Gym

While browsing through the junk at one of the markets I was at this weekend, I happened upon a piece of sport equipment. One of those step kind of things with rubber bands on it so that you can work your arms as well as your legs (so much for my descriptive capabilities). And that all for the grand price of 5 euros.
I've had a fantasy of throwing out the matrasses in my room and putting in a gymmy kind of thing. Because I don't go to the gym any more and all motivation to go walking or to do anything active on my own has disappeared like clouds before the sun. But I thought I might just possibly be active if some kind of equipment was readily available to me indoors. So after much thought and deliberation and asking peoples opinions at home, I went back to get the darn thing.
Only to find it being sold in front of my very eyes! Bummer. There go all my wild aspirations of becoming a svelte, sporty, sexy thirtyseven year old.
Maybe it's a sign, the equipment being sold.... Maybe it's just not meant to be..... ;-)

Sugar-free

I have been looking into sugar addiction and considering a sugar-free diet. Maybe that's just a fancy way for me to say that I can't control my eating. Calling it an addiction sounds so much more interesting and complicated, doesn't it?!? I can't help but feel really sad to think of spending days and days (not to mention weeks and weeks) sugar-free though. Like today for example. I baked brownies. Now how can I bake brownies and not eat them? If I had that kind of willpower I would not be overweight! But I have tried sugar-free before and have reaped the benefits and weight loss is only one of them. When I eat healthily I have less PMS, am less moody (though I'm not sure if that's due to diet or due to the fact that I'm so glad to be losing weight!), and I feel more energy. And I feel less compulsive about eating. I hate it when I walk around driven by appetite and am seemingly unable to control it.
So I will brood on this sugar free option some more and possibly give it a try. As you can tell, it may take a while............

Sabotage

Well, it took me all of.... let's see, ...... 12 hours to sabotage my weight loss plans.
12 hours. Not a very good score. I think it will take more than 12 hours to burn away 12 kilos. Methinks I must employ more drastic measures and start looking for a dietician. That shouldn't be too much of a problem considering half the world is on a diet.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs that half the world is still starving while the other half has to take all kinds of measures to stay in shape. Wish there was some way to take the surplus from one place and transfer it over to the other. You'd think that it wouldn't be such a problem.
I also wish that knowing half of the world is starving (and having also seen it) would be enough motivation for me to take better care of myself and my environment. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way for me. Somehow I end up stuck in my small little world, worrying about my piddly little problems and I forget to remember how lucky I am and to consider what I can do to help the other half.
I'm becoming philosophical. I will shut up now and try not to eat the apple pie with ice cream that is so readily available. Or the strawberry tart. Or the paprika chips. Or the almond cookies. Or.........


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Just finished reading The Promise by Chaim Potok. Excellent, excellent author. If you've not ever read him, then try!

Tomorrow

Tomorrow real life starts again. It feels like I've been on a lovely long break! But tomorrow Tristan AND Marinda have to go to school. Marinda has had practically three weeks of vacation, lucky girl, including her week in Italy! Somehow I'm also expecting the weather to get worse now. Like when real life starts it must be accompanied by clouds and rain and wetness. How logical is that?
I think I must also try to get back on track with my eating habits. (Yes, I KNOW I have said this before!!). Looking at the pictures made at the wedding on thursday made me realize that I have really visibly put on too many pounds, and that's just too bad. I don't look aweful, but I don't look as nice as I'd like to look. It's kind of hard though because our fridge is filled with brunch leftovers from this morning, and it's all just so darn good... But there's no way around it. If I want to lose weight, I must eat less. No exercise in the world can compensate for bad eating habits. Maybe I will force myself to post my weight every week, instead of the books that I read. That way I will be making myself accountable. But then I first have to get our scale fixed......................

Good and bad habits

Can somebody tell me why it's so easy to keep up bad habits and so darned hard to start good ones? Even when you KNOW that the good things really are good, feel good, make you feel better, and lead to a longer and more satisfactory life??
I went to the gym today and rediscoverd how good it feels to get my body going again. Yeah for me!! But why, why, why did it take two months for me to reach this point? Really, I am the most frustrating person I know.
Anyway, it felt good, and I have now committed myself to this gym (meaning that I now have to pay my monthly dues. And if that isn't an incentive, then.....). I aim to go twice a week. Once to do the cardio and weight stuff, and once to do the slow motion concentrated Pilates stuff.
It feels real good to get more good habits going on my life again!
( I have used the word good way to many times in this short post. Please forgive my lack of creativity!)

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currently reading: Vets might fly by James Herriot

Coming Week

Another week is coming up when I will be at home, jobless. Although I do have a second job interview on tuesday, so things are looking up for the weeks after! If I do get this job then I hope to start immediatly. And my main motivation is not even the finances, but the fact that I need the structure in order to stay sane. I wish I had the discipline to create my own rhythm, but I desperately need other strutures to keep me up and at them!
One of the things I really need to do is go to the gym. I have gained about 12 pounds since my lowest weight last summer, and it's bothering me. Not bothering me enough to change my eating habits though, even if I have made some vain attempts. Getting some energy from going to the gym should be of help. Getting that bike ride in the other day was a start anyway! I saw some people rollerblading yesterday and it reminded me that that's something I like to do as well. I will check out the roads here to see if that's an option. There's no use in rollerblading over cobblestones, which is what a lot of the roads here are made of. I've tried it before and I thought my eyes would shake out of my head. Not an experience to be repeated!
Today we will be biking to church since it's another gloriously sunny day. I will take my camera this time and hopefully take some picturesque shots to show here. Yesterday we were in a village close by which needs to be framed and mounted, it's that cute! And the funny thing is that it's a village I lived in when I was about 2 years old. My sister was born there (the only one in the family to be born in Holland!). I will get our old adres from my parents and see where our old house is. So Herman and I do have some roots in common, in a very small slight way!
Now I will stop rambling and start labelling my old messages, making it easier for everybody to see what I've written about in the past (as I'm sure you're all really curious :-))

New Job

On Thursday I just "happened" to go the the volunteer center here in my town to talk to the coordinator to see if she could help me find a job. We talked for about an hour. Then I looked through all their volunteer jobs to see if there were any appealing organisations. Suddenly she "happened" to remember a job offer in a city close by. As it turns out the closing date for applying was the coming friday and I knew the organisation because I had sent an open job application months ago. To make a long story short, I talked to the director on friday morning, sent my letter and resume an hour or two later and the next day received an invite for a job interview. Pretty nice set of circumstances, isn't it? Of course there's no knowing if I will get the job, but the location is great, the pay is the same as I was getting, they want somebody a.s.ap, and the hours are exactly what I wanted. Hmmmm, maybe there's a Higher Hand involved?
I was/am going slightly crazy at at the thought of spending many hours at home, so the thought of having a job soon is very comforting!
I will keep you posted, let you know if this really works out or not!

p.s. This is a picture of me at work at my old job. It's a real victory for me to post a picture of myself not looking my best (e.g. weighing a lot more...). I figure, what the heck! If I'm going to bare my soul on internet I might as well show what I have looked like as well.....

One more won't matter

I've fallen into the trap of "one more won't matter". One more cookie won't make a difference. That extra piece of meat? I really need my protein! I'm tired, so I need some extra energy, a bit of sugar will help. I deserve this treat, after all it's a really busy time and there's a lot going on. Tomorrow I'll feel beter and THEN, yes THEN I will watch my food again. But for now, one more won't matter..........

Sound familiar anyone?

Engrained habits are so darned difficult to get rid of. Even after a year of watching my weight,( and losing a lot of it!) I still fall back into old habits. It's like it will take another 10 years before new good habits will catch on and become normal to me. And in those ten years I'll just have to keep being aware of my own pitfalls, recognize my "bad" thought patterns, and consciously chose to change whatever it is that wants changing.
Aaaahhhhh, don't I wish life was just a little bit easier! :-)

New resolution

I've been letting my weight creep up again the last couple of weeks. It's just been too easy to give in to all the food that's in the house. That means I'm eating lots of candy and pretty much anything else that's lying around! It's so weird though, because although it tastes good and feels comforting in some way, it doesn't "hit the spot" (wherever that may be!!). And just today I realized that we'll be leaving for Ethiopia in 5 weeks, and I don't want any extra weight on me. I guess it's a matter of pride in some way. And somehow being heavy has always made me feel ashamed of myself and less able to cope. Although losing weight has not brought the dramatic change that I hoped it would. I'm still just me! The most important thing is after all, my concept of myself. If I'm feeling selfconfident then I also look better.
I guess weight gain gives me a sense of visibly failing. And in the past it has definately been associated with not doing things right, or not being good enough. And eating is a way of coping, of not dealing with what's going on. That's why it's not really so weird that I have been eating badly lately, what with all the action in our lives! I want to work on coping better while not being too hard on myself. Hopefully people like me for being me, and not for being thin(ner)!
Some other time I'll post some pictures of my different looks in the past.

Weight

Despite the fact that I wrote I have lost 15 kilos in the last year, weight still remains a HUGE issue in my life. It started during Marinda's pregnancy. I ate a lot then, partly because I was "eating for two" and naively thought I could get away with it, and partly to cover up a multitude of feelings that I was having.
After I gave birth to Marinda I was quite severely depressed for two years. I gained a lot of weight in that time and it became a really big deal. A big part of the years since then have been spent eating away a lot of issues instead of dealing with them.
That still happens to me regularly. I eat when I feel happy, eat when I feel sad, angry or dissappointed. Eating is very easy! One of the reasons that I finally managed to lose weight this time was because I got to the root of a certain issue and that finally helped me to get to grips with my weight as well.
I so wish that that would be end of my weight problem! Unfortunately it isn't. I still have to deal with myself, with who I am, and how I deal with things, and that means that sometimes I grab the candy, cookies, or whatever eatables are lying around the house and try to eat away the uncomfortable feeling that something is not quite right. Sometimes it seems a lot easier than actually dealing with the feelings. "Seems" is the key word in that last sentence!
Anyway, why I am writing this..... I'm not sure really. Probably because today was kind of hard because I saw a lot of bald kids, and because I saw where Hermans dream job is and I'm worried he won't get the job, because Marinda has been feeling sick for quite a while and I'm worried about her, because I'm tired of my job, and because I have PMS?
So now I've written it down, maybe I can keep myself from overeating the rest of the day!!

Resolutions

A couple of weeks ago I was at home feeling exhausted. Sometime in that week somebody asked me what kind of things I enjoyed doing. I couldn't give a decent answer at that point. A while later I realized that something that has always helped me has been to write things down. The last two years I've written lists of resolutions (or goals or dreams) to keep me awake and keep me aimed. If I don't look at those resolutions often enough I find I get so caught up in the daily routine of living that I forget to really live. So, remembering that, I decided to buy myself a brand new notebook, the cutest I could find, AND a new pen (never mind the fact that I have about 100 pens lying around the house) and start up a new list. That notebook, with all the things I've jotted down inside, has really helped me rediscover the things that give me energy. And the last two weeks have been spent putting some of my resolutions into practice.
Ever since the tv series Lost has been shown on dutch tv I've been wanting to follow it. But due to bad timing (and kids and husband wanting to watch other things) I've never managed. Now I just watch in from the internet! Simple, but very effective and fun. If I hadn't written it down I wouldn't have done it...

Yesterday on my way to work, I walked by the market. Usually I walk by with a feeling of regret because I supposedly don't have the time to have a look (I really like markets!). Now I took those couple of minutes and even bought some flowering plants for my office. So that little decision will give me weeks of pleasure because of my office looking more cheerful. I find a lot of the joy of life is in the little stuff. Mind you, I also have a number of BIG resolutions. Like visiting the States, going to visit my sister in Uganda, wearing a ball gown, going skiing, becoming a color consultant (I love the thought of taking an insecure person and brightening them up by using the right colors), and driving a really really fast car (or driving in Germany where there is NO speed limit on the highways!). Such fun to think of these things coming true!

And to my great pleasure a number of last years resolutions have been resolved! We're going to Ethiopia this Christmas for a family reunion and I have managed to lose 15 kilos. YEAH!!!

A bit of this and that

No pictures today, just a little peek into my day. Wednesdays are my day off. Usually I go to the gym in an attempt to keep fit and keep my weight down. But I woke up so tired I decided to give myself a break. I know though, that that is not very smart because I probably would have felt a lot better after giving myself a good workout! But all in all it's been a good morning. Marinda had to go the doctor and afterwards I treated us to a cup of coffee in the shopping center here. And then we ended up going into shops and buying stuff. Got myself a nice winter jacket! I usually hate shopping so it's great to run into something kind of by accident. Tristan will be coming home from school soon, wednesdays are always half days for elementary school kids. I'll feed him and then he'll probably go out to play soccer. Meanwhile I have a ton of housework to do. Definately not one of the joys of my life! Herman and I share household tasks pretty equally because he works parttime as well. He cooks most days of the week for example. Tonight is my turn and seeing as he's not here and my kids can be picky eaters, I'll probably make something real easy.
All these details are fascinating, I'm sure, so now I'll just stop going on and on and start getting on with hanging up my laundry, dusting and vacuuming.