BACK ON THE RIGHT TRACK AND IN A PRETTY DRESS

If you scroll up and look right, you will see a before and after comparison of me at my heaviest in February 2009 on vacation and me in June 2010 at a family wedding.  Underneath, you will see my body fat percentage when the photos were taken.  Lately, my body fat has been above 34.4%, but today - TA DA! - I hit that number again!  I was so happy that I put on that same dress and had my husband take a pic to celebrate.

So this is me, with a different do, no makeup and wearing my cheaters, and no, I am not referring to a push up bra!

Im just happy today and feeling skinny...

(To hear the song, fast forward the video to 0:45.)

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Letting Go And Moving On

The last few months I have been pondering letting go of some items I have around the house that have ties to Barry, and the life we lived together.

• Our bed frame that we bought when we were first married
• Our Christmas Tree
• The Roses from the arrangements that my friend Lisa made for me for his memorial service

And that just names a few of them, well, the items that are weighing most heavily on my mind.

Our Christmas Tree we bought when the twins were just 10 months old.  It is 7.5 feet tall, 5 feet wide at the base and is just huge. It has lived in 6 houses, this one being the sixth. It has been set up for 9 Christmases, and held many years of ornaments.  Has had hundreds of Christmas gifts under it.  Has been piled with candy canes, and cursed at for being difficult to put up. Barry even made us a diagram after Christmas 2008 so we would remember how to do it.  Youd think after so many years we would remember, but we did not.  But now it is leaning a bit to the side.  The box was so torn up and taped up, that last year I bought a bag for it. I have to string the lights myself and it is a very tedious job.  So this year I am getting a new tree, with pre-strung lights.

But what do I do with the old tree? Do I keep it in the bag its in for years down the road? When Barry and I bought it, he said wed get the biggest tree possible so that we wouldnt have to buy another one for YEARS. He picked it out.  So have 9 years been enough? Should I make this the 10th year it is up?

I feel like change is needed.  I want a new tree, and will buy one, but I just dont know what to do with the old one. I feel wrong getting rid of it.  But I dont want it to clutter up my garage.  Im all about streamlining lately, and have been getting the urge to declutter and purge again.

Now I have the roses from Barrys memorial service, dried, in my closet.  Why have I kept them? I dried them all, and they sit in a basket out of sight.  I dont want them anymore.  I have no use for them.  But to throw them away would, again, make me feel guilty.  Almost like I dont respect him anymore, that I dont value the memory of that day.

Lastly is our bed frame. This I struggle getting rid of the most. We actually bought an entire bedroom set, and had matching dressers and a nightstand to go with it, which I gave to Habitat for Humanity before I moved. This was our wedding gift to each other. But the bed frame, that is special.  That is the baby making bed, where our family was started.  That bed has seen love, anger, sadness, fighting, laughing, lots of sex and making love.  It has seen everything.  And the night after Barry died, I laid in it, and woke up crying in my sleep at 5 AM.  It was the foundation of our marriage almost, and I have it in my garage right now, leaning against the wall.  I knew when I moved that I would keep it.  But here I am, almost seven months later and I dont want it anymore.  It is taking up space.  What the hell do I do with it?

Does all this mean I am moving on with my life? I dont want to "lose" Barry, so to speak.  I want to hold onto him forever.  But I can not keep all this "clutter" in my life.  Quite honestly, it stresses me out because I see more stuff taking up space.  And I do not want clutter.  I hate clutter. Yet with four children, it is nearly impossible to not have clutter, but I do my best.  And throw away crap I see lying around.  Anyway, I dont want to disrespect him.  I feel bad for wanting to get rid of all of it, especially the bed.  Its just though I dont need it anymore, I wont ever have a use for it unless one of the kids wants it when they move out of the house.  So do I hold onto it for another 10+ years? Hell no! But then there is just that tie to the bed, the one place I last laid with Barry, where I heard him snore and wanted to suffocate him, where we loved each other, and cuddled, and made love and had sex and laughed and fought.  There is so much to that bed.

I know these things dont represent him, our memories of him are in our hearts and our minds, but there are still things that he touched, things he fixed.  Hell, we were going to get rid of the whole bedroom set if we had moved to Pennsylvania anyway! I just feel like its so special now, that how could I possibly get rid of it?

I just dont know what to do.  I want it, yet I dont want it.  I need to move on, and I am afraid these things are holding me back from doing so.

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Were Back!

I apologize for my absence and lack of writing.

While I thought I would have all the time in the world to blog while we were in Florida, i did not have much time at all.  We were so busy.

We had a wonderful vacation.

two weeks in hot, sunny, Florida.

Walt Disney World, NASA, Gatorland, Cocoa Beach.

Putting my feet in the Atlantic Ocean was one of my highlights, as was seeing Eric, who was Barrys squad Sgt when he was in the Army years ago.

Spending a day with an old friend, and dinner with another who has promised to come visit us next summer from Tampa.

I am tired and exhausted.  I took over 2000 photos.  Probably spent that much money on souvenirs, food, etc etc.

The kids are back in school, tomorrow will be our first normal week back. Back to routines, to schedules, to normalcy.  To rain.

Waking up Thursday morning to a wall of fog outside my window was monumentally depressing, as Wednesday morning I woke up to sun.  Left Orlando and it was 90F outside.  Got home late Wednesday night and it was 60F inside my house.

Weve spent the weekend adjusting.  I promise to write more.  soon.

But I am tired, and emotional. Missing Barry so much right now.  Today I took a scalding hot shower and sat on the seat in the shower with the water cascading above me.

The water was so hot it was scalding.  But it felt good as I cried buckets into my hands.

I was sad because I was told I needed to lose more weight.  Yes I know that. But almost 90lbs in one year is pretty fucking amazing.  And even more sad because I know the size I am now Barry would be a total horn dog teenage boy with me. He wouldnt be able to keep his hands off me. But to everyone else I am still fat.

I need to go catch up on Glee from while I was gone, and then off to bed early for me.  I do promise to write soon.

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BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

I have been doing so well that I stopped tracking what I eat and I also stopped monitoring my blood ketones and blood glucose.  But in the past week, I have gained over two pounds and I feel like Ive been slightly overeating protein and carbs and undereating fat.

It was my usual habit to have 2 eggs with cream cheese in the morning, then have a fat snack around lunch time and then have only 3 ounces of some sort of protein for dinner along with minimal veggies.  While I was doing this, I was never hungry and never felt the need to snack on anything after dinner.

For the past week, I have been having eggs and sometimes also bacon for breakfast, and then having some sort of snack that contains some carbs around lunch time and then too much protein for dinner along with more carbs than I am used to eating.  The result of this is that I have gained a little weight and I am also experiencing hunger during the day and after dinner.  Most of those days I was eating a snack before bed, like some sour cream or almond butter.

Another thing I have been doing differently is that I have been having a really big cup of tonic water from the golf course bar with lime.  My husband was drinking it one day when I went in there, so I tried it.  It was so good, that I kind of got addicted to it.  After doing this for a couple of weeks, I found out why it was so tasty and why I got addicted to it:  high fructose corn syrup!  I thought tonic water was just seltzer water with quinine added to it.  It turns out that it is also sweetened.  Each time I was having my 16 oz. cup of it, I was ingesting around 20 grams of carbs.  Sigh.  Obviously, I am not going to have any more of it.

This morning, I decided to check my blood just for fun, but it was not fun reading the results.  My blood glucose was always in the mid 70s or low 80s in the morning before eating, and this morning it was 108.  That is not diabetic level, but it is still too high.

The reading on my blood ketones upset me even more.  My average since entering nutritional ketosis has been 2.2.  This morning it was 0.6.  Of course, this would explain why I have been so hungry lately.  Nutritional ketosis will knock the hunger right out of you.  At least in my case, hunger = no ketosis.

I read, or maybe heard, either Dr. Phinney or Dr. Volek say that once you are out of nutritional ketosis, it can take weeks to get back in again.  So even if I had not been eating a little bit too much protein or carbs, this could have happened from drinking all the tonic water alone.

Well, lesson learned, and I am going back to tracking what I eat.  I am going back to where I left off, which is 135g fat, 57g protein and 28g (or less) carbs each day.

I am also going to start checking my blood glucose daily and checking my blood ketones weekly.

Has anyone else who is tracking seen anything like this happen?

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