Gusher: Almost a Setback

Calorie reduction works.  And it's the only thing that works.  I weighed this morning (I should only be doing it once a week, but I think the novelty of the diet is making me feel all excited), and the scale read 240.8.  That's 3.6 pounds I've lost since Tuesday.  It feels really good, especially because yesterday was hard.  I was so tempted to just do something easy...  It would have been really easy to shove a gyro with fries into my face.  Satisfying and delicious, too.  I would have loved it.

But I didn't.  I didn't feel like cooking when I got home, so I just nuked a Lean Cuisine.  It was sufficient.  I had a Skinny Cow bar for dessert.  I was satisfied.

But I did have a little bit of a scare yesterday... maybe I'm not doing the right thing?  I was following my plan rigidly, and I stood up from my desk at one point during the day and felt like I was going to pass out.  I got really worried.  I probably just got a head rush from standing up too fast, but all of these things started flashing through my head: is what I'm doing unhealthy?  Am I not giving myself enough calories to function?  Maybe my obesity has lead to Type 2 Diabetes, and I'm feeling the effects of low blood sugar.

These are all excuses to give up.  And I was tempted.  I panicked a little bit, and thought for a brief moment that everything would be ok if I shoved a cheeseburger down my throat.

But I thought about it again.  I thought about what the scale had read yesterday morning, and what it was going to read this morning.  I thought about being able to run again, about not having a hard time standing up, about not having my belly sitting in my lap all day at work.

So I stuck to my plan.  I ate my lunch (half a pb&j and some snow peas with salsa), I ate my snack later, I ate my Lean Cuisine and my Skinny Cow.  I was ok.  But I very nearly wasn't.

This did scare me in a very real way.  I don't want to be miserable on a diet, because to get where I "should" be, I'd need to lose over 100 pounds, and that is going to take a while (in reality, I probably shouldn't lose quite that much... I'm large-breasted and always have been, even in my brief moments of "thinness" throughout my life... if I weighed 135, which is what the BMI tells me I should weigh, I might be sick... but I'll see where I'm at once I get close).  Ok, even if I lost the 85 that I'm hoping for (160 would feel pretty good), it's still going to take a while.  I don't want to be miserable the whole way.  And once I get there, I don't want to feel like I get to reward myself with food that's just going to make me blow up again.  I need to find a happy medium, where I still get to eat some of the awful-for-me things that I like... just a little different.  The problem is I am not a fantastic cook, so it's hard for me to reproduce stuff in my own kitchen with substitutions and controlled portions.

If I had the money, I would go to a nutritionist and a personal trainer.  I am clueless about making good decisions for myself.  I really am.  So I'll just continue being persistent where I'm at.  It's working... but at what cost?  I have to do some heavy thinking about what kind of nutrients I'm putting into my body...  I might be reducing calories and losing weight, but I didn't feel so happy yesterday.  Not at all.

I also did some reading on fat acceptance last night.  That merits another blog post.  Stay tuned.