Time to come out from under the rock

I've sort of been hiding out the past week. I spent the weekend in Idaho with friends and family and had the most glorious vacation! I got to reconnect with so many old friends from ISU. I got to see my old professors and in the words of Dan, "You mean music professors have souls?" (he said that after meeting my former piano teacher and choir director.

Going back to my old stomping grounds at ISU left me in deep thought for a long long time. During this period of deep thought I was also in deep thought about my progress. I am actually really disappointed about my progress which is LAME because I'm down almost 17 pounds. The only problem is that I feel like my progress is slow. I'm not necessarily disappointed I've made progress, just that it is happening slower than I wanted it to.

I am kind of tired of having 10 voices in my head about what to do. I read a book that says one thing, a nutritionist says something different, trainers who say something else, doctors who give me their advice and at some point I just want to shut everyone out because it's confusing to me.

I had my body analysis doctor (the guy who does my body analysis at the rec center) tell me I am doing an amazing job with my weight loss, especially considering my Hashimoto's. I tell him, man I'm so sad I only lost 6 pounds this month and I exercised like a wild woman and last month I lost 12 pounds and didn't exercise at all. What gives?

Well He said what I have been told before- you are STARVING crazy girl. Your body will simply hold on to everything if you are exercising an hour a day and eating 850 calories. I told him I had been having some extra protein and probably eating 100 calories over my program a few times during the month because I felt so ravenous that I might eat my own arm. He said in his opinion it's just not enough food.

This is so hard for me to process because when I eat a normal person's weight loss calorie goal I gain 15 pounds even with activity. When I stick to just medifast and eliminate exercise, I lose 12 pounds. Then I do medifast with some extra protein, exercise, and lose half as much weight. It is just so confusing!!! I'm scared to eat more food even though he told me to get 1200 calories in. I just don't know what to think.

The only good news in this situation is that I am completing my 6 weeks of exercise torture this Friday. I was doing 2 programs of personal training/bootcamp style training for the last 6 weeks because I paid for them before starting medifast and I knew I was asking for trouble. The medifast book says 45 minutes of exercise is the max and I've been exceeding that and then not knowing how to make up the difference. Luckily these workouts are over soon and I can finally find some balance with all these variables.

So back to my former Idaho life. I had completely forgotten how full of life I was. I seem to be getting these reminders about me and my past pre-utah life lately. Why have I changed so much? My friends were reminding me about stories that I had totally forgot about and I missed that old Stephanie so much! I miss how carefree and ridiculous I was. I think my kind of people are still back in Pocatello. This is not to say I don't have my kind of people here in Utah, but they are just fewer in number and my circumstances are much different now so it's harder to really get their full impact.

I found myself so sad that I don't have the carefree life I had in Pocatello. While in choir, we always went to Kamp Kumbaya at the beginning of the year and it was a place for us to bond as a choir. There's always a skit/get to know you section and in 2005 my fellow free spirit, Beth Blackburn and I performed an interpretive dance together called "The cocoon." We started out in a sleeping bag, yes, two girls in one sleeping bag. We emerged from our cocoon and proceeded to do this insane sleeping bag dance together with lifts and lots of rolling around. Apparently this cocoon dance has been carried on through the years and every year there is a tribute cocoon dance that is performed. My choir director was telling me all about it and I was stunned! He remembered so many things about my time there, comments I had made, things I did, etc. It was really surprising to me.

(More pictures at the end...hehehe I couldn't resist even though these are not from the original dance)

I guess I just never really felt comfortable enough to let some of those sides of myself come out once I moved here, like this environment is much too serious for a cocoon dance. It's not all about the cocoon dance but I do find myself being more serious and reserved here in Utah which is not all the bad. There comes a point where a person has to grow and mature. What I miss the most is having the herd of people who are equally weird, quirky, spontaneous, and free spirited to join me in such adventures. It's like I was some crazy free spirit who got put in a cage. Maybe I created my own cage and maybe I'm only funny to my fellow herd members.

I was reminded by friends about how active and adventurous I was and how they knew me as the girl who wore a bandana all the time and rode my bike EVERYWHERE. I remember trying to introduce my favorite hotdog on a stick game at a party here in UT and I'm pretty much 94% of the people thought I was a FREAK. I used to play this game where we tied a hot dog on the end of a string that was tied to a broom stick and there were two people blind folded and two people with hotdog sticks. The contest was to see who could bite the hotdog off the string first. Easy enough, right? Not at all! Since the hotdog is dangling on the string it just goes everywhere and the person blindfolded has no idea where the hotdog might be swinging. The person holding the stick reserves the power to just rest the hotdog on the person's face or nose and when they try to bite it they look like a ravenous dog trying to eat a squirrel. If you can't picture this in your head, well, just trust me, it's fun. At least I think it is!

I am missing things like that and missing my Idaho people lately. Life is still good here and still full of wonderful people but I feel like I've had to become a bit of a different person to fit in and I feel a little confined and caged in because of that. It's totally my own problem, and I'm sure I'll find a solution soon enough.

I have no idea where Dan and I will be next year. Part of me can't get out of here fast enough. Part of me is feeling so stifled like I am a fish in a fish bowl where people watch everything I do and say. Part of me loves living here because I have great friends and family. Part of me looks at Dan's graduate school adventure as my one chance to get off the island, like this is the only time the tide will come to wash us away. CONFLICT.

This conflict has had me wanting to eat everything in sight. I have resisted so many temptations but I've been wanting to just shove my face with food. Luckily the responsible part of my brain kicks in and tells me to deal with my stress another way which usually leads to me begging Dan to wrap me in a blanket and hold me baby-style. He's so sweet. It's times like this that I am aware of my addiction to food- it's my crutch. I'm overcoming it though, one day at a time.