I'm better now, I swear!

My sister, having just got back from hiking the Grand Canyon with our dad (not everyone in our family is traditionally sedentary, y'see), discovered that I had melted down yesterday and called last night. By that point I was on the rebound and feeling optimistic again, so mostly I grilled her about her love life. The sisterly love was felt all around.

You guys. I adore you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Just knowing I'm not crazy, knowing that it is the weather and not my wussitude, knowing that this is normal-- seriously, that helped SO much. I did a HIIT session last night after I got home from work, with my normal mph levels dropped a notch, and whaddaya know, the moment my legs hit 4.5 mph they got the happy. That "oh! running! my favorite!" feeling, where suddenly I want to frolic around like a puppy. I haven't had that since the heat started, and it was like seeing an old friend. That alone cured all ills, I swear.

Here's the scoop on my situation: I do have a big ass fan, and we do have one window cranked open enough to fit a fan that blows the hot air (and coincidentally the cat litterbox stench) outside, so it's not as bad on the porch as it could be. The reason the treadmill is out there is because we live on the second floor of our building, and the floors/ceilings transmit sound like nobody's business. When I first ran with the treadmill set up in the living room-- even with one of those mats underneath-- our downstairs neighbor threatened to call the cops if I ever did it again. We moved it onto the sun porch, which is made of concrete and transmits vibration a bit less than the drum-like floors. It's freezing cold in the winter and hot as hell in the summer, but thus far we haven't had an early-morning visit from law enforcement.

I get up at 5:20 AM, because we have to leave for work at 6:45 AM, and I exercise immediately. I'm thus far barred from running outdoors because my Hub is a paranoid creature; he doesn't want me to get hurt or raped or killed out there in the mostly-sleeping city. I try not to get him too riled up, so I don't do outdoor running unless I'm in a group or a heavily populated area. Ah, the price I pay to keep my spouse from getting an ulcer.

I'd love to run outside early in the morning. The times I've done it, I loved it like fire; wind on my face, birds in the trees, early-morning delivery people going about their early-morning things. I gotta tell you, there's pretty much nothing that I envy my sister about her boyfriend, but having a built-in running partner? Yeah, that's the one thing. Sigh. Maybe someday she'll move to Chicago and we can run together in the mornings.

Currently a gym membership is out of the question. That's actually part of what put me in such a state of despair; we are so tapped for money right now, it's not funny. I just had to spend money I didn't want to on a new Palm, because my old one's on/off switch ceased to work and it would've cost as much to fix as to get a new one (what the hell is up with THAT?). I've been trying to make do by using the soft reset to turn it on, but that's enough of a pain that I've found myself using the Palm only for my workouts. Which means that I haven't been tracking my meals. And even though I'm eating clean-- sticking purely with meals that I know are on-plan, and using the palm-of-the-hand/size-of-a-fist gauges for improvised meals-- I don't feel comfortable with it. I like tracking my meals, dammit! I like knowing that I didn't go over my calories and that my carbs and protein are neatly balanced and being able to notate my drinking water and...

Er, I was going to say, this means that I definitely had to buy a new one. My whole darn life is kept on my Palm, so limited access has been painful. I'm just so pissed. I want to be able to afford new clothes and a gym membership, dammit! I can feel myself verging on the point where I'm mentally strong enough to accept instruction from a professional ('cause dude, while I'm building this castle in the sky of gym membership, might as well imagine getting a personal trainer, too) and to bust my ass in public, and so I keep hitting this point where I get frustrated by lacking the social aspect of training. Admittedly, I want better machines and a better weight set available to me, too. I want to be one of those folks who goes to the gym first and then heads to work.

Problem #2, besides the money, is the lack of a car and the fact that I live in Chicago, where we have rather inclement weather for half the year. That limits my pick of gyms quite a lot. Problem #3 is the Hub, again. I'm going to have to start getting him used to the idea that I will someday have a gym membership and he will either have to let me go alone or come with me. I have to admit that I'm hoping he'd choose to come with; even for a sedentary computer geek like my darling, there has to be something he'd enjoy doing at a well-equipped gym.

Anyway. Not limitations: challenges. I do bounce back pretty quickly after breakdowns. I'm gonna figure this all out, and it will be fine.

Tomorrow, we leave for the in-law's. Today, I have to develop a plan for how to deal with my BFL eating while there. Thus far it's all about the vegetables: making sure that I have cucumber and celery (and possibly zucchini and squash) available to chop into munchy finger-food portions. I'm pretty sure I can manage carb/protein amounts on whatever mom-in-law will cook, and I can bring a good stash of meal bars along for midmeals. I may bring along my turkey chili recipe (which was received to rave reviews when a friend came over last night) and the turkey sloppy joes recipe. I'm going to have to be my own best friend on this, because while usually my Hub runs interference for my diet while we're at his folks', this time he's still (STILL! GODDAMMIT!) paralyzed with fear where feeding me is concerned.

So tired of this. So tired. He completely freaked out last night when called upon to cook something that would be both visitor-friendly and me-friendly, and if I hadn't gone into the kitchen at an hour past meal time and said, "Heat up three portions of the turkey chili and make a salad and BE DONE WITH IT, for God's sake," I doubt we would have ever been fed. It's going on two months, for pity's sake. I bought the damn Eating For Life cookbook so that he could look through it and get ideas. (Which is great, 'cause I love it, but he has touched it ONCE, and that was when I practically shoved it into his hands.) I am swiftly reaching a point where his fear of upsetting me IS UPSETTING ME, dammit, and he doesn't seem to grasp that I would much rather have him act decisively and be wrong than futz around in a frightened manner all the time, effectively leaving me with all the work.

Anyway. Planning. Lean on the vegetables this time. Grab some EggBeaters and low-fat cheese at the store and make very veggified omlettes in the mornings with some fruit on the side. It's three days. I can live through three days.

I'm going to bring along my weights, because (thank God) Sunday is lower-body, and I can get away with having only the weights (no exercise ball or anything) for lower-body. Saturday is my day off where exercise is concerned, so that's all good. Monday I'll run outside, and try out doing intervals the way I've read about. It will all be good.

Tonight, we have to stop by the cheap-ass clothes store and get me more shorts and tops. The problem about having been this size for only one other summer of my adult life is that I lack adequate clothing. I'm still trying to get to the point where I just lack adequate good clothing.