The Yo-Yo

Ever hear that joke about ADD kids?

Joke: "How many ADD kids does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

Answer: "Wanna go ride bikes?"

Yeah, it's a bit like that inside this little brain of mine. For every decision I come up with, I rethink it six different times and come up with twelve more options... repeat process. Dieting and exercise is apparently no different.

I started the low-carb thing, right? The South Beach Diet, because I've been flatlined in my weight since, well, let's be honest. OCTOBER. I started working out in February, and I thought, you know what? Screw calorie counting, I need to work out. I know what's a sensible meal, and what's not. I can NOT eat at Outback every week. That's reasonable, right?

And then when May rolled around, oh GUESS WHAT? Still at the same weight, and my clothes still fit moderately the same. Great. Zero net progress.

So I went to the doctor about it, because I was driving the hubby INSANE over it. And let's be fair. I have a slight propensity to obsess over things. Hardly even noticeable.

So the doc says, hey, no big deal. I've got some meds. Sometimes a girl's metabolism gets shot when she has a baby. It's not unusual.

So I take the meds. And I lose another ten pounds. (Actually I started losing the weight after I got a 24 hour stomach bug and tossed my cookies and drank nothing but Gatorade for a full day and a half. Ain't viruses great?) I decided to go off of them, mainly because I would get lightheaded if I forgot to eat, and it was the sort of lightheadedness where a little red light starts blinking in your head that says, "For the love of God, you idiot, don't DRIVE!"

I kept the ten pounds for a little while, and then my in-laws and a series of other events came around, and I gained BACK the ten pounds. Plus a little. How this is possible after skipping ONE WEEK, I will never know. I think, "Okay, I guess maybe I need to do more." So I started doing more classes. More variety.

The scale? Same numbers.

I do three classes in a day. For a WEEK.

The scale? SAME FREAKING NUMBERS.

So I got depressed, and reminded myself I needed to get back to it, otherwise I will never see the bottom side of that number. So I started the blog, to give me some incentive. Can you guess what happened then? You betcha. SAME THREE STINKIN' NUMBERS.

And then I had my little [unrelated] visit to the GI Doc. He suggested low-carb, and I said, "Yeah, okay, why not? I haven't tried that, at least."

Only problem is that with working out, you need the carbs. I'm dragging butt so badly in class, I can barely get through one workout, much less two or even just the elliptical. So I did some reading today (after I destroyed the kitchen with my daughter and actually reassembled the whole thing; go me!), and apparently I can have some carbs. Low-fat yogurt, oatmeal, or pumpernickel bread. (How they came to pumpernickel bread, I'll never know. Why not something standard, like, say, Indonesian flatbread from Jakarta?)

So tomorrow, I'll try to get some carbs in before I workout. I have some oatmeal, but it's instant. But I could possibly get to eat one of my Kashi cereals in the pantry. Kashi is supposed to be a low-glycemic load food. I would have to guess so, seeing that one of the cereals has 25g of carbs per serving, but only 5 of that is sugar, 5 more is fiber, and the rest is listed as "other." The new one I bought, Vive, has 43g of carbs, 10 from sugar, and 12 from fiber.

I'm sort of conflicted, though, because the scales finally moved. How can I really argue with any progress at all, after looking at the same three numbers on my scale for almost 10 months?

Oh, and by the way: I made it to a cycle class today!