I should explain something. Were I work, we eat…a lot…and often. EVERYONE has multiple snacks in their desks. We have potlucks to celebrate every conceivable occasion. The running joke is that the company encourages us to eat so much so that our rears expand to fit snugly in the chairs and therefore no one is in danger of falling out of them. We are quite literally staffed mostly by overweight people. Wednesday, we celebrated my ex-supervisor’s (she got a promotion, the lucky broad) birthday with…yep, you guessed it, a massive potluck.
These things are mostly political in nature. If you don’t participate, you’re pretty much ostracized. So…while I REALLY wanted to stay on this diet, I also didn’t want to fall out of favor with anyone. So…I signed up to bring a garden salad. I figured I would make sure I could participate by bringing something I could eat.
ALL DAY leading up to serving the food people were asking me if I was going to eat and I kept saying yes, but I’d only eat the salad that I brought because nothing else we were serving was allowed. Oh wow…chicken and dumplin’s, cocktail weenies in BBQ sauce, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, rigatoni casserole…it was all there including 5 different kinds of desert not including the custom-made cake. Dude, when I say we eat…I mean we EAT! LOL!
So after I was done helping serve the food, I got my cup of salad, put my salad spritzer on it and sat down to eat my little lunch at my desk away from everyone else, which I knew was a calculated risk. Sure enough, people started stopping by to chat. And while they told me how amazed they were by my restraint and how they would NEVER have the strength to do it themselves, they munched on their food in front of me and dropped crumbs on my desk. They weren’t being intentionally cruel, just careless and thoughtless.
I put up with it all day long but my friend Tay can tell you I was in the WORST possible mood. I got off work and I just…broke. I took Little Man to the Happy China restaurant and we got take-out. I came home, ate every bit that I could stuff in my mouth without throwing up, feeling horribly guilty the whole time, and then when I was done…had to find something to do. After all, if I was at least productive then maybe my lapse wouldn’t be so bad right? I went through one of the drawers I have of my mom’s things. I read letters she’d written to Grandma a long time ago and I looked at pictures of me and my sister when we were little. One of the letters really caught me by surprise, though now that I think about it, it really shouldn’t have. One of her many letters to Grandma, when she was living just an hour away, before I even knew I had a baby sister, she was just telling Grandma what she was doing, which wasn’t much. She was going to school and taking care of my sister as a baby and that was pretty much it.
But the one thing that hit me hard was that she said, “I’m happy right now”. Not, “being a mother makes me happy” or “doing this is fulfilling”. Just…”happy right now”. I burst into tears. I cried and cried. I let out the guilt and the confusion and the anger of my day and honestly a LOT of emotions that had been building up inside me. And afterwards I felt SO MUCH BETTER!
And then I was mad because I realized that if I had just had a good cry BEFORE I went to get food, I probably wouldn’t have even done it.
Yeah…I’m not REALLY in-touch with my emotions most of the time. I tend to find them inconvenient or irrational and tuck them away, intending to find a way to get rid of them later and then I eventually explode. Need to work on that…eventually. Right now, I don’t have time.
See?!?!?!
Ok, I know I’m at least half-crazy. Let’s face it, I wasn’t the most stable person in the world BEFORE I started this damn diet. So I KNOW being on the diet hasn’t helped, but I haven’t lost any friends yet and have managed to control myself for the most part. So I think that should be considered an accomplishment!
Anyway, I walked away from that with this plan. I was going to go on a supplement only fast for the next 4 days, taking 5 supplements per day which would REALLY drop my calorie count, but it would get me back into ketosis because I was positive I would be out of it by morning at least. So Thursday and Friday I did my liquid diet. I wasn’t going to weigh-in until Monday. Figured I’d find some sort of excuse, but on Friday I seemed to be back in ketosis surprisingly, so I talked myself into going. And I was SO glad that I had! The last time I actually weighed was the previous Thursday, so this is over a 9 day period technically, but I had lost 6 pounds taking me from 276 to 270!
I was so happy and proud of myself!
Then I had the weekend from hell and basically just feel lucky to be alive and in one piece. Ok so my weekend…was a freaking Visa commercial!
Saturday morning I was grocery shopping and then reading for the whole weekend. Those were the sum total of my plans and it sounded heavenly! But, I got suckered into taking Little Man on a mini camping trip with a bunch of my buddies and their kids. “It’ll be great! There’re all these air-conditioned cabins for the parents to sleep in and the kids will have a ball camping in their tents outside!” Couldn’t be bad right? Wrong. I don’t normally do things like this.
I hate the outdoors unless it’s the dead of winter and everything is either dead or hibernating.
I use my weight as an excuse: I can’t be expected to go roll around in the dirt! I’m too fat for that! I can’t handle it!
BUT, I said no and then I saw Little Man’s face fall. It was like all the hope and life had been sucked right out of him, and I remembered Grandma bitching at me just the day before about how I never do anything special with him. I felt guilty for holding him back. So I agreed to go despite the fact that I had this mantra playing in my head the whole time we got ready and drove up there going, “this is SUCH a bad idea! What the hell are you thinking? You’re not prepared for this! You are going to regret this in the worst possible way!” It turns out, that little voice in my head was right, but I’m jumping ahead of myself here.
So we pack up everything you can possibly think of, including food for me so I don’t break my diet…well everything but the car-charger for the cell phone, which I had taken out because I got my car washed Saturday morning and for some strange reason, I thought the car wash people might steel it (SO stupid). So I forgot it wasn’t in the car when we left. So we drive 3 or 4 hours into BFE Alabama to this camp site which has apparently been shut-down at some point due to the bad economy. We decide to stay there anyway because by this time, it’s about 2pm or something and we just figured “screw it”. So we broke in…great idea.
The cabins are all boarded up, can’t get in them and there’s no electricity or running water anyway. But some of us had been smart enough to bring our own water so we figured we’d still be ok. Wrong.
The whole place is like one giant nest of chiggers. These things are NASTY. They burrow under your skin where they live and just bite you over and over and over again. In fact the only way to get rid of them is to suffocate the skin where they’re living, which is highly unpleasant because it’s like painting your leg with clear nail polish. Just…icky. Chiggers may or may not be repelled by bug-repellant, it depends on what kind you get. Guess what? We didn’t have the right kind.
So we’re all being eaten alive.
Oh wait, I forgot a very important piece of info. Right when we got there, I pulled out my cooler full of my food and set it next to mine and Little Man’s little campsite. Well genius outdoors man that he is, the husband of one of my buddies decides to back his truck up between two trees so we can jerry-rig all the tents together and maybe sleep sitting up in the back of the truck and not on the ground. Which sounded like a good idea until he backed over my cooler and totally destroyed it and everything in it.
Now see, I’d skipped breakfast and lunch in my hurry to get everything together to get out there with everyone, so all of my food was in there and I had intended to eat some once I got a chance to sit still…so I was already starving and then I had no food and no water left because it was demolished in my cooler. I was…upset.
Everyone was all “it’ll be ok. You can just eat real food for the weekend. It won’t be that bad”. Yeah…no. I had binged Wednesday night. I refused to do it again. But I eventually caved and ate a hotdog because I had this horrible head ache and felt so damn nauseous. So I spent the rest of the day trying to deal. Just trying to stand back and let Little Man have fun because I never do stuff like this with him. They had this little satellite TV and someone had brought a laptop. So I was watching the Forbes list on E and I even managed to make a facebook update before the dead tree that some other genius outdoorsman had hooked the portable satellite up to collapsed, crushing the TV, the car it was sitting on and loosing the internet connection.
By this time, I was hot, hungry, pissy, dirty, and being eaten alive by bugs. Little Man was all of those things except hungry. We were done. So I said screw it and decided to leave. We packed what was left of our stuff into the car and right as we were about to pull out onto the little road, my friend Buffy (swear her parents called her that as a joke, but it stuck) asked me if I knew my way home. I figured if I just kept heading east I’d eventually hit something I recognized (because I’d followed them up there and had no earthly idea where I was), and in my head I was telling myself I was a big girl and we’d be fine, so I said yes. I looked at my phone, noticed it was almost dead, realized I didn’t have the charger and THOUGHT about staying, but decided to try going home anyway. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
So off we drove.
Gotta explain. It’s summer so it’s not actually dark here until around 8:30pm. It was like…7:30 or something, so still plenty light outside. I got a flat tire right at the edge of what looked like a little pseudo-town. You know, the kind of place you typically drive through when you’re going through BFE to get to somewhere else. I get out see that it’s my rear driver’s tire and realize I’ve got a real problem. My phone is dead and before RT, when I’d taken my car to get a thorough check up, they’d rotated the tires but put the hub cap back on so that it was actually blocking the air thingy. My lug-nuts and hub cap are attached. So, I figure I’m fine. I have a spare. I get out the kit and start trying to get the lug-nuts off. About this time this guy with all of 4 teeth comes over asking (if you could call what came out of his mouth some kind of language) if I needed help.
Yep, I did. So we screwed with it for about 30 minutes before he says it’s just not coming off and he needs his air gun to get it off. Thankfully, he runs the one and only gas station/repair shop/convenience store in town. I’m all like cool, you do that and I will go call my insurance.
Guess what? Some moron drunk driver had taken out the telephone pole into town earlier that day. No phones. Didn’t know when it would be fixed, probably not until tomorrow. The air gun he’d lent to his buddy who’d driven off to god knows where the day before to take his wife to the hospital because she was in labor. And my phone was now dead. Great. I’m starting to feel like I’m in the middle of some horror movie like “the Hills Have Eyes” or something. Little Man’s actually freaked out too so he’s stuck to me like glue, which didn’t help my temper at all.
The guy was nice enough to let me into his little convenience store to grab $20 worth of snacks. You KNOW none of that was on my list of allowed foods, but I didn’t have a choice. We were starving and had no other options. He woke up his wife, who woke up her friend, who woke up her cousin to come let me rent a room at this little dive of a hotel/motel. They looked at my visa card like I was crazy when I handed it to them to pay for the room. Dude, as broke as I am, I was just praying they’d accept it. With no phones, they couldn’t run it, so they had to write down all the numbers, which made me nervous, but whatever.
We go to our little room and weren’t terribly surprised that it was a worse than a dump. But despite the fact that the place gave us the heebie-jeebies, it seemed somehow more secure than sleeping in the car, just not by much.
Seriously, the place was down-right creepy. And to top it off, there was no lock on the door, only a latch…and that latch was only attached by one tiny little nail. Needless to say we didn’t sleep. Little Man and I were both too freaked out to sleep. We sat on the floor and played go fish with cards made of the pages of my food diary. All the while, I’m thinking about this is how people end up buried in the woods and how stupid I was to leave the camp alone WITH a dead phone and hoping that at least if we still weren’t home by Monday my family would wonder where the hell we were.
The sun FINALLY came up but no one in town was around. They were all at their creepy little church. So Little Man and I stayed in our creepy little hotel room and waited until we saw activity around 1pm. We walked over to the gas station and the guy said he still hadn’t seen his friend. I’m thinking we’re never going to get out of this hell-hole and telling the Almighty that I’m sorry I’m such a stubborn bitch, even if he did help make me that way.
Right about then this guy pulls up in a telephone company truck and guess what? It’s his friend. Yeah. He’s there to fix the phones AND he can give back the air gun. So the guy gets my tire off, actually patches the flat and right before I tear out of there at top speed, I ask what the name of the town is. He says, “ain’t no town here. Just a place.”…so not only don’t I know where the hell I am, I don’t know where the hell I’ll be running from so I never make the mistake of going within 100 square miles of the place again. I drove until I hit Georgia, got out, got directions back to Pensacola and managed to get home around 7pm last night, totally exhausted and munching on chips and coke the whole way.
I WILL NEVER GO CAMPING AGAIN. No amount of guilt can convince me to do it. Not happening. Never. And when Little Man asks why I won’t go camping with him, I will (using the most wise mouth words of my wonderful friend Kay) remind him of the last time Mommy gave in to him and we almost died in Deliverance Country.
I know it’s overly dramatic, but DUDE! YOU didn’t go through it so give me a break! LOL!
So, I knew I had eaten what I wasn’t supposed to eat and even though I knew I’d had no choice in the matter, I still felt guilty about it, because if I’d just listened to myself and not gone, or at least stayed with the group instead of trying to head home alone, I’d have been fine. I was going to go on my super strict fluid-only diet again before I weighed, but instead I just dropped myself back down to the 500 calorie diet today and will only stay on it until I’m back in ketosis again.
The best possible news to come out of this hellish weekend was that I lost a half of a pound! The counselor said it was probably more due to the stress and fear than anything else, but hey, I’ll take it! LOL!
So now, I know that I can be active with my son, but that I should plan MUCH MORE CAREFULLY and not go haring off on an adventure like that again. Little Man slept with me last night which means it affected him as much as it affected me. So I know I probably won’t be sleeping alone for the rest of the week and I feel I deserve it.
I was stupid to put myself and my son in danger that way and I’m WAY too stubborn. I was LUCKY it ended the way it did and it only cost me:
Food, water and ice = $75
Junk food at the Deliverance, BFE convenience store = $20
Gas before I left the state of Florida = $40
Gas on my way back (stopping at every gas station I saw…just in case) = $55
But it all added up to:
Getting out of Deliverance, BFE alive and in one piece AND still loosing half of a pound = priceless! LOL!
OH! I’m so flaky! When I was at the grocery store Saturday morning I knew I needed batteries for something, but couldn’t remember what it was. NOW I remember! I needed them for the camera because it’s dead. So no picture today, but I’ll grab batteries tomorrow and take it.
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