Nothing so shocking as a glimpse of her stockings...

It has been said that idle hands are the devil's workshop.

And if by "the devil's workshop" they mean "an excellent vehicle for shoving cheezits into one's mouth" then I totally agree.

Though I have amassed an impressive collection of reasons to eat that have nothing to do with hunger, sometimes it's simply the lack of anything better to do that finds me in the kitchen. Or in the drive-through lane. Or digging around in my desk drawer to find that tootsie roll I'm pretty sure I threw in there last Halloween. Over the years I've learned that one way to rechannel my brain's obsession on all things food is to give it something else to do, another task to direct my freakish ability to focus on.

And that's why I decided to make new Christmas stockings this year. A few weeks before my world imploded, when I was still concerned about not looking like a satin wrapped bowling pin in front of my family and friends, I did the mental math and computed that if I traded my nightly raid-the-cupboards-for-random-carbs-and- watch-TV-with-the-family-pre-bedtime-ritual for a maniacally-cut-and-sew-and-applique-and-embroider-while-repeatedly-injuring-myself-with-sharp-objects-routine that I might be able to both lose weight AND complete three new stockings to hang by the fire before Christmas Eve

You know how some people decorate for the holidays and their freshly cut, snow flocked trees are draped in golden ribbon, sparkling white lights and perfectly coordinated ornaments that form the centerpiece of a whole-house theme that looks like something Martha Stewart herself oversaw the completion of before the House Beautiful photographer showed up to document it for the December issue?

I am not one of those people.

I believe that a Christmas tree should be a festival of multi-colored lights and a home for every ornament your kid has ever made, that any relative or friend gifted to you, or that you made to hang on the pitiful tree in your college dorm room so that the only things on it wouldn't be colored condoms and paperclip chains. The sleigh bells on a plastic belt that always hung on your beloved Grandmother's front door should continue to find a home on yours, and the cheap porcelain nativity set (the one that had to be glued back together when you came downstairs and found the severed head of Joseph perched menacingly on his walking staff after your three year old broke it while making the figurines fight like ninjas) should be set up on the end table by the couch every year.

This decorating philosophy is what made me settle on old school felt craft stockings covered in sequins and stuffed and embroidered with retro-chic fabulousness. I picked out three appropriate designs and got to work on them. And, miracle of miracles, my plan worked. I had managed to curb my night time snacking, AND I'd finished the first stocking!

I was nearly finished with the second one when the person whose name had been embroidered on it decided to go all Houdini on me and disappeared from my life. After the shock of the first few days began to wear off, I sat down one night and ripped off the stitches that spelled out his name and tried to decide what to do with it. I considered boxing it up and sending it to him, but I figured that an unfinished stocking embroidered with "Ass-Hat" would probably just get thrown away and I couldn't see letting all that hard work go to waste, so I just went ahead and finished it. I've been trying to decide what to do with it.

I guess that since he never used it, I could save it for someone else someday. In fact, I could embroider the name of the next person I go out with and give it to him on our first date--because that's not creepy or anything, right? Though now that I think of it, that might be a great idea! I mean, if I give it to the guy and he loves it, then I know he's an over eager freak and I go running the other way as fast as I can. And if he finds it off-putting and frightening then HE goes running away as fast as he can, and...oh, wait. I didn't think that through very well. Never mind.

In the end, I decided to put it away and work on the third stocking, and that's what I've been doing for the last few weeks. It's just one little sled-riding bunny away from being done, and I think it will be finished before the week is over.

As a diversionary tactic, the stocking project has worked like a charm. It's kept my hands busy, making it much harder to use them to transport food to my mouth during these dark, cold winter evenings. But equally importantly, it's kept my MIND busy, helped me not to obsess over the unexpected turn that life has taken in the last month.

Yep, that's right. It's been a month--and I'm still alive. And I'm not just alive, I'm also OK.

And we have new Christmas Stockings.

Win-Win.

Food: 0, Sara -6

Against all odds, it's been a really good week.

In the last seven days I've managed to do something that I literally haven't done in YEARS: I rejoined Weight Watchers and spent a full week completely, 100% on program. And it paid off. Know how I know?

Because when I stepped on the scale today I was down SIX POUNDS.

BOO-yah, Baby! I'm back!

The Fourth Stage of Grief: Tater Tot Casserole

After learning of my ex-fiance's surprise disappearing act a few weeks ago, I immediately did what any self-respecting woman in my position would do: I called my therapist.


After she picked her jaw up off the floor (and there were numerous floor/jaw bruise incidents that week. Seriously, how did NO ONE in my life see this coming?) she told me that as luck would have it there had been a cancellation in her schedule and that she could see me that afternoon.

After I did my best to lay waste to an entire box of tissues in her office, she produced a slightly modified list based on the Kubler-Ross "Five Stages of Grief" model (with an extra step thrown in, because hey, I'm an over achiever) and told me to be aware of the steps I'd have to go through as I adjusted to the abrupt end of the relationship. And I, being a homework loving geek from way back, have been clutching it ever since. Observe:

An actual scanned copy of the list my therapist gave me, which I've included here because its germane to the post, and not just because I really wanted to use my new hand held wand scanner. Which totally rocks. And that's on the lowest resolution! I'm not saying I also scanned a throw pillow and my dog's back, but if I HAD done that you'd totally be able to see every fiber in the fabric and each individual dog hair. On both the pillow and the dog.

Step 1: Denial passed pretty quickly. I don't spend a lot of time mired in those parts anymore. Check!

Step 2: Anger? Um, yes. A lot of it. That one hasn't faded as quickly, and I'm given to understand that these steps are somewhat fluid in nature and that anger might linger even as I make my way through the rest of the list. Check. Check. Checkcheckcheckcheckcheck. CHECK!

Step 3: I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole "bargaining" thing, but I'm pretty sure it refers to all those times I thought things like "maybe if I hadn't gained weight" or "If only I hadn't gotten mad at him that one time 5 months ago when he totally deserved it" or "maybe if I click my heels together three times and wish REEEEEEEEAAALY hard I'll wake up and none of this will have happened." So, check. I guess.

Which brings us to the stage I am currently firmly ensconced in:

Step 4: Depression.

I wish that I could tell you that I am so well adjusted that I had a good cry and then got right on with the business of acceptance, but I can't. I'm sad. I'm sad that the future I had counted on isn't possible anymore, that someone I loved would treat me with so little consideration and respect. I'm sad because, let's face it, cancelling a wedding is a depressing task. And for me, food and depression often go hand in hand.

When I'm depressed, it can be hard not to seek comfort in dishes that fall into the category that has the word "comfort" in the title. On days when it feels like the empty space inside of me will swallow me whole, the only thing that has a chance to fill that void is something warm and satisfying. It's a temporary fix, one that will leave me empty in the long run, but in the short term that rarely seems to matter. I fall prey to the brand of magical thinking that whatever ails me will certainly be cured by a gooey grilled cheese (and if it happens to include bacon, so much the better). Or the perfect almond cupcake. Or a mountain of fettuccini alfredo with butter soaked breadsticks and a token salad.

Or a plate full of savory-on-the-bottom-gooey-in-the-middle-crispy-on-the-top Tater Tot Casserole.

I made some the other night. I'd been thinking about it all day, going over the ingredients in my mental kitchen inventory, and practically sitting on the floor watching the oven window like a television as I watched it bubble and brown. As I scooped it out onto my plate, I could barely wait for the steam to dissipate so I could engage in casserole therapy to drown my sorrows. Giddy with excitement, I inverted the pepper grinder over my plate and, just as I began to turn the barrel, I felt the top give way and watched in horror as a full cup of peppercorns spilled all over it. As the tiny spheres stuck to the creamy sauce and got lodged in the molten cheese, I reacted perfectly appropriately by bursting into angry, heartbroken tears and loudly asserting that HE had done this to me, had loosened the top of the peppermill on PURPOSE, a last insult before he left designed to further RUIN MY LIFE!!

It was a short lived, though impressive, tantrum. All the hurt and anger that I'd been keeping at bay for the last few weeks came pouring out in a flood of tears over a very peppery heap of ruined dinner in the sink. When I pulled myself together, I calmly served myself up a replacement helping, then sat down to eat it. It was good, but it wasn't as good as I thought it might be. It wasn't comfort, it was just food.

It turns out that all the work I've put in on myself during the last few years hasn't been in vain. I am convinced that without it I wouldn't be where I am today, just three weeks out, and already working my way back to normal, to a life that goes on toward new hope.

Get ready, Step 5. I'm heading your way.

One Good Thing

Years ago, a friend gave me a terribly simple yet profound piece of advice. She said:

"Every night before you go to sleep, find ONE good thing about the day that just ended...even if the only good thing is that the day is over."

I have never forgotten those words, and I've tried to live by them.

There are some changes coming to this site, a line in the sand that I'm drawing and crossing as the next phase in this ongoing journey is before me.

The best thing about this day is that a NEW one starts tomorrow.

World Fall Down Go Boom

Hello Internet.

So you've noticed I've been MIA, but I suppose with all the life living and wedding planning you gave me a pass on being incommunicado, and I thank you for your patience. How've y'all been?

Me?

Honestly, I've had better weeks.

Of all the lessons that blogging about my weight loss journey has taught me, the single best one is the value of honesty, of the phenomenal power that the truth can wield in our lives. A secondary, though no less important, lesson I learned is that sometimes the truth hurts.

Internet, I got dumped.

Ouch.

I'd like to sugarcoat it, to make a joke or two and a glib reference about how I lost 260 pounds in a single day, but the truth is that I just don't have it in me to laugh this off just yet.

Two weeks ago I was getting married. The dress was bought, the deposits were paid, the reservations were made, the invitations were picked out and the engagement pictures were taken.  I woke up one Thursday morning and engaged woman, dressed for work, kissed my fiance goodbye and told him to have a good day, and by noon everything had changed.

He called me at work. Said he'd done something that would come as a big shock, and that he never meant to hurt me, that I was a wonderful person with a great kid and an awesome family...but that he had moved out. Told me it wasn't me, that it was nothing I'd done and there was nothing that I could do. It was over. And it was.

He was gone. So were his clothes. And the couch. And the TV and entertainment system. And our bed. Every gift I'd given him, every item he'd moved into our home...gone. He turned off his phone, and there hasn't been a single word from him. No goodbye, no apology, no "Dear Sara" note on the mantle, nothing.

I never saw it coming. At all. Sure, he'd been a little tired lately, but he'd injured himself at work a few weeks before and had a lot of lingering pain. But we'd just had engagement pictures taken on Sunday. We tasted wedding cakes with my family on Friday.The day before his disappearing act he'd taken my car to get the oil changed, called me at in the afternoon to tell me that he was heading off to work, have a good night, love you, bye.

And now I stood in the rubble of my ransacked home, and as I stared at the fallout all around me and my mind tried to make sense of what had happened, I grasped for reasons that he had done this to me.And all I could think was:

I must be my weight.

I know that this is silly. Yes, I've gained some weight since we met over a year ago. But he had put on quite a few pounds too, and he wasn't a delicate willow to begin with either. He never made my weight an issue, he made me feel beautiful and special and I started to believe that I was. I believed that it was finally my turn to be happy, to win one for all the fat girls out there who secretly believed that falling in love and being overweight didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

At the end of the day, I have chosen to take him at his word and believe that it was nothing I did or didnt do, and that his cowardly little escape act was the result of a deep seated character flaw within him.  We had always marveled at how, with such a crazy upbringing and tumultuous childhood, he had turned out so normal.  Turns out he wasn't.  Normal, good people don't do what he did. He's defective, an anomaly.

He left me holding every bag, with every burden that his leaving brings with it. He left me to pick up the pieces of my son's broken heart.  He left me to tell the world that the wedding is off.  To call all the vendors, to cancel all the plans, to stare every day at the non-returnable wedding items that hang in my half-bare closet.  He left me without a bed to sleep in. He left me.

And now I've got to find me again.

Wish me luck

Crazy(ish) no more...

 
An eavesdropping fly on the wall one week ago might have heard the following snippet of conversation:
 
Me: I've been thinking that I don't need to see you as often anymore.
 
Therapist: I think you're right.
 
Well bring on the propeller hat, rainbow wig and bright orange rain poncho (which I assume is standard attire for such an occasion) because I've officially graduated from crazy school!  
 
Well, that's how it feels anyway.  
 
I've spent my Thursday lunch hours discussing the finer points of my emotional well-being with a therapeutic professional in a year-and-a-half long quest to find out just what the hell is wrong with me.  And to my great surprise, I think we did just that.
 
It was a personal crisis of epic proportions that led me to her in the first place. I walked into her office full of plush furniture, eclectic decor and shelves stuffed with self-help literature without knowing what to expect.  All I knew is that I felt broken, like there weren’t enough king's horses and king's men on earth to put me back together.  A lifetime of cartoon images of bespectacled, clipboard toting men asking patients lying in prone positions about their mothers didn't prepare me for the soft spoken, scarf wearing, easy smiling, kind eyed yet sharp tongued woman who introduced herself as Cynthia when she invited me to sit down anywhere on her cushy furniture and tell her all about it.  
 
There was no in-depth analysis of my dreams or dramatic recounting of childhood traumas.  There were no shock treatments or repressed memory discoveries, or creepy attempts to reenact my birth experience.  Instead there was conversation.  There was advice.  There were sometimes tears, but also a lot more laughter than I'd expected.  There was talk of the fat, but there was more talk about all the other things I am.  And--to the great delight of my inner nerd--there were worksheets, handouts, diagrams, and homework.  And, most importantly, there was progress.
 
Therapy gets a bad rap sometimes, I think.  The red-blooded American pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that runs deep in our collective veins can sometimes mistake reaching out for mental health support as evidence of a weakness of character, a convention of a modern age that relies on science and medicine to cure what a good kick in the ass should be able to knock out of us. After all, people have survived for thousands of years without therapy and antidepressants, why do we need them now all of a sudden?  That argument is short sighted at best.  People lived without antibiotics for thousands of years to...and they died of ear infections and strep throat.  If I had cancer, I'd get chemotherapy.  I had a case of the crazies, so I went to therapy, and I'm so glad I did.  The hardest work may be over, but I'm not done yet.  
I am the same woman who walked into that office for the first time, but I am not the same person I was that day.  That girl was so lost in her fear and despair that it makes me ache to remember her.   But the woman writing this?  Her I like.  She’s strong.  She’s resilient.  She knows where she's going, and she’s tough enough to keep working to get there
 

Scared Straight

Scared Straight
 
Yesterday I did something momentous.  If, that is, one defines “momentous” as “something I’ve done like a thousand times since the age of 12”.  
 
I rejoined Weight Watchers.
 
Again.
 
If you’d like me to spend oodles of time and space explaining the particulars of just why keeping my ample buttocks on the proverbial wagon on a permanent basis is an impossibility, you can drop me an email and ask for a dramatic recounting of my numerous climbs onto and spectacular nose dives off of said wagon.  
 
Or you save me a lot of time (and fritter away a bunch of yours) by going back and reading my archives. I did just that recently and have realized that something I’ve said before in the last few years happens to be true:  
 
The longer I do this, the more convinced I become that this journey is essentially an endless series of beginnings, of moments when draw a fresh line in the sand and start over.  Sometimes the fresh start comes from a place of zen, a calm acceptance of the infinite struggle between ourselves and a lifetime of obesity.  
 
But there are other times when we see a moment in our future where we’d just really rather not be quite so fat, thank you very much.  Like, say, the prospect of wearing a big white dress in front of your friends and family while pledging eternal love and faithfulness to a man just crazy enough to love you.
 
That’s right, friends.  Tim and I are engaged.  A year from now we’ll be dressed in our best and saying I do.
 
(Shout out to the citizens of hell who are all enjoying tall glasses of ice water today—You’re welcome!)
 
The quest for the dress and a body that fits into it begins today.
 
Let the adventure continue!