Sunday, March 20, 2011

Child's Play 2


I'm rather surprised to be here this morning, to be perfectly honest -- I had an absolutely horrible night of it last night, though it wasn't entirely my own neuroses causing the problem this time. Believe it or not. The whole thing actually arose from my current living situation; I house-sit for my parents, who live in Australia, along with my elder brother. They still pay the mortgage and the rates and the insurance on the house and its contents; I pay all other bills. What does my brother do? Why, he sits at home all day, as he has done for the last almost two years, and plays computer games.

Incidentally, he's two years older than I am.

Generally I just roll with this, even though it galls me to go through such hell at work and have to come home and find he hasn't mowed the lawn in two weeks. It was almost knee-high when I went to Australia, for starters. But last night...well. I was started to feel somewhat agitated anyway because today's weigh-in for the week and I so desperately wanted to be under a BMI of 25. Around midnight, I shut off my computer, turned on some ambient music, and settled in for a good night's sleep.

...just wasn't to be, apparently.

About half an hour later, my brother cranks up the stero and for the next four hours proceeds to listen to crappy music at full blast. Because we live more or less in the middle of nowhere, it's not even like we had neighbours who could call noise control on him. I let it go until half-past two because it is, after all, Saturday night. But after that I lost my temper -- this diet, you see, has two very good reasons for getting enough sleep and going to bed at reasonable times. Firstly, my meals must be five hours apart -- sleeping in means fucking everything up completely, especially as I really need to have eaten all my meals by nine in the evening. Secondly, sleep is when my body is working towards weightloss with the changing levels of Human Growth Hormone; HGH does its magic tricks when the body is on downtime. So, being kept awake by music until four am and then being kept awake to roughly five by having to listen to him puke his drunken guts out?

Well.

My alarm went off at seven, because as I said, I need to have breakfast around eight to have lunch around one to have dinner around six. I had planned to go back to sleep for a couple of hours, but I don't think I will now; I have a cake to bake for a meeting tonight, and I haven't even finished the damn story either. I am going to be wrecked at work tomorrow. Really, I'd love to take the day off and just try and regroup; you'll recall from earlir entries of last week that by Friday night I was bloody shattered anyway. Last night's non-event of A Decent Night's Sleep is not going to help. But of course work is a nightmare because my boss is away yet again, and God knows when he'll be back.

But I guess that's enough of the negativity. What's with the post title, after all? Well, for some reason yesterday I was reminded of the days I first got into animated media. I was a late bloomer on that front, actually. It wasn't until I went on a school trip to Tacoma that culminated in a trip to Disneyland that I really became interested in animation. Being 1994, or thereabouts, I soon became enamoured of the animated television series that followed up on the movie Aladdin, for various reasons. I was watching old episodes on youtube last night and recalled rather suddenly that around that time, I'd written myself a time capsule letter. I'd run across it late last year, and it asked to be opened on the 31st of December, 2010. Whoops. So, I dug it out with some interest.

I haven't really read through all of it yet. It's quite long, but not really...substantial? I was a very fickle and shallow child, shall we say...huh. I bring it up in this diary, mind you, because very early on in the letter I actually note my weight. And this is interesting, because in the long run? I'm really very unsure of how my weight fluctuated as I got older. I do know that in Tacoma I weighed about 44kg, because I remember weighing myself at the host family's house for a lark and finding out that despite all the American food I'd lost a couple of kilograms. After that, I've never been sure of my weight. I do know I lost weight unintentionally at least twice, but otherwise it pretty steadily crept up. If you're curious, I lost weight my first year at university, while living in a hall of residence; for most people it's usually the other way around, but it apparently restricted my snacking somehow. I gained it all back and more once I started flatting. In another bit of wtf-ery, I actually gained the most weight when I lived in an old Gothic mansion on top of one of the steeper streets in Dunedin's CBD. You'd think walking up there several times a day would lead to weight loss, but apparently not.

The other time I lost weight was when I first moved to the UK; that was a combination of stress and a monstrously terrible diet. Basically I had a Kit-Kat for breakfast, a Subway sub and cookies for lunch, and then I sometimes had dinner -- and usually dinner was a McDonald's combo or a tuna salad from Marks and Sparks. Or if I couldn't be bothered with either of those, I'd have half a tube of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles. Again, I have no idea how much I lost, but it was significant -- five or six kilograms, at least. I gained it all back when my sister and I moved from Sheffield to Abingdon, though. And then I gained more here, to create my average weight of about eighty-five kilograms. Before that, as I said? No real idea of my weight, though I do recall being somewhere in the mid-seventies between my first and second years of university, and having it rise to the low eighties a year later. That's just because I worked for an aluminium smelter in my holidays and they required a yearly physical.

This letter, though, registered my age as fourteen years and six months, and my weight as 58kg. As my height is recorded at 153cm, my BMI at that stage was 24.78 -- so, I was very close to tipping over to the "overweight" category. This morning I weighed myself despite the horrible night, and...my Weight Watchers scales gave me 61.8kg. My BMI is 24.76. This is a nice piece of irony right here! And yes, I did a ridiculous happy dance, which must look doubly ridiculous for the fact I weigh on that scale in only my underwear. I was wearing my Paul Frank pyjamas and my Nigella black satin nightgown for the Wii's judgement; it gave me 61.6kg, actually, and for the first time ever I saw and heard what it does when the BMI result is normal. Happy chimes and a dancing Mii? YAY. So...despite the horrors of last night -- and it was more horrible than I've explained, actually, and is likely to become worse -- I am normal. I am normal. And I am ready to keep playing the Game and will work towards a weight in the fifties over the next week and a half or so.

I was also reading the latest issue of Healthy Food Guide Magazine yesterday, which had turned up in the post in the morning; in another nice bit of irony, this tidbit caught my eye:

In 2008, 9.8 per cent of men and 13.8 per cent of women in the world were obese (with a BMI above 30kg/m^2), compared with 4.8 per cent for men and 7.9 per cent for women in 1980.

In 2008, I was part of that percentage. As of today, I am officially not. It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. ^_~ ...but in the meantime, and on a less dramatic and Elizabethan note, I should tend to today's meme question.

Day Seven - Who knows about your weight loss journey? What do they think about it?

I've had a bit of a hard time gauging this one, actually. In the beginning I was fairly close-mouthed about it; I purposely waited until my father left the country so I wouldn't have to explain to him what I was doing, and I only told my mother because I had to prepare and eat my own separate meals. I did explain to some of my workmates from the beginning what I was doing, particularly because we had a going away dessert evening that first week for the workmate who turned me onto this diet in the first place, but there were several workmates I had no interest in discussing this with. Friends sort of found out when they found out. Six months on, pretty much everyone knows about it one way or another; I'm less self-conscious and embarrassed about doing it, now that I've proven it works. However, it has got to the stage where people are beginning to really disapprove of it because in their eyes? "That's enough, now." And it almost is, sure.

But there's still a bit more of the Game to go just right. So...let's play?

4 comments:

  1. Hey Clarice! This is GLT from New You. Good to see that you're doing the 30-day challenge too! I kinda fell off the wagon (in terms of the challenge) but will resume soon! Awesome blog by the way. Love your insights. :)

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  2. Thanks for dropping by! I always love reading your diary, your food is always so delicious and your insights are also fascinating. Glad to hear you're going to go back to the meme, too; I obviously started doing it because I was so interested in your answers! :D

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  3. It's funny how quickly people can become disapproving about weightloss. I'm very lucky to have Paradox, because I know he would tell me if I truly lost too much, not some knee jerk judgment (or worse yet, comments of someone jealous that I got it together).

    And if you're curious, based on your pictures, I think you look great now, and I think you'll look great at your goal. Although I still think the goal that the diet set for you was rather crazy and glad you set your own goal instead. :p

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  4. It's a tricky one, I think -- you can never be really sure if it's concern for your health, or just concern that you're doing something they don't think they'd be able to do themselves. :/ You want to give people the benefit of the doubt, although to be honest I'm slowly getting to the point where I can almost trust myself to make the final call. And that's why I've actually officially changed my ticker to the weight I think would be my best stopping point. It's above the range they set for me, but like you I thought the original goal was a bit beyond the pale...!

    But yeah, the pictures are getting better all the time, and my lower half finally seems to be catching up with the top. I've become obsessed with my hipbones, which is probably understandable as I haven't really seen them in a long long time. XD

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