Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 20: The Year in Fat

I'm sitting out on the back porch, sipping my Pepsi Max and enjoying the first non-deathly-hot-and-humid day in probably a week.  I've been empaneled on a jury for the last three days and it's getting exhausting - it's like being in a very, very long grad school class where at the end, instead of writing a paper, you have to decide whether or not someone goes to jail.  The weight of the responsibility and the absolutely horrifying details of the case have been wearing me down.  It is part of the reason that this post is a day late.  However, as I have learned over the past year, you gotta let a lotta shit go.  No biggie.  Woooooosah.

Upon re-reading my very first Diary of a Fat girl post, I realized that the introspective and conversational tone has leeched out of my more recent entries.  I could try systematically to diagnose that problem, but I think it's probably just that there have been no major things going on with my fitness/weight loss, and it's become pretty well incorporated into my life so as to become far less noteworthy.  To avoid such a fate here, however, I'm going to try something new.

Dear July 2011 Amber,

Hey, it's me, Future You.  As much as I would love to spend time telling you winning sports bets to make and shit like it's Back to the Future Part 2, I'm going to do my favorite thing - talk about me.  Er, you.  Or, uh, us.  Yeah, us.

At this point, you have a lot on your mind.  Thankfully, you did a smart thing and wrote some of that shit down, which was pretty helpful.  I don't know if you can tell yet, but it really did make a big difference to start writing about all the emotional, social, and psychological complexities involved in trying to lose weight.  Keep it up, and stay honest.

In a few months, you're going to join a website called Fitocracy.  No, don't join now; what did I just say? Anyway, this site is pretty neat.  The "exercise is a video game" element is cool, of course, but really what you're going to find valuable is the education and the community.  Most of the people there are super nice and supportive, and also have really good advice.  You'll have a lot of questions that feel like stupid questions, but the answers are waiting for you there, and no one will poke fun at you for asking.  Oh, and don't forget to follow Niobe back when she follows you.  I know you don't know her yet, but trust me, she's amazing and also posts really hot pictures of herself.  So...twofer.


There are some caveats to this whole Online Fitness Community thing, though.  You know how the internet tends to make totally normal people into assholes?  Well, even though I just said that most people on Fitocracy aren't dicks, it only takes a few to ruin it for everyone.  There will be petty arguments, judgmental douchebags, and lots and lots of elitist posturing.  People will make fun of ignorant individuals (many of whom fit into categories like curl bros and cardio bunnies) for being stupid, without seeming to recognize that those people are a) earlier versions of the cool people on the website who just haven't figured their shit out yet and b) the ones who need the most help and support, not derision and dismissal.  You will even laugh at, take part in, and initiate some of these fun-pokings.  It's probably because you feel super excited to know all the things you know now, and can't help but get elitist about it.  But knock it off.  It's not cool and it doesn't make you cooler to do it.


Also, a bit of education advice: don't stop learning.  Every few months you're going to feel like, "I just learned and incorporated the thing I was missing.  Now I have figured things out.  I know things now.  I have completed my learning."  Not only is this just stupid, but it also makes you slower to realize when you're starting to learn new things that you should pay attention to right away.  For example, right now you basically just do Turbo Jam for exercise, plus walking and sometimes a bit of elliptical-ing.  There's nothing wrong with any of those things.  In fact, Turbo Jam still kicks my ass, and I've been doing it for a year longer than you.  Well, not like a consistent year, but you get it.  Anyway, right now you think that you have this fitness thing sort of cornered.  Burn calories however you can, the end.


Well, that's not the worst way of looking at things, but you're excluding a lot of really fun, challenging, satisfying, and productive exercise.  Guess what?  When you're me, you'll be able to run a 5k no problem.  I shit you not!  I'm not saying that we become particularly speedy - in fact, our normal running speed clocks in around a very brisk walk - but we run now.  So that's kind of awesome, right?  But right now, I know you're thinking that running is fucking impossible and that just hoofing it to catch the T is beyond what can reasonably be asked of a person.  But that's before Couch-to-5k.  Trust me.  You won't start it until after the New Year, but when you do, it's going to blow your socks off.  Oh, and don't worry, the winter is going to be super mild.  That doesn't create a paradox if I tell you that shit, right?  Wait, am I my own grandfather now?  I don't really understand time travel.


So I guess what I'm saying is that you have to stay open to new things.  I know that we don't like new things.  New things are terrible.  BUT in this case especially, new things are awesome and we have to try them.  When you join Fitocracy and notice that everyone gets these crazy high point totals for lifting weights, you'll see what I mean.  The machines over by the cardio room are NOT the same as free weights.  I'm not going to bother schooling you now because you'll figure this all out (with a lot of help) later, but I'm just saying...keep your mouth shut 90% of the time and your eyes/ears open 100% of the time.


Unsurprisingly, I'm sure you realize by now, the whole exercise component of this is not the hard part.  Not by a long shot.  The fucking food thing is SUPER annoying.  Keeping track of food isn't really a problem, necessarily.  Soon Dan will get a food scale and you can go very OCD very quickly.  It'll help.  But trying to limit calories all the time can be a bitch, and you'll have to get used to what it feels like to be hungry.  Here's the cool part though.  You know how when you get hungry kind of suddenly, you can sometimes get light-headed and have a headache and get suuuuuuper pissy?  Well, when you stop eating shitty food for every meal and drinking full-calorie soda like it's a life-giving substance, that doesn't happen anymore.  Like, almost ever.  It's not something you'll notice right away (sort of like not being able to prove a negative), but eventually you'll realize that you just get hungry like a normal person, and nothing worse ever comes of it.  I think they call that "not being pre-diabetic."


But with all the up-sides to having more of a handle on the food situation, the problem is that you have to keep a handle on the food situation all the time.  The habits that you're worried about, where you eat terrible food in response to pretty much every emotional state and situation possible, those don't really go away.  I mean, I can't speak for July 2013 Amber (I suspect that Amber will be very busy, but I don't want to ruin the surprise, so I'll just say that good things are afoot), but July 2012 Amber still wants to eat chocolate and chips and fried food when things are rough, or when things are great, or when things are boring.  And as you know, those three states cover pretty much all the time.  So the battle to maintain good/better habits is something that's just part of our reality matrix now.  No use kvetching about it.  Just do the work.


And you do have to work for everything you want.  I know that right now, you're looking at skinny chicks on the subway or hipsters strolling Harvard Ave in the jeans that just seem to get skinnier by the day, and you're thinking, "why do I have to bust my ass to weigh 190, but those fucking shitbags get to be skinny while eating six McDonald's cheeseburgers and drinking fucking Starbucks 900-calorie frappuccinos all goddamned day?"  First of all, calm the fuck down.  There is no reason to get that mad.  Second, those people aren't actually healthy.  To your untrained eye, they certainly look healthy, and most of them would probably pass a standard medical exam with flying colors.  But they're not fit.  The double-zero girls would break in half if they tried to deadlift their own bodyweight, something you will accomplish next year.  The guys are just as weak.  Watch them run for the train or bus next time.  They huff and puff just as hard as you.  Having less mass means fuck-all.  Oh, and they're just as unhappy with their bodies as you are with yours.


This also dovetails rather well into a particularly important life lesson, and I'd love to save you some grief by imparting it to you now.  It's time to stop giving a fuck about what other people say and do.  I'm not saying you should go live in a cave and sever all social ties, and I'm not saying you should disregard the actions, words, and feelings of your loved ones.  I know it's been a whole year but I'm not a monster, geez.  What I am saying is that your bitterness about others' metabolism isn't helping anyone.  Neither are your judgments of others' habits and workouts, your butthurt when people online shit all over something you like (or were taught to do, or whatever), or your analysis of the way people talk to you about your weight loss and fitness schtick.  Right now, you give a LOT of fucks about that kind of thing, and it's a waste of time and energy.  It's a tricky game, because I just finished telling you to learn from people and keep your eyes/ears open, but life ain't black and white, baby.  Oh, and don't call people "bby" on Fitocracy - it's probably a Reddit thing that you'll never understand, but regardless of the origin, it's not part of your internet thing and there's no reason to appropriate it.  There is unbelievably immense passive pressure to conform on that website, and the last thing you need to do is start omitting an A because someone else did.  Everyone will still like you, it's okay.


One of the most important things you'll learn is that there are a lot of ways to do this right.  Everyone has their own "this is the right way" spiel to give, but in all honesty, fuck that.  If something helps and doesn't hurt, then it's correct.  That's a highly subjective and personal assessment, so things that work for you might not work for other people, and vice versa, but basically, don't start regretting shit like, "oh, why didn't I start lifting weights six months ago?" or whatever.  You will lose a bunch of weight doing mostly in-home cardio, and then you'll keep losing weight when you add a shitload of weight training and running.  You'll change  your calorie goals several times, going as low as 1200 and as high as 1800, and there are lots of days you go way over.  None of those modes of operation are The Right Way, per sé.  All of it gives you results that make you happy and healthy.  The whole year in front of you is full of teh win, and the ways in which you choose to execute that victory are all fine.  Don't start ranking your shit, like "oh, I am worth more today because I touched a barbell but yesterday I only ran so I wasn't worth as much."  All the shit you're doing is improving from where you used to be, so don't obsess over become more correct, more efficient, more acceptable to some unknown third party.  Somewhere behind all the lazy/indifferent/understanding/IDGAF in you, there's a perfectionist streak that gets really upset when something turns out to be less effective than you thought or when you feel you've wasted time/effort/whatever. Striving for your best is great, but there's no use getting upset about shit you can't change.  Use your energy for the future (hey, that's me!) and not for the past.


Oh, and with your squats, break from the hip first, not the knees.  That's half the reason you're so fucking unstable, and it takes you like 10 months to figure it out.  Flexibility couldn't hurt either.


Lots of love,
Future You

Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 19: On Eating More, Branching Out, and Hitting a Benchmark

This part was written in June:
I've started writing this entry a few times in the last couple of weeks, more from a place of obligation than inspiration, if I'm being honest.  A few important fitness/health things have occurred in recent weeks, though the writing content associated with them is probably a collective paragraph (though let's be real - I'll probably talk your ear off about them).  Things have been pleasant and calm on the home front.  Dan's job keeps him pretty well exhausted most of the time, with on-call weeks and late work nights and long commutes, but it pays well and he enjoys the challenge.  My job is in the strange waking dream state that is post-senior/pre-summer June; because my program is so tiny, everyone takes final exams at the same time, and then seniors leave.  The few weeks after that are still a part of fourth term and count for grades, but the underclassmen who remain are already in summer mode.  This year, a particularly virulent strain of this disease has spread to the staff as well, and we're all silently wondering, "why am I still here?"  It's hard to blame the kids for feeling unmotivated and unfocused when we're having the same issues.

...Which is directly related to the next piece of news: I got an iPad.  And it is awesome.  Now, I can't really speak to the incredible capabilities of the iPad because I've been using it almost exclusively to play Plague Inc., a 99¢ game that has consumed nearly every waking moment of my life for the last week.  It's a strategy game in which you play as a disease (or as God, depending on how you look at it) with the goal of infecting and killing every last human on Earth.  With seven different pathogens (from bacteria to nano-viruses to prions, et al) and three difficulty levels, the game has more depth than I would expect for something that is seemingly so straightforward.  It took me a few days to really nail my strategy down, but I beat the last remaining level on "brutal" difficulty this morning on the train, which unlocked three cheat-filled bonus levels.  So I've got my afternoon planned out.  It's not like I have grading or planning to do...sigh.

The boredom is sort of pleasant, however.  Normally I'm a frantic mess this time of year, trying to finish projects for my second job (writing science workbooks) that are generally sent to the printer at the end of June or early July.  Although that job still exists, the amount and type of work have changed, leaving me with a smaller future paycheck but also a calm end to the school year for the first time ever.  In the evenings, I spend my time couch-surfing, web-surfing, and pandemic-modeling.  I have an abundance of free time, something I value extremely highly on the other side of grad school, and I'm not particularly eager to give it up.  I did take a summer job "teaching" summer school (in quotes because the kids are doing independent online courses and I'm a glorified lab monitor), but it's only 20 hours a week and there are two weeks off on either end.  I suspect that the iPad, or at the very least, several novels, will get plenty of use during that time.

That all being said, I do have a twinge of guilt over the free time because I've been using even less of it for fitness work, rather than using more of it.  It's only been about two weeks of slacking off, but it coincides with my adoption of a new lifting program, the parameters of which have me doing less work than I was doing in the first place.  So all told, I'm doing less each time I exercise and I'm exercising less often.  Not exactly the change I was going for.  The program I'm doing is from the book New Rules of Lifting for Women, something that sat in my Amazon shopping cart for weeks on end before I finally purchased it last month.  The book itself is a quick read (I finished it in about a day), but it's full of comprehensive info regarding nutrition, exercise guidelines/basics, and specific training schedules for lifting.  The routines are challenging and designed to avoid classic over-training (something I don't think I was guilty of, but I'm trusting the program right now and seeing where it takes me).  The Phase 1 exercises are mostly familiar (deadlifts, squats, lunges, lat pulldowns, cable rows, OHPs, etc.) with a few new additions (stability ball jackknifes).  I did switch from doing kneeling push-ups (aka girl push-ups) to incline push-ups using the smith machine, which were more challenging but also more doable, if that makes any sense.  My ROM is much better on the incline push-ups and I am able to do enough reps to be sore the next day; I'm hoping this will lead me to doing regular push-ups and will also improve my bench numbers.

One aspect of the NROLFW program is eating more calories.  Up until recently, I've been eating between 1200 and 1400 calories depending on the day (on days when I burn a lot, I eat more), which makes for a deficit of about 500 calories a day, suggesting weight loss of a pound a week.  I've gotten used to that level of eating, and I also got used to feeling hungry sometimes, something I would not have abided before.  NROLFW, however, suggests that eating at such a deficit is not particularly helpful, healthwise, and that only those looking to lose significant amounts of fat should be worrying about getting calories low.  According to the formulas in the book (which are pretty standard across multiple websites), I need about 1900 calories a day to maintain my weight if I'm not doing anything special (i.e. not working out).  On days I exercise, I need more like 2100-2200 calories to maintain my weight, though that number obviously varies based on what I do and how much I do.  To that end, I've increased my daily calorie goal to 1800 on most days with bumps to more on lifting days.  I drink a protein shake on those days, which I've gotten used to, and I try to eat more chicken breasts for dinner, even though they're too boring for even me.  The hardest part has actually been trying to care about macros, considering I get well over 50% of my calories from carbs every day (usually 55-60%, whereas it should be 40-45%).  Bumping up my protein and reducing my carbs is a lot harder for me than cutting calories in general.  Dealing with both number of calories and sources of calories makes the restriction more problematic, at least in my head.

The actual exercises in the program, however, seem a little too easy for me.  Given that the program recommends 2-3 sessions a week (and I've only been doing 2), there are several days each week that I am able and willing to do work but shouldn't do any strength training.  Some of those days are running days, which is something I'm still trying to work on in both speed and stamina.  According to my personal trainer (who is taking the summer off and might be moving....laaaaaaame) and several websites and the NROLFW book, I should be focusing on interval training rather than steady state cardio.  However, I enjoy longer easier runs a lot more than short, intense runs.  I know that "enjoy" and "should do" are not the same, and the beginning of the C25K program was closer to interval training than steady state cardio anyway (and I did just fine there and saw amazing progress in a short amount of time), so I know what I should be doing, but it's hard to get motivated to do it when I don't have a regimen/goal/schedule to work with.  If I want to hit a 10-minute mile, however, I would be better off doing short rounds of interval training than running a mile every week and shaving a few seconds off.

I have, however, had some running success lately.  On June 2nd, I ran in the 2nd Annual Pug Rescue of New England 5k in South Boston (Castle Island, to be exact).  Considering the RFYL 5k was more of a mud hike than a run, and considering I was held up for almost an hour at the final obstacles, the PRoNE 5k was the first real 5k race I've ever done.  The weather was as abysmal as it could be for June in Boston.  It rained heavily the entire time, with ferocious winds coming off of the ocean and spraying the runners with stinging salt water.  It was slightly cold, which meant that the wind and rain combined to make for hypothermia-inducing conditions.  On any other day, the route would have been beautiful: overlooking the ocean the entire time and ending near a historic fort with beautiful grassy areas everywhere.  But instead, it was a shitstorm.  Apparently, though, I thrive in such conditions, because I posted a time of 39:06, which beats my previous treadmill time by like 2 minutes.  I think it was a combination of the motivation boost of being in a real race with other people and the overwhelming desire to go home and get out of the rain.  It took me several hours (including a nap) to feel normal and warm again after that.  I'm hoping my future events are less taxing on my homeostasis.

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This part was written today:
Things have improved quite a bit, motivation-wise, since I stopped writing last month.  Once school ended, I found myself sufficiently refreshed enough to hit the gym about 5 days a week, rather than 2 or 3, and I have finally finished stage 1 of the NROLFW.  To be honest, I got pretty bored with stage 1 after a few weeks because it the same two routines back and forth for 16 sessions.  Without bench presses (which make me feel super-human even though I'm benching like 50 lbs) and any real variation between the sessions, I found myself going through the motions more than thriving in the activities.  Stage 1 is over, though, and thankfully the subsequent stages are all fewer than 16 sessions (most are half that) and have more exercises to do during each session (with the exception of a special stage designed to make me able to do a chin-up - which is going to be awesome).  So this past week I've been substantially less bored at the gym.  I've also starting doing interval runs, which are not as bad as I made them out to be in my brain.  I do need more running songs, though.

As for weight/calories/other things, I finally hit the 50 pounds lost mark at the beginning of June.  It was a much bigger deal at the time, because I've been stuck within a pound of that weight since then, although at least that was kind of on purpose.  My aforementioned calorie re-working put me right around maintenance, and when you combine that with a little bit of gym deceleration, you get stalled weight loss.  I didn't put a bunch of weight back on, which I'm happy about, AND I did manage to do a little recomp in the meantime.  I finally broke down and bought one of those impedance scales with the metal things you step on.  Yeah, it's not super accurate, but at least it's consistently inaccurate, if that makes sense.  Great for tracking delta-F, where F is fat.  If I "calibrate" this reading against the hand impedance meter I used at the gym twice before, I have lost at LEAST 3-4% body fat in the last 3 months, and if I ignore science and controls, then it's almost twice that number!  Of course, I have lost pounds in that time, so it's not all balanced by muscle gain, but I can only expect so much muscle gain/maintenance on a cut, even a meager one.  That being said, I am ready to start losing pounds (net) again, so I have cut my target calories from 1800 to 1600.  Still a lot more than the 1200-1400 I was shooting for before, but not so close to maintenance.  We'll see how it goes.

To be honest, the reason I'm so hastily wrapping up this entry is that tomorrow marks one year since I started my Diary of a Fat Girl series, and I intend to write something (hopefully) more interesting and more coherent than this mish-mash of unconnected updates.  If I allow myself the indulgence, they may be one or more numbered lists.  You know how I feel about that shit.  For now, please accept my apologies for passing this off as worth your time.  I could never be a professional writer because it pains me to throw anything out; I get attached to everything.  Exhibit A, ladies and gentleman.