Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I’d been casually thinking of goals — not with any prompting or from any sense of “should,” but just in the natural course of things and in the wake of the mind-bogglingly-quick and surely-temporary progress I’ve made so far.

It wasn’t a big leap to start thinking about goals; I’m already looking for an excuse to not go to WW meetings. That seems like a fine enough reward for my first goal. It’s not that I dislike the meetings so much, but that it’s not really me and it costs so much money. It wouldn’t be so much money, if I weren’t a grad student living off of financial aid and facing winter.

Also, I can’t even bring myself to say the words “Weight Watchers.” Not even in therapy, where I can say anything. It’s just too terrible. I’ll be very grateful for the kick-start that I’ve received there, but I just simply can’t see myself paying and attending meetings there every week for the year and a half to two years that I estimate it will take to drop to a reasonable level.

Anyway, I thought this week, “Once I get down to the point where I can weigh myself at home, I’ll probably quit going to meetings.” Mostly, I’m motivated to go for the once-a-week weigh-in and for the overall structure of the eating plans. The standard bathroom scale only measures up to 300 pounds. Even still, it’s good for me to not own one because it keeps me from the obsessive weighing habit that would surely be part of my neuroses. I dunno. I’ll explore this with my therapist.

In the meantime, here is the first draft of the goals that I managed to jot down last night.

1. 310 = join curves
   
2. 300 = angel dvd’s
   
3. 290 = buy my own scale, re-think weight watchers
   
4. 280 = road trip to Seattle
   
5. 270 = open web site
   
6. 260 = alias dvd’s
   
7. 250 = join a gym
   
8. 240 = new digital camera
   
9. 230 = laser hair removal
   
10. 220 = bookbinding press
    
11. 210 = new bed
    
12. 200 =
    
13. 190 = board shear
    
14. 1 year of maintaining 190 = lasik surgery (if brave enough!)
    
15. 2 years of maintaining 190 = new car (hybrid or hydrogen or something)
    

I go through food phases. I know I’m not the only person who does this, but my phases seem pretty out there. I can eat the same thing (or vacillate between the same two things) for weeks on end. Right now it’s whole wheat pasta (preferably penne, rigatoni, or fusilli) with homemade sauce and meatballs (a la Denise).

The homemade sauce is a secret recipe from the Italian roommate I had in Boston. She was Italian, yes, but also a major health nut. She had taken her mom’s recipes and altered them. The sauce is mostly a filler of sauteed eggplant but also includes fresh Italian parsley and finely grated parmesan and is slow-cooked for at least 12 hours.

The meatballs are a mixture of ground turkey and low fat ground beef. She used to use breadcrumbs and the same parmesan with wild abandon. I substituted cooked cous cous for the breadcrumbs with really great results (although next time I think I will use uncooked couscous and see if the texture is dramatically different). Then, the meatballs are baked in a shallow foil-lined pan, rather than fried. She’d make huge batches of each recipe, freeze the bulk in small containers, and then just thaw a little at a time so it always tasted fresh. Man! I miss Denise!

I’m still in search of good recipes for: soy-sauce based drizzle or teriyaki sauce, a way to use the white beans and lentils that I cooked up, and other quick recipes with ingredients that are easily prepared ahead of time.