I've been complaining all summer that my linen trousers are too loose and my cropped jeans are too loose, and that skirts are made too big in the waist and I can't find one that fits. I was trying on and buying UK size 10, and had it in my head that if something was baggy in a size 10, it must be made to be that way because there is no way I wear smaller than a size 10.
Well, today I tried on a skirt in a size 8. It fit. I then tried on the same style skirt in a size 10. It was too big.
I actually wear a size 8 in skirts and some trousers. For over a year, at my current weight, I was a size 10 or 12. Now I am a size 8 or 10. I weigh 135 lbs still, but wear a size smaller than I did last year.
People, a UK 8 is a US 4!!
This is SO freaking me out. Most of my adult life I wore a US size 18. When I lost weight, I would get down to a 16, feel complacent and gain back up to an 18. For a brief time I wore a 20. It's SOO hard to believe I am wearing a US 4.
1 REST 2 Get Ripped 3 Express Cardio AND Kundalini Warrior Workout 4 Complete Aerobics and Weight Training
5 Kick, Punch and Crunch 6 REST 7 Body Sculpt 8 Cardio Sculpt Blaster AND Kundalini Ultimate Stretch Workout 9 Jiggle Free Buns AND Jiggle Free Arms 10 Kick, Punch and Crunch 11 Get Ripped to the Core
12 Kundalini for Beginners and Beyond 13 Fat Burning Cardio Toning AND Kundalini Warrior Workout 14 Cardio Dance Slimdown 15 Kundalini Ultimate Stretch Workout 16 Low Impact Circuit 17 Get Ripped Slim & Lean 18 REST
19 Body Fusion 20 REST 21 Super Body Sculpt 22 Fat Blasting Cardio AND Kundalini for Beginners and Beyond 23 Aerobic Body Shaping 24 Kundalini Ultimate Stretch Workout 25 Get Ripped
26 Firm Bootcamp Maximum Calorie Burn 27 Cardio Sculpt 28 Kundalini for Beginners and Beyond 29 Kick Max 30 Basic Step AND Yoga Burn 31 Complete Body Sculpting
They're gone now. I am faced with the usual sense of deep desolation and cutting grief. I think this is a primal response. No matter how ready my head is for the separation, it is still deeply and unexpectedly wrenching, and usually doesn't happen until he's gone. (Or when I visit there, it's after they leave me at the airport). I know I live here and DS lives there. I know all the reasons for it. And still this happens every time, and will happen every time, for the rest of my life.
So now I'll be bursting into tears for no apparent reason at least once a day for about the next two weeks. I'll have to figure out how to say as little as possible to my colleagues at work when they ask me how the holiday went. I will have to face finding things he left behind here and there in the flat (like 5 pairs of socks I just discovered! How can you leave 5 pairs of socks!)
It's almost harder to get together than it is to stay apart. That may not make sense but it is true.
I feel absolutely nauseated, and my impulse is to go to the store and buy cakes or chocolates and eat them all.
I probably should not be blogging about this, as it will only invite some people who could never possibly understand to make remarks like, 'Well, why don't you move back to the US?' or 'I could never live in a different country from my child.' Could I just ask, please don't do that. It hurts in deeper ways than you know. There are things that you don't know. There are things even I will never understand about my situation. All I know is, I've done the best I could, I've done all I know to do, I've made choices and decisions--and so have we all--that have led to where I am now. He's made some choices that have led him to where he is now.
I do welcome all support, though.
Sometimes I wonder why we're given all this life, when so much of it is spent hurting. Why are we given all these emotions. Why do we have all these hours when so many of them are spent in such turmoil. And why do we look back and back and back, when there's nothing we can do about it.
I'm off to try to distract myself. It's the hours that I have to get through now.
How many times have I heard carnivores and lacto-ovo vegetarians say to me, 'I can give up anything except cheese. I love cheese.'
What's the deal with cheese? It doesn't taste or smell good, if you are honest with yourself about it. Like alcohol, tobacco and other bad-for-you substances, you have to acquire a taste for it. Ultimately, it's the brain associating the taste with the subsequent pleasurable feelings that leads us to 'love' cheese. (And chocolate, and beer, and wine...)
Research by Dr. Neal Barnard of PCRM, the author of Breaking the Food Seduction: Behind Food Cravings and Seven Steps to End Them Naturally, has shown that naloxene, an opiate-blocker used to treat morphine and heroin overdoses, reduces the desire for chocolate, sugar, cheese and meat. This suggests, writes Barnard, that "their attraction does indeed come from drug-like effects."
Amy Lanou, nutrition director of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says that it's something called casein that makes cheese addictive. "Cheese is a concentrate of protein and fat, and casein is a type of protein found naturally in milk. Caseins convert to casomorphines, which are chemically similar to morphine, when they break down during digestion. It's these casomorphines that are addictive," says Lanou. "All mammalian mothers' milk contains casomorphines so that the young will return to the breast for milk." Since we are the only mammal that regularly drinks the milk of other animals, Lanou posits that it's this process that's behind humanity's affection for cheese.
Cheese contains far more casein than in cow or human milk, and holds other drug-like compounds as well, such as PEA, phenyethylamine, an amphetamine-like chemical. (Chocolate also contains PEA, but according to Dr. Neal Barnard in Breaking the Food Seduction, cheese contains 10 times more PEA than chocolate!)
So. Maybe that's the reason you think you can give up anything but cheese.
Here are some reasons why you really ought to make the effort to end your cheese addiction:
It's fattening.
It is full of saturated fat, which is linked to atherosclerosis, heart attack and stroke
It is linked to cancer of various types, including breast cancer
It is high in calcium, but it leaches calcium from the bones! (That's not something you're going to hear from the dairy industry, so you may not believe me, seeing as most of the western world has been brainwashed by big meat and dairy)
Did I mention that it's fattening?
At the risk of sounding like a militant vegan, cheese is gross anyway. It's like the crusty scrapings from inside of a nursing mother's bra. Yummy.
And lastly, it is fattening.
Okay, that's enough of that. The boys are in the living room watching Total Recall, a film which I abhor, so I thought I'd blog.
Family have been here since Saturday. We spent that day sitting around fighting jet lag and playing board games. It was raining. Then Sunday we walked them around the town. Monday we went to Birmingham. DS didn't want to see Harry Potter and opted instead to spend the admission fee on something, so we went to the Bull Ring, then popped over to Chinatown. It was only three hours, but they were both knackered, so we caught the 16.12 home. On the train, I asked Ethan if he enjoyed his day. He said yes. 'At least I learned something,' he said. 'What?' I asked. He leaned forward conspiratorially and said in a low voice, 'Birmingham is foul.' I gave a sharp laugh and said, 'Son, you just earned your British passport! You've bypassed the Life in the UK test and gone straight to Briton in one city visit.' Next stop Manchester and Sheffield!
This morning Ethan joined me for a short set of sun salutations (Budokon Beginning Practice), but left when I started up the 5 Tibetans on Kundalini for Beginners and Beyond. He said he didn't like to get hot. LOL Boy, is he stiff. He did well considering it was his first time to try yoga, though.
Today we went shopping in Nuneaton instead of going to Leamington Spa. My dad was too tired to do a train journey and walk-around, so I announced that we were staying home today. He slept all day long, woke up at 3.30 just as Ethan and I were going to try to sneak out and leave him on the sofa, went into town with us. We just got back at 6.00 and I give him 15 minutes before he passes out again. Ethan has just eaten his first fish and chip meal. He said the fish was good but the chips not so much. That's an experience he needed to have, I think.
So the phone rings in the middle of the night. Derek goes bolting out of bed saying something about it being his alarm clock. I look at the clock on my side of the bed--it's midnight! Turns out it was my mom calling to tell me that Dad and Ethan have for some reason been diverted on their flight from Memphis to Newark and have landed in Allantown, Pennsylvania. We go back to bed. Phone rings at 3.09 AM. It's mom again to say that they are in Newark but have missed their trans-Atlantic flight and will have to get the next one at the same time tomorrow. So basically, they will have spent nearly two days in airports just trying to get their flight to England. The airline did provide a room and food vouchers, but they're still going to be hanging about in the airport all day.
Anyway, it gave us the opportunity to go to the grocery store and stock up on some food. It's just as well they weren't here because it is really tipping it down with rain out there and as we don't have a car and have to walk and carry what we buy, they would probably have opted to stay back at the flat and wait for us.
Plus, I got the chance to do another workout today! I did Aerobic Body Shaping this morning. Man, was I sweating. I did Jari Love almost exclusively last month, and the break from the Firm was just what I needed to help the old workouts shake me up again. (Weird factoid. I weighed at 3.00 this morning while I was up. 136.6. Freaked me out. I weighed again when I woke up at 8.45--it was 134.2. Bodies are weird.)
Derek has the day off today because obviously we thought we were going to be spending the day with my family, so we are going to do a kundalini yoga workout together this afternoon, after lunch digests! It's so much fun to do the yoga together with our mats side by side. Very good.
We've book a taxi to take us to the airport to meet the family tomorrow morning. For some reason even though they're on the same flight they were meant to get on Thursday, it's due to land an hour earlier. Weird.
My UK passport arrived today! Whew. Now all my vital documents are back safe and sound with me. Hooray!
When I got home from work today, I didn't feel like doing any step aerobics, so I opted for Ultimate Fat Burning Workout. I just finished it and I am in a lather of sweat. I haven't worked out for three days and it felt good to get moving again, but also awkward. I was over half an hour into the workout before the endorphins really started kicking in and I started getting mean with it. But I did my set of push-ups in intermediate (girl-style) position rather than on toes.
Let this be a warning to you, people. You only have to miss a few workouts and you start to feel it. I tell you I did not want to do any workout. I rationalised all the walk home about how I ought to celebrate getting my passport by not working out--maybe even by buying a cake and a bottle of sparkling wine. I know that while the family are here I won't really get the chance for another workout until 30th of July. What am I crazy, that I would miss the last opportunity to work out for the next 11 days?! So when I got home, I put on my workout clothes. Still didn't want to do it. Ditched the planned workout and stood and stared at my shelf full of exercise DVDs. I wanted to do yoga, but I haven't done a sweaty cardio in so long, I knew I needed it. I looked at friendly lovely Jari Love's weight-lifting workouts, thinking, 'They get my heartrate up.' I was just avoiding the cardio workouts, though. That stupid childish inner voice was wheedling its way out of doing what I need most to do--get my heartrate way up, breath hard and sweat my way through some tough cardio. (Tough by my standards at least.) I chose the only cardio workout on my shelf with no step and no jumping up and down and I got in there and I did it, using 3kg dumbbells!
So anyway, I'm glad I did it, I'm drenched, and tonight DH and I are going to do a bit of blitz of sweeping and tidying in preparation for the arrival of my family tomorrow.
135.6 this morning. I have not worked out for three days in a row. Hubby and I have been busy each evening planning.
Tonight, it's Cardio Sculpt with Allie Del Rio. It was my very first Firm workout, and the one I return to after a hiatus of any length.
When DH gets home, we're going to do a mad dash of cleaning of the flat. Then tomorrow morning, we have to catch the 6.00AM train to Birmingham International Airport to meet Dad and DS. Unfortunately, the forecast is HEAVY rain all day on Friday. Oh well, what can you do. Let's just hope that 25-27th July are at least partly sunny. I'm sure we'll be shopping for DS a raincoat!
