The void that doesn't need filling

I have this distinct feeling that my ass is smaller than it was just a week ago. If you have a badonk, you know what I mean when I say that it's an omnipresent force in your life. It's always...THERE. Bumping things off tables or brushing against people in department stores. When you swing your body around to check yourself out in a mirror, it seems like your ass catches up with the rest of you a half second later and ruins the profile. It's there to remind you you're just about too big for your last pair of fat jeans, it's a water-dark, supersized Rorshach blot on the side of a concrete swimming pool when you stand up to jump back in, it's the first thing you think of in the morning and the last thing you think about your life. THE ASS can ruin whole days if you let it.

Well, my ass is missing some of its bulk, and that's completely weird to me, because in the time that I was actually working to lose the weight I never felt like I got smaller. But I think I am. I really do. My summer jeans aren't quite clinging to my posterior the way they were a month ago (maybe I've finally just worn them out and they're too weary to do anything except sag). And most important of all, I feel that....absence. Some part of me isn't where it used to be.

I must say, I'm rather thrilled by this.

Challenge Day One

Eek.

So the first day of this was good in terms of following the rules, but not great in terms of actual nutrition.

DailyPlate.com reports my caloric/fat intake as 1957 cals/87 g.

The teacher friends and I were seduced by the fabulous chips and spinach queso at our local Mexican restaurant, which is where I consumed the bulk of my cals/fat. The burrito itself wasn't so bad, and I did great at breakfast and I doubt we'll be there again in the next 30 days so I'm glad I ate what I did, and I'm glad I got to see them most of all.

Breakfast: Fiber One w/Raisin cereal, skim milk, banana, black tea w/Sweet n Low

Lunch: Black bean Monterey burrito, copious amounts of chips and dip, Diet Coke, water

Dinner: Leftover bean burrito, refried beans, Spanish rice, Edy's no sugar butter pecan ice cream, raspberries, Diet cream soda, water

Water intake: 132 oz (woot)

Exercise: About 30-45 minutes of softball practice. Daily Plate calculates I burned around 350 calories for this, but I think they're dirty overexaggerating liars. Although I did fall to the grass in exhaustion and laid there apathetically while my friend Jen's 125 lb. Malamute made out with me.

Saw people: Check

Went outside: Check

Day 1 is a success, I think.

Grocery List for the Week of 7/9/07

Here's the link to my grocery list for this week, since a few of you were interested:

Grocery List Week 1

Hark, a challenge! (Why am I suddently entitling everything like it's from a Renaissance Fair?)

I realized that starting today, I have exactly 30 days entirely to myself. And I know that those of you with real jobs are rolling your eyes because YOU don't get an automatic 30 days to yourself at your job, but President Bush doesn't tell you how to do your job, and you don't also have to sometimes be in charge of scraping dried boogers off of bathroom stall handles, so you eye-rollers can go ahead and just suck it.

I can see this upcoming month going two possible ways: first, it's a disaster because I never leave my house and I end up sublimating my boredom and loneliness with a whole lot of ill-planned craft projects, online computer games, and of course food.

Or, I can actually get better, get happier, and maybe at least even out the dreadful farmer's tan on the tops of my feet where the sun has emblazoned burnt sienna latticework on top of my painfully white skin. I've also been thinking about the way I'm consuming SO much paper and plastic and water bottles by eating out almost every evening, and so I'm going to make sure that's a goal in this endeavor as well.

So here's my 30-Day Erin, Stop Being Such a Whiner Challenge:

Rule 1: Unless on vacation or showing up to a previously planned dinner date or get together, all meals must be taken at home, even on nights when I work late. I'd rather eat healthy food late and risk a slow digestion than shove a Baconator down my throat on the way home from work.

Rule 2: Food will obviously be of the healthful variety, with an emphasis on the principles of the G.I. Diet as a guideline for what to buy. Any snack food, frozen junk food, full-fat cheese product, or "heat and eat" type food will be thrown away as of Monday, July 9.

Rule 3: I will blog each day about food intake, how I'm feeling, what I'm planning for the next few days unless I am on vacation. On Monday evenings I will post my grocery list for the week.

Rule 4: I will have 128 oz. of water each day, but only in a glass/Nalgene bottle, and never from bottled water. (I reached the breaking point on my justification for bottled water consumption when I paid $2.50 for 16 oz. of Fiji water the other day at a coffeeshop. I can't abide by all the bottles we drink and then trash, especially when the majority of it is just purified tap water)

Rule 5: I will do 30 minutes of exercise each day starting Tuesday, July 10 and will blog my accomplishments each evening.

Rule 6: I will go out and do something that involves interacting with people at least once per day. There will not be a day when I spend the entire 24 hours in my house, having conversations only with my cats. (Even though my cats have gotten a lot more interesting and opinionated since they started watching The View)

Rule 7: I will go to church

Rule 8: I will clean something in my house each day

Rule 9: I will spend some time outside in the sunshine each day.

Rule 10: I will never make more than 10 rules for myself even though I loooooove making lists.


So, this sounds doable enough. If you'd like to follow along on your own challenge for the next 30 days, that'd be cool. Just email me if I'm not already linked to your blog or if you don't post online so we can keep in touch.

HRM, the Queen of Self-Loathing Land hath declared It Restrained Exhilaration Day

(I made him put his breeches on just for this)

WHEREAS: Even though some days I wake up and put on my clothes and I feel like my old shirts and jeans are so tight you can see the outline of my spleen through them.

And WHEREAS: Even though I don't really DO anything to deserve it.

And WHEREAS: I can't really see it myself because that would be admitting I'm good at something.

BE IT RESOLVED ANYWAY: That today two people, independently of one another, came up and said they'd noticed "I'd lost a bunch of weight".

Happy Weekend...I'm on a mini-vacation 'til Monday.

I perched on the edge of the black examination chair, legs dangling centimeters off the floor like some kind overgrown eight year old and stared at an insurance noticed taped to the wall. Something about how we should write to CIGNA and chastise them for not meeting the clinic's terms. I really like coming to this hospital, which is odd I know, but some clever architect managed to hide the actual hospital-y parts below the ground and grouped all the outpatient services into this lovely shopping mall atmosphere. There are glass elevators and fountains and a coffee place, and when I go there for appointments, I feel like I should be walking out with a Nordstrom's bag on one arm, too.

This was a visit with my ENT who gets to visit with me for sundry reasons each year ever since I realized that my rapidly failing vocal health was probably not a good physical path for a music teacher to travel. This time he was there to look at my tonsils and determine whether or not they should be exorcised from my body and hung from the London Bridge for making me use up all my sick days on actually being sick, rotten traitors that they are. He didn't really give me a strong opinion one way or the other, but a tangential conversation we had made all the difference in how I'm feeling since my sulky post of last Tuesday.

I walked into his office wearing yoga pants, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and flip flops, which I ordinarily wouldn't dare wear in public for fear of seeing my grandmother's ghost, looking disapproving and resigned to her sloppy granddaughter, floating in a corner and knitting some sort of commemorative quilt at the same time (I presume even in death her Teutonic genes enable her to multitask with ruthless efficiency, and that the afterlife has the shiniest linoleum floors its ever seen). But I had driven straight from summer school, where I get to mess with kids who can't read well in the mornings and teach yoga in the afternoon. The ENT is usually used to seeing me in some permutation of black dress pants and button down teacher shirt, so he asked me what I'd been up to this summer, and when I told him about the kid yoga his normal expression of bored amusement lit up into something resembling genuine interest.

We spend the next fifteen minutes discussing what I did with the kids, and his Bikram classes in the heart of Kansas City and how the hot yoga classes I once attended weren't true Bikram classes so I should really come and see what it all was about, and how the winner of the 2007 Yoga Games came to class and performed and he was truly incredible and if I ever wanted to go to his studio I should mention his name so he could get 20% off, and then FINALLY when we ran out of yoga conversation he remembered I was here about my tonsils and we got back down to business.

When I walked out of his office, I felt this peculiar sense of lightness, and it took me the entire trip to the parking lot before I realized what it was: while we were discussing yoga, and his progress and my progress, and especially my interest in the most physically demanding and kind of competitive form of yoga there is, he never once indicated that it was absurd for someone like me to participate in those classes, and to be with those kinds of people. My ENT is the paragon of health; glowing skin, lithe body obviously built for endurance athletics, and every time we talk he mentions a new physical activity he's challenging himself with. I feel like Jabba the Hut talking to him, even though he's an extremely kind and unassuming man.

But it completely blew my mind, because in everyone of the yoga classes I've taken, in the dance classes filled with their Russian former ballerinas, in the Pilates workouts and the tennis afternoons, I have run into the people who look me over and say "You're seriously doing yoga? Isn't it difficult to do if you're not already in shape?" "Tennis is a pretty big cardiovascular workout...are you sure you don't want to start with walking?" And the comments roll on and on and I end up just sort of cringing underneath the shame of them, all the while furious that I'm relegated to the fat lady exercises that I don't want to do. But this man...he ACCEPTED me. Even while I was frantically trying to come up with novel things to say about yoga so he didn't think I was a fraud, he just kept acting like it was the most normal thing in the world for a 220 lb. midget to be able to do a handstand or a Scorpion. And in not questioning how someone like me could do something difficult, he very much helped blow a good portion of my funk away for this week.

I suppose it's little secret that I have something of a self-esteem issue, and I swear to you I cannot figure out why that is. I know, intellectually, that I am good at things. I had trophies and plaques and scholarships in school to prove it; I have job accolades and compliments to validate it now. But I absolutely cannot translate any of that into really knowing that I'm good, that I can do stuff, that I deserve better things. And it's also fairly obvious that I bounce from one exercise, one diet plan, one philosophy on life faster than a Paris Hilton headline pops into my newsreader every morning when I log on. I quit so much because I don't really ever believe I'll succeed. I don't stick with anything because I don't want to admit to failing.

I've felt recently sort of spiritually bottomed out, although I'm not really sure what that means even more. When I lost weight last time it was joyful; I talked myself through hard runs, and tempting meals...I seemed to spend a great deal of time focused inward in a really good way. The difference was between then and now, I guess, is that I was a fairly devout Christian at the time. Things and circumstances have changed, and I'm confused about how to regain that level of commitment and dedication and sincered belief in my ability to succeed, because in each of those things I was confident and self-assured and successful, and that's what's missing at this point. Right now I feel pretty empty...raw...joyless...and I didn't used to be that kind of person.

I think I need a pretty rigid routine, and I think I also need to find something to get me out of bed in morning that doesn't involve work or the pressing need to vanquish the pile of dishes from my sink before things grow on them. I have this whole next month free of obligations, and I can already foresee a disastrous stretch of napping, getting depressed, being alone, and getting more and more unhealthy as the weeks progress. I desperately need to find something else to do, something to focus on, something that makes me feel more alive and ready to actually believe in myself, even when very few people seem to believe in me, too.

Or maybe I should just take up crystal meth. I hear provides similar results.

I am blocked, and that annoys me to no end, because I'm not lacking for things to write; I just don't really feel the need to expand them beyond a topic sentence and a couple of paragraphs that ultimately lead to nothing even remotely resembling a conclusion.

I am not out of money right now, I have food in the cupboards and social engagements on my calendar. Nothing is hurting, or infected. My car works. Work isn't challenging in good or bad ways. My cats are still adorable. My eating habits have been acceptable, though not stellar. My gym membership expired yesterday, but I didn't renew it because I have a subscription to an aerobics class right now. I went once and have neglected to go again, but I probably will this week. I don't expect to lose weight this week, but I also don't expect to gain anything big. Frankly, I don't care.

I have never, in my entire life, been at a point where I would admit to being bored and disgusted with who I am and what I'm doing, but I think I've finally gotten there. I was cleaning out old Rubbermaid containers of stuff I've carried with me through college and grad school and my last job, and I found a pile of legal pads from five, six years ago stacked neatly in a corner. In my cramped, precise script I had written out shopping lists and meal plans, all perfectly enumerated on a weekly calendar that looked like I had drawn out with a ruler. And like every shopping list I have ever written since I stopped sponging off my parents, the food on it was fresh, healthy, low-fat, no sugar...hopeful, ambitious, and probably wasted in favor of takeout and ice cream. I have been pulling the same bullshit for five years and all the gorgeous lists and tables and entries I made have rendered me enormous, unhappy, and positively lavishing in my own torpor.

I am so, so tired of this holding pattern I've been in since college, and I am so very sick of people who helpfully offer suggestions to make me feel better. "Take a dance class!" "Find some interesting friends in the city!" "Get season tickets to the ballet!" "Stop shopping at Wal-Mart if the sight of braless women in muscle shirts depresses you!" Great, thanks. But the problem is everything seems to be dependent upon everything else in order for me to make a clean break from this malaise...I can't go into the city to do things until I can afford to lose a quarter tank of gas with each jaunt northward, and Iget a fuel-efficient car, but I can't get a car until I pay off my debts, and I can't make substantial payments on debts because I have to eat and stuff, and I can't get the things I need because I'm always paying off debts, but I can't use a credit card to get the things I need because I have to pay off old credit cards, and I can't move into the city because I can't afford the rent, but even though I pay a smaller rent on a bigger place outside of the city, I can't get into the city to make upf for the fact that I live in the flabby, warty backside of the Universe because I can't afford the gas...

And it just goes on and on and on.

And it's not like I haven't tried to find a loophole out of this cycle of not being able to move forward. I'm not just sitting on my ass and complaining about my life. I really have paid down a ton of debt in the last two years, I have researched bank loans for people with messed up credit, I have considered getting a third job just to make car payments, I try to find substitutes for expensive yoga or Pilates classes by doing my own on video or teaching it myself to the kids at school. I research grad schools and make contacts with other people who could help me in the future and try to do research and write and do whatever I can to pad my resume for the time when I can apply in four years. I feel like every day I square my shoulders against whatever battle I have to fight in order to retain some dignity, some footing in moving ahead, and then I go to bed with a clenched jaw and regrets about whatever I screwed up or didn't accomplish enough of during the day before.

I do all of these things...but for what? I'm still supersized, I'm still poor, I'm still the tired, wan girl who might've been pretty at one point but who isn't worth the second look in the grocery line or the bookstore because whatever spark she used to have has since extinguished under a mountain of bills and stress and self-doubt.

And now I've just realized how incredibly stupid my problems must seem to someone who actually has to deal with real issues, and I'm sorry for that.

Anyway. Back to the food, because that's what this is about:

Breakfast: Banana, Iced latte (5 pts)

Lunch: Broccoli cheese soup: (6 pts) Garden salad w/FF dressing: 0 pts

Dinner: Probably Pei Wei

Sometimes I hate my rotten life, especially when I realize it's not even interestingly sucky.