#I've got about 150 or so hours in now so I'm not getting pounded into the dirt nearly as bad as before tho | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

maryellencarter · 2 years

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Well. Fuck.

So money was already tight and I'd delayed some bills, not to mention put a couple hundred in groceries on my credit card so I could eat till payday under the (reasonable, at the time) impression that I could pay it off again by the due date.

Then I had a three-day migraine which completely prevented me from looking at screens. I work in customer service *text chat*. That knocked my upcoming end-of-the-month paycheck from "can get sort of caught up" down to "this won't even cover the rent".

Then I ordered a laundry pickup, because I hadn't had any clean bras all month (not having the physical ability to do my own laundry) and it was demoralizing. It's thirty bucks for fifteen pounds, I did the math and figured I could afford it. I don't have a way to weigh my laundry before sending it out, but I didn't think I owned more than about fifteen, maybe twenty pounds of laundry.

It came out to *thirty-six pounds*. Which the laundry service just auto-drafted the charge for (as is their right).

So the point is -- I'm fucked. There are bills I can't delay coming out on Saturday that are well over what I have left in my bank account. My credit card is already full and it's going to have a bunch of interest added. If I take as many extra hours this week as my work will allow, I can just about cover the rent, but *nothing* else... not the electric or internet service I need to keep my at-home workstation running, not the food and meds to keep *me* running, zilch.

Minimum, to avoid immediate overdraft, I have to have at least $30 more than I've got in my bank account by Saturday. Longer term, I have food for maybe a week if I'm careful, and after that I'd need at least $200 to tide me over to mid November's paycheck (which I am optimistically assuming will be a full paycheck for now :P). If I can't get the extra hours to cover the rent I'll also need about $100 (estimated) there, and I need to get a new psychiatrist to fill my meds and also actually afford my meds, that's at least another $60...

Optimally, it'd be really nice to also raise the money to get my bills up to date, which would be uh... oh shit I have an ophthalmologist copay coming up, in addition to the actual bills... call it like $150? Living is fucking expensive.

So that all shakes out to something around $400 minimum to get me through the next month or so, and another $150 to stop having to keep pushing shit out further. My PayPal is ethanrabbits at gmail, my Ko-fi is right here, and -- god, I don't know what I'll do if y'all can't help out. I wish we lived in friggin Animal Crossing or something so I could at least go hit rocks. I've got nothing.

#begging post #god fucking dammit #i just wanted to be clean and have clean clothes #thirty-six pounds of laundry i swear to god HOW

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watch-simone-shrink · 14 days

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12 April 2024

Reading: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Weight today: 336.6 Next goal: <330

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I woke up feeling super bloated and gross today, so I'm pleasantly surprised that my weight hasn't gone up by much. Not sure whether I ate something that offended the GI gods or am about to receive a certain monthly visitor.

I think it may be the latter, as a quick glance at my Clue app says I'm due for my period in three days. That would also explain the weight fluctuation and the foul mood I'm in. *shrug* (Yes, gentlemen, avert your tender eyes; there will occasionally be mild period talk on this blog.)

At least I've got therapy today. Pray I don't cuss anyone out in the intermediate 3.5 hours.

I realize that yesterday I forgot to talk about my goals. The truth is, I don't have a specific number in mind as a UGW. I was 135 on my eighteenth birthday and 150 when I graduated from high school. Once I start seeing numbers that start with a 1, I'll probably fine-tune goals based on what feels the best and what seems realistic.

There are also non-scale victories that are meaningful to me, like wearing certain clothing sizes, not needing shorts under dresses for chub rub, not needing a seatbelt extender to fly, and things like that. Also, just more movement and mobility in general.

Some other benchmarks I care about:

286 — no longer morbidly obese

214 — no longer obese

177 — no longer overweight

(I'm 5'11". Did I mention that? I feel like that's relevant here.)

However, I haven't found it to be helpful or productive in the past to set my sights on some lofty goal that feels (and probably is) years away. Instead, I want to focus really intensely on ten-pound increments. So right now, the only goal weight I care about is 329, since I'm in the 330s. Then it'll be 319, and so forth. Always something realistic and attainable to keep me moving forward.

I have found that, when I focus on getting back to my high school weight or something, and I'm faced with a decision about food or movement, my thought process is "well, I'll never get there anyway; might as well make the bad choice." However, being 336 and aiming for 329, every decision feels like it matters because I'm super close to my goal. So, I think that, for me, this is probably the better way of going about it.

Oh, and I ordered a new Fitbit (one of the new Charge 6 models) so, soon, I'll be able to share my daily steps with you. I guess I'll just add "yesterday's steps" or something to the header.

Maybe eventually, once I'm more in the swing of daily blogging, I'll share food logs as well? Just an idea. What do you think?

Anyway, that's probably enough for now. I'll talk to you guys tomorrow.

Simone

#april 2024 #friday #daily journal #330s #goals #direction #weight loss #health and wellness

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dsolhip · 4 months

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It Starts

So it begins. I'll give you some background for this blog. It's a Journal I'm going to be keeping on trying to improve my health through several means. From modifying my diet to introducing an exercise plan and anything in between, I hope to get back some energy. I want to be able to walk to the store and back without feeling like I ran a mile. I'd also like to fit in more places. I hope to one day be small enough that I can ride roller coaster again. I haven't done that since middle school at Busch Gardens. So how will I accomplish this?

Alter my diet

I've been doing this for a couple of years in small increments. Before the pandemic I was Reducing the number of unhealthy / junk food items. Biggest example of this is soda. I used to drink soda like water. During the pandemic my usage jumped right back up as I just stopped caring. These days I've gotten it back to where I Drink mostly water with some coffee and flavored sparkling water. The only time I drink soda is when I go out to eat.

Over these last couple of years I've mostly stopped cooking. Issues range from I got tired of cooking all the time to I just don't have time for it. At one point my dinning out / ordering out costs were stupidly expensive. I started doing Freshly and then Factor 75. They was cheaper than takeout especially these days with how prices have gone up. I plan on going back to cooking for myself as I want to try to more closely control the food I normally eat. The plan here is to have a more structured diet on the day-to-day and allow myself to eat out with friends or go to events and not worry about it. In essence, allowing my day to day diet to make up for any "cheat days".

The current plan is to focus on a diet with the following factors.

Overall calorie consumption below 2500

My goal weight is going to be 250 pounds and 10 calories per pound leads me to this number.

High protein

Protein helps you feel full of longer. I think it's something around 1 gram of protein per pound recommended for high protein so I'll stick with that.

High fiber

Fiber has been documented to have several health benefit. The key one I'll focus on here is that when soluble fibers are digested in the large intestine it releases a chemical that's similar to the synthetic drug Ozempic. The major difference being that the chemical produced only lasts for around an hour while Ozempic lasts for several. NPR had an Article outlining this. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/30/1208883691/diet-ozempic-wegovy-weight-loss-fiber-glp-1-diabetes-barley

Everything else

The plan is not to worry much about carbs or fats. If I keep up the protein and I go for high fiber, Whatever's left over can be distributed however it falls. With protein being 4 calories per gram, That means 1000 of the 2500 calories is accounted for. That might mean I might do 100 grams of fat and 150 grams of carbs. Might be different. This means less to track overall.

Reintroducing physical activity

I work a sedentary job in front of a desk. I let myself get to over 450 lbs. I barely do anything physical. I've been thinking about this and from what I understand the best option is to start with a small light routine of physical activity. I'm thinking for a month starting with the following:

A quarter mile walk

Three sets of ten wall pushups

Three sets of 10 squats

I want to add jumping jacks; however, When I attempt them, My stomach flops up and down and it hurts quite a bit. I'll start these for now and I'll Look into next steps.

Seek professional assistance

Did you know the last time I've seen a doctor, outside of an ER, was when I was getting my hepatitis shots for 6th grade? I'm currently 32. In that My father has had three heart attacks with the final one being fatal. My brother having passed away due to an undiagnosed birth defect in his heart. My mother has been diagnosed and beat cancer. I need to get a primary care physician, And start having them check for anything that can go wrong.

#health #self improvement #getting healthy #weight loss

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chrysolipsist · 7 months

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mid 20th century furniture and early 21st century disease

I bought myself an Eames chair because I spend so much time sitting at my desk at home for both work and leisure, I figured I am destroying my body by being in an office chair so much. In fact, I'm fairly convinced this is true. My body already revolted against me once a couple years ago where, for a period of weeks, my ass hurt like hell every time I tried sitting in a chair and it even took some physical therapy to get out of that condition. I've used a cushion most of the time since then (and I bought a nicer chair), but it still doesn't seem like enough.

I thought what might be a nicer setup would be to get a lounge chair with a lap desk to put my keyboard and mouse on. I bought a $150 chair on Amazon that looked pretty comfy, but it turned out that it wasn't all that comfortable to sit on for long periods of time. And yes, I don't really like that this is my life, but the fact of the matter is, much of my day consists of sitting in front of a computer screen. I've been trying to get away from that, and recently started going to the gym. In fact, I've lost 10 pounds since doing so. But there is a long way to go. Anyway, my first experiment failed and I kept searching for the ideal chair for my intended setup.

I was traveling for work a while back and I encountered the Eames chair in the lobby of a hotel. I came down, got some food and a drink from the bar, and sat in their Eames chair for a while, chatting with a friend on the phone. After a good couple hours, it still felt very comfortable. The only problem with this chair is that it costs nearly a month's salary to get one, if you buy from the high end of the market. I could wipe out about a third of my remaining student loans for the price of this chair. Obviously I didn't go for the high-end model. Instead, I found a "cheap" knockoff on sale for about 8% of that price, or $600, which still seems like a lot of money for a chair to me. But I figured, what the hell. If nothing else, it looks nice. I think it looks like what someone I used to know would have described as "swank". Long story short, I ordered the chair.

I have COVID again, by the way. This is the second time I've gotten it since the start of the pandemic. Not wanting to acquire long COVID, I've been trying to mostly rest, in the hopes that this would give my immune system ample time and energy to fight it off. After a couple days, I feel better. Today I did remote meetings, and by the end of the day, I was feeling run down, when the chair was delivered. I assembled the thing somewhat leisurely; it wasn't too hard to put together, despite the instructions being written in very questionable English, and actually incorrect (thankfully, there was an online video showing the steps). The hardest part was attaching the arms to the flange that connects the back to the seat. The last arm took over an hour to attach, whereas the rest of the chair took less than half that time. The problem was, I had to use my left hand to tighten a bolt while pushing the arm down onto the flange, but once I got the arm close enough to push the bolt in, I could no longer see where the bolt was going. It felt like the bolt was in place, and I was turning it, and it gave the impression that it was going in, but this turned out not to be the case. I pulled up on the arm and it came right off. I must have done this about a hundred times, getting increasingly irritated. As in: how fucking stupid am I that I can't get this to work? Why couldn't they have made the bolt just 1/8 of an inch longer? I got so angry and frustrated that I think I forced all my COVID symptoms to disappear out of pure rage; as soon as I finally got the fucking thing bolted on, I felt a bit wiped out. Hopefully, I didn't give myself some sort of long-term problem by spending my late afternoon putting this chair together.

Now, I really can't tell whether this chair is identical to the one in the hotel lobby. As far as I can tell, the build of my chair is absolutely identical to the one on the expensive furniture company's website. It is visually indistinguishable to me. Maybe some kind of furniture expert could tell. It feels about as comfortable as the one I sat in before, and I seem to doubt that the people operating that hotel would have actually paid $8,000 for a chair to sit in their lobby. I feel like their chair may have been a bit softer, but that might just be because mine is new and the foam in the cushions is still a bit stiff. Anyway, I feel like $600 was a fair price for this chair.

When I was a kid, at my grandparents' house, my grandfather and my aunt used to sit in the living room in two recliners sitting side-by-side, separated by a table with a lamp and an ashtray, facing a TV set on the other side of the room. They would sit there most of the day, watching television. My grandfather would chain smoke, with his jaw hanging open, flipping the dial. I remember he would pause momentarily on things like wrestling, or exercise programs where women were bent over doing stretches. Meanwhile, my aunt would knit, and my grandmother went about doing all of the domestic duties around the house. My aunt had some kind of mental condition I don't really know the full details of. She was epileptic, and slightly developmentally disabled. She was able to work at a Goodwill store for a while. She was petite when she was 20-something, and she probably could have lived semi-independently, but they discouraged her from doing that. Instead, she spent most of her adult life rocking in a recliner, knitting blankets that smelled like tobacco smoke since they'd been marinated in it. And she grew steadily larger during the '80s, '90s, 2000s, and 2010s, becoming diabetic somewhere along the way. My grandfather died in 2016, and my aunt had a stroke and died a couple years later, leaving my grandmother behind.

I always found her condition a little sad, but it was nothing I had any ability to do anything about. When I look in the mirror at myself now, having taken poor care of myself for nearly half as many decades, I see part of her looking back in my own round and too-chubby face. I have the same overall face shape shared by my grandmother, my dad, and my son. All three of them are in pretty good shape compared to myself. Meanwhile, I'm doing to myself what happened to my aunt: consigning myself to a lifetime of sitting in comfortable chairs, only I'm marinating in work rather than smoke.

I recently began exercising to try to counteract about 15 years of neglect, and as I said earlier, I did lose a little weight, but I really need to lose at least another hundred twenty pounds. I didn't exercise when I was traveling the past week, and then I caught COVID. In an effort to avoid getting long-term symptoms, I thought I had better just rest until it's completely gone before starting the exercise again. That's if the advice I've read has any element of truth to it. You can read articles all day on what to do and what not to do, and get contradictory advice from seemingly legitimate sources. This is without even considering the nutcases and hucksters recommending off-label use of veterinary drugs, supplements, or metal colloids. After I rolled the heavy box containing the chair into the house this afternoon, I felt temporarily overwhelmed with fatigue. I would really be unhappy if that happened to me every time I tried to exercise. But, when I was putting the chair together, I think I exerted myself even more, but I felt perfectly fine. I'd like to think, although I doubt it could be true, that I tapped into the power of pure unrefined anger to render the coronavirus paralyzed with fear.

Well, I wrote most of this so far in the new chair, and it has worked pretty well. I could imagine doing the majority of my work in this position. It's better than the office chair so far, I think. We'll see. But even as I have found what I think might be a new and improved way of organizing my home office space, I really need to get away from spending so much of my life sitting down and typing. I reason that if I can get to a healthy weight within five years, I could enjoy the remainder of my 40s in much better condition, and the following decade, a chance at a little middle-age renaissance, before the inevitable old age, and oblivion. That's if I don't cough myself to death first.

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