Snow my god! Snowtastrophe! SNOWBLIVION!!!! I'm more tired of tortured snow puns than I thought possible. Snowzilla? REALLY? I thought it couldn't get worse than Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon. How about snowverreaction? Tossing "snow" in to replace the first syllable of some cataclysmic word is not clever. I can handle the transportation paralysis and forced hibernation; it's the criminal level of forced portmanteaus I can't handle.
Please stop. You're doing unspeakable things to English. What did English ever do to you?! SNOW YOUR ROLL. (That's how it's done.)
Anyway, back to my life as a fat girl, which I realize is the actual purpose of this blog...
I'm pleased and a little shocked to report that after 4 nights surrounded by mountains of homemade cookies at my parents' house, I had not a single one. NOT ONE. I should emphasize that I was not only surrounded by the cookies, but surrounded by people eating them. FOUR DAYS OF PEOPLE EATING DELICIOUS COOKIES AND I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A BITE. I leave here in about an hour, and I have no plans to break that streak. It was so difficult, and I wanted to eat all of them, which is why I knew I couldn't have one. I can't believe it. I escaped without surrendering!
A huge reason for that is that I took a few minutes to make preparations, like organizing a snack survival kit for all 4 days, before leaving my place. I also made sure I got in all of my steps according to Jiminy in spite of being off routine and needing to make an extra effort to work out. This involved scoring a week-long pass to a local gym so I could get legitimate workouts in since exercising outside wasn't really on the menu this time. So, yes, it took a lot of additional work to pull off what is second nature to me when I'm in my natural habitat, but make no mistake: it was still overwhelmingly a mental struggle. I had to constantly remind myself that I'm on a mission here, and there is no pause button. I have impending weigh-ins and momentum that should not be compromised. I haven't had that much trouble with temptation since before I started losing the weight, and I couldn't believe how hard this was. I had to tell myself over and over again that I had a choice: have a cookie and be mad at myself, or resist them for this entire visit and be immensely proud. I chose pride, and I feel AWESOME!
Along the way, I had a couple of memorable weight-loss moments that impacted me and became part of my arsenal of resistance. (WOW, that sounds militant!) First, when the snow stopped on Saturday, my mom and I shoveled out the driveway and de-snowed my and my brother's cars that were parked there. Even with two of us, it took an hour to finish because of how much snow we had to clean up. With all that work, I never got winded or tired, and I kept thinking to the last time I had to dig out my car and how laborious it was. All I had to do was clean the snow off of my car and shovel a little bit behind the rear wheels so I could back out of my outdoor parking space at my apartment. That's something that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes with the quantity of snow I was dealing with at the time (maybe 2"), but it took nearly a half hour. I went inside afterwards feeling completely exhausted and was covered in snow from being so big that there was no way to brush off my vehicle without leaning against it and getting snow all over me. That was then. This year, my body never made contact with the cars when I was cleaning them off, and I actually enjoyed shoveling for the productive workout it gave me.
At my grandfather's party yesterday, I made the mistake of wearing a sleeveless dress in the dead of winter. At a certain point, one of my mom's cousins, who's a massage therapist, came up to me privately to say hi. He didn't waste a lot of time getting to, "I don't know if this is a polite thing to bring up with a woman, but..." and went into how amazing and toned my arms look. He said that as a massage therapist, he notices these things, but I must be doing some work on my arms. He asked more about it and said to keep doing whatever I'm doing, because the effect is obvious and looks great. That made me feel pretty rad!
Beyond that, people kept telling me how happy and confident I seemed, and that kind of threw me because I don't really think I was doing anything to give anyone that impression. It's not like I was front and center, but pretty much everyone I talked to make some remark about that. No one asked about the weight loss, but I could tell that sometimes they were waiting for me to say something about it (and I didn't). I guess I'm carrying myself differently and just projecting this stuff. And the 3" heels that made me a respectable height probably helped and would give the illusion of confidence to most people. ;-) Oh, and then I ate a piece of the birthday cake, and was fine with that choice/had planned to do it, anyway.
It's about time for me to be getting ready to hit the road, so I'm gonna wrap this up here. Not an earth-shattering update this time, but I had to record for posterity that it is in fact possible for me to spend this much time in an environment inundated with my trigger foods and not cave to them. It's possible because IT HAPPENED. Woo!