Since I began attempting to be less of a fatass in June, I have lost approximately 50 pounds. Or, as one of my friends put it, I have shed one of these:
While I'm unbelievably proud of myself for having lost that amount of excess weight, it's important to remember that, when I started, I was 230 pounds. Unless I'm doing math wrong (which is a distinct possibility), I am now at roughly 180 pounds. That's still fat. What those 50 pounds have done is move me out of the sketchy Obese neighborhood and into the slightly less trashy suburb of Overweightville. It's a gigantic accomplishment, but I have so far to go before I get to live in the fancy gated community of Paloma Del Attractive People. To that end, I have made my diet a tad more specific than "stop shoveling so much goddamn food down your throat, Madigan."
First things first... the word diet is stupid. It implies something temporary. What I've done is permanently change what and how much I eat. What I haven't done is deprived myself of anything I love because, and I believe this requires some emphasis, THAT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. I love food that's bad for me. I love pizza and beer and cake.
This is a picture of happiness.
My rule is only cut it out completely if you won't miss it. I accidentally gave up soda. I realized one day that I hadn't had soda in over a year, so I clearly don't need to drink it. I stopped eating at McDonald's or Jack in the Box or Carl's Jr or any of their brethren quite some time ago because I realized there was a direct correlation between eating that food (I use that term very loosely) and feeling like there are tiny civilizations declaring war on one another throughout my digestive system. Those things were easy and I gave them up long before I actively started losing weight. But when it comes to things I love, it's a bit harder. I started simply. Instead of eating pizza or a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for lunch at work, I switched to fruit or salad. Instead of having a beer or two with dinner every night, I switched to water or juice. Real juice, by the way, from actual fruit. Not fruit-flavored liquid whose first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. That being said, I still do enjoy the occasional pizza and beer. "Occasional" being the operative word. And it's the same with everything I eat. I eat less of it, less often. At this point, I'm down to about 1200 calories per day. I say about 1200 because I'm not obsessively counting.
There's a super easy trick to get started on eating less. It's purely psychological, but it works. Use smaller plates. That's all. When I have dinner with my family, they all have dinner plates and I use a wee salad plate. I eat the exact same thing as them, but at least 50% less. Having a full time job is tremendously helpful as well. If I'm busying myself for 8 hours a day (ten, actually, given my hour commute to and from), I don't really have time to stuff my face. But, more than anything, it's just awareness. I'm finding it easier and easier to remove certain things from my diet simply by making myself aware of their ingredients and their caloric content. It's incredibly easy to decide not to eat something when you know what kind of atrocious things are in it.
And knowing is half the battle!
In other news, some of my friends have taken up running along the beach. I joined them last night and I found that I'll push myself a bit harder when I'm with people instead of alone on my treadmill or running around my neighborhood. And I thoroughly enjoy running along the beach. I'm going to gush about California for a moment. I've lived in Southern California my entire life. I love it here. I love that I go over a hill and see the ocean every day on my way to work. I love that I can drive for two hours in the other direction and play in the snow on the mountains. But I really love the water. I love being near it, being in it, being on it, and I love the creatures who dwell in it and are so delicious wrapped in rice and seaweed, dipped in soy sauce.
Hey look... I found Nemo.
I intend to join my beach running buddies as frequently as possible. And, on nights when that isn't feasible, it's back to my abusive relationship with Jillian Michaels.
Assuming I continue to do what I'm doing (and really, I see no reason why I'll stop), I see an iconic golden bikini in my not-too-distant future.
One of my co-workers came to work one day talking about how sore she was from a workout video she was trying. She said it was only a 20-minute workout, but it was supposed to be incredibly effective. It's called Jillian Michaels' 30 Day Shred. I thought to myself, "A 20 minute workout every day for 30 days? Psh... I can do that. I've already been doing that. How hard can this be?" So I bought the video (about $9 at Target), along with the prescribed equipment: a yoga mat and some 5 lb hand weights. The next morning, I got started.
Jillian Michaels is a sadistic bitch.
Having never watched The Biggest Loser, I had no idea who Jillian Michaels was. She looked like a pleasant enough person on the DVD case. I expected a supportive exuberance, like Richard Simmons or any of the other creepily nice people to which we were subjected in high school when the P.E. teacher had a hangover and didn't feel like actually teaching, so we sweated to the oldies instead.
There was one semester where I saw this guy more than my teacher.
But Jillian Michaels yells at fat people for a living. She's not sweet or understanding. She tells you to stop whining and keep moving. If you stop for a break, YOU FAIL AT EXERCISE. You do your 24 minutes, exactly how she tells you to do it, and you shut the hell up about how hard it is. There is something to that method, though. You very quickly develop a special type of resentment toward her that drives you to continue. Like you need to prove to her and yourself and everyone that you can do this. Also, you know that if you get through your 30 days and reach whatever goal you had set, you never have to look at her stupid face ever again.
This is the face of evil.
Apart from a general feeling of impending death, the first two days of the video went pretty well. Day three rolls around and I'm feeling the burn, both in my muscles (a soreness, the likes of which I've never experienced) and a seething hatred in the core of my soul. I begrudgingly press play and get started on the third day of punishment. Midway through, I mercifully injured myself rather severely. One of my 5 lb weights came crashing into my left thumb. Here's the magnitude of brainwashing that comes with this harpy's video: as my thumb immediately began to swell and turn unnatural shades of blue, my first thought was that I needed to finish the routine. Luckily, rationality (and experience with far more injuries than I'd like to admit) won out, and I administered first aid to myself, all the while with Jillian playing in the background, yelling at me that when it starts to get painful is when it counts the most.
Last night, I went to the doctor and had some x-rays and it turns out that I'm incredibly lucky. My thumb isn't broken, just badly bruised. Not only am I lucky for having averted major injury, but also because, if it had been broken, my doctor visit would have lasted quite a bit longer and I wouldn't have been home in time for Jeopardy.
What can I say? This is one sexy Canadian.
Last night was the online test for potential Jeopardy contestants. Auditions for that show are a long, complicated process. Anyone who even wants to be considered has to sign up months in advance to take the online test. Of the people who "pass" the test, a randomly selected group gets a phone interview. Of those interviewees, some get to actually go to a real audition. Of the people who do well in the auditions, a select few will become contestants on the show. How do you know if you pass the test? You don't. You don't ever get told your official score. You can guess, based on how many of the questions you believe to have gotten correct. My guess is that I scored 30-35 out of a potential 50. But the Jeopardy officials are rather tight-lipped about what constitutes a "passing" score. The only way to find out if you answered an acceptable number of question correctly is to get a phone call, which could happen any time between next week and December. Whether or not that call ever happens, I'm proud of myself for doing it. And I'll probably do it again next year.
That's not the only show for which I'd like to audition. When I've lost all the weight I want to lose, I'll figure out which of my friends will be least likely to kill me or send me into a homicidal rage when stuck together under a great deal of stress of two months and go out for The Amazing Race. Apart from the obvious reason,
Need I say more, ladies?
I would just love to go traipsing around the world doing wacky things. Who wouldn't?
It seems like I shouldn't be attempting a post on something that I can't do at the moment. For the last three days, I've been stuck in bed with the plague.
This guy just came to my house yelling "Bring out your dead"
Not really the plague... just a truly awful head cold. I tried to do some exercise. I really did. It's just that, when getting out of bed is a harrowing ordeal, going for a quick jaunt around the neighborhood becomes a task of Herculean proportions. And attempting my usual battery of sit-ups is a really good way to become incredibly disoriented. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I started exercising regularly about six weeks ago, with a program called Couch To 5k that a few friends directed me to. It's a good starting point, but I quickly learned that not everyone can follow it. At least I couldn't. Maybe I just fail miserably at running, but by the time I hit Week 3, I was noticeably behind schedule. I mean, I was proud of myself on the first day when I managed to jog for an entire minute without dying. Week 3 came along, expecting me to jog for three minutes and my fat ass could not do it. Also, my time to distance ratio was not matching up with the site's, which meant that I was supposed to be running faster. So I started to deviate from it a bit. Instead of following their carefully constructed routine that I'm sure is scientifically proven by people who went to school to become nutritionists and personal trainers, I decided to do something a little most simplistic. Just run. As fast as you can, as far as you can.
Basically, this
So that's what I do now. If I'm on my treadmill, I cover up the time and distance monitors so I have no idea how far or how long I'm running. If I'm running around my neighborhood, it requires a bit more psychological willpower. I have to refrain from using things as markers or goals because then my brain will decide that it's done running once I hit said marker, so as I get closer, fatigue sets in and my legs don't want to work anymore. Because my brain is a jerk like that. The downside is that I have no idea what kind of progress I'm making, if any. But eventually, I'll be able to run the entire distance around my block, which is exactly one mile. I realize that's not impressive for most people, but for someone who never did anything under a 12-minute mile in P.E. in the entirety of my time at grade school (and the 12-minute mile was probably in 6th grade to begin with), running that distance without having to stop for a walking break is sort of a big deal.
When I started six weeks ago, I was running every other day. Then, about three weeks ago, I noticed something. While I was getting noticeably smaller, my midsection was still a problem. When I'm standing, I just look unpleasantly squishy around the stomach region. When I sit, my midsection looks like it should be sorting British children into Gryffindor.
I want to go to whichever house has all the donuts!
Since I'm not well-versed in whatever new-fangled exercises the kids are doing these days, I went with an old standard: sit-ups. I started doing them on the days I wasn't running. So I was doing that for about two weeks, alternating running and sit-ups. But then I realized that I'm going to be on a crazy adventure in the UK and Ireland in two months and I'm going to be going to bars and meeting people and I don't want to be some fat American broad. I want to be a fairly attractive American broad, or, at the very least, the American broad who is slightly more attractive than the average UK broad. Or, better yet, the hot chick in the bar who has good taste in beer and doesn't sound like a moron, so who cares where she's from, let's hang out with her. So I combined the two. I go around the neighborhood or do a mile on the treadmill, followed by approximately 70 sit-ups. Sometimes more, sometime 5-10 less, depending on what my ab muscles want to let me get away with. I have a couple of t-shirts that are slightly too small at the moment, but will look fabulous on me once my stomach has retreated. Everyone who wants to lose weight should have some "goal" clothing. Not a whole wardrobe... just an article or two relevant to your specific problem area. Just something you have to remind you not to get impatient and not to give up.
The only lesson Tim Allen ever taught anyone: Never give up. Never surrender.
And that's what I do on a daily basis. You know, when I don't have the consumption.* But as soon as I start to feel better, I'll be back to it. In the meantime, I'm going to drink lots of fluids, get lots of sleep, and take so much cold medication that even my liver will start hallucinating. I should get on that. See you next time!
*I don't actually have the consumption, on account of me not living in 1897.
My name is Madigan and I used to be really fat. I'm still kinda fat, but not nearly as bad. I've always had this desire to go from looking like this:
to looking like this:
Preferably before Comic-Con
But every time I started a diet or exercise program, I'd do it for about one-tenth of a second before giving up. I tried all the gimmicks. I'm pretty sure, at one point, I made Jenny Craig cry. Thanks to my complete lack of will-power, this was me in April of 2011, all 230 pounds of me, plus an automatic weapon:
I was in Vegas. They let you play with guns there.
Shortly after that picture was taken, I reconnected with an old friend. And, by reconnected, I mean we started sleeping together.This friend of mine is one of those impossibly attractive people. The kind of person whose insane good looks will cause normal looking people who have never been self-consciousa day in their life to start reassessing their decision to leave the house that morning. Or ever. So, given that I was regularly sleeping with this freakishly hot man, I decided that maybe I shouldn't be such a whale anymore.
I started with a diet. And, by diet, I mean I just stopped shoveling so much food down my throat. I didn't stop eating anything I loved or switched to living solely on "shakes" and bars that taste vaguely of kitty litter. I ate exactly the same stuff I always did. I just ate less of it.Far less. And a crazy thing happens when you ingest fewer calories... you start losing weight.
So that was going pretty well. I lost a good amount of weight with diet and I was certainly getting some excellent exercise from my interactions with the aforementioned hot fellow. But there was still no getting away from the fact that he was basically an Abercrombie & Fitch poster and I was still shopping at fat chick stores. Predictably, our several month entanglement ended thusly:
To be more accurate, imagine Adele's "Someone Like You" playing in the background
So that happened. And it sucked. And I don't want to say that the only reason it didn't work out was our severe differences in looks. Hell, that may have had nothing to do with it. I don't know. I don't care. Because it was my catalyst. It was the point at which I decided I don't want to be fat anymore. I don't want to feel that nervous and unattractive the next time a ridiculously hot person wants to sleep with me.
On a side note, I won't use this fellow's name or put any pictures up of him because I do care about his privacy. Those of you who know me know who I'm talking about and those of you who don't know me, well... I guess all I can say is thanks for reading the ramblings of a fat nerdy girl endeavoring to become less fat. But, back to the guy, caring about his privacy is the extent to which my caring goes. If you'd like to know how I feel about the guy himself, I'm going to direct you to my close, personal friend Weird Al Yankovic*:
*Disclaimer: Weird Al is not actually my close, personal friend, but wouldn't that be awesome?
Instead of handling things like a crazy girl would, I decided to parlay my sadness and frustration into something productive. Eating less was going okay, but I wasn't any stronger and I wasn't getting close to Slave Leia in any kind of hurry. So I took my emotions out on a poor, defenseless treadmill.
And that brings us to now. I've only been at this running thing for about six weeks and it's hard, but I'm sticking with it. In addition to my goal of looking half-decent in a Slave Leia bikini by July, I have acquired a new goal: run a marathon. Maybe not this year, but sometime in my future, there are 26.2 miles with my name on them.
This blog will be my repository for my experiences going from fat chick to hot nerd girl, along with whatever nonsense happens to float from my head to my keyboard along the way. As I'm figuring out all this weight loss stuff along the way, my experiments will provide some information about what works and what is pants-on-head retarded, should anyone else wish to embark upon a similar endeavor.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my next entry, "Run Away, Run Away!"
