wickedqueen.net

Awhile ago, someone on LiveJournal mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, which is a study associated with Brown University Medical School “developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss”–here defined as people who have maintained a 30 pound loss for one year or more.

Despite having regained a bit of weight in the past two months due to first being Full of Blood Clots and then, a week after they finally let me go back to the gym, catching the Death Flu, I am still within five pounds of my original goal weight, which I reached on December 13, 2005–coincidentally closely following Clot #1; I only missed about a week of gym time for that one. Anyway, my study consent forms arrived with my held mail today, so I got to initial a bunch of stuff and provide evidence that I did actually lose all that weight.

They offer two options: you can get your doctor’s office or whoever to provide documentation, or you can submit before-and-after photos. If there’s one thing I have ready to hand, it’s photos of myself–admittedly quite a few more “after” shots than “before,” as Matthieu has commented on in the past, but definitely enough “before” shots to prove that I used to be fat.

Although not, actually, the worst and most horrible of “before” shots, which for some reason my father had on his website for MONTHS after it was no longer accurate, until he finally listened to my desperate pleas and took it down. I don’t know what happened to that one. I looked like Jabba the Hut. It would have been PERFECT for the purpose of demonstrating how fat I used to be, so I am actually kind of sorry.

Anyway, here are the photos that are actually getting sent:

Before:

(October 7, 2004)

(June 2005)

(Christmas 2004)

AFTER:

(December 2005)

(July 25, 2007)

(July 23, 2006)

The Christmas 2004 one is probably the worst of the lot, mainly because that was when I weighed the most (178 pounds when I, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to weigh myself like two days after Christmas). It’s actually pretty encouraging to be looking at those old-old photos, since I’m actually only about five pounds over my preferred weight at the moment, and while that’s worse than it might initially sound because I’m also down quite a bit of muscle from being benched for so long, on the other hand, I do not look like Jabba the Hut. My face is still pretty much the way it looks in my “after” pictures, for one thing, rather than all chipmunky.

My gym is closed until January 2–I did get in some cardio and probably some strength-training shoveling snow this afternoon; I could only do so much since no one has been in residence for over a week and people have been walking on the sidewalk, packing it down, and eventually I got very, very tired of hammering away with the edge of the shovel to remove 1/8″ of snow from the walk. I put down salt. Come January 2, I will be doing 5-6 days of weight training a week until I am back to my former glory:

My biceps have really suffered. But I will get them back into shape.

You know, all those years of secondary school gym class, I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated fascism.*

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

–Richard Brautigan, The Memoirs of Jesse James

(My other reflection on biking lately is that the older I get, the more like my father I seem to become. Biking, cooking,** and I’ve started contemplating camping, which was definitely not my thing as a child, at least not after age 8 or so.)

My hair is also getting really faded. I’m loathe to cover the highlights, which still look good (if faded), but probably I’ll dye it all back to Atomic Pink after I get back from visiting my cousin in LA. This does mean that Cyn and I will not be total twinsies if we get together for lunch, but that may well save the universe from implosion,*** so perhaps I should consider it a necessary sacrifice.

And speaking of the universe imploding, today’s Thursday PARC Forum is about dark matter. Maybe I should go.

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*I’ve remarked this to several people now, which is why I can’t remember who thought it should be on a t-shirt. I think it might be a little long.

***I’ve always been a big fan of parallel universes, such as Star Trek Dark Mirror and the Futurama Cowboy Universe. Maybe there’s one where everyone’s got pink hair EXCEPT Cyn and me. I’ll tell you one thing: I bet Evil Bizarro Cabell has really conservative hair. Lime green would be the photo-negative, but I’ve done that, too.

So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*

First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.

So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.

As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.

AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”

And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.

BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.

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*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.

****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.

I went to my first “Core Crunch” fitness class today at the gym. For the first 10 minutes or so I felt like I had voluntarily sent myself back to junior high gym class–dear god, what have I DONE–but I adapted.

At least the core crunch class is a) focused on a particular objective that I feel I can get behind, i.e. having a totally fucking hot stomach, rather than senseless games involving teamwork and balls, and b) taught by a member of the university track team off of whose body you could bounce quarters. At one point his shirt rode up and I got a look at HIS abs; I don’t know why he doesn’t just teach the class shirtless. It would be a great motivator.

Anyway, it wasn’t easy, which is good, but it wasn’t so hard that I felt like I was going to die for longer than maybe 10 second periods, which is also good. Parts of it were actually quite easy–mostly the lunges. Instructor Guy kept going, “Feel it! Man, that burns!” Probably he was exaggerating his own experience, since he is on the track team. But I didn’t really feel it much either–so either I’m doing them wrong (something to look into), or it’s just that it’s not nearly as bad as footwork drills for fencing. Some of the crunches and leg lifts, however, were almost killing me. So I know my weak points.

After the gym, I went to see my gynocologist, who basically confirmed that my GP is a paranoid idiot* and said that okay, she wouldn’t look me in the eye and say there was absolutely NO RISK being on Depo with a predisposition to blood clots, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye and say that about ANYTHING, and when she had a patient who had, like, a double embolism-type thingie around her HEART, they put HER on Depo with the blessing of her surgeons or whatever.

Anyway, the point is, it would be way fucking worse to get pregnant, and my gyno sees absolutely no reason I cannot continue on Depo, although she also gave me information about the progesterone IUD. She repeated several times that while the literature is scanty, pretty much everyone thinks that it’s the estrogen in hormonal birth control that is a risk factor for blood clots–something my GP had refused to acknowledge, because he is an idiot and apparently has an irrational desire to take everyone off their hormonal birth control regardless of the facts. But as my gyno noted, I am an adult and you have to weigh your costs and benefits.

My gyno also said that she really couldn’t say if the blood clot might have been precipitated by my weight loss, but that it was a possibility. She did not reject it out of hand like the GP.

I would get a new GP, except that I have not been having great luck picking doctors at random (except for my gyno, who I picked at random several years ago), and it’s so much damn work. The important thing is that now he cannot fuck up my birth control, although I guess I have to keep an eye on him and make sure he isn’t UNCHECKING the “sexually active” box on my chart again.**

You know, the healthcare system is really only comforting if you are willing to assume that all the doctors are smarter than you and always know what is best. If you can’t make these assumptions, it all falls apart. I have to get my blood drawn again on Wednesday, and if I can’t get to my phone when the nurse who is totally younger than me calls back, I will have to play phone tag again while dwelling on yet another totally content-free yet anxiety-inducing message. I’m glad I got vaccinated and all, but sometimes I can sort of see why a person might want to give it all up as a bad job.

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*This is the man who told me I should get off of Depo, and when I said, “But it doesn’t have estrogen in it,” HE said, “Well, they’re ALL HORMONES.” For serious.

**The nurse checked it when she took my history. This guy comes in, looks it over, says, “So you’re in a relationship.” I say, “What? No…” and look over to see him UNCHECKING THE “SEXUALLY ACTIVE” BOX. I told him he could just recheck it, because just because I’m not in a relationship doesn’t mean I’m not sexually active–which, dude, WTF, I should never ever HAVE to tell a doctor that. What the hell are they teaching them in doctor school?