word wrecker

Goal Post #6 Summer of 2011 was the last time I felt happy with my size. Attending grad school after my divorce, I was in regular therapy and on antidepressants. Life was stressful and crazy but I’m pretty sure the medication helped me lose some extra weight I’d gained in my rocky marriage and rockier divorce.  I'm only bringing this up because stress and medications can make a strange cocktail in our systems, effecting our health in ways we cannot predict. It’s important to note I do not currently have any known conditions, am not on any medications including hormonal birth control, have never been pregnant, and do not have small children. On the subject of children, every parent knows we can love and enjoy them while acknowledging toddlers are super stressful energy suckers. Two years old is still my favorite developmental age even though my health spiraled drastically the year and a half I worked at a preschool teaching 2½-3 year olds.  During that year I develop...

Goal Post #5 Last November (Thanksgiving week, precisely), I started tracking my daily calories again using the app on my phone. This is the same   app I'd tried to use to track calories earlier and failed, but it's where I'd been tracking exercise and efficiency is apparently more important to me than accuracy.  Strangely, counting calories over the holidays was the double-bluff my mind needed. Knowing I had a good reason to fail at this somehow  made it okay to start trying. For two months I was constantly and sometimes obscenely over my intake goal. It was the easiest goal by they way: cutting   250cals/day. Allowing for failure actually made it more enjoyable. The activity became about tracking my eating habits: figuring out  how much was I eating and how many calories   were in those foods. Finally , seven weeks into  keeping track, I started meeting my calorie goal consistently. For a while, I also didn’t cut any particular food from m...

Goal Post #4 At some point during the summer of 2017 we got a scale that also measures our fat percentages. To figure out how everything fluctuated, I went a little overboard - weighing myself twice a day (or more). Nic threatened to toss the scale if I didn’t knock it out, so I limited myself to bi-weekly weigh-ins. This is still difficult (I want to know all the data all the time!) but healthier than obsessing over every tiny weight change. The university I attended for undergrad had a P.E. requirement every semester. Homework was workout time and finals had two p arts: a body fat composition test (nicknamed the “pinch test”) and a timed physical challenge: running, walking, biking, or s wimming. Completing a certain distance in so many minutes or less earned an A, same distance at a slower time a B, and so o n. Even then, I loath ed running with every fiber of my body, so for six semesters I had to swim 800-1000 meters in less than 20 minutes to ace my P.E. final. Many of us...

Goal Post #3 In August I burnt out and stopped everything but walking. Bike rides dwindled to once a week or less, and yoga only happened twice that month. The damage wasn't limited to the month of August- burnout effects extended into November. Why did this happen? The answers are broken into two categories: calories and exercise.   Counting calories One of the main reasons counting calories didn’t work for me summer 2017 is simple. It's a total drag. It interrupts enjoyment of a meal, leaves any companion alone for however long it takes you to complete the process, and is mind-numbingly boring. Who loves searching for a detailed caloric description of the thing you're about to eat? No one. No one loves that. The app I use isn’t great by the way. It has all kinds of tics that make no sense. One of these is reminding people to eat more when they’re 200 calories down or exercise if 200 calories up. At 11am on a Tuesday most people are going to eat in an hour or...

Goal Post #2 In May 2017 I started walking 15-20 mins on my lunch break and going on bike rides after work. My body was so out of shape I noticed improvements right away. 2015 is the first year in my adult working life that I’ve had the luxury of a whole hour for lunch. Those first two years I positively reveled in sitting or napping in my car alone at lunch (introvert much?) If you barely have the time eat on your lunch break, food is your priority and I would never tell you to limit that for a walk. For three years I also worked nights so I understand your 2am lunch isn’t the best time to take a stroll. If either of these is your situation, look for other places in your day to take a short walk - even 10mins can make a difference in how you feel. For example, when I worked nights I could have gone on a short walk or bike ride after work before going to bed each morning. One of my sisters who used to work nights said she'd take 20mins on her lunch climbing up and down the...

Goal Post #1 Growing up I was super active: swimming almost every day in summer, biking everywhere, climbing trees, and weekly gymnastics lessons . Unfortunately, none of that prepared me for how my body started deteriorating with age. Rather than approach things constructively, I decided this was just how getting old works and became less and less fit. By the spring of 2017 I was far from healthy. Walking more than a mile made my legs hurt, my back completely seized up twice a year, I needed help moving our coffee table off the carpet, and suffered heartburn multiple times a week.   Like most people, my weight has fluctuated over the years. When I got my driver's license at 16, I added ten pounds to my actual weight. My logic was if I gained weight, no one could look at it and think “Yeah right, 20lbs ago.” I also didn’t want to have a mythical “driver’s license weight” that was some unattainably low number because I was still a kid. I figured I’d get heavier and...

My friend David is a poet. He has a poet's soul and a poet's hunger and he doesn't drink which means he has more than a poet's proliferation. It's incredible. I just checked out his blog and he writes every day- every day a poem or an observation and I know that he also writes every day off line on various projects. I love writers, (see most of my closest friends) but I hate writing. This may sound strange. I keep trying to write that novel---or short story or screenplay--- but transitioning from my first medium- poetry, to this new and prose is clumsy and difficult. Especially after such a long estrangement from both. In college my best short stories were like poems. Professors and classmates would always say one of two things about my short stories: "this could be a poem" or "this could be an excerpt from a novel." At our hooding, one of my professors introduced my as a poet. I don't know when I have ever felt so humbled. I still don...