Keeping the faith

Finished work-out #12 today.

I'm a little frustrated, though changes are perceptible. Today noticed that maybe there's lessof that extra chin which has grown in the last 10 years much to my great annoyance. Though my pants don't feel any looser, my belt is cinched in tighter. My upper chest muscles are becoming pronounced, as are the muscles in my calves and legs overall. My stomach is definitively flatter and feels less in my way. The measurements this week are down 1/4 to 1/2 an inch, and I keep thinking I'm just tightening up the tape measure to get that extra inch. Other people, including Carter, are noticing that there's less of me. Not much less, I'd venture to say, but certainly less enough that someone other than me is either yanking my chain or honestly sees some improvement. I hope the latter.

Okay, here's why I'm really frustrated: I haven't lost any weight. I really haven't. That four pounds I mentioned early on is still the only four pounds lost and even so, I go up down between 209 and 212. Stein and I got to talking on Monday (today is Thursday) and I mentioned martini and oyster Wednesdays, and he asked how much I actually do drink, which admittedly is far more than is good for any aspect of my health. Ask my liver, she'll tell you all about the abuse I put her through.

So anyway, it bothered me so much to think that all this work is being stymied by my nightly libations that I just decided to stop for right now. Not try to limit the amount I drink, but to simply stop. It's funny how easy it really is to just. stop. Tonight is the third night without a drink, and to be perfectly honest, it isn't as hard as I thought it would be. It's easy to make excuses to toss back a few, and hey, it's Fun! but when you're easily 70 pounds overweight and working your literally ass off to melt some pounds, and aching every single day, and even so, you do those extra 1/2 hour cardio burns, etcetera, well... let's just say, it's just not too hard to pretend this big glass of water is just what I wanted. A bottle of vodka came into the house tonight, and I dabbled in the thought of having a drink and then decided not to. It's just not worth the extra calories right now, never mind the potential hangover effect, no matter how small, that may linger tomorrow.

I'd like to mention food for a minute. All the diet commercials and other weight-loss "solutions" really focus on food: how much, when, and what. Replacements for food cravings, i.e. aspartame sweetened foods rather than sugar; fat-free preparations that almost always rely on some man-made concoctions designed to fool your taste buds into believing you're ingesting fat. Pills, like Alli that promise to eliminate some percentage of fat from your colon. Other pills that promised to reduce the appetite, provide "fat burning" enzymes... what have you.

Now I'm all for a miracle Dieter's Little Helper, but for HEAVEN'S SAKE! I've tried diets, Weight Watcher's, Atkin's, versions of the South Beach Diet. I tried Allie when it was by prescription-only, Hoodia because Oprah said so, and a lot of other bullshit herbs and snake-oil tonics. However by history, I can attest to the fact that only two things really work: diet and exercise. And by diet, I mean real food -- not chemically produced, artifically flavored and colored alternatives. That includes lots of whole grains, vegetables, fruit and good-for-you proteins, but not weird nonfood substitutes. I'm not denying myself anything that I really want to eat. I'm perfectly happy eating the healthy options I usually choose, and not beating myself up when I eat a cookie or take a potsticker. For two months, I've had almost nothing but healthy foods and the upside of this tirade is that the healthier I eat, the less there are food cravings to the extent that I really blow it. Fundamentally, a healthy diet somehow regulates my blood sugar and takes long enough to digest that there aren't many times during a day that I feel a deep need for something to spike my sugar. When a real hunger pang hits between meals, a few nuts, a couple ounces of tuna or turkey slices, a piece of fruit or a yogurt suffices. I think there's really something to the glycemic index and it's effect on appetite and cravings for quick sugar sources.

Last word: on Saturday, Carter and I went for a hike in Tilden. I have tried several times to complete this one hike, always turning back before I'd gotten all the way around. Well, I finally did the entire hike. It isn't particularly hard. I'd bet it would be considered easy to mildly moderate by most estimations, but it's got an incline that just keeps going on and on (at least for me). Admittedly, I chugged for the first mile or so, but after my sore-ass muscles let go, it was good. Carter was surprised it seemed so difficult for me at the start, and I had to explain that my muscles are really fatigued and I get terrible cramps -- the biggest improvement overall was in my stamina and lung capacity. I honestly didn't get particularly fatigued at all, it was just my muscles complaining. At least I finished it. Finally.

Okay really the last word: Stein got me on the stair master today. I cannot put into words how much I hate that machine. How much I hate stairs in general. I am, after all, the one person in the entire world to refuse to climb to the top of Notre Dame out of sheer fear of stairs and the pain they give me. Three minutes was quite enough, thank you very, very much. No, really, can I just not ever do that again?