Coming Up: Back to the not-so-pacific and back to the quest for weight-gain gold. Adella revisits her treating professionals in a whirlwind tour of pumpkin smearing, chanting, and struggles with faith that can only be assuaged by a healthy dose of cherry juice and OOOOOOOH BARRACUDA!!!Will she carry on? Will the live chicken dance cure her ailments? Deep dark secrets are revealed. Lavish gifts unfurled. And our first Socktober weigh in is upon us! Did Annapolis wreak damage on our heroine's reverse-diet?? Will she survive? Will she and Andrew meet in the middle or merely stay afar, a scale betwixt their love?
Read on for answers to these quandries and more!
SOCKTOBER!! It's not in the bag yet, but definitely on it! -
About two weeks ago, my darling husband came downstairs with gentle brow knit up and tatted. If I didn't know him better, I may have been concerned that something truly horrible was forthcoming. In days of lesser experience, I may have even cringed for "the talk". As it is, I've learned that this expression of profound concern is generally an icon for interior monologues about engineering problems, cycling fantasies, and training calendar contemplations. So, I accordingly braced for those talks ("oh the widgewarmiwadoeroo fits perfectly in the godufizbit when you multiply the integer of zeta phi kappa according to the laplace chain ring? That's nice dear!").
Instead, he hesitantly bridged a delicate topic: his enduring thoughtfulness. "So," he began with a wrinkle in his tone, "I was thinking that I wanted to buy you a bag for your laptop..." pause to gulp as if he'd suggested buying me unsolicited silicon bosoms for Ramadan. "But," he continued, "there are so many options that I don't want to do it without your input... would you maybe want to ... look at bags with me?" Naturally I slapped him and stormed from the house for such effrontery!
To explain, I have several devices as befits my station. One of my devices is an enormous laptop. Despite the fact that we also have a television monitor and dvd player, this laptop mostly fills in as our tv/movie player, what with it having built-in internet and being expansively huge. Its primarily intended use, however, is to serve as library/player/editor for my vast music library. I take it out with me when I dj.
And, because it is so large, none of my old laptop bags even come close to containing it. I've been throwing the poor thing into one of those reusable shopping bags for the past year. It was only a matter of time until I inevitably dropped the computer and sent my entire collection of playlists, mp3s, and carefully cut cortinas sprawling to the depths of Lethe. Andrew, apparently, thought this might not be ideal.
And to explain "looking at bags," I'm perfectly pleased to report that he meant "on the internet" at a really cool site, Timbuk2, which caters to bike messengers who want high quality messenger bags. Oh yes, of course bikes would show up in some way!
Andrew has had several incarnations of different Timbuk2 messenger bags of varying sizes and scheme. His current one, which he purchased early in our relationship, is an exquisitely Andrew combination of yellows and oranges which enable him to be seen on the road (and possibly from space). It also enables him, should he so desire, to cart around a one-year old great dane or several corgis should the occasion demand. These are huge bags!
Arriving at the Timbuk2 site, I could definitely understand why Andrew didn't want to simply surprise me (aside from his accurate astute terror of me and my myseteriously "feminine" ways in general). The entire process is more customizable than any time I've had it my way at whatever fast food restaurant purports to let me do so. You start by picking your basic bag. Then you choose the fabric for each panel. Then the strap. Then the logo color, then various odds and ends and attachments. You get to preview your bag as you build it, so the entire process could make for an engrossing several days of sheer play. I settled on this and he did the rest. It came sometime during our trip! And it is just so perfectly me.
I'm very excited. It sounds like the first use of this bag will be in the first weekend of November. Tango Popolare has apparently gone and put together some kind of tango festival in Whidbey. I had heard information about it in passing, but nothing specific. My teaching partner, and TP figurehead, asked if I'd be willing to teach a workshop and dj one of the practicas. Force my opinions AND music on other people and make them dance dance dance, little monkeys??? As if this were even a question.
In other news, it is decidedly socktober in these parts. We may have gotten more rainfall in the last few days than some states get all year. I don't mind, but it is definitely time to switch out my wardrobe for the warmer clothes I've been storing. I even took the ultimate step in home-climate-control and set the thermostat for our current hours.
To celebrate, I shall continue eating a lot. I had a follow up with my gyno (I like abridging gynocologist thusly, and then imagining a children's book called Mandy the Gyno Rhino... or would it be Rhino Gyno... which is the modified and which is the modfier??) yesterday. Still entirely clad in clothing, shoes and purse, I weighed a hefty three pounds more than the last time I hopped on the same scale. I like to think that's accurate. I was wearing a heavier coat this time, but I had a clipboard last time. I'm sure it evens out.
At any rate, I got my patient goldstar A for Adella's Awesome Effort and then a 'scrip for some delicious and delightful hormone pills. I shall subsequently refer to these as HRT (with the inevitable parenthetical "OOOOOOOH barracuda!" whenever I say it). Yep, apparently, I'm a post-menopausal woman. Or, the same therapy is frequently used to spark plug lazy lady parts back into pulling their own weight (har har) after a hiatus. It's been a while since foreign hormones mucked about in my system, so looking forward to see how that all pans out. Crazy lady on hormones is totally appropriate for Halloween Month!
And yes, for me, Halloween is a month. I have broken out the the #socktober vault and am fantasizing about costumes I will never actually wear anywhere. There shall be pumpkins and candy and delicata squash by golly!
Further Afoot in the World of Eating and Other Socktober Adventures -
So, after all that nicety about my sweet husband and the plus-sized pulchritudinous pack, I had to come clean about a deep dark secret in our marriage. It wasn't easy, but the deceit and the lies were corroding the very pith of our union. That's right: Andrew has not been eating as many eggs as he thinks! I know! I don't know how we'll get through this!
Since we moved in together about six months ago, I took over breakfast duties. Around that time, Andrew was wanting to cut back a little, so we experimented with his typical meal plan. Mostly it came down to eliminating one of four pieces of toast he has in the morning (so, a 100 calorie reduction from a 3,000+ calorie diet, or a staggering 3% reduction in caloric intake - needless to say, he wasted away within months).
Subsequent modifications were made to my taste (har har, ok, kind of true, since I do nibble at everything I serve) over time. I don't like cooking with butter, so I switched to coconut oil for some tropical lauric lubrication in his frying pan. I love making hummus and could never eat a full batch before it goes bad, so now he gets that on his toast instead of more butter. All of this was pretty obvious and calorically uneventful. But, over the course of about three months, I made an apparently subtler switch. He has typically had three eggs. I started by reducing that to two eggs and half a yolk. Then two eggs and an egg white. Then, finally, one egg and two egg whites. Minor, yes, but I still figured he might have noticed, given the general blanching trend of his morning meal. Oh, and the fact that I'd mentioned it previously.
This all came up because I was remarking on my reverse process of gradually adding caloric value to my morning meal. A month ago, I added a glass of milk. Then, I added extra avocado, and later extra flax meal. Then, I switched from one egg to one egg and two egg whites. And then to two eggs.
I was remarking that this was the most I'd eaten in a single breakfast in a long time, and naturally Andrew hypothesized that it was still less than his usual breakfast by a fair amount. And, yeah, it still is, but not to the extent he thought. I may have done the math. My current breakfast tallies to about 520 calories. His is about 700 in its current incarnation (used to be a bit over 800). Then again, I am still following my previous bird-like plan of frequent feedings, while he will just as frequently forget about food until far past what I'd consider lunch and then inhale his 1,100 calorie lunch (yes, it's oddly compelling to compare calories right now, since I actually am supposed to be eating more than my metabolically gifted beloved and sometimes even mange it!).
But, yes, Andrew had no idea. Which was probably a fine thing, since it reduces that halo effect opportunity that comes from knowing you're eating less. More, though, it emphasizes the point I am trying to make to myself in reverse: volume and caloric density are not always so similar. And satiety (or gut-busting fullness) is something deeply impacted by variables far afield of mere caloric load. I'm not saying I'm going to go research what color of plates will make me eat more at one sitting (was it high contrast for less? I remember only shreds of these studies); nor will I likely eat in the dark (although it could be a fun experience!) after getting wasted and stoned (legal as it may be now). I did start drinking wine a little bit before meals, though, actually. Supposed to aid appetite and make you 45% snootier in one fell swoop. Maybe it will even help me like cheese again.
I had my check in with the nutritionist yesterday. Yes, I have a rotating list of professionals and check in with them frequently. It's how I feel like I have friends. It was an awkward affair, being a telephone appointment and my head being particularly muddled by a potent combination of foreign estrogens and jet lag. I believe my side of the conversation reached heights of ultra-ante-post-modernism only dreamt of by James Joyce in his later years. But I hope the gist of the self-reporting gelled into some semblance of sense: I'm eating more. It's harder to eat while travelling. I'm stunned at how my body had just gone along with such a caloric deficiet without much of a complaint, but am also realizing all the different side effects that I'd written off as aging, just me, or part of the job.
I got a few interesting caveats though: She was supportive, but did have to point out (darn her) that often my reports of initial weight gain may actually be water weight. Funny, I knew that in reverse: that when somebody starts cutting their diet and carbs, their first five to ten pounds are usually superficial water losses. I hadn't quite realized this incarnation, but when I upped the amount of available carbohydrates, my body may have started letting them store and plump up with more liquid. So, hey, I think I've got a little eensy bit more definition in my calves, but it could all be water! Which is awesome, because with this estradiol supplement - if it's anything like the pill - I might be able to chock up another five pounds of water in no time at all!
She also warned me that my metabolism had probably slowed in a beautifully adaptive way. That much I expected. The twist ending was that there's a possibility that my metabolism will start to adjust to the new influx of energy and I may actually lose weight by eating more in the short term. Not necessarily likely, but cause for vigilant monitoring.
Other than that, things went fine. I had a very difficult time explaining that my aversion to butter was not some kind of deep seeded emotional thing as much as my conviction - which I so eloquently eventually expiated - that it "tastes like snot." Hey, whatever else, it did shut down the probing discussion and inquiry into any childhood trauma relating to butter. To my more rational credit, I also admitted that I found it bothersome to cook with and - as above - had already transitioned the butter-related cookery to coconut oil in our home.
The only squeaky part in our well-oiled beat poetry of a conversation is that she is hesitant about my gynecologist's recommendations on starting HRT (OOOOOOOH BARRACUDA) so soon, instead of waiting to see if my body resumes cycling on its own. I saw her point, but I'm also really impatient to get some semblance of "normal" even if it's a faked normal. And I just freakin' started these estrogen bombs from the tenth circle of hell (tenth circle was too scary for Dante: PMS all the time!). I paid monies for this crap. Also, two professionals cancel each other out. She said she'd talk to him and we could go from there. I await their wise counsel, or at least an elaborated list of pros and cons for my informed consent and medical decisionmaking.
Yesterday, was "date night: stay in because Adella is reuniting with hormones and Andrew was on his feet all day plus we spent all weekend on a date weekend, really, so can we just stay in and snuggle with some take out and some thirty rock before going to bed early, because that sounds like the pinnacle of romance to me right now! edition"). I had my staggering 600 calorie teff stew and Andrew had his 1,000 calorie burrito mound, and then we snuggled on the couch. In some very sexy grey sweat pants and scrubs. Oh man, Playboy wishes it could write about us!
Anyways, I seem to be adjusting to the new estradiol a bit better today than yesterday. At least, I think. It may be that I haven't wanted to rip anyone's face off or curl up in a ball in front of them because the only person I've seen so far has been my little loris of a sleepy husband... but I like to think it's a little more than that! Maybe! I'm listening to 80's music and drafting adoption papers for my best friends! Things could be better, but only on some kind of really grand scale involving my errant cabana boy returning with that $300 billion dollar check the universe promised me in exchange for twinkling my toes and otherwise being me (or did I just demand that from the universe? Did we form a binding contract on that... I'll have to check my scanned files).
Me Gusta those Sweet and Savory Seasonals of Socktober -
I appreciate the fact that modern farming allows me to theoretically enjoy any fruit or vegetable I prefer at any time of the year, but I am also a novelty junkie who simultaneously enjoys the fruits of long-delayed pleasure. In other words, to every produce turn turn turn there is a season. And a spice for every equinox to dominate. Don't get me started on seasonally appropriate candies and desserts. I think that the Hallmark-Hersheys Cabal has already nailed that one to the ground.
And October, for me, is the start of my favorite seasons: pumpkin season, delicata squash season, butternut squash season (yeah, there's a theme so far), sweet potato season, baked apple season, poached pear season, mulled everything season, savory stew with slowly simmered onions and thyme and sage and barley season, mashed cauliflower season, and novelty pumpkin themed candy season! Oh and candy corns. I hate candy corns in actuality. They taste like saccharine ear wax to me. But they have a special place in my heart as the markers of fall.
We leave them out in the office in October, in addition to last year's leftover Halloween candy (almost through it in time for this year). It adds a special festive feel to things. I don't whip out the full Halloween decor until the actual day of Halloween, but this reminds me that it is nigh! And induces me to stop, take a small piece of candy corn, sample it, and then go through the eternal moment of decision on whether to quickly swallow or simply spit out the earwax cone I've just deposited in my mouth. I'm thinking to add to the festivity, we might as well go further afield and include some of my other favorite seasonal goodies: delicata and sweet potato anyone?
Actually, I had one of the delicata and I have to say it was definitely a September delicata (DUN DUN DUUUUUN). It had no flavor of which to speak, which has got to be one of the most disappointing things on earth, given how delicious delicata really should be. The sweet potatoes, on the other hand, were quite grand. And by sweet potatoes, I mean garnet yams which are not yams which is continually confusing to me. I guess it's like how we call soy drink, soy milk, even though there are no soy farms and edamame is not usually a straight-from-the-udder creature. Not that farms of roving soy beans wouldn't be adorable. Except I don't know that we Americans are familiar enough with actual yams to require a yam substitute and if so, are sweet potatoes really not just a thing in and of their own right?
Ok, I actually do know the story of why we call them yams when they are not (come gather 'round children and spare yourselves half a second's google search): Legend has it that the orangey sweet potatoes came to America after the regular white sweet potato was already well known. The exporters of garnet "yams" wanted to distinguish them from the white sweet potatoes and were unoriginal, I guess.Yam comes from Spanish/Portugese interpretations of an African words meaning "to taste" and/or "to chew" and referred to a common root vegetable that actually is a yam as opposed to the sweet potatoes from the Americas. So I guess anything can be a yam in some ways. But, I say from here on out we call them garnet YUMS, because they are, in fact, yummy.
In other shattering dissilusionment (no, Virginia there is a Santa Clause but he has heart disease from smoking too many pipes and mistaking obesity for jollity), baby carrots are a lie and, um, all of your fancy juice cocktails have more sugar in them than most sodas.
But let's return to the hearth and have a hale and hearty hello to the most succulent of seasons... then let's run out and binge on pumpkin pie spice Hershey Kisses (is it just me, or do those taste like candles more than candy?) and candy corn oroes until we puke!
It Was a Dark and Stormy Scale - 1st Socktober Weigh-in -
After playing scale-hooky last week (has it really been a week since I was in Annapolis?), it was time once again to measure progress by skivving down to bare necessities and hopping on a scale. Then holding still, because hopping actually screws up the read a lot. I'm not vain in skimping down to skivies, as much as I want to limit as many variables as possible. And, as I noticed from my trips to several doctor's scales, what you wear makes a difference in the finer tuned numbers (like, say, anything after the third digit out).
Also, I'm an exhibitionist? Did I mention I did all of this on my own special webcast youtube channel? Oh I didn't. That's probably because that would be a lie, and no, no I probably won't be doing that anytime soon. Why did I suggest this? (Google lights up with weird searches on my name)
Let me preface all of this by saying I don't believe any of this. I know I am wrong in my disbelief, but I still don't believe it. As far as I'm concerned, this whole weight gain thing is one big game of house or superheros or fairy princess (or Equus!). I'm good at make-believe, maybe the best, but that's probably specifically because I have fine-tuned my suspension of disbelieve. Suspending disbelief does not in any regard mean diminishing or dispelling disbelief. I'm a skeptical person by nature, and nobody every really believes anything that applies to others applies to them as well.
And thus: I don't 100% believe I need to gain weight. And I don't totally believe that in order to do so I need to eat so goshdarned much to do it. Again, I know I'm wrong. I know I do. I know I should.
I certainly know better than to trust my own judgment on these sorts of matters instead of objective evidence and reasoned expert opinions. I know from many years of dating and other personal travails that I am not the exception to the rules and the advice I would give to a third party is generally the better advice than the twisted post hoc rationalizations (pretty as they are) to keep on keepin' on with my course in honor of all applicable cognitive biases. Even more, the consensus advice of several experts is worth going along with, if only to humor them into liking me enough to summon their magical doctor powers and intervene with the spirits (that's how medicine works, right? you jump through whatever weird hoops the doctor gives you to show you're committed and then they summon the gods?)
I keep thinking if I just go along with all these crazy doctors and experts for another week, poof! Everything will be magically better and I can go back to my usual way of doing things. I think that's the thing. I'm not attached to this weight or lifestyle because I have some kind of body image issue (I really was happy at a heavier weight), but there is a little part of me that fears change of any kind. Fears leaping into the waters and letting go of old habits with only the faith that new ones will be better. I suck it up, but I think that's always an element in these sorts of things.
Yes, I'm medically underweight by all measures (but only a little and not in the middle of the day when I'm fully dressed and have just had a meal...), yes I exhibit almost every single damned classical symptom of chronic malnourishment (which I know because I keep a list, but of course there's always a chicken and egg problem with symptoms as vague and interrelated as stress and anemia and hormonal disruptions), yes all of my treating professionals have agreed on this basic point (cabal!! voodoo!)...
But, I mean, I don't look like I'm starving or anything. I have muscle. I have problems with women's socks and sleeves being too tight for my brawn, in fact. The anemia went away with some iron pills. My hair isn't falling out. And 3300 calories? Surely they jest! Sure, I know that I'd had no luck gaining the weight I surely didn't actually need to gain when eating 2500. But surely a less extreme extra - oh I don't know - tootsie roll a day, would do it, right?? I mean, this is America. You're supposed to be able to gain weight here just walking past a television in a store window!
And yes, I know the answers to all of those objections, but my brain still whirls them about like little bingo balls from time to time.
I'm sure there's some very astute and evocative Kierkegaard quote about knowledge and faith and pop tarts that I could manufacture for this occasion, but I'll skip it and get to the good part: KASHA (psych!). Which I tried to cook in the microwave the same way that I cook teff and kamut in the microwave. The results did vary and now I have kasha flavored soy milk all over pretty much everything in the kitchen. But I did get some into my breakfast bowl and what made it there was pleasant. It's making me think it's time to make some more buckwheat beer bread perhaps.
In other random grain shout outs: after three attempts, I managed to pop sorghum, which is kind of awesome for looking like miniaturized popcorn exported from Lilliput, but perhaps does not have the same satisfying ease and high pop yield that really makes popcorn fun. I still have half a bag of the unpopped kernels because it seemed wasteful to throw them out.
Alright, that was a fun diversion.
Drumroll please: 127!! YAAY WOOOOOO!
I guess. I mean, I guess that is about 2 - 2.5 pounds since the last time I weighed myself on the 21st. So, less than 2 pounds a week, but then again I was travelling last weekend, and that inevitably interfered. And did the hormones do anything to add to that? Is that - like my nutritionist warned - water weight??
I think that means that probably the extra 1k calories is probably about right and I should keep with my non-travelling regime. (All the while waiting for my nutritionist to show up on the full moon and tell me to lie smothered in pumpkin pie and apple bits in an open field covered in companion snakes and leeches until the gods favor me again - sounds like a good way to kick off some #socktober Halloween celebrations!)
Entertainingly, Andrew and I are actually heading towards the same goal at the moment: 145. I don't know why 145, except that's where I was when I was running regularly. I guess it's feasible (about 2 and a half months of concerted weight gain), about where I was when I considered myself really in running shape, and ... well... his goal weight so it was already out there to select. Technically, he's a little bit closer to 145 than I am as of this morning, but then again he's far less motivated to get there and has no ambitions of doing anything resembling the 2 pounds a week model.
Needless to say, we both celebrated our respective weigh-ins by going on equal but different work outs. Andrew's training for a duathlon next weekend and, as such, is doing a "brick." That's not drug code, except for endorphin addiction. It involved riding around really hard and then immediately hopping off the bike and going back out to run. I have no idea what this is a brick. Draw your own conclusions.
Since his version of the run was going to be running around Lake Padden (and all its hills) really fast, I decided two things that make sense when taken independently but perhaps not as a total: (1) I don't really hate myself and don't want to feel horribly uncomfortable and shy of exploding pluck, so I don't know that i want to join him for that part of the run, (2) I do want to run for a short period of time and I'm really enjoying how the treadmill at the YMCA allows me to do pretty intense controlled intervals followed up by weights. So, yeah, in order to avoid a 30 minute masochistic run around the lake and to celebrate my minor weight gain success, I drove to the YMCA, ran a 25 minute interval workout, and compounded the experience with an additional fifteen minutes of making macho (whooooooaoaa)man grunts (silent, but implied) over some work out equipment. Sometimes I think I'm not entirely rational. But would a rational person have such adorable darned socks? I doubt it.
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