The Amazing Shrinking Woman

I am a reader – I blame this on my parents. I also blame my freakishly good manners, my willingness to try pretty much any new food and activity and my love of tea on them but those are beside the point. lol. 😉

I grew up in a household where it was common to hear the sentence “go and play” or even the almost unheard of today “go outside and play”…yup, that is right, I was not raised by the tv or by video games or by computers, I was raised by my parents and the automatic assumption I had a brain and imagination and could therefore entertain myself for hours on end. It was a good system. 🙂  I have so many fun memories of me playing with other kids, me playing with my toys by myself, just of me playing and really, isn’t that what childhood is supposed to be about?

Not all of my childhood was playing, obviously, I mean I did have to go to school, and do chores and be a brat lol. But something else my parents did for me that I’m not sure is being done for children quite as often anymore is instill in me a love for reading. I got books as presents, my parents would read to me all the time, we went to the library often, heck, in the summers I joined the kids reading club where you were challenged to read certain amounts of books from different genres and you earned stamps in a little booklet to show when you reached certain checkpoints in the challenge. That love of reading has intensified the older I get and I realized when unpacking and setting up my bookshelves that I am a book hog. Yup, that’s right, I own a freakish amount of books considering the amount of space I have to store them.

I am a firm believer in re-reading a book, after all, if a book is good than it is good enough to be re-read and with some books the more you read them the more you get from them. Like Memoirs of a Geisha (which I read before it was made popular via the movie thank you very much 😉 ) I swear, everytime I re-read that book I notice some new detail, I enjoy even more the poetry that is used to create the story, it’s a beautifully written book and so many images are invoked in my brain while I read it. I can see so clearly in my head visions that match what I am reading (there goes that imagination again) that it’s like watching a movie of the book without all the missing parts and added scenes you get in actual movie adaptations.

This wonderous love of reading, the enjoyment I get from a story…this I blame on my parents…and if you follow my logic here that means I can also blame them for the freakish amount of books I now own and the fact that everytime I finish unpacking a box with books in it and finally figure out a way to fit them on my bookshelf and am so happy I am done with that section of my new apartment set-up I manage to find yet another box full of books! You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I’ve opened up a box over the past couple days and sworn in a manner befitting a sailor (or perhaps pirate?) because I’ve found even more books!

I can’t be mad at the books though, at those wonderful pages filled with all those interesting characters that provide me with some mixture of entertainment, education, suspense, horror, joy, wonder and more. So, instead, I will blame the parents…and perhaps my inability to not buy what I am always sure will be a good book! 😉

On the Weight Watcher’s front I have essentially stopped tracking. 😦 Not on purpose, exactly, more out of sheer frustration. My kitchen is still not set up, sigh, my roomie finally moved her stuff in this past Saturday but then left immediately so we did no set up. She came back today but only worked on her room. She says she is coming back tomorrow but we shall see…In case you’re wondering why I don’t just set it up myself it’s cause she assured me she has just as much kitchen stuff as I do so we have to go through both of our kitchen inventories to see what we should use of whose and what should be packed away and put in storage cause there isn’t room in the kitchen. There is no point is me setting up the kitchen with all my stuff just to have to take it all out of the cupboards again, shrug.

As a result, this means my kitchen scale is still packed so I can’t weigh my food (driving me nuuuuuts!), most of my measuring items (spoons, jugs etc) are also packed, I have a couple out cause I found them randomly stuffed in the box with my plates when I unpacked those but not a full set so sometimes I can measure sometimes I can’t…and the counters are so cluttered that I feel as if I can barely move in there.

Oh, and the stove still doesn’t work so I can’t even cook properly lol. I’m existing off of frozen dinners, grilled cheese sandwiches and crackers mostly…oh! and cereal! Yum huh?

One other reason I am not tracking is because I am fairly certain I am undereating everyday, sigh, not on purpose just by happenstance. shrug. When I tally in my head at the end of the day what I ate it’s usually rather pathetic, breakfast is generally two pieces of weetabix with unmeasured milk (the horrors!), my next meal will be a frozen dinner (healthy ones tho, so those steamer things or lean cuisine), and if I get hungry later on a grilled cheese sandwich or some yogurt – so somewhere around 14 points or so per day when I am supposed to be eating 20…plus the physical exertion of moving furniture, setting up furniture, unpacking etc.

I don’t know how this will affect my weight loss, it might falsly bring my weight down because I have less food in my system or it might make it bounce higher cause my body might be freaking out and holding on to it’s fat thinking it’s being starved…I doubt the starved thing cause when I feel hungry I eat so I’m not ignoring my body’s signals to get food, I’m just not eating as healthily as I did before the move…hopefully my body understands and forgives me for this – sooner rather than later! lol 😉

Tags: books, food tracking, moving, points, reading, undereating, weight loss, weight watchers