Rollercoaster going down, down

OK, so back to work was 4 weeks ago, 5 if you count the pre student prep week. Since then I have done exercise, not done exercise, restarted exercise, avoided exercise. My weight has gone up, never down. Once it seemed like maybe it had gone down and then this week, I am too afraid to weight myself because I think I am heavier than when I started.

I am not binge eating. In fact overall I am eating a lot better.

I don't understand what is happening.

But I am really stressed out, I have been since I got back to school.

As you can tell, I am not in a very positive frame of mind.

Things I am fretting about: (yes, this will be a list of negatives, my head is full of them today)

- How little I have to eat in order to lose weight. Eating a low calorie diet frightens me because every single time I have done it, I have ended up larger than ever. I don't want to be ANY larger. I KNOW low calorie diets are dangerous. But it's all that ever seems to work.

- How tired I am

- How on my own I am

- How embarrassed I am all the time about my size. I just imagine people are judging me every-time I eat anything. I hate going out anywhere now. Even though I know this is not rational or true.

So how do I turn all of this around? I don't know, I am stumped. I did make a pretty big decision the week before school camp. I resigned from my Head of Subject job, and put in a request to be allowed out of the Middle School. I need some distance from the place that refused to welcome and support my son. That was not the only reason of course, but it was definitely part of it.

To be honest, this funk has really centred around that decision (well the factors leading up to it as the decision itself feels great. Less money, but new challenges). That and a somewhat difficult child (who I love to bits! He just isn't the fully automatic model!) with lots of learning challenges and a big attitude, and just surviving day to day as a single parent.

It also didn't help having to go on camp with my class. I find them really challenging (not the camp itself, which is absolutely fine even with the spider alerts), because stuff with Dan ALWAYS unravels when I am not here. And camp makes me feel huge, incompetent and useless. (My dream is for them to hire just one fattie as an outdoor ed person - fatties apply now!)

Lastly, there seems to be a lot of shit on the net and around the place about how terrible fat people are, and how we are all ugly and awful and lazy and generally not fit to be viewed. That does start to get to you after a while. I do feel ugly (another irational thought, but media is EVERYWHERE), but I sure as shit am not lazy.


I suppose I just have to one day at a time it. Work has meant that I lost my way a bit, and I think my goals for this week need to be simple: (I had 5 goals here, but I came back and changed them, because even my goal-setting got snarlified!)

1. Go to bed at 9:30
2. Write down three good things each night for the day.

Here are my first 3 good things:

I had a great sleep in after arriving home exhausted yesterday
I wrote in my blog and it made me feel better
My friend got a super cool job, which made me smile

I am not sure how to avoid the sad days. But I can look for happy minutes as a start, right?

Back to work.

Holy crapoly. Back to school today. I did really well, got up at 5:15 AM. AM!!!!!! and had a yoghurt. (Had to force it in but it did the trick, I am sure my body will get used to having food foisted on it at such and unreasonable hour eventually. After all, aversion to food is not what got me here blogging about losing weight, hur hur.

Got on elliptical. Did 30 minutes of that which was broken into parts as I could not push through as well as I might later in the day. (Have yet to do 30 minutes without a pause for horrified breathing anyway though).

Got weights and mat out. Did some really bad weight training. Well so-so weight training. Well kind of more weight dancing than training.

Ate a very healthy breakfast of wholegrain cereal and blueberries and stuff.

Got myself ready to leave the house by about 7:10am (I was walking so needed to get going).

Spent the morning feeling totally awesome and full of beans.

Endured hours, I mean HOURS of meetings broken up only by one 15 minute break and an hour for lunch. Tried to be productive at 3pm but ended up in the cafe buying cookies and coffee. This is really the only solution to meetings. Because meetings are brain fry-ers.

Sigh.

I will be OK. I guess. I need to get my head around these calories though. And I need to stay the hell away from that cafe.

Aim for tomorrow before school: Do the elliptical, or at least walk elliptically away from that cafe.

Day 1 complete - almost

Countdown commencing, day one almost put to bed. Did I do well? Um, not sure. I did a bunch of really healthy stuff and then ate some unhealthy stuff and then saw a photo of myself on Facebook that made me want to cry. So just a normal day, really. One thing I have noticed about life in general is how much bloody STUFF is running around in my head at any given moment. I really have taken on too much - too much work, too much extra stuff (i.e., the dreaded Masters), too much food... too much. Without realising it, I joined a carousel and I don't even know why. I just recognise that there is a part of me that wants to keep moving and busy and that feels things are under control that way. Interesting. Well tomorrow is Day 2, and I am off to the beach which will be great for thinking about all kinds of stuff. And maybe figuring out how to put indentations and paragraphs into these posts. No, you know what, actually Day one kicked ass. And I am deleting that photo from my feed, because I don't need to be discouraged like that. And I finished clearing out a cupboard! night night world xo

Whyfore is this blog?

This blog is really just for me to keep track of how I am doing health-wise, weight-wise, lifestyle-wise. It will not be of a huge amount of interest to anyone other than me, but if you ARE reading it feel free to comment. I'd like to ask you to keep it encouraging and positive focused. I am not setting myself up as any kind of inspirational guru or expert in the making, nor am I am aiming to be funny or entertaining or even smart in this blog.

But I do need encouragement in order to keep things moving along, and it seemed to me this morning that this was an ideal compromise. This way, I can do my ranting and venting and over-sharing, and it is not in everyone's face, and I don't have to deal with feeling guilty about cluttering people's feeds with my physical minutiae.

I am attempting to focus on a short term, 90 day goal for eating healthily and exercising more. Part vanity (yes, ten years of being a fat woman has utterly sucked, and despite my belief in my worth as a person, I am not really happy with the way I look), and part health (in the past 12 months I have had some serious health problems occur which are all improved by losing weight). So, I really, really need to stick to it. It will be hard because obesity is a pretty complex disorder - I have metabolic issues, I have physical issues, and I have a lot of pretty deep-set emotional issues. These all combine to create a near perfect storm of opposition to rational behaviour when it comes to food.

My thinking right now, is that while I realise consistency and moderation is key with exercise and food - it is also true with thinking. So my aim in the blog is to keep my mind focused on what is really important. I am starting by setting some fairly specific goals for the 90 days. I say fairly specific because they may change, as in they may become clearer to me as I get better at reflecting. Here goes for now:

1: I will get the balance of my work and home lives better, so my 90 goal is to not do any school paperwork on the weekends, and to finish all school paperwork by 6pm on weekdays, and spend time with my son no matter how behind I am with anything. (I will need to attend some weekend rehearsals for plays)

2: I will lose a minimum of 10kg in 90 days, so my goal is to eat plenty of lean meat and protein, lots of vegetables and fruit, and the healthiest carbs/ grains I can. I also need to avoid alcohol and fatty foods because of my liver problem.

3: I will consistently do 300 minutes of exercise per week over the 90 days, I will need to do a majority of this first thing when I wake up in order to fit it in. 4: I will write in this blog every night before bedtime.

This is a pretty personal journal, I have no problem with people reading it and helping me to stay focused but please don't be disappointed if it is a bit dull. Especially at first!