Malingering

I should just never, ever write posts that even allude to success or well-being or self-satisfaction because they will inevitably come back to bite me in the ass.

I feel so bad for my poor, neglected blog and my shiteous posts of late, but I cannot get over feeling sick this year. This week I felt so generally ill I managed to convince myself I had diabetes, drove to an urgent care facility in Kansas, and pleaded with the staff to give me a finger-prick test. I laid on the examining table for an hour while people poked and prodded my flesh and I peed into a cup and the whole time it was going on I pretty much knew I wouldn't end up being diabetic, because whenever I get this sick there is never, ever anything specifically wrong with me.

The doctor came in after my lab results were done, and I had this brief moment of wanting to soil my pants when he sat down on his rollie-stool, pulled out my chart and said with a wry voice, "Well, your urinalysis came back and your blood sugar is absolutely perfect, but you are..."

...and I'm not exactly certain what he said at the end of that sentence because my mind's ear heard "PREGNANT" and I had a little mini-panic attack because even though I intellectually knew there was no possible, biological way I could've ended up pregnant, I am so paranoid about getting sperminated that I will run to the drugstore for an EPT if I even so much as bump into someone wrong at the post office. So, after a brief, torturous moment of envisioning my new future of Pampers and paternity suits, I realized that he was handing me a prescription for antibiotics and not prenatal vitamins. Apparently, I've been harboring a rather nasty and persistent infection in my body for several weeks and it was to blame for the nausea, and the fever, and the dehydration, and the swollen eyes, and the swelling, and the temporary anorexia, and the overriding feeling of wanting to just embrace sweet, sweet death every time I had to move my body (but, unfortunately, not to blame for my ill-advised purchase of an unreturnable fuschia print kimono dress from a Target clearance rack last Tuesday).

Since the Cipro started kicking in mid-afternoon today, I've already started feeling a little perkier, and I'm hoping tomorrow I can actually get up and move around a lot more than I have for the past month. In a way, it's encouraging to know that this bone-crushing fatigue was at least in part due to being legitimately sick instead of just sedentery or depressed, but it's also kind of a startling wake up call for me to realize that my immune system is a lazy bastard who prefers clipping his toenails and watching reruns of "The Nanny" on afternoon Lifetime to actually PROTECTING MY BODY FROM DISEASE. I was the most healthy, sturdy person I knew all the way through childhood, adolescence, and college; I'd have like one bout of flu or strep once a year and would otherwise be so vibrantly, annoyingly healthy that I'd have to fake sick in order to get to take a day off once in awhile. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that my health problems started right when my marriage fell apart, and that living on a futon and drinking myself to sleep every night for a year and a half during the "we're separated but living in the same house/shut up it's complicated" period probably wasn't the greatest choice for me health-wise, but it's been almost two years since that happened and no matter whether I get more sleep, less sleep...whether I shop at Whole Foods or spend a week scarfing down coney dogs at Sonic...whether I'm working out or napping every day after school...nothing I try or do seems to ever give me enough breathing room with my health to actually DO anything about it.

I'm not exactly where to turn on this. Should I get a full workup at my doctor's office to find out if something bigger is the underlying factor for all these illnesses I've had in the last year? Should I just keep doing what I'm doing and try to take regular baths in hand sanitizer on the side? Should I look into something more holistic, even though I'm not sure exactly what "holistic" entails?

I'd really appreciate advice or ideas, because I'm sort of stuck. I just want to feel better, be able to be active and healthy as much as possible. Because there's still a lot of stuff about life I need to investigate, you know? Like why my town's Super Wal-Mart always smells like farts, and how wide my mother's nostrils will flare when I mention that I'm thinking about going back to school for another degree. I just don't want to keep missing out on life, even though hunkering down amongst the blankets and the pillows and the cats for the past month hasn't been all that bad, either.

Linky Goodness

Since I've been spending a lot of time in bed on my back (that really didn't sound as dirty inside my head), I played around with my template and added a bunch of links to excellent nutrition/exercise resources on the Web, non-diet blogs I read every day, and my treasure trove of my very favorite timewasters. Check them out, but don't blame me when you find yourself skipping work next week to read through ten years of IRC chat archives on Bash.

Aight, so. The Biggest Loser thing.

Two weeks ago I received a very innocuous email in my work inbox from a friend of mine who asked if I wanted to do a weight loss challenge. I was all for it, assuming it was just a thing among our friends and we'd go walking after school and maybe go for salads on Friday nights and it'd be fun and I'd be able to blog about it and that was it. I was so, so wrong.

It ended up being a school-wide thing, and we were divided up into teams of five with each member assigned to a team so we would all roughly have the same aggregate weight. So it was kind of like a team comprised of The Fat Girl, The Kind of Chunky Girl, The Two Ladies Who Want to Lose 10 lbs. Before Their Retirement Cruises in 2008, and The Girl Who Really Had No Business Losing Weight At All. I'm sure you can all guess which role I'm occupying in this debacle. I am on a team with Gen, she of the hotdogs wrapped in cheese infamy from a prior post, and before we even started the challenge I started hiding my carbs from her ever-watchful eyes during lunch. God help me when I walk into the cafeteria on baked potato day, because I feel like I have to go home and put on a hairshirt or flagellate myself to work out the palpable disappointment she has for those of us not strong (or masochistic) enough to endure Atkins for the duration of this thing.

Anyway, so things kind of got out of hand the first week when a huge argument ensued amongst the Ladies Who Lunch (although not so much now) about whether we should choose the winner by the amount of pounds lost or the percentage of their starting weight lost. I was the one who suggested the percentage thing, figuring it wasn't fair if the thin women who joined the challenge to build muscle or get healthier couldn't even begin to compete with the substantially larger women who could lose 10 lbs. just by cutting out sugared sodas. Apparently this was high blasphemy to the other women, who started screeching about "ridiculous amounts of algebra involved" and other blindingly intelligent statements about skinny bitches who didn't need the win anyway. We reached a detente by dividing up the kitty (we're each paying $10 to lose weight) so that the person who lost the highest percentage of body weight got an individual prize, and the team who lost the most poundage would get a separate prize. All was well in Mudville until another woman suggested whoever gained or who just didn't lose that would should have to pay a penalty fee into the kitty. At this point I stalked out of the lunchroom, a Gladware container of whole wheat spaghetti in my hands and a look of supreme disgust on my face. I think I may have told her what I thought of her idea in slightly too-harsh terms, because now she doesn't make eye contact with me in the hall. I'm fine with this, as it seems to have simultaneously abated her entreaties for me to accompany her to an Assembly of God speed-dating night next month. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I wrote the above half of this post at the beginning of last week when my mouth was filled with the pleasant, minty taste of indignation and I had lots and lots of bad things to say about this challenge. I guess I've backed off this week, mostly because, well, my team's in the lead (the prospect of easy money usually shuts me up pretty quickly), and also because the attitudes from all the teams has made a profound switch from catty to supportive and that's heartening to see. I'm still worried about the women who leave the nurse's office in tears because they only lost a pound and their friends lost seven that week, and we've all been commenting on how gaunt my friend Stacie's face is looking since she stopped eating solid foods and started sucking down protein shakes for every meal, but I guess a thing like this is all about figuring out your own limits and what's healthy for you, and not what's healthy for everyone else.

I'm doing pretty well on my own; I'm sitting very comfortably at about 210.5 lbs. this week, which means I've had a 3 lb. loss in the last ten days and I've also officially reached my goal of losing 10% of my body weight (were I still in Weight Watchers I would be fondling my 10% keychain right now). I'm very, very happy with the progress I've been making and as the clothes start to get a little bit looser each day I'm more and more motivated to keep plodding along. I have two new goals for the end of 2007: First, I'd like to drop under 200 by New Year's Eve, which I think is imminently doable in eleven weeks, and I'd also like to completely pay off my credit card debt by December 31st as well (slightly less easy, but certainly within reach if I can break my habit of staring lovingly at high-heeled boots on endless.com for the rest of the year).

One other major goal is to seriously try to get moving again. I baaaadly need to exercise, or else all this fat loss is going to turn into muscle loss and someday I'll be 104 lbs. of pure jiggle and that ain't pretty. I've confessed before that I really despise exercising, and I hate nothing more than getting home from work and having to change clothes and go right back out to hit the gym. With this second job and the screwed up hours of our local rec center, especially, it's very difficult during the school year and I don't ever seem to make in time to actually do anything. I would ultimately like to buy a used treadmill sometime early next year after I've finished paying down some stuff, but in the meantime I'm going to actually use my gym membership and start slowly like how I slowly got the eating and the crazy thing under control. This week all I'm going to make myself do is three 30-minute workouts and that's it. It's lame, I know, but any other time I've created elaborate workout schedules and resolved to pick up my 90 minute/5-6 days a week workout regime from days of yore, it never works out. I gotta start thinking less like College Student With No Perceivable Responsiblities Erin who could go to the gym at 10 am as easily as 10 pm and more like Old Lady Erin Who Gets Excited Over a Good Pair of Naturalizers and Also Has More Bills Than Time and realize I can't go full out until I've built up the stamina and the desire to do so.

I actually get a week where I'll be home at night more than not, so I'm looking forward to checking in with each of you soon. Have a great week, and take very good care of you!

Update, Part Deux

The old monitor is dead! Long live new, bigger monitor!

I actually scored my replacement monitor at a garage scale last week, but I then got very distracted by the new! fancy! laptop! that showed up in a box in my classroom on Wednesday and demanded to be taken home and stroked lovingly for the rest of the week. I had a business trip from Thursday to today and now I'm finally home, listening to my cats engaging in a standoff with some random cat who's decided to make my Adirondack deck chairs his new permanent base of operations, and feeling decidedly overstuffed after my weekend of a lot of eating and not much moving.

The woman who accompanied me on this trip is a bona fide Uber-Mom, in that she packed three travel packs of Kleenex, a flashlight, four bottles of lotion, fourteen cans of diet soda and juice, a bulk pack of Kashi cookies, a bag of chocolate, and a box of Poppycock all in one medium-sized purse. During a minor electrical fire in our hotel, she managed to emerge from the bathroom completely butt-naked from the shower, dress herself in a very tasteful capri pant and brushed cotton jacket ensemble, and apply lipstick in the amount of time it took for me to murmur "I think I hear an alarm", then say, "I don't know if this is something to worry about, but people are running", and then shriek "There is SMOKE and you're going to have to STOP PACKING UP THE POPPYCOCK".

Anyway, spending the weekend with Uber-Mom was spent eating and then eating and then wishing Uber-Mom's mother had never introduced her to food, because this woman? She likes her food, and she likes it in copious amounts at regularly scheduled intervals regardless of how full we were from the meal before. I left for the trip fairly buoyed because the scale was sitting at 213, and now the thousands of pounds of food rotting in my intestines is going to make it a little bit difficult for me to pull off a successful weigh-in for Week #1 of our school's Biggest Losers competition (more on that debacle tomorrow).

I hope everyone's week was good, and I'll check up on you starting tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the swing of eating comfortably, eating well, and never, ever eating Poppycock again.

Status

On temporary hiatus due to the death of my monitor. I'll be back very soon. Happy Johnny Appleseed Day!

The one in which I have absolutely nothing witty to say

My second cousin Aimee was on Nightline last night in a feature about her life with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and how she's preparing her kids for her death. I never spent that much time with Aimee; she is twelve years older than I, and she was off doing important things like a studying abroad in Paris and living with her husband, Jim, in a suburb of Chicago. She had this gorgeous wavy red hair, and a ready smile, and my most striking childhood memory of her is when she offered to help me with one of those puzzles where the two circles link together and you have to figure out how to slide one out from the other, and as I sat on the floor and looked up at her joking with her siblings as she played with the puzzle, I thought I would probably never again be in the presence of someone so unassailably exotic and fabuous.

Aimee and I, of course, grew older and as I transitioned into Nerdy Teenager with Unfortunate Hair and Glasses, she turned into A Bona Fide Cool Mom. She and her husband and her kids would drop in on my grandmother every few years, and we'd engage in the ritual of the extended family; the Chamerniks would crowd together on my grandma's divan, and we'd assume our customary places in the armchairs and against the walls and we'd pass around pictures and admire Nick and Emily as they played on the floor and eat some sort of fried poultry and cream pie and then we'd all agree to see one another again in a year, or two years, or whenever.

The last time I saw Aimee, though, was about four years ago when she was pregnant with her third child, Alex. No one said anything, but we all knew something was wrong. Her speech wasn't clear, and her magnificent smile seemed somehow dulled and off balance. The family gossip mill started churning, and eventually the word was out that Aimee had been diagnosed with ALS. We shook our heads and were saddened in the way that semi-casual observers tend to be, and then I lost track of her and Jim and the kids for four years.

But Aimee's been busy since then! It's been nearly 66 years since Lou Gehrig died, and ALS unfortunately hasn't reached cause celebre status like AIDS or cancer, because it doesn't currently have a Magic Johnson or a Katie Couric to put a powerful and resonant face on the disease. As with other auto-immune diseases of its kind, scientists are perpetually close but no cigar in finding treatment or a cure for it, and no one seems very motivated to give it enough attention or money to advance the progress. So Aimee decided she would be the face of ALS, and she's been writing to newspapers and magazines and appearing on television to appeal for support. I found her blog semi-accidentally a few months ago, and I visit it regularly now. Her writing is simultaneously so hilarious and so exquisitely painful to read that I inevitably end up in tears one way or the other by the time I'm done. I also found out that she's a rabid Cards fan, so of course that reinforced my estimation of her uber-coolness (even if she did marry Jim, who has equal passion for the Cubs).

Anyway, I know I haven't written very much about weight loss in the last few weeks, and I apologize if you're coming here and getting disappointed at not getting to read about how big my ass is, or whether garlic or cheddar croutons have more calories. I promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week. I just wanted to share the Nightline clip and Aimee's page with you, to show you how beautiful and articulate and strong she is, and how much ALS sucks for not letting her stay in this world for very much longer.

Nightline video clip from ABC

Aimee's website

The ALS Association

Now with only one foot in the grave!

Hey Internets, I'm obese!

I was having dinner with a friend who reads this blog and also keeps up with a lot of people in my blogroll, and he mentioned that a few of those bloggers only use their BMI as a weight loss indicator. And because I still am kind of All Things Weight Loss on the inside, even though I've ostensibly shunned formal dieting and I sit in my work's food lounge smiling beatifically like some sort of oracle of self-acceptance and emotional peace while Gen miserably wraps her hunks of meat in bacon and dips them into nacho cheese and then sacrifices the liver of a wild boar to Dr. Atkins, as soon as he said "BMI" my mind immediately snapped into "Hmm, I wonder what I weigh now?" mode. And even though I was like 99% invested in the rest of our conversation that evening, a tiny little part of me was pining to reunite with my scale and see whether my slightly looser pants this week were actually loose or just stretched out to the point of giving up.

So this morning, after sort of ignoring all this weight loss business in the wake of being Officially Insane in the Membrane, I woke up and performed my little weighing in ritual of peeing, stripping down, and blowing all the air of out my stomach (because air weighs SO MANY OUNCES). I sort of half squinted through my dirty contacts, and then I had to bend over close to the numbers because I really couldn't believe what I saw.

217.5 lbs. Hm.

This is pretty good, considering I was climbing back up near 227 about three weeks ago, right before I had my little mad scene and decided to go for help. And really, the most gratifying part of it is that I've done this completely without dieting. I'll admit that the Wellbutrin seems to be playing its part in toning down my appetite, and that's fine, but I've also somehow decided that fruit is better than ice cream, and water is better than pop, and having a bowl of brown rice and vegetables is a definite improvement upon three frozen Totino's pizza and a bag of honey mustard pretzels.

As my brother's summer job boss would say, "Too cool. Too cool."

So, back to the BMI. When I first started this blog, I dutifully weighed myself and took all my measurements and went to the little government health website that calculates your BMI for you. When I clicked "submit" and a big red block of text showed up next to my BMI of 42.9, I was really sort of taken aback when it said I was in the "morbidly obese" category. I sort of furtively looked around my room for a gaunt hooded figure with a scythe, and then looked down at my body for signs of impending disease or death. I couldn't really find any.

Being morbidly obese to me means having to use the motorized shopping carts at the grocery store because walking to the bread section and back is impossible. Morbid obesity means clothes don't carry your size anymore, and your body starts betraying you in ways that it shouldn't for your age. You limp, you huff and puff on a single flight of stairs, you move slowly and ungainly and simple chores and household tasks are a monumental undertaking. In my mind, morbid obesity means diabetes and heart attacks and maybe the necessity of surgery to help get your body back into fighting shape. I am NOT morbidly obese.

I'm not claiming that I am in any way in truly acceptable physical condition either, though. I'm not good at running, and I can't even do one real pushup, and my body doesn't bend and flex and move as efficiently as it used to, but my blood pressure is low, and my body is healthy, and when I walk I do so quickly and smoothly, and I can work for hours and hours without needing a break. My body, if not aesthetically pleasing or athletic, is at least functional. And yet, I might as well have printed out that big red DANGER sign on that website and taped it to my chest like a big scarlet F, because science and mathematics have decided that my weight was inching me closer to my deathbed with every ounce I gained.

And so this morning after being surprised by the 217.5 on my scale, I remembered last night's dinner conversation and decided to check my BMI just for fun, and since I managed to lower it three points this year, I'm now squeaking just under the morbid obesity line at 39.7. Obviously not so good, but at least I didn't earn the scorn of the NIH this time.

I made a little bar graph of my progress since January, because I don't really think the numbers on the side of my blog give an accurate picture of my gains and losses over the last nine months. There were sometimes I'd weigh in on my calorie counter website, but not here because I wasn't blogging or it wasn't "official" or for whatever reason, and so I stuck those things in on this bar graph to see if I could notice any trends. So, here it is:



I think this tells so much more of a story than those numbers, because it just proves to me how much of getting healthy just has to become ingrained in your mind as a matter of fact lifestyle, and not as an undertaking with an absolute beginning and absolute end. Looking at it like this also lets me be so much more forgiving of the progress (or lack of progress) I've made since January. Analyzing the numbers and realizing I've only lost 17 pounds since January kinda made me cringe, because what have I been DOING this whole time? When I look at the graph, though, I can tell you exactly why the weight spiked. I see February and I can say, "Right, my grandma died in February and I really took it badly." I look at that last little spike and I know that that's where the depression started going out of control and I was eating so much I couldn't breathe and of course there'd be a weight gain when something like that happens. And now there's my new measurement of 217.5, which tells me on paper I'm doing as well as I thought I was in my head.

When I started all this, I really thought that getting to a 35" waist or an under-40 BMI or dropping below 200 lbs. was the absolute most important priority I had for the immediate future. Somehow though, even back then, I knew it wasn't going to roll that way. The bar graph wasn't going to look like the side of a mountain so much as a big, craggy, drama-filled mountain range that just wound on and on and on. If you had told me that in, say, January or even May of this year, I would've been profoundly disheartened to hear it. Now, I'm just kind of "Eh." about it. If I look at the scale next week and it's on 215 or something, then awesome...I'm on the right track. If I spike back up, then I know I need to stop pulling into Taco Bells and start spending more time at the places with the salad bars and the veggie wraps. That's cool with me, because hopefully the aggregate successes will mitigate the times when I can't always keep it together.

But at least now that I know that the government has helpfully provided an arbitrary number to endorse my opinion that my weight (never mind the fact that I commute hundreds of miles each week on heavily trafficked highways and I fly in airplanes and I often fall asleep at night with my back door unlocked and my baseball bat nowhere near enough to protect me and sometimes I try to plug in my hairdryer with wet fingers) isn't suddenly going to cause me to unceremoniously drop dead while playing "Skip to my Lou" with a bunch of first graders, I can stop being so obsessive about alway wearing clean underwear. I just figured that if I did keel over because of my ABHORRENT AND COMPLETELY LIKELY TO KILL ME CASE OF MORBID OBESITY, I at least ought to try make my mother proud.