Flexi-Lady

You have to find the dietary choices that work well for your lifestyle as well as being satisfying and healthful to you personally.

And here’s mine (currently anyway):

Flexitarianism: Is a semi-vegetarian diet focusing on vegetarian food with occasional meat consumption. A self-described flexitarian seeks to decrease meat consumption without eliminating it entirely from his or her diet. There are no guidelines for how much or how little meat one must eat before being classified a flexitarian. Flexitarianism is distinguished from pescetarianism (i.e., one who eats only fish in addition to vegetarian foods), as well as pollotarianism (i.e., one who eats only poultry in addition to vegetarian foods).
In 2003, the American Dialect Society voted flexitarian as the year's most useful word and defined it as "a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat".

Definition courtesy of Wikipedia, found by my friend Teddi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexitarianism

When I discussed it with my doctor last week, she was amused by the term and supportive of the idea. She reminded me that as an omnivore I am meant to eat meat in certain quantities, but decreasing the amount significantly (as long as I get enough protein) is a healthful choice because of how fatty meat can be.

On average, I’m eating meat maybe two or three times per week at the moment. We’ll see how it goes.

I know it probably seems like I’m trying on program after program after program, and in a way – yes I am. It’s like trying on different shoes until I find the lifestyle choices that work best for me on a long term basis.

The Pit of Despair

So I went to my annual physical on Friday, as usual my Doctor patted me on the head and praised me for my healthy eating and exercise habits.

See, apparently I’ve got really svelte and healthy blood and way sexy blood pressure scores, and that’s the part of me that she looks at.

So while the rest of the world is peering at my fat body and going: “Yeeech! What an out of control SLOB, she must sit on the sofa and eat cheetos all day!”

My doctor is meanwhile looking at numbers on a page and going: “Wow I can really see those healthy eating habits and the fact that you go to a gym three times a week. Good work you good patient you!”

I’m like the poster child for those people who try to convince the rest of the world that slim does not equal healthy and obese does not equal death.

So why am I in the proverbial pit of despair? Why have I been hiding from my blog?

Confession time: My weight at the doctor’s office (you know the dreaded slidey scale) was back up to 274 lbs.

That’s right folks – I’ve wasted every bit of work I did since I began last October. I might as well have never tried at all.

It really wasn’t hard… a cup of hot chocolate here and a serving of French fries there, and presto! Weight springs right back up again. Since my metabolism didn’t have enough time to get out of it’s “CRAP, we’re starving to death!” mode that kicks in as soon as you lower your calorie intake, it was more than happy to pack back on every additional calorie I’ve consumed since Christmas as fat storage.

It’s like my body was going “Thank God that crisis is over… whew!”

And now this time, trying to cut, scrape and pry extra poundage off myself will be even harder. It’s harder every time. Every failure makes it harder to walk the road – which is steadily sloping uphill on me. The goal growing further and further out of sight.

We’ll see if I even get back on it. Right now I’m teetering on the brink of self acceptance as a fat girl and resigning myself to a life of having to be content with being beautiful on the inside, even though my outside looks like total and utter crap.

Itch

I find it deeply ironic that with as much as I baby my skin I’m still covered in extremely itchy hives at the moment.

It started after that extremely hot weekend I spent gardening two weekends back and hasn’t quit. At first I thought I encountered something out in the garden that my skin found disagreeable – but one of my coworkers is convinced I’ve got “stress hives.”

Great.