Costo and gym judgement

Seriously, how bad does someone need a free hot dog sample?

I haven't been shopping at Costco since right before I started Optifast in February.  I did go once for a work thing and another time to buy shoes and vitamins for my mom, but I mean to go shopping for myself.  It is just too tempting a place for an overeater.  Trust me when I tell you that I have spent a pretty penny there in the past.  I was never one to sample the food at the end of every aisle like what I saw back in February.  Every time I indulged, it was in private where no one could see me.  So I went in there today to get some yummy salmon, chicken breasts, fruit and veggies.  Since I will be eating a lot of veggies and fruit as well as healthy cuts of fish and meat, I thought that was a good place for me to go.  Yet, there were those end-of-aisle hawkers.  I was amazed at the lines that accumulated and how annoyed people got at me for trying to go around them.  Well excuuuuse me for actually trying to shop.  I did well and was proud of myself for making good choices.  Yay me!  I did discover something that my body just doesn't like ... Greek yogurt.  Perhaps it was the batch I got, I don't know.  But my body was screaming at me, "Just say no!!!"  I guess I'm just used to the regular non-fat plain yogurt and not that thick stuff.  Otherwise, I found some great stuff to experiment with.  My challenge right now is to get a lot of veggies in without making a big salad at every meal.  I love a good salad, but after a while, you start feeling like a furry little bunny eating all that lettuce.  Melissa did give me some good suggestions for roasting my veggies and preparing them in other ways.  I appreciate that so much because I need the variety.

Later on the in the day, I decided to hit the gym for a good workout.  It was a little difficult because of the ten huge plasma TV's they had above the cardio section ... every single station had some piece on about the shooting tragedy in Connecticut.  I had my iPhone plugged in and was listening to music on Pandora, but I couldn't escape the images.  My heart is so heavy when I think about what happened to those poor babies, their teachers and other innocent victims who never anticipated such a fate coming upon them.  It helps me to remember, though, that I always need to tell people how much I love them and how much they mean to me.  Life is too short and precious not to do that.  Besides that, though, my experience in the gym today was a little weird.  One one hand, I had some man watching me.  I was walking on the treadmill for an hour (I want to run, but my knees just won't let me), alternating my speed from 3 miles an hour to 3.5 miles an hour on a random hill track.  So I would walk slower when I was walking on a flat surface and kick it up when I was walking on the hills.  When I work out at the gym, I am definitely in my own zone.  The earphones are in and I'm lost in the music. But, every so often when I would look up, I would see this man from the other side of the room where the weight machines were checking me out.  He wasn't outright staring at me the whole time, but between his sets.  For some reason, that made me walk faster.  Was it because I was being looked at and wanted to appear like I was doing something or was I trying to run away?  Weird feeling.  Then I had two women who didn't know each other look at me with disgust on their faces.  Hard to ignore when I caught them doing it.  So I was judging them right back, thinking how dare they put all that on me.  They don't have an idea of where I've come from.  If they were judging me so much today, can you imagine how floored they would have been to see me sweatin' it up at 420 pounds?  Actually, come to think of it, they would have never met me at 420 pounds ... I wouldn't have even dreamt to step foot in a gym at that size, no way.

I'm working hard at taking care of myself, whether that is physically, emotionally or both.  Soon I'm going to start writing on some of the questions from the workbook/binder we received from the Optifast clinic.  I want to seriously delve into the "why" of overeating, even if that might prove a difficult task for me.  The easy part was the shakes, the hard part is after the shakes, especially when I'm still trying to lose weight and not being on the shakes.  This is life and it isn't easy, but that's my challenge.  The 2012 year was about starting my journey in losing weight, which I think was a great success.  2013 and beyond is about continuing on that journey while attempting to find joy in the process at the same time.  I don't want this to be about just me taking the weight off.  Of course that is important for me, but I want it to be about a changed life where I get to make different, better choices and embrace being healthy.  Can you imagine me ... healthy?  I want to embrace that and some difficult work will be a part of the process.  The truth is, though, I'm no longer afraid of it.  I want the life I'm walking towards so much more than I ever wanted in that larger body.  And you know what?  I deserve it. So do you.

Heartbreak for her

A story has come out about a bus monitor in New York who was bullied by middle school children while she was working.  They relentlessly teased her about being overweight, "calling her fat and at one point suggesting that her children commit suicide."  When I heard about this story, my heart just broke for this woman.  Sometimes children just don't have a filter (as well as some clueless adults), but to treat another human being like that is not only disrespectful, but just downright deplorable.  I couldn't watch the actual video they took of the incident, but I knew from the clips I saw on the news that she was taking the teasing because she just didn't want to make it worse and probably wanted to have it end as soon as possible.  It brought back painful memories for me.

I have always been overweight, never had those "thin" years and I, too, was relentlessly teased at different points in my life.  Her bus ride brought back an incident that I had on a bus when I was in middle school.  For a solid week, a girl-bully would tease me on the bus ride to school.  She would get in the seat behind me and say just awful things to me about how fat she thought I was, how much of a loser I was, how she said I smelled and all kinds of other awful things to make me feel as big as an ant.  She got off on it and made sure other kids around me would hear her taunting.  Nobody stopped her and I was afraid to do so because she got in fights with people all the time.  Yet, every single day, she was on me.  Finally, that Friday, I calmly got up, turned around in my seat ... and punched her face with all the might I had in my arm.  Boom!  She hit the floor, was bleeding and in pure agony.  The force in my arm was not just for her, but for every other time I had been teased and made fun of, as if I wasn't worthy of being a human being and that it was okay to treat me like that.  Then, I turned around and sat back down, like nothing had ever happened.  I got in serious trouble, but I didn't even care.  The pain she caused me inside was like something I could never describe, but I think people reading this probably understand.

It pains me that people in society think it's okay to hurt someone because they are not the same size and shape as they are.  We all have things that bring us to becoming overweight and it's not a simple put-down-the-fork-and-push-away-from-the-table solution.  Oh, how I wish it was!  I ache for the woman in this story and the indignity she suffered at the hands of bullies, even if they were children.  This is another reminder that losing weight is not an easy feat.  There are emotional issues behind carrying extra weight and, often times, a lot of pain.  Yet, I know, I must work through that pain and any issues that come up so that I don't have to live in a body that keeps me in an unhealthy space any longer.