Losing a part of me

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  • Day 665

    My weight continues to creep up despite my not eating more than I was just a few days ago when I was losing weight. I take some comfort in the fact that according to the same bathroom scale that keeps giving me this bad news my muscle mass and lean body mass are also increasing, which means that the weight gain is not an unhealthy one; I just wish that I could point to more than walking my doggie twice per day as reasons for the increased muscle mass. Yes, my legs are looking and feeling stronger than they were just a few weeks ago, but I am not actually exercising. Hopefully next week I will be able to resume some sort of exercise routine so that I can get back on track. While it was up again, my weight was still below 249 lbs., which is a relief. There was one day last week when my weight was within half a pound of hitting the 250 lbs. mark, which for me is a psychological disaster. I vowed a couple of months ago that I would never weigh more than that ever again, and so far I have avoided it… no matter how bad things are, and no matter how close I came.

    Tomorrow is my last crazy long day, and I am looking forward to getting back onto a normal schedule. I have not had a good night sleep in two weeks (although that is not because of my teaching), and I am looking forward to being able to recover at least somewhat. This morning I slept through my alarm (or turned it off and went right back to sleep) and was a lot more rushed than I like to be in getting ready and out the door. Her Floofness seemed to recognize the hurry and she was happy to pick up the pace of our walk; we took the same route as always, but we cut our time from 25-30 minutes for the circuit down to 19 minutes. With that I was actually able to prepare and eat my breakfast at a mostly normal pace, rather than either making a meal replacement shake, or just wolfing down my omelette. It was a relief, and I was at my desk and logged into my class at exactly the same time as I was the last several days… but with an extra 45 minutes of badly needed sleep.

    My rabbi and I spoke last night and while he is supportive of me, he did not pull any punches. He showed me how one thing I did would have been a terrible blow, and although he supports that I did it he still forced me to see how I am not completely innocent. Introspection is good, even when you do not like what you see. It did not help me sleep, but he is a good man and a good friend.

    I wrote this early in the day and see it is 9:00pm and I have not published it. Oops! Time to move.

  • Day 664

    My weight is up this morning, but only by .2 lb. which is up… but within the margin of error of any given day. Considering my stress and anxiety levels, I am not pleased… but I am also not giving up. I did not eat more, but I also did not cut out my starch with the evening meal. No wonder.

    My food plans for today are to change it up slightly. Rather than having chicken for lunch and dinner, I will have meatless burgers and air-fried potatoes for dinner.

    I have three more days of the 14-hour teaching schedule, and then I have ten days off. I am looking forward to being able to being able to get some exercise back into my schedule. That should help to reverse the trend of these last three days.

    One of my students last week broke down emotionally after failing her mid-course exam, and I spent a lot of extra time tutoring her. This morning she told me that she passed it and was feeling better about understanding more of what I am teaching. There are some very rewarding moments in my job!

  • Day 663

    I did absolutely nothing to warrant a 4.6 lbs. jump over the last two days. I had potatoes and rice with my lunch and dinner, but that is all I did differently. How can that possibly account for such a sharp increase? I protest. The only upside is that somehow my body fat percentage is down 1.5% and my muscle mass is up 1.6% in that time, but as I have been sitting on my duff from early morning until late night, I see no real way that could be accurate. Not fair. Way to kick me when I’m down, body.

    While I will still have rice with lunch, there will be no carbs or starches with my dinner this evening.

    Not happy.

  • Day 662

    I made it through the weekend relatively unscathed. I am not going to say that I did not cheat a little – I absolutely did, but not terribly. I had some mini crisps (essentially flavoured rice crackers in chip form), and I had some peanuts. If that was the worst cheating that I did during one of the worst weekends of my life, then I am absolutely not going to complain. Not being able to see a light at the end of a very long tunnel does not mean that there isn’t one. Things will get better… one day.

    I was completely shocked by my weight gain this morning. I cannot think of anything that I did that would account for a two-pound increase. I know, it is just a blip… but it sucks. Either the scale was telling me that it had made a mistake the last few days, and was just correcting for that, or it wanted to tell me to keep myself in check today, and it would correct things tomorrow (or at least over the next few days).

    We begin my second week of fourteen-hour-days. I had a good chat with a very close friend this morning and it gave me a little bit of a boost. Hopefully that will carry through for a few days. Next week I am off work, and I will take that opportunity to prepare for an exam that I need to take sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I did my shopping for the week yesterday and I was pretty good on buying only what I should be buying. I will keep my head up and keep trying to look forward to a better day.

    In a couple of weeks, I am expecting my newly tailored clothes to come in, and I am looking forward to that. I wish… ah, what does it matter. They will be great.

    Thanks for reading.

  • Day 661

    My life is no better today than it was yesterday. It is still a complete and total disaster from which I see no way out and no way forward. Still, I have to go forward. Aside from the fact that my religion forbids any form of self-harm, there are people who love me and care for me. I have to remember that. There are people who know that I would never hurt the people that I love, and that I would in fact go to the furthest extremes to protect them. So I move forward, and I try to continue to do my best to not give up the progress that I have made through nearly two years of hard work… even as I see that I am losing those which are most dear to me.

    One of the ways I encourage myself to keep going is with numbers. I have been trying to weight for six hundred and sixty-one days, and when I need the push, I look at the numbers. I am in the worst place I have been emotionally in many years, and so I decided to turn to my numbers for at least some encouragement.

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    This graph represents my weight every day since September 30 (excepting the 26-29 of October, and November 5). The yellow line represents my lowest weight ever – 238.6 lbs. on October 18. The red line is my highest weight in the forty-three-day period that I selected (249.4 lbs., this past Wednesday). The green line represents my weight today (243.4 lbs.). The vertical black line is the day my world fell apart. I had a bad slip for a few days… what with the pizza dinner splurge Friday night, my life crashing down on me destroying everything on Saturday, and then the travel day on Sunday. With all of that, knowing even that I had gained a full eleven pounds from my best weight by Wednesday, but have been able to reign that back in and get back on track. This morning my weight is less than half a pound up from that terrible day… even though every day since has been even worse. I am now less than 5 lbs. from getting back to my best weight ever.

    I am still not sleeping well. Admittedly, I did do a little better last night than any of the previous seven, but that is probably owing to the sheer physical and emotional exhaustion finally catching up to me. According to my fitness watch, my sleep score was only a 49/100. My body battery was an abysmal 31/100 when I woke up, and at 11:15am it is down to a 26. There were a number of times that Leslie offered to give me a few of the pills she has to help her sleep, but I refused. I know I was right to, but I am still kicking myself that I do not have anything in the house (aside from copious amounts of scotch) that would help me to rest.

    It was good to see my friends yesterday. They are the first to know what is going on and how I feel. I do not know if or when I am going to start talking about it… but it is not today. Today will be spent trying to help a friend with his computer that seems to have died so I will go over and try to salvage everything he has lost. In the evening I am tutoring one of my students who needs extra help, and who seems to have started my class behind the eight ball because her instructor for the previous class (which is a pre-requisite for this class) seems to have taught way too fast and using way too much jargon for anyone, but especially for a non-native English speaker to understand. I promised I would help, and I will help. Hopefully in doing so I will be able to keep my mind off the fact that I really have no interest in living anymore.

    One day at a time.

  • Day 660

    My weight is slowly dropping back to where it was before I flew to Texas (nearly a three weeks ago). It is astounding to me that in the last week since my world imploded I have not gone completely to pot. It would not have surprised me had my weight jumped fifteen pounds this past week after what happened last Saturday. While the bathroom scale still has me up 2.2 lbs. since then (my last pre-collapse weigh-in, also my last weigh-in before a completely depressed travel day), it could have been much worse. From that weigh-in I would gain 6.4 lbs. over a four-day period, but have been able to drop 4.2 lbs. these last three days.

    I am slowly coming to terms with the reality of my world which has been completely destroyed. I do not know how things are going to play out, but I do not expect that I will be able to go back to the way things were. It is strange… a week ago I woke up happy and optimistic. I have not gone to bed nor woken up like that since. I have not had a good night sleep in that time. I do not expect I will have one for quite some time.

    When I finish writing this entry I will leave the house for social reasons for the first time since I set foot inside late last Sunday night. I have gone shopping, I have walked my dog. Today I am going to see friends who might, I hope, be able to offer me some sort of comfort. Nobody knows what is going on with me yet. I suspect that had I told any of my friends, they would have been banging on my door immediately and all week. With my ridiculous work schedule this past week (and the next one as well) that just would not do, as I need to maintain both my work schedule and my composure during the day. I cannot let my students know that I do not care about living, let alone computers. I have put on a very brave face and I know that they are learning and enjoying the classes – the results of the mid-course exams yesterday bear that out. The fact that I am dead inside is masked from the world.

    I got the most touching communication yesterday. I truly have no idea who reads this blog; in truth, there are times when I think that nobody reads it. When a reader reached out and told me that she reads my blog every day and that she hopes I am okay, it was more than heartwarming. It is entirely possible she is the reason I did not dive into a bottle of scotch last night… and chase it down with a large platter of deep-fried chicken wings with extra sauce. I am not sure that I would have physically harmed myself, although that thought has certainly crossed my mind. Diving off the addiction wagon would not have killed me, but it would certainly have started a long and slow road back to where I was two years ago.

    Maybe Paul Simon was right. A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. Maybe the best course of action to never feel this again would be to completely cut myself off from the world. Friends and lovers have hurt me more than any enemy combattant ever could. Maybe that is the answer.

    For most of the last 660 days I have ended my journal entry with a positive wish to my readers to have a great day. I am sorry that right now I do not have it in me to feel anything positive.

  • Day 659

    My weight dropped another few ounces this morning. I can assure you that it is not because I did much different yesterday. It is certainly not because I am feeling any better about myself, and I know that I did not get any significant exercise in yesterday. I am as emotionally down as I could be, and I have not fallen off the wagon, I have not crawled into a bottle, and I have not harmed myself. I have not only taken care of my responsibilities, and my students seem to be happy and do not notice anything wrong. It is emotionally exhausting to put on the happy face, but I am getting through the day. What will happen tomorrow when I am not working? I don’t know.

  • Day 658

    Things are not getting better; it is quite the opposite in fact. I will continue to push through and try to get back on track, but the emotional turmoil of my life is absolutely crushing. I cannot focus on my diet right now. The fact that I am getting through my classes without breaking down is completely shocking to me. I do not know how I will get through. I am not able to sleep so I am not even getting part way through the day before falling apart. It is truly a herculean task. I am nearly through Thursday and then there is one more day until I can rest.

    My weight yesterday was just barely below 250. This morning it dropped (shockingly) nearly two pounds. I am now back to 9 lbs. from my best weight ever… but that is not nearly something I am concerned with right now. I am just trying to get through the day without wanting to harm myself.

    It’s not easy.

  • Day 657

    My weight on the bathroom scale is still under 250 lbs… but just barely. I really need to get a handle on myself. I do not want to lose the amazing progress I have made because of the terrible trying and emotional times I am going through. I will do much better today. I have to get back on track, especially knowing that I cannot exercise until the weekend.

  • Day 656

    Another sucky day. I hope I can get back on track tomorrow. Emotionally, eating, everything sucks right now.