It's Sunday, and I've mastered the Anti-Bloat piece of the FBD with about 80% accuracy - if I had a dieting IEP, I would have met this goal. The only two hiccups came in the evening, when invited to delicious places with friends. Tuesday, Tall Friend and I had Pies and Thighs in Williamsburg. The ultimate thing that may deter my success in my pursuit for a sleeker me is this very fact - I will always choose good time with friends. And, frankly, if that's what stands in my way, that may be something I just have to accept. However, I was feeling great at the end of Day 4 on Friday (I completed an additional, less successful day on Saturday as penance for straying on Tuesday) as I was weighing in at 145.5 lbs. 3 pounds in 4 days felt really great.
Something must have happened yesterday, however. It was a pretty typical Saturday, both eating and events-wise. Saturday school, nap, SoHo for Christmas shopping, then a delightful mani-pedi followed by tacos and guacamole at Mercadito Cantina. Perfection - and full of avocados, which according to the FBD, are a great thing. I know, obviously, that eating these high-fat, high-calorie fruits should come with moderation, so that may be where I went wrong, but when I awoke this morning and stepped on my scale, I was back to 148.5. My waist is indeed an inch smaller and the book touts that water weight should be discounted. But as someone always concerned with my size and how I feel, I don't actually feel 148.5 lbs big.
Today will necessitate more reading, as well as a menu design to be sure that I go into the 1600 calorie stage prepared. I started the morning with a 410 calorie oatmeal with walnuts - I feel really full, so perhaps that's a good sign. As I plug along, I'll have to get back into the yoga, and keep trying on those thigh high socks I want so desperately to sport.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Everyone's a Little Bit...
Crazy. True story. I really believe that if you take the time to really evaluate where your mind goes when you're, say, standing in a crowded room thinking, take notice of how you size people up. Try it - I think you'll find out a lot about yourself. Roommate always wonders if she's the smartest person in the room (usually yes) while Manfriend dislikes anyone taller than he is. I've had friends who fixate on clothing (i.e. writing off people in asymmetrical tops or sunglasses indoors) or drink choices. I even have a friend who will wait to see how long a girl takes in the bathroom before approaching her in a bar. Who knows what you notice about other people (and ultimately how you judge them) but mine has been (thus the purpose of today's post) literally sizing women up by size for as long as I can remember.
Who knows where this started, but I know that for at least 10 years I've been comparing my size to the other random women around me at any given moment. College was my only real respite because as a rower (and at 5'7" a short rower) I knew that mass moved mass. I knew I lacked height, so had to make up for that with muscle. Therefore sure, I was physically more intimidating than my friends on the men's tennis team, but I knew that my size held a purpose. I rowed boats, and I was constantly working to row them faster. There was nothing more gratifying than hearing the thud from my dropped power clean bar resonate around the weight room. While there were certainly times when I wasn't happy with my steadily increasing weight, I took solace in being able to bench more than many of the guys I dated. Being buff was awesome.
But then, like all college athletes, senior year passed and I was left with a body that no longer served a purpose and released back into a population that didn't necessarily understand competitive athletics. My Vegas Roommate remembers only two things about me from our first meeting in the Teach For America intro session: I was wearing a Ralph Lauren halter top she liked, and I had the largest shoulders in the room - including all of the men. (In hindsight, maybe a halter was a poor choice.) But without the lifting and constant eating, the muscles and my weight started to slowly deflate.
Fast forward to now - I'm 28 and as my Hip Colleague has pointed out, something strange happens at 28. When she told me this, I assumed as I usually do, that I would be immune to aging and any of its adverse affects. However, she's totally right. Suddently weight management isn't as simple as being sure that I don't over-eat. Also, the combination of both getting married and being in love with clothing (read: a touch vain) has sent me in search of a real diet plan. A friend suggested The Flat Belly Diet, so over the next month I'll be documenting any changes and the journey itself as I attempt to become a lither version of myself.
In the interest of honest documentation, I started their 4-day Anti-Bloat plan yesterday and began with measurements of:
Weight: 148 lbs
Waist: 31 inches
Thighs: 21 inches
Let's see if if nothing else, this helps cure a little bit of my crazy...
Who knows where this started, but I know that for at least 10 years I've been comparing my size to the other random women around me at any given moment. College was my only real respite because as a rower (and at 5'7" a short rower) I knew that mass moved mass. I knew I lacked height, so had to make up for that with muscle. Therefore sure, I was physically more intimidating than my friends on the men's tennis team, but I knew that my size held a purpose. I rowed boats, and I was constantly working to row them faster. There was nothing more gratifying than hearing the thud from my dropped power clean bar resonate around the weight room. While there were certainly times when I wasn't happy with my steadily increasing weight, I took solace in being able to bench more than many of the guys I dated. Being buff was awesome.
But then, like all college athletes, senior year passed and I was left with a body that no longer served a purpose and released back into a population that didn't necessarily understand competitive athletics. My Vegas Roommate remembers only two things about me from our first meeting in the Teach For America intro session: I was wearing a Ralph Lauren halter top she liked, and I had the largest shoulders in the room - including all of the men. (In hindsight, maybe a halter was a poor choice.) But without the lifting and constant eating, the muscles and my weight started to slowly deflate.
Fast forward to now - I'm 28 and as my Hip Colleague has pointed out, something strange happens at 28. When she told me this, I assumed as I usually do, that I would be immune to aging and any of its adverse affects. However, she's totally right. Suddently weight management isn't as simple as being sure that I don't over-eat. Also, the combination of both getting married and being in love with clothing (read: a touch vain) has sent me in search of a real diet plan. A friend suggested The Flat Belly Diet, so over the next month I'll be documenting any changes and the journey itself as I attempt to become a lither version of myself.
In the interest of honest documentation, I started their 4-day Anti-Bloat plan yesterday and began with measurements of:
Weight: 148 lbs
Waist: 31 inches
Thighs: 21 inches
Let's see if if nothing else, this helps cure a little bit of my crazy...
Monday, December 6, 2010
Single Living
In all meanings of the word I am single - but just for tonight. Roommate is out of town on a training and Manfriend is back in Ohio. I'd only lived alone for a year, and hated it, so I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying a short bit of alone time. Since birth I've always wanted to surround myself with as many friends as would have me and been fortunate enough to have entirely pleasant roommate situations dating all the way back to my freshman year at UB. I arrived home after a lackluster yoga class in the East Village (it's usually awesome, it was a total fluke) and some grocery shopping, fully anticipating a lonely evening where I slip into bed as quickly as I could.
Much to my own surprise, I found the time guiltily luxurious. I did a little laundry, drank a little wine (no, really. Just a little.) and cooked delicious food for the next several meals. I put on some Mumford and Sons (thanks to my super hip colleague) and enjoyed an atypically late night in apartment 19.
Oddly enough, this feeling of slight liberation in isolation lead me back to a conversation my best friend and I have been revisiting over the past several weeks. She is married, living the dream in Denver with two beautiful boys and is - shockingly, as I imagined how mature I'd be at this age - one of my only married friends. While lifestyles and life phases have found us on the opposite side of the coin in so many debates (Red or Blue? Knock-off bags? Importance of personal appearance? White or red?) we've been able to deepen our adult-version of our friendship through the simple question: What kind of wife do I think I should be? Her newly-cemented faith drives many of her feelings, and my wishy-washy-wistfulness for the grounding faith used to bring colors mine more than I'd like to admit, but the idea remains - how does one do this new phase? What do we do with these new roles? How do we decide what is best for our new families?
While I don't pretend to have any real answers (I'm not even actually married yet) I've found a lot of solace in the ideas New Jersey Friend has sent my way via A Practical Wedding - it's a lovely, well-rounded collection of thoughts from many women working through the same questions I am. What if the wedding isn't the only thing I want to talk about? What does it mean to be married/ engaged/ committed to someone while maintaining a sense of self? While I have no idea what this next, precipice-like stage of my life will look like, there are some things I do know: I will want and need smart-women time, with or without children. I will want and need great mothers and wives in my life so I can model my development after traits they embody that I admire. And I will want and need a good deal of great food, great wine, and the company of close friends. Because if there's something I know, it's that late-night alone time is precious, but it creates anew the longing for wisdom, wit, and cheeky banter from the brilliant people in my life.
The whole wife/ mother/ matriarch thing? We'll have to wait and see what opinions will surface in that new stage.
Monday, November 22, 2010
A Decade
In truth it was very much, those first few hours, like Quentin Compson had come to stay. Not in the suicidal-in-love-with-one's-sister kind of way, but more in the you've-lived-so-long-in-only-my-mind-and-words-and-now-you're-really-here-and-want...wanton soup?! It took a solid 24 hours for the desire to poke him to subside (think kindergarten, not Great Britain) just to be sure he was really there. What does one do when confronted with so many new feelings, many of them confusing about one's soon-to-be-husband? Drink wine, of course, and lots of it!
We also stumbled upon a distillery that looked much like what one would look like were Dad to turn our pole barn into a moonshine still. I loved the mud and the barn cats - Manfriend loved the whiskey.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The World is Getting Smaller
In a new attempt to both avoid becoming my father and also keep my brain young I have recently learned some new things and joined the 2010 online community. The first dabble was the blog, but I've now traded in my archaic phone with a shiny, new BlackBerry and gone a little technologically crazy. Within one day, I've now joined Tumblr, FourSquare, and added all kinds of fashion and political blogs to the blogs I follow. Upon checking into a local coffee shop this morning, I was immediately reconnected with an LA rowing friend of mine - the world got smaller! Will I have time to keep up with all of these things? That remains to be seen...
Today was a welcome peek into what I used to believe being a normal, real-live adult would be like. All day, as I loved on my city, I wanted to stop every other person on the street, desperately inquiring, "And what do you do? Can I do that so that I, too, can wander the city, or brood importantly in this lovely coffee shop?" Roommate and I went out last night, ate, danced, were insulted (more on that later) and came home after midnight. This morning I had leisurely coffee, a bagel, read part of a real book, hung out with some lovely students, and read up on friends, fashion, and politics. This isn't to say that there aren't bits of all of those things peppered into my teaching days, but the fact I continue to combat is simple: I have a job where I teach students every day, beginning at 7:15 AM and ending at 5:30PM. Don't get me wrong - I do love my job, and am reminded in little, every day things that I teach for a reason. I cannot stop the connection my brain immediately makes when reading about a delicious pumpkin cinnamon roll recipe that without the ability to sound out multi-syllabic, closed syllable words like pumpkin, my students may not ever have the cultural or literal capital to enjoy some of life's little luxuries. So yup, I love the job and know why. But then it's 4:40AM and my alarm clock is going off, and I yearn for a 9-5 gig. Working from a small coffee shop seems so attractive. How to squeeze it all in? Is technology a piece of the time-stretching I seek?
And now back to the insults last night - Roommate, Neighbor and I, as stated, enjoyed a dinner that ideally would have taken hours upon hours to be able to savor every truffle-filled bite at Sojourn in the Upper East Side, and then headed to FB Lounge for some Latin jazz. I learned so many things (like a motherf*@#ing adult) about my terrible dancing skills, how little I understand any form of jazz, and why the trombone is a really great instrument. But then an older (not old, just older) man came up to the mic to do a series of spoken word pieces. Usually I find spoken word forced and pretentious at best. I loved it in the Mos Def DefJam Poetry days, and some artists are still able to manipulate language and make connections that instill some awe, but now the tenor and syntax and long... drawn... out... pauses to illustrate my....... brilliance is a bit too much. This particular series, however, brought too much to a whole new level. Why, oh why did this man decide that a room filled mostly with women needed to hear a piece informing us that as women we trap, manipulate, and stifle the men in our lives through our very presence in theirs? Why, oh why was it necessary to then read an entire piece entitled "Spic" in a Latin-inspired establishment? Why, oh why did the jazz drummer then need to follow up said verbal excrement with a short lecture about the importance of the poet himself, as though like jazz, I was a bit too uncultured to really "get it?" Why, oh why, oh why did Neighbor's Friend (white, male, and wearing the kind of glasses that state "I take myself so seriously that I assume that you don't realize that I am just trying to look ironic") sitting to my immediate right THEN feel the need to let the rest of our table, clearly upset by both the letter and nature of said pieces, inform us that he "really wants to hear what we thought, just not right now?"
What better way to end that kind of an evening? By eating most of a pint of Roommate's Ben and Jerry's ice cream, of course.
Today was a welcome peek into what I used to believe being a normal, real-live adult would be like. All day, as I loved on my city, I wanted to stop every other person on the street, desperately inquiring, "And what do you do? Can I do that so that I, too, can wander the city, or brood importantly in this lovely coffee shop?" Roommate and I went out last night, ate, danced, were insulted (more on that later) and came home after midnight. This morning I had leisurely coffee, a bagel, read part of a real book, hung out with some lovely students, and read up on friends, fashion, and politics. This isn't to say that there aren't bits of all of those things peppered into my teaching days, but the fact I continue to combat is simple: I have a job where I teach students every day, beginning at 7:15 AM and ending at 5:30PM. Don't get me wrong - I do love my job, and am reminded in little, every day things that I teach for a reason. I cannot stop the connection my brain immediately makes when reading about a delicious pumpkin cinnamon roll recipe that without the ability to sound out multi-syllabic, closed syllable words like pumpkin, my students may not ever have the cultural or literal capital to enjoy some of life's little luxuries. So yup, I love the job and know why. But then it's 4:40AM and my alarm clock is going off, and I yearn for a 9-5 gig. Working from a small coffee shop seems so attractive. How to squeeze it all in? Is technology a piece of the time-stretching I seek?
And now back to the insults last night - Roommate, Neighbor and I, as stated, enjoyed a dinner that ideally would have taken hours upon hours to be able to savor every truffle-filled bite at Sojourn in the Upper East Side, and then headed to FB Lounge for some Latin jazz. I learned so many things (like a motherf*@#ing adult) about my terrible dancing skills, how little I understand any form of jazz, and why the trombone is a really great instrument. But then an older (not old, just older) man came up to the mic to do a series of spoken word pieces. Usually I find spoken word forced and pretentious at best. I loved it in the Mos Def DefJam Poetry days, and some artists are still able to manipulate language and make connections that instill some awe, but now the tenor and syntax and long... drawn... out... pauses to illustrate my....... brilliance is a bit too much. This particular series, however, brought too much to a whole new level. Why, oh why did this man decide that a room filled mostly with women needed to hear a piece informing us that as women we trap, manipulate, and stifle the men in our lives through our very presence in theirs? Why, oh why was it necessary to then read an entire piece entitled "Spic" in a Latin-inspired establishment? Why, oh why did the jazz drummer then need to follow up said verbal excrement with a short lecture about the importance of the poet himself, as though like jazz, I was a bit too uncultured to really "get it?" Why, oh why, oh why did Neighbor's Friend (white, male, and wearing the kind of glasses that state "I take myself so seriously that I assume that you don't realize that I am just trying to look ironic") sitting to my immediate right THEN feel the need to let the rest of our table, clearly upset by both the letter and nature of said pieces, inform us that he "really wants to hear what we thought, just not right now?"
What better way to end that kind of an evening? By eating most of a pint of Roommate's Ben and Jerry's ice cream, of course.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Late (or early?) Beginnings
It's a very foreign idea to me - this blogging business. I have lovely friends, many of whom Tweet, sign in on FourSquare, and also blog. I had been considering beginning a blog, usually in times of great vocational distress, dreaming of becoming one of those possibly fictitious bloggers who have become well-read enough to blog for a living. I imagine myself, waking up leisurely in my Manhattan apartment, enjoying coffee slowly, feeling the excitement but luxurious lack of urgency in my day, pulling out my laptop and spilling my thoughts out onto the world. The bibliophile in me, however, was always taught that to write for public consumption was to perceive greatness in oneself, which makes me nervous. I find some solace in the fact that particularly with the great mass amounts of mediums for friends to stalk friends, strangers to judge strangers, and Martha Stewart to bombard my inbox with a paralyzing number of ways I am currently not improving my life but should be, that not even my mother will actually read this.
My general hope is that this blog will simply allow me an outlet for the millions of thoughts that bombard my brain every minute. I've always had an intense feeling of trepidation about the passing of time. As a young child, growing up on a farm (hence the name) always meant that to sit still was to waste time that could be spent working. I hoped that if I just noticed enough, paid enough attention to the details of every day, that I could, in fact, slow time. As a fake adult I'm not as convinced as I used to be that that is the case, but I do think that noticing the details, taking the time to (cheesey as it sounds) seize the day will allow for a richer, slower passing of time.
I start with all of that to say that my vision is to use this blog to publicly bookmark for myself ways that I can better take advantage of my time while I live in, in my humble opinion (and the opinion of its almost 19,000,000 inhabitants) the greatest city in the world. (Trust me, it's true!) Again, as that small, time-slowing child on the farm I always dreamed of being in New York. Teach for America brought me to Las Vegas for 2 year after college, which was a lovely adventure for a time. The love of a man brought me kicking and screaming to Los Angeles for another 3, but I came to visit my brilliant sister, who was studying at Manhattan College in the Bronx every possible second I could. The plane rides back west were always dreadful, as though I was living my life just to get back. And now I've been one of the lucky nineteen million to be able to call New York City my home for a full year - and I feel I'm missing a bit. I have a job I believe in as a teacher in Brownsville, and that consumes so much of my time and energy, but there is always room for more.
In the spirit of no longer wasting time, around 2AM I was turning restlessley, unable to return to sleep and decided - why not? No time like the present! So I got up, got some water, organized my closet, and started my blog! Hey, if my middle school academics can do it, I'm up for the challenge.
My general hope is that this blog will simply allow me an outlet for the millions of thoughts that bombard my brain every minute. I've always had an intense feeling of trepidation about the passing of time. As a young child, growing up on a farm (hence the name) always meant that to sit still was to waste time that could be spent working. I hoped that if I just noticed enough, paid enough attention to the details of every day, that I could, in fact, slow time. As a fake adult I'm not as convinced as I used to be that that is the case, but I do think that noticing the details, taking the time to (cheesey as it sounds) seize the day will allow for a richer, slower passing of time.
I start with all of that to say that my vision is to use this blog to publicly bookmark for myself ways that I can better take advantage of my time while I live in, in my humble opinion (and the opinion of its almost 19,000,000 inhabitants) the greatest city in the world. (Trust me, it's true!) Again, as that small, time-slowing child on the farm I always dreamed of being in New York. Teach for America brought me to Las Vegas for 2 year after college, which was a lovely adventure for a time. The love of a man brought me kicking and screaming to Los Angeles for another 3, but I came to visit my brilliant sister, who was studying at Manhattan College in the Bronx every possible second I could. The plane rides back west were always dreadful, as though I was living my life just to get back. And now I've been one of the lucky nineteen million to be able to call New York City my home for a full year - and I feel I'm missing a bit. I have a job I believe in as a teacher in Brownsville, and that consumes so much of my time and energy, but there is always room for more.
In the spirit of no longer wasting time, around 2AM I was turning restlessley, unable to return to sleep and decided - why not? No time like the present! So I got up, got some water, organized my closet, and started my blog! Hey, if my middle school academics can do it, I'm up for the challenge.
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