Weight Loss

So, to commemorate my achieving the totally unexpected weight loss of 35 pounds in under 7 months, I thought I'd write a blog post with my tips!

Note: This is not really a healthy level of weight loss.  But there was no actual starvation involved.

If I knew how many tips there were I would say X Tips for Fast Weight Loss!
However, I don't,  And actually I would never title a blog post in such a pathetic way. I'm not convinced enough of my skill in irony to trust that people wouldn't think I am that pathetic and lame. I have no idea why, but I seem to care.

1.  The first step for me is, admittedly, kind of cheating.  Gain weight first!
I had to take prednisone for asthma.  Prednisone makes you eat like a horse.  I had 3 dinners in one night once, seriously.  At least it amused the roommates.  Anyhow, I took it for nearly a year, and therefore was fat for nearly a year, and it was starting to seem like I would never be normal again.

So, my starting point wasn't exactly my normal weight, but then again, if you're trying to lose weight, it's probably because you're not at your 'normal weight.' After all, your normal weight should be your healthy weight.  And that's all I intended to achieve. So chances are, this step has already been accomplished.  You have gained weight.

2. Arrange your life in such a way that obtaining food in any normal way is difficult.
This is not something that I would ever have thought of, but has turned out to be incredibly helpful.  Because I had no idea where I was moving, I ended up living in a neighborhood in which it is difficult to have a car, but it is also difficult to not have a car.  I can't park, but I can't get to a grocery store.  Oops.  But, no it has turned out to be a godsend.  At work there is a grocery store, and so I purchase necessities only and take them home with me.  Significant walking discourages weighty or excessive purchases.  And any added weight is helping me to burn more calories on my walk.

3. Make only as many rules as you can actually stick to.
In my case, no ordering in is an easy way. I hate making phone calls, particularly to strangers. And once I made the rule it was possible to stick my fingers in my ears and say lalalalala at the mention of the fact that food can be ordered over the internet.  After all this still leaves the awkwardness that we have no intercom and the doorbells aren't labeled, so stranger visits stress me out. Is my neuroticism showing yet? It's helpful sometimes.
Another rule for me is no processed foods unless absolutely necessary.  The slight out is for when I'm sick, or when I'm not quite sure if something counts as processed or not.

If you LOVE pizza, don't say you'll never order in cause obviously you'll fail and then start ordering other things.  I would imagine that it's highly unlikely that someone could eat pizza 7 days a week.  Even 2-3 would probably get old pretty fast.

4. Use your laziness to your advantage!
After all, we're all fairly lazy, particularly if we've gotten to the point that we need to lose weight.  My use of inherent extreme laziness? It doesn't matter how hungry I am I am not wandering out into the night to obtain food.  Given block on ordering in, this forces me to forage in the pantry.

Now, an added bonus to laziness which is not healthy, but hell, it comes in handy.  I'm generally too lazy to make meals. I'm always too lazy to make meals. Therefore the foraging is more for like snack food.  So as to not actually die or make myself ill I do try to make sure there's some yogurt smoothies in the fridge (stay good much longer than milk) and some nuts, olives, or dried fruit around. The no processed thing kind of ensures that whatever little stuff I eat is not crap.

5. Find healthy inexpensive ways to obtain food during the day. I know, WTF? That's stupid advice, everyone knows it and no one does it. Hang with me for a moment. We've already established laziness is going to be an issue, so pretending you're going to make a lovely fresh salad every single day to take to work with you is asking for failure.  So just find the nearest place that doesn't sell crap like hamburgers and pizza.  If you can do salad bars without wanting to gag, go for it.  Otherwise, get like a normal sized sandwich or something.  Which usually means half a sandwich at even relatively healthy eating places.  So, knowing you won't/shouldn't finish the sandwich, stop after half, wrap it up and take it with you, and be gleeful that you will not have to obtain any additional food that day, because you have dinner in your hand.  And your lazy day stores will remain undepleted.

Wow it worked out to 5, that's unexpected.  I always see Top 5 this and Top 10 that, and think bs.  Dumb to put a number on it, cause obviously you're actually going to come up with 6 or 8. So now I'm really trying to think of another one, but that's not fair either.  Making shit up just so the number's weird is (I'm sure there's a good word, but I'm not coming up with it) lame.

Oh, no tips on exercise.  I walk part of the way to work cause I have no car.  I'd probably be, nope definitely be better off if I actually exercised, but see underlying theme of laziness.

I'm now nearly 15 pounds lighter than when I started the prednisone.  Back to the low end of healthy for me.  Hopefully I will stop now.  Because the new clothes I bought are starting to slip and its a nuisance (and expensive) to buy a whole bunch of new clothes.  Since this is just lifestyle not a diet, I can't really control that except to actively try to eat more.  Which I've actually been doing.

So anyway, most of it is giving way to laziness and making it work for you!
Yeah, it may not be the healthiest way to lose weight.  But it's not the least healthy either, and it works, so who cares.

New England Winter

Okay, I give up.  Its only been a couple of weeks, but I'm going to say it.  New England winter is worse than Iceland's ever were.  I don't really understand why this is.  When I think back on winter in Iceland there seems to have been quite a lot of sleet, lots of wind, occasional snow, and snow and ice would last forever, because there was never enough heat and sun to melt it.  Eventually it would rain and wash away the snow.  I did three and a half winters in Iceland, its not like I'm talking a couple weeks here.  I know what its like.
I walked to work in everything but the worse snowstorms when I had wonderful friends who picked me up and gave me a ride.  The night before I left Iceland I had a sleet storm blown full on directly in my face for 10 minutes and I just thought 'Awww, its Iceland's way of saying goodbye.' Seriously, I thought it was sweet and my face was nicely exfoliated.
Now, I've either become soft, or this is worse.  It sucks. And its only been a few weeks.  November, December, nothing.  Little chilly sometimes but I like it when its cold, dry, crisp.  As soon as it gets wet or windy, not so much.

I'm not usually paranoid

In fact, I would say that I'm very laid-back and chill.  Lacking the energy or dedication for hypervigilance I tend to have a little bit of a 'Shit Happens' attitude towards crime.  I'll make little adjustments to my life to avoid dangerous situations, but I'm going to accept that the reality is most of it is random, and as long as I don't make myself a sitting duck, I'll just have to accept it as part of the way things go if something bad happens to me.  After all, the only time I've been robbed was when someone broke in in Iceland, which at the time at least, had a crime rate, of ohhhh, as close to 0 as you can get.  (Read about some strange happenings of late with people getting punched in the face so hard they're in critical condition, but I will say that chances are both men were very drunk, and thus willingly and knowingly increasing their risk of becoming criminals and/or victims).  I lived in New York City, Brooklyn, Atlanta, D.C., no witnessing or personal knowledge of crimes.  Go figure.

Where was I? Oh paranoia.  I generally laugh at the conspiracy theorist, have shook my head at the government is out to get us folks, and I've shrugged at the internet privacy folks.  Aside from banks and shopping sites (which have quite a lot to lose if their security systems are hacked), for which I use separate iterations on passwords than I use for any other sites, I enter no personal information aside from my e-mail address (well, one of 7, I didn't do that on purpose), and thanks to my job, if you google my name you don't even have to click on the webpage, my e-mail address is right there.  So, that cat is out of the bag.

Two things have changed me very recently.

I tried

I tried.
I thought, you're just being boring and repetitive.  And you sound like a fangirl.  And I criticized myself in several other ways.
And I think the result was that I stopped writing anything at all.  That was kind of dumb.
If my brain is totally obsessed with 2 people and a football team, so be it.
And today, of all days, I cannot not write about two of my obsessions, the Patriots and Chris Colfer.

Dangers of Reading Internet Comments

I know I haven't written anything in ages.  I got all neurotic about it, so let's just leave it at that and move on, yeah?
Oh, that seems to be a new, well, style of my typing.  I don't think I say it.  At least I haven't noticed.  But in e-mails and stuff, I add ',yeah?' to all kinds of statements.  Where the hell did that come from?
Oh, point, right.  The title.

So, here's the background.  I read quite a lot of stuff on the internet.  Like, a lot of news stories, and a lot of things that might be considered to pass for news, but really aren't.  They might show up in Google News, but you know they're meaningless crap.  I read insignificant news.  I read less about significant news for some reason.  If there are like 1000 articles about it, I read the headline and a sentence.  No, I spend my time going after like everything ever written about the Patriots (at least since their last game), everything about Tim Minchin I can possibly find (my Idol, swoon).  I check out other NFL stuff now the playoffs are here, I look at movie reviews.  Even for movies that there is absolutely no chance in hell I will ever see (The Dilemma, although if I had an exact amount of screentime for Channing Tatum and it was sufficient I could be convinced.  However, I know absolutely no one who would want to convince me to see that.)  I read NYTimes columnists. Lately I've been rather hypervigilant about the weather with the whole blizzard thing.  And I inevitably end up on People or some other even worse crap because some little thing about a celebrity I like shows up (partly this is because of awards season, but realistically I'd land on them anyway).  As you can surely see, this is colossal waste of time.

Glee - Never Been Kissed

*swoon*  *applause* actually *jumping up and down clapping with huge smile on face*

Before I hit the oh my god I did not see that coming moment, I've realized that I think, strangely, part of the appeal of Glee to me is the potential from week to week that it will suck.  I know, weird huh?

Every episode, on Monday I get happy its coming, but I also get anxious.  What if it sucks?  Thing is, there are always many stories, or little mini-stories going on at the same time.  If the main story sucks but there's some major awesomeness in the B stories, the episode is still good.  But you can also easily have an episode with, like one awesome moment.  And you think wow that was great.  And a half an hour later, you think, actually, most of that kind of sucked.  But sometimes you get wonderful episodes where it seems everything is clicking.  I think tonight's was one of those.

Language

Why do we use the language we use?
I would say words, since as far as the entire language goes most of us only have one or a couple to choose from, except I mean the entire style of language we use.

Its really very interesting if you think about it.  When you listen to your own words in different situations, or think about how your use of them changes over time.

In general I know I have a tendency to use rather precise language.  If I know a word that has all the proper connotations I'm looking for I will use it.  I wouldn't say I use flowery language though, I just end up using words that don't necessarily come up frequently in conversation.  That's my baseline.