My daughter came home today and is going to share the experience of the first 14 days on the South Beach diet with me. The diet is taxing in its prescribed recipes, but we’re going to give it a go. I’m a little anxious, frankly, but I will attempt to blog every day to express my thoughts.
Fingers crossed.
Just happened to stumble upon this blog post. Looks like it’s out of the UK. Men prefer women with curves, apparently. Check it out.
I bought the South Beach diet book today. As I mentioned, I’m so inspired by PastaQueen‘s story, I’m going to try and follow closely everything she did. While I was sitting at Barnes & Noble I made a list of everything I needed for the first few days of the diet. It was fairly exhaustive. One of my challenges with weight loss is I don’t know how to cook, really. I tend to throw stuff together that is easy. Nearly every ingredient for the first two days’ recipes was not in my fridge or my spice cabinet. It’s also a little expensive to buy all those things at once, but I realize I’ll be using them so hoping I can amortize the expense over the year. I spent $125 today and that only covers the first two days of the diet. I’ll buy the rest in similar short trips to the store.
I spoke to my daughter on the phone about my new venture into serious weight loss. My daughter is 17 and could probably afford to lose about 10, maybe 15 pounds, but she is obsessed with body image. She was happy to hear I’m going to try to lose weight and said she’d do the diet with me. She was not happy, however, that I started a blog to chart my progress. Her reaction: “Can anyone tell it’s you?” She expressed her fear of embarrassment for me (and her) if it were discovered I’m writing this blog. As I mentioned in my previous post, I want to conceal my identity as well at first. The reason why this is significant is I have a fairly high profile position in my industry which revolves around the social web. I have over 10000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of people read my industry blog. I’ve been transparent about my weight before on Twitter and on my personal blog, but it’s another thing to be so completely vulnerable- exposing the severity of the issues with weight loss for a morbidly obese person. I hope in time I can break that artificial separation between my professional self and this tortured inner (and outer) self character
I started a Twitter id too today. I chose Bulbasaur for my avatar because when my son was really small, he told me I looked like Bulbasaur– a Pokemon character. We thought it was funny at the time, but, ya know. It’s not really funny.
I have a hard time reaching my feet. I have to grab my shin to put on a sock. The massive frame of my body prevents me from moving around freely. Everything is an effort. I’m always afraid when I go into a boutique gift shop that I will knock something over because I misjudged my hips. Getting on and off buses is never graceful. (I need to take buses for various industry events where they shuttle you to dinner and events.) When I attend conferences, many times large groups of us will walk to nearby restaurants. Invariably, I always end up 20 paces behind the pack, trailing with some poor colleague who feels sorry for me. I was reading an article recently about how to react in a crisis. The article pointed out that people who were not fit suffered many more injuries and sometimes death because they didn’t have the ability to escape easily from a dangerous situation.
Of course, I’m writing this blog post laying in bed. I need to get moving today. I’m also going to the grocery store. Planning healthy choices.
I’ve let my gym membership languish. I forced myself to stop in today to look into getting my account straightened out. I had frozen my personal account because I wasn’t going, but because of a billing glitch, they terminated my daughter’s account. She’s not going to be happy to hear that. (My daughter has been in the Northeast all summer). She’s coming home on Monday.
The gym I used to attend when we lived up North had a womans-only area where I didn’t feel so self-conscious on the equipment. In addition, there were many all-size women who worked out at that gym, so I never felt too freakish. This new gym, however, gives me the self-conscious heebie jeebies. I feel like they should pay me to go there, as I’m a walking billboard for reasons why other members need to keep coming.
I don’t really like this gym. All I can really do at this weight is the treadmill. The treadmills are not as advanced as the one in my old gym. I used to listen to CNBC in the morning and several podcasts that I would synchronize to my ipod before I left in the morning. I’d like to switch gyms, but I’m not sure I can get out of my contract. In any event, I’m going to have to start going.
I’ve thought about walking around the neighborhood. It’s so unbearably hot here though.
For the past few months, it’s been bothering me that I am grotesquely overweight. Although I don’t have high blood pressure or diabetes or any other indicator that I’m unhealthy (even my cholesterol levels are not terribly unhealthy), the truth remains I am morbidly obese. My BMI is 46 where it should be somewhere around 20 or so. I weigh 285.
As a professional, I spend a lot of time online. I work on the social web, so to speak. It occurred to me that I should try blogging about my journey to reinvent my body shape. When I started researching “fat” blogs, I came across Jennette Fulda’s amazing PastaQueen blog and story. As they say, if she can do it, so can I.
Maybe.
When I went through my divorce, I kept a journal online. It was invaluable to be able to express my emotions, my fears, and ultimately my joy when it was over. The journal was private, however. For this life-changing trek, I see the value in sharing my experience with others who are also struggling and with those who can offer encouragement and advice. It’s a little scary putting it all out there in the public domain, but that’s part of the problem with obesity. We’re afraid to deal with it head on.
So, with that short introduction, I’m beginning my trek. I don’t know where it will take me, how long it will take me, and whether I’ll ever succeed at tackling my obesity, but this is my attempt to begin. For now, I’m going to mask my real identity. I feel badly about that, but the real truth is, I’m ashamed of my weight problem. I’ll be talking a lot more about that in posts to come.
The Fatcinating Blog 