A friend of mine is having one of those weeks. You know exactly what I am talking about. The kind where not only does everything go wrong, but also the things that wouldn’t normally get you down start to seem like the end of the world. It’s a busy week at work AND she has some major things going on at home (not necessarily bad things, just BIG things). Her week started out with her boss flying off the handle at her for something for which he bore the bulk of the responsibility. Then the website where she could download her W2 was offline for hours, when she needed to get to the tax accountant’s office. She hasn’t been getting the results she wants with her healthful eating and exercise. It has just been an endless series of mishaps and annoyances that add up to a very frustrating week. Individually, she would have no problem dealing with any of these, but together… Well, together they can feel like defeat.

She needed an opportunity to vent, so we chatted for a little bit while she worked to get her game face back on. I hope it made her feel better, but oddly it definitely made me feel better. It’s not that I am happy she is having a terrible week, but when I was giving her a pep talk, I realized I was pep talking myself as well. It is so easy to give someone advice or encouragement when they are down, but we rarely listen to our own advice. So this week, as I struggle with my challenge, I am going to give myself some advice. Some of it is pretty obvious, but we are all very good at not doing the things we should. Here’s hoping I learn something from myself.

Be kind to yourself
I need to get this tattooed on my forehead so I see it every time I look in the mirror. We often hold ourselves to such impossibly high standards that anything less than perfection looks like a failure. But it’s just not true. The problem is when you give yourself a laundry list of all the things you should be doing or could have done differently, it starts to look like there was nothing you did right. DON’T make that list. Make a list of the things you have accomplished. And when things do go wrong, just cut yourself some slack and think how you could improve the situation in the future. I have been struggling with what (or more accurately, how much) I have been eating in the past couple weeks. It has been stressing me out, and that stress makes me want to eat even more. But here’s what is good: My challenge is not blown by any stretch of the imagination. I am still well ahead of where I expected to be in my weight loss challenge by the middle of week 10. I am definitely healthier and I feel better than I have in a long time. So why should I focus on my mistakes? I am going to focus on what I need to do today. And tomorrow. And I will keep moving forward. I won’t give up because I had some bad days.

Know when to let go
Comedian Mike Birbiglia tells this awful story of being hit by a drunk driver and, due to an error on the accident report, ends up being told he must pay for the damages to the drunk’s car (which the drunk smashed into a tree after t-boning Birbiglia’s car). The story is classic Kafka, and everyone keeps telling him to pay for the guy’s car. He fights it for quite some time, becoming obsessed with proving that he was not at fault. Listening to this story fills you with indignation, but you know that certainly justice will prevail in the end. Except it doesn’t. He finally decides to stop letting it consume his life, he pays for the guy’s car, and he moves on. It’s the same with my friend who was unfairly blamed by her boss. She knows she’s right, but forcing her boss to lose face to prove she is right is not going to end well. She proactively informed her supervisor about what happened in case her boss complains, and then she wiped her hands of it. This is one of the most difficult things for me. I HATE to let go when I know I am right. I find it easier to do at work, but in my personal life I have to work hard not to let perceived injustices get the better of me.

Expect the Unexpected
You may get it right the first time, but if not, make sure you have given yourself enough time and resources to get back on track. There have been so many times when I completed a task and patted myself on the back for a job well done, then got surprised by an unexpected hitch. This is not infrequent. The worst was the year we got a letter from the IRS saying that we owed several thousand dollars because we claimed too much interest on our mortgage and missed some of the taxes on our investments. Once I started breathing, I realized that they simply had not received the tax form from the bank holding our mortgage, and all I had to do was send them a copy of the backup. The investment miscalculation was my fault, but that was only a couple hundred dollars, and we sent back a check and our mortgage interest statement and all was well. Sometimes, even if you have done EVERYTHING right, something will still go wrong. Be prepared for what goes wrong, and things (or you) don’t have to fall apart.

Most of the time, it does get better
I won’t lie, sometimes things just suck and there is nothing you can do about it. But there have been so many times when I have been at rock bottom and I couldn’t see how things could ever get better. Yet they have always gotten better. Occasionally, they have gotten worse first, but they have always gotten better eventually. I have a LOT of examples of this, but here’s my favorite. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived in a rooming house with a bunch of other girls. Instead of a landlord, we had more of a house mother, kind of like a sorority. I had always gotten along well with her, even though I thought she was a bit unstable and sometimes treated other people unfairly. I should have known it was only a matter of time before she turned on me too (and perhaps I deserved it for not standing up for the other people she turned on). I happened to mention that my Dad was disappointed that he didn’t know sooner that our house would be closed over spring break, or he would have come out to see me and we could have stayed in a hotel. I certainly wasn’t upset when I said this, I just mentioned it because the house had always stayed open during previous breaks. If there ever was an appropriate time to say that someone “flipped out”, this was it. She went from zero to sixty on the crazy scale in about two seconds flat. I’ll leave out most of the details to keep this short, but the gist is that she decided that I must be evicted and gave me a three-day eviction notice. I spoke to someone at the city, and found out that what she was doing was illegal. Even if she had grounds to evict me, she would have had to give me a 30 day notice because it wasn’t for non-payment of rent or anything. Then, while this was going on, I got a letter from UCLA saying that I did not get into the grad program I applied for. And worst of all, my Dad called me and said that he was having some heart problems. This was all in a two-day period. So what it felt like was that I had no place to go, had no future, and might lose my Dad. Well, to prevent this from becoming a novel, I will just say that I did end up finding a place to go, and I did have a future, and I still have my Dad. I feel very strongly that some of these things that seemed so awful at the time probably set me on the path to the life I have today. And I like my life. It isn’t perfect, but I like it. So I have accepted that suffering is just a part of life. Sometimes things do get better. Sometimes things happen that we can’t fix, like losing someone you love. However, when something awful (or even something sort of awful) happens, chances are that it is not the end of happiness.

Knowing that someone has it worse doesn’t make your pain go away
One of the things people do that really gets on my nerves is when you are talking about a problem or annoyance and they respond, “Well, you should be happy you are not in Haiti. Those people really have it bad.” Well, of course they do, and I am happy that is not my situation. But the fact of someone else’s pain does not negate your own pain. Sure, sometimes we get a little ridiculous about our problems, but it is okay to feel bad if your dog dies or you have an awful day at work. You don’t have to justify feeling bad to anyone, as long as you keep some perspective. Just because someone has it much worse doesn’t mean that this makes your problems better. They are not related. No one can tell you that you don’t have a right to hurt. Of course you do. I don’t have a lot to say about this – I just have a big problem with people diminishing someone else’s feelings or trying to assign a relative value to them. It’s just not relevant.

There are probably a zillion other points I could make about dealing with life’s hiccups, but I’d like to hear what other people do when they are faced with crises big or small. Please post a comment and share your advice. Yes, I know these flower pictures have nothing to do with the subject of my post, but they are pretty and made me smile, so they’re in!

I am almost caught up now on my reading, which will hopefully make me less stressed about my challenge. Surprisingly, I’ve done much better with the weight loss portion than the reading portion, but I am trying to even that out. I finished Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child tonight. Child is one of my favorite authors, but I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed in the book. It was well-written and exciting, but the plot was kind of a retread of Relic, which he wrote with Douglas Preston. When I read Relic the first time, probably 15 years ago, I couldn’t put it down. I ended up staying awake most of the night to read it. Now I couldn’t stay up all night if I wanted to, but I didn’t have that sense of urgency with Terminal Freeze anyway. I knew where it was going, and luckily, getting there was still a fun ride. His new book with Douglas Preston is coming out later this spring, and I am really looking forward to that one.

I’ve been collecting books from the Portable Library of Korean Literature, so I’ve decided to tackle those next. I only have seven of them, but there are probably at least 50 in the series. Most of the books are novellas or short story collections, and they usually only run about 100 pages. I am starting with A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball by Cho Se-Hui. It was first published as part of a short story collection in 1978, and is considered a modern classic in Korea and remains very popular. The translator of this edition, Chun Kyung-Ja, has won awards for her English translations of Korean literature, so I am hoping it is a good translation.

I am having surgery in about three weeks that will hopefully help with my back problems, which will probably result in a brief spike in weight loss like when I was sick a couple weeks ago. So don’t be worried if I lose weight a little more rapidly that week. I am just hoping it has a positive effect on my back. The bummer is that I won’t be able to walk Chiqui for awhile. Well, I can walk with her and Stephen, but I won’t be able to hold the leash.

Sorry for the delay in posting my challenge update from last Friday. It was my birthday weekend, and I was busy having fun! After losing more than six pounds in week six, I gained just under four pounds in week seven, making my overall weight loss so far a little more reasonable. Plus I seem to be over whatever stomach bug was ailing me.

Yesterday, I started reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. I enjoyed it so much, I ended up finishing it yesterday too. I’m on week eight now, so I need to read two more books to catch up. I liked it so much that I put the movie in my Netflix queue. I hope I enjoy it as much as I did the book. I got rid of a few more books too. My friend’s daughter is an avid reader, and I went through my book donation boxes and picked out a bunch of titles I thought she might like. We need to make another trip to the library this weekend though, to get rid of the rest of these boxes.

Cando Vestibular Disc

I have made an adjustment at work that will probably contribute to weight loss, although the reason for it is to reduce back pain. My desk has been converted to a standing desk, so that I do not have to sit all day. This means that I will be moving around a lot more. They have ordered a stool for me so that I can sit when I need to, but I am going to try and stand as much as possible. To alleviate stiffness and pain in my legs from standing all day, I ordered a vestibular disc. It is kind of like a balance ball, but flat. You stand on it so that you are shifting your weight and moving all day, instead of standing in one position with your feet flat on the floor all day. They raised my desk much more quickly than I expected, so hopefully my stool and my disc will arrive soon.

Stephen put together this nifty graph of my January weight loss. It actually starts on January 14, when my weight was 212.9. For the first week or so of January, we were in Jamaica and I didn’t have access to a scale. My starting weight as of January 1 was 215.3. I lost 8.3 pounds during the month of January. My goal was to lose four pounds, so I exceeded my target. Without Jamaica, I might have done even a little better, but I couldn’t help eating at least a couple Jamaican patties.

I have been concentrating on trying to eat a balanced diet and get all the right nutrients. The hardest thing for me is getting enough protein. I am not a big meat eater, so on days when I don’t eat any meat, I try to eat other high protein foods. I use The Wellness Encyclopedia of Foot and Nutrition from UC Berkeley to look up nutritional information for various fresh foods. Unfortunately, this book is no longer in print in any of its various incarnations, although you can buy used copies on Amazon. There are probably lots of similar books on the market. I find this one to be extremely useful.

I read four books in January, which is almost on track. I am about one week behind. In January, I read the good, good pig by Sy Montgomery, Tongue by Kyung Ran Jo, Food Rules by Michael Pollan, and a children’s book called, The Wicked Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House by Mary Chase. I found the last one when boxing up books for donation and figured I could read it very quickly (like an hour or less) and then give it away. It doesn’t seem to be in print anymore, but it was originally published in 1968 (as The Wicked Pigeon Ladies in the Garden), so there are probably zillions of used copies floating about. I would have loved this book when I was about 10 – lots of creepy elements. A quick and enjoyable little read. I really wanted to be reviewing the books I’ve read so far, but I haven’t had a chance yet. Of the first four books, Tongue is the only one that I definitely would not recommend. It may be the translation, but I found it a little dry and slow.

I haven’t been too diligent about updating my blog, but luckily I have been diligent about my challenge. I went to the doctor for my annual checkup yesterday and I was down to 205 lbs. I got a big surprise though. Every time my height has been measured for the past 20 or so years, I have been 5′9″. Yesterday, I was 5′8 1/4″! I thought I was a bit young (a couple weeks shy of 42) to be shrinking, but I asked the nurse if it could be related to my ruptured and herniated discs. That is exactly what it was. I had no idea it would affect my height – especially not that much. I am still calculating my BMI based on 5′9″ though! I figured the change in height didn’t affect my body composition – my spine is simply compressed.

I got a little behind in my reading because I had been driving to work. I started taking the train to work again, so I am getting caught up this week. But the big news is that I have decided to let go of some of the books in my To Be Read (TBR) pile. I will never get through 911 books, so I decided to keep only the ones that I REALLY want to read. I have donated about 150 books so far, and I have another 150 or so boxed up. I got more boxes and I think I can probably get rid of another 200. This will put a huge dent in the massive numbers of books I have around the house. I feel better already! I am donating all the like new books to the Friends organization of my local library, and sending the beat up ones to Goodwill.

Stephen just posted his pictures from our recent trip to Bhutan. They are absolutely beautiful, please take a look if you have a chance. You can also read my Bhutan travelogue on my travel blog.

It turned out to be a busier weekend than I expected, and I got NO writing done. It also wasn’t a very good weekend in terms of food. I still had a calorie deficit, but in the case of Sunday, it was only a deficit of 11. I was feeling a little down, probably because my back is bothering me and because of work stress, and I always have trouble with eating in moderation when I am down. I did a little better on Monday and had a 500 calorie deficit, and I feel like I am back on track today.

Because I had such a crummy food weekend, I decided to change my week three book to Food Rules An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan. I haven’t read Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food, but I have heard wonderful things about them. I chose Food Rules because it is a quick read with concrete advice, as opposed to being about the science and history of the western diet. Here’s a brief description from Amazon: “Michael Pollan, our nation’s most trusted resource for food-related issues, offers this indispensible guide for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible, and easy to use, Food Rules is a set of memorable rules for eating wisely, many drawn from a variety of ethnic or cultural traditions. Whether at the supermarket or an all-you-can-eat-buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat.”

I hope to get caught up with various posts here and on my travel blog by the end of this coming weekend. Despite setbacks on Sunday, I think I am on track for my weight loss and reading goals for Friday. I have a tendency to neglect updating my websites, even when the news is good. I am trying to be a little more disciplined about that, which is why I switched to the blog format. It is much easier to update since I don’t have to write code for every page.

Meal Planning

In my quest to eat more healthily, I think I will do a lot better if I plan ahead. But in the times when I have planned out my meals by week, it turned out to be a LOT of work on the weekend. However, it was great during the week when I already knew what we were doing for dinner when I got home exhausted from work each night. I am trying to find ways to make meal planning a little easier, while recognizing that it will probably take some extra organization in the beginning. But if I can find something that works for me, maybe I won’t lose steam on planning our meals.

I looked at all sorts of meal planning templates, but what bothered me was the waste of paper by printing one out for each week or using pads with tear-off planners. Then I ran across an idea I thought was great. Print out your lovely meal planning template on a piece of 8.5×11 paper, then put it in a picture frame. You can use those wipe-off markers to write on the glass, then at the end of the week, you just wipe it all off and start over. You can even hang it on the wall in your kitchen, then take it down to write out the new weekly menu. No wasted paper!

I still need to deal with weekly shopping lists. I used to use a shopping list I created in Word that was organized by the aisles in my grocery store. I just sat at the computer with my week of menus, then added each item under the correct aisle. I printed it out and away I went. I used to have people reading my grocery list over my shoulder, getting excited that I had it organized for that particular store. But again, more paper wasted. There is probably some sort of shopping list app for the iPhone, so maybe I should investigate that. I don’t know how good I would be about utilizing that type of thing. And walking around the store while staring at my iPhone sounds like it would just be annoying. I don’t think I’ll try the picture frame idea for the grocery store!

Recipe Organization

I probably have around 30 cookbooks, but there is no good place to store them in or near the kitchen. I am wondering if maybe I should just take one cookbook at a time and type the recipes I know I will use into my computer, then get rid of the cookbooks. My husband would love this. There are a couple cookbooks I would definitely keep, like Joy of Cooking, but then I would clear out some more books and make more room in our house. Of course, if the recipes are on our computer, then that necessitates printing them out and wasting more paper. My Mom has a great setup. She has one of those little counters between her computer/tv room and her kitchen. If she is working on the computer (which is on the computer room side), the monitor faces that room. When she is cooking, she brings up the recipe, then turns the monitor to face the kitchen. It works great. I’d actually have to have some sort of computer on my kitchen counter to make this work. If I had unlimited funds, which I don’t, I’d mount a Mac Mini under the cabinets and set the monitor on the counter.

What I want to avoid is spending tons of times paging through cookbooks at meal planning times, when half the recipes are things I would never make. It seems more efficient to have only the recipes I like stored on my computer. I looked at recipe organization software for the Mac awhile back, and it seemed a little pricey. My Mom just uses MS Word, then stores each recipe in the appropriate folder, with names like “chicken”, “dessert”, etc. At some point, I think she’d like to scan her hard copy recipes and drop them in those folders as well.

I have a huge three-ring binder with lots of my favorite recipes in those clear plastic sheets. The idea was that I could take a plastic sleeve out to use a particular recipe, then just wipe it off if there are any spills. I can barely lift the thing, however, so it seems less than practical. It was a good idea at the time, but if I add another recipe, I’ll need a forklift.

I’m still thinking about ways to make meal planning and recipe organization easier, and I’d welcome any suggestions.

Week 2 Update

I just got off the scale and found that I have lost three pounds so far. Of course at the beginning of this type of lifestyle change (notice I don’t say diet), it’s not unusual to have the weight come off a little more easily. Technically, if I continue to burn more calories than I consume, I should continue to lose weight, but I am skeptical that it will still be this easy as time goes on. I am not calling this a diet because to me, a diet is something that can’t be sustained indefinitely and generally the weight loss can’t be maintained. My real goal here is to change my habits and be healthier as a result. I chose a weight goal simply because weight is easily quantifiable. So are inches off the waist, but they come off much slower than pounds and I have no idea what type of goal would be feasible for a year. Weight loss (or gain) correlates to the number of calories you burn and consume, so it is the logical way to measure my challenge, even if it isn’t my ultimate goal.

Plan Ahead

One of the best ways to avoid overeating is to plan ahead. Today, we are having a potluck at my office and a few of us who don’t have the time or inclination to cook are going in together on pizza. As soon as we decided this, I went to the Pizza Hut website and downloaded their nutritional information. Then I concocted a recipe for a Pizza Hut pizza that I could enjoy without feeling (too) guilty. I selected the thin and crispy crust and lighter toppings. I won’t be tempted by the other thick crust pizzas, because they all have toppings I don’t like. I can only have one slice, but I love pizza, so at least I can partake.

Keeping a Food Diary

One of my friends suggested that I keep a food diary. Even though I enter all my food in my Bodybugg program, a food diary will help me ensure that I don’t conveniently “forget” something I ate while I was away from the computer. I pulled out a little Moleskine Cahier journal and wrote “Stuff I Ate” on the cover. It is small enough to fit in my back pocket, so it can go everywhere with me. I can write down nutritional info in there too whenever I don’t have time to create a new food item in my program. Anything that will make my challenge easier is worth doing.

Health Screenings

Luckily, I work for a company that has a wellness program. They actually pay us to complete various tasks that will help us lead healthier lives. We get up to $300 each year, depending on which tasks we complete. I would be doing these things anyway, but it’s nice to have the additional financial incentive. One of the things we can do as part of the wellness program is take advantage of health screenings they offer. I immediately took them up on this offer, because it gives me some baseline numbers to start with so that I have additional data besides weight and waistline to compare as my challenge continues. This screening included blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose level, and percentage of body fat. They also measure your waistline, weight and bmi, which was information I already had. I will do these again when I go for my annual checkup, and then again when I lose 50 pounds. These are measurements we should all be keeping track of, so I couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity.