Secret Eating

This is me having my afternoon snack yesterday. It sure is hard to get back on the old weight-loss plan until you get to the place when there's NO bad food in the house at all!We’re just about getting there now, on the 14th of January.Our trouble is, we get these tins of nuts through the mail at the holidays. They’re gifts from people who want us to die young: greasy cashews, super-salty almonds, macadamia nuts even, which have more fat than you find on the thigh of a pig.Then there’s the whole array of specialty chocolates people bring.And the bottles of wine.It’s all part of the holiday haul which takes longer than you think to dissipate.Lucky for me. Old Dave plays cards once a week his grizzly scotch-drinking pals. That's when I trot out all this hi-cal stuff and put it right near to where they’re playing.It works pretty well unless this one guy brings his famous pan of chocolate chip brownies studded with walnuts that I want to get under the covers with and eat every crumb of.Instead, I make Dave take care of it. “Hide this from me and never tell me where it is no matter how much I beg!” I tell him."Jeez! Show a little discipline!” he says but he hides them yes he does because he’s no fool. He knows if he wants to feel that butter-and sugar-and-dark-chocolate combo on his own tongue he’ll have to hide them.He’s pretty mean to me come to think of it, teasing me, calling me "fatty" and all and making "boom! boom! boom!" sounds when I walk across the bedroom floor - when in fact I weigh 20 pounds less than I did when we met - And he weighs AT LEAST 20 pounds more than he used to. Ok I've gained 15 pounds since the millennium but that just brings me to 135, and he’s calling ME fat?That’s the thing with men though: they don’t look fat. Dave has a big deep chest and legs that weigh like 75 pounds each as I learned when I was moonlighting as a massage therapist and he never looks fat.So there it is: your man looks awesome and manly with this white hair that the ladies all swoon over while YOU, no matter how trim you get with Weight Watchers, are still just this aging chick with cellulite.Well whaddya gonna do? At least I got this cute new haircut. :-)

Look at it This Way

So here's how I really feel.......Most of the time.I got used to this position during my Catholic girlhood when, every Sunday like clockwork, I fainted in church."Put her head between her knees!" the grownups  were always shouting. (Adults were cruel in those days.)"Turn her upside down!"I knew better than anyone in the congregation how much gum there really IS stuck under those pews.Now of course we all feel this way.Especially in the month of December at whose rag-tag end we now find ourselves.This squirrel was in our hawthorn tree all day, even doing the Houdini move to get at the last of the berries.Can't blame him.After the first he too will probably be joining Weight Watchers.Don't scoff, yo. It works if you work it. :-)

Fun for Me on the Old DL

What a huge thing to be forbidden trips to the Y, though I have devised this home workout you see on the left. (Yup that's me in the red fur and sure the knots were a little hard to get right but it all works great now.) And wow are the days deliciously long with no Y-trip to schedule into the old workday! Plus it’s really quieted me down to be sittin’ on the bench here with an incision that looks like what you see stitched into a football, only uglier; a wound you have to tend every day, unwrap and air out and poke with a Vaseline-daubed Q-tip and all.And so much for shorts and skirts with a dressing on my leg the size of a dinner napkin. I’m in so many pairs of jeans and long hippie dresses it feels like the 70s again. :-)Also I’m catching up on my sleep. I was in the bed ‘til ‘til 7:30 yesterday morning, a record for me. I did get up at 4am and make a quick tour of the house making improvements but that’s only because the leg hurts just enough to keep me in light-sleep mode.I figure I might try eating less since I can’t exercise. When I was on the table and the surgeon was  wrapping my leg with a super-tight Ace bandage I said “I heard when you have liposuction they put you in this all-over bandage for a whole month while your tissues get over the shock of being Hoovered half to death, did you know that?"She glanced up from her bandage winding to give me a bland noncommittal look. “I did know that. We do that here.”Only then did realize I was actually ON the cosmetic surgery floor of this famous hospital just because everybody just assumes the sky will fall if they they have a regular scar, even on their lower leg where no one is ever going to notice it. Who knew I'd be  in the cosmetic surgery unit? I mean it’s not like I'm Tina Fey after having her cheek slashed by some crazy guy that’s for sure.So I'm thinking hmmm .... Diet and exercise? Or the sucky thing and the body bandage after?  Diet and exercise or the sucky thing? It’s tempting to go with the latter but I figure with my home workout here and a little of what Jennifer Hudson and my WW pals call tracking I‘ll be ready for my close-up in no time  - from the knees up anyway. 

Please Squeeze Me Oh Yeah Like I Squeeze You

All these years I've stayed away from corsets, Spanx, all that stuff. I was 12 when I started wearing stockings and with stocking came corsets whether you liked it or not. They called them panty girdles back then and for all their similarity to chastity belts they were still better than those tight bands of elastic with garters dangling off them.Still, adamant as I am about never wearing a corset I have to acknowledge the jaunty appeal of this emails that arrived in my inbox last night:“Hello! We are professional corset supplier in China. Majored in exploring corset, make lingerie, bra, and corset by your requirement, best price, low MOQ, do OEM! Supply corset with 5-20% discount, assure you the best price, best quality, welcome to place sample order to check quality. Welcome to place sample order to check quality!”I haven’t gone to their website - I have that old late-'90's fear that my computer will explode into fever blossoms and fall down dead - but I think maybe I will find some way to reach out because they seem like such a competent bunch. They majored in exploring corsets and how impressive is that? I majored in overeating and all-nighters. I think I have a lot to learn.So sure call me crazy but I'd still rather keep going to Weight Watchers than wear one of these pubis-to-sternum squeezers. It's true that it's all about the bra after age 25. but you could never, ever EVER get me into one.

ouch!

The JOY of Cooking?

Is anyone out there as sick of cooking as I am? I’m trying to eat carefully here in the new year but my God it’s a lot of work. Chopping up a butternut squash is harder than anything Tony's nephew Christopher ever did in the back rooms of Satriale’s if you get the reference. And peeling a mango and cutting it into edible pieces? It’s like peeling an elephant’s eyeball and then trying to dice it. I mean shouldn’t there be some sort of tool?This week I made enough mouth-watering entrées, soups and salads to feed an army, and all for a husband who won’t even sit down to eat anymore. The man is getting odd no doubt. His approach to a meal: get it down and move on to the next thing which for him is some left-brain project like Sudoku or the world’s most difficult crossword puzzle. Even when I’ve expended the last scraps of energy making Crab Cakes with Mango Relish or Slow Cooked Lamb and Fresh Thyme Stew I can’t get him to actually sit at the table with me …. Ok sure they’re from Weight Watcher’s kitchens instead of The Silver Gourmet’s but they’re great.Last night I served this whole fisherman’s delight of a spread with Garlic Steamed Spinach and Toast Points and I don’t know Fetal Tomatoes or some such and the only way I could get Old Dave to do something other than stand like a horse at a trough was to use On Demand to call up The Sopranos on the tube. All it took was offering him the episode where Ralphie gets his head cut off and he was rooted to his seat while he chewed. (Wait so where are those old TV tables? I think maybe the good old 1950s are coming back to haunt me...!)

Packin'

I went back to Weight Watcher’s because I started looking like Homer Simpson in my underpants but here was the problem: The last time I'd tried going back they turned me away. They said given my height I wasn’t overweight enough.  “A person would have to have a weight someplace within this range to qualify, CAROLINE” they said, using my real name  which always makes me feel like, Help it’s the nuns again. I couldn’t take the chance of being turned away again so  I started lying the second I walked in the door. I said I was two inches shorter than I really am in the hope that I would seem heavier in relation to height, and I also did another thing: I stuck a couple of five-pound weights into my pants and went to the weigh-in like that; stepped onto the scales and boom, I was in.

Every week after that I slid those dense little packets into my pants and sure they made me walk a little funny but they worked. The 1st week I lost some actual weight through careful eating. The 2nd week I plateau'd.  The 3rd week I overate a tad, so just took one of the weights out  before going there. “Down five pounds!” the lady sang. And the 4th week I ate everything in sight and so took out the other one. “Another five!” she rejoiced and pasted a little gold star into my booklet.

Sadly, when I stopped 'carrying' I also stopped 'losing.'  Some weeks I even gained, and the nice lady would try to comfort me: “But look how much weight you’ve lost since you began here! A whole ten pounds!” Sigh. So I guess I feel better confessing here but if doing so in such a public forum gets me kicked out, well then what will I do, if they bar the door and take away my Points Tracker?

Well. Recovery is over-rated I can always tell myself - and couldn’t I just pack my car full of Ding Dings and Ho-Ho's quicker than you could say Jack Robinson! Plus hey there's always alcohol. And anyway think about it: Who wants to be a skinny grandma ?

I'm Stahvin' Heah!

So I been goin' to Weight Watcha for 12 weeks now and guess how much I’ve lost? A pound and a half.I blame my husband.I blame him because in the beginning when I had actually HAD lost 4 ½ whole pounds I put on this awesome tiny-waisted skirt I bought ten years ago and said “Dave! Look how skinny!” -  which OK was a bit of an exaggeration but do you know what he says, not even looking up from his fiendish Sudoku addiction? “It’s a start.” I mean, Jeesh!I also blame the other lifeguard my senior year in high school who told me at the City pool where we both worked that no matter what I did I would always be ‘a big woman.’ He disappeared the following year - was never heard from again - and I’ve often wondered if it had anything to do with my grandmother’s hat pins and that nice old Ken doll o' mine.Weight Watchers is always saying that the real secret to dropping the LBs is to  record every single thing you ingest in the little food journals they give you and OK I’ll admit it: I haven’t actually done much of that. But I haven’t written in my real diary for almost three months either and there’s no punishment there! In fact, what I find is that your entries take on a far jauntier tone if you do make 'em a few weeks or months later. You get to compress events, tighten up your descriptions, make the jokers around you sound a lot hipper and funnier than they really are - whereas with the food diary it turns out even if you don’t write down that you’ve begun pouring heavy cream all over your Mint Chocolate Chip your hips seem to hear about it anyway and shame you by billowing.But the latest in shaming for me? The ‘smart’ pedometer I gave the Weight Watcher gang a hefty 35 bucks for, which when I first strapped it on it mornings USED to say I weigh 138 ½. Now for some reason it has me at 297 and counting.I'm tellin' ya: machines and males: they just won’t DO what we women do every day of our lives: make people feel better by simply telling ‘em what they want to hear.