As anyone who either chats with me or lives with me knows, eating has been a ridiculous chore for me. It’s been four weeks since I’ve learned to eat almost double what I’d been eating previously.
A few years ago, I made the goal to be more healthy and no longer need to worry about my family’s overwhelming history with diabetes being affected by my weight. I lost a lot and maintained, but since moving to Berkeley, I started to gain weight again, much of it in the past year.
I went from mild-exercise and driving everywhere to slightly less exercise but walking/biking everywhere, and then last year I began working an active full-time job in a cafe. I attributed the weight gain mostly to muscle as even when I dropped from working five days a week to three, I was still lifting and carrying and generally running around for each of my shifts and filling up the rest of my time at school where I was lugging buckets of clay around and being far from sedate.
Having measurements recorded, I definitely gained muscle, but in the past six months, pants I should fit well in were snug, and with a higher activity level, I should be fitting in them even better. For a good long time I waffled between worrying that I wasn’t eating as much as I should and being certain that all the food I stuffed in my mouth had to be enough.
Even though I’ve read extensively on nutrition and should’ve known better, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the formula for my basal metabolic rate could be at all accurate. I’m only 5′1″ and nevermind that height is factored in. Surely, I was still only a step above sedentary.
I’d bought a food scale a few months ago intending to use it, but it wasn’t until cleaning up my already fairly good (in content) diet and starting a serious fitness routine where I couldn’t lie to myself about my activity level, I stepped it up and spent a few days weighing everything I ate.
The verdict: holy shit, I’d been starving.
Minimum calorie intake for women is recommended to be 1200, and the week before I started my new fitness routine, I was struggling to make 1000.
Entering my fifth week of eating at proper maintenance to kick start my metabolism, I need to start weighing my food again and evaluate where I’m at. Particularly since more hours at work means I’ve missed some days at the gym, and I need to adjust my routine and my eating habits to compensate. Food is still a chore, but I’m getting better at it.
What hurts even more looking at these is that more often than not, even if you deliver a decent set of comps, the client will inevitably want the sucker working on their logo to take the crappiest one in the set and make it even crappier.
Of most hilarity and sorrow is they highlight Glass on the Move, which upgraded the Most Hideous Logo I’ve seen in the Bay Area to a Still Hideous but Marginally Better Logo, and have now upgraded their crappy website with forms that didn’t work properly, to a crappy website with a video clip that auto-starts and has sound.
Despite how much I loathe their logo(s) and the fact that their website now has sound and badly aliased images instead of just a horrible layout, they did a super fast and excellent job replacing our window last year.
I was able to make an appointment and everything online, which was awesome enough I would have recommended them. If I’d seen their current site though, I never would’ve bothered sticking around long enough to even look at their rates, and I don’t think it’s worth it for anyone else to wade through the mess to see if that’s still true. SOUND. I’m there for the info, not a crappy sales pitch. I’ll take the animated gifs, thanks.
Our household is in the process of a move. It’s a cross-town move if a mile north and slightly east can be considered cross-town. Having already been bitten by the spring cleaning bug, the move would be a lot more productive in me Getting Rid of Crap if school and work didn’t add up to very little time to sort beforehand. Today is more packing with the bulk of the actual moving happening tomorrow. When did I get this much stuff? I can already tell that it’s mostly art and crafting stuff that I tend to packrat with the “it might be useful for a future project!” mentality. Time for an attitude adjustment on that.
I’ve embarked on a few projects recently, including upping my drawing output. Justin and his drawing a day (for over two months now!) has been very inspiring. I’ve also started running again. The last time I was going running it aggravated my knee and I’d also been having slight ankle problems. I know the bulk of problems with my knee was likely due to that I started directly from the house which meant about a half mile on concrete. I’m being much smarter about it now and so far the only complaints are from my lazy, lazy muscles. I’m working on my jog/walk until I can get up to a steady pace again. I didn’t think my stamina was nearly this good, but I managed to maintain a steady jog for about a minute and a half before needing to take a walking break.
I have a lot of things to do on the design side for the cafe where I work, but I’m bumping in to a lot of frustrating things like lack of dedicated time and also waiting on information or important things from other people that are keeping me stalled in terms of what I can accomplish without said information.
J and I went to Comic Relief downtown today and picked up tickets for Wondercon. While I’m bummed I didn’t have time or energy to put anything together for hall cosplay, my very own Owly hat arrived just the other day! Perfect timing. I adore my new hat. That it was lovingly handmade only makes it more special.
I am so in love with the Owly comics, I can hardly stand it. I bought the fifth book today as well, and I can’t believe how much of an emotional reaction I get to such a seemingly simple comic. It’s so beautifully written and drawn. Although I’m already slated to attend two more conventions this year, I’m even more motivated to try and finally make it Comic-con so I can track down Andy Runton and thank him for drawing.
So~o Zach Snyder is confirmed as a Wondercon guest, as are “and cast members”. Gah. All I need to know is if Jeffrey Dean Morgan is going to be in attendance. While I am overwhelmingly excited to see Watchmen, the only reason I care about the panel is if I can witness first hand the sex-on-legs that is JDM. The man has made me voluntarily watch romance movies. Clearly, my fan crush is massive.
How am I supposed to resist that? Hotness.
Luckily I have discovered a new blog to help me cope. Three cheers for the [SM].
We watched the new GI Joe: Rise of Cobra trailer tonight. Although I’m still more excited about Transformers 2, based on my love of digital destruction, I’m optimistic.
There was a need to improve upon the trailer, however, and I headed over to Fensler Film’s classic PSAs and remixed some audio…
Managed to squeeze in most of my favourite quotables, but sadly there was no room for “your ass got saaaaaacked.”
Tuesday evening I was walking to the BART to meet up with J and Neko to see Dark Knight in IMAX. Only a block away from my apartment, I noticed quite a bit of smoke coming out of the engine compartment of a car parked on the side of the street.
A woman and her son walked up and the boy and I concluded that yes, the car was on fire. There were no visible flames, but they were reflecting on the pavement beneath the car. I called the police and then lent my phone to the woman since it was her husband’s car parked directly in front of the Car on Fire.
I hung around long enough to wait for the fire department to show up. Which didn’t take long since the station is within spitting distance. While waiting, somehow I ended up helping the boy with his homework. A bit surreal, since I kept imagining that any second the flames were going roar up.
I failed to take a picture, so here’s a dramatic recreation of what I hoped was going to happen:
I’m certainly now carrying my camera around more frequently.
On a completely different note, I rather wish people would focus more on pollution beyond simply carbon emissions, and maybe with the scientists speaking up recently they will, but I doubt it with all the media hysteria.
Climate change scare notwithstanding, this is both interesting and slightly depressing…
It would require the same number of workers to install rooftop solar panels on every house in the U.S., helping to mitigate the effects of global warming, as we currently have military personnel deployed in Iraq.
Paraphrased from this post, about this book by two Berkeley scientists (free download). I downloaded it this morning and am looking forward to seeing what they have to say.
