When It Rains

Grey, rainy days are made for crawling into bed and sleeping for hours.

Not for going hard at the gym.

I guess yoga is a good compromise?

It’s Hard to Feel Sorry For Me…

You know what’s frustrating?  Trying to make friends as an adult.

See, one story I have yet to tell is how I figured out that I’m gay.  Yep, I’m gay.  It’s weird coming out to…the internet?  Whatever.

Anyway as stories go, it’s not very interesting.  I met a girl, she intrigued me more than she “should” have.  She was gay, I was straight…until I wasn’t.  I put together some puzzles pieces and realized I’ve been gay for a long time, I just wasn’t aware.  It’s upsetting in a way to think you know yourself and then realize that you were ignoring something pretty blatant.

I am an extremely lucky person.  This revelation cost me almost nothing and I gained more than one person might be entitled to.  My family was accepting and although telling them was nerve-wracking, no one reacted badly.  (My grandmother hilariously asked me if it was because I couldn’t meet a nice boy and then asked me if I was sure.  That was quite literally, the worst reaction I got from my family.  I am surrounded by awesome.)  My friends, for the most part, were happy that I was happy and that was that. 

The reason I started telling this story is to bitch.  Irony, you are a hilarious beast.

I don’t have any lesbian friends!  It’s annoying.  I’ve got lots of friends, and I’m pretty sure that all of A’s friends like me well enough.  However, maybe because I wasn’t gay in my teen years or in my partying 20’s, it’s been next to impossible to meet any friends from my “people”.

I don’t actually think that this is a phenomenon exclusive to me and my gayness.  I think this is pretty universal amongst people who are a) not in school and b) not parents.

Where do you go to meet people to make friends?  Work?  I don’t like most of the people I work with.  That sounds horrible, but it’s true.  I don’t HATE them, I just don’t want to be friends with them.  Bars?  I go to my local pub once a week for trivia night and I’ve met some awesome people there, and we do occasionally hang out.

They are not lesbians though.  So even though I know how to make friends, I obviously am lacking exposure to the very group I want to infiltrate.  I’m certain if I just met some of my kind, they would love me.  I’m clearly adorable.  I’m going to have to figure this out because although I love my straight friends, there is a part of me that wants to hang out with people I have something pretty fundamental in common with.  At least some of the time.  I’d at least like the option.

I think this may be the weirdest thing I’ve ever written.  Or thought.  But it keeps bothering me, so there must be something to it.  It just makes me feel like an asshole seeing this in black and white.  I may come back and delete this.  We’ll see.

The End is the Beginning

I rejoined Weight Watchers on Saturday.  I never really stopped going this past year, mostly because I was working for them, but I turned my notice in as leader at the beginning of October and now I’m just a regular ol’ member.

It makes me almost laugh to rejoin (or whatever) because I’m re-learning all my old lessons and I think it’s funny that I keep remembering things I already thought I had down pat.

Things like:

Sweetened beverages screw up your ability to taste how sweet real food is.  This is true of both real sugar sweetened beverages AND artificially sweetened beverages.  I had to relearn this lesson after I let diet pop (or soda) creep back into my diet.  I kept rationalizing this by saying ‘hey it has no calories!  It doesn’t count!’.  It was still not good for me!  Thankfully, I’ve cut all this stuff out of my diet again.  If I want something sweet, I eat real sugar/honey/maple syrup or agave and call it a day.  I’m just back to it being a once in a while thing as opposed to everyday.

Muscle is worth being heavier.  You may not think so when you look down at the scale, but it’s so much more attractive to be muscled.  Lean muscle makes you look pretty hot, even when you feel like it’s messing with the scale.  The scale is just a number!  Those muscles?  They represent you in a way that a number never can.  Muscles say ‘I’m a badass, I can change the water bottle in the water cooler whilst wearing a skirt cause I’m strong’. 

Losing weight in a healthy fashion is actually about self-love.  In order to take care of yourself, eating right and working out, you have to like yourself.  All this stuff?  Is effort.  If you don’t think that you’re worth the effort, you will never lose weight or get healthier. 

That last one?  It’s the most important thing I’ve forgotten over the last year.  What’s weird is I don’t remember when the switch flipped for me.  I don’t remember ever thinking that I WASN’T worth the effort but it happened.  It happened because I have a long history of not recognizing that I’m good enough to care about and even though I practiced taking care of myself for a while, it’s got to be a conscious effort for much longer than a few years before it becomes natural. 

I’m not going to post my weigh in’s like I did on my other blog, but I will give updates as I hit my big milestones.  Right now, my focus is on getting back into the 160’s without getting blinded by weight loss obsession.

A Reason to Love Eddie Vedder

“That guy you used to be, he’s still in the car.  He’ll always be in the car.  Just don’t let him drive.”

One of the best things I’ve read in a while, certainly one of the best things I’ve read today.

A Fresh Start

I weighed myself this morning, as my official starting weight.  I want to get back to my goal, or at least back to that goal “feeling”.

I don’t mind sharing how much I weigh – as of this morning, I am 174.6 lbs. 

That means that since I stopped weighing in publically on my blog, I’ve gained almost 20 lbs.

That sucks.

It’s not the end of the world but it’s still not the greatest feeling.  I liked the way my body felt at 155 lbs.  I felt healthy!  I felt invincible!

But the thing is, I’m pretty sure that the feeling of invincibility and health had nothing to do with what I weighed.  It was a state of mind!  I felt like a champion because I was working on something, I was accomplishing my goals and I was kicking ass at it.  I think that’s why I’ve been basically at this weight since last Christmas. 

It’s not about the twenty pounds.  I’ve already done this.  I’ve already lost weight and I’ve already been good at it.

My problem is, what now?  What is my next step?

I feel like I can’t figure it out.  The people who manage to keep their weight off seem to have to find a focus other than weight loss.  The issue is that I have no idea what I want to make MY focus.

Really, I’d like my focus to be my life.  Why is that so hard?

Sometimes Life Sucks

My sister is really sick. 

It’s hard to think about anything else.  Caitlyn had a liver transplant almost six years ago.  Life did not really go back to normal, at least not the way I expected it to.  I guess it’s a bit of a fallacy, based solely on what I’d seen on TV and in movies, but I really expected my sister to just start living a normal life, maybe taking medications to prevent rejection but mostly the way it was before.

It didn’t happen.

She’s struggled with health issues all along – from rejection episodes to unexplained seizures and now it’s gotten worse.  She’s been diagnosed with portal hypertension and her spleen is enlarged to four times the normal size.  She has to have her spleen removed and is now on a no-salt, low protein diet.  They are also discussing putting a stint in her hepatic artery to improve blood flow to her liver. 

According to my mother (I live quite far from my sister and mother and have not seen Caitlyn in person), she moves like an old woman.  This is complicated further by her doctors assessment that her other organs (specifically her kidneys) are so taxed from everything else that they’re not sure how much more they can do if these treatments don’t work.  Her kidneys are functioning at the level of a 70 year old’s right now.

It’s so freaking scary.  I am worried constantly.  It’s not fair.

IT’S NOT FAIR.

She is 23 years old and recently married.  She’s already been told she cannot have children, why can’t she catch a break? 

I walk around feeling like I have a time bomb burning a hole in my throat.  I can’t breathe around it sometimes.  I lay awake at night and think about all the “what ifs”, which is horrible, counter productive and useless, but you try NOT doing it when something horrible is going on in your life and let me know how you accomplish it.

I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t contain my sister.  She’s the best of my family, everyone agrees.  Caitlyn never speaks ill of anyone, she’s funny and generous and open-hearted.  She makes the world a better place.

I’m trying really hard not to talk about this stuff out loud.  I feel like its jinxing things or somehow I’m prophesying something.

But I had to spew it to someone.  And since no one reads this blog, it feels safe.  If my chance someone stumbles on this, please pray for my sister, even if you don’t believe in prayer. 

Caitlyn needs every good thought you can send her way.

In The Beginning

I’ve thought about how to start this blog a million times.  I’ve missed blogging an enormous amount, it used to be such an integral part of my life.  It helped me lose almost 175 lbs!

So here I am, launching another blog.  One that’s less weight loss focused.  Sure, I’ve gained back a few pounds but really my goal with this is not necessarily to lose them.  I mean, that would be nice!  But more so, I would like to just live my life and see the weight loss as a result of my healthy choices.  It’s different this time.  I’m not living in a prison of my own body this time.  I’m just trying to wear my favourite skirt, which currently does not fit. 

I don’t know why I feel like I need to come up with a mission statement for what is essentially a journal, but I do.

So here it is:

I want to blog about my food, my activity, my purchases and, most importantly, my life.