Monthly Archives: July 2009

Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough

Posted on by Noor
2

You should listen to this song while reading this post.

I’m not sure what it is about flying but I seem to do some of my deeper (read: better) thinking during airplane rides. Perhaps it is being so physically above everything that makes up my world. Perhaps it is the prolonged periods of time spent listening to music, looking at clouds, or just staring at the back of the seat in front of me. Or perhaps it is all the time I spend observing all the people around me. Whatever it is, I seem to almost always come off a plane with a better perspective on my life. And sometimes I even come away with a solution to a problem.

During last night’s flight to Seattle, I started thinking about my injury and how that has really derailed my weight loss progress during the past few months. My usual feelings of frustration and anger surfaced but then I realized that I am not totally helpless to the situation. There is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can’t fix a situation because it is out of my control. But the situation isn’t totally out of my control. It isn’t an ideal situation but one that I can work with. There are lots of things I can do instead of running and lots of things I can tweak to feel better about things and eventually get back to losing weight again. Here are the ideas I jotted down last night in my notebook – they’re loosely organized into food, exercise, and emotions:

food

  • food I struggle with (e.g. ice cream, Ciff Bars) shouldn’t be anywhere in my apartment. When I was running three or four times a week, I could “afford” to eat ice cream on a weekly basic. This isn’t the case right now.
  • get back to eating very slowly. I learned a little routine from a nutritionist last year that essentially forces you to eat very very slowly (take a bite, put your fork down, chew food slowly, swallow, take a sip of water, take another bite). This method is extremely tedious but seems to work (since you’re eating so slowly your appetite/mind has time to recognize when you’re getting full). This is the sort of thing that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do without resenting it or feeling like it is natural but it is a good temporary measure and may help kick start things again.
  • continue cooking most of my meals. I don’t really have a problem with this one (except when I’m traveling).
  • continue drinking 100 oz water. Again, this one I don’t really have a problem with right now.
  • only eat when I’m hungry. This one is actually a lot easier said than done but it involves the slow eating thing and usually very strongly tied to my emotions.

exercise

  • get back to working out for 60 minutes/day every day. This one has slipped a bit during the past few weeks due to moving and having a really awful physical therapist who seemed to think I was going to hurt myself every time I worked out. UGGGHHH! :)
  • get back to doing resistance training 2 to 3 times a week. This one also slipped due to the very conservative physical therapist.
  • start taking spinning and kickboxing at the gym. I’ve never been a huge fan of exercise classes – I can’t listen to my own music and I really hate how patronizing some instructors can act to somebody of my size (I always want to tell them, “Have you ever lost 65 pounds? You haven’t? I have. Now go back to your spin bike and leave me be.”). Regardless of my anxieties around exercise classes, I think doing one or two a week will help me get some higher impact workouts and ease my boredom.
  • work my way up to 30 minute swim sessions. Since I only learned how to swim a year ago, I suck at it, which means that I’m wiped out after 10 or 15 minutes.
  • work my way up to riding my bike to work a few times a week. Since I learned how to ride a bike only a few months ago, I’m still not that great at it. But with a little practice (and patience), I think I can start riding my bike to work pretty soon. I may have to walk the “scary” parts of the commute (e.g. the big hills).
  • stretch once or twice a day. I’ve been trying to stretch on a more consistent basis during the past few weeks.

emotions

  • make sure to get enough sleep.
  • when I’m angry or frustrated, I can: write, paint, cry, watch a movie, take a shower/bath, get a massage, read, buy new clothes. Essentially, I need to be less self-destructive.
  • stop weighing myself everyday. Weighing myself so regularly hasn’t been very helpful lately so I’m going to try getting back to only weighing myself once a week. This one doesn’t sound so hard but it really is when you’re impatient/require immediate gratification!
  • start collecting something to represent every pound I’ve lost so far. I’m a visual person so I think having something visual to see everyday would be really helpful. I just have no idea what that thing is (I’ve thought about some sort of cool figurines or Sigg water bottles. I’m open to suggestions on this one.

It is a huge list but that’s sort of the point. I can better manage/control the situation. But I’m not perfect so I’m trying to not think of it as an all or nothing kind of thing.

the last two months

Posted on by Noor
3

A friend of mine emailed me this morning wondering how I could possibly not have updated my blog since May 15th?!? She even started to wonder if her Blackberry had it wrong.

Her Blackberry didn’t have it wrong – I just haven’t had much to say lately. I wake up, I weigh myself, I get frustrated when my weight hasn’t gone down, I do stretches that are supposed to help my injury, I go to work, I attempt to workout given the limitations of my injury, I see specialists about my injury, I get frustrated about the lack of progress in the healing of my injury, I read vampire novels, I go to bed. And then I repeat the whole cycle the next day.

Being injured has sucked. I don’t have a clear diagnosis of what is really wrong with me – I have some sciatica-like symptoms in my left thigh. I have a constant tingling in my thigh, which most of the time I don’t even think about. When I do go running, I have a fairly severe pulling pain in my thigh and sometimes in my butt. Depending on who you ask, this pain might be a pinched nerve due to tightness in my glutes and other muscles in my butt (did you know that you butt does a lot of work when you’re running or hiking?). Or it might be a herniated disk that is inflaming/pinching the nerve. Or it might be a compensation injury due to an imbalance in my form. I also sometimes have pain in my lower back or tail bone but that seems to be more sporadic.

It is frustrating because I’ve been dealing with this injury since February. I’ve seen my doctor, a physical therapist, and a chiropractor. We’ve tried a bunch of different things and so far nothing has healed my leg. I’m trying to stay positive about the chiropractor since I only started treatment with him a couple of weeks ago. If that doesn’t work, I’m supposed to see yet another specialist (I can’t remember the technical medical term but I believe it is a doctor who treats the back exclusively).

This injury has been a pretty major setback for me. I’m angry, disappointed, frustrated, and generally feeling helpless and like a total failure. It is one thing to get injured when you’re skinny. It is something else to get injured when you’re trying to lose weight. I’m actually surprised with how hard I’ve taken it. I knew I was starting to love running but I didn’t realize just how much it meant to me. Not only did it enable me to stay on track with my weight loss goals, I just really enjoyed it. Running makes me feel like I’m an athlete – it makes me feel like I can do the impossible. Sure, I’m pretty slow and I can’t run that far (4 – 5 miles is the longest distance I’ve run) but it still feels like I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be able to do at my size right now. Getting on the elliptical doesn’t excite me or give me the same feelings of self-worth that running does. Running helped me sort through the various emotional and mental junk floating around my mind. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to get the same sort of clarity from any other exercise I’ve tried.

I’ve been trying to see the silver lining to my current situation but that has been a struggle. I keep reminding myself that I’ve come a long way and accomplished something that most people can’t do. I’m at the lowest weight I’ve been in 11 years. And despite my injury, I’ve still managed to maintain my weight loss. All of those are very positive things but I can’t help but think that they’re excuses. At the end of the day, I’m left with overwhelming feelings of failure, anger, and disappointment.

And that’s really why I haven’t been blogging – nobody wants to read a whiny angry post.

In more positive (but unrelated) news, I just moved to a new apartment this weekend. I LOVE the new place so far (despite having a bunch of maintenance issues).

I have a lot to be grateful for in my life right now – I’m just struggling to see past this setback.