Ten pounds less of ME

This morning when I got on the scale I saw a lovely number I hadn’t seen in over a year: 182. Which meant, much to my delight, that I have now hit the 10 pound mark in the great initiative to lose 42 pounds by June!

So yeah, thus far the whole LoseIt app on my iPhone is continuing to be a win. I have not significantly changed the stuff I’ve been eating: I’ve just been eating less of it. And really, this means not getting too crazy with the snacks–either the tasty tasty M&M cookies that they sell at the cafe next door to my workplace, or the deep, deep temptation of Starbucks’ Vivannos and Toffee Almond Bars, or worse yet, Seattle’s Best Coffee’s Cocoa Trios and Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Looking up how many calories those things cost me has been very educational! And it’s really kind of amazing how useful knowing “okay, if I want to eat these things, I have to manage my eating the rest of the week in order to have enough in the calorie budget for it” has been. I.e., I can still sometimes have these things; I just have to earn them.

I’ve noticed already that it’s easier to bend over and to get out of the back seat of the car. userinfosolarbird clued in as well that the surgery scar across my right shoulderblade has been changing now that the fat layer back there has lessened. It’s wider now and shallower. It’ll be interesting to see how it continues to change as I get thinner. My energy is up and my sporadic back pain has lessened.

All in all, a win. Thirty-two pounds to go and I’m on track to get there by June. Wish me luck, folks.

And now, a holiday review!

I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that userinfosolarbird and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.

The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all. Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so. I dropped in on userinfokathrynt to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!

Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with userinfomamishka to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.

Christmas evening, userinfomamishka, userinfodarthhellokitty, and userinfoking_chiron all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1”. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.

I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!

Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.

And oh yes: with userinfospazzkat coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:

Indy Ornament
Carefully, Indy

There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. userinfospazzkat knows me very, very well. <3

Two weeks in, so far so good

So y’all know how I posted two weeks ago about using the LoseIt! iPhone app to start trying to get my weight under control? I’m pleased to report that so far, the plan seems to be working. And in fact, I’m a little ahead of the game since I had set the thing for losing 1 1/2 pounds per week and so far I’m down four pounds, not three.

I made a point of checking in with my general care doctor too so that she is aware of the Plan. Happily, she agreed that what I’m setting out to do seems sane and a healthy rate of loss; she counseled me to make sure to not drop more than two pounds a week and to be prepared to bump up my exercise later as well, neither of which were surprising. She wants to see me in 2-3 months for a physical, so we’ll see where I am in March or so.

Going to have to brief my post-cancer endoc and my thyroid doc as well, especially the latter, given that weight reduction will of course also affect my thyroid levels. Fortunately I have appointments with both of them next week during my vacation time, which will be nice.

All in all I am finding the app a breeze to use, since it conveniently combines several things I was either trying to do or was intellectually aware I should have been doing anyway: i.e., a food log, an exercise log, and managing not only what I eat but how much. Really, the idea of losing weight by eating less and exercising more is one I have known for most of my adult life–we ALL know this one. But knowing it and actually having an effective tool to pull it off seem to be a world apart, at least for me!

Having a daily calorie budget and a way to easily check against it also seems to be vital. Knowing how many more calories I have to blow in a day has already led me to decide against snacks when previously I would have had them; as I type this, I am stoically resisting cake. Because I don’t have enough of a calorie surplus yet, and I won’t until I get on the treadmill Saturday morning!

Long story short, I love this plan! I’m proud to be a part of it!

So this ought to be fun

Good Murkworks friend userinfodarthhellokitty has had amazing progress this year losing weight, and on Thursday, userinfosolarbird pointed me at a post by another local acquaintance of ours, userinfopetit_chou, who’s been working hard on losing weight as well. It seems userinfopetit_chou has been having great results using an iPhone app called LoseIt!, so I’ve decided to check this out.

The way this works is, you tell it your current weight, where you want to actually be, and it’ll work out for you how long it should take you to get there and how many calories you’re allowed to consume in a day. Then you enter in what foods you eat and it’ll tally up that up for you. You’re allowed extra calories if you get in exercise, which it also lets you record. (Courtesy of this I learned I burn roughly 300 calories a day just walking to and from work during the week.)

So yeah. Given that I’ve continued to have weight issues and that I really need to get on the stick dealing with this, given that it’ll significantly reduce my risk of a recurrence of breast cancer, I’m going to give this a shot.

I started trying it on Thursday night and so far the app is quite easy to use and kind of fun. Since I have my iPhone with me all the time anyway, it makes it very easy to just whip the thing out and track stuff as I eat it, or as I finish a bout of walking. It’s also handy for providing immediate visual data on how much I’ve done during a day and how much more I’m allowed, and for keeping track of progress as well. This seems like it’ll be a way more effective tool than what I’d tried before, which is to say, keeping a manual food log on my laptop.

Trying it last night when we went out for sushi was fun, too, since it meant I was able to go “okay, I’m down to about 120 calories left, I can either have another round of sushi or go for the mochi!” Mmm, mochi. And today, I’m feeling kind of weird and almost-hungry, like my system thinks it should have more food except it doesn’t really need it. So it should be interesting to see how far I can get with it all. Wish me luck, folks.

Better update

Had those new mammogram pics done this morning–and the long and short of it is, yeah, they think they were looking at scar tissue. I am to come back in six months for another followup just to keep an eye on it, and they also recommend a new baseline, post-reduction MRI just so that they have a new baseline for what it looks like in there.

So, yeah. Good to get that confirmed and I am deeply relieved. Or at least I will be when I get my energy back from being worn out from being nervous and tense!

Again, thanks all for your good wishes. Very much appreciated.

Update

So, rough sleep last night, lots of trying not to flip out, and obsessively shooting the heads off of zombies. Oh yeah, and making myself actually work on Lament. Last night, not so fun.

Heard back from Dr. McMillan’s office who had no idea what was up with the mammogram stuff, so that told me that whatever was up with that, it wasn’t prompted by them. So I called the breast center people back, and they pointed me at the records nurse, who looked in my actual file to find out WTF. She said Dr. Carlson (who I actually met, I think, during the last round of BFFN) had noted something about a bit of a thing that was visible from one angle and not from another, so they wanted more angles of that. According to what the nurse described, it sounded like it could well just be scarring from my reduction.

So. Still nervous but not quite so paranoid. Keep your fingers crossed, people.

Oh HELL no

I just got called by Evergreen. They want me to come in for followup pictures for the left mammogram I just had last week. The scheduling desk doesn’t say why; they don’t have that data. So I’ve had to leave messages with Dr. McMillan’s office as well as Dr. Towbin’s to ask them WTF, as they’re the ones who got the actual report and who would presumably have requested the followup pictures.

It is within the realm of reason that this may just be a scenario of scar tissue on my left side making the scan turn out weird. Or hell, just pictures that got fucked up for some technical reason. I will be focusing on this, because really, seriously, I am not up for Round Three of this shit.

Please to be directing any positive thoughts towards the least annoying scenario here, people. Thank you in advance. I’ll be over here trying not to be stressy and irritable and paranoid until Thursday morning, when I go in for the followup scans.