately—plenty of veggies, lean protein, the right amount of carbs? If I'm in doubt about the answers to any of those questions, it can make for a tough decision, but one that gets easier.

25. I EAT IT ANYWAY

Sometimes. Because sometimes I just want food because it's appealing at the time. What I think of as "normal people"—people who have a healthy relationship with food—sometimes eat things just because they taste good to them. They don't try to mentally calculate the calories of every meal they eat, and they don't debate the nutritional value of feta cheese over bleu cheese or skip the cheese they really want because it's going to add calories. Normal people sometimes eat sweet potato fries two days in a row. Normal people eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full, and normal people do not always eat all of their servings of vegetables. My diet is already tons better than it was two years ago, which was better than it was five years ago. Balance, people. I'm talking about balance. But if you're going to eat it, make sure you enjoy it.

26. I MAKE ROOM FOR ICE CREAM

Damn straight I do. I live in the land of Bliss Brothers Dairy, which makes some of the best ice cream I've ever had, in a part of the country where we do not toil under the misguided notion that ice cream is a seasonal food. I love ice cream. I don't eat it every day, or even every week. But when I do eat it, I enjoy the hell out of it. I don't add up its calories or skip a meal to make up for it (although having a sundae for dinner one night in the summer is a long-standing tradition that I refuse to abandon, it's got nothing to do with limiting calories) or think about how long it will be before I can have the next one. I have two rules about eating ice cream: first, I need to really want it, which means I need to have been craving it for a while (often more than a week). I don't respond to my first craving for ice cream, pretty much ever. Second, I need to really enjoy it. If I want sorbet, that's fine, and that's what I'll get. But if I want a full-fat peanut butter cup ice cream cone or a sundae with whipped cream and walnuts? Then that's what I'm going to get. And I'm going to appreciate it, because when it's gone, it's gone. It's not a mistake, it's not "bad" food or "bad" behavior. It's fucking dessert and it's awesome and if I try to tell myself that I'm never having it again, I've set up another all-or-nothing scenario, knowing full well that after enough time of nothing, I'm going to revert, no-holds-barred, to all.

27. I EAT MORE PLANTS

It's one of the dietary adjustments I made. It wasn't difficult for me, as I was already eating more vegetables than most people I know—I love vegetables. Raw, steamed, roasted, sautéed. I'm in. I'm not a huge fan of fruit, but I do what I can. At least two days a week, I keep vegetarian. That started accidentally, and it's not a rule by any stretch of the imagination, but it works for me. And rarely a day goes by that I don't get my full five servings or more of vegetables. Fruit…sigh. Fruit is a challenge.

28. I EAT WHEN I'M HUNGRY

I get hungry a lot. If you're running 25 or 30 miles a week and climbing hills for another ten or fifteen, plus going about your regular activities, you're going to get hungry. My body is working hard, with the workouts and the building of muscle and all. I make sure to get three full meals a day, and usually two snacks. If I get hungry on top of that, and I know it's actual hunger, not thirst, I eat—I just try to choose my snacks well.

29. I DRINK A LOT OF WATER

Thirst can masquerade as hunger. I drink a lot of water—it's easier when you don't drink soda—and probably half the time, having enough water in my system makes the hunger pangs go away. (If it doesn't, I revert to number 28). I know you probably hear it a lot, but water makes everything function in your body: your organs, your digestion, everything. Yes, I have to pee a lot. If that's my biggest problem in life, I'm doing just fine.

30. I DRINK A LITTLE WINE

Every couple of nights, I have a glass. There are reports that it's good for you, but I don't care. I like a glass of red with dinner, and I seldom have two, or even one glass two nights in a row. Relaxing is a good thing, and if people tell you that alcohol is liquid fat, tell them to shut up. Wine is liquid awesome. (So is sweat, but don't drink that, because it's gross.)