My Diet - Week...8?

It’s FINALLY time for an update! Sorry ya’ll, got traumatized by work and life. The last time I weighed in at the actual center, I think I was 267. As of this morning, the scale said 258. That’s almost 3 weeks to loose 9 pounds, however, I was steadily loosing a pound a day until Sunday. Saturday I was 257, Sunday morning I was 263. And I’ve been steadily fighting it down since then. Most of this is due to PMS. Ya’ll ladies know what I’m talking about. You know it’s coming because you get bloated first. So I’m dealing with it, waiting for the main show to arrive (because it hasn’t yet which is worse), hoping once it does I suddenly drop 5 lbs in one day the same way I gained it overnight.

I’ve been on the 700 calorie diet for like 9 days now and it’s driving me crazy. But when I eventually get in there to do a weigh-in I’m sure it will be worth it. So I promised to explain the actual levels of the diet I’ve been through so far.

500 Calories
You start off here. You’re only supposed to be on this one long enough to get into a state call ketosis, wherein your body is basically tricked into eating fat instead of muscle for energy. You do this by cutting you carbs and increasing your protein intake by what most doctors consider dangerous percentages. Some of the side-effects of ketosis are severely low blood-sugar and kidney stones, which I’m prone to. You test your ketosis level using Ketone strips you can get at any drug store. I get 50 for $10 at Walgreens.

So here is a page out of my food diary while I was on the 500 calorie diet:

Water = 140 ounces
Fish Oil= 4 Capsules
Coffee with Splenda = 2
1 Orange flavored supplement (60 calories and tastes like Tang. I love it!)
1 boiled egg
1 slice of bread
1 cup lettuce
4 ounce of chicken
½ cup steamed spinach
1 cup lettuce
1 double chocolate pudding supplement (90 calories and also very yummy)

So I drink 20 ounces of water first thin when I wake up. By 7am, I have my first supplement. These are protein-rich supplements designed to keep you from being hungry. Three hours later I have the egg and use it to take my medicine, 2 of the fish oil capsules and the multivitamin and mineral pills they give you. By this time I’ve had 60 ounces of water. Three hours after that I have lunch, which is the slice of bread and the cup of lettuce and another 20 ounces of water. I can use that salad spritzer if I want, which is one calorie per spray, but after a while it gets old. Three hours later I have dinner, which is the chicken, the vegetable and the lettuce and 20 ounces of water. Three hours after that I have the other supplement and another 20 ounces of water or double that right before I go to bed.

The first time I did this, it took me 7 days to show as being in ketosis. Drove myself crazy every morning peeing on the strip and waiting 15 seconds before looking, only to see nothing…when I finally saw the strip turn the faintest pink color I was so happy!

From this point, you’re supposed to move up to the 600 calorie diet…provided you don’t cheat and knock yourself out of ketosis, which I did…often.

The 600 calorie diet isn’t much different. Just replace the food on the list above with other food Breakfast was ½ of a small orange and a slice of diet bread with diet spreadable cheese on it. Lunch was a egg and a cup of salad and dinner was 4 ounces of chicken, ½ cup of vegetable and a slice of diet bread.

The 700 calorie diet that I’m now on is ½ slice of bread and an egg for breakfast, 3 ounces of chicken, ½ an apple and a cup of lettuce for lunch and 4 ounces of chicken, ½ cup of vegetable and ½ slice of bread for dinner.

All in all, it’s boring stuff, but sticking to it is getting harder and harder. I’ve spoken to several different people who either have finished this diet or are in the maintenance phase of it after having lost the weigh they wanted to lose. Some cheated on a regular basis and some didn’t cheat at all. The one thing I have noticed is that each person had to find the thing that worked for them before actually being ok in the diet as a whole. One girl found that if she let herself cheat at all, she went on week-long binders eating everything in sight. Another found that if she just cheated for one meal once per week, it made being good the rest of the time possible. Personally, the second one seems to work for me. I let myself have one meal per week where I eat what I want. Not huge mountains of food. Just normal portion sizes, and I don’t order ANYTHING large-size except maybe my diet coke on occasion.

Speaking of “occasion”, I had the best laugh last week. I went to McD’s for Little Man on our way to…crap. Can’t even remember where we were going. But anyway…
We went and I was getting him a happy meal and just a large diet coke for myself, and we’re sitting in the drive-thru waiting to order and he looks out the window and yells, “Look mommy! Kitties!” He LOVES animals in general but cats seem to be his favorite so far. You know there are always strays living around the dumpsters at restaurants and at this particular location there’s a McD’s, Barnhill’s, Sonic, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut…you name it, it’s all in one spot. So these cats are living large. So he’s sitting there making goo-goo faces at the kitties and he stops and says, “Mommy how can you tell if it’s a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” By this time of day, I’m brain dead. I basically tend to just tune him out and reply to his queries on auto-pilot, but by some miracle that day I was half-way paying attention to him as he prattled away and actually managed to respond “By looking very closely honey, we can’t tell at this distance.” They were a good 50 feet away.

So I’m staring at the sign McD’s has showing the toys they’re currently giving out, wondering when beanie babies will die in general and he goes, “wait mommy, I zoomed in, it’s a girl.”
Now I have to explain. When people ask me questions, I have what basically amounts to a zillion pairs of eyes in my head that look up information so I can answer them fairly intelligently. When I give you a stupid answer, you can bet those eyes are not working for one reason or another. But occasionally, when someone says something that just totally stumps me, it’s like all those pairs of eyes get crossed at the same time and you get a system error…that’s what happened to me here. I was like, “WTF?” I knew there was no set of binoculars or anything in the car and as I’m turning my head to look at him I’m wondering how the hell he “zoomed” in…and then I see.

He wears glasses as most of you know. He had slid the glasses off his nose and was holding them about 2 inches in front of his eyes…that was his “zoom”! LOL! It was priceless! I tried SO HARD not to laugh I bit my tongue until it bled. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but it was hilarious.

Anyway, that’s my diet update. Life in general has been hell on wheels lately. Work is aggressively seeking to thin out the ranks, so everyone is looking over everyone’s shoulders and the atmosphere is tense to say the least. Beyond that, I diet because that’s the only food I have in my house and in a time of turmoil having a routine is comforting. I cheat once a week Saturday nights with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s all to myself. My current fave flavor is Americone Dream. And looking forward to that all week every week helps keep me on track. I’ve stopped testing for ketosis because I was driving myself crazy checking several times a day to see if I was in or out of it and none of it really matters because I’m still loosing weight. Besides, know that I know ketosis can cause kidney stones, having actually had surgery in February to break some up so I could pass them, I really don’t want a daily reminder that if I’m in ketosis, which is good, it will cause kidney stones, which is bad. My psyche can’t take the pressure basically.

Other than that, I just function like a good little robot. I don’t see it in the picture, but maybe you can. Everyone keeps telling me I’m disappearing before their eyes. Of course they’re always looking at my chest when they say this so it tends to piss me off more than flatter me. But they mean well.

Just a little poem without a title as of yet

Twinkle, twinkle starry sky.
Decorate the night.
Be the backdrop for my dreams.
Let my mind take flight.

Soar we now o'er mountains peaking,
twisting toward the moon.
Lull me softly with stories speaking
into sleep's cocoon.

Rest gently now my head on clouds,
my body in gossamer draped.
My eyes coax closed, my hands gently stilled,
from waking, let me escape.

My Diet - Weeks 4 & 5

I know this is late. I’ve been avoiding it for two whole weeks. And at first I didn’t have a reason to avoid it other than I was just being childish. But after that, I was avoiding it because I was ashamed.

So the bald truth is that I cheated this weekend and went TOTALLY off diet. I ate pretty much whatever was put in front of me.

However, that was preceded by the news that I’d lost a total of 21.5 lbs in my 4 weeks! YAY! It was obvious because all of my pants where practically falling off me. That’s a mixed blessing. Everyone keeps telling me they can really see the difference. I can’t, but if you think about it, that’s four 5lb bags of sugar. THAT’S HUGE!

So I stood naked in front of my mirror and started examining myself and I STILL don’t see it. People say they see it in my face…I spent an hour examining my face in the mirror.

No matter how hard I try I don’t see it. I feel it a little. My pants are looser and I need a belt. But that’s it. On top of that, Little Man went away to summer camp for the first time.

Most mothers would be overjoyed to have a week without the kids. And I must say I had planned out my “dream schedule” for while he was gone. But once I actually dropped him off and he told me “You can leave now mommy” and wouldn’t let me kiss him in front of his friends, I just kind of broke.

I cried the whole way home. I sat like a lump and stared at my computer. I had no words for the diet. They were all tied up in the fact that my baby is growing up! I’m not ready for this yet! I suppose no parent thinks themselves ready for their offspring to grow up, but it hit me hard and fast I guess.

Over the next 5 days, I stared at books that I needed to read, stared at my computer screen and stared at my TV, all without actually paying attention to any of it. I remember how long he took to walk and how we took him to speech therapy because he was 2 and not talking yet, only to be told that he would talk when he had something to say. I remember how scared and pissy I was when he was delivered by emergency C-section more than 2 months before he was due and how incredibly angry I was that I hadn’t even gotten the chance to take ONE Lamaze class. I don’t know why but that seemed very important at the time.

Eventually I pulled myself out of my stupor enough to at least attempt to play his video games. The plan was to be kinda good at it by the time he came home, because apparently, according to him, I suck. And on the day he came back, when my grandmother picked him up while I was at work and called me to let me talk to him, I cried silently while he told me how much fun he’d had and how he was happy to be home.

He came home 7/2, so we went straight into the holiday weekend. So I gorged. I ate every single thing placed in front of me and I just COULDN’T stop myself (which is total bullshit because I could have, but I didn’t want to and rationalized the hell out of my behavior).

I have explanations for it. Right before he left, I started my period, which I’d missed for the last 3 months (not at all uncommon for me). So it came and it made up for lost time. It was heavier, harder and lasted longer than it usually does. My diet counselor thought this was probably because of the extreme nature of the diet. Whatever it was, I was DYING of hunger. This part, I couldn’t exaggerate if I tried. I was so hungry my stomach was literally cramping for lack of food. Now, I don’t think this excuses my food consumption at all because it did stop. It stopped 2 days before the holiday weekend. I behaved myself the whole time. I was very good. I did exactly what I was supposed to do and didn’t eat anything I wasn’t supposed to have.

But once I hit the holiday weekend, I guess I just thought it was owed to me. Like I deserved to feast after the week I’d just been through and of course also to celebrate losing weight! LOL! That’s right! In my head, I thought I was celebrating my weight loss…by eating. And I knew better!

So I went in Monday for my body composition and weigh-in. And I admitted to everything. Plus I took Little Man and he told on me the MINUTE that door was closed! LOL!

And they told me that if I don’t straighten up and fly right, they will have to kick me out of the ketosis diet and put me on something else. On another diet I will still lose weight, just not as fast. I have a personal time-line to keep, so this got to me. Apparently, it’s not safe for me to keep dropping back into the 500 calorie diet.

So this means that I absolutely cannot, for any reason, go off diet again for at least the next 11 weeks. I have to finish my first 16 week program before I can even think about rewarding myself with food. And even then, I will have to temper myself and have some seriously extreme control.

The good news is I only gained 1.5 pounds, but if you think about it, I probably lost 4 pounds during the week between and actually gained back 5.5 to leave me at a grand total of 20 lbs lost. Still not bad at all, but could be better.

So I need to lose 117 more pounds in the next 27 weeks. That’s 4.3 lbs per week. My track record shows me that’s possible. But I’m still feeling a little guilty for my binge last weekend. I got to weigh again tomorrow. Let’s hope me behaving myself since Monday actually pays off.
No picture today. Honestly, I’m already dressed for bed and I just don’t feel like getting up again.

I know I’m feeling sorry for myself. I know that my accomplishments so far are nothing to sneeze at. I know that I can do this and the sacrifice I need to make to achieve my goal isn’t THAT big in the grand scheme of things.

But I can tell you that I’ll be dreaming of cupcakes tonight! *rolls eyes* It’s sad, but completely true. You can take the obesity out of the person, but you can’t take the person out of the obesity. Nope, that’s something they have to do for themselves. So I may need some personal growth work during the course of this diet too.

My Diet - Week Three

So last week started off REALLY good for the most part. Tuesday, I measured when I weigh and I’ve lost a total of 8.25 inches! I was so happy! Wednesday was another matter altogether.

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.

My Diet - Week Two

So this week’s update is late. I almost didn’t even write it. I was thoroughly disgusted with the diet and myself this past week.

It started off badly. I had to sit through the family birthday party (we have 4 or 5 birthdays in the month of June so it’s just easier to celebrate all at once), watching everyone else eat huge steaks with grilled sweet potatoes, cake and ice cream, and I couldn’t have any. I had my little 4 ounces of plain, flavorless steak that I massacred with salt and pepper and my ½ cup of brussel sprouts…that was it. Oh! And a cup of coffee, sans creamer. My Uncle did the steak, it was perfectly rare. My aunt did the brussel sprouts; they were perfect too. And the coffee was infused with coconut so it tasted great. I had no reason to complain about what I had to eat, but…it still TOTALLY sucked to watch everyone else eat the food I can’t have. Needless to say, I dreamed about steak that night. I woke up cranky. Imagine that.

I also woke up with the distinct memory of eating two pieces of bread with butter in the middle of the night. At first, I thought it was just a dream, but when I went into the kitchen, there was the tub of butter still sitting out on the counter. I was SO angry with myself! I don’t eat in my sleep! At least I never have before! It’s not uncommon for me to wake in the middle of the night and grab a snack, but I’ve always been awake for it before. My only explanation was that I was just that tired that I was hungry but didn’t wake up fully, or I might have stopped myself.

I say “might” because honestly, if I was that hungry, I might not have stopped myself. I can’t complain, I knew this diet would be way more than just difficult for me. But I was very angry at myself for the slip, and I was not in ketosis anymore. I went in to weigh on Monday (6/8/2009) and had only lost 1.5 pounds. I say “only” because with the sacrifice I’m making for this diet, the payback should have been much higher. My counselor talked me down, because even though it was the end of the day, I was still really pissed at myself, the world…air…everything.

I was just flat pissed-off. I was supposed to have been on the 600 calorie diet from Sunday until Wednesday, but because of my slip and drastic difference between what I SHOULD have lost and what I actually lost (and also the fact that I was not in ketosis anymore), I had to go back on the 500 calorie diet starting Tuesday.

So I did. I went through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, eating only what I was supposed to eat, totally pissed at everyone and everything, including myself and was just generally a really unpleasant person to be around. To salve my wounded spirit, I added Creole seasoning to everything. You know that Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning that’s so spicy it will literally burn your lips? Yep, that’s the stuff. OOOOOHHHH! Damn it’s good! LOL!

So I weighed in again on Thursday…and had lost a grand total of 3 ounces!!!!!!!!!!!! There are no appropriate words to describe how totally angry and upset I was. Those of you that know me, know that I don’t shy away from using the inappropriate words…pretty much ever. But this time…no, not even going there. There’s no point. I’m pretty sure you understand how upset I was. Apparently there’s so much sodium in my happy little seasoning, that I was retaining water like a damn sponge. Now, to look at the back of the thing, there’s only 310 mg to every serving, which is ¼ tsp. However, you’re only supposed to have 2100mg of salt per day and when I say I put that stuff on EVERYTHING, I don’t mean I dusted it lightly. I coated my food with the stuff. I put it on my morning egg, my salad, my veggies, my chicken…If there’d been more food, I’d have put it on that too.

Yep, I LOVE spicy! It’s my downfall. I like sweets. Dessert is fabulous, but…roll out the spicy and I’m there.

So, I only lost 3 *cuss, cuss* ounces and had to stop using my seasoning and had to stay on the 500 calorie diet.

You’re not supposed to stay on the 500 calorie diet for more than 4 days at a time, because your caloric intake is so dangerously low and because eventually, your body will FORCE you to cheat. So I had to have the will of a freakin’ mountain. I’m telling you, I don’t think I have ever been more unpleasant in my life than I was right up til yesterday afternoon.

Not to mention, that F-ing KFC commercial came on 72 MF-ing times! Mind you, this is with me frantically surfing channels trying to avoid ALL food commercials. I don’t even eat KFC! I prefer Popeye’s for the red beans and rice and Churches for the Jalapeno Cheddar poppers. Screw the chicken. I don’t really like it that much unless it’s made by someone’s grandma. But it came on so many times I had to count.

When the commercial for the Honey BBQ chicken strip sandwich from Whataburger came on, it was almost game-over. I’m telling you, I had my keys and my wallet in my hands so fast I didn’t even realize I’d moved. My son, Little Man, looked up at me and said, “Mommy? Where are you going?” That’s pretty much the only thing that snapped me out of it. I really like that sandwich.

But despite the hell of food commercials, which I now firmly believe should be banned from TV, I held strong…or suffered greatly. Either way you look at it, I made it through the weekend without cheating.

I FINALLY got back into ketosis, finished out the day (making sure there was absolutely no food in the house that I could eat that didn’t require actual preparation so I couldn’t eat it in my sleep), and woke up this morning tired, cranky and pissy. But, at least I’m back in ketosis and finally on the 600 calorie diet. I’ve gone through the whole day almost. Last is dinner.

I got to have my 600 calorie breakfast (I DON’T mean that the one meal was 600 calories) which I’ve been looking forward to for 2 weeks now because I got to have diet cheese.

Most diet cheese is shit. Nasty, nasty stuff I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. But, the laughing cow diet spreadable swiss is FABULOUS. I got a wedge of that and spread it on my slice of bread that I’m allowed. And I ate my ½ of a small orange, took my fish oil (to keep my hair and skin from turning into sandpaper), my vitamins, my minerals and my allergy meds…and then spent 2 hours trying not to throw up.

I can’t take my allergy meds on an empty stomach ever. I can’t even take them and turn right around and eat something. There HAS to be something substantial on my stomach for at least 5 minutes before I take this stuff. Apparently, ½ a small orange and a slice of bread with diet spreadable cheese is not what my stomach considers substantial enough to mitigate the nastiness my allergy pill causes down there. I wanted to die. Seriously. There is only one thing I hate more than throwing up. I will avoid throwing up at all costs.

Which meant that for 2 hours, death was preferable to vomiting.

Then it passed and the rest of my day went along as only Mondays do, leaving me practically homicidal by the time my second break rolled around. However it all got better. I went to this store that’s right next to work and they had these sexy-ass heels…in only my size…on sale! Seriously, how could a Monday possibly be better? LOL!

So thanks to my new fabulous shoes, I had a great day. I don’t weigh until tomorrow, but I also get measured again tomorrow, so this coming Sunday, I will have actual measurements to post. Yay me.

This week’s picture, I took in my living room. I purposely have on the same clothes I wore last week. I will attempt to do this as long as possible (the pants are REALLY loose already) to try to make it evident how much I’m loosing. My grand total so far in my two completed weeks is 13 pounds (I don’t count the ounces. I’d prefer to even forget about that weigh-in entirely).

Kisses, Hugs and Spanx,

Luci

My Diet - Week One

Maybe not everyone in the world knows yet…but they will soon. I started a diet last Sunday. If you take a look at my profile pictures, you might think it’s obvious why I did this. And you might be partially correct, but there’s more to it than that.

I’ve been fat for the last 10 years. My weight has fluctuated wildly over that time span, but I certainly haven’t been what anyone would consider “thin”. After my son was born, I got comfortable being chubby. There was a lot of work to do. And I didn’t have time to worry about myself. Before I knew it, I weighed more than I’d ever weighed in my life, had grey hairs poking out of my head and was over 30 with a kid I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with.
I remember saying I’d loose weight and get healthy eventually. “One Day” I’d get thin again and take my kid to Disney World. “Next year” I’d be a little skinnier and could go to the fair and ride the roller-coasters. I made excuses for why I couldn’t go to the beach to play volley ball with my friends and I’ve been surfing alone for years. I used to be a competitive swimmer, yet I haven’t been in a pool in a really long time. I have NEVER gone to a high school reunion.

In fact, I almost didn’t go to the RT Book Lover’s Convention this year. It was my first time to go. I’d been dreaming about going for years. There were a bucketful of reasons I almost talked myself out of going. Only one of them was my weight, but it was a very big reason. Now, if you have read my Mother’s Day post, you know why I actually went. It’s ironic actually, because Mom used to be one of the reasons I hide from my problems. But now, I have to give her credit for helping me face them.

I went to RT, had a BLAST and came home filled with the fires of hope and purpose. I finally wanted to loose weight badly enough to actually go for it. I want to be a true professional in the publishing industry. I have skills that I want to showcase and ideas that I want to share. I want to go back to RT next year with a little experience under my belt to go along with all of that. But…I also WANT the cover to match the story inside.

After all, we must admit that the main thing we look for when we shop for books is the cover art. If it grabs your attention, you pick it up to read the synopsis on the back. Now we might not buy the book if we don’t like the subject of the story, but in the end if we do buy it, we have to credit the cover for the sale. Because we never would have even picked it up if it weren’t for the eye-catching art on the cover.

I’m a fantastic book with a pretty crappy cover right now. I need better cover art. No one can give me that. I have to do it myself. So I started a diet.

I didn’t go out and just start going to Weight Watchers or pick up that book on the South Beach diet. I didn’t use “eenie meenie, minenie, mo”. I had seen co-workers who started a diet in January and are now 70 pounds lighter. I remember walking past their desks while they were eating their lunches and thinking they were starving themselves and that it was so ridiculous and would never work. But when I came back from RT, that was the diet I wanted to do. I know it works. I have seen the dramatic and amazing results. That’s what I want.

So I made an appointment for my consultation and got started. I officially started the diet last Sunday. I weighed in on Tuesday and had lost 4 pounds already. I weighed in again yesterday and had lost another 4.5 pounds. I weigh 277 pounds now! Just another 107-127 pounds to go and I’ll be happy. I don’t necessarily have a weight as a goal. It’s more of a look, but I know that look is around 170-150. So that’s my goal.

This is the Physician’s Weight Loss diet. I have to say, it’s expensive as all hell. If you really want to know how much, email me or message me privately and I’ll tell you. But for now, it’s enough to just say that the cost of this diet is putting a real strain on my finances. However, I KNOW it works so it’s worth it to me.

What I want is to feel sexy again; to go shopping and actually find clothes in my size; to be comfortable in my own skin; to be visually as interesting and eye-catching as I feel inside; to date and have fun and maybe actually find my Prince Charming (though I know that’s a long-shot); to pursue my chosen profession with vigor; to play soccer with my son and go camping and go to the water park with him and maybe swim competitively a little and to live to be some insanely old age where I get to hold his grand-children and watch the world change. I don’t care if I have to wear diapers. I just want to be there for everything.

Maybe I don’t really know what I want to look like. I know I’ll never be a super-model. But that’s ok because I don’t WANT to be one. Maybe I don’t know what my ideal weight actually is, but I’ll know when I get there. I’ll know, because that’s when my son will hug me, and his arms will actually go all the way around me. When that day comes, I’ll know I’ve arrived at my destination. But I’ve got a long way to go before I get there. It’s going to be one hell of a trip. So I thought maybe I’d take ya’ll with me.

I plan to blog about my diet journey, once a week, with a weigh-in report and a picture. I estimate that I’ll be done within the next 31 weeks. My goal is to let other people see my journey, to maybe inspire others to do the same, or maybe just to give other people the chance to know me better.

So whether your reasons for reading this are just mild curiosity or if you actually have goals of your own and want to know that you’re not the only one striving to reach them, welcome! If you want to talk or have questions, contact me. If you want to share the goals you’re working towards, go ahead. We all have dreams, we should all be striving to make them come true. And sometimes when you’re sitting there thinking about it, it’s scary. But knowing someone else who is putting themselves out there, someone who is also working towards a goal, sometimes it makes it easier to take that first step.

So this week was HARD! The first 4 days were the worst because I was just so hungry. My body is used to eating all the time. I never realized how often I really used to eat. I muched my way through the whole day. Well not anymore. It took me 4 days to get used to not eating constantly. Now, I just have to be aware that when my brain tells me I'm hungry, it's usually wrong. I'm not hungry, I'm bored. BIG difference. Hunger, true hunger, is accompanied by that hollow feeling in your stomach. If that's not there, I'm not hungry. I think this is going to be one of the hardest things for me to fight.

Secondly, with this first week of dieting, I was comsuming the least amount of calories that I will consume in this whole 32 week process. That was hard to deal with for several reasons.

1. I'm used to eating all the time

2. taking in so little food, my brain it telling my body that it can't possibly be full, even when I AM full.

3. I'm tired, cranky and a total space cadet.

This diet is controlled by a doctor-advised staff, so they pay very close attention to you when you tell them things like this. Since I just started the diet, there's no real worry because these things were expected. But...being this tired really is a pain in the ass. The space-cadet part is annoying. I'm not used to being brainless and knowing that I'm acting that way pisses me off. Actually...right now everything pisses me off. I knew that would happen. It's a private demon I will have to overcome. I know what triggers it, I know where it comes from in my head and I know how to deal with it. It will just take time.

When I heard that I had lost a total of 8.5 pounds, I was very proud of myself, as were my family and friends. Everyone is very supportive. But I got that urge to celebrate and had to really work hard to stop myself from going out to get a burger or chinese food to celebrate. It took a lot of reasoning with myself to finally put a stop to that urge. In my head I kept hearing "just one meal off-diet is ok. You can't be expected to eat like this for the rest of your life." That's true to a point. I won't be eating like this for the rest of my life. I dropped to 500 calories per day to shock my system, to make it start using fat for energy. It was a necessary step.

But it's NOT ok to go off-diet to celebrate. It's been ok for the last ten years. I've been fat for the last ten years...trust me, there's a connection. And no I won't eat like this for the rest of my life, but it's absolutely necessary that I do this. The diet won't work if I don't work the diet.

This is only getting harder right now. I expect to be tired and weak for the next 2 weeks or so before my energy level actually starts to improve. I can't stress enough how truly exhausted I am.

I don't want to sugar-coat this journey for anyone. I don't expect this to be a breeze. I expect it to be hell on earth for me. I fully expect to be completely miserable for a while. I weighed 300 pounds not so long ago. My goal is to basically loose HALF OF ME. That's not an easy thing.
For now, I am very proud of myself for getting through the first week.

If you have questions or want more details of the diet itself, please feel free to contact me at luci.calanor@yahoo.com

Kisses, Hugs and Spanx,

Luci

Happy Mother’s Day!

So I got my present early, because it’s absolutely impossible for my Little Man to keep it a secret or hide it from me until it’s time! LOL! He got me a beanie baby, a little dog. It’s very cute and sweet. Of course he got himself one as well…*giggle* How could he possibly have done otherwise? LOL!

And he got me one of those cards where you record your message and then it plays music. Very cute and I will cherish it always!

I spent a small fortune getting cards for all the mothers in my family. And it occurred to me…we have a hell of a lot of women in this family!

Earlier this week, we celebrated my great-grandmother’s 93rd birthday! Happy Birthday Big G-ma! She moued-down on a pint of oysters and finished them all herself! LOL! Little Man drew her an incredibly detailed picture of his favorite Pokémon and explained it all to her very patiently. Her eyes just glittered as she teased him and pretended not to understand.

She might be older than dirt and a little slow to get around, but she is most definitely still here and enjoying the hell out of it! LOL! I feel so very lucky to have her here. That’s five generations alive at one time. She’s my maternal grandmother’s mother. I hope I live as long as she does. I don’t care if I have to wear a diaper! I want to live to see as much as she has and to get the chance to enjoy my son’s grandchildren!

Now if we could get her to stop dancing with death every other day, it’d be great. We know she doesn’t have much time left. But she keeps getting really ill and then bouncing back. Actually while I was at RT, I was pretty sure she’d be dead by the time I got back, but once again, she surprised us all.

But all of this is just update news. What I really wanted to talk about today is my mom. Those of you who know me well, know that my mom wasn’t June Cleaver by any means. She was a drug addict and suffered various forms of mental illness throughout her life. She gave me to my grandparents to raise when I was three, which was the best thing she could have done. I resented her for it and I resented my grandparents for taking me from her for years. It didn’t help that she tended to attempt suicide almost every year either on or near my birthday. Anytime between Labor Day and New Year’s was pretty much open season for her. I think I stopped looking forward to birthdays somewhere after my 16th. Her last real attempt was in 2006. She promised my sister and I that she wouldn’t do it again. She kept her promise, but the next year, she was cutting herself instead.

It’s sad but I actually used to hope that the next year would be the year she succeeded. Because then, I could mourn the mother I’d never had and remember only the good times, as few and far between as they were. I got my wish last year. She died on October 22nd at 5:37pm. I know this because they took her off life-support and I watched her die, my eyes flickering between the clock and the heart monitor. It seemed very important that I know exactly when her heart stopped.

It’s different than it is when you see it on TV. It’s worse. The sound on the monitor was off. But the sense of panic that came with just standing there watching and waiting for it to be over was…they can’t show that on TV. I don’t think there is an actor or actress alive who could ever accurately portray that. I was standing there holding myself back from trying to do CPR or rescue breathing…that’s what I’m trained to do. Having been a lifeguard for a number of years and being trained as a first-responder…that little stint I pulled when I thought I wanted to be an EMT. NOT responding to imminent death was very difficult.

My thoughts were as hyper as my body was not. I flickered from the panic induced by not doing anything to pleading with myself to just let it happen, to finally be done with it. After all, this is what she had been wanting for most of my life, right? She’d tried enough times…now she was getting what she wanted. And when the end came, I was so torn I was almost two separate people. I was the little girl crying for the mother who never answered, never came, never dried my tears or held me close. And I was the adult woman who felt a tremendous sense of relief and guilt at the same time.

“Thank god, she’s gone. It’s over. After all these years, it’s finally over.”

“Oh god, she’s gone. She can never make-up for what she didn’t do for me now. I’ll never get the chance to tell her how I truly feel now. Oh god, she’s gone!”

“What if I was supposed to save her? What if her eyes opening like that and her hand twitching in mine wasn’t just a muscle spasm like they said?”

“What if my sister hates me for not keeping her on life support until she got here to say good-bye?”

Then, it was trying to explain to Little Man that Grandma Julie was better-off dead. “She’s not broken anymore sweetie. There’s nothing wrong with her head now and she’s not hurting herself or anyone else. She’s finally happy.”

Then there were the arrangements to be made. It’s a good thing she had wanted to be cremated because she wasn’t all that great-looking in the end. She was blue and swollen in the hospital and by the time they had arranged her features for the I.D. viewing, she was much better, but that isn’t saying much. I mean…dead is dead. I was glad she just wasn’t blue any more. (Jerald, I don’t care who did it, but thank you so much for that. She looked worlds better than she had. Blue wasn’t her color.)

Having worked in a funeral home, in fact, in the funeral home we went to, there was comfort in KNOWING. I knew what happened next. I knew what would happen to her. I knew who would cremate her (Thank You Karl!) and who would type up her death certificate and who would take it to the doctor to be signed…I knew the ladies who would file it with the health department and the people who would work the memorial service. I knew each and every person who touched her or even stood in her presence after she died. I can’t even begin to explain what a comfort that was. I didn’t sleep for…3 days? I couldn’t sleep until I knew she was at the funeral home.

The arrangements were simple. Cremation, small keepsake urns for myself and my sister, and the rest of the cremains to be divided among the family. Grandma and Grandpa wanted some to scatter. So did Uncle Jeff and Aunt Kim. And my sister and I wanted our own. At one point, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough of her to go around. She wasn’t that big. She had only been about 5’3” tall and at death, had weighed about 130 I think. I said it out loud too. Everyone turned to stare at me. I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I was laughing and crying and soon so was everyone else.

What people don’t understand is that stuff like that is normal. It’s ok. When someone is grieving, dark humor is probably the best thing to hear. In fact, while working at the funeral home, I had a typical “Luci Moment” where I opened my mouth, and inserted my foot, but thankfully, it ended well that time. But that’s another story.

We spent the next several days clearing out her trailer (had to finish before the first of the month so we didn’t have to pay another month’s rent) and preparing for her memorial service. There were some serious issues trying to find a clergy member who would accept what my sister and I wanted and still give the rest of the family the nod to Christianity that they needed for comfort. But we got that settled (Thank You Rev. Theresa Liefur!).

Then, all that was left was for me to create her service folders. I paged through hundreds of memorial poems, but none of them were right. I eventually broke down and wrote my own.

Don‘t be sad at my death for I will never leave you.
I will be your guardian angel walking beside you.
I will be in the snow that falls gently upon you.
I will be in the rain drops that wash away your tears.
I will be in the earth that cushions your footsteps.
I will be in the bird song that falls sweetly on your ears.
I will be in the gentle breeze that caresses your cheek.
And I will be waiting with God at the gates,
When it’s your time to come home.
Until then, never be lonely,
Feel the snowflakes on your skin,
Look up into the rain storm,
Walk barefoot in the mud,
Enjoy the birdsong,
And open your arms wide to the wind.
When it’s your time, leave no regrets behind.

That was SO hard to write! I desperately wanted to feel that way, but I didn’t. I was mostly feeling guilty, lost and angry. I still don’t feel that way. I still haven’t been able to totally shake the anger and the guilt. I’m angry because she wasn’t perfect. I feel guilty because I gave up on her. I turned my back on her to save myself and my son. I went from being the person my family liked to use as the ambassador to Julie-land, to be being the person in the family who talked to her the least.

Having this NOT show in the words I was to speak at the memorial service was…next to impossible. But I managed. I wrote out a little speech. In it, there was nothing overly negative, nothing to show how I truly felt. I stood up there in front of everyone and cried as I read it (Thank You Ms. Susanne for the fabulous AVON make-up that didn’t smear, smudge or even budge an inch! And WOW did I put it to the test!) and they all thought I was nothing more than a grieving daughter. No one suspected how angry I really was.

Since then, I’ve tried to deal with it, but it’s been slow going. There’s something I want to explain. Mom was an addict. Addicts tend to stash things, like squirrels hoarding nuts for the winter. Mom stashed things everywhere and we will be finding little surprises for years, like the suicide letter I found addressed to me stuffed in one of my files. She put it there when she lived with me and forgot about it. She intended for me to find it “one day” after she was gone. Yet another suicide attempt. How surprising.

Now, I’d been planning on attending RT for…a whole year. I’d been lusting after it for years and I had decided that this year was the year I’d go, damn the cost. I planned and stressed and planned and drove myself crazy for it all year long. And then it came time to go. And I sat at my desk, stared at my bags and started doubting myself. In my head I heard, “why do you think you can do that? You’re a TOTALLY different person in-person than you are online! No one will like you. You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re gimpy…you’re not good enough. You’re a fraud! You TALK about wanting to write, yet you delete anything you do write and only dream of the things you want to write. You don’t belong there!”

Pretty good at bashing myself, aren’t I? LOL! Children of addicts usually are. I decided I wanted a notebook to take with me in case I wanted to write down email addresses, names, whatever. I had inherited all of mom’s notebooks. If she bought one, she bought ten. She couldn’t just buy one! She wanted them all and they might not be there next time she came back! Typical addict behavior. So I will likely not need a notebook or paper for the next several years. I pulled one out of the drawer and decided it was too big. I pulled out the next one and decided it was too thin. The next one was too small…I finally settled on one and opened it up. I started scanning mom’s scribbling notes to make sure there was nothing I wanted to save. Mom didn’t just stash stuff, she stashed her writing too. She would be scribbling notes on a new craft project she wanted to do or making a list of stuff she wanted to buy, and then she’d turn a page and just jot down a poem or a 5 page dissertation on why smoking isn’t the horrible habit everyone thinks it is.

These little blurbs have let me see into her head in a way I never managed when she was alive. So when I come across them, I save them. That’s what I was doing, ripping pages out of the notebook to throw away, making sure there weren’t any nuggets in there I wanted to save. And as I did this, I had pretty much made up my mind not to go to RT. I was going to call everyone, tell them I would pay for the hotel like I promised and they could pay me back whenever, but that I wouldn’t be there. I’d make up a good excuse…I’d say…Little Man was sick or I didn’t have anyone to babysit my cats…something believable.

I turned a page and put the book down to pick up my phone to dial Ash Roland and let her know. And as I was about to push the Talk button, I looked down and saw this:

Believe in yourself

Set UR standards high
U Deserve the best
Try for what U want
And never settle for less

Believe in URself
No matter what U choose
Keep a winning attitude
And U can never loose.

Think about UR destination
But don’t worry if U stray
Because the most important thing
Is what U learn along the way

Take all that U’ve become
To be all that U can be
Soar above t. clouds
Let UR dreams set U free.

Mom’s been using the U that you normally see in text-language like that since she was 15. I’ve found several things she wrote when she was younger where she was using language this way. I don’t know why, but she always did want to be different from everyone else.

I read this, I hung up the phone. I cried for an hour. I cried like a little girl who lost her mommy. I cried hard, deep, wrenching sobs. I cried so hard and so loud it hurt.

And then, I looked at her picture, on the entertainment center, sitting there with her ashes, and I called her a bitch. Then I literally threw all my crap in the car and left.

I never would have left if I hadn’t found that poem. It’s not fair! ALL THESE YEARS she’s never been the mother I needed. Now, when I needed her, she “says” exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it, and the bitch isn’t even here for me to hug! It just figures that when she finally acts like my mother, it has to be after death. Like I said, she always did want to be different from everyone else.

I went, and I had a blast. You’ll read about it soon when I finish my RT Virgin article. I’ll tell everyone what happened and what I saw and who I met. I even have some interviews to do! And I’m going back next year…all because of mom.

So Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Hope you’re enjoying death, whatever that entails. Can wait to see what you hit me with next.

R.I.P.
Julia Lee Gunkel
1958 – 2008



This is my favorite picture of my mom. She’s holding my little sister. She was beautiful when she smiled. She didn’t smile often enough, not really, not like this. So I cherish this picture.