Tuesday 26th, February, 2002.
It is going to take me a while to remember how to use html again! A lot of cutting and pasting will be the order of the day I think! It's taken me so long just to change the basics of this site to reflect my return to journalling that I have run out of time to actually SAY anything!
I would rather sit down and have a proper think about what I have to say (lots have changed for me this year) but just to give you a hint ..... stopped smoking, stopped dieting and started going to the gym regularly (like almost every day!!) So as you can see there will be a bit to talk about as every one of those changes has been brought about by soul searching and has resulted in some wonderful changes in my life.
I will now go and do what I have to do before String Bean comes home and we go to the gym (yes, it's becoming a real family thing!) I just felt mean directing you somewhere and not even writing a leeetle bit! That is, of course, if anyone actually got here!
Later....
This wonderful person has worked so hard for over 2 years to lose a considerable amount of weight. She has been an inspiration to so many and I am so happy for her.
OK ... I've got about half an hour before I have to take String Bean to the gym. Let's go back to the end of last year .....
Christmas morning to be exact. I awoke after the usual Christmas Eve spent at the in-laws. Too much food, too much alcohol and far, far too many cigarettes. Unfortunately I cannot say that this was an excpetional feeling. I had been waking up like this most mornings .... this day I had slightly more of an excuse! As we gathered around our Christmas tree I announced to the family that I was never going to smoke again. I was fed up with waking up with a foul taste in my mouth, coughing and feeling short of breath. Lo and behold and completely unbeknownst to me there was, underneath the Christmas tree, addressed 'to mum from the two cats', a book and CD entitled "how to stop smoking in one hour". They must have known!!!! Christmas morning was rather quiet because Middle Son had to work and we were waiting for him to return before we continued with the festivities. As the rest of the family was watching a DVD I read my book and listened to my CD. It is by an English hypnotherapist who specialises in smoking cessation and I have not craved a cigarette since. DH (who took the cats shopping, I later found out!) listened and read on the 29th December and, after 40 years of smoking, has not had once since.
I started to feel better within myself from the start. I still wasn't happy with how I looked and I still had little energy but at least I was breathing more easily, the kids were delighted and I felt I had achieved something pretty important!
Wednesday 27th February, 2002.
This is me and my good friendTrish who convinced me to set up my own journal in the first place. At least that's who she says it is!! Like MMM, Trish is another person that has inspired me over the years.
So ..... I stopped smoking. Back in 1998 when I first started university I joined a local gym with the idea of getting fit and protecting my back. After many suspensions and half hearted attempts at attending the place I changed my membership to one which cost a certain amount a month for 6 visits. These were cumulative and so I felt less guilty about not going as I knew that when I finally did I would be able to use all the visits that I had paid for. On Friday 4th January I decided that the time had come and dropped in (they are in the local shopping centre - very convenient!) to book in for a fitness assessment. The very words struck fear and terror in my heart! (I also found out I had accrued 87 visits!!) DH was making noises about joining so we arranged for him to have a week's trial for free. On Sunday we had our fitness assessment. DH was 'good' and I was 'poor' .... so poor in fact that if I registered much less I would have fallen backwards off their chart! Oh well ..... I could only get better!
Thursday 28th February, 2002
DH was so excited and impressed with the gym (the Winning Edge at Chadstone in Melbourne if anyone is interested!) that he signed up for a 2 year membership.
Now in the past I always felt very intimidated by gyms. All those fit, lycra covered bodies bursting with energy, youth and vitality ... and that's the just the people on the front desk! It almost seemed that one had to be superfit just to join a gym. Not this place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the people that work there aren't fit, they are, but they look ... well .... normal!! Pete was the person who conducted the fitness assessments (the less said about that ordeal the better!) and designed our first programs. Because of my shift work I couldn't say that I would be in on any set day so he designed a program that was flexible and allowed me to work out everyday if that suited or with days off if necessary. He took into account my aversion to exercise bikes and listened to me in general. I had my first program walkthrough and I was off!!
DH and I took to this new lifestyle with a vengeance! We were going in every day possible and loving every minute of it. It was nice to have someone to exercise with and to be able to talk about it at home. The kids started to roll their eyes at us and mutter about obsessions and mid-life crises and stuff! It was about this point that I swore that I would never, ever, ever go 'on a diet' again.
Friday, 8th March, 2002.
Just a quick visit to let you know that I haven't given up on this journal again!
I've been working all week and that makes it hard to get on the computer for any length of time. I didn't go to the gym this morning and have put up an 'about me' page for those who don't know me! That took longer than I planned because my html knowledge really is pathetic and even using a tool like angelfire I still take forever to create links. Trial and error .... more errors than anything but I think it's working now. Such a lot of time and effort for seemingly little results.
The family continues to be a regular fixture at the gym. Middle Son has now joined! That leaves The Kid who, at 13, is a tad young I think and gets a lot of exercise with his karate. I will have a chat with the powers that be at the gym and see if they will mind if he comes along now and again and just uses some of the cardio equipment. I feel so mean when the four of us go off the the gym leaving him at home. I never ever thought in my wildest dreams that this family would have outings together to a GYM!!!!!!!
I want to talk about my approach to eating and my thoughts on dieting but this is a fairly sensitive area and I don't want to say anything that might be misunderstood (I don't give a toss if people disagree with me as long they understand what I was saying in the first place!!)
I shall have to wait, therefore, until I have a decent amount of time to update this page. Maybe next week.
I haven't been to the gym as much this week. I had planned to go every day but work IS tiring and I have 4 other people (plus two feline family members) who like to eat now and again. DH is always good at shopping and cooking when I'm working but he's at the gym more often than not, now, so I like to make sure that there is food in the house and that means going to the supermarket!
I had my RBT session this week at 8.00 at night after being on my feet all day. Dear Pete decided that my legs could do with a bit of a workout. I thought they were going to turn to jelly but, as always, I felt fantastic afterwards. I know I sound like a broken record (there is a whole generation who don't know what broken records are!) but I cannot get over how much better I feel in myself since exercising regularly. Once I have got the nutritional side of things better controlled I will be lethal!!!!
Thursday, 14th March, 2002.
The cat on the left is really a pig.
Just a quick update. I caught up with Pete last night at the gym and was telling him how I had been experiencing a touch of lost plot. He didn't seem overly concerned as I have really been training hard over the past weeks and he feels that a break every so often is beneficial. I also mentioned that I was having a bit of a battle with the food side of things and that I keep slipping back into 'diet' thinking. (I know .... I haven't explained that yet. Be patient ... I will get there!) I had been writing down what I have been eating. Not that I needed reminding (and I WASN'T doing it from the 'diet' side of things!!) but I find that even a healthy diet can have some areas that need tweaking and to come back and be able to view a week or two as a whole can be quite enlightening. He asked to see this and when I went to print it off this morning I realised that I had stopped recording my nutritional intake at the same time I had been struggling to get to the gym. HMMMMMMM!!!!!
Anyway ..... back there this morning for my training session with Pete (upper body today) and I felt so much better for having expressed my concerns and knowing that he has a better idea of where I'm coming from.
Some of you may know from previous entries (can't remember if they're in last year's lot or the one I deleted and can't be bothered having a look!!) that I have a real issue with control and feeling that I am being told what to do. I crave structure and organisation in my life and then when I put it in place I rebel!!!! Go figure!!! In a conversation with String Bean last night he indicated he had the same issues with routine and the like!! What a thing to pass on to your kid!
I feel that I have benefited, though, from having that break and can't wait to get back into it. I think a lot of it, too, was a fairly heavy stretch at work and, contrary to my fondly held beliefs, I am NOT superwoman and I can't do everything!!
Sorry if this journal is becoming a bit disjointed. I had planned to give a sort of history of how I got to where I am in my head at the moment but day to day stuff keeps getting in the way. I promise I will sit down soon and finish what I started .....
Later.... Food and dieting and stuff.
As I have reached an age that I can remember my mother being I have come to realise that a) she had some HUGE issues with food and b) I am becoming more and more like her (and not in a good way). Last year saw her hospitalised for a condition that could be considered to be hereditary but over which I can certainly exercise some control. (Cryptic, I know, but that's all you're getting at the moment!)
Growing up in such an atmosphere created in me some very strange attitudes towards food and, sadly, affected my self image. I went through my aldoescence feeling like a big fat slob with no self control when it came to food. I now realise that I was underweight (45 kgs & 165cms tall!) but unfit and flabby. Well, these were the days before gyms and aerobics and the like. Just look at some of the models from the time .... they were thin but hardly toned. I digress. What I perceived as no control was, in fact, a healthy appetite. I thought of myself as overweight and unattractive. Yet a male friend once told me that his ideal woman had a face like Candice Bergen and a body like mine! I still thought I was unattractive and overweight! As I went through my 20's I was never really overweight (the unfit was still an issue) but would periodically crash diet a few pounds off. Fortunately I have always loved my food too much to become anorexic and although I tried a couple of times (half-heartedly I admit!) I was never a success at bulimia. I firmly believe, though, that whilst these two conditions are serious and difficult to treat, they are not the only manifestations of eating disorders.
String Bean was born in 1984 and I gained slightly more weight than I probably should but thanks to a severe, undiagnosed and hence untreated, case of post-natal depression I didn't eat for 7 weeks unless DH prepared a meal. So I basically lived on one meal a day and the baby weight fell off. When String Bean was about 6 months old I discovered weight training. And I LOVED it!! I have no idea what I weighed but I know I was a size 10-12 and firm and fit and healthy. I also know (because I can become obsessive from time to time and have kept the list of weekly meals that I planned from that time) that we didn't eat low fat or diet food. We ate well. We ate a variety of food and we ate until we were full. I made sure that over a fortnight we had a balance of meat, fish, chicken, vegetarian meals and lots of different veges. I used cream if the recipe called for it. I steamed veges cos we like them that way. See what I mean about balance?
At the time I was also walking heaps (my weight training was for 1 hour twice a week in a class situation - not like today's gym environment). Walking and pushing String Bean in his pram were things that I had to do to control my depression. Many days I walked and walked with tears streaming down my face. It took many months for me to recover from this and I still have issues with my GP at the time for not telling me what was happening to me .... another story another time. At least I was well and whole in my body and I'm sure this helped me recover sooner.
When String Bean was 14 months old I became pregnant with Middle Son.
Friday, 15th March, 2002
I was delighted to get pregnant as quickly as I did because it took us some time with String Bean. This time round, though, I was quite nauseated for some time .... and food helped! I had changed exercising venues and joined a gym close by. I missed the structure of the classes and the friendship of the women I had met through the old centre. The new place certainly wasn't as friendly and was very much the stereotypical image of the gyms of the time .... lots of pink lycra and gold jewellery and socialising but not a lot of serious weight training. String Bean wasn't overly happy in the creche either. It became harder to motivate myself to go (there's a lot to be said for set times for things) and with morning sickness and then some early pregnancy bleeding it became easy to justify not going at all.
By the time Middle Son was born I was the heaviest I had ever been in my life (weighed more since, though!) and I was not a happy camper. This time I was under the care of a specialist obsterician who was aware of my previous experience with depression and whilst in hospital I started to show similar symptoms. I was referred to a psychiatrist who specialised in this are and those first months with Middle Son were so different from those with String Bean.
Whilst I was pregnant with Middle Son we decided to build a new house (as you do!). I came home from hospital and we took the first load of furniture out to the new house.
By the time Middle Son was 10 weeks old I had lost a bit of weight but was 'stuck'. The wife of one of DH's colleagues told me about a weight loss group which was very similar to WW but incorporated cooking demonstrations and recipes in the class. I went along and lost all my weight (plus a bit more) very easily. It helped that I was at home with two very young children and apart from entertaining them I had nothing to focus on other than losing weight. We lived in a new area with few facilities so a trip to the milk bar was a two hour walk with kids in tow. I became super organised and always had extra stuff in the fridge and although I did walk with the boys it was at a slower pace than necessary for helping with weight loss. And I was soooo flabby! Even though I weighed 57 kgs I had no muscle tone whatsoever.
In January 1988 I found I was pregnant with The Kid. I did not gain excessively with this pregnancy but I had major problems with PRE-natal depression this time. We decided that we really did not like living where we were so we bought a place close to where we used to live and put our 'dream home' on the market. A month before The Kid was born we moved into our 'new' house. I was so happy to be back in an area I knew and loved and settled in very quickly.
The Kid was born and my depression was fairly well controlled. I loved this boy from the moment I set eyes on him. I knew I was having another son and I think I had bonded with him before he was born. Also I knew he would be the last (we couldn't keep moving house!) and that somehow made him special. And by the time you get to the third it all comes so much more easily.
As with all my kids I breastfed and quickly got down to a good weight (62kgs). This is a healthy weight for me and looking back at photos of the time I looked good. BUT ..... when I became pregnant with The Kid I weighed 57kgs and I felt grossly huge because I weighed an extra 5 kgs. Forget that breastfeeding mums shouldn't be too light. Forget that I had a brand new baby. Forget that I looked good and had energy and felt great. Somehow over the past few years the diet demon had made a home in my brain. For the next 13 and a half years I was either on a diet or off a diet ...... and my weight yoyo'd up to nearly 90 kgs.
In January this year I vowed that I would never diet again. I have disposed of all my old WW stuff. I have re-read 'If not dieting, then what?' and 'Stop dieting and lose weight'. I still have days when the diet demon is particularly shrill in my head and I have to stop myself from calculating points or fat grams or kilojoules. I still have to remind myself that food is to feed the body and be enjoyed. But slowly, very slowly sometimes, I'm getting there. Over a quarter of my life has been spent in full blown 'diet' mode and most of my life has been spent with poor self image and delusions of being overweight. Sadly, these are no longer delusions but I am not as big as I think or act at times. I have a long way to go but this time the goal is health not a number on scales or a dress size. And I'm enjoying the journey.
