Trophy Hangers by Phil Cuttance






I saw these in last weekend's NY Times Sunday magazine. They are brilliant I think. Phil Cuttance, the designer, took the ridiculous motion of trophy hunting and turned it on it's head. And they are actually affordable-- $50 per animal (you get the head and bum) from the very cool website Charles & Marie .

Birthday Resolutions

I think New Year's Resolutions are way too overdone and therefore, meaningless. Instead, I'm initiating a big birthday resolution this year: focus on my wellness.

I need to get adequate sleep, eat better, get to the gym more and find ways to relax. I have a few solid steps I'm going to try to take to get there.

• In bed by 10:30 every night, which after talking (and whatever…) will hopefully get me to sleep by 11:00. That should give me 7 1/2 hours of sleep a night.

• Stay on W*eight W*atchers until I've lost this freakin' extra weight. But I am going to let myself have one and only one treat a day, be it wine, sorbet, etc.

• I'm aiming for 5 days at the gym-- 4 during the week and one weekend day. When I can I'll try to add an outside run on the other weekend day. I'm not even going to try for 7 days and won't pressure myself for the 6 unless I want to do it. No more making myself feel guilty.

• The relaxation thing I still have to think about. I'm not really sure how to relax, especially when there's absolutely no spare time. Any ideas?

Top 10 things to avoid

10. $3 for a can of Diet Coke.
9. The god awful sun of Southern Spain (I know, that doesn´t sound horrid to many, but to me it is)
8. 2 hours on an un-airconditioned bus.
7. Sleeping in the same bedroom as my father
6. A hot internet cafe sitting next to people with BO.
5. Restaurants that serve only seafood or toast.
4. Seven days of unending bickering between my parents.
3. The horrid exchange rate between Euros and dollars.
2. A week without baby Beck
1. A week without my beautiful wife.

Fishs Eddy's new "Floorplan" plates & platters




Last night I walked by Fishs Eddy on my way to the subway after leaving the gym on 19th Street. I spotted these very amusing plates and platters in the window. They come in every apartment style from a tiny studio to a luxurious penthouse. My favorite is the duplex apartment.

There's only so long a guy can go around feeling unappreciated in every part of his life before it makes him feel like shit. And there's only so long he can spend 8 to 10 hours a day doing something he's completely disinterested in before he feels like he's going to implode.

And that's where I am now.

I'm back-- well, I'm trying to be.
Life has been crazier than ever. My dieting attempts have been as bad or worse than ever.
But today Beck turns 9 months old and I think we're at the place where change can start being made since he actually sleeps now.
Went to the gym for the first time in a week. It was good to be back. Let's hope it's a good start to new habits.

Never enough time to blog

I'm resorting to bullet-point-blogging because I simply don't have time to really blog. So, I will present my main themes in a Power Po*nt-like format.

• My eating and exercise has been crap, crap, crap ever since Dec 20th. It has not been a good start to a new year at all and it makes me so angry with myself. And the angrier I am, the worse I seem to do. I got a cold, which meant I couldn't work out, which meant I just started eating junk. The cold has lasted three weeks now. I think I am now better enough to go to the gym tomorrow.

• Last night Bri said to me that a friend and fellow blogger was having a difficult food/body time and so she wasn't going to read my blog in case I was doing better than she is. And then Bri said, "I'm happy I don't have the food and body weirdness issue you two have." I wish I didn't have these issues.

• Sometimes I sneak eat. I just bought 3 oatmeal-raisin cookies when I bought my lunch (a low-fat mango smoothie-- I know, it's not a real lunch) at my office cafeteria. I quickly ate the cookies in my office before people saw me eating them. Why did I buy the cookies? Because I don't feel well enough to go to the gym and somewhere in my fucked-up logic that means I shouldn't even try to be healthy and lose weight. Why don't I want anyone to know I'm eating crap? Part of it is because I can't digest the stuff in the cookies (oil and dairy) and people know that. And so I don't want to explain why I'm eating something that will make me feel ill. But part of it is because I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed I'm not sticking to my diet and I'm ashamed that I don't always eat "perfectly". Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and eat junk food. Several years ago I "sleep ate". I was taking a medication to help me sleep and it made me really out of it. It turned out that I actually ate ice cream in my sleep. Really not a good thing since I'm lactose-intolerant! But now I have no excuse. If I've had a crappy food day I sometimes just find myself eating junk at 4am when the dog wakes me up. But I would never eat it if Bri was in the kitchen with me or if other people were around. And it's not even stuff I really love. It's almost like I'm thinking, "tomorrow's another day and I need to eat perfectly starting then. But until then I'm going to cram as much crap into myself as possible because I don't know when I'll ever get another chance."

• How can I stop this rollercoaster? How can I get myself to actually not go completely down hill if I miss the gym one day or I over eat a little one day?

Up and downs

I haven't posted here for 2 weeks because that's how busy I have been. There has literally not been 5 spare minutes in my life.

I really should have made time to post, though, because last week was hard. I had stuck to my plan but when it came time to weigh myself I was 1 pound heavier than the week before! Holy shit! How did that happen? I was blown away and felt so upset. It seemed pointless to stick to the diet and I ate crap for the rest of the day.

But by the next morning I realized that if I continued to eat crap there was absolutely no chance the numbers on the scale would ever go down, so I went back to the plan. And luckily this week I was 2 pounds lighter.

The pace of the weight loss is making me a little depressed. I've now lost a grand total of 5 pounds in about 2 months. How can it be that slow? How do those people on that reality diet show lose 15 pounds in a week? OK, intellectually I know the answer: they are severly overweight and they are cutting their calories by a huge amount. It doesn't seem fair, though. I would be happy with a steady 1 pound a week weight loss. Anything but this one step forward, 2 steps back thing.

Sloooooow

After a week away from the city and 2 weeks away from the scale, I lost not quite a pound. That feels painfully slow. I only managed to fit one run into our vacation (which is sort of odd because I usually try to use vaca as a time to work out a bunch but we had three days of traveling in a one week trip, which sort of made the tip short).
Our first full day in San Fran we had a lovely time walking around the city with friends and I allowed myself to indulge in a bunch of salt water taffy. At the end of the day I estimated the number of pieces (something crazy like 17!) and added the points up and realized that it wasn't a big deal. It was sort of shocking to find that out. And I ate more pieces of candy on Thanksgiving (while everyone else ate pie, which I don't like at all) and it was fine. But I felt fat without working out. And on our second to the last day we hit a mall with a candy store. When I saw it and said how much I wanted candy Bri told me that when she went to W Watchers they were told that they could take a weekend break and not gain weight. Either I was feeling cocky (after calmly eating taffy) or just feeling greedy and I decided to load up on sour balls, Swedish Fish, gum drops, and other sugary goodies. And then I just gave up on counting the points. I ate more candy the next day while being stuck in the airport and by that point I stopped worrying about it.
The idea of taking a "break" made me feel relieved but also incredulous. How can you basically eat a bunch of crap for two days and not gain weight? That seemed impossible. And then I started to feel angry that she told me that because if I hadn't known that maybe I wouldn't have splurged so much and would have lost more weight. Wouldn't it be better if I just stuck to the plan perfectly?
I get so torn between the perfectionism and having fun/ letting go. And that's true in all areas of life. I hate that our house is a complete disaster right now. I have moments where I just want to attack all the crap and dirt and unpack as many boxes as possible. But when I get home from work what I really want to do is play with the baby. And so I tell myself the house will get organized. And I try to convince myself that it's pointless to really get much organized now since in a few weeks our renovations will be over finally and then we can really get everything organized and unpacked. But then I still feel a little guilty and angry at myself for not being more productive. And I berate myself for eating all the candy and therefore getting a pathetic number on the scale.

Another week, another weight/wait.

I was actually strangely less scared of weighing myself this week (only put it off for a day) and was happy to have lost 2 pounds. To convince myself to weigh myself I thought how my pants were feeling looser, which then got me all excited and I half-expected to have lost 4 pounds or something. So when I saw he 2-pound loss I was a little sad and annoyed with myself. But then I tried to make myself happy with the smaller loss. And I realized that I actually had Swedish Fish this week because we went to I*kea and I got a bag there. I amazing had it last for the entire weekend, which might have been a first. Part of myself wanted to eat all of them on the ride home but I stopped myself. But then the next day I ate the rest of them and had a few minutes when I thought I had just screwed everything so I should just throw in the towel for the day. Then I added up the W W*atchers points and realized I was totally fine.

Next week we'll be away for the holidays and I don't want to weigh myself on a different scale. In fact I'm only weighing myself at the E*quinox near my office instead of any of the other locations I go to. That feels safer to me. So, it will be almost 2 weeks between weigh-ins. That feels sort of nice but also scary-- what if I gain weight during all that time? Thanksgiving foods don't hold any interest for me but the airport bulk candy and dried fruit stands sure do.