Monthly Me - September 2014

Outfit of the day:

- cute baby-whale shirt with tie shoulders and front pocket

- fav purple skirt

- Pan nail polish (mine - Incidental Twin)

- slate Avon eyeliner, black Mark mascara, and gold-copper mismatched Burt's Bees tinted lip balm that is so old it smells stale

- Annabel Lee perfume by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

I'm not at all happy about the weight, but I should be getting to my Moontime this week if the black cohosh keeps working, so I won't complain about it until I know whether that's it. And I've been eating poorly again because funds are tighter and tighter and I'm having trouble affording the more expensive options I should be eating. I'm hoping to take a trip to the local Korean market this weekend coming up to se eif I can get some rice-based stuff and some fresh veg for cheap.

Physically and mentally, I feel like I'm doing better. I've had a few days where depression was an issue, but overall, that's looking better. If I can afford it, I'm going to add magnesium and st johns wort to help with that, but I think the cohosh and the big doses of omega-3s I've been taking are helping. They helped Kickstarter my moon last month after almost six months without, and ever since then I've been feeling less fragile, less tender, less wobbly and wrong than I had for ages beforehand.

I'm also writing again, and that always helps me feel more human. I lowered my daily goals so that it's way less stressful to get them or to miss them, and added daily poetry, and it's early yet, but it feels better. We'll see if I can keep it up!

And I feel like even if I've been trending heavier again, I feel better and look better. My hair is smoother and less dry since I started treating it with coconut oil, my skin is softer since the same, and my face is less... Okay, my skin gets sort of gritty when my diet is off and I'm not washing it enough, but with the vitamins and my fancy new soap from the handmade soap stall at the flea market, it's much clearer.

How're you doing? How do you feel today?

more about weight and ideals

According to the interwebs, if my wrist stays the same, I should have a waist of just over 25 inches. I have about ten inches more than that. But also according tot he interwebs, waist and hip should be about ten inches off eachother, and I do have that, so... I'm horribly fat, but in perfect proportion?

I don't know why I look at those charts. I keep wanting to have some sort of goal, something to compare to, but all it does is make me think that the charts want me to be way too skinny. When I weighed 100 lbs, which is 20lbs less than they say my ideal is, I had a 24 inch waist.

But also also according to those charts, my neck is good, and my arms and calfs are below where they want them to be. So... it's just my butt that's huge. Got it.

I lost two pounds this week, and I'm pretty sure it's because we haven't turned the air on yet. It's warm in here, and that makes me less likely to sit around eating when I'm home. And it's hot outside, which makes me less likely to want the heavy, starchy things I usually eat at work. I've pretty much switched naturally and without any trouble at all to what I call my Summer Diet-- I just don't want solid foods more than once a day, I don't want heavy starches, I don't want heavy or greasy meat. I want juice and apples and berries and sorbet and lemonade and sweet tea and yogurt. So I've been eating less, drinking more, and sweating like a pig, and I'm down two pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but I'm really short-- it shows. Already, my waist is narrower, and that corner of my hip that was starting to look like a shelf is starting to smooth out again.

I think I'm okay with this. I'm aiming for 130 first, to see if I can get it, and I'm under 150 now, so it seems easier. Then I'll see about 120, which is what I weighed when I started college and what the charts say is the upper end of ideal-- it's where I was comfortable. Less than that, and a stiff breeze can knock me off my feet. So there we go. I'm still on my same plan, even after all those charts.

appropriate weight and other matters

I just spent half an hour looking up appropriate weight-to-height ratios, and aside from one really scary chart that said I shouldn't be over 99 lbs for my height (?!?), they all sort of agreed that I should be around 120ish for the middle-range height (max, somewhere around 130, min somewhere around 100, though it seems unfair that my min is further from my average than my max).

Now, I'm currently at 159, as of this morning. I know this is too much, but I don't feel like I'm well into obese as far as these charts are concerned-- I mean, I don't look like those women that come in and order triple-scoop icecreams, have three chins and huge elbow-fat, and look like they're smuggling pillows under their shirts. I'm also not as mean as them, but that's a different story. And I know from experience that at 100, I'm bony and boobless. 120 should be about where I was when I started college, though I carry my weight in all new and different places now, and I think I wouldn't feel too skinny there, but that's alot of weight to lose to get there, and-- well, here's a confession:

In highschool, I was anorexic. I spent more than a year eating once or less a day, and at my lowest, I was under 89 lbs. At the same height I am now. I didn't realize at the time that I was anorexic because I didn't have the mental problems or the exercise addiction that went along with it, but I did (and do) have a stomach-valve malfunction that makes it hard to eat sometimes. In high school, it made it better to just not be hungry, so I stopped eating. But now, I know my triggers, and I know that when I cut my intake too much, I start obsessing, and I develop the OCD I didn't have then. And it would be so easy to just stop eating again. After a few days, I'm just not hungry any more.

But I don't want to starve myself, so I have to be careful to keep this reasonable.

And I still hate exercise.

I'm working on only eating when I can sit down and have a proper meal. I'm drinking more tea again, both because I love tea and miss it and because it speeds my metabolism without getting me so wired that I can't function (although I have to be careful about drinking it too late, it seems). I have a hoolahoop that I really like, and there are apparently hoola-hoop-exercise videos on YouTube, and maybe I'll take up poi or something, too. Things that take effort but are about the opposite if boring. When it stays cool, I'm going to try to walk more and maybe start running some, when I can afford to buy a pair of shoes that aren't flip flops. I'm working more, and that means I'm lazing less, and that's already good. And I'm going to start enforcing weekly weigh-ins so I know where I am and have to face it when I eat poorly.

And that's where the Plan is right now.

And in other matters:

I think we're getting a pitbull puppy. I'm not ready to pottytrain a baby dog, but I think as long as we're nice to it, it should grow up nice, right? Just because they're bred as fighting dogs doesn't mean all of them will clamp on and have to be killed to get them to release, right?