Admission: I'm on a diet

I'm on a diet.

Without getting into the details, yes, it's brand-name, no it does not involve anything delicious, and yes, I'm aware I'm consuming a lot of chemicals. It's temporary!

I've been trying for a while to lose the weight I gained when, over two years ago, I worked at a job with long hours and a lot of travel. And I've been unsuccessful. I've tried upping my protein. I've tried new exercises. I joined a CrossFit box. (I LOVE my CrossFit box! I am so strong now! But I have some pants I still can't button.) I've tried cutting out drinks (any drinks: juice, coffee, alcohol).

But it wasn't working. So when a coworker had success with this diet, and another wanted to try it, I thought, well, let's see what happens. It's easy in that I don't have to think about what I eat: everything is prepackaged. I have some friends doing it with me, so that helps. And it's been working.

I was hesitant to try this diet because I was afraid of what people would think. I didn't want to be someone who had to diet. I didn't want to jump on a trend bandwagon. I didn't want to feel desperate and fat. I WANT to be someone who can be cognizant of what they are eating and make smart changes to lose weight. But, I'm not that person. Or at least not yet. But then I also realized, I don't care about the diets of my friends: I care that they're healthy and happy. I'm not doing this because it's a trend, I'm doing it for me. And I'm not desperate. I'm still a healthy weight and size. I'm not fat. I'm just not who I want to be.

Tackling the question of who I want to be has many layers. But one of them is someone who is a little smaller.

Almost every female I know has a love/hate relationship with food, or has gotten over a love/hate relationship with food. It's like that boyfriend we've all had--that one where we say, well, I was in this dysfunctional relationship and it sucked, but now I really appreciate the person I'm with because of it. Why do we need that? Why can't we skip over the disfunction and just appreciate? This is probably a topic to discuss with my therapist. If I had a therapist. But that's another kind of "dating" relationship; one that I don't really have time for right now.

Back to the love/hate relationship with food. It's really sad, because food is fuel, and it's delicious and nourishing in more ways than one. Food is socializing with people you care about, food is holiday traditions, food can feed your body and your soul.

But sometimes food pollutes your body and soul.

When I talk to people who have made major changes to their diet and nutritional lifestyle, I'm always amazed by how personal it is. I always thought you just start eating better and less, but that's not the case at all. It's way more an emotional battle than a physical one.

I used to be the person who could eat anything. In high school, I was on two swim teams. That coupled with a fast metabolism inherited from my mother meant I could eat donuts and Reese's pieces every day, in addition to all of the significantly more normal, and decidedly healthier meals my mother prepared. And still be a size 2. And have muscles.

Tragically, I am no longer on two swim teams. I have a job where I sit at my desk. My mother doesn't cook my meals, my husband or I do (mostly my husband, actually). And while I still have muscles (bigger muscles, in fact!), and my pants size is single-digit, I'm far from a 2 (although I have no plans to ever get back to that).

I've been on this diet almost two weeks now, and I'm noticing both the physical and emotional changes. Good or bad, here's what I've learned about myself:
1. I miss coffee more than chocolate (WTF?)
2. I don't like to be full; I like to be not hungry.
3. I like eating small meals every two hours, like a newborn.
4. I like eating the same thing every day.
5. It's actually easier on the weekends, when I can DO what I enjoy than on the weekdays, when I don't enjoy what I do.
6. Which means I should probably be looking for a career change. Hopefully it's not located at the bottom of a pint of ice cream or beer.
7. In general, I don't miss alcohol, but I haven't become a teetotaler.
8. I do miss juice, hot chocolate, tea with milk, and pretty much anything else I can drink.
9. I'm more of an emotional-eater than I thought.

I'm not a patient person by nature, so this whole life's-a-journey thing is never really something I've embraced. But, to quote the Cheshire cat, if it doesn't matter where you want to go, "then it doesn't matter which way you go." And I definitely have a destination in mind.

The other day, a coworker I'll call David (who is not, in fact my coworker who is actually named David), asked me if I had any upcoming 10Ks or if I was taking the summer off.

It was nice that he remembered that I'm a runner, although I really don't run 10Ks. I told him no, that my next race is the Carlsbad Marathon in January, so while I'm not actively training this summer, I'm still running.

I explained to David that last year, my running partner and I ran the Portland Marathon in October, so we did all of our long runs in August and September when it was miserably hot here in San Diego (yes, I realize San Diego is really far south and basically a desert, but it is rarely miserably hot here).

Here's what a typical Saturday looked like for me last summer:
4:30 am: Get up and eat a bowl of cereal (For those of you who are not distance runners, you CANNOT do long runs without eating first. You're going to be out there for hours.)
5:00 am: Leave my house to meet my running partner at the predetermined designated location
5:20 am: Arrive at the predetermined designated location. Debate the usefulness of putting on sunscreen BEFORE THE SUN IS UP. Decide to put it on anyway. The sun in California is out to get you. And you. And you.
5:30 am: begin 16, or 18, or 20, or 22 mile run.
sometime around 9 am, on your return trip through Torrey Pines, observe that you've burnt 1,642 calories. Have a random stranger say in astonishment, you've burned 16-hundred calories?!?! (It is only 9 am, after all). Respond, yeah, we just bench-pressed a whale. Because this somehow seems a more logical explanation than the fact that your 22-mile run started at 5:30 am when weather.com told you it was only 74 degrees out (we actually considered starting to run at 4:30 am, but weather.com told us it would be 73 degrees, and we decided one degree wasn't worth an hour of sleep) AND that you still had 5 more miles to go. And it's now 95 degrees. Let me tell you, the Torrey Pines park water was the most delicious thing I have ever consumed in my entire life.

The cool part of this was...oh wait, nothing was cool about this. The sun god was all, I hate you bitches. I'm going to turn your running playground into a sweltering death zone. It's going to be awful when you start running, and then I'm going to peak my rays up over the rest of the country and hone in on you so that all of your sunscreen has melted off well before I reach my zenith. So not only will you be hot and miserable, but you are now almost certain to die of skin cancer. BWAH-HA-HA-HA!

So what did we do this Saturday? We ran approximately 5 miles and then went and ate doughnuts and walked around the convention center, admiring the amazing people watching that is comic con. And I even got a Captain America doughnut to bring home to Captain America.

She dreams in color

I'm trying to get real stuff done, like paying bills, but all of the sites I need to use are currently undergoing maintenance. Presumably because it's a Saturday night, but this sucks for me because when they're back up on Monday, I'll need to go back to my other real life of going to work and the gym and such. THIS is why I never get anything done!

So, in the meantime, I thought I'd share with you a dream I had the other night.

I was in heaven, with my cousin. I was my age now, but in my dream he was about 8. We were in a candy store and I was hesitating to make a selection (NB: despite my real life love of all things sweet, I actually rarely  make purchases in candy stores...even when I go in just to look around and smell that candy store smell. I'm pretty sure once I started buying things, I wouldn't stop.)

Then I turned to my cousin and said, I'm so glad you can't get cavities in heaven because now I can have all of the Bubble Yum Watermelon gum I want. 

I'm not sure what I'm more concerned about: dreaming that both my cousin and I are dead, or that my heaven is a candy store (and that Bubble Yum is the first thing I go for).

The rights of the reader

I'm currently reading a book called The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac. And it's awesome.

It might seem odd (or maybe not) that I'd read a book about what a wonderful hobby reading is, since I already love to read, but this book articulates everything I love about reading, and learning to read, and discovering books, in better language than I could dream up. When I write my official review, I'm going to pretty much quote the entire thing.

I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about how mind-numbingly dull high school was. I really wanted to skip, say second through fourth grade. Which would have gotten me to high school at point in my mental development when it probably wouldn't have been so dull. (Although, emotionally, on the other hand, it would have been a train wreck.)

I commented to my friend that during the summers, I would easily read seven or eight books at the same time. (Now that I have work and grown-up responsibilities, my max is about 3 before it gets stressful.) What would happen is, my mother would go to the library a couple days a week (it was across the street, and she a librarian) and bring home some books. They'd be on the coffee table, the kitchen table, the dining room table, the porch. Some would make it upstairs into the (accurately, but somehow inaccurately named) TV room. Some would end up on my sister's bedside table, some on mine, some on the floor next to my mother's bed (see, Captain America, I inherited this trait!).

And as we mosied around the house, my sister or I would pick up one book, ask whoever was reading it how it was. We'd sit at the old-fashioned telephone table, waiting for a friend to pick us up to take us somewhere, and start a book that had been placed there as someone ran inside to answer the (land-line) phone (which was, ironically, located not on the telephone table, but in the kitchen, where everyone used to keep their phone). We'd start a book in one room, leave it to get a snack, and begin another as we stood at the kitchen counter (on one leg) eating a bowl of cereal.

We'd tear out strips of the Ladies' Home Journal that my grandmother would bring over as impromptu bookmarks. Sometimes there would be multiple bookmarks in any one book; part of the challenge was remembering which bookmark was yours.

Is anybody still reading this? my mother would yell as she readied herself for a new trip to the library. Sometimes we'd have requests...the second or third or fourth in a series...another book by the same author...a chapter book the kids we babysat were reading so we could catch up and understand what they were talking about when they called us muggles (was this really an insult or are kids just ridiculous?). Yes, even in high school, my mother picked out my books (she was, after all, a librarian).

Who does this belong to? I'd holler down the stairs. My sister would answer her friend, or my grandmother would claim it, or I'd have picked it up babysitting. Books littered my youth the way the shoes accumulated by the front door when we had friends over. (My father had more fits over the shoes than the books...I'm not sure if this was a pick-your-battles scenario or if books just stack better than shoes do.)

Books still litter my house. Instead of getting rid of some of them, we buy more bookshelves. Put the story aside, we're about to have dinner, my husband tells me. Could you put some of these on a shelf, he admonishes, Josafina is cleaning today.

My sister uses rule #2, the right to skip, and rule #3, the right not to finish a book (I can't bring myself to do this). I've mastered rules #4, the right to read it again (somehow Dobby dies EVERY TIME. It's still tragic); #6, the right to mistake a book for real life (um, hello, I have second breakfast EVERY DAY; if second breakfast is real, then by the transitive (or some such) property, Hobbits are real); and #7, the right to read anywhere (most recent bizarre reading location: in a bar during an MMA fight). My whole family uses #5, the right to read anything (I would add the emphasis ANYTHING!!), and #9, the right to read out loud (my sister and I were first introduced to Harry Potter when I read it out loud to her as she was recovering from surgery).

But my favorite rule is rule #1, the right not to read. I've never used it, but it would be a sad day if I had to read rather than got to read.

On Obsessing

I have an obsessive personality. I'm not actually sure if that's a medical condition or not, but if it is, I've just self-diagnosed. No doctor has ever told me this. It's not always a bad thing. For example, when baking, I always wash my hands after cracking the eggs, before moving on to the next ingredient. And it enables me to stick to the point in arguments (Captain America, long before he married me, learned that the "sleep on it"   philosophy of dispute resolution didn't work for us--he'd wake up just fine and I'd wake up exactly where we left off).

Okay, technically, hes's not beating anyone up with his shirt
here, and it really makes no sense that he'd be fighting
someone without his shirt on, but look at all those muscles!

On the other hand, it's not so good when, for example, I really like one Jason Statham movie, and then go ahead and get every B movie he's ever been in from the library. For the record, I've always LOVED action movies. Don't judge me. The Transporter ones are awesome, if only because he beats people up with his dress shirt (and, consequently, you get to see him sans shirt), but the Crank ones where his heart is removed and replaced by some sort of battery thing that runs off adrenaline or something and so he has to have sex in public to keep it charged...yup, they're just as terrible as my synopsis made it sound.

My latest obsession is post-apocalypse/zombie/vampire survival, which is just really silly. But I am wondering if I can turn my nerd-ocalypse novel into an apoca-romance. Is that a genre, or did I just invent one?

What do Homer Simpson and hobbits have in common?

Donuts! At least in my imagination, they do!

I learned about Hobbit Second Breakfast Day from my friend, Tracy, over at Tracyfood. And I really wanted to celebrate. But I had to go to work. And then I forgot. I even meant to get a donut (to eat at promptly 11am) when I was getting coffee (sshhh! Don't tell Captain America I was getting coffee!), but I forgot to do that, too. I have no idea where my mind has been. I mean, who forgets about donuts? That's a new one for me. I LOVE donuts. And Blogger apparently also loves donuts because it's very confused about the singular donut. It thinks it's not a word. Like, why would you stop at one? If I were a hobbit, I certainly wouldn't. Because there really aren't any fat hobbits. There aren't any skinny ones, either, and I'm pretty sure girl hobbits don't have to wear bikinis 10 months a year like you do here in SoCal. Because it's mandatory.

And then Tracy did a rockstar job of celebrating with scones and Gaffer's eggs, the recipe for which she found on the...wait for it...official hobbit recipes website. On the one hand, I'm not sure the world could get any better (unless of course there was an official Harry Potter recipes website and it taught me how to make butterbeer and treacle tart), and on the other hand I'm very sad that I somehow missed everything completely. I'm sure this is a sign of the coming Armageddon. And on top of all that, I have to eat vicariously through Tracy, which is decidedly un-hobbit like (I meant eating vicariously is un-hobbit like. However, Tracy is also not a hobbit. In case there was any confusion there. I'm sure I just cleared everything up.).

The Innocent by David Baldacci
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

David Baldacci is my newest guilty pleasure. This book was good fun in the same sort of way action movies are good fun.

View all my reviews