Weigh-In Wednesday: Thursday Edition

This is actually from yesterday, but it was a very technologically challenging day for me and I wasn't able to post here. It started out bad: I noticed that the scale, when I stepped on it, was looking a little dim. I was also taking the picture in my new bathroom at the new house, and so when I moved the scale to try for better lighting - the weight was significantly different. Uh-oh. I tried a few locations and still the number fluctuated within 5 pounds or so.

So I changed the batteries on the scale, thinking this might help a bit. Not really. Maybe the bathroom floor is uneven. It is on the ground floor of a daylight rambler, so the floor is concrete, I'm sure. I moved the scale to a place that seems nice and level, and it gave me the same weight several times in a row, so I decided that's just the weight we'll go with, and I'll weigh in the same spot each time.

I went to take a picture and my iPhone camera was full and wouldn't take any pictures. Isht. People, I am doing all this in the morning before I take my shower (and after I go pee, haha)! I gotta get ready! Plus I have three kids to get ready! Ok, deleted some pictures. Snapped a couple pictures from the phone. The numbers are still dim - I wonder if this old scale is giving up the ghost? Now that we're in a bigger house with more bathrooms, maybe I'll pick up another scale. Everyone in the house should have the same opportunity for the joy that is stepping on the scale in the morning, bah.

Who even knows if this is accurate.

I wouldn't have been surprised to see the number skyrocket from last week. I just feel *fat.* Really bulky. Very unhappy with my body. Blech. An effect of weight gain after the tummy tuck is that my tummy doesn't (didn't, anyway) have fat cells to fill up, so fat goes to other parts of your body. Specifically for me, boobs, thighs and arms. I feel like the Michelin tire man. Blargh!

On a good note, we are all moved into the new place and we all love it! It will take some time to get settled in, but we have actually made wonderful progress and in some places, it is looking quite homey. To celebrate a nice new house, we are doing things like taking our shoes off at the door, the kids are making their beds in the morning, etc. No food or drink in bedrooms. Eating at the table only. This is largely due to the fact that the old house was all hardwood and this house is all nice clean carpet. Greg is ecstatic about that, he doesn't like hardwoods. I prefer hardwoods over carpet, myself. But the move was a great time to make some new habits and keep the house looking nice.

Hey - on another good note, I got back gobs of money from the old house: last month's rent, full month's security deposit, plus I sold my w/d to the new landlord. I used this money and rolled it right into PAYING OFF MY TUMMY TUCK! Yay! This is a big win, as it's no fun having credit card debt rolling around sucking up money and accumulating interest.

I have a couple fitnessy plans in the works, though neither of them are particularly groundbreaking. I'm going to cancel the Y membership, since we are rarely using it. Greg and his f'ing family cooked formal dinners really screw with doing anything else in the evening outside the home, I will admit. :) When it was just me and the kids, we ate out I would guess 3-4 times a week. When I made dinner at home, it was lots of prepared foods. We do neither with Greg, haha.  There are advantages and disadvantages to this, for sure. I have a nice gym in my building at work and dues are less than $30. Sabrina and I are going to join, and I'm just going to figure out a way to get up there, even for 20 minutes at a time. I dunno.

I'll at least get a little walk in every day as we're about a mile away from Reid's daycare. I'm planning to have Greg drop me off there and Reid and I will walk home. When there's time, I'll go home with Greg and walk to and from the daycare so I'm picking up a little more time. The kids (and dinner, dinner, don't forget thinking about and planning and preparing dinner) fill up this time, though, as lacrosse starts next week and my daughter's extra-curricular's require a fair bit of ferrying around after work, too.

Sheesh, I just made myself tired writing this out. I miss my bike.

Weigh-In Wednesday: In Which I Admit Everything I Do is Wrong

I would prefer that this be a "Wordless Wednesday" post.

That says 168.3.
I couldn't get the light right and felt it was self-torture to keep trying.

But, here I am, ready to blather and make excuses. I am stress eating, I think. I feel so frigging *hungry* all the time! This cannot be true. I am battling old demons. The stress of the move, maybe, the stress of...I don't know. I know I have a lot going on, but I don't feel like anything is particularly challenging or out of control right now. I do know that I feel edgy, edgy, edgy. It is so CLAUSTROPHOBIC living out of boxes, living around boxes, thinking about packing constantly, etc.

I'm a totally claustrophobic person, anyway, and I've been feeling it lately. I have a new coworker who is very chatty in the morning and I feel like she is laying in wait for me at our little pod when I come in in the morning. I have noticed I am typically in a bad mood before I get to my desk each day, haha, which is highly unusual for me. I do not like to speak in the morning. :) Call me a bad employee, I don't give a isht. I need time to warm up.

We are up to our eyebrows in boxes at home, in a house that was already cramped and cluttered with too much stuff. I can barely breathe when I'm home...I cannot wait to get moved in to the new place. Soooon. Saturday AM bright and early, we are outta here!

I'm sorry, it's a terrible divorced mom thing to say, but sometimes I miss our days of 50/50 custody. Lots of times I feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe, with so many children she didn't know what to do. Having the kids home most of the time feels good and right, but there are times when I think about how I would cry out of loneliness when the kids were gone and I was home alone in that big, empty house.

A side note: as a formerly single woman with children, I *hated* to be told by friends that "Oh, what I wouldn't do for some time alone!" etc. I would never wittingly say this to a lonely single person. But as a not-single mother of three, I have to say, sometimes I would kill for some time alone. :) I just wouldn't tell any lonely single person that, as I know how awful it can feel. But still. I am having to draw on distant memories to relish those days of what am I going to do, I am soooooooo alone.

Now I always know what I'm going to do, I am going to be surrounded by lots of people in a crowded, box-laden home. 

Saturday. Soon. We will be ready. But in the meantime, I eat. I'm eating well, lots of veggies and hard-boiled eggs and chicken breast, etc. But the Seahawks playoff game was a root beer float, Doritos, baked beans, potato salad and hot dog. A Klondike bar. Insatiable appetite these days.

I am a little person. I don't even have to eat much food to gain weight, it simply does not take a lot of fuel to run my engine. It is not fair. It is what it is.

I think I need to get back to blogging. I am forcing myself on that ufcking scale every week, but I am starting to avoid the blog for it's hatefulness of putting up my scale picture. I'm not running, I'm not cycling, I'm not losing weight, ugh, I feel like I am without a theme. Adrift.

But I was thinking about it this morning: first and foremost, this blog was about my gastric sleeve surgery. I am putting my head in the sand by not acknowledging that the challenges I face are part of that life-changing surgery. It wasn't a magic wand. It wasn't a quick fix or a cheat. I lost my weight and I still have to put in the work to be where I want to be. And I'm not.

I'm more than the weight loss surgery, but all these struggles are part of the experience. I wonder if I let myself feel like it's part of the journey and not my failure, if my mindset will change. As usual, this is just a very, very rough time of the year for me, and as usual, I wonder if moving away from Seattle to a sunnier climate would improve things.

Well, I am thinking, thinking, thinking. I think the new place will do marvelous things for the whole family. Space. Amenities. Comfort. Getting our belongings out of these friggin' boxes.

Weigh-In Wednesday: Dear Scale, You Suck

Ah, frustration. I just cannot seem to do this right, and I'm not sure why. On Saturday, 1/11, the three year anniversary of my weight loss surgery, I was feeling upbeat and happy about my progress. I took a picture of the scale, with hopeful confidence that this Wednesday's weigh in would win big on the scale:

You go, girl!

I've been back to weighing myself every day, because I decided these 20+ pounds I accumulated from my lowest weight did not magically appear overnight, but were instead a result of my head in the sand scale avoidance. So I knew that the numbers were creeping up, even though I do not consider it fair or accurate. Alright, I suppose it's accurate, at least, haha.

Dear Scale, You Suck.

Well, I am on my period, anyway. It's really not faaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrr. And I have to tell you, in a factual here's an effect of weight loss surgery that you may benefit from hearing about way, I continue to have a real problem with constipation. Is this from the sleeve? From my gallbladder removal (I don't think so as I believe the opposite problem is more common)? Just my lucky draw of old woman aging symptoms? I dunno. At any rate, I realize I have been saying for three years "I need to find a way to address this" and I really do. I eat gobs of fresh fruit and veggies. I am super well-hydrated. Ah well. I feel, in all honesty, this is contributory problem to the number on the scale this week.

Whatevs.

Big developments on the home front, as G and the kids and me have found a new home. We are all super excited. It's in the neighborhood: this will be my FOURTH address in a one mile radius following my divorce, haha. I tell you, when those kids grow up and throw in my face that I didn't do everything I could for them, I will throw back FOUR ADDRESSES IN A ONE MILE RADIUS SO YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO CHANGE SCHOOLS!

So there.

Anyway, it's a fantastic home with a commensurate rental rate. We will have gobs more space and there are tons of man-cave features for G that have him practically singing with joy in anticipation. My daughter will have her own private luxury bathroom. My sons have a wooded ravine adjacent to the back yard to lose themselves in. The whole family is humming with anticipation and pleasure at the thought of our new home.

For me, it has kitchen cabinets. And counter space. Whoa. I never understood what a luxury this was until I lived the last four years without them (the teeny tiny condo we lived in had a worse kitchen than this one, but not by much).

The move date is a bit ambiguous right now, it will be as early as next weekend or as late as the end of February. We're just trying to hash things out between the two places, as they're doing a bit of work for us on the new place before we move in. It's all very exciting. And stressful. I have been up since 2:30 a.m., suddenly waking with moving organization thoughts and such that kept me up for the rest of the night. I was in good company, though, as when I woke up G said he was laying awake since 1:00 a.m. with the same thoughts, haha. We're both in peak form today, in other words.

Weigh-In Wednesday

Welllllllllll...it ain't setting the world on fire, but at least it's down-ish.

I will say I'm eating lots better, and lots of veggies. Recently, I have been eating baby spinach salads with only a few chopped strawberries, a diced hard-boiled egg and this, the yummiest non-dressing dressing ever:

Oh, it's so very, very good.

I'm (mostly) tracking my food, too. All in all, I would say I'm heading in a very good direction. And it's amazing how quickly my body responds to eating well: I have been feeling pretty darn good lately.

Which is good, since my personal life is a roller-coaster ride right now! Ups and downs, highs and lows. More on that later, but I wanted to get this posted while it was still Wednesday...

Weigh-In Wednesday, Ketchup Edition

The holidays and a bout with a very bad cold kept me from posting my Wednesday weigh-ins for the last couple weeks. But I did force myself onto the scale on Christmas morning...um, Merry F'ing Christmas to me, as I nearly picked up the scale and threw it out the window:

Oops, this is not going well.

Well, I did buckle down and clean up my eating quite a bit. It's all these sweets, I tell you. I don't honestly think my eating had been that bad in the week prior, I think that all the SUGAR I had been eating between Thanksgiving and Christmas finally translated on the scale as fat. 

Greg and I both got very ill right after Christmas. My New Year's Day weigh in was a tad better, but was also tainted, I knew, by the cough syrup with codeine that I had been guzzling since Saturday. I hadn't pooped in days and days! I felt like a stuffed sausage, so constipated and miserable. 

I knew I had done better than this, I just need to give birth to that food baby.

Yesterday, I took steps to rectify the situation, so I allowed myself an updated weigh-in today, which I feel better reflects reality. 

Still up, but getting better.

I'll just post this now and get to work on my Why 2014 is FreeJulie's Year post that I'd rather talk about, haha. I am glad that I'm at least holding myself accountable by getting on that scale - I have to say, getting on a scale with a camera on Christmas morning, knowing it was going to be up, up, up...well, that takes grit.