I will note, about the vacation that Madeleine mentioned, that although she did not write anything, I did not smoke. Naturally I won't put a value judgement on either of those things; that's for you to do.
Since our return I have been self-improving with renewed zeal because, among other things, my head is far too small for what seems to have happened to my tshirts in vacation photographs. The good news is that it has been effective, and I have now lost a total of 6 real pounds since I began this whole ordeal almost a month and a half ago. The bad news is that while this change is visible, I'm afraid I am going to have to revise my weight loss goal to an additional 15 pounds as this first 6 is definitely not having the desired effect. The truth is that what they say about quitting smoking has in general been true for me: every time you quit you gain 5 pounds. And those 5 pounds seem to be very “sticky” and they also don't go away when you start smoking again. I am also beginning to feel like I am on the wrong side of the age line to be messing around with my no-longer girlish figure. I remember looking at my mother and thinking to myself “she used to be so athletic—how could she let herself go like that?” For me, evidently, the answer was graduate school. The point being that I know now that I am really too old for a “diet” to work for me. If I don't want to continue to look like a marshmallow with toothpicks stuck in I am going to have to make significant, consistent, long-term changes to my diet and to the amount of exercise that I get. Unfortunately for me, I have never been very good at long-term projects. I am more of an “intense focus” kind of person rather than a “slow and steady” kind of person, and I would take this opportunity to request that the race be made shorter, only I know that it won't do any good.
This week I have started a new tactic of self-tracking everything that I eat. There is a website called Sparkpeople that has an iphone app with which you can input all of your consumption. I think this might be a bit more practical to do if I had internet access at home, which I do not. Trying to do this on the iphone every time one has a handful of peanuts is bad enough, but trying to figure out exactly how much rice/chicken/onion/zucchini/egg/oil/soy sauce one has eaten in a plateful of homemade fried rice is a fucking nightmare. Self-tracking is fucking tedious, and added to its innate bloody fucking tediousness is the impossibly annoying slow fucking NYC iphone 3G connection. In the end it's no wonder that the people who do this (according to the “user-entered” items that pop up everytime I do a food search) end up eating all sorts of unsavory Heathy Choice meals and individual fat-free yogurts, and endless amounts of “baby carrots.” It is time-consuming enough to make a tasty, healthy meal with fresh ingredients; to then have to try and figure out exactly how much of whatever it is ended up on your plate and to try and guess how much by volume was, for example, that extra scoop of salad greens is simply too much. Cooler heads might argue that since salad has only somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 calories per cup that an extra scoop here or there is mathematically negligible—and I'll agree that is true. But it is so fucking TEDIOUS! I will admit that it is satisfying at the end of the day to be able to tot up all the calories/carbs/proteins/fats one has eating and then to counterbalance that with the amount of exercise one has gotten. It's great, and I have decided that if a team of nutritionists and a home chef want to move in and cooperatively strategize with my personal trainer, massuese and teeth-whitening consultant I would totally be down for that. But it is really a very had thing to be able to do on your own if you don't have lots of (or any) money. And this is from someone who a) has a gym membership and b) IS NOT CURRENTLY WORKING. And if it makes Our Dear Reader feel any better: Agnes has not been getting any work done lately. Though her studio is kind of set up and she has started working a bit today and will be full steam ahead tomorrow.
Agnes is toying with the idea of fixing up a “routine” for herself. She has never before had a routine that was not imposed upon her. For next entry, I will write about the one time I had a healthy routine: this was the time that immediately proceeded my matriculation.
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