glitches

Core!

Inspired by allyo, I have jumped back on the cult bandwagon.  When I was nursing constantly, the cult worked really well for me because I got an extra ten points each day.  I was eating plenty, I was perfectly happy with what I was eating, and I was rarely hungry.  Sounds great!  but the deal when you're nursing is that you get those ten extra points!  There's no scaling back as your little one nurses less, you just get ten extra points.  Can you see I was a little fixated on those ten points?  They were great.

But now that the lentil only nurses once each day, and perhaps someday soon will nurse even less, I've started gaining weight again.  I am such a sucker for those dang chocolate cookies!  Gah! (this is supposed to sound a little like Napolean Dynamite.  just so you too can hear the voices in my head.)

So I am back on the cult.  This time, I'm working the core plan.  Here I have so many foods I can select and eat sensibly from.  It's a good list.  Any list that includes unlimited supply of avocado is a good list.  Yes, I know I'm supposed to eat sensibly, and only to where I'm full but not sated.  So what.  I could only eat avocado all day, and then I would be full but not sated and still eating unlimited avocado.

But that's the problem.  I know the cult well now, and I know how to cheat.  I know a little too well.  I know that the foods we eat are made up of ingredients, and frequently I can justify why a decidedly non-core item is really a core item, it just didn't make it on the correct list.  For example, millet.  We have a lot of millet left over from when we ground up the lentil's breakfast cereal and really cared about what he put into his body.  What do you do with a bag of millet?  Even though the cult tells me that millet is worth something ridiculous like 4 points a serving, I decided that whoever made that designation doesn't really understand what kind of millet we're serving here.  this isn't some processed, chain-store, bleached and additive-laden millet we're eating.  We're eating organic millet, cooked in the way of the rice that is brown.  It says on the instructions that it takes 40 minutes to cook.  The rice that is brown also takes 40 minutes to cook.  The millet is not super hulled, much like the rice that is brown is not hulled.  Rice of the brown family is considered a whole grain, and therefore is a core food.  Our granola-crunchy organic millet?  I grant thee honorary core status.

That's how it works.

So yesterday, as I was making my ill-fated "vegan" brownies (I forgot the eggs) I reminded myself that these just aren't so good for the cult diet.  But then I started thinking about it.  What are they made of, anyway?  a little oil? maybe some flour and eggs?  Eggs are core.  So they can't count in the whole points calculation (never mind the fact that my brownies didn't have eggs at all),  and the flour I'm sure was meant to be whole grain.  It just got sifted funny.  As I thought of this I saw myself in the future.  Not too far in the future, just like 28 minutes in the future.  I saw myself in 28 minutes, chocolate smeared all over my face, fingernails brown and caked with brownie crumbs, looking up from my just baked tray and saying defensively, "what?!  It's core!"

Yeah, right.

But I mistakenly omitted the eggs and ended up with something resembling chocolate brittle instead.  It's yummy, but not nearly as binge-able as a big tray of brownies.  Sweets spent about an hour last night scraping the muck out of the dish and salvaging whatever he could for his chocolatey treat, but I ate maybe a tablespoon-full of the stuff.  It was good, but it wasn't the same.

If you only eat a tablespoon-full, then can it be core?

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

If you're just joining us, please take a minute to click over to the new whylime forums, at dish and spoon.  We're a new family, very impressionable.  Log in, become a charter member, make a few comments, enjoy the presence of like minds and new friends.  We'd love to have you.  All 15 of us!  (yes!  15!)

So tired

Nightweaning update, briefly:  for the last few nights the boy has gone to bed at 8:15, sleeps pretty solidly until around midnight, wakes up and is moved to our bed.  Then he sleeps until 2-3, when I nurse him.  The he sleeps until 6:00.  We can live with this.  It isn't exactly what we had set out to do when we planned on nightweaning him, but it works, I suppose. I would like to get away from the 3:00 feeding, but the week when we tried to hold off on feeding him during that time period was so miserable, I just got fed up.  That, and I am sick again, so I just don't have the stamina to hold out on him when I just want to go back to sleep.  Anyway, there is a certain peace around our apartment these days because I think we came to this place as a family.

Mother's day was great.  I woke up and went to my meeting at the cult.  To my delight, I've lost 17 pounds now, and have passed my 15% goal.  I really wanted to make that goal before our vacation, and now I have done it.  The secret?  writing everything down, trying not to eat chocolate bars, drinking lots of water.  Oh, and nursing a baby like it's going out of style.  I'm worried that I'm going to gain some of it back this week because I have another crappy crap crap cold (thanks, lentil!) and haven't been running except perhaps to the little market to buy chocolate bars.  But Hey! I NEED those calories.  Feeding the cold, and all. Starving a fever.  Well, nothing's starving around here, but whatever.

One more paper to write.  Gah.  So tired.  So fed up.  So much harder to get anything done when I have a runny-nosed babe hanging off my legs and a river of mucous running freely from my own face.  I need vacation to be relaxing and nice and fun and not crazy.

Sunday with the dath

Since joining the cult I've lost 6.8 pounds.  That much in three weeks is pretty good, I would say.  Since I'm still nursing the lentil I don't want to lose too much too fast, but this is just about right.  It is really nice to be able to step on the scale and see a difference each week.  Even though I don't see a change in my body yet, at least I can tell that something is happening.  I have two coupons for $25.00 off at the local chain decent clothing store and I can't wait to use them to buy smaller pants.  Or perhaps some snappy little skirt.  snap!  snap!

I bought myself an early birthday present.  I bought that guitar I was thinking of getting.  Now every night is filled with me strumming away, learning such classics as "You are my sunshine" and "This Land is Your Land."  I love it.  My wrists don't hurt at all either, so this is working out.  The little boy also likes it- he likes to come up and strum while I am playing.  It's nice to know that guitars aren't super expensive and somewhat sturdy.  I like being able ot share this with him.  I didn't know it, but sweets is a decent guitar player too!  We've all been having a good time with this new toy. 

The lentil has a very good friend, the son of parents we met in our birthing class.  We share childcare with them, so the lentil sees a lot of this little boy.  For lack of a better name, I think I will call him The Crusher.  The crusher isn't really a crusher, he's just relentless in his quest to find and destroy anything not baby safe.  He likes baby toys just fine, but his real pleasure in life is to seek and expose the chinks in the baby armor.  He can go into a room and find the one thing that you overlooked in your babyproofing.  It's actually fairly remarkable.  As a result, the crusher is covered, head to toe, with bruises.  And now that he's walking, scrapes and bruises. 

We spent the day yesterday with the crusher and his mom.  We went to the natural history museum that is conveniently located just blocks from our apartment.  We've taken the lentil there before, but now that he's able to stand and crawl he was much more appreciative.  The large mammal dioramas are just right for his size and ability- he would cruise along the glass and make growling noises at the bears.  He liked the bears the best too.  Maybe he was just growling at his own reflection in the glass, but it was terribly cute.  The crusher was bouncing from display to display, running around touching everything, discovering everything.  These boys are so much fun, I can feel my heart exploding out of my chest each time they find or learn something new.  I can't wait for each new thing, and I"m sad the old new things went past so quickly.

We've decided that the lentil has his first word.  He's actually been saying it for a few weeks now, but only recently did we clue in that he says it consistently and correctly.  He is definitely his momma's boy- his first word is "dath."  Which, to the untrained ear, may not amount to much.  But in our little world we know that he means "cat" and he loves the cat enough to learn all about her before anything else.  In fact, last night he went from room to room looking for the dath.  He was calling her name, looking, searching.  He would go into the bedroom and look under the bed, then into the computer room and look on my chair.  Back and forth, until we found her snuggled up on the rocking chair.  When he found her he just shrieked with joy and pleasure.  It was fabulous.  I have the smartest baby in the world.

the duchess

I went back to weight watchers (the cult) last week, and today was my first weigh in.  I'm very pleased to announce that I've lost 3.8 pounds in the past week, even though I know that most of that is water weight.  Even so, I feel better and I'm eating better now that I have a little structure.

I first went to the cult before my wedding.  I was overweight and had been for a few years, and I desperately didn't want to have to look at my wedding photos years down the line and think to myself "ug- I look so fat in that photo..."  So I went and weighed in week after week and ended up losing about 25 pounds.  It was good and I felt good and that was that.  Then I got pregnant and stopped thinking about portion size and low fat and high fiber and I just ate.  Eating bland, starchy foods made my nausea better in the first trimester, and eating helped me emotionally cope with the massive changes I was going through.  I didn't blow up too much while pregnant, but enough that I couldn't just drop those pounds without some sort of outside assistance.  And I've been trying, but not hard enough.  See, there's this thing called chocolate and I can't seem to break the habit.

I used to skip the meetings and just weigh in, but now that I'm making a new start I think I will do the meetings again.  The problem before was that the meeting leaders were just so strange and uninspiring.  There was this really wierd one who I swear was a tranny, or at least aspired to good tranny fashions.  I used to spend the whole meetings examining her throat, looking for the scar from where they removed her adam's apple.  Not that I think trannies are inherently strange, it's just having a tranny lead a weight watcher's meeting that is so off.  It was like having Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie coaching you through a weight watchers meeting.  Like I said- strange.

Now they have Patty, the overenthusiastic leader.  I like her so far, or maybe I like her energy.  And she actually wears decent clothes, not the drapey polyester Dress Barn dresses and pearls that Miss Thing wore.  She has this incredibly loud voice.  It's almost like she thinks she's leading a cult meeting at Madison Square Garden and the PA system is on the fritz.  Seriously- last week I counted two women who popped some tylenol within minutes of the meeting starting.  I can't imagine coming to a meeting hung-over.  holy cow, that would be painful.

Not being from this area, when I first joined the cult years ago I approached it as an ethnographic experience.  Attend and observe, but don't participate.  Maybe because I've lived here for five years and am not as impressed by the Connecticut experience, or maybe I'm just more mature, but I'm trying to avoid that trap again.  Feeling superior doesn't make one superior, you know?  I used to just sit and watch, but today I was there with them, shouting out my weight loss total and enjoying the talk.  I even won some fat-free puddings in the raffle.

I'm really trying to do something big here.  Or perhaps just do something less big than it was last week.  But I'm not going to observe any more.  I'm going to participate.  damn it.