Oh Jack-O-Lantern, Jack-O-Lantern

Oh Jack-O-Lantern, Jack-O-Lantern, how I wish we had never met! You were meant to be festive, sitting with your joyful cranium stuffed with Kit Kat's and Reese's peanut butter cups. I could have waited to place you on the dining room table, but your wide grin won me over. I felt certain that I was strong enough to resist your allure. After all, your contents were intended for the tiny dinosaurs, vampires, clowns and princesses that will be coming to call on you this Friday night.

Perhaps the heart of my difficulty was the forbidden nature of our relationship. In the end, it made you positively irresistible. I meant to just grab my piece and break things off, but you've kept me coming back for more.

Jack, we're through. You're just no good for me! Wipe that silly smile of your face and turn away that seductive gaze. By the way, please don't pretend that we've been exclusive; I saw you with my grandmother this weekend!

I Joined the Wellsphere Community

I'm always looking for new resources to make my weight loss efforts easier. To that end, I've joined the Wellsphere community. Wellsphere is a website that combines medical information from physicians in a variety of specialties with social support networks. The site connects users with local resources as well as a variety of blogs.

But what really got me enthusiastic about the site was the level of personalization available to users in the My Wellsphere tab. Create a login and you can join a variety of teams and communities. You can also set goals and receive regular reminders via email or text message, which I was really grateful for today.

Originally, I had intended to brew a cup of Earl Grey and spend my lunch hour with my feet up, attacking my new stack of paperbacks. I'd just opened my tea bag when my phone buzzed with a text message that inquired, "How much have you walked today?" as a friendly reminder that one of my goals is to walk 60 minutes a day, 5 days this week. So instead of kicking back, I laced up my sneakers and taking my usual route to the park, I enjoyed a walk that was good for my mind, body and soul.

It really is a wonderful season for a long walk. I'm sure it's been said before that Autumn is an absolute feast for the senses, and today was no exception. The weather was brisk, but not cold. The foliage was nothing short of amazing. My path was lined with glorious trees, determined not to go quietly into winter, positively afire with shocking oranges and yellows in shades rarely seen outside of a box of paints. As I walked, I was met with the rich aroma and the symphonic crunch of a carpet of crimson castoffs.

So why are you sitting here reading this? Get out there and experience it for yourself! Go on! But before you go, check out Wellsphere by clicking on the badge on my page or going to www.wellsphere.com. Feel free to post your opinions of the site in my comments. Hope you make time to enjoy the season!

Assertiveness in Action

If there's anything worse than the feeling I get when I know I've made a bad decision, it's the feeling get when I know I've let someone else do it for me. In the former situation, I may feel remorseful, but I also am aware of my own personal power. But when I allow someone else to make choices for me, I abdicate that power, feel a loss of control over the course of my life and am faced with regret and resentment.

In spite of all this emotional disharmony, I regularly am a passive witness to my own life. This is especially true when it comes to my lifestyle, and most especially, my diet. I have blogged about allowing my co-workers' behavior to influence my own, but the truth is, that's only part of the problem.

Most of the issues arise when I'm with my family, which on the whole does not share my weight loss goals. I live with my sister, who in my days near 300 pounds, was my snacking buddy. We planned out our ice cream, pizza, cake and cookie feasts with serious delight and overwhelming anticipation. Then we would devour our food without a shred of guilt.

The trouble is that, much of the time, my sister still wants to do just that. She's not trying to sabotage me, but she's made it clear that she doesn't like to indulge alone. But sabotage she does, just by virtue of how guilty she makes me feel. She'll say that we should have ice cream and if I say that I don't want any, she'll say "but it's no fun to eat it if you don't." Then she'll tell me that I probably could have just a little; that it wouldn't hurt "just this once." Before long, she has me in the kitchen dishing out two bowls of ice cream.

When I view the problem in retrospect I know that part of the trouble is that I really do want the ice cream, and am, therefore, a lot easier to convince. But I think that the greatest difficulty is that I'm not accustomed to being assertive about what I want. Rather, it's more important that other people are satisfied. I know a lot of people, women in particular, who have a similar problem. My situation is complicated enough, but throw in children, a husband or sick parents, and it can be really easy to let your interests get lost to the general good.

I don't want that. I deserve to get what I need just as much as anyone else, but I know that I'm going to have to struggle for what I want. To that end, I tried my assertiveness hat on last night. My sister wanted to order dinner from a local Chinese restaurant, but she wanted to use our limited funds to get fried foods covered in sauces or surrounded by rice and noodles. I told her that those foods wouldn't fit with my goals. She could order them if she liked, but I wasn't going to eat them. She then suggested pizza, sausage hoagies and a whole host of foods that would provide an entire day's worth of calories in one shot.

I held my ground. She sat on the end of the couch looking sad and talking about how there was no food in the house. I said, "Let's go to the grocery store then." But she didn't want to. Finally, around 7:30, a whole 1hr 45min after this whole debate began, we struck a compromise and went to a place where I got a delicious salad and she got what she wanted.

It was exhausting and stressful, but I feel great this morning knowing that I was strong. I know change is hard for everyone, but I was very clear that she was welcome to eat whatever she pleased. I said this without judgment, but her issue was that she wanted me to follow her down the garden path. Part of me wanted to follow. It would have been incredibly easier, but I knew I had to stand firm for my goals. In the end my assertiveness won the day.

I hope everyone else is having courage and enjoying success today! Have a great weekend!

The Merits of Meetings

When I first started this process, I really didn't know how to lose weight. I thought that weight loss was a secret that only movie stars, athletes and Oprah shared. Along the way, I found ways to educate myself. I saw a nutritionist, surfed the web, and talked to other people who had reached their weight loss goals. Finally, I attended some Weight Watchers meetings.

By now, I know what to do. And yet, I don't always do it. In fact, I've blogged a lot recently about how this is the time of year when I seem to lose all of my motivation. As the days grow shorter and colder in my neck of the woods, pumpkin pie becomes a lot more tempting than walking the dog. I've done well up to this point, but if I'm going to stave off the wolf at the door, which is diabetes in my case, I need to do better.

That's why I've turned my attention this morning to weight loss meetings. I had attended weight loss meetings with some significant success, but I decided to stop going. A friend of my said, "You know how to lose weight! Why pay all that money to go to a meeting to hear what you already know by heart?" Her argument made sense, so I pocketed the cash and decided to try it on my own.

The result? Well, have you seen my weight loss ticker move recently? I'm not saying my recent struggles have been completely related to my decision to go it alone, but to be honest, I think there's a real connection. Many people reap serious benefits from attending weight loss meetings.

Firstly, in attempting to make any major life change, it helps to have support. You can get that in the blogging community, but face to face communication is always more powerful. I never actually shared much in my meetings, but I got a lot out of hearing others talk about their barriers and victories.

Secondly, having a meeting always helped me to stay mindful of my goal. It's easy to get diet amnesia when someone's offering me a piece of cake, but if I know that another human being is going to see my weight in bright red numbers on a digital screen, I'm more likely to stay strong. Also, the fact that I knew other people would be asking me how I did at my meeting was some serious motivation.

I also always felt that attending meetings was a concrete way to demonstrate the commitment that I was making to myself. Once a week, I set aside an hour to consider my priorities and evaluate my progress. It's easy to forget to do that now that I'm solo.

I know meetings aren't the answer for everyone, but as the holidays approach, I think I need to return to them. It's a significant financial outlay to be making at this time of year, but there's certainly no surer investment on Wall Street these days!

An Unpleasant Night

I had a low day yesterday. It was one of those days where I felt overwhelmed and invisible. It wasn't necessarily a logical state of mind, but I just couldn't snap out of it. It started because I ran into a guy I really like who couldn't even remember having met me. Ouch! I thought I'd been witty when we met, and even if I hadn't, how many twenty five-year-old obese chicks with braces does he know? You'd think I'd have made an impression, even if it wasn't positive. Things went downhill from there culminating with a meeting at work during which I just couldn't make myself heard.

I probably should have brushed all of this off and went on with my day, but instead these issues plunged me into some existential lines of thought that were anything but uplifting. When I got home last night, I felt like a caged animal. I was overwhelmed by that hollowness that I so often stuff with food.

And why do I do that? God only knows. I've read a lot about this common experience on a number of blogs. Most recently, Lyn from Escape from Obesity, has done an incredible job of putting words to something that so ferociously takes hold of so many of us. For a lot of people who binge, eating has become a way of soothing emotions that they feel are beyond their ability to deal with. Sometimes that hollow manifests in really physical ways. It seems like there really is an emptiness inside, so I eat out of a desperate desire to fill it up. While eating never makes me feel better, the truth is that it makes me feel bad in a different way. If I have my regret and disappointment in myself, I don't need to focus on all the other difficulties.

But yesterday, I knew I couldn't turn to food for comfort and it was agonizing to not be able to escape the way I was feeling. I've always known food wasn't the answer to my problems, but in its absence, I began to entertain the possibility that maybe some of my problems just don't have solutions or at least solutions within my grasp. All I could do was sit and wait for the sadness to subside (since eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's would have made me feel like a hypocrite after yesterday's post).

In the end, I accepted the fact that I was going to feel crappy the rest of the night. I took a hot shower, made some tea and wrote in my journal for a while before turning in early. I feel a little less melancholy today and am looking forward to the weekend.

I'm not sure what to do with all of this. Should I find a new way to self sooth or should I learn to sit with my emotions no matter how unpleasant? What do "normal" people do? Does everyone use a crutch to get by or is there some better adjusted way of being?

Oooooh the temptation....

I expected yesterday to be a tough time for me. I was working on an event with a woman in my office who really just doesn't seem to like me very much. She was instrumental in getting me hired, but now, I get the impression that I've let her down somehow. I try. I take a genuine interest in her life but try not to be intrusive, but I still seem to bug her. I know I shouldn't let it get to me. I don't need the whole world to approve of me, but it does bum me out. It definitely added to the stress of the day and made me desperately want a brownie.

I've mentioned before that the most dangerous time of the day for me is right when I get home from work. I'm usually still stressed out or upset about something. The house is quiet; the food is there promising to comfort and fill the void that my day carved out. If left unchecked, I could easily eat half a day's points between 5 and 6, all BEFORE dinner!

I anticipated that this nasty habit could rear its ugly head yesterday afternoon, so while I was walking at lunch, I developed a strategy. I decided that I would walk the dog for 20 minutes as soon as I got home, then I would put some laundry away and do an assortment of chores. Then if I had time left, I would start making dinner. I rehearsed it over and over and you know what? I went home and read for an hour instead. But what's important is that I didn't snack. I got it straight in my mind that I would not be munching, and I didn't. Yay!

But the temptation didn't end there. After dinner, when we were clearing up, my sister started talking about ice cream and about how she was really jonesing. She started listing our favorite varieties. She offered to buy. We live right next to a grocery store. Close enough for me to practically smell Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream. I thought, "I really deserve it; I had a tough day."

But then I had a moment of clarity. A pint of Ben & Jerry's is usually a whole day's points and I KNOW I don't have the restraint to eat just some of it. I need to poke my spoon around the little cardboard container until I get every last morsel of yummy goodness. (Then I usually lick the lid). I could almost feel a riot building within my chest. I could feel the loss of control, and I didn't like it. It's not like I'm never going to eat ice cream again, but I knew that getting it last night would be a defeat. So I said, "Let's make a deal. If we still want the ice cream when we go grocery shopping this weekend, we'll buy it. Neither one of us is hungry right now anyway." My sister agreed and that saboteur inside me was silenced for the night. I felt successful and in control.

Mini Victories

Yesterday was definitely a day of much needed mini victories. I started the day out right, getting up early enough to have a decent breakfast so I wouldn't dive into the cookies in the office. I packed a nice lunch of chicken and broccoli, which I had the foresight to make on Monday night. I got a little off track when I got home and saw our little pumpkin filled with Halloween candy sitting seductively on the dining room table. I have to confess that I did indulge a little, but I wrote everything down and stayed within my points (back to WW because I just couldn't maintain South Beach).

I spent my entire lunch hour walking with a much more physically fit friend. We walked up to a park which is a little over a half a mile as the crow flies, then we walked a 1.5 mile circuit in the park and walked back. It's the route I used to do every day when I was loosing weight more quickly, and I find it incredibly challenging. When I got back, I was sweaty, but I felt like I'd really accomplished something.

Also, last night was grocery night and I made the mistake of going shopping hungry. All the cookies and danishes seemed even more tantalizing than usual, but I made a conscious effort to visualize what my success would look like and how I would feel when I got there. I reminded myself that buying baked goods would delay my success. That was enough to keep me motivated.

Finally, after dinner, although I felt full and lazy, I took a twenty minute walk. I felt focused and energized and am glad to have some good news to report.