This journal is somewhat friends only, although less so lately. Comment if you'd like to be added. If you're friends with one of the people on my f-list, please mention her name. If you stumbled upon my journal by accident, I will check out your journal before adding you. Welcome to the inside of my brain.
1. Scones with clotted cream and jam. If you've only had scones in the U.S., you haven't had scones. Turns out, they're not supposed to be heavy, dense, dry things. They're supposed to be light, fluffy vehicles for shoving as much clotted cream and jam into your mouth as humanly possible. I plan to not eat anything else ever again.
2. Boots. It's like CVS, only better and more cheerful.
3. The way my skin and hair are reacting to this climate. No wonder women in the British Isles all have dewy, creamy skin.
Number One thing I DON'T like about England so far:
1. Continually, incessantly adding and removing layers of damp clothes. One is always too hot or too cold in this country, especially going in and out of the tube, and everything is always damp. Always.
Went to Oxford yesterday, will post some pics later. If you didn't notice, I posted a long update over the weekend, before this post. Please check it out! Love you all xoxo
Clicky for piccies!
Just a quick update while I have a quiet moment on my SECOND TO LAST DAY OF WORK OMG!
Everything is still insane, as you might imagine. But it is controlled chaos. We do actually sort of almost have everything under control. *frantically knocks wood* We are managing it. It's all happening.
I gotta tell ya, if you want to ensure you've married the right person, plan an overseas move together. If I ever had any doubt that Julian was the most fantastic man on the planet (which I never have but anyway) they've been laid to rest by this process. He has been SUCH a rock! He just puts one foot in front of the other and doesn't panic, and it all gets done. He's AMAZING. I am so freaking lucky.
And for the most part, we're actually enjoying this process. Can you believe that shit? :D
Okay, I'm running out of time, so here's a timeline of events:
Today: After work, I say goodbye to my sponsor (*sob*) and then go home to try to find the floor in our third bedroom/my dressing room. OH HOLY JESUS is our house a mess. This is what happens when you pack 75% of your belongings but still have to live there for some days.
Julian is currently at the vet having him fill out the certificates we need to take to get the cats into France.
Tomorrow: my LAST DAY OF WORK! I've worked here 4.5 years and I can't believe it's almost over. Everything's gone smoothly handing over power to my replacement and she's assumed my former role of Supreme Commander Overlord with a minimum of fuss. I've taken all my pictures and knicknacks and do-dads home already. I gave thank-you presents to my two awesome bosses. I will forward our public blog link to the people with whom I want to stay in touch.
Saturday morning: BFF Mandy arrives for our last week.
Sunday evening: goodbye dinner with friends here in town.
Rest of weekend: pack like the dickens.
Monday: still with the packing. Need to finish the packing this day.
Tuesday: go down to Rehoboth with BFF Mandy, spend the night at a friend's house down there.
Wednesday morning: pick up my mom, bring her back up here.
Thursday morning: 20 foot container comes, the movers put all our stuff into it, it leaves.
Thursday afternoon: don't know, but clearly not something in the house, as there will be NO FURNITURE.
Thursday night: goodbye dinner at Le Bec Fin for the girls - my mom, Mandy, and me.
Friday morning: I think I'm going to have Mandy and Julian go off and do something and give me some time alone with my mom.
Friday afternoon: Lots of tears, lots of hugs, and then... we get on a plane! OMFG!
Saturday morning: land in Paris, get traumatized cats off plane, pick up rental car.
Saturday: Spend 6.5 hours driving to in-law's farm in Rodez. Mainly concerned with keeping Jules awake behind the wheel.
Saturday night: I can only imagine will look something like "say hi, hugs all around, collapse into a coma for 12 hours".
Sunday, Monday, some of Tuesday: decompress and replace our heads on our necks at the farm. Seeing my in-laws will be wonderful; I adore them. Also, they have dogs, cats, chickens, BABY CHICKS, horses, cows, and I think a donkey. It's going to be AWESOME.
We will be getting the cats situated for their 6 month stay at the farm, since we can't take them with us to the UK (quarantine laws; we weren't preparing them for the UK since, you know, WE WERE MOVING TO FRANCE UNTIL 2 MONTHS AGO). My fantastic, wonderful mother-in-law will be doing everything to prepare them for the UK move, in addition to providing them room and board and giving them lots of love. Because she is awesome.
Tuesday late afternoon: fly from Rodez to London.
Tuesday evening: check into hotel that will be our home for the next two weeks, while we look for a flat.
Sometime in those 2 weeks: find a flat (THE GOOD LORD WILLING.)
8 Sept: Jules starts work.
Sometime mid-September: the container shows up and we'd probably better have a flat by then, so we have a place to put the stuff.
And after that, for the first time in my life, my calendar is completely blank. It's all waiting to be filled in, this glorious adventure, day by day.
Love you all. xoxo
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
heatherella rightly pointed out that I'm not supposed to be weighing myself every day, but you know what? I need to write about it.Yeah, I'm not supposed to be weighing myself, but the thing is, when I don't weigh myself, I gain a LOT of weight. 8 years ago when I stopped weighing myself, I gained 30 pounds. This time, I gained about the same. Which is really not okay. I'm now at the point where my level of overweight is going to start affecting my health. The shitty thing is that I haven't yet figured out how to weigh myself without it affecting my mood.
ANYway. So the report on the weight loss is that...there isn't any. After the initial loss of 5 pounds (which was almost certainly water), I've stayed the same. 155.5. I don't think I can overstate how little I'm eating, and there is no weight loss. I can't say I feel much better in terms of health either. I feel better ethically not eating meat and I think I'm going to continue with that, but otherwise, I'd say the cleanse has had no discernable impact on either my health or appearance. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it. I won't. I do actually think the change to my diet will be permanent, because it's just healthier. But it didn't translate into the things I really wanted, which was weight loss and increased energy/vitality.
The thing is, other than cutting out the cheats (junk food) it's not that different than how I ate before. I guess I don't know why I thought it would make much difference, except that I am practicing extreme portion control and mindfulness and you'd think that would help.
HAES people would tell me that I'm at my body's set point and it's unhealthy and dangerous to try to change it. I don't believe that, because then why did I hover between 120 and 130 for the entire 5 years before I started gaining weight? Yeah, I had to watch what I ate, but I wasn't starving myself, and I DID cheat. I can't believe that my set point increased by 30 pounds for no reason in the course of a year. No, I ATE myself this fat and there must be a way to undo it. This CAN'T be permanent. Because I don't want to live in this body for the rest of my life.
Julian thinks it all has to do with exercise; that if we started a daily routine we'd lose weight right away. He may be right, but that just makes me want to cry. The idea of being FORCED to exercise just to be allowed to inhabit the body I used to have, that wasn't even that great, just fucking SUCKS. I suppose this is aging, huh?
Yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: cantaloupe
Lunch: vegan wrap consisting of tofu, spicy tomato sauce, and chickpeas
Snack (met my sponsor so didn't get to eat dinner til 8:00, was starving): Luna bar and decaf coffee with shot of soy milk and artificial sweetener. (The Luna bar was not a good idea; waaaay to much sugar - in the form of organic cane juice - in there).
Dinner: teeny portion of tilapia, about 10 florets of cooked broccoli and cauliflower.
This will have to be quick; work is monopolizing my time this morning.
Yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: cantaloupe
Lunch: vegan wrap with texturized meatless protein and taco seasoning. YUM
Snack (was STARVING): spoonful of peanut butter, cup of soy milk
Dinner: half my leftover dinner from the Vietnamese place (which was already basically half), small portion of salad with homemade dressing. Dessert: sugar-free popsicle.
Have a great day, kids.
To celebrate our successes over the weekend, we made our first foray into a restaurant since starting the cleanse. We went to a Vietnamese place we like so as to have the maximum amount of choice. I accidentally cheated, but it was only because I ordered wrong. Yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: cantaloupe
Lunch: leftover grilled eggplant and Boca vegan burger patty topped with salsa.
Dinner: vegetarian summer roll with peanut sauce; stir-fried tofu and veggies over egg noodles
Did you see where I cheated there? EGG noodles. I totally meant to order RICE noodles and just pointed at the wrong thing. Whoops! So the no-eggs thing ended about 6 hours early, but I'm not too worried about it. :)
Today at work is going to be busy, so I wanted to knock this out before I left. Happy Monday, all!
Yesterday Julian and I sat down for a State of the Union where we figured out all the dates of when everything is going to happen with the move. Basically, because his work needs him in London sooner than we first thought, we are leaving almost TWO weeks earlier than we were supposed to. We now fly out on Friday, August 22nd. I know this for sure because we BOUGHT THE PLANE TICKETS (and all I can say is, thank god his work is paying for our flights because the oil prices SURE AREN'T MAKING PLANE TICKETS ANY CHEAPER). We fly into Paris with the cats, rent a car and drive down to his family's farm, drop the cats off with his mom and spend 3.5 days visiting and attempting to decompress, then fly back out of Rodez and into London. His work will put us up in a hotel and we spend the next almost two weeks looking for a flat as our full-time job. Because what we've found out about London is, it's like New York but possibly worse. By the time ANYONE has heard about a good flat that's available, it's already rented. We can't do this from across the ocean, no matter how diligent I am about sending emails and making transatlantic phone calls. We need to be bringing baskets of mini-muffins to the agents and smiling a lot, hoping someone gets a crush on us so they deign to show us the good flats. ANYway.
We organized a whole hell of a lot yesterday, and today I'm feeling really good about it, but yesterday, I was feeling kind of freaked out, heh. And I didn't have any of my usual things I use to avoid feelings of stress or fear. I stopped drinking and doing drugs years ago, I quit smoking, and now I don't even eat shitty food to distract myself from these negative emotions. I was sort of feeling like I couldn't stand being inside my skin, you ever feel like that? I felt very very uncomfortable and just...bad. Subsequently, I ate more, even though I tried my best to control that. Here's yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: cantaloupe
Snack before lunch because we were waiting for the pasta to cook and I was starving: leftover hummus with 3 stone-ground wheat crackers
Lunch: small portion of whole-wheat organic pasta with homemade red sauce
Snack when we got home from seeing The Dark Knight (which was FUCKING AWESOME) because it was 7:30 at night and I was starving again, (and I was proud of myself because Julian totally cheated on the cleanse and had popcorn and Reese's Pieces at the movie, and I didn't have a single bite of ANYTHING!): spoonful of organic natural peanut butter and a cup of soy milk
Dinner: Boca vegan burger (no bread or bun) topped with salsa, grilled marinated eggplant, which was DELICIOUS.
So, the crackers and hummus and the peanut butter and soy milk were definitely over the top, and consequently, I gained a pound. But I'm not beating myself up about it, just learning about my emotional responses to things and how I've mis-used food in the past. I need to find a more healthy outlet for those negative feelings. I'm not sure what that is yet, but it's not food and I need to start taking food out of that role. I haven't been starving on this cleanse except for the very first day, but I was starving yesterday and that was all emotions that didn't know how to express themselves. This is all a learning process.
I continue to be amazed at how small my appetite is. Sometimes I crave certain "off-limits" foods, but I realize right away that it's because I'm stressed or upset about something else, and I just don't eat them, and the craving passes. This morning I weighed in at 154.5, which is 5 pounds lost in 6 days. That's too fast and I don't want to lose that fast, but the first week is always a lot of water weight lost, so I trust the weight loss will slow down. I also firmly believe that I am well above my body's natural "set point", so it makes sense that as soon as I stopped eating large amounts of unhealthy foods, the weight started to drop off.
Anyway, menu from yesterday:
Breakfast: cantaloupe
Lunch: baked tofu over brown rice with veggies, topped with tahini and balsamic vinagrette. It was a small portion and I didn't finish all of it.
Dinner: we weren't very hungry (I think the brown rice from lunch filled me up, and Julian had cheated and had beer with lunch with his boss - the contract for London got signed yesterday), so I just made some hummus and we dipped carrots, radishes, tomato, and a few stone-ground whole wheat organic crackers into it. For dessert, I broke my no-artificial-sweetener rule and had a sugar-free pineapple-flavored popsicle - YUM!
Happy Saturday, everyone! We start packing up the house in earnest this weekend. Blergh! But at least we're doing it together.
Anyway, after I got them home last night (it was traumatizing for all three of us, me and the cats. I will NEVER take them to the vet without Julian again. Must get better about asking for help!) and finally had something to eat and started to wind down, I had the most intense craving for a cigarette that I've had since I quit - by FAR. Of course I didn't smoke, but I was like, WOW!! THAT hit out of nowhere. I actually chuckled at my addiction - it's so sneaky, it just waits in the wings for a weak moment and then BAM!
Miraculously, I STILL didn't cheat on the cleanse. How awesome am I???
Yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: canteloupe
Lunch: The bean salad I had the day before, but only a few bites (it wasn't as good the second day); mixed cut fruit (strawberries, watermelon, honeydew melon, canteloupe, mango, banana) from the cart outside
Dinner: Boca "chikn" patty over a small salad
Snack: 10 pistachios and MY GOD they were good
Okay, yesterday's menu:
Breakfast: canteloupe
Lunch: beans (assorted) cooked in vegetable stock, chilled, and dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, lots of cumin, and salt and pepper. YUM.
Dinner: teeny tiny portion of leftover whole wheat pasta with vegan red sauce. I wasn't hungry for anything else!
This is getting much, much easier. I am no longer hungry all day long, and I'm feeling better and better. I also realized last night that I am also PMSing, so it's kind of a miracle that I'm sticking to this and not mugging small children for their candy bars. Heh.
I'm amazed at how little I miss meat. Far as I can tell, it's just not going to be a problem to give it up permanently. On the other hand, I am SO looking forward to fish and eggs next week! :) :) :)
Breakfast: canteloupe and a banana
Lunch: vegan wrap with tomato, tofu, and brown rice
Dinner: small portion of whole wheat pasta and vegan sauce w/ tofu, medium portion of salad (romaine lettuce, carrot, cucumber, grape tomato, green onions, and my homemade dressing - we never use commercial bottled salad dressing - made with olive oil, lemon juice, dijon mustard, chopped garlic, onion powder, salt, and pepper).
I feel great and I've lost another half a pound. I am not weighing myself for another week though, as I think I'm getting obsessive about it. I wasn't nearly as hungry yesterday as I was on Day One, and today is better too. I have more energy. I feel good about the food choices I'm making.
Mainly I feel like I'm being mindful of what I eat, and that's my goal with this experiment.
heatherella is doing. Julian and I are doing it together and it basically looks like this:Day 1-7: complete veganism. No animal products.
Day 8-14: Same as Day 1-7, but add fish and eggs.
Day 15-21: Same as Day 8-14, but add goat's and sheep's milk cheeses (only from unpasteurized milk)
The difference between our plan and the others is that we did not cut out wheat gluten, although we are not really eating it anyway. We also did not cut out the organic sweeteners - cane juice, honey, etc, although again, we're eating mostly vegetables and fruits, so it's not an issue.
Our menu yesterday, Day One:
Breakfast: canteloupe
Lunch: salad with olive oil and balsamic, bowl of fruit
Dinner: marinated tofu and grilled asparagus
Before we started Monday morning, we weighed ourselves and were not surprised to find we'd gained more weight. We have been eating a lot of crap the past few months. I am not at my all time high of 165, but I was at 160. Well, 159.5, but you know, same thing. Heh. I was 130 when Julian and I met. 30 pounds in a year! But all this fat acceptance stuff I've been reading must really be working, because I didn't hate myself when I saw the number, and I was really okay with it. It's just a baseline, a place to begin, and it's only a fact; it doesn't have power over me. There are factors that caused that weight gain:
1. I got married and let myself go and enjoyed myself for the first year.
2. I quit smoking.
3. I injured myself and have been basically immobile for 2 months.
And those are ALL valid, even number one. I don't regret any of it (well except the ankle sprain, ha!) and I am really looking forward to making some changes to our diets, permanently.
This morning, I weighed 155.5. 3 pounds of water lost in the first day.
The other difference between our plan and the others is that we plan to continue the Day 15-21 day plan indefinitely; that is, we don't want to add meat or dairy back into our diets. Obviously, we've got fish and eggs in there, and goat's and sheep's milk cheese, but no cow's milk-derived products, and no beef, chicken, or pork. We're going to do it for some unspecified time and see how we feel. We both agree that we don't want to ever eat meat again that we don't know where it came from. No corporate meat, with its hormones and antibiotics and fecal matter. I would consider adding chicken back into our diets when we're in Europe and they have REAL free-range chickens available to buy. But not yet. I don't trust even the "organic" meat in the States. From what I keep reading, the organic corporations aren't much better than the conventional ones in many cases.
As far as dairy, there is a multitude of evidence to suggest that pasteurized, homogenized, antibiotic and hormone-filled cow's milk, and anything made from it, is basically toxin poison to human beings. We think we are better off without it.
I'll keep you posted on how it goes!
Work beckons. Too many blogs to read. Need to work. Don't want to.
Husband and self on vegan cleanse. Melon this morning. Yum.
Possible I've been Twittering too much.
A humorous recap of the 7th and final Harry Potter book.
That is all.
This is what comes of no longer working in a record store. I'm telling you, when you get old, you stop having ANY IDEA what's going on in music...
Profile
- tommybarbarella
- tommybarbarella
Syndicate
