froggy's Open Salon Blog

Memorial Day Song

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:05:11 -0400

In the immortal words of Moxy Fruvous.

I'm with the band

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:05:49 -0400

It's band season again.

Portland's One More Time Around Again Marching Band. So now I've given my anonymity away away, within 500 people.

That's right, 500 people. It's awesome. And it's loud.

We practice in a middle school cafeteria. There are drums. Drums! Lots of them! My whole body vibrates, my ears ring, and I can't stop grinning. And a whole line of tubas. Clarinets, saxes, flutes, trumpets, trombones. A bunch of aging band geeks. Playing Sousa and 70's pop tunes and big band and jazz. And Louie Louie.

We have a flag squad. They don their short skirts and their knee braces, wrinkles and all, and they wave their flags and dance down the street. We have a baton team and a dance team. I love them to pieces. It's the silliest, most ridiculous thing I've done as an adult. I marched down the street last year, in front of thousands of people, both playing and singing Louie Louie. Really. Me. Middle-aged suburban mom, with kids in middle school. Singing Louie Louie. In public. With 500 friends.

Making more noise than should be legal.

God this is fun.

I wish it lasted all year.

Weight Loss Journal: Ten pounds

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:05:53 -0400

Ten pounds. Something of a milestone. Two sugar sacks.

It's disappointing, though, because there is so much farther to go. I want to look in the mirror and see the person I remember, not this fat woman hiding in my skin. I want it now. Not in six months or a year. Now.

I know all the adages about losing weight in a healthy way, it didn't come on overnight, it's not going to come off overnight, yadda yadda. One or two pounds a week is a long, long time.

I want a magic pill.

I want.

I want someone to notice who I haven't seen in a while. But it hasn't happened yet. I have enough to lose that ten pounds is indistinguishable to everyone but me. I notice that my pants fit better, my favorite shirt doesn't gap in the front. That's all. That fat woman is still staring at me in the mirror.

I keep exercising. I keep obsessively writing everything down. Weighing and measuring, walking and swimming, biking and taking aerobics class. One foot ahead of the other, climbing a mountain I can't even imagine the top of.

I want it now.

Weight Loss Journal: Estimating and Honesty

Mon, 7 May 2012 13:05:33 -0400

These are my new best friends.

What this weight loss journey is teaching me is:

1. I can't estimate.

2. I lie to myself all the time.

I can't estimate to save my soul. I have no idea how much a portion is if I don't measure it ahead of time. I pile it on the plate, if I like it, I'll have more. "That looks like about a cup." Yet when I measure it for real, what I thought was a cup is really one and a half. Or two. Or something. Who knows?

So I measure.

Everything.

Every day.

Because if I guess, I know I'm always wrong.

I lie to myself, early, often, and all the time. I can so easily tell myself, "It's just one," or "It's not very big," or "You get a treat, just have one," or "You exercised today, you deserve this." One, whatever it is, turns into two, or three, or half a container, and I don't even know how much it was.

If I weigh it, measure it, look it up, and write it down, and be honest about what I'm doing, then I'm not lying any more.

If I weigh it, or measure it, I can't lie. Numbers are numbers. Half a cup is really truly what fits in the measuring cup. An ounce on the scale is an ounce. If I want more, I have to write it down. And in that act of weighing or measuring a second helping, I'll usually discover I didn't want it anyway.

Weight Loss Journal: Beans

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:04:09 -0400

And no, I'm not talking about the kind of beans you eat.

This is my kitchen windowsill. I had the jars already--I just like them. There they sat, collecting dust. When I started this weight loss project, and decided to get serious about it, I knew I needed a way to see it and pay attention to it, every day.

The jar on the left is what I've accomplished. The one on the right is what there is to go. I get to move a bean from one jar to another with each whole number of pounds lost (I couldn't figure out how to do a quarter of a bean. And that's just silly anyway). Officially lost--aka weights only count at Weight Watchers meetings.

And I really really don't want to have to move a bean back.

So there they are. In my kitchen. Visual, tangible, real. Right near my measuring cups, my kitchen scale (aka my new best friend), my measuring spoons.

Making it real. One bean at a time.