Do I Listen to My Own Advice? Not!

Just recently, I advised you all to forget the scale. Well, today I went out and bought a new one. How's that for listening to one's own wise counsel!!

I've been weighing myself every two weeks on the scale that my husband brought into our relationship when we starting living together 19 1/2 years ago. BTW, we'll be celebrating our 17th wedding anniversary on Sunday--and a pretty good 17 years it's been! But I digress...

The problem with the darn scale is that it's the old-fashioned kind with the arrow and the dial. Half the time, it needs to be re-set, leading me to obsess over its accuracy. I'm not really sure in general about the weight reading that it gives either. It's lower than the scale at my acupuncturist's, which is a more expensive version of the old-fashioned arrow and dial model and it's higher than the reading I get at my endocrinologist's. She has a super-duper electronic monster.

So in three-bears fashion, I have gone out and finally bought a scale I hope I can trust. It's sleek glass, electronic and beautiful. Just one problem: I can't figure out how to get from metric to imperial measurements. Living in Canada has made me a very confused bunny. I can't think in miles anymore, automatically doing a rough conversion to kilometres. Same thing for temperature. I really can only understand celsius. But when it comes to weight, I'm pounds all the way...except for buying food, where I do understand the concept of 500 grams or a kilo. Just to give you an example of how crazy it is here in Canada, my acupuncturist weighs me in pounds, my endocrinologist in kilos and my GP in pounds. Babies are weighed in kilos. Arggg!

I got home this afternoon and decided to weigh myself with the old scale and the new one so I'd have a baseline. On my old scale, my weight has not changed in about two months, but I'm tempted to do one more weigh-in tomorrow morning on an empty stomach, which is how I normally do it. The new scale, after I've done the conversion, puts me a pound lower. We'll see how they compare tomorrow morning. After that, no more weighing myself for another two weeks.

Aside from scale adventures, I had a little kitchen mishap with a very sharp knife and a avocado pit yesterday. I spent an hour waiting to be stitched up at the local clinic, but all is well. Stitches come out next Wednesday. Thank goodness, here in Canada, you walk in the clinic, you give them your provincial medicare card, you get treated, you leave. This is the real meaning of your tax dollars at work. Yes, taxes ARE worth paying for the valuable services they provide!

Blogging in Sunny Saskatoon

I've been here in Saskatoon for a conference for the past three days. I'll be going home tonight.

I don't have anything much to say about the conference, but I have had two interesting and heartening sessions on the treadmill since I got here. I had considered bringing my bathing suit and doing some laps at the hotel pool, but of course forgot it, so I decided to courageously get on the treadmill and see what my knee had to say about it.

Yesterday and today, I did an approximately 20-minute walk on the treadmill. Yesterday, I built up the speed quite slowly but today I reached a faster walking speed in less time. So far, my knee has not complained any more loudly than it does on any other day. I am amazed.

I am still planning to make an appointment with a sports medicine doctor as soon as possible to see about getting a knee brace, specifically for exercising. I'm really excited about that possibility.

Wish me luck. I really do want to be able to exercise! And it might even inspire my hubby to do some exercise too...(wistful thoughts...)...

Forget the scale. Make friends with your tape measure!

My job takes me to many interesting conferences, and many more than are more boring than watching paint dry. Today, I was privileged to hear a very interesting talk on weight and exercise while working at a conference on lung disease.

A wonderful professor of medicine gave a fascinating talk on how reducing belly fat is much more important than losing weight or lowering one's BMI (body mass index). Belly fat is the worst kind of fat one can accumulate and is associated with heart disease and other medical conditions. Reducing one's BMI through diet does not necessarily mean that the belly fat is being lost. The doctor went so far as to say that for people who are physically resistant to weight loss, despite serious efforts at diet modification and exercise (let's hear it for menopausal women!!!), it is more important to work on reducing belly fat through exercise than seeing the numbers go down on the scale. Of course, he said that ideally, we should be losing weight AND belly fat, but if you have to choose, any exercise that gets you panting and sweating is better than simply trying to lose weight.

Thus, if your BMI is going down, but your pot belly is not, you're not doing what's really necessary to be healthy.

So how do you know if you're losing belly fat? Well, the answer is really, really low-tech: a measuring tape. If your waist circumference and the distance between your pubic bone and your belly button are going down, you're on the right track.

This message really hit home for me: my wonderful, supportive husband has been "growing" a sizeable paunch during our almost 17 years of wedded bliss. He's not a junk-food junkie and I wouldn't say he's an overeater. He walks every day, and some days walks long distances. But the paunch is expanding every year. He's only 47 and I don't want to lose him any sooner than necessary. We had a little chat about this and it seemed like he was listening, but men are so resistant to change. I'll have to keep you posted on any positive changes!

Now, on to what this means for me. I too have quite a round tummy, though I carry a sizable amount of weight on my thighs too. I know that my cardio-vascular exercise is practically zero, due to arthritis of the knee. I do walk, but cannot walk fast enough to work up a sweat. Right now, the exercise bike, treadmill (see: cannot walk fast) and elliptical trainer are out because of my knee, which is permanently swollen and leaves me with a low-level of almost constant pain.

After having had one disastrous hip surgery (fortunately corrected by a second surgery, but I was out of commission for not far off two years in all), I am deathly afraid of even a small intervention on my knee. A friend who had her meniscus trimmed must now wear a leg brace whenever she goes out. I don't think that's very encouraging. But I have to do something to stabilize my knee so I can do some serious sweating.

I will be going out of town tomorrow for a few days of work half-way across the country. This being Canada, it means that I'm travelling far, far away. But when I get home, I'll be calling a sports medicine clinic and setting up an appointment with a doctor to see if I can't get a brace made specifically for exercising. I don't know if that's the solution, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In the meantime, I'd like to salute all you brave souls out there on the treadmill or the bike or whatever. Keep up the good work.

And try to forget (or lessen your dependency) on the scale. Go out and buy a tape measure!

Ouch!

Yesterday, I had a particularly tough workout at my yoga lesson. I have had a recurring pain between my shoulder blades for many, many years, but it has gotten worse recently so my yoga teacher spent virtually the whole lesson on my upper back and shoulders. Last night, I realized that all this work had irritated a nerve, which is now causing me discomfort in the crook of my arm. I have e-mailed my teacher and in the meantime will try to rest the arm a bit (I shouldn't stay on the computer too long, since the pain is in the arm that moves the mouse!).

Curses, foiled again!

On a different note, today there were two really interesting articles in Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail (in my opinion, one of North America's better dailies, along with the New York Times). "The Sickly Side of Sweet" discusses the dangers of high fructose corn syrup, which is used to sweeten so many foods. Yes Virginia, there is something worse than sugar.

The other article, on conditioned hypereating, is a must-read for sugar addicts. In a nutshell, the article confirms what I've been reading so much about in the blogosphere: some people really do have a harder time resisting bad foods. Dr. David Kessler, the former U.S. FDA chief just published a book about what he calls "conditioned hypereating", "a willpower-sapping drive to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods even when [people are] not hungry".

There's lots of food for thought (pardon the pun!) in these articles. I'll let you read them yourselves, and give my mouse arm a rest!

Same weight...attitude changing?

I have maintained the same weight for the past six weeks. Through thick and thin, worry and calm, my weight has not budged. I'm trying to get a handle on how this makes me feel.

I'd like to lose 25 pounds. For my friends out in the blogosphere, this may sound like a trivial amount. For me, it's a mountain. It represents close to 20% of my current weight. Currently, my BMI is 27.8. I started at 29.7 and want to reach 22.6, which is definitely far from model skinny.

I am really, really trying hard to change my feelings, rather than what or how much I eat. I hope that my red-leather boots post of a few days ago will be significant in helping me to shift my attitude and ultimately help me, however slowly, to lose that weight.

On Friday, my husband and I went out for supper with some friends. We then stopped by a wonderful pastry shop at the corner of our street to pick up some dessert to take back and eat at our house. My husband and friends chose their dessert...and so did I: a piece of chocolate mousse cake. We got home, put on a nice pot of coffee and sat down with our desserts. I ate about a third of my piece of cake and put the rest aside. Tonight (Sunday), my husband and I split what was left. I admit, I wasn't terribly hungry when we had it, but I wasn't stuffed to the gills either, having finished supper about 1/2 hour before. This story may not represent the kind of action that will help me to lose the next pesky pound, but I think it's a great example of psychologically healthy eating.

And here's another example of what I would term psychologically healthy eating. On Friday night, when the four of us returned back to the house and opened the box of pastries we'd bought, we discovered that they had put an extra piece of pie and two cookies in the box. Since our older son was at home, we asked him if he wanted something. His response? No thanks. He'd already had some sweets that day at school and that was enough for him.

Contrary to actively discouraging my children from eating sweets as my mother did with me, I am trying to be low-key with them. We often have a box of cookies in the house and the boys both adore ice cream, so they regularly have some type of dessert after supper, but I neither encourage nor discourage their eating dessert. And whaddaya know? Sometimes they really want to eat sweets, sometimes they don't and sometimes they eat their dessert an hour or two after supper. Their behaviour makes me really happy. Perhaps they are teaching me.

You Have Got to Watch This!!

Many thanks to the mahablog for this WONDERFUL moment!

http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741

It's Not Just About Weight

This morning, the front page of the Globe and Mail featured an article on a few hundred brave women in Afghanistan who dared demonstrate against the new laws affecting Shiite women in their country: a woman must BY LAW sleep with her husband every four days, if he so wishes, with very few exemptions (if she is very ill, for example); she cannot go out without her husband's permission, etc. The demonstrators were stoned and insulted. Eventually, they ran for their lives.

This is a reality for many women in the world today.

The newspaper also ran an article on a young Canadian woman who wants to come home from Saudi Arabia with her three children. She is being held against her will by her Saudi husband. Yes, she did go willingly originally, but she was barely an adult herself and already a mother when she left for her husband's country of birth. Now she is trapped there. I suspect that she could get out herself with some help and a liberal dose of subterfuge, but she could probably not get her three children out with her. As a mother, I can only barely imagine the anguish she feels.

This too is a reality for many women in the world today.

And let's not forget the women's rights activist who was murdered in Kandahar earlier this week. Her name was Sitara Achakzai and she was killed for being a woman who defended the basic human rights of women.

No, I haven't completely changed the focus of my blog. I'm still working on myself, my attitude, my weight, my world, but I felt like I had to acknowledge the plight of women who live in desperate circumstances, with no law and no one to protect them.

Please give a thought to these women. They are our sisters and our fellow human beings.

The Red-Leather Boots Syndrome

Fellow blogger, B., over at the Blog of 30-day trials, was kind enough to respond at length to my moaning over my paltry results with the Paul McKenna method and my overwhelming feelings of anger, frustration and dissastisfaction.

I think that B. put his finger on the bobo when he asked me to expand upon these feelings. The strange thing is that I am still struggling to flesh out for myself this feeling of being psychologically dissatisfied. Somehow I feel hard done by--that others are getting what I should be able to have too, but am denied.

This is scary: I can feel the can of worms opening as I write...

I was brought up by a single mother who was also handicapped and for the most part housebound. Her financial resources were extremely limited. This did not mean that I was deprived of food or shelter. In fact, she deprived herself to give me those little extras in life like a pair of beautiful red-leather boots that I still remember to this day, over forty years later. It was not a terrible childhood by any stretch of the imagination. My mother was extremely loving and caring and thought the world of me. She was always there with praise and support. We lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, with excellent public schools and at a time when social services were there to help those in need.

Considering the "bum rap" my mother had had (a cold, unloving husband who treated her with disdain and wasn't even there by her side when I was born; arthritis, which robbed her of her physical and financial autonomy; and an undeserved inferiority complex, which I have inherited, though thankfully to a lesser extent), she still succeeded in making me feel loved and cherished as I was growing up.

But at the same time, there was always the possibility of deprivation lurking around the corner. Although it never actually materialized, there was always the fear that we would "go without". Accompanying this fear was the feeling that we were the "undeserving poor". My mother often told me not to flaunt what I had. People would wonder how a poor woman such as she could afford to buy her daughter red leather boots. Yes, she really did warn me to not show them off, especially to her sister, a nice middle-class lady who was married to a man who worked and supported his family "properly".

Growing up, I got the message that I did not deserve to have nice things since my mother had not worked to be able to buy them herself. People like us were supposed to be satisfied with the minimum.

On the food front, my mother was always concerned about healthy eating. Sweets were seen as evil--something we should keep away from. They were the food equivalent of "pretty" things. Mom did buy me an orange Crush and a chocolate bar from time to time, but mostly I was instilled with a fear of sweets.

Even as a child, I knew that I had a "weight problem". I don't think I can ever consciously remember not worrying about what I was eating and how I was getting fat. My mother certainly worried about her weight. Another thing I remember was her weight when she got pregnant with me (119--remember, she was about 4'8" in her prime) and how it went up into the 150s as she got older. She struggled and I went along for the ride.

So what does all this mean? First, I think the "weight problem", although a physical truth, is rooted in a dysfunctional relationship with food. "Well, duh!", you say. OK. Duh. But it's up to each one of us to understand what this means for us on a deep, individual level. For me, this means seeing sweets (and food in general) as my red-leather boots. I have a perfect right to eat sweets, just as I had a right to wear my boots. But while I gave up those boots willingly when they were too small for me to wear anymore, I'm still wearing my addiction to sweets as if nothing has changed. Today, I can buy red leather boots or their current equivalent if I want to. I have enough money to splurge from time to time, but mostly, I choose not to. I'm comfortable with spending money and comfortable with saving too. Now, I have to apply this to food: it's almost like those sweets, or that extra few bites of whatever are how I say that I deserve "it". I deserve to want what I want and no one can say that I'm not deserving, that I should be quiet and meek because I'm part of the undeserving poor.

I am struck by how melodramatic the above paragraph sounds, especially in light of my post on the horrific plight of many women in the world today. However, I stick by my words. Once we get past fighting for our very survival--as is certainly the case for most people in the developed world--we can become very introspective creatures. Certainly, introspection is often the hallmark of the blogging world. And I hope that my introspection will lead me to a more peaceful relationship with myself, and by extension, others.

Excuses, Excuses...

In Canada, our taxes have to be filed by April 30. Well, I'm actually on-track and will not be late. All that's left is to print out the 12-month spreadsheet and transfer the relevant numbers into the document I send my accountant. I'm self-employed but not incorporated, so I send him the data (all 30 or so columns' worth) and he crunches the numbers. I'm hoping for a little refund this year, due to some personal, one-time expenses in 2008 that were thankfully tax-deductible.

I've just been surfing a few weight-loss sites, drinking in the wisdom and skipping over the ones that concentrate on points, being "good" or "bad" (i.e. I ate three carrot sticks vs. I ate salsa and chips), and how many calories the writers ran, biked or weight-trained-off.

Now, I'm hungry as heck, though it's only 11:20 a.m. Truth be told, I like to eat all my meals early, which sort of screws up having supper with the family at 6:30 p.m. Yesterday, I noshed (healthy, but noshed nevertheless) through supper preparation, so I had quite a light supper in the end. I've really got to go and have lunch very soon, before I eat this computer!

Here are the objects of my procrastination: finishing a small translation that's due on Thursday, taking a walk and doing some yoga. So now, off to lunch, then I should take a walk, do my translation, do some yoga and get supper ready.

How much am I actually going to do? Placing bets, anyone?

Seek and Ye Shall Find

Lyn, over at "Escape From Obesity", has an excellent post on learned helplessness (http://escapefromobesity.blogspot.com/). I think it is the perfect antidote to my recent, "poor me" posts.

What I Really Want

I want a buddy--someone just like me: short, overweight and arthritic! Doesn't that sound just totally glam!!!

Recommended Reading and Further Whining

When I first discovered Paul McKenna's system, I scoured the Internet for people following his method to see what they were saying. I discovered "The Blog of 30 Day Trials", written in English by a fellow in France. He tried McKenna in the summer of 2008 and for the most part was quite bullish about the system. Once the month was over, however, he went on to other things and didn't mention McKenna again, until 30 days ago when he again started following the system, much more strictly this time. Again, I read his blog religiously and recommend that anyone interested in the McKenna method read about his experience (http://thirtydaytrials.wordpress.com/).

I totally agree with my French friend that the McKenna method--which was actually first developed by Geneen Roth in the States and exists in various forms elsewhere in the world (the 30-day blog cites a Dr. Zermati in France, for instance)--makes the most sense as a long-term, healthy approach to eating and being able to maintain a healthy weight.

However, this does not solve my own personal problem: the fact that I have absolutely no wiggle room in how much I can eat. I am one step up from a person of normal height who has a severe handicap. I am no longer severely handicapped, but I am so small that I am terribly limited in the number of calories I can ingest, given the fact that I cannot do cardio-vascular (i.e. calorie burning) exercise. I feel like I am constantly up against an impossible wall. Unless I watch every mouthful of food I eat and swim EVERY day, I am pretty well doomed to weight loss failure. Since I have other things to do in life besides swimming (like working and taking care of my family), I really can't see any way forward.

STOP!!!

I should be refering myself back to my own post on dialectical and non-dialectical thinking at this point. Is my goal truly impossible? Can I at least imagine a sort of "neutral" point, where I gently listen to my full signal, while refraining from cruelly and constantly repeating to myself how fiendishly difficult it is for me to lose weight?

Hmm.

A Tough Shift in Thinking

It's funny how when you start thinking a lot about something, suddenly you see it everywhere.

Ever since I've started trying to non-diet, I've begun to see more and more people in the diet blog world talk about eating "real" food and dropping "diet" food from their eating vocabulary. I really do think this is the greatest and most important shift in thinking that's happened in a long time.

I'm so tired of hearing and reading that you "must" eat this and you should "never" eat that. Yesterday, my yoga teacher was telling me how her body had finally given her the message loud and clear that she should give up all caffeine, never have a coffee, ever, etc. etc. I asked her about chocolate--she said that would be next.

I guess that attitude is fine if it works for you, but my response was that my body was telling me loud and clear that I can eat anything I want, but in moderation. I must say, though, that it's hard to do, after spending most of my life fearing anything but hunger. I'm still afraid as I sit here typing at 1:15 a.m. I had about 10 walnut halves early this evening after supper and I still feel full and horribly guilty. Those walnuts were no doubt way, way more than my body needed, though I didn't feel stuffed after eating them. It's just that I still feel them transiting through my body hours later and I keep thinking that I shouldn't have eaten them.

I'm going through a tiny crisis right now. I feel guilty even calling it that, since I'm healthy, my finances are good, my kids and husband are doing well and spring is coming. But I'm feeling all over the place when it comes to accepting and instituting this new way of eating.

I was originally planning to talk about the good shifts I've made since January, but the thoughts that invade my mind have to do with what is still hard to change. I really hate eating slowly and I really detest eating without doing something else. It's alright when there are people around. I can actually eat a bit more slowly, since I have a good reason to stop eating and engage in conversation, but eating alone, without any distractions is mild torture. I've also realized that I feel the full signal so fast that short of taking one bite and waiting 60 seconds before the next one, I can feel "fullish" after having taken just a few bites. I never feel psychologically satisfied. I eat a little bowl of cereal, or a small bowl of apple sauce and the tum says, OK, that's sort of enough. If I stop then, then an hour or less later, I have a few nuts and the tum says stop and I say FUCK this, I want to eat a goddamned meal. And it just goes on. I know that I can't have a meal that doesn't involve more than three sips of soup, a cracker, a small piece of cheese and a strip or two of pepper or carrot without being too "full"...but never satisfied.

Boy, do I feel grumpy, full stomach and all. I'm back to feeling that this McKenna thing makes sense, but that the amount I can "safely" eat is just too small to ever satisfy me psychologically and that's what eating is at least partially about. I'm almost--almost, but not not really--jealous of people who really binge. My binge is just eating a few extra bites of good food or eating some walnuts. There's no safe room for anything fun or extra, ever.

Yup, I'm grumpy.

Sniff

I've got a cold.

After working a couple of 5 and 6-day weeks, I am totally worn out and not surprisingly, I've got a cold.

I'm sure most of you are wondering what's so special about working a 5-day week. Well, in my line of work, it's totally exhausting: learning new vocabulary, reviewing power-points, dealing with Blackberry buzz through the headphones and documents read at top speed when they forgot to give a copy to the interpreters. Not to mention, often going to places you've never been to and making sure you get there a half-hour early despite the freezing rain and the accidents on the highway.

Please let me vent. I've got a cold and I feel miserable.

I'm also getting to "that time of month", which means that I feel bloated and depressed. It's so much easier being a man. You don't have to go through a monthly physical and mental trough and you lose weight just by walking a couple of steps more and eating a couple of bites less.

Let me tell you a funny story:

A few years ago, I decided to try hypnosis to lose some weight. I paid out the big bucks (so much I'd rather not mention) for a six-month programme and went faithfully for about four months. Why did I stop? Well, first there was the male counsellor who had done the programme himself and told me how easy it would be to lose the weight. Whenever I hear a man say that his weight loss was easy, I'm already doubting the programme's efficacy for me. Sorry guys, but it's a fact: men can lose weight much more quickly and easily than women. It's not your fault, I'm just horribly jealous. (Short digression: I also did a weight-loss programme that involved drinking two shakes a day and eating one real meal. Did it with my hubby who quickly overtook me in the weight loss and went on to lose considerably more than I did. Of course, we both gained the weight back and then some.)

The other reason I dropped the hypnosis was bad grammar. Yes, bad grammar. The programme involved listening to tapes that were full of grammatical errors. Anyone who tells me to "lay" down and relax can expect a punch in the face. Relaxation my foot!

Clearly, I'm not in a great mood tonight. Sorry, friends. I'm sure that within a few days, I'll be feeling much better.

Be well and happy Passover and Easter to you all!

Deprivation and Sugar

One thing that has become crystal clear to me since embarking on the McKenna programme is that for me, sugar and hunger are totally unrelated. When I'm really hunger, the last thing I want is sugar. What I crave most when hungry is protein (usually in the form of cheese), followed by carbs (bread). Fruit and veggies are low on my list of hunger satisfiers, but sugar is not even on the list at all.

However, the minute my hunger has been satisfied, in other words the minute I should pack up my knife and fork and leave the table, something sweet becomes a practically overwhelming need. I usually succeed in shrugging this need off, but often give in to a generous handful of dried cranberries or some other kind of dried, high-sugar content fruit.

Though consumed with sugar desire, I am able to take a step back and look at the strange compulsion that has envelopped me. For me, it all comes down to a sense of deprivation. I feel somehow that I am being deprived of something that others have a right to, but that I cannot have. I feel envious and "hard done by".

Why me? Why can't I have this beautiful, sensuous delight without paying the price? I honestly don't have the answer.

By all rights, I should feel much angrier about the bad hand of cards I've been dealt with respect to my arthritis, or being such a shrimp, but no! I'm angrier about how quickly I get full and the fact that physically there's no legitimate room for that amazing piece of chocolate cake or that gorgeous serving of crème brûlée.

McKenna has various techniques to deal with such cravings, but I have yet to find them useful. I certainly haven't mastered the tapping technique, which involves a complicated series of taps on various acunpuncture points. I keep saying I'll practice them more, and since my colleague has given me back my copy of I Can Make You Thin, I'll have to re-read the section.

McKenna also has techniques to totally eliminate the desire for certain foods. On one episode of the British ICMYT TV series, he "cures" a woman of her cola addiction. On another show, he uses his techniques to completely extinguish someone's desire for chocolate. But the interesting thing is that I am so far resisting the idea of eliminating my love of sugar. I wonder why.

After all this writing about sugar, you must think that I gorge on it constantly. In fact, I have very little in my diet. But it's still a psychological obsession. I probably need to further investigate my sense of deprivation...

Twelve Weeks

As I typed the title of this post, I suddenly remembered the movies "28 Days Later" and "28 Weeks Later". Fortunately, no zombies were involved in the writing of the post you are about to read!

Well, it's been twelve weeks since I started using the Paul McKenna approach to eating and weight loss. With the exception of last week (more on that later), I only weigh myself every two weeks, plus or minus a day. Obsession with the scale is something that McKenna warns against--and with good reason, in my humble opinion.

OK, I know you all want to know the results of this most recent weigh-in. If you've been following this blog since the beginning (not hard to do, lol), you know that when it comes to weight loss, my middle name is Molasses. And this weigh-in has been no different. I still weigh what I weighed two weeks ago. The difference is that I feel less disappointed in this result than I have in the past.

Over the past ten days, I have averaged close to 10,000 steps a day (and that's including a low-step weekend). Last week and this week, I have been working at the same downtown hotel for three different conferences and have taken public transit rather than the car to get there. I'm actually feeling the muscles in my legs a little more than usual and my arthritic knee has not protested any more than usual. This is good. And I'm hoping that upping my step count will contribute towards a small weight loss at my next weigh-in.

I have continued to reflect on intuitive eating. I realize that it is still a challenge for me to respect the fullness signals my body sends me. Being so small, sometimes the signal will sound after just a few bites of food. Even when I try to eat very slowly, it's hard to feel psychologically satisfied after having eaten such a tiny bit. It's also more difficult when you're eating at a restaurant, which I almost always do when working. Leaving more than half my plate full is a real challenge. Two days ago, I actually took a doggy bag and had a few more bites when I was on break a few hours later. I still ended up throwing out a fair bit.

Back to my weight loss/stability. In the past twelve weeks, according to my scale, I have lost nine pounds. Six of those pounds were in the first four weeks. Now remember friends, we're talking about someone who measures 4'10" on a good day! I need some applause, please! Last Friday, I visited with my endocrinologist, whom I see regularly due to a thyroid problem. I was on medication for one year and was given the green light to stop the medication on the very day that I began following the McKenna programme. According to my doctor's notes, I had lost 5 kilos--two pounds more than my scale tells me. My doctor was a little worried because one of the symptoms of hyperthyroidism is weight loss. I reassured her that nothing was wrong and that the weight loss was actually intentional. In any case, the blood test confirmed that all is well with my thyroid.

So that's the latest, up to the minute story. I can feel another post coming on, but I'm going to save it for another day. Now, I have to prepare my for my next conference.