Getting and Staying Healthy After Fifty

I hate it. I hate having to plan my meals. I hate not being able to eat what I like. I just hate it!

I grew up poor, and I remember always being hungry. I used to love summer, because there were wild fruits; blackberries, strawberries, mulberries, pears, plums, and more. In the fall there were wild grapes.

I promised myself that when I grew up, I would never be hungry. Now I am, and it’s self-imposed. And I’m not losing anymore weight, in fact, I’ve gained back most of what I lost on the lemonade crap diet, so it was all just a lost cause.

I think I’ll just quit. I don’t have the willpower to go through with this. I can’t stand not eating! I’m seriously beginning to think fat women who think it’s cool to be fat are a lot healthier than those who are constantly obsessed with being thin, emotionally more healthy anyway.

But I hate the rolls of fat too! This is torture. I want to crawl under the covers and never come out!

… depression makes it impossible to get off your butt and exercise. When I’m depressed, I just sit in front of the computer or read all day. No way am I going outside, because that would involve getting into some decent, not grease stained, clothes and actually making myself look decent to go out.

It’s much easier to sit here and do nothing, except that it makes me more depressed. I haven’t eaten much today, so that’s a good thing, but I haven’t drunk enough water or juice either.

Why does everything in life boil down to an impossible choice? This is why so many people sit and do nothing with our lives. They go to boring jobs, pay the same bills, watch the same t.v. programs, and basically turn into mindless blobs. It’s because doing something different would require making a choice.

Choices are hard. Indecision is easy. Change is hard. Sameness is easy. If you make a choice, it can be the wrong one, so why risk it? Risk is hard, and it most of the time leads to failure. Getting up and brushing yourself off and starting over is hard. Not starting at all is easy.

Failure is easy when it’s all you’ve ever known. You get comfortable with it, with being a failure. You become numb to the world that keeps pushing you to do more, ask more, feel more, be more.

You just sit, and become a lump. I’m a lump. Now I have to make a choice…do I want to stay a lump or do something about it?

Choices are hard.

It’s bad enough when you suffer from depression anyway, but what is the simple act of trying to lose weight makes you even more depressed? Can doing something that is good for you bring you down? I’m here to tell you, yes it can.

My friends wanted me to go to the local Chinese buffet with them tonight. They were going to pay. I love that buffet. It has all-you-can-eat crablegs, boiled, fried, and coconut shrimp. For a seafood lover like me, it’s pure heaven! I don’t even eat veggies, I just eat the seafood.

I couldn’t go, because I’m on this stupid diet. They promised to take me when I got off of it, but that’s not the point. The point is, I’ve had a horrendous day and I want to go eat seafood! If I do, I literally will have to drink water for three days to make up for it. That’s how much I eat when I go to this buffet. Add to that that seafood is loaded with cholesterol…well, you get my point.

This is depressing. VERY depressing. I’ve only been dieting for a couple of weeks, and I’m already getting sick to death of it. There has to be a better way to lose weight. I know, more exercise. That just isn’t going to happen.

Maybe I should just consign myself to being fat, like my mother finally did. She wasn’t so unhappy. Yeah, maybe that’s the answer.

Drank juice, ate, and now I’m ready for bed. I don’t know even how to get a decent post out of this, except to say that it’s boring.

I never had to diet when I was younger, and I didn’t understand why people quit diets when it was obvious they desperately needed to lose weight. I don’t desperately need to lose weight, but it would be nice to not be overweight.

I do, however, now understand why people give up on diets. They are boring. The same foods, the same way, day in and day out. It’s enough to make you want to rush down to Mickey D’s and grab a triple cheeseburger and large fries, and top it off with a sundae!

On the Master Cleanse, I cheated because I was hungry. Now I just want to cheat because I’m sick to death of not having anything decent to eat. Do you think it would work if I dieted 6 days a week, and ate anything I wanted one day? Surely, you can’t undo a week’s worth of dieting in one day. I mean, I’m not going to go buy $30 worth of junk food and scarf it all day. I’d just like to have one hamburger, or one steak, or one baked potato with butter AND sour cream.

I’m human. I want human food! And right now, I’m very, very sleepy, so I’ll think about this tomorrow.

O.K., so I was supposed to already have started this, but I didn’t.  I needed to get to the supermarket, and since I don’t have a car, and I’m pretty much dependent on my neighbor to get me there, I had to wait.

I went yesterday and bought juice, fruits and veggies.  I have a 5 lb. bag of carrots, celery and some beets, so I’ll  be juicing those and mixing with the fruit juices to drink during the day.  For dinner, I’ll have a nice salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing.  

I know bottled juice isn’t that good, but I couldn’t afford enough fruits to juice properly, nor could I afford organic juices.  I bought Juicy Juice, which is, I hear, the best of the processed juices.  Anyway, that’s what I have, and that’s what I’m using.

Hopefully, this will keep me healthier than the other fast, while still helping me lose weight.  I need to get my vitamins daily, especially potassium, so I don’t have symptoms, and the lemonade dieting just wasn’t giving them to me.

I’ll be doing a lot of walking today, because I have to go pay a bill, and the bus stop is a mile away.  I’ll get at least two miles in, maybe more, depending on where the bus stops.

More tomorrow on this ongoing struggle to lose weight after fifty.   

I won’t even finish that sentence. This is a rant, because I feel like I was screwed.

I suffered for 12 of the 14 days I was trying to get through the master cleanse, and I can’t see any results other than losing 5 lbs. I’m already starting to gain back. I don’t feel healthier, have more energy, or any of the other stuff they claim. I wish I had never done it.

Plus, my bowels are now so messed up, I can’t even have a BM! I’m glad I didn’t take the laxative every day, or they’d be worse. 

I feel like I wasted two weeks on something totally worthless, when Icould have been doing the juice/raw food diet, been healthier, and lost more weight.

Of course you’ll lose weight if you don’t eat, but let me tell you the downside.  No matter how dedicated you are, when you start eating solid food again, you WILL have all the same cravings that you had before.

Today, I went to buy carrots for my juice fast, and guess what?  I bought candy. I still have the same sugar cravings, and if possible, they are worse than before.

So don’t torture yourself on the Master Cleanse. It’s not going to do you any good for losing weight, and may actually be bad for you.

I’ll never do it again, that’s for sure!  And now I’m stuck with four jars of molasses. Guess I’ll be drinking molasses in my coffee for awhile. Yep, I’m drinking coffee, and loving every single cup. 

Am I still going to try to lose weight? Yes, but with something that won’t almost kill me, and will actually work. I’m doing juicing and raw food for the next six months.  I’ll actually be healthier and thinner without putting my body through what I had to put it through with this. 

I know some of you people who are addicted to this MC thing will say “Well, you cheated, and you didn’t follow it exactly, blah, blah, blah.”  I don’t care what you say, this thing is just something to take advantage of desperate people like myself.  I knew when I had the horrendous leg cramps that this thing wasn’t giving me the right nutrition, like it claims.

No more. No fads, no starvation, just food that is actually healthy for me and lots of exercise.   I’ll lose the weight I want to, but when I do, my system will not be this screwed up.

Wonder how long it will be before it gets straightened out? 

Sundays are my self-designated day off. I didn’t do much, played online, ate soup, gave away some plants, ate soup, read, ate soup. I must admit, it tasted better today than yesterday. Why is it soup just gets better and better? Except for after day three, then it just gets boring.

I love vegetable soup, but two days of it is enough now. I’m ready for some juicing. Tomorrow, I’m going to the produce store and get lots of veggies to juice. I’ll be drinking juice all day, and having a salad at night. I want to get 10 more lbs. off by Christmas.

I’ll also be starting a really serious exercise program, walking 2-3 miles a day plus working out with stretch bands and weights. My walk to the store will be my first workout, because it’s a little over a mile one way, so over 2 round trip.

I know I’ll never look like I did 20 years ago, or even 11 years ago when I moved here, but I want to look better than this.

11/28/08 (oops! Forgot to publish)

I spent the day yesterday in pain. I figured it was a healing crisis, so I finally took four ibuprofen and went to bed when I could stand it no longer. My gut just felt twisted, and I was having a hard time even standing up straight.

So I spent yesterday sipping O.J., and suffering. Today, I brewed up the veggie soup I will be eating for the next three days. It really isn’t much, not really homemade, and definitely not organic. This is what I put in:

1 can of potatoes
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 can of whole kernel corn
1 can of lima beans
1 can of kidney beans (for protein)
2 sliced carrots
2 sliced celery stalks
1 cup frozen okra
1 medium chopped onion
1 tsp chopped garlic
a little Nature’s Seasons
a tad of salt

All I can eat all day of this is the broth, and a few of the veggies with it tonight. I had forgotten how good veggie soup broth was! I always add meat to my veggie soup, so I hadn’t had any real veggie broth for awhile now. I’m definitely liking it, and of course, as it simmers away, the broth gets yummier and yummier each cupful.

I seriously could live on veggie soup, which is good, because I intend to live on it for the next three days, then go on a raw food diet. I think I have enough, but if not, I’ll just make some more.

Oh, and I have no idea how much weight I’ve lost, because it keeps fluctuating up and down according to my scale. I just know the bloat is gone in my upper belly, and my lower belly is much smaller. I’m thinking probably from 8-10 lbs. so far, if I’m judging by how my pants fit.

11/29/08

This veggie soup really is pretty good. Not what I’m used to, because I usually put beef in it, but I’m enjoying it.

Yesterday, I was putting 2 parts broth to 1 part veggies, and today I’m doing 2 parts veggies to 1 part broth.

On the upside, I just tried on my stretch/skinny jeans, and they actually pulled on over my butt. First time I’ve been able to wear them for two years. I tried my size 10’s, but they’re still too tight in the waist, so probably another ten days for those.

Tomorrow, I eat soup all day, then Monday, I start the juice fast with one meal in the evening. That should knock off another 10 lbs. by Christmas, doncha think? I hope so.

My belly is really flabby, so I’m starting calesthenics tonight. Just 25 reps of everything, but you have to start somewhere, right? I’ll do 25 for three days, add 1, then repeat until I’m up to 50. Then I’ll add one a day until I’m up to 100. By then it should be pretty easy to do 100 of each.

I’m really psyched! Even though I didn’t follow the master cleanse exactly, and cheated some, I still got the results I wanted, so I’m motivated to go forward with this.

Modified Juice/raw food fast, here I come!

I’m tired or torturing myself. I must not have been very toxic, because I never had a lot of detox symptoms, except for the coated tongue, which will just have to stay that way.

I’m really sick of the whole thing. I’m still hungry, and the energy I had on day four and five is totally gone. I’ve only lost 5 lbs, which I will gain back as soon as I start eating again.

So today I will only drink the lemonade, no salt water flush, no laxatives, no torture. Tomorrow I am going to start the four day routine to come off the fast, although I think it’s probably pointless, and unless I lose another 5 lbs. over the next 4 days, I’ll consider this whole thing a bust.

Besides which, I absolutely have to take my vitamins from now on, because last night I was up four times with severe cramping in my feet, which can only be a potassium deficiency. I took a multi last night, or rather at 4 a.m. this morning, and I will continue to take my vitamins from here on out.

I’ll do the modified fast after the four days, drinking the lemonade and tea during the day, and having a salad for supper. No laxatives, though. I’m done with laxatives, even bulk laxatives. I figure a raw food diet is laxative enough.

So ends the torturous 10 day fasting experience. I’m really horrible at fasting. I don’t ever intend to do it again. I’ll do the modified fast for a month and see what happens, then I’ll add another raw food meal and stick with that for a month.

I know that one reason I failed so miserably is that I didn’t do any exercise to speak of. I admit that. I intended to, but didn’t because I had more important things to do, and my mind just wouldn’t wrap around the exercise thing. Now I’m truly too tired to exercise, other than walking up to the store for food, which is exercise, I guess. I will try to walk faster, so as to burn more calories.

My advice to anyone trying this Master Cleanse is not to be tough on yourself if you fail. It’s a very, very hard thing to do for ten days and four days after. Not a lot of people succeed their first time out. So if it doesn’t work for you, try something new and keep on keeping on.

Well, at least my scale says I lost another pound. I haven’t done my salt water flush, so I may lose another after that, but gain it back as soon as I drink some more lemonade.

I actually saw a waistline this morning! Been a long time since I’ve seen that.

My tongue has this grayish-greenish coating, which I sincerely hope goes away in the next two days. Tomorrow is my last day on this fasting, so if it’s not gone after the four days of orange juice and vegetable soup, I may have to just go back on it until it clears.

I can sincerely say that the absolute worst part of this whole thing is the salt water flush. I hate it! I even add a little lemon juice to make it more bearable, and I still hate it! I also hate having to run to the potty every ten minutes for two or more hours. I’ll be so glad when the next two days are over, so I don’t have to do that anymore.

I used the fiber laxative last night, and got solids out this morning. I saw a couple more of those solid ball looking things. Someone said those were bile stones, but mine weren’t green. They are just sort of oblong and really solid. Hard to think those things have been in me all this time. Eck!

So my friend the health nut says that if I continue with the lemonade during the day and raw veggie meal at night, I will still detox and still lose a lot of weight. She’s done this for up to 60 days with no ill effects.

I’ve been really cold the last couple of days. Last night, my thermostat said 76 without the heat on, and I was freezing. Had a hard time getting warm when I went to bed last night, although it was 74 in the house. Had to crank up the heated mattress pad to 4, which is very unusual. I’ve never put it on over 3, except that one night when it got down to 25.

The burning in my gut is gone, although it’s still rumbling. Must be the salt water.

More tomorrow…