Bits and Bobs

I've been thinking about a few things and here they are, helter skelter.

Believing: I watched an episode of Paul McKenna's I Can Change Your Life. Usually the bits where he's actually working with the person are sort of boring. I like the schadenfreude of hearing about their problems and thinking to myself, there but for the grace of God go I. But something really caught my attention. Paul had the woman look at herself in the mirror and say what she thought about herself. Of course, she thought she was fat and ugly. Then Paul had her say this in a funny voice. It really took the sting out of the words and made both the words and the idea sound absolutely ridiculous. So I've tried this on myself a few times. For me, the issue is that somewhere deep inside myself, I really don't think that I can lose weight. So I said it out loud in a really silly voice. Then I imagined my husband saying it with his killer Donald Duck voice. I'll keep trying this on and off and see where it gets me.

Channelling: I'm (arghhh) 52 years old. A weird thing has been happening as I get older: I'm "channelling" my mother. My mom died 8 years ago. We were close though we had the usual mother-daughter issues. I am an only child and my mom was divorced when I was very young, so we lived in each other's pocket, so to speak. Mom was very, very tiny: about 4'7" or so. Not a dwarf, normally proportioned, just tiny. Well, I've bested her by about two inches or so, and I'm not a dwarf, I'm normally proportioned, just tiny like my mom. I remember as I was growing up how she ascribed many of her disappointments in life to being so short. For instance, she felt that she had had a miserable love life, ending up for only a few years with a man who never really loved her because no one else would consider loving a woman as short as she was. I think she also felt that professionally she could have done a lot better if only she had been taller. Well, I have a wonderful husband and a great profession in which I am very successful, but I still feel (ha, ha) short-changed by being so short. In my case, I keep thinking that being so short is making it really difficult to lose weight. Mom also used to criticize herself for not being such a good musician, something I have done too (the story of my never-realized career as an opera singer is a whole other chapter...). Well, I'm tired of channelling my wonderful mother, who really had nothing to beat herself up over. She was great and a lot of people remember her with love and respect!

Here's something interesting I found over at Cara's Weight Loss Journal (she found this on the Weight Watchers site):

"Why Weight Loss Always Slows Down

There are some predictable patterns in everyone's weight-loss efforts. In the first few weeks, it's normal to see quick losses. People talk about this as water weight.

But what's happening to cause this loss of water weight? When you reduce your calorie intake, your body responds by releasing it's stores of glycogen, a stored form of carbohydrate found in the muscles and the liver. Glycogen holds water, so when it's burned for energy, it releases water.

Since you're eating fewer calories, your body starts burning up its glycogen stores, and then, after they're gone, your body starts burning fat for energy—which is exactly what you want to have happen. But because fat does not hold water and it takes twice as much energy to burn fat, you'll see slower losses on the scales."

Something to think about as we measure our progress.

Arthritis: Osteo-arthritis runs in my family. OA runs, we limp. It's yet another thing that makes weight loss harder for me, since the only thing that I can do to really get my heart pumping is swim and I have neither the time nor the inclination (in winter especially) to go to the pool. But my attitude is starting to change and there's a bit more of the "can-do" entering my inner dialogue. No, I still don't want to go to the pool. Swimming is something I do in the summer at the lake. I'm thinking about slowly introducing the exercise bike back into my life. I was talking today with a colleague in her late fifties who has become a work-out diva and her advice was to start really slowly. I know that 5 minutes on the bike is too much for my knee. I'll be starting today with 30 seconds and do this every day for a week or so. I'll take it to a minute and stay there until I'm comfortable. I know this sounds like such a small goal as to be nothing at all, but little people have to start small.

Now, I must be brave and start preparing for a contract I have on Friday. I've got to plough through about 200 pages of text.

Be well, my friends!