Return to Sender

I have a friend in Pennsylvania who delights in regaling me with stories of finding fat in new, jigglier places. She says that she must be finding what I have lost.

She must have marked a few of those pounds "Return to Sender" when they arrived on her doorstep, because I seem to have gotten them back. Postage due. That bitch.

I haven't updated in so long, not because of this dietary slip, but because I have been a) incredibly busy during the summer holiday and b) burdened with a crippled computer at home (the a and k keys have stopped working, so I have to copy/paste those letters whenever I need them).

So, yes... very busy summer. I went away for a few weeks, was out and about, did my thing. I am a food diary keeper. This is my weight loss method. I use http://www.calorieking.com/ to track every bit, bite, morsel, and drop that goes into my mouth. While I was away, however, I didn't really have regular or easy access to my logging system. So I just kind of played it by ear (by mouth? Oh, that just sounds bad...). When I was finally home for long enough to get on my scale a few times and own up to the unlogged abyss, I was shocked to find that I had blown straight through the 280s and landed firmly in the realm of the 270s. About 276 pounds, to be precise.

Then... oh how it went to hell in a handbasket. Or was it a basket of fried chicken?

I had been SO busy during the summer, I'd had no time for myself. So, once I was finally free of all my plans, I took to heart the idea of using a vacation for rest and relaxation and did just that.... although my hand kept moving to my mouth. No rest for ol' righty OR the incisors. Even cooking was far too much work to contemplate during my precious down time. I ate convenience store food more often than any human being should. (And convenience store food in Japan is GOOD. Not good FOR you, but good in a salty, greasy, and fresh way that US convenience store tends not to be... three year old hot dogs on the rollers, anyone?)

I have excuses - I couldn't cook because all of my dishes were dirty; all of my dishes were dirty because I couldn't wash them; I couldn't wash them because a rogue sparkler blew off half of my thumb and it took two weeks for it to heal over enough that the idea of submerging it in soapy water didn't fill me with terror. (This is completely true, though no real excuse.... I guess I could have taped the crap out of it and just cringed through scrubbing a few plates, but... it really, REALLY hurt. A lot.)

Anyway... when I finally faced the music and stepped on the scale again, I found that I had jumped back up to 289. In 10 days. Yes, 13 pounds in 10 days. Another friend calls me the Titanic, because I just keep taking on water until I finally go down. You won't catch me tossing a giant diamond off the port bow, though. I'd pawn that sucker. (And probably buy food.... fail.)

The good thing is, I know that the majority of the weight is water. I'm guessing 8-10 pounds of it. Yes, my body holds on to that much liquid. I'm a camel. I'm a cactus. I'm a walking Sigg bottle. I'm a fricken ChamWOW. Take me to a third world country and wring me out over a dusty well, the community will have water for a week. Three pounds have come off again already in as many days, this week is period week (sorry, boys, fact of life), and my sodium intake will go WAY DOWN once I finish off that huge jar of dastardly delicious dill pickles I got from CostCo. I fully expect to lose five pounds this week (maybe more) without even really trying that hard.

All out of my bladder, uterus, and arm pits.

Fun times.

Back in the saddle again. Ride, Sally, ride.

Success Begets Success

Anyone who says that the first month, two months, three months... or the first 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 40 pounds.... isn't all about willpower, pain, and forcing your way through the hell of changing an unhealthy lifestyle into a healthy one.... has never done it.

This morning was another scale-butt-kicking kind of morning. Imagine my surprise when I stepped on the thing and it spat back 128.6kg (283.5lbs). Less than four pounds away from the 270s. I probably haven't been under 280 since junior high school. No joke.

Seeing a success like that... pushed me on my intervals this morning and I managed to go a few more feet than usual. Not that much, but enough that I noticed.

I've always heard that you have to have money to make money. I'm going to say that you have to have success to succeed. When I'm doing badly, when the scale shows a terrible number, all I want to do is eat crap. Against all logical thought, gaining a pound makes me want to eat the caloric equivalent of five pounds.

However, a success, small or large, pushes me to work more, eat less.

But, getting started at all is kind of a miracle.

Anyone who has overcome the intial hurdle of willing a change, forcing healthy habits in to force out unhealthy ones... Kudos. If it's any consolation... it's happened to us all.

Veni, Vidi, Vici! Angela - 1, Tokyo - 0

I beat you, Tokyo. You big, scary city of temptation, you.

On Saturday morning, as I was prepping to head out for a work meeting in Niigata City (the capital of my prefecture and a 3-hour train ride away), I weighed in. I was back at my lowest weight on record since I've been recording my weights in Japan - 130.2kg (or about 287 pounds).

I was actually a bit devastated because I thought, "Oh, woe! I am going to Tokyo where they have Krispy Kreme and TGI Friday's and Outback and Denny's and Hard Rock Cafe... bye-bye 130.2!! Guess I won't be seeing the 120s..."

You know what?

I WON.

This morning, I tipped the scales at 129.6kg (285.7 pounds). We ate at Denny's....TWICE - I got the most sensible things on the menu - bean salad, light chicken plate, brothy veggie soup... a one-scoop ice cream cone. We ate at TGI Friday's - I got the Key West Tilapia and a glass of white wine... which my friends seemed to like better than their own orders of typical Friday's fare after we all tasted around and tried each other's food. The bus ride back yesterday was full of carbs and I was too tired after my adult evening class to cook, so I bought some pre-cooked (fried) garlic potstickers that were on sale at the grocery store instead of making real food when I got home. And yet... I still won. And after the water I was retaining from said bus ride and carb/sodium overload drops, I will probably find that I won even bigger than I initially thought. I feel like Rocky. I feel like the entire team of Mighty Ducks. I feel like every underdog-come-out-on-top there has even been in the history of competition.

It feels amazing. And motivating.

Onward and downward, keep on keeping on.

GACKT Eats My Money, or How A Japanese Rock Star Is Making Me Thinner)

Though I am not being directly effected by the recession in my job or my salary, I have found myself facing budget crunches to rival those of far too many Americans getting hit with downsizing and pay reductions.

I wish I could say I didn't know how/why this happened, but I do. I wish I could say that my company is suffering the ill effects of the economy's slow suffocation, and this is why I suffer. It's not.

It's a rock star. He eats my money. And that's okay, because when he eats my money, I don't eat cake. It's a kind of symbiotic relationship, you see? I buy tour goods and pay extravagant transportation fees to follow him to venues all over Japan.... and then I can't buy cakes or Oreos or chips or pizzas or anything 'extra' in my food budget, and it all works out for the best.

Things that I have in my apartment that I am using, now, because I can't really buy more food (this list is more for my own reference than your information... still, have a gander and toss some recipes my way if you have any!!):

- wild rice
- whole wheat pasta (and jars of sauce for said pasta)
- quinoa
- pearled barley
- oatmeal
- brown rice
- frozen veggies
- fresh veggies & fruits (lemons, avocado, leek, onions, potatoes)
- canned black beans & tomatoes
- frozen chicken and frozen white fish


See, my apartment is fully stocked for living a healthy lifestyle. It has been for a long time. I just haven't put forth the effort to live that lifestyle.... most of the time.

Now that I have no choice in the matter, let's see how things progress, shall we?

Today's grocery list:
- All Bran (although if I would prep oatmeal daily, this would ultimately be an unnecessary expense) - 400 yen
- bananas - 200 yen
- milk - 250 yen
- tofu - 100 yen

Ideally, these purchases will get me almost entirely through until next Thursday (with what I already have at home).

Going Green... Not That Way

I am a bit of a treehugger, these days. It's true. I do what I can to 'go green' in my daily life. I even put money toward a Carbon offset for my flight home last Christmas.

Still... I go green the other way far too often.

Envy.

If my skin acted as a mood ring for all the world to see just how I was feeling at any given moment of the day, it would probably be green more often than most.

See, here's the way it goes:

- I can't buy clothes in Japan. Sometimes I can squeeze my rolls into mens' shirts, but only if they're stretchy and a bit oversized to begin with. I couldn't buy pants (and certainly not jeans), even if my life depended on it. When I go shopping with friends, I like shopping with them, but I can't help feeling envious of them.

- When I go to a restaurant, I painstakingly scour the menu, comparing both prices and calorie counts. The "healthiest" options are often also the most expensive and I am living my life on a strict budget recently. I usually try to choose something in the middle of the road for both calories and yen. My dining companions, on the other hand, flip blithely through menus, looking at pictures of deliciously fried, sauced, sweetened, honeyed, and any other manner of unhealthily prepared foods. They choose what looks tasty. The food that their eyes and their tongue say that they want. What does it feel like to go to a restaurant without suffering from menu anxiety, I wonder? Do tell.

- I have missed out on any number of opportunities in my life because of my embarrassment about my size. KODO (internationally famous taiko drumming group) came to one of my schools to give a performance and people were offered a chance to play with them. I didn't do it because I didn't want to be banging on a drum with hot taiko men in front of my 300 students with my arm flab swaying in the breeze. I have burned too many internet-built bridges with contacts in Japan (boys, yes) because the prospect of meeting them in real life is just too terrifying and depressing. I won't even dream of trying to go on a fan club trip with GACKT until I am half the woman I am now. No. Freaking. Way.

- I can't eat anything in public without near-crippling guilt and shame descending on me. Today, on the way home, I had a bowl of cut up watermelon from the grocery store. Watermelon. I ate it in the waiting room at the train station and knew, simply knew that everyone else in the waiting room was mentally berating the fat girl for eating anything - even something relatively harmless like watermelon. Friends can eat ice cream, French fries, crepes, frothy 500 calorie Starbucks ambrosia... and not think twice about it or about what other people are thinking. Admittedly, I have gotten better about this particular phobia over the past few years. When going out for dinner with friends four or five years ago, I would pre-eat before getting to the restaurant, so that I would eat less in public than I would have had I not pre-eaten. I've gotten over that.

Hopefully, my current budget crunch will help to keep things in perspective (and crap out of my kitchen) and I can kill this crazy green-eyed monster that makes life so miserable some days.

Psychological Warfare

There's a war going on. It's a big one.

What? You want proof?

You want weapons of mass destruction? You got it.

- The public
- Public transportation
- The three fat chick clothing stores out there (variety? pshaw, have a muumuu!)
- Floor boards

..........whut? I know, I know, floor boards threw you for a loop there, eh? Well, listen to a tale of woe.

On Saturday morning, after having not gone to bed until 1AM (or a little after), my alarm blared at 5, and I slapped it off so as not to disturb my houseguests (two friends stayed over). Exhausted and dragging, I filled up my water bottle and drank nearly a liter pre-run. I went out for my C25K run (still doing week 2, not comfortable moving on yet), came back, made breakfast, and we set out for the day's adventures.

After taking care with my lunch restaurant choices and recording the calorie counts from the menu, we went to a beach for sunset watching and Mario Party playing and then to an open front beach bar that I hadn't been to in years. It was nearly empty and the owners are very laid-back and cool and have (or had in the past) good relationships with the local foreigners, so they may have recognized me.

We ordered a couple of small things, a drink or two, and just chilled. The owners switched the music over to Michael Jackson and we seriously rocked out. We played ping pong. Here is where it goes bad.

Ping-pong is decent fun and I'm actually not bad at it (I'm not bad at most sports, actually... I'm just too fat to keep up with everyone else who's playing them). I went off chasing a rogue ball several times until one time when I stepped on a floor board... and went straight through it in my socks and landed on the bare ground below the bar.

How many 90 pound Japanese people have walked across that floor board? They could tap dance on a Faberge egg and the fucker wouldn't crack. It could have been either of the two girls I was hanging out with. It could have been one of the bar owners. But no, it was me, the 300 pound monstrosity chasing a damned ping-pong ball.

Everyone says, "Oh, the wood must have been rotten," "It could have been anyone, just a matter of time before it broke through," etc. The fact is that it was me, and I already feel fat enough on a daily basis in this country of walking bean poles without breaking through floors. Everyone was worried about me when it happened, thinking that I must surely have broken my ankle or something like that, but really, the look of horror on my face a mixture of humiliation and wanting to get my foot out of that hole as quickly as possible because I had no idea what was living down there. Visions of pre-historical insects crawling up my pants leg filled my head and I yanked myself out of the darkness immediately.

Anyway, we decided it was probably time to go after I broke the building and I left with as much dignity as I could muster.

I even managed to hold onto it at Mister Donuts and ordered the lowest calorie donut on the menu and drank my coffee straight and black.

At karaoke is when I lost it. I dove head first into the food menu and kept pestering my (not really hungry) companions to order something. Eventually, we ordered too much (pizza, fries, a cheese/cracker plate, edamame) and I ended up downing half of the pizza (3 slices), half of the fries, and a decent amount of the cheese. Two slices of pizza were left on the plate when it was time for us to vacate and I really, REALLY had to fight the urge I had to pick them up and jam them in my mouth. Not only is leaving food you've ordered a waste, it's also like lighting money on fire just to watch it burn. I hate doing it. But I did. A small victory, to say the least.

On Sunday, I made pancakes for everyone and had my own with butter and honey... I finished off the batter and refridgerated the two pancakes it made as leftovers. We went out for yaki-niku (generally translated as Korean BBQ... cook your own meat over hot coals at your table) and ate until we were all a little stuffed. After my houseguests went their merry way, I helped myself to those leftover pancakes that were just hanging out in my fridge.

SO, back to the psychological warfare of being fat... all it takes is one little nudge and I tend to run, screaming, back toward the comfort of comfort foods and the satisfyingly warm embrace of my glowing TV. Kids being assholes, falling through floor boards, being faced with a store full of ugly clothing - but the only clothing that fits, tensing every muscle in my body and squeezing myself into as small an area as possible on a reserved bus seat and still having the guy in the seat next to me complain to the driver so that he could change seats... being passed over by men again and again and again and again and again.

Dieting is like running through a field full of land mines while wearing clown shoes. Except in my case, it would be a food court full of hair-trigger activated pedastals holding greasy food and pastries.

This weight loss thing is hard. It's even harder when you're the fattest person for miles and miles around. Harder still when those miles are anything but friendly.


Anyway, I have a date with a Japanese rock star (well, a ticket to his concert, but he doesn't need to know I'll be undressing him with my eyes the whole time) this coming weekend, so I'm going to be on my best behavior. Maybe I can drop a few before I get there.

My Body, Myself

There comes a time in every dieting fat girl's life when she starts experiencing changes.

New muscles, shifting body mass, the discovery that there actually ARE bones in her wrist, not just Jell-O Jigglers and whipped cream....

For me, that time is now.

Basically, I'm going through the adolescence of diet and exercise... and it's no less painful, awkward, or annoying than puberty originally was. At least my muscles and slowly de-fatting bones aren't getting zits (yet).

If I bend my wrist at just the right angle (not a right angle, but at the right angle), there's this pointy pokey bone thing that sticks out at the side. On both wrists. Huh. Go figure.

When I stretched my leg up toward the ceiling while lying on my back the other day, I felt the back my thigh and wondered what the hell it was since it was a bit solid. Muscles? There are muscles there? I thought they were gigantic, squidgy corn dogs! My god, why didn't anyone tell me before? I knew my high school failed me by not offering an anatomy class.

And let's talk about my arm, from shoulder to elbow, looking more like an 8 as opposed to a 0. That's new and different. Oh, it's still big. But it's a big 8, which I'll take over a big 0 any day.

I have collar bones, too. I don't know if I can handle this much skeletal exposure. Nothing but turtlenecks for the entire summer.

I fear for my life if I ever find out where the pelvic bone is.