I have been focusing on working out instead of scale numbers and it has paid off in a couple of ways. Last week I worked out at the gym 3 times, which is my goal for each week, before leaving for a long weekend in Chicago with Kat. It felt great to have hit that goal and know that on the weekend I’d be getting more exercise in since we were bringing our bikes. I planned to start eating food on the weekend so that was also fun to look forward to.
So Friday we got on our bikes with Lance and Stephanie (the cousins) and hit the beautiful Lake Shore trail in northern Chicago and pedalded the 8 miles into downtown. The MOST beautiful ride – super sunny, not too hot, awesome city on one side, beautiful beachfront on the other. I felt stronger than I have since surgery and enjoyed it so much. We biked to the Bean, my favorite sight in Chicago and there was Dave, our friend who moved there 2 weeks ago. SO great to see him! He grabbed his bike and pedaled with us into the city and it was exhilarating to ride with the traffic through downtown. We ended up at a beachfront restaurant for dinner and it was surreal since there were palm trees and sand and surf a few yards away from our table yet we were in Illinois, not California J I had a few bites of some barbecued pork and that was fine, gave me a lot of energy and tired me out at the same time, kind of hard to explain. We then hit the bikes again after saying farewell to Dave and pedaled home with the wind at our backs. Total we biked over 18 miles and about 3 hours. And I could do it! I feel like I’m finally getting my strength and stamina back and it feels AMAZING. I know it wouldn’t be possible were it not for the gym time I’ve been logging. So my non-scale victory, or NSV, is my newfound energy. I feel awesome! I did go to bed earlier than anyone else, and I did sleep like a rock, but hey…so what?
I snuck a weigh-in on the scale. Down to 245.6. So that’s a scale victory! That’s a total of 31.2 pounds so the scale FINALLY budged! Not much, but whatever. I am happy with that and will not be tempted to weigh again for a while. There was a scale in the bathroom at Lance and Stephanie’s and it was tempting tempting tempting!
Food is quite another situation entirely. I am feeling rather down about food in general. I could eat anything I wanted this weekend but in tiny bites of course. I fill up in about 5 small bites. This is good, this is the whole point of what I had done. But it really hit me HARD at Sunday dinner in Chinatown. I love Chinese food. I was feeling ravenous, which is rare since I have such a small stomach, but we’d not eaten all day and had been running all over town at this point. We sat down and I was so excited to taste some of my favorites and we ordered lots of different items to try off the Dim Sum menu. I had about 6 small bites and I was full – not just full but painfully, uncomfortably, I want-to-die full. I hadn’t even tasted what I had really wanted to try, the sesame chicken. So I sat there waiting for the feeling to go away and the urge to lay on the floor in a fetal position to subside. It hit me so hard how going out to dinner is just not what it was. I had to sit there for 45 minutes watching everyone else eat and waiting for them to be done. I no longer wanted to eat anything but it was boring, it was, sorry to be dramatic, isolating. Everyone was comparing items and textures and laughing and sighing over how good everything was and I was sitting there in misery. I was totally bummed out. And what can be done about it? Nothing. I can’t eat. Everyone else can. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to change a thing. So I have to figure this out, how to better handle these situations. Granted in the future I’ll be able to hold much more food and I can eat for longer than 2.5 minutes, but that won’t be for months yet. So I think the first thing is to make sure I don’t get so hungry and the second thing is to take a couple of minute break between bites. I won’t fill up as fast and will know when I’m full quicker so I won’t be uncomfortable. And ultimately, going out to eat will be the rare occurrence, not the norm, as it used to be. There just is no point. I’d rather socialize AWAY from food so I don’t have to watch it and see it. Once it’s out of my face, I don’t give it another thought. This whole thing is quite a learning experience, that is for dang sure! The good thing is that I got to have a donut. Make that, 1/16 of a donut. One medium size bite is all I can handle of anything bread or yeasty. So that makes a donut way less appealing, which is awesome cuz they are one of my favorite things ever. It makes me want to live on protein shakes for the rest of my life and just forget about food entirely, way simpler. But we can’t have that, so onward in figuring all of this out!
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