30 April 2010

Thurs., 29 April 2010

What I Ate: almond milk iced latte (90 cal); maple brown sugar oatmeal with 1/8c granola and 1/2 tbs honey (210 cal); big ass salad: spinach, baby lettuce mix, roasted chicken breast, dried cherries, walnuts, goat cheese, Ken's lite raspberry walnut vinaigrette, alfalfa sprouts (~360 cal); small Fuji apple (60 cal); 1 tbs "peanut butter spread" (95 cal); oven-baked fries and beef/mushroom/muenster sandwiches (hard telling).

What I Did: treadmill (walk/run), 22 minutes.

I learned some stuff:

(1) "Peanut butter spread," or the stuff most people consider peanut butter, is gross. I've been buying only natural peanut butter for the past several years (the kind that contains peanuts and salt and nothing else). Today, however, I was at Target on my lunch break, and I didn't want to have to try mixing a new jar of pb with a plastic fork (we don't have real silverware in the office), so I settled for a smallish jar of "reduced fat peanut butter spread." Suffice to say, I won't buy it again. It's gross. And it has considerably more on the ingredient list than "peanuts, salt." Not that that stopped me from smearing a tablespoon of it on my apple a while ago, but I didn't enjoy it. As much.

(2) My watch is really old. I bought it at a vintage shop about 10 years ago for about 10 or 15 bucks. It's a tiny little Bulova wind-up job with a cheap stretchy replacement band, but it was cute and dainty and old and I liked it. I wore it until I was pregnant with Bob and developed carpal tunnel and couldn't stand to have anything on my wrists. Then I lost it because it was in my lost jewelry box, which just resurfaced last week while I was cleaning out some shit in the basement. When I found it, I wound it up to see if it still worked--voila, it sure does! And it still keeps accurate time.

I've been thinking I should get a new band for it, because the existing band is really, really tight. I took the watch off and started looking at it, and noticed the serial number on the back. Google is awesome--within seconds, I knew my watch was made in 1962. (Other than that, I don't know much--our desk computers are very firewalled so I don't have access to many sites.)

So now I'm even more enamored of my watch. :)

(3) I am not nearly as efficient or productive an employee when I am not overwhelmingly busy. I haven't missed anything, but I've let a couple things slip my mind (I caught them before any fires were started, but still). Sadly, that's the nature of the beast in my line of work--either you're so busy you can't breathe, or you can't find enough to do in a day. If I were a model employee, I suppose I would put out that "I'm available to help you" APB, but I won't, and here's why--every job I've had, I've been the person who got work done quickly and without any difficulty. Which means I always got stuck picking up the slack of the slow and the stupid. After about 15 years of being taken advantage of in this manner, I am DONE. I'll do my work, you do yours, and we'll all be just fine. I don't ask for help, and I'm damn sure not offering. Maybe this is a bad attitude to have, but all my assisting others in the past ever got me was...well, extra work. And it kept people in jobs who probably shouldn't have been. So it's just my policy not to do it anymore. So there. :P

(4) My husband is awesome. Well, I knew that already. But now he's made himself even awesomer. The local paper he used to write for went tits up, so now our little suburb has no local news source. And trust me, the big city media couldn't give two shits about what happens north of the river. So my husband created GladMo.com, a web collection of news feeds referencing our municipality. It's pretty cool, even to a non-techie like myself. Of course I'm most impressed by the pretty pictures he has on the banner (which he took himself). I'm simple that way.

I also learned an important lesson about the power of negative thinking. Well, it was a lesson I already know well, so I guess I didn't really "learn," but was reinforced. My plan was to try to bust out 25 minutes on the stairs and then 20-25 minutes on the treadmill. I was especially eager to have a decent workout because we took the boys to the park and then for ice cream afterward, and let's just say I didn't say "oh, no thank you, I really shouldn't."

When I got to the gym, the stairs were all taken (DAMMIT), so I hopped straight on the treadmill. I walked for about a minute and then cranked it up to 6.0. And I thought I was going to die, but I forced myself to run, and keep running, until I hit the 1 mile mark. And the whole time, I kept thinking, why is this so fucking hard? Why can't I just run, like this little 20-something skank next to me? Maybe because she might weigh 97 pounds in the rain and most of that is her fake tan and her long, luxurious hair, and I'm hauling around 15 pounds of spare tire. Why can't I do that? Why can't I just stop eating? Why can't I be thinner and younger and hotter and tanner and faster and fitter and have better hair, dammit???

Yeah...it was pretty much a downward spiral from that point. Every time I'd catch a glimpse of my humidity-screwed hair, or the bulge created by my shorts waistband cutting into my gut, or my pasty skin, I'd immediately throw a mental dagger at myself for not being 25, tan and gorgeous. Ridiculous, yes, but it is what it is.

So I made my 1 mile, and then I forced myself to do another. But self-loathing makes for a heavy load, and after 10 minutes (and only .86 of a mile), I quit. By that time a stair climber had opened up, but my heart wasn't in it, so I didn't bother. I went back to the locker room to weigh myself, and finding the scale missing, nearly had a panic attack. So I went back to the floor and climbed on an elliptical, where I spent another 6 minutes before deciding I was sweaty, exhausted, depressed, and my t-shirt had been left in the washer too long and had a mildewy stench emanating from it--time to call it a night.

Ah, the roller coaster ride of emotional overeating. I am depressed. I eat because it makes me happy. I eat too much, and then I'm depressed. So I eat. And so on, and so forth.

How do you stop it?

Today: the plan is simple--Stop. Eating. So. Damn. Much. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. Go to the gym and just do it, dammit. And while you're at it, stop beating yourself up for not being 25 because dammit, if we were all 25 forever, the world would be a really stupid place.

It's already not looking good for me. We just got an email that there are 5 million cookies in the fucking conference room downstairs, free for the taking. And already I'm rationalizing with myself...if you eat it, you'll feel like shit. Yeah, but you'll feel like shit anyway, whether you eat a fucking cookie or not, why not just have a fucking cookie?

Argh.

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