Well, it seems as if the blog thing is working to get me to write more. I can hardly shut up! We’ll see if it lasts.

There are still some CSS bugs and some pages I haven’t even touched yet, but overall I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the site tonight. I’m not really wild about the design, but hey, I’m not a designer, after all! I’ve got to quit for today and go to bed.

Back when I was moderating the NAAFA discussion forums, one of the posters there mentioned a site called FitDay. At that time, the site allowed members to record their daily food intake–for free–and then calculate things like total calories, percentage of calories from fat/carbs/protein, etc. The site now sells software that allows you to do that and more–stuff like see reports of calorie balance as a function of mood, whether or not you’re getting enough nutrients over time, etc. I bought the software a year or two ago, and have used it for short stints of monitoring my food intake once or twice. I’m doing so now.

Lucky me, I’ve never been a real dieter, so I only feel educated by monitoring every last bit of stuff that goes into my mouth, not harassed. Likewise, I don’t freak out when I see my weight on a scale. You learn a lot of things by keeping a food journal, and I’m glad I’m able to do so without freaking out. I’ve learned that I actually eat less when I’m depressed–by quite a bit. I’ve learned that I don’t really eat that much for a person of my size and activity level–usually between 1500 and 2500 calories a day. I’ve learned that I hardly eat any vegetables at all (but I already knew that!). I learned that the more water I drink, the less I eat. And most importantly, I learned how incredibly many calories I’ll drink in soda if I drink as much as I would like to. Analysis from this program is a big part of the reason I decided to lay off the Coke.

The program also thinks that I’m eating significantly fewer calories than I’m burning, but I don’t think that’s the case, since I’m not losing weight. You can change the settings for your metabolism, choosing levels from sedentary to very active. You can also customize your metabolism, which is what I did, since I sleep so much. My custom number of calories burned per day. given the activities I usually do, is just a bit above “sedentary” levels, and still the program thinks I should be losing weight based on what it thinks I burn versus what I tell it I eat. I’m not lying about what I eat (I log even the butter on the corn!), so this just points out how metabolism is not one-size-fits-all. It’s not even a small-medium-large-XL-thing. My metabolism must be extremely slow for my weight to be stable given my caloric intake. I wonder why.

So, what lesson do I take from the above statistics? Life isn’t fair. I knew that before, certainly my life has taught me this lesson before. But this is just another example of the fact. Every day I walk up 50 steps to get into my apartment, at least once, and I take the dog on a walk. Once a week I do an hour and 45 minutes of yoga, some of which is extremely strenuous (sun salutations, anyone?). A couple of days a week I run errands, which involve walking anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, during which I’m carrying a heavy backpack around. Granted, this is nothing compared to the government’s new guidelines for physical activity, but I know it’s more than many Americans do. And I know that it’s a helluva lot more than most people my size do. I also know that I don’t eat all that much, although I could eat more veggies.

So, no, it’s not fair. I know this, and I know that life’s not supposed to be fair, but that doesn’t make accepting it any easier. Everyone tells you that if you just eat less and exercise more, you will lose weight. Well, I’m not going to eat less. I’m hungry a reasonable amount of the time, and I eat reasonable amounts, and if I deny myself when I’m hungry, I’m just going to end up bingeing later. I thought I’d lose weight when I moved to the city since I’d be walking around so much more. I did walk around a lot more, but all it got me was huge calves. I thought I’d lose weight when I started doing yoga classes twice a week. I’ve reaped a ton of benefits from the yoga, but weight loss wasn’t one of them. I’m going to be starting Aikido now, and practices are twice a week for an hour and a half at a time. Something tells me I’m not going to lose weight then, either. I’d like to hope that going off the coke will make me lose weight, but I doubt that, too–cutting out all those calories is just going to make me add them somewhere else. Weight loss was never the goal for any of these changes–walking cutting out coke, yoga, or aikido–but I always hoped that the changes would result in weight loss in addition to the other benefits they bring. No weight loss. No, it’s not fair.

Lately life’s been telling me that I have to learn how to accept things that aren’t fair. This is something that’s come up repeatedly in the past couple of years. It’s so hard to learn those lessons, though, when you come from the US. American culture wants people to believe that any problem is surmountable, if only you want to fix it bad enough. And while I don’t believe that’s true–I don’t believe it’s possible for everyone to be thin, or even not-fat, for example–it’s so hard to learn to accept reality when there are constant and ubiquitous messages screaming the opposite. How do you learn to accept reality when life’s just not fair?

OK, so it looks like crap in my newsreader. Lots more work left to be done. Everything is readable and functional right now though, so far as I can tell. I’m going to take a break for a while.

I’m working on a style for the blog now, so things might be weird for a bit.