I've gotten some sleep lately.  The Ambien helps.  So that's good.

I am the same weight I was in August.  Now, people close to me--and I may have said it before--have pointed out that I've had a lot going on since, say, Thanksgiving.  Staying the same is, therefore, a win.

It is a win.  I know that.  Given how I've lived in the past, a plateau is a decent thing.  I wish I'd been keeping better track of my measurements, because I get the sense that I'm still shrinking a bit (everywhere but the waist).  I'm still frustrated. 

It's possible that I'm not eating enough for my size, but I find that hard to believe.  I eat plenty.  I really do.

Lately, I've had some slippage into the not so great for you items (a scone or two, that kind of thing).  Calorie-wise, I'm fine, but I really do believe that crappy food is a hindrance to the goal.

My kids are due in August.  I'd love to drop 20 by then.  But there's no race.  I'll keep doing what I'm doing.  (Oh, and after several weeks off, I'm getting to the gym pretty regularly.  That won't hurt.)

So, more plateau, but not gains.  Yay me.

Darkness Visible

I stole the title from William Saroyan.

I have found, over the years, that I am prone to depression.  I have had, I think, three seriously depressive periods.  I'm just coming out of one (knock wood).  If you have ever suffered from this, you know how debilitating and freaking scary it is.  Forget about decent sleep.  One is hopeless and joyless.  Suicide seems like one of the few good resolutions.  It's not rational, and even if you recognize that, you don't care.  I could go on, but I won't.  I don't really want to think about the last month or so.

If  you have read my past entries, you know I've had a lot going on.  I reached my limit, and I was spun.  I'm doing much better now.  Meds and therapy help.  My wife is unbelievably kind and supportive. 

I didn't eat.  I couldn't.  (This is a first.  I'm ok with not wanting to eat, too.)  But I have not been tracking, and I have not limited what I've been eating.  Willingness to eat has been enough.  My appetite is back, and I don't feel much need to eat a lot.  It makes me thing that whatever my issues, I might have--for the moment--changed my relationship with food over the last year.  I hope so.

If you suffer, my heart goes out to you.  I have found a book called Undoing Depression pretty useful.  You can read about it here www.undoingdepression.com.

I'll be writing more here later.  But that's all for now.

Cheating

Today I weighed in at a meeting. Down 1.4, which is not as much as I had hoped. It's also for two weeks. I have to remember that in my world, where staying the same is a win, losing is a big deal. I'm down almost 30 pounds since April. There are faster ways to do it, especially when you're as big as I am, but I want something I can live with long term. I want to change my life.

I was up for about an hour last night. When my brain starts working, I sometimes have a hard time getting it to stop. Last night was bad because I thought of something that happened when I was a kid. I was 13 or 14, and it was around a holiday, because my mother's parents were there, too. We'd had a roast beef instead of a turkey, so I'm not sure what the occasion was. Probably Christmas. Anyway, a couple hours after we ate, I was in the basement at our miniature pool table. I had cut off some pieces of the meat for a snack. At some point I was going up to cut off pieces of meat so often I was tired of it, and there was so little of the roast left, that I just took the whole thing down with me and at it while I shot pool. This was probably a six or seven pound roast, half of which had fed five of us plus two grandparents.

My dad looked for the roast later to make some sandwiches--you know, a light dinner. He couldn't find it, asked me where I was. "I ate it," I said. Very sheepish. That created a crisis, embarrassment (me because I was out of control, the folks because I was out of control and they didn't know what to do).

I couldn't possibly have been hungry. I don't know what was going on. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I was agitated about something. I don't even remember what happened after that. But I'm still mortified about it, and I try to think what I would do if I were that kid's parent. In a way, today I am.

Today in the meeting, someone mentioned how weigh-in day functions as a cheat day. I get the concept. I have a lovely, skinny friend who really works at staying thin, and she and her mother have shared the concept of the cheat day since D was little. (D thinks a 600 calorie breakfast is ENORMOUS. Not for me it's not.) Anyway, I understand the concept of a cheat day, but who would I be cheating? Me, right? So why do that? My concept, though, is based on the theory that it's not about the food. It's about need. I have some ideas about the need, but it could be food or anything else that's the object of the need. Mine's food. For other people it's Sailor Jerry's rum. I don't want to cheat myself. I've been doing that my whole life.