Ownin' up and all.

Despite spending the last week feeling like shit, I still ate a bunch of junk. Sometimes. Other times, I ate well. So .. nothing changed much. I weighed myself today, a few days late but I couldn't be bothered before. I always weigh myself in the morning, like most people I think, and I don't get up early enough to deal with weighing myself. Not that stepping on the scale takes very long, of course, but I don't keep my scale sitting out. I put it in a really inconvenient place, specifically to prevent myself from getting on it all the time and obsessing over the number.

Anyway, I dug it out today, and was surprised to find that I haven't gained back everything I lost. I really thought I had, because I've felt so bloated and gross. But somehow I've only gained back two pounds. I suppose it's because it hasn't been all binging, all the time. I'm just glad I didn't do any more damage.

I've got another job, and one that's a very regular schedule and even regular hours. I'm suddenly on the same schedule as the normal working world, for the first time in my life. I even have weekends off. I went to the store last night and got a bunch of stuff to pack my lunches for the week so I don't end up going down the street for junk food, and I also have stuff to eat for dinner at home. I'm as prepared to eat properly for the week as I can be.

Damn me and my emotional eating.

Some meals are good, some are bad. Yesterday was really bad. Nothing has really happened to trigger this, at least that I can put my finger on. It's really frustrating me. I can't even babble about it trying to process whatever is wrong because it's so vague. Maybe I'm just feeling generally overwhelmed? I don't know.

I'm am pretty bummed out that I've given up on baking. Everything I've made for the last year has been a fucking disaster; I've lost my touch (meanwhile, a friend of mine who never baked a fucking thing until I started is now promoting her baking business). Baking was the first thing I felt like I Wanted To Be When I Grow Up, sort of thing. So there are definitely some feelings of loss there. I keep thinking if it's making me unhappy to give up, I shouldn't give up .... and then I remember all the exploded cupcakes, the sunken cakes, the frostings that changed weird colors, the broken cake stand, etc., and I remember why.

Plus side: I got a job that (so far) I don't hate, and at a company that (so far) seems like they really treat their employees well. So that's really been a boost!

Color me surprised.

I had a feeling as soon as Blogger showed a massive spike in pageviews that Al had linked to me again. I'm not surprised that once again he's assuming things that aren't in the entry (never said a bad day of eating was 3500 calories, he added together example of different days; I don't believe I've even stated my height which is not five feet), assuming I'm lying (If I weren't "coming clean" about the treats etc I wouldn't have explicitly listed the junk I was eating), and using the old one-size-fits-all-calories are everything method came up with 7,500 calories a day for a week to gain five pounds (another figure he pulled out of thin air, when did I say anything about five pounds in a week).

Really, Al's response is an absolutely perfect example of the point of what I said in that entry: People assume if you're fat, you're eating massive amounts of food all the time. It doesn't matter what you say. As I've said repeatedly, I have absolutely had my binges. Plenty of them, in fact. I was not eating healthful things. No denying that. But the plain truth is that my average daily intake of strictly calories is nowhere near what people would assume by looking at me. I'm not "lying to myself and posting it for the world to see." I have no reason to lie to myself. I am fully aware of my size, my eating choices, and their consequences. I have no reason to lie to anyone reading this completely anonymous blog. But, again, I'm fat, and my statements don't tally up with the old calories-are-everything belief, so I must be lying. Or too stupid to realize what I'm putting in my own mouth, or too deluded, or whatever. It couldn't possibly be that there's more to weight and metabolism than strictly calories, nope. Couldn't be that I have blood sugar and insulin resistance issues, and the consistent intake of sugar was keeping my insulin chronically high which prevented any fat from leaving my cells (because, you know, that's one of the things that insulin does). I must be just a liar. Even though I'm stating that the choices I made caused that situation, I'm still not "owning up" to it somehow.

Now obviously a lot of people have lost weight, and even a lot of it, strictly by counting calories. I'm not saying it can't or doesn't work. I'm saying it's not the only factor for everybody. For somebody with insulin resistance, eating low-calorie and high-carb at the same time is going to make weight loss exceedingly difficult. Even if you need fuel, if there's a bunch of residual insulin in your bloodstream because of  massive sugar spike that's only very slowly coming down, it's going to block the mechanism that moves fat from the cells for use. Eventually the insulin level will come down, and fat from cells would begin to be released -- unless you eat a bunch of carbohydrate again, of course, which is likely to happen when you start feeling tired and cranky because you're running on empty because your body can't access your stored fat for energy. Now, if your metabolism is functioning normally and you don't have any issues with insulin resistance, that's a different situation.

In any event, it doesn't really bother me on a personal level. I've had worse things said about me by nicer people, as my father would say. What bothers me are the societal assumptions about overweight people, which is what I said in the first place.


I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday up to my eyeballs in wedding cake baking, which sort of turned into a disaster. Things were fine until the cake stand broke. And there was no air conditioning in the hall and the bride flatly refused to have fondant over the buttercream, even though it would have looked much nicer and withstood the heat better than smoothed buttercream (and been a hell of a lot easier on me). I wasn't happy with how the cake looked, but at least everyone told me it tasted great.

I haven't been paying a goddamn bit of attention to what I've been eating since .. er .... going on a week, I don't remember exactly. No excuse for it other than just not caring. I definitely feel shitty, though. My allergies are worse, my moods are unstable due to the see-sawing blood sugar (wheee, let's not eat anything for 24 hours and then gulp down a burger and fries!), and food doesn't taste as good. I'm going home tomorrow (wedding was 100 miles away), and will even have a little money for grocery shopping, so I'll be stocking up on meat, cheese, fruits, and vegetables again. I'm not expecting to have any weight loss this month, but I would like to undo any damage I've done this week and at least maintain the 12 pound loss from last month.

Just plain depressed.

Depressed about the way some people have been treating me, depressed about my job/financial situation .... one day I ate nothing but macaroni and cheese. Yesterday was a perfect day. Who knows what today will be. So far I don't want to eat at all. We'll see.

Feels pointless.

I haven't been awake long today, but so far I just feel like it's completely pointless to try to eat well. I don't feel any different, any better. With the overwhelming abundance of crappy, quick, easy, sometimes delicious food, the idea of me avoiding it for long enough to make any true difference seems utterly laughable. And even if I do, then it just means more time avoiding it to maintain that difference. It all seems like a epic waste of time today. I'm assuming it's another by-product of PMS. But it makes me want to binge. That urge got worse when I went to try to donate plasma and was told I was put on the nationwide permanent deferral list -- because two of their employees couldn't find the same fucking vein I donated out of for literally months on end at the center in my old town. I was wicked pissed. I needed that money.

By the time I went to Walmart to get a money order for my rent, I was all set to get a box of macaroni and cheese and some cheap ice cream. I even wandered the food aisles a bit and then just left because I it wouldn't fix what was wrong. I feel bad about myself, but making myself feel physically sick wouldn't change that. I'm pissed at life, but ice cream won't make it better.

Of course, really the deciding factor was really that I'd just sucked down so much water my stomach felt uncomfortably full. If not for that I might be munching down on some potato chips right now -- I'm craving them, which is really weird since I almost never eat chips.

Ugh. Scratch all that. My second trip out did not go well.

I feel badly about myself.

I took a long shower, and this is what I realized: I feel like shit about myself. Nothing to do with weight or eating; I just feel like I'm ... not good. I don't feel like I have any particular talents, like I'm particularly smart or funny or anything. I hate it when I feel like this. It may just be PMS, but right now I just feel like I'm completely useless. I feel like a total loser.

Speaking of PMS, I'm interested to see what my period is like this month. Last month's was the lightest I've ever had in the 19 years I've been dealing with that pointless (for me) monthly cycle. (It really pisses me off every month when I'm put through pain and discomfort because of a capability of my body I will never willingly utilize.) I've been on the same birth control since November, and the only thing that has changed is how I was eating. I know insulin can affect a lot of the hormonal processes in the body, so I'm wondering if that might be a nice side benefit to ex-naying the carbs. We'll see.

I did okay today, although I did use all my carbs at one meal. I had a jar of alfredo sauce and some chicken I'd sauteed in olive oil, and I was craving pasta in a wicked way. I could have gone to the store for a box of Dreamfields LC pasta, but I should eat what I have since monetary funds are severely limited. After battling the craving all day, I decided that I could have real pasta ... if I made it myself. Well, that stalled it for another hour or so, but I really wanted some damn noodles. So I made up a very small batch of pasta dough! I wasn't sure it was going to work; the recipe I'd looked at said to knead until the dough was smooth, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to tell when it was smooth enough.

As I was kneading the dough, and examining the texture, I realized I knew exactly what it should look like. I'd never made pasta on my own, but I'd made it with my mother when I was very little. It always amazes me the things that have stuck in my head from those experiences. I made royal icing to decorate some cupcakes once, and the smell brought back ... not exactly memories, they were a little too vague for that, but a definite feeling and familiarity. One time at the first restaurant I worked at, somebody asked what the difference was because lemon meringue and lemon cream pie. I was kind of shocked when I heard an explanation of what meringue is come out of my mouth, because I didn't know I knew. The pasta dough was another example of that. I should have sliced it a little more thinly before cooking, but other than that it was quite tasty and hit the spot. I should have spread my carbs out more through the day, but I was still within limits.

Either tomorrow or Sunday I'm going to go prostitute my blood, as a friend of mine calls it. One of the few good things about being fat is that I get paid a much higher rate for my blood plasma than skinny folks! We'll see how it goes. I never had a problem at the donation center in my old town, but the one here I stopped going to because they could never find my damn vein! In retrospect, I wonder if it's because I'd gained about twenty or thirty pounds since I was going to the other center. I've lost about half of that, so we'll see if that helps. I really hate doing that; it's not painful, but it's boring. My free arm gets tired from holding up my Nook! But especially the first five times as a "new" donor, it's worth it. Assuming they can jam the bigass needle in my arm in the right spot.