Taking the blog way personal

WARNING: The following post is TMI


My dosha is very kapha, so I've tendencies for both laziness and being overweight, although on the plus-side, when properly nourished, excercised, and rested, I'm quite strong. How fat I am has always been a good indicator of how stressed and/or unhappy I am. For example, over the past few years, I started my nursing home social worker job at a high degree of fatness, having come off of several months of unemployment and a year of uncertain job security before that. Over the course of 2 years at the nursing home, I lost about 30 pounds, although toward the end we had an administrator who was a demented nightmare (may all beings benefit) and I regained about 10 pounds prior to my promotion to executive director of an assisted living, a job I had really wanted and had worked for years to get. Over the next 14 months in that position I gained an additional 35 pounds, a sure-fire indicator that it was not the job for me after all. My subsequent release from the fat-making job has not helped matters, and for the past few months of unemployment, I have remained fatter than I've been since 2001, when I lost 60 pounds of stress-weight to return to a close-to-healthy BMI.

Well, I start a part-time job Monday, and I'm encouraged to see that the folks there are normal-weight, since obesity is at least somewhat contagious. (At the fat-making job, my boss and all but one of my 7 peers were overweight-to-obese, whereas at the nursing home all but one of my peers was normal-weight. Hmmm.) To leverage this opportunity of a fresh start, I have signed up for a fitness journal, in which I can enter everything I eat and whatever exercise I get, and track my weight loss.

I took this step after reading this article on WebMD, which is disappointingly not linked to the study on which the claim is based, but what can you expect from Good Housekeeping after all, right? It seemed reasonable, so I decided to give it a try. (I wasn't vegetarian when I lost the weight in 2001, I did it by going high-protein and low-carb, which meant eating meat daily, not just a couple times a week which was my more natural tendency, so it's not an option this time, I have to come up with something else workable.)

Mostly for my own convenience, I'm making the fitness journal "public" so that I can link to it form here for ease of access. This will have the unfortunate side effect of inflicting on my imaginary readers way more infomation about the eating and non-exercising habits of a middle-aged suburban mom than anyone wants, and for this I apologize in advance.