Tag: weight loss

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The thing about being a woman of a certain age is that, while much of life is certainly so much better than it was in your 20s (more money & stability, no need to please everyone around you, etc), there comes with age this one particularly unpleasant symptom.  And for someone who has always run a little hotter than everyone around me, when I say that I’m having a hot flash, please understand that isn’t just me being dramatic.

Heaven knows I can be dramatic, but this kind of hot is no joke.

Having returned from my days at Disney with some sort of sinus infection/cold, I’m sitting here at my computer trying to determine if this is a hot flash, or a fever.  Of course, I can’t find my thermometer to check, and I have no desire to leave the house to get a new one, so I will continue to wonder.

Still, the trip to Disneyland with my 24 year old niece was worth a few days of being less than fully healthy.  It was the thing I needed to release some stress and included some amazing character interactions in Galaxy’s Edge (complete with massive Chewbacca hugs that just made life worth living) and getting to ride the new Rise of the Resistance ride twice.

I got to ride roller coasters and other rides, which is something I haven’t done in 20 something years due to my size.  We flew the Millenium Falcon, had drinks at Oga’s Cantina, and ran around Batuu hacking our way through the Play Disney App’s games.

Since I was there last in September, I’ve read the book Black Spire, and that gave me a whole new appreciation of the park, and really informed some of our interactions with the “locals” including one guy at Oga’s that just really got into his role.

Of course, all good things must end, and we eventually left LA for the long drive north, a drive made all the longer by traffic problems that included a big rig fire on the Grapevine that burned the hillside and left nothing of the truck but some bits of metal.

That got me home too late to even consider going in to the office on Thursday, and I woke up with the cold/sinus infection on Friday morning, so I worked from home both days.  For today, I’m going to take it easy, going light on the chores, and probably not even getting much writing done since my brain is having trouble getting words to push through the sludge of congestion.

I think it might be a good day to settle in with my giant TV and surround sound to watch movies and get caught up on TV.  Happy Sunday, Readers!  I leave you with one of my favorite shots from Disney, on board the Millenium Falcon in my Han Solo Disneybound.

 

Han Solo on the Falcon

Header Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash

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and so it is…

Pride week. Second week on the new job.  Deadlines for writing and editing.

Yeah, it’s been a week.  And it’s only Wednesday!

I turned over my writing and editing stuff to all the various people who I needed to get it to early this morning, seeing as I was awake at 5 am, even though I’m pretty sure I meant to sleep a few more hours.  Might as well make use of the time, am I right?

I have to work the day job for a few hours this morning (it’s amazing how quickly you can burn through an allotted 20 hours!!), before turning my attention to the rest of my Pride prep, which at this point of the week includes doing laundry, sorting out my meds for the weekend, making sure the laptop is set up for sign ins over the weekend and making some hard boiled eggs.  Because Protein.

There is probably going to be some house cleaning and sorting through the piles of clothing I’ve pulled out of places to decide whether it stays or goes…and if it goes, where is it going to?  Having lost 122 pounds since my heaviest weight is great, but it does make clothing occasionally problematic.  I picked up two pairs of size 18W capri pants the other day…they’re already a bit baggy, and yesterday I put on a pair of size 16W that were too tight for comfort, but I could zip them up and everything.  Won’t be too long before I’m in those.  But that means the piles of 20Ws need to find new homes.

I should probably get on with the day job work.  More deadlines, you know?  And that cup of coffee I set down somewhere and is probably getting cold…I should go find that too.  Happy Wednesday, Readers!  And Happy Pride!

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

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writing time

It’s early on a Saturday morning and I am up, showered and dressed (for some value of dressed anyway).  There is coffee sending up steam and the aroma of goodness on the desk next to me, most of my house is clean and I have a weekend stretched out in front of me.

Today I am going back to the short story I recently finished, having received feedback from my beta reader.  I have a much firmer idea of what happens before the story than I did when I began, and the characters are much more real to me than they were 5000 words ago, so it’s time to readdress and rewrite.

That’s the task for this weekend, to get that story up on its feet, so to speak, so that I can focus on editorial duties as we start to approach the deadline for submission.  I have to admit, I love playing editor for projects like this one.  I get to read a diverse set of stories, from a diverse set of female writers about a diverse group of characters.

I am also expecting my mother at some point today, she’s driving out to spend some time with me and we plan on hitting up the local nursery, and possibly some other fun places.

If you want to read more of my blog ramblings, I have two other blogs that I am actively attempting to maintain, one of them is chronicling my weight loss journey post-surgery, the other is mostly my take on current events, being fat in a world that rewards skinny, as well as philosophical ramblings on politics and religion, as seen from a point of view outside the mainstream. There is poetry blog too, if you’re into that sort of thing.  I also have a Patreon, if you’re interested in seeing some content from me before others, some exclusive content, etc.

You can find these here:

Weight Loss: https://aweightyjourneysite.wordpress.com/
Current Events: https://myweightinwords.wordpress.com/
Poetry: https://weightywordspoetry.wordpress.com/
Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/nataliejcase

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (be warned I post a lot pictures of my cats).

I should get to that whole writing thing.  Happy Saturday, Readers!  May it be filled with fun, silliness and a whole lot of love!

 

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breaking through

Happy Saturday, Readers!  I hope that you’re safe and warm and out of all of this crazy weather!  Here in Northern California it’s been very wet and colder than we’re used to, making for good times to stay inside with a good book and a cup of tea.

I’m now a week + out from my surgery and healing is progressing well.  I’m up to walking a full mile, which means it’s time to go back to work.  I’m also writing again for the first time in quite a while, working on a short story for an anthology that benefits a writer’s conference I will be attending in October.  I will also be editing that anthology in the near future.

If you want to follow my weight loss journey, I invite you to follow along in my blog devoted to that: aweightyjourneysite.wordpress.com.  It is likely I will stop talking about it so much here.

It feels good to have broken through the writer’s block that’s been plaguing me, and I think turning my attention to something new was a big reason I finally got through it.  I’ve only got a vague notion of where this story is going, but it’s built on a character that has been kicking around the back of my brain for a while.  It’s also a foray into true science fiction, which is always a fun playground.

Wishing you a cup of your favorite hot beverage, the comfort of a favorite blanket and some really good reading material!

 

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walking because it’s good for me

One of the things I had to give up when my back and my feet became too painful to support me adequately, was walking just because I enjoy walking.  In fact, I had really started to hate walking, and how it made me feel.

There’s nothing enjoyable in the pain that radiated out of my feet and across my lower back after walking a half mile just to get to BART as I headed into the office, never mind how much worse it was after the half mile to the office, or the return trip at the end of a long day.

It was one of the driving factors in helping me make the decision to have the gastric bypass surgery, which happened a week ago yesterday.  They encourage you pretty quickly to get up and moving after the surgery, and in the week that I’ve been home, I’ve been focusing pretty strongly on building my stamina back up by taking multiple short walks each day.

The first day, I got from my house to the corner, about 6 houses away.  The next day, I added a few houses on the other end.  Yesterday I made it around the block for the first time, a distance of approximately seven tenths of a mile.  Today, I ventured to the Starbucks just past the street I would turn up to go around the block, then I finished the block.

It feels good to be walking again.  I won’t say I am pain free, my feet are throbbing a bit right now and my back is letting me know it felt that walk, but each step moves me in the right direction, and while I feel ridiculously fatter than I have in a while, I’ve actually lost a decent amount of weight being only a week out from surgery.

One foot in front of the other, as they say.  Happy Wednesday, Readers!

 

Photo by Taylor Jacobs on Unsplash

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the neverending journey

I have recently made the decision to undergo weight loss surgery.  I have been some level of overweight for most of my adult life.  At my largest, I weighed in at 320 pounds.  The smallest I’ve been as an adult was 153 pounds.  Currently I’m circling 280, and fighting to get down another five before I see the surgeon again.

Like most women who have struggled with their weight, I’ve tried every fad diet, every supplement, every new-fangled idea that came along.  Some of them worked, some of them didn’t.  Most recently I tried a very restricted eating regimen, which resulted in a loss of sixty something pounds, but I was only consuming 800 calories per day, which simply isn’t sustainable.

All of that dieting and sporadic bursts of exercise has my metabolic system so screwed up that when I upped my calorie count to 1000, I stopped losing weight.  When I upped it to 1200 on my doctor’s advice, I started gaining it back.

I’ve gained almost 30 pounds since then. Admittedly, I lost my will for it when I started gaining it back while still restricting calories, and I’ve struggled to get back to eating healthy after my vacation in September.

Ultimately, what made the decision for me was the levels of pain I am in on a daily basis.  My back, my feet, and most of my arms and shoulders are in chronic pain every day.  If I manage to walk my 10K steps on one day, the next day I can barely walk.  It’s nuts.  If I can’t walk, I can’t do much.

So, here we are.  I see the doctor on Wednesday, and that is when she will decide if we can schedule the surgery for before the end of the year. My hope is that this will set me up for a 2019 that is healthier and stronger, and less pain-filled than 2018 was.