Upward trend

217.0

I spoke too soon yesterday about the headaches; not two hours after I wrote my post, I developed a headache which persisted through aspirin and a cup of tea and was only relieved after I broke down and took some ibu.prof.en. Thankfully not a migraine but still annoying when I've been doing so well off caffeine.

The scale is up more today. I sometimes why I bother to weigh myself (almost) daily. It certainly doesn't seem to cause much change in my behavior.

I feel really bloated actually. MM and I had dinner at the Oli.ve Ga.rden (or "The OG," as he calls it) last night. Probably not the healthiest choice. I am drinking lots of water today and have a healthy dinner thawing in the refrigerator at home. So I hope to get rid of some of this bloat.

(almost) caffeine-free

216.2

It has been 13 days today since I last had a cup of coffee. My horrible migraines of the third weekend of April convinced me that perhaps I should have another go at giving up caffeine. While I have still had tea on occasion, at this point I have eliminated my daily morning cup of coffee entirely.

I'm not gonna lie; quitting has not been easy. Last week in particular was hard. . . . I felt sleepy and sluggish a lot during the day and had some mild headaches (which, surprise surprise, responded to one Ex.cedrin tablet. . . which contains 65 mg of caffeine). I was literally sleeping nine hours a night in order to wake up feeling rested, and the feeling still wasn't lasting all day.

Now, almost two weeks in, I am back to just sleeping eight hours a night. More often than not over the past several days, I have woken up before my alarm, feeling rested. My concentration at work has been fine. Today and yesterday I have felt the most energetic I have felt in a long time.

I have not been exercising (aside from walking the dogs for 20-30 minutes most evenings) and have not been focused on eating any particular way. Aside from cutting out the coffee, the only other change I've made is that I started five days ago taking a daily supplement for migraines called Mig.reLi.ef, which is a blend of riboflavin, magnesium and feverfew.

I am happy to report that, aside from the mild headaches I've had up until several days ago from caffeine withdrawal, I have had no headaches since April 11. This past Sunday, I made the 5-hour round trip drive to Tucson and even spent the better part of an hour out in the direct sunlight and did not get a migraine. (I often come home from trips like that with a bad headache.) I hope this trend continues; we shall see.

From the weight posted above, it's probably clear that I haven't been making an effort in the weight loss department. I have not been eating horribly, and I always drink 8-10 glasses of water a day, but I haven't been eating many fruits or veggies of late (and as I said, I haven't been exercising). The scale is starting to creep up again, and I know I need to get back on track.

Not much else to report. Work has been VERY slow this month, which for me is actually more stressful than being busy, but now I finally have a few projects. I'd better get to 'em.

Memory Lane

(forgot to weigh)

I've been thinking for a while about posting an excerpt from my one of my teenage diaries, just for fun. I'd thought, in fact, about posting about my first sexu.al experience, which I wrote about in detail the day after it happened.

So last night I dug out the journal for the relevant time period, and the first entry, dated June 14, 1986, began as follows:

"Sometimes I get so sick of life. I hate being fat and unpopular. . . . It's really depressing."

Um, yeah.

Reading on, I expressed my desire to "lose 20 lbs by the time school starts, 30-35 lbs eventually." Knowing that my high school goal weight was always 125 allows me to extrapolate that I must have weighed between 155 and 160 when I wrote this entry.

Ah, what I wouldn't give to weigh 160 now! Hey, it's only 55 lbs or so less than I weighed the last time I stepped on a scale.

How sad is it that, nearly 24 years later, I am still struggling with my weight? While I would no longer say I am "sick of life" and would not describe myself today as "unpopular"--what does that even mean, at 39?--it is still depressing to be fat.

Wow, good thing I didn't know at 15 that 24 years later not only would I not be "thin," I'd be even fatter than I was then. . . . I probably would have just ended it all. LOL

I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that I am much happier in my life overall than I was at 15, even if I am still not happy with my weight. As a good friend pointed out when I shared this diary entry with her, a big part of the reason I'm happier with life now is that the majority of my life now is of my own design and choosing, whereas at 15, it was mostly either of my parents' design or other circumstances beyond my control.

It has taken me a while to get to this point, but I am now (mostly) living the life *I* want to live.

Mixed bag

216.2

This weekend was a mixture of good and bad. The good included lots of "quality time" with MM. We went to the zoo on Saturday and out to lunch after, and went to a movie (Date Night) together on Sunday afternoon. Because my mom had been in town from early March until Easter, it had actually been a while since MM and I went out and did something fun, just the two of us.

We also had lunch Sunday with an old, old band camp friend of mine whom I had not seen in nearly 26 years. (She and I found one another on Fac.ebo.ok several months ago, and she was in town for a medical conference.) That was fun! I enjoyed seeing her and meeting her husband and daughters.

The bad: I went home around 1:00 on Friday afternoon when the headache I woke up with before 6:00 a.m. took a turn for the worse and added nausea to the mix. After a dose of prescription medication, I spent a few hours in bed and felt OK by 6:00 p.m. or so. Another headache started Saturday afternoon after the zoo and developed into a full-blown, debilitating migraine in short order. So I spent most of Saturday afternoon and evening in bed in horrible pain; none of the medications I took helped. It was awful. Thank G-d, I only get a headache that severe that can't be at least decreased by medication a few times a year.

Sunday I woke up headache-free but felt groggy and hungover from the previous day's headache and medications. I ended up going to bed at 9:00 p.m. and didn't finish my laundry or go to the grocery store.

This morning I woke up just after 7 with a mild headache. I took Ex.cedr.in and slept for another hour, and now I feel OK. . . . no headache but still not feeling 100%, a little tired despite over 10 hours of sleep.

I hate periods like this when my migraines are worse and more frequent! The hardest part is that I don't usually know what triggers these more-severe migraines, making it very hard to do anything to prevent them. The only possible trigger I could identify on Saturday was sun exposure. Even though I wore a hat, I was out in the sun for the better part of two hours while at the zoo. However, I live in Arizona, so I am often in the sun, and it's not every day that it leads to a severe migraine like Saturday's.

Moving on. . . . .

I would like to get back to the gym this week, assuming my head cooperates. (Clearly I am not going to bust out a full-on aerobic workout if I have a migraine.) Currently planning to go Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning.

Oh, happy anniversary to my sister V and her husband. They were married in Vegas 7 years ago today!

I suck

215.8

• Into week three "off the wagon." Wow, I think that's longer than I lasted on South Beach this go 'round.
  
• Ate Mexican/Chinese fusion for dinner last night (delicious but NOT a healthy choice)
• No exercise all week (I've even skipped a few dog walks)
• Scale is, predictably, climbing
• Unmotivated to change course

I suck. Why do I hate my body so much?