Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Yesterday, I talked about writing when you feel lack of motivation. Here is an example of what I was talking about taken from my personal journal completely uncut and uncensored. It usually takes this much writing to get to the bottom of my problem, sometimes more. When you try this, just keep writing until you feel better and motivated to stay the course.

02-01-05: 8:31 am: Good morning. I am intent on getting a lot of entries written today, so I am getting my morning pages finished as soon as possible. I have this Friday off, so I am super excited! I exercised this morning, but it didn’t really feel good, so I’m thinking of doing more at the gym today. I know my heart rate was in the correct range and I did it for 50 minutes, but it just didn’t feel right. I don’t know what I need, but it just didn’t feel like work enough, so I feel like I need to do more. I just … I don’t know. I guess I feel like I need to suffer or something and it was too easy this morning. I just don’t know. According to the heart rate monitor, I was working hard. When I first started, it felt hard, but I got into the show I was watching and it was over before I realized it. I don’t know. I guess I should just take it as it is. I guess I’m disappointed because I didn’t get the runner’s high from it. I guess I can’t get high from exercise every time I do it.

It’s trying really hard to snow today. The small flakes are floating down, but they might as well be imaginary for all the effect that they are having on the area. The sky is blue to the west, but it’s really dark and cloudy right above us. It’s strange dandruff-like snow.

8:56 am: I got interrupted and had some real work to do. I did well eating yesterday. Mike wanted to go out to eat last night, so we went to Del Taco. Mike was so happy to go there. I am reluctant to go there when I’m dieting because I always want to eat a quesadilla, but they are so many points that I just can’t afford them. This time, I ordered a rice cup and a green burrito. I realized that I like the quesadilla because it tastes so much like the green sauce on the green burrito. Next time, I’m going to ask for extra green sauce. When I was finished, I remember feeling full and satisfied. I was surprised because I expected to be disappointed. It actually took me a half hour to realize that I wasn’t disappointed. I ate a total of 8 points instead of 20, and I felt really good about it. I was really surprised at how good I felt. A 20 point quesadilla doesn’t overfill me like most 20 point items usually do, so I wouldn’t have been sick. It’s not like I avoided being sick. I just felt good.

Thinking about it right now, I’m wishing for a quesadilla, though. I was satisfied with that other food, but I really wanted a quesadilla. I don’t know about this situation. They are not really worth 20 points, though. Maybe Mike and I could make quesadillas that are less points. I should talk to him about it. Here I am talking about how NOT disappointed I was last night, but right now I am feeling disappointed. What is the matter with me? It’s just food. Why do I feel deprived? Why do I feel like I’m missing out? This can’t be about the quesadilla. I felt full and satisfied yesterday. Why do I feel like I’m missing out now? What is difference?

I really don’t know. I feel hungry right now, but it’s snack time, so that makes sense. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe all of this focus on losing weight right now reminds me of when I was in Billings. When Grandma was so obsessed with getting us thin, I constantly felt deprived. This morning, I tried to watch the rest of the Margaret Cho video, but it was scratched and the DVD player couldn’t read it. She was talking about her feelings with food. She said that when she was thin, her father loved her and when she was fat, she was invisible. I remember feeling like that at my grandma and grandpa’s house, except I never remember getting thin enough to deserve Grandpa’s attention. I don’t think I’ll ever be thin enough to please him. When I lost 50 pounds at first, he didn’t give me one word of praise. There is no pleasing him.

When Margaret Cho talked about that, I was having so much trouble with the DVD that I never got a punchline or was able to laugh about it. I’m sure if I could have seen the rest of the DVD, I would feel better now. Instead, I ended up watching Northern Exposure, which was good, but it wasn’t what I needed.

I don’t know how to heal from this. No matter what I do, I will never be able to please him. I should just concentrate on pleasing myself. She said that she wondered how much time she would save if she just stopped spending all those extra seconds berating herself about her weight. That is so true. She said she saved 97 minutes a week. I wonder if I logged how many seconds a day I think negatively about myself how much time would I save? How much better would I feel?

I guess the Margaret Cho thing bugged me this morning. Suddenly, the quesadilla looks incredible and I wonder at how I felt satisfied last night. It has nothing to do with the quesadilla. It has to do with how I feel about myself. It’s the same reason the exercise didn’t invigorate me this morning. I let myself get a little depressed about the whole weight issue. How do I get out of this? How do I feel better?

10:00 am: I just ate my snack and put everything into the WW tracker. If I eat everything that I brought today, I will only have 9 points left for the day. That includes my exercise and everything. Usually that feels like plenty, but today, it felt like not enough. Right now, it feels like enough, but I panicked earlier. Something drastically changes in my mind when I go into Deprivation Mode. Suddenly, 9 points seems like it’s not enough. I actually removed my applesauce and graham crackers from the list so that I could have more points at dinner. I was feeling deprived, so the first thing I did was take away my treat. What the hell is the matter with me?

God, I need to keep a tight watch on myself. Here, I thought I was doing great and all I noticed was that I had a bad run this morning. I didn’t even think about the stuff that Margaret was talking about this morning. I was even trying to talk about how good I felt last night about only eating the green burrito and how I didn’t need the quesadilla anymore because it’s really the green sauce that I like. I felt like I had made such a fantastic advance, but I was bugged by that quesadilla. I just need to watch myself carefully. It’s amazing the things that set off my instincts. Deprivation Mode is something that I deal with on such a guttural level that I am almost unconscious of it. How do I fix this? I am feeling a little better right now, but the panic is still there. 9 points is plenty for dinner. Restricting things even more is not going to make me feel better, but that was my first instinct. I wanted to hoard as many points as I could for dinner. I don’t know how to get beyond this because it seems so incongruous. I feel deprived, so I don’t let myself have my treat. Enough weeks of doing that, and I end up bingeing. I can be really tough with myself for a long time, but after awhile, I end up overeating.

I guess the hard part is that I don’t understand it. My first instinct when I felt deprived was to hoard points. I know what happens when I hoard points. I end up at the end of the day, unable to eat them all, so I end the day low on points. Sometimes I do that several days in a row until I end up so hungry and truly deprived that I binge. I know how the process goes. That’s why I required myself to eat all of my points every week. The last two weeks, I have been using a lot of my flex points at the first of the week and then subsisting on a couple of flex points a day. It would be better to spread them out to four points a day instead, but I don’t think that was what put me in Deprivation Mode.

Just thinking about Grandpa and my weight is what did it. I had no trouble last night. I ate the burrito and rice. They were filling and satisfying last night and I remember feeling surprised and happy. I felt like I had made progress. This morning when I tried to recount it for my journal, I ended up telling the story as if I were deprived.

Ironically, now that I’ve looked at this, I feel much better. Nine points (plus the 2 flex points that I forgot earlier) sounds like plenty for dinner. I can have dinner for two or three points if I need to. Nine sounds great and I could even eat out at a restaurant with that amount. That quesadilla isn’t calling to me anymore.