I know that it's been forever since I've been on here. It's been a really rough couple of months.
I found out back in July that I was going to be losing my job come January 1st. I've been looking and looking, but with everyone so freaked out abut the economy - there is just nothing out there.
We figured out a few different financial scenarios, and we decided that unless some amazing $50k a year job falls in my lap out in Orlando, then we are going to wait until Jan and find me something that pays a little less here on the coast. It's amazing how much that drive to town ends up costing! I think I spend about $550 a month just in tolls and gas. Crazy, eh? That's practically a part time job paycheck right there!
Anyway - with the whole job thing causing major stress, and other quick, but painful, money events coming up lately, I haven't even thought for two seconds about my weight.
Of course, with my anxiety and all, I have been so totally stressed out. My stomach hurts in the morning, I'm tired and cranky, my OCD is back 110%, and I just want this whole situation to be past us.
I think I would even be alright if my work weren't dragging their feet so bad. They were supposed to get me some information about a separation package with them about a week or two after they dropped the axe - but it's been three months this week and I just keep hearing "We requested it...I don't know what happened...I'll ask again...."
LAME!!!
'I don't know" isn't going to put food in my families mouth in January. I need to know exactly if you are giving me a few months pay or a jelly-of-the-month club certificate! Plus on top of that, my husband was supposed to get this really great raise back in the first week of June and they are dragging their feet on that too! We have no idea even what his pay is going to be and even though they said there would be back pay, with all this trouble it's taking just to get the stupid raise, I won't believe it until we have an actual check in the bank.
So as you can tell these last few months have been horribly, horribly stressful for me. And I am supposed to run a 5k with my sister in the first week of Jan too! I haven't even trained one day yet!
Obviously, with food being my favorite comfort tool, I have ballooned up to 255 -265. Kind of bouncing around in there. My clothes don't fit and I feel like a total pig. My stomach is just disgusting, I have rolls everywhere when I sit, and when I'm driving I feel like I have this big ol truckers belly that I could practically use as a table. I weigh about 30 pounds MORE than when I was 9 months pregnant with Harper!
So anyway - I've been thinking about how little control I feel that I have lately and I need something to work on if I can't do anything about the lack of jobs out there right now. I need a project that will be good for me and let me feel like I am getting something done!
I'm supposed to run in that Disney 5k on Jan 9th - which is right around 10 weeks away. All I have to do is be able to finish the thing in 45 minutes - I don't have to run the whole way. I figured out that if I go around the two blocks by my house 4 times it is 3.2 miles. (A 5k is 3.11 miles) So that would be a great way to train since I hate to be too far from home when I workout outside. Once, back when I was an actual runner, I slipped on some ice and fell on my hip hard and twisted my ankle badly - but I was on a nature trail and two miles from home. That was not a fun walk back!
My first goal is to make it those 4 times around in 40 minutes. My second goal is two lose 10 pounds in these 10 weeks till I get to Jan 9th. And my new weight goal is just to get under 200 lbs. I know that it's not in my healthy weight range - but I just need to get to something I can maintain to better my health, not be a swimsuit model.
And I'll try to be much better about posting. I need the outlet!
So ladies - it's been a hell of an end of the week.
Yesterday I knew that our big wig boss was coming down to the studio from downtown and I thought that it was going to be one of those "Hey look! I can hang out with the studio people once in a while!" free lunch kind of days.
Well, he did show up and he basically told me that my job is being relocated to Miami and if I want to keep my job, I have to move with it. Well, that aint gonna happen.
So basically I am on the job hunt. I have to at least give it to my company that I am still employed until January, I can use any free time at work to look for work or go on interviews, and they are even offering me Fridays off to schedule interviews and such.
(Long rant about what a bummer it is to have to find a new job) Grrrrrr........
We are trying to look at this in a positive light and are starting our search close to the house so that maybe I can find a position here in our small town and I can get rid of that crappy commute into Orlando every day and get Harper into a local daycare, so she wont spend 3 hours in the car everyday. That would be nice.
Lucky for me I updated my resume a while back and it was still in pretty good shape. I just sent it out to all of my friends and told them to pass it on anywhere they thought I might be good at. And we did find one really good lead at a local community college that is just 10 minutes from here. From the ad it sounded like they are hiring people to start up a station or expand the one they have on campus. I finished the online application this morning - so I guess seeing that I already found a good lead and got a resume out in less than 24 hours I should be at least a little hopeful.
I got 5 months to find something and the clock starts now....
Well girls, things are still going well. The last few days have been veggies galore and I don't see anyone complaining. Frankly, it's quite amazing!
I have to admit that I'm still having big time trouble in the afternoon. Mostly from about 2:30 up until I get dinner ready. Even though I have had all my snacks - my tummy just gets downright famished that time of day and for most of it I'm in the car. It's hard to be in control when you are in the car passing McDonalds.....Burger King.....Wendys.....Taco Belll..... Ugh! snap out of it! ;)
Things will hopefully start to get better next month. See for a while now the whole fam has been car pooling to save money, which is great, but I end up spending about 4 hours in the car everyday because we all get dropped off on different ends of town. Such a pain in the butt! But, my office is supposed to move downtown at the end of the year. That would put me just a few miles from Terry's work and then we would move Harper to a school just around the corner making for a much, much shorter route.
Well, the daycare that she is at now gave me some paperwork last week that said that they were raising their rates by $30 a week!!! That's $120 a month!! So even though they were willing to grandfather us in for a few more months with our orginal scale - the more Terry and I talked about it, we figured it was a sign that we should just move her now. This way I drop Terry off, go about a mile down the road and drop off Harp, and then diagonal accross town to my office. Still a long drive, but in December it will cut the city time drive by about half.
HOPEFULLY this will get us to the point where we can work out some exercise time! I found out from one of the ladies in the downtown office that there is a gym in the building that only has a ONE TIME $20 fee and you can use it as long as you work in the building! Awesome eh? She said she would show it to me the next time I'm down that way.
Anyway - speaking of driving, I better get out of here so I can beat the traffic!
The spaghetti squash experiment turned out really well. The only thing that I might have done wrong was put in a little too much sprinkle cheese. ;) Terry said that he thought that he might like it just as much as the noodle version. That's saying a lot for a bowl full of squash! :)
Harper liked it so much she ACTUALLY LICKED THE PLATE AND TRIED TO CHEW ON IT!! That has NEVER happened before - even with her all time favorite, regular spaghetti. Man, I wish I could have grabbed the camera fast enough to see her smearing the plate on her face to get it off. :)
And one other funny note, this is our cat Lamonte either playing dead or taking a nap. Sometimes it's hard to tell....
Sorry, I know that's gross, but I think it's kinda funny when you haven't really focused on veggies in a while and your tummy does cartwheels and all kinds of fancy tricks for the first few days. Haha - I won't dwell on it. ;)
I feel much better today - I thought I was get a stomach flu yesterday because I was nauseated the whole day, but it seems to have passed. I often have problems with that because I have a very nervous stomach and even little things can set it off. Like if I have to get up early and don't get a good nights sleep - forget about me not feeling like barfing all morning. I got my dads stomach. I've found that it helps to take a heartburn pill before bed so I dont end up with sour stomach in the morning.
It will be interesting to see how we both feel at the end of the week. I think that all the fiber will be really good for us. I already feel less bloated! (This is turning out to be a gross post! Sorry! haha) Tonight we are having spaghetti squash dinner and thats a lot of fiber!
I think it's funny how much Doodle (our 1 1/2 year old, Harper) likes the veggies that I thought she wouldn't even pick up. Tonight with the fake spaghetti will be a big test. That is one of her all time favorites! But last night I made:
Greek Chicken
3 chopped up chicken breasts
2 tbs olive oil
2 cups chopped mushrooms
1 package frozen spinach
1 tbs chopped garlic
1 cup feta
(cook the chicken and mushrooms in the oil, add the spinach and the feta!)
And Harper LOVED it! She ate almost all of it! But I shouldn't be surprised because she always likes fruits and veggies. I guess I was more surprised that Terry and I liked it! haha
Rachel
255
p.s.
Yes, that is down 5 pounds! I didn't weigh myself yesterday, but I know that last week I was at 260 and I think I've maybe lost a pound and lost a bunch of bloat! :)
I know that it's been a long time and Terry and I are as fat as ever. Sigh. We have been so busy lately that we have been using our very, very busy schedule to justify our eating and lack of exercise.
But the other day I read that article saying that they have pretty much decided that lower carb is better in the long run then lower fat, I decided maybe it would be a good idea to try to at least try to start eating better.
I don't believe that Atkins is a healthy way to go because we tried it once before and I truly believe that the reason people lose weight on it is because IT IS FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE TO EAT UNDER 20 CARBS A DAY. You would litterally just have to gnaw on big hunks of meat all day. I'm sorry, but I don't like meat that much and we couldn't afford it anyway.
So I did more of a modified South Beach style - mostly lean meats, veggies, fruits, and whole grains. I know that with South Beach you are supposed to go for a week with the whole no carbs thing - but we are just too busy for that. I needed a healthy menu that I could also feed my daughter and do a two week shopping list for.
I think I came up with some good stuff to make for dinners, but I know that the days are going to be tricky. Lots of the same lunch over and over. That's the hard thing when you aren't doing processed foods. Lots of tuna and lunch meat on whole wheat pitas.
So we are giving it a shot and seeing a) how we like it and b) how much this menu will cost. We have a very tight budget and the grocery bill needs to fit into that too. Steaks every night are not going to be affordable!
This first week will be bumpy because we cant do a full grocery run till Friday - but next week should be smooth sailing. :)
Okay girls, my sister and I are signed up for January 9th! No refunds! No turning back now.
Terry and I are going to attempt to go running as soon as we get home tonight with Harper in the jogging stroller. We will see how it goes - hopefully well. :)
Thats about it for today - oh and by the way, the fastest way to lose a couple pounds is to cut off 10 inches of your hair. :)
Rach
256
P.S. Isn't this a fantastic photo! I look so thin! I should always take my picture in my bathroom looking up at a cell phone! ;)
I don't want to be a super model - I just want to be this lady.
Well, it's been about a month since I've been here and nothing much has changed. I still have all the same stats pretty much, with the same ol excuses.
I decided to write again today because I was in the bagel store getting lunch.
It wasn't a bad lunch at all - much better than a lunch from the burger joint next door. But still a fast food lunch. Anyway, I'm waiting over at the soda machine for my order and I notice a table of 30 to 40 year old men sitting nearby.
The 3 of them were just sitting there paying no attention to me at all. Which is fine - I mean I am not here to say that they were doing something mean to me or made a snarky remark or anything, BUT...
As I have said before in this blog I have been fat for most of my adult life. Only for about 2 years did I live the glorious life of a thin, hot 20 something year old. And because of my past experience I KNOW how men react to a pretty woman pretty much anywhere.
Now I'm not talking about the way guys act in bars when they are trying pick girls up - but just when you are in a shop or a park or any other public place. Men treat you - different. When you're fat, they aren't mean to you or anything usually (I mean I'm just talking about passing someone in a grocery store isle or something like that) but they treat you the same way they treat their mom or their sister or their grandma.
They treat you like a "Mamm".
When you are thin - men, young or old, put a skip in their step to open a door for you. Not that they wouldn't do it before, they just wouldn't put a little speed in their walk to get there faster. Old men wink at you, more working guys call you "sweetie", if you reach for something on a high shelf - magically a guy appears to get it down for you.
They treat you like a "Miss".
I'm not saying that these guys are jerks normally or anything, but I think that they are somehow wired in their brain to do these things. I don't think that the old guy at drug store who called me "Honey" wants to get in my pants or anything like that at all - I really think their brain kind of goes, "Ooooh - girl pretty."
I know thats very simplistic of me - but that was the best way that I could think of to describe the different feeling I got from men in general when I was thin. And I think that women who have been thin for a long time and then become fat later in life don't notice really, I think they just think that they are getting older.
And at the bagel shop those men wouldn't have looked up at me if my hair was on fire. I just didn't tune into their pretty-girl radar. Just like a long time ago I when I was like 24 and single I tried and experiment. I went to that web site - Hot or Not.com and I put in some pictures. I put in one full body when I was fat, one close up when I was fat, one close up thin, and one full body thin. The results were interesting, but expected. On the two heavy pictures I averaged about a 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. On the thin pictures though, I averaged a solid 8 on the face shot and a 8/9 on the full body shots (this was in regular clothes, but fashionable and well fitting). These stats all came from men AND women. It's amazing people's perceptions of you just because of your weight.
I just want to get back to like the woman in the picture. She is not at all what I would call a galmour gal or anything like that - she just looks nice, her clothes fit well, and she just, well, looks nice and healthy.
I want to be back to at least a 6 or 7 - is that so wrong?
I could do that, right?
Rachel
255
P.S. And I just want to say I love you to my husband, Terry. Who still runs to open doors for me. :)
So this last weekend I was invited to a friends wedding shower. Like I've said before - because of my work I hardly have any dress clothes. When my parents were down a few weeks ago my mom and I went shopping and I found a few blouses at the "Dress Barn" (lovely name for the fat girl store) and i put one of them on with a denim skirt. Well it was one of those pesant styles with the embroiderd flowers on the neck and a big full bottom. I remember it looking okay at the store, but as I'm racing out the door to get to this party I realize that I look like a 300 pounds and 8 months pregnant. Great. Too late now to change, and I didn't have anything else to wear anyway.
So I get there and it's like it always is. Terry had a lot of friends already when we started dating, and I didn't have hardly any because I had only been there about 4 months. Anyway, most of his friends had either girlfriends or were married, and they have all been friends from way, way back. It was a good thing - it was like getting a whole bunch of new friends who already knew each other. Pretty soon I was being invited to things like girls nights and showers without Terry.
All of this was great except for one thing - these are Florida girls. If ANY of you are from Florida you know exactly what I mean. In Florida it's warm all the time so you really don't wear a lot of clothes no matter what the time of year, and you always have a tan, and you always have a pedicure because you wear sandals, and you may as well get a mani while you are there getting your feet done, and with all the tourists there is tons of shopping with trendy clothes, bags, sunglasses...... and so on and so on.... hell, there is a mall in town that I NEVER go to because all the stores are like Guess, Coach, Tiffany's, all designers and I can't afford any of it. My mom was looking for a specific perfume when she was here so we stopped there and we were looking around. I picked up a very small beaded purse that I liked, I looked at the price tag and it was like $400. Yikes.
Basically all the girls down here have been matching their flip flops to their bags to their nails to their highlights since the 6th grade - and thats fine! BUT...I was not raised that way. I have had 2 pedicures in my whole life! And I only get my nails done at halloween and once for my wedding. These girls look like they put an entire outfit together just to go to the store to get some milk.
I love these girls and I love how much they just accepted me. But when ever I go out with them I feel like a big slob no matter how dressed up I try to get. They have the cutest clothes because they are thin and can actually fit into them. They go to the beach together and there is a sea of bikinis and then me in a one piece and a tank top. (NOBODY, I MEAN NOBODY WEARS A ONE PIECE IN FLORIDA)
I like to go out with them. But man, I feel like crap afterwards....
