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NITTINNANA's Recent Blog Entries
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Saturday, June 15, 2013
Time to address eating plans. I found SparkPeople somehow on the Internet last fall; don't have any idea how. I was struggling with Atkins and that point. It was not the only "diet" I've used, of course, only the most recent. Diet Workshop. Weight Watchers on and off since 1972. NutriSystem, both at a center (1981) and again with their current ordering plan. Jenny Craig. Diet for a Small Planet. Eating only one meal a day.......and so on, ad nauseum. Heck, I'd even been influenced by Adele Davis when I wasn't overweight.
I knew immediately that I wouldn't want to use their weekly menus, but it looked like an interesting concept. And I was SO ready for a change. So I signed up and got the ranges for the macronutrients. I've never bought into the "bad saturated fat" concept, and I definitely DON'T believe in the serious fat restriction currently advocated by our government and endorsed by SP. a also believe that the carb range I was given was way too high. So I tweaked those ranges and started working to eat better choices of foods.
I was off and running, so to speak. For the first couple of weeks, I only used the water and freggie Quick Track. Then I was keeping my food diary faithfully every day. And I was losing weight! Nothing fabulous, but a pound or two every 4-10 days. (My old bathroom scale just gives whole pounds).
And then the problems began. Not for the reason many of you are thinking, either. You see, I'm a reader. And I was also reading other SparkPages, usually from the scrolling list of huddles, blogs, etc. at the edge of my Start page, or those whose blogs were featured. So I was finding that there were SparkTeams for those who follow (insert whatever). And I was getting books out of the library.
Now, I'm definitely not a Perfectionist - not even the closet Perfectionist one often finds in the Procrastinator. But I was raised with the concept that it is better (quicker, easier, cheaper...) to do any and every task right the first time than to have to go back and do it over. So now, in addition to all those precious eating plans, I was now reading about Primal and Paleo. I read Wheat Belly and The Perfect Health Diet. And more and more and more.
It seemed like with everything I read, I was playing with those protein, fat, and carb ranges. I was only trying to get my eating plan "right" - right? Of course, I thought I was. But I've learned that what I was really doing was making myself CRAZY. Just the ticket to add to the stressors I've already blogged about!
So I lived and ate CRAZY. Not sabotaging, such as binges, junk food, and such. Just CRAZY. I tracked. I was usually at or near the top of my calories but also exercising quite a bit more. But day after day after day I was changing those macronutrient ranges. And day after day after day, when I ran the Daily Feedback, the 7-day lookback was all over the grid. Red marks, red marks, and more red marks! I got even CRAZIER, I guess, every time I saw all those red triangles!
So now, I'm just going back to basics. I don't feel CRAZY. I've lost four of my 6-pound regain. And I'm not keeping a food diary or running a Daily Feedback. I track freggies and water. I don't eat boxed food other than oatmeal or pasta, I don't think. I'm essentially added-sugar-free. And for the indefinite future, I plan on doing pretty much that and only that!
Thursday, June 13, 2013
I decided today to edit this blog - just can't shake the feeling that it was TMI.
This will certainly be the most difficult blog ever for me ever. I am a survivor of incest. Not my Dad, my oldest brother, starting when I was 10. When I was in my late 40s, I finally told my mother. With my permission, she told my Dad. They later talked with my brother, but I have no idea what anyone said. My parents and I never spoke of it again. From my (outsider) perspective, their relationship with Gary was unchanged.
Shortly after I knew that my mother had let Gary know that she knew about it, I got a letter from him. It was brief, half-a**ed apology for "what we did when we were younger." No acknowledgement that it was abuse. I cut the letter into confetti and mailed it back to him without a word. For years, we did not communicate.
In 2007, Paul and I moved my parents in with us in Southern California, and I chose to be cordial whenever Gary visited. I didn't stick around much, just saying that I didn't want to intrude on their time. Then in 2010, after my mother's death the previous May, we moved to MO with Dad. My brother lives in Urbana, IL, so he and Dad visited more often. Gary stayed in a motel (small house, plus he's allergic to animals). Again, I was cordial for my Dad's sake.
Last summer, Gary and I argued about Dad's care, and he ended a phone call with , "F*** you, goodbye!" At that point, I told Dad that I did not intend to speak with Gary again until he apologized. He never did. I still chose to be communicate with him by phone regardimg Dad's care and to be cordial at Dad's funeral.
I'm ever so thankful that my other brother is the only one I have to deal with regarding wrapping up Dad's affairs. And I'm even more thankful to know that I have no reason to keep silent now that Dad's gone.
So sum and substance of this blog - I'm now free to deal with how much the sexual abuse hurt and affected my life to this day. I'm finding a great deal of help working through Renee Stephens' Full-Filled. Her discussion of overeating personalities, especially The Fraud and The Abused, has been particularly enlightening. Now that I'm no longer silent, I even better grasp (take hold of) the truth that today is the first day of the rest of my life.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
First of all a progress report. I've done my 3-step morning and bedtime routines well, although it's taken me longer in the morning than I like. And I've done the Sparking I'd planned, not caring about the SparkPoints and always completing my 3 Fast Break goals. And I've done way more than the 15 minutes of decluttering, to get ready for moving David and the boys in at the end of the summer.
There was a modicum of necessity in skipping the blogs for a couple of days. On Sunday, we had Erik from 11am on, instead of the usual after supper. And on Mondays, when I take care of the boys at David's house, the only Internet access is by using data on my phone. Costly AND unsatisfying, because I much prefer the larger iPad screen.
But then, too, these next however-many blogs are going to be far more personally challenging to get down on paper. (Quaint phrase, but I rather like it). So I'd like to publicly thank JESSERMOVICK for stopping by my SparkPage to suggest it was time to get back in gear. This is a lady who persists through odds that I know would get the best of me, so I really appreciate her taking the time to write that comment. Jessica, you're one special lady!
So what have I been doing the last couple of days? Beating myself up with the worst trash-talk I've used in quite some time, that's what! And it's got to stop, so I need to start writing. You see, I've been NITTINNANA since eight or ten months after I retired. (Last day 12/26/09). I took up knitting again for the first time in literally decades! I loved my evenings with Paul, my Dad, and my knitting needles.
But something happened about a year and a half ago. Dad was on hospice, still doing fairly well, but Paul and I were no longer comfortable leaving him alone ever. Heck, we weren't entirely comfortable leaving him with only one of us for very long at a time. But Paul graciously held down the fort for 4-5 hours every Tuesday so I could get some real down time. Often I spent much of the time at the local library, or at a coffee shop in Columbia or Jefferson City, just reading or knitting. But instead of finishing projects, I just kept starting new ones. And then, last May when we moved Dad to assisted living, I packed everything away in the closet, paving the road to you-know-where with my good intentions. But in all those months, before and since Dad's death, I've been wasting too many hours on the computer, doing mostly nothing.
So, I pulled everything out of the closet. And there sat all those unfinished sweaters. The ones for granddaughters now too small. The ones for me now too large. And for more than half of them, I can't even find the directions anymore. What to do? Only one thing to do - start ripping.
The problem with unravelling yarn is that it occupies your hands, but not your thoughts. I started out with some really constructive plans about what I'll say when I blog about why I'm going backward on my food plan/eating habits. Unfortunately, it quickly became the ugly "you're so lazy you can't finish anything you start" and "you're so stupid you can't even find the pattern" kind of stuff. I really haven't been one to berate myself in the past, so I guess I was letting 50+ years of negative stuff come rolling out of my brain in just a couple of days.
Tonight I plan to pick up knitting needles again, along with one of the easiest patterns I own, and get busy being productive again. I've decided to remake at least two of the items I'd 3/4 finished for myself. I have the patterns, and I love the yarn, the look, everything about them. But I need to start with something easy, and I need to do up half a dozen quick projects so I use up some yarn and give myself back some sense of worth. I also plan to work up several sweaters for kids in the reasonably near future an send them off to the Red Cross in Oklahoma City. By the end of summer, I expect they'll be looking for some warm, attractive, made-with-love items - and by then many people may not be thinking about that anymore.
Unravelling - almost finished. Trash talk - OVER! Now it's time to get on with the rest of my life!!
Saturday, June 08, 2013
Today, it's time for more FlyWashing of my brain and my life. Ah, the morning routine. For those of you who haven't read my previous blogs, I'd appropriately grown my morning routine to some 10 or a dozen items. Then I got depressed enough again to see this as overwhelming, and the result was no morning routine at all. So here's my new 3-step morning routine.
1 - Out of bed by 8:30. (Yeah, I know - but it beats the 11-11:30 it's been of late).
2 - Dress to shoes, including face washing and toothbrushing. Again, no frills.
3 - 15 minutes of decluttering evey day.
That's it. It's doable, and I'll get more accomplished than I have for several weeks.
www.flylady.net
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