WHAT'S UP?

Snowball #365

"Snowball #365"

 I haven't really talked to much about my Jawbone Up since I got it. Someone asked me weeks ago if I liked it and I just kind of shrugged and said "sure". I really only use it to track steps and sleep.  I'm doing well over the recommended 10,000 steps a day and I mostly get in eight hours of sleep a night. There's an option to enter extra workouts and food, but mostly I don't bother. My extra exercise is just more walking and I forget to put in my yoga time. I never track my food or water. It just seemed too much, too time consuming. Also, I didn't care. I eat super healthy most of the time and I'm not a big snacker. I eat three good meals a day and that's it. Sometimes there's ice-cream or a cupcake, but to be fair that happens few and far between. 

Last Thursday, I received an email from Jawbone talking about how easy it is to enter your daily food now because they'd made some improvements. I shrugged and decided to enter in my Thursday food intake. By the end of the day I'd eaten 750 calories. I thought that seemed kind of low and the next day I was talking to Talaura about it. I told her that I was pretty sure I'd entered it in wrong. Then I told her all of the things I'd eaten and she said "no....that's about right." Walking just 10,000 steps a day burns about 2,000 calories. I am not eating enough calories. This explains why I have not lost any weight. Well, three pounds. I've lost three pounds. I smacked myself on the forehead for being so dumb. Then I started thinking I might have an eating disorder. Has my obsession over clean eating morphed from healthy to dangerous? And why does it always come down to food with me?

I mastered the art of pushing food around on my plate as a teenager, thinking that if I just didn't eat, I wouldn't be fat. Then in college, I didn't care what I ate because someone was always ordering a pizza and I always wanted to eat pizza. Also, every time I ate something in the cafeteria, I'd get sick to my stomach. Eventually this started happening with some of the fast food places we visited on a regular basis. I figured it didn't matter what I ate then as long as it stayed in my gut for more than ten minutes. Things got a little better when I had access to a kitchen and did more cooking, but we were also poor. That meant lots of spaghetti, anything I could do with a whole chicken, chili, and stews. Chris and I both gained a lot of weight entering graduate school. My answer to this was more exercise and less food. Still eating the same stuff, just less. I lost some weight. I thought this is as good as it will get and moved on.

Cut to the Food Revolution where documentaries like Food Inc. changed the way we looked at food all together. I dropped animals, with the exception of seafood, completely from my diet and ingredient lists couldn't go higher than the number of fingers on one hand. Organic all the way. Our grocery bill was astronomical, but I didn't care. I would bankrupt us in this new obsession to not eat poison. And this led to more weight loss and eventually I was a size I never remembered being before. Suddenly I was determined to stay at this weight no matter what. Then I didn't and gaining ten pounds this time was more emotionally devastating than the fifty pounds I had gained in graduate school.  How could I possibly adjust my diet any further? Maybe I wasn't exercising  enough? I AM DOING MY WHOLE LIFE WRONG? Those ten pounds might as well have been fifty.  It might as well have been a hundred pounds. 

When I turn forty, I want to be the kind of woman who doesn't care about this stuff. I don't want to stress and worry over every bite taken or not taken. As I sit wondering where all of that comes from I realize that we are constantly being bombarded from the minute we are born with what we should or should not eat. Eat this. Do not eat that. Today the best thing you can eat is this. Whatever you do never eat that. It will kill you. You eat that roll and you'll get fat. Julia Child died at the ripe old age of ninety one and she ate butter all the time. Calories be damned. I want to be able to say the same. Right now I'm working on balancing and finding that sweet spot of getting enough calories while eating the right things. I've added greek yogurt to my oatmeal and a snack of nuts between lunch and dinner. 

I'm still waiting to see what kind of woman I'll be at forty.

NUDGYBONES

Nails did

elephant_soap's photo on Instagram

I've had a few people ask me what I think of my JawBone Up. I've been wearing it for almost a month now, so I think I've had ample time to decide on how I feel about it. How are things going between me and Nudgybones? Well, I think we're getting along pretty well. I've lost five pounds and I don't really feel like my ass is taking on the shape of my chair seat. When I've been sitting too long, I'll get a gently vibration on my wrist. Then I'll get up and walk around the Institute and stick my head in some microscope rooms and check on people. It is recommended that I take at least 10,000 steps a day. I have not struggled to accomplish this, but usually end my day with well over 10,000 steps. 

The app for Nudgybones is easy to use with all kinds of notification options. I've left things set so that I get a few notifications throughout my day telling me how many steps I've walked. This keeps me from constantly checking my phone and obsessing about steps. Also, the app is very encouraging. It's always saying that I'm doing a great job. On New Year's Eve, it told me that I'd earned an evening of fun, stay up late and sleep in the next day. I thought that was really nice. The only time I ever feel like it's scolding me is when it talks about how I'm sleeping. I'm either sleeping too much or not sleeping enough. It does this back handed complement thing where it will say "hey, you're bedtimes have been so great this week. try being more consistent in your weekend bedtimes." and then it will give me a suggested bedtime for Saturday night. This is usually when I say "fuck you, Nudgybones. You can't tell me what to do." Really, the audacity of giving me a bedtime. I am a grown up. Plus it's usually a miracle I make it to Saturday Night Live any way. 

In fact, the only times that Nudgybones and I don't really seem to get along is on the weekends. I may get up early on Saturdays to go grocery shopping and run errands, but surprisingly enough, this involves less walking than one would expect. I have started parking the furthest away from the shops to add in some steps, but even with all of that I think I only managed about 4,000 steps on Saturday. Sunday was even worse. I sat on the couch Sunday morning watching CBS and writing. I had taken Nudgy off because it gets in the way of my keyboard. It was sitting next to me on the couch and every once in while I'd hear a buzzzzzit. Every time I'd reach over and check my phone thinking I'd just gotten a text or something. Then I'd remember that it was just Nudgybones telling me to get my ass off the couch. Occasionally, I'd yell back at it "It's Sunday!" Nudgybones doesn't understand the concept of Day of Rest. Not that I was a complete sloth on Sunday. I did laundry, dusted EVERYTHING, and vacuumed. Nudgybones was not all that impressed though.

For the most part, I think Nudgybones and I have a great working relationship and maybe we just need a break from each other on the weekends.  

IT SEES YOU WHEN YOU'RE SLEEPING

I'm dressed like a third grade ballet teacher.

elephant_soap's photo on Instagram

I know Thursday posts are usually devoted to love, but I didn't really have anything for today. It's snowing here and there was/is a soft white layer of powder coating everything when I got out of bed this morning. Which made me want to crawl back in bed and pull the covers up over my head. Except I couldn't because my new fancy bracelet kept buzzing on my wrist. Way back in November, I mentioned to Michael that maybe we should get each other some sort of FitBit like thing for each other for Christmas. It was during one of those particularly bad moments where I'd eaten a whole pizza by myself (this is not true, but it felt like I'd eaten a whole pizza and looked like it too). Both of us have plans to get healthy and lose some weigh in 2015. I thought maybe getting some sort of activity tracker would be good motivation. 

The more research we started putting into what tracker device we would want, the more enthusiastic Michael got. Meanwhile, I was starting to have some regrets. I tend to obsess over things (I know right?). When I found out plastic causes cancer, I threw out all of our plastic. I have  broken down in tears in a convenient store because I couldn't find a healthy organic snack. I used to wear a watch, but after one too many panic attacks about the possibility of being late, I took it off. I was starting to suspect that if I could see the number of steps I hadn't walked flashing on my wrist, I'd probably start stressing about those lost steps. Because I wouldn't see that number on my wrist as an achievement of steps taken that day, I'd see disappointment that the number wasn't larger. Here's what happens to my body when I stress about losing weight. It holds on to every pound and refuses to let go. 

That's why I picked the Jawbone Up24. It just looks like a bracelet. There's no read out for me to obsess over and it nudges me when I've been sitting too long at my desk. This is what I really needed. A nudge. It showed up in the mail yesterday and Michael had it out of the box and charging at my computer before I could blink. When it was done charging, I put it on and downloaded the phone app. I enabled all of the things. When I got to the part where I had to enter my weight, I moaned something about not knowing. Michael made me get up and step on the scale. Before I did, I made a guess and said "174." If we'd been at the fair I would have won a Cupie doll. I know this weight well. This is what I assumed was my "normal" weight for years. I had been that weight for so long, I just thought that was what I was supposed to weigh and maybe it is, but after Chris died, I lost ten pounds. I was pretty happy with being 164. Forget the camera lens. Men and relationships make me ten pounds heavier. 

The Jawbone tracks other things like food and water and sleep as well as how many steps you've walked. I put it on last night and set the sleep setting just before I went to bed. I thought it would be nice to start off my health stats with something I know I excel at. I went to bed thinking "I'll show you NudgyBones (that's my bracelet's name). I am so good at sleeping, I will blow your mind." And then I didn't sleep. My stomach gurgled from eating too much saag paneer at lunch. I was hot. I was cold. I felt a pea under the mattress. This side of the bed was weird. The middle of the bed was wrong. I had to get up and use the bathroom. I needed a drink of water. Eventually I did go to sleep, but when the alarm started chiming at 5:50 am, I squinted at it and whimpered. When I looked at the numbers that NudgyBones collected over the night, my shoulders slumped. NudgyBones says that I slept about three hours last night with four hours of restless sleep, meaning I was tossing and turning. I'm not as good at sleeping as I thought. 

Now I know why there's a "power nap" timer on NudgyBones.