For those of you concerned about my foot pain saga (there must be at least one of you, right, Mom?), I saw the podiatrist today. She felt up my feet, took some x-rays and told me I most likely have tendonitis and I most definitely have flat feet.

I knew I had a flat chest, but the flat feet thing is new to me. Can we complete the trifecta and get me a flat stomach, too? I’m not sure if I’ve always had flat feet or if my morbid obesity helped flatten them or if it’s a new thing unrelated to that. Regardless, I am no longer supposed to walk barefoot. Anywhere. Even if I’m just shuffling around the house I need to have sandals with a good arch support. She recommended some brands for that.

She also sprayed my foot with glue and taped it. I’m supposed to keep the tape on for the next five days and see if it helps with the pain, and if so that means an orthotic or just the shoe change should probably help cure it. (So far it does seem to help, so that bodes well.) The glue will help the tape stay on even in the shower, though now I’m wondering if I’m supposed to wear shoes in the tub too. That gives me flashbacks to my college days and how grateful I was that I couldn’t see anything in the shower stall because of my poor vision.

I’m also supposed to take a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) every day (like ibuprofen) since tendonitis is basically an inflammation of the tendon. This presents an interesting dilemma because every single one of my headache doctors agrees that you should not take more than 2-3 doses of anti-inflammatory medication a week or else you will get a rebound headache. So, what do I do here? Do I take NSAIDs daily for my foot and put up with the headache? Or do I only take a moderate amount of NSAIDs, severely limiting the anti-inflammatory effects of the medication, and put up with a longer stretch of foot pain? It is a conundrum. I probably should have asked the doctor about this, shouldn’t I have? Maybe we should just cut the damn foot off and give me a robotic replacement with a can-opener attachment and increased ass-kicking functionality.

I’m supposed to go back to the doctor in three weeks to see how things are progressing. I hope changing my footwear solves the problem. If not, maybe I’ll just learn to walk on my hands.

I have been hating runners lately. As I’ve mentioned, the weather is lovely and idyllic around here, so I see them bouncing up and down the sidewalks all they time. They’re wearing their fancy running shoes and their cute running shorts and DAMMIT! I want to be one of them, but my stupid right foot has been hurting, so I’ve had to forgo any aerobic exercise for the time being.

My neurologist and I have found a magical mix of medications and behavioral habits that have been keeping my headache locked in a closet lately with only some occasional mumbles and door rattling. I’m at a 1 out of 5 on the pain scale most days, so I’ve had more energy and I want to get back into the running game. Yet, once again, my body is not on board with me. So I have to wait for my foot to heal, and I have to read people tweeting about their marathon training and how many miles they’ve run that day and it is turning me into a green-faced envy monster.

But I shall be patient, and I’ll wait for the stupid foot to get better. And then, THEN, finally I hope I can become a runner once again.

Here is the nose, one week after that knife fight I got into with a female, Mexican biker gang. It is looking much improved from how it did last Friday morning:

I’ve been keeping it coated in Polysporin and covered away from the sun. I think there will be a faint scar at first that will fade over the next few months. Nothing to cry over.

***

I also wanted to thank everyone who voted for me in the Blindy Awards hosted by Blog Indiana. I won best Hoosier Blog! Woot! Sadly, I was in transit to my 5K when the awards were announced and was not able to leap up and down and rub my victory in the losers’ faces, which is probably for the best.

I woke up this morning to a cat crawling on my face, as I do many a morning when I am sleepy and the cats are hungry and we battle it out to see whose superlative will win. Today Java Bean’s back leg stepped on my nose and he dug his claw into my skin and left a two-inch long cut under my right eye.

It HURT. It was bleeding. I grabbed some toilet paper from the bathroom and applied pressure for 10 minutes. Then I cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide. Then I Googled “how to prevent scarring” where I learned that I should keep the wound clean, moist and avoid direct sunlight.

I’m not sure how I’m going to get a bandage on this thing, but I’m going to the drug store to see if recent innovations in bandage technology have provided a solution. I’m not that vain of a person, but I’d rather not have a scar on my nose for the rest of my life. If I do, I’m going to have to come up with a story about a knife fight. I also won tickets to the Journey concert at the State Fair on Sunday, with Heart opening, and I really want to go, direct sunlight or not. If have to wear a veil over my face to get there, so be it.

Also, please refrain from commenting on my skin, my pores, or the fact that I don’t pluck my eyebrows. I really don’t give a shit about any of that, and the only reason my skin looks a bit oily is because I put some Vaseline on the wound to keep it moist. Thanks.

UPDATE: 10:35am

I took a cue from the stoners and abused wives of the world and discovered that a big pair of sunglasses will cover up most facial wounds. Only a centimeter of the end of my cut curls out from under my big lenses. I don’t know what the cashier at CVS thought of me wearing my shades inside, but when I took them off in front of the pharmacist he thankfully did not recoil in horror. Instead, he recommended a liquid bandage, which is basically clear nail polish with some anti-bacterial ingredients. I applied that to my cut and covered it up with a piece of gauze I cut up to fit the wound. Then I taped it on with some cloth tape. It seems to be holding and now I have plenty of time to practice that knife fight story involving some bitch with long fingernails who got fresh with me.

I was a bit worried on Sunday because my left knee felt weird. At the rate these things were happening, I thought I’d soon be reporting that the left side of my body had fallen off and I was going to rename this blog “A Fourth of Me.” Thankfully the knee feels fine today too, so we’re back in business.

All this means I didn’t go for my training run with my group on Saturday morning, but I’ll hopefully be back out there this Saturday. Just in time for the 1 hour 45 minute run! Um, yay? I doubt I’ll do that whole distance. I’ll see how my foot’s feeling and go with that. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but even though I’ve missed several group runs I still haven’t missed a Saturday morning with lovely weather. Even though it’s warmer, it’s still been gloomy or rainy. Before that it was always snowy or icy. There has yet to be one really nice morning for a run. This is a city where I had to scrape frost off of my car on Easter morning. I’ve lived here for several years, but I can’t remember a winter this long. I don’t know if my memory is just bad or if the cold starts to grate on you after several years or if this is indeed a really, long winter. I do know that it is officially spring now and I’d like to see some God damn roses on the side of the trail that I can stop to smell.

So, of course, this is the week I injure my left foot.

Some days I might be happy to use an injury as an excuse to avoid a long run. Instead, I’d been looking forward to using a long run as an excuse to have a Coco Loco, a chocolate truffle surrounded by coconut cake and glazed with caramel. No 90-minute run for me. No Coco Loco either :(

It’s all been rather tragic. Last Wednesday it was 50 degrees out and I came home 90 minutes before sunset, leaving plenty of time to run on the trail without three layers of insulation. Only I couldn’t, because I’ve developed a sharp pain on the underside of my foot when I walk, not always, just sometimes when I distribute my weight in certain ways. I suspect it’s an overuse injury, a strained ligament or tendon or something. The best way to attack an injury is to catch it early, ice it and rest it, which is what I’ve been doing. This weekend I tried not to leave my apartment, which wasn’t too hard since that’s how I spent most of my college years. Ha, ha, ha…how I wish I was kidding.

It seems to be helping because the pain has receded, though it doesn’t yet feel healed. It’s happened in a fairly good spot in my training schedule since next week calls for a cutback in running. (30 minute runs instead of 45!) However, it effing sucks. It’s beyond frustrating when my body cannot keep up with my mind. I’ve been using the elliptical machine at the gym instead of the treadmill, but it’s such a letdown. I don’t want to ellipticize, I want to run! I also find it difficult to push myself hard on the elliptical. If I stop on the treadmill, in the best case scenario it sands the zit off my face. If I stop on the elliptical, the machine turns off. Oh my God, how horrible.

However, I am reminded of Deena Kastor, a featured marathon runner in the film Spirit of the Marathon which I saw recently. During the film, she injured her leg or foot or some appendage, and could only run in a pool for several months. When she talked about recovering from the injury, you could tell she was upset that she couldn’t run for real, but she kept a positive attitude and worked out in the gym as best she could. (And damn, she lifted weights so rapidly it SCARED me.)

So, I will ellipitcize and I will pray that my foot heals. And no matter what, I’m completing the damn half-marathon in six and a half weeks. If the bus trailing behind at an eighteen minute per mile pace tries to pick me up off the course, I will beat them off with my crutches if need be. Hopefully my foot will just heal itself, I’ll try not to increase my mileage too rapidly, and all will end well – including me at the finish line.

However, I also have to admit I don’t want to weigh more than 180 ever again. At the most I never want to pop back over 186, which was the point where I officially lost half my weight. If I get bigger than I am now it’s back to plus-sized jeans and ordering bras online. I’d like to have at least a 10 pound buffer area so I have time to correct course if I ever do start gaining back weight. Right now I don’t have any margin of error.

I decided to reevaluate my goals, like an annual job evaluation. It’s good to check-in with your goals at least once a year, be they weight, financial, or career. It’s hard to get where you want to go if you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there. I decided I’m going to try to get to 170 pounds by January 15, 2008, my three year anniversary. That’s three and a half months to lose 10 pounds, which seems reasonable. And now I’ve told you all, so I had better stick to it, right?

But I needed to decide how I was going to get there. After some debate, I started tracking what I was eating in the SparkPeople nutrition tracker a couple weeks ago. I’m not a big fan of tracking every last detail of my meals because it makes me feel like I’m stopping at the last gas station outside of Crazy Town. You’re not in Crazy Town yet, but it’s a short drive to the city limits. Do I really want to start obsessing about every gram of fat I’ve ingested in the day? So, I decided I’d just do it for two weeks so I could analyze what my diet had been like lately.

I’ve never paid much attention to the ratio of macronutrients I eat in the day (carbs/fats/proteins). It always seemed pretty damn complicated, plus when I first started out I didn’t know what half the foods I ate were made out of. Learning what were sources of fats and proteins was like learning the gender of all the nouns when I was learning Spanish. The table is feminine. Why? It just is! And cottage cheese has protein, okay? Why? It just does! There are no shortcuts. You just have to memorize it all. I prefer just to make sensible decisions and let the whole thing sort itself out naturally.

But holy cow, I’ve been eating a lot of carbs! Funny how I just kept slipping in more and more fruits and yogurts and oatmeal servings into my day. There is not anything inherently bad about carbs. They are an essential macronutrient. Yay, carbs and fat and protein! However I know when I eat a lot of carbs I start craving a lot of them, which might be part of the reason I had been eating so much in the evenings lately.

I’ve adjusted my diet somewhat, like I was restarting my computer. I’ve settled into something less carb-o-licious but still satisfying, but there were four days there when I was going pretty low-carb. I started to feel weak on the second day and I got a headache on the third day which did not go away no matter how much water I drank. When I woke up to the same throbbing in my skull on the morning of the fifth day I decided, “I’m going to have some oatmeal!” I don’t mind eating low-carb foods for a week or two, but I do mind having a freakin’ headache for more than two days. I do not want to be the girl who chooses weight-loss over good health, so oatmeal it was! Life is so much better with carbs.*

However, I did lose several pounds during those four days as my glycogen stores drained away and I have to admit it was really fun. I always tell people that slow and steady is the way to go, and I truly believe that, but there is no denying that it’s hella’ fun to see the numbers on the scale go down every day, even when you know it’s not really fat disappearing. That experience made me understand crash dieters a little bit better. It’s easy to see how extreme that kind of speedy weight loss is when you’re outside looking in, but when you’re the one actually dropping a pound a day, it’s easy to get sucked into a twisted way of thinking. No one who does something crazy thinks they’re doing something crazy, right?** You can always make up rationalizations for why it’s okay for you to be doing something that would otherwise seem questionable to an objective mind.

Anyway, I’m back to eating fruits and whole grains now and a lot of my cravings have gone away. It was pretty interesting to see how quickly my body reacted to a dietary change like that. I sometimes take it for granted that what I eat directly affects how I feel, but there’s no denying it’s true when you feel like sticking an ice pick in your brain to relieve the pressure.

There’s also no denying you need to lay off the running when you diagnose yourself with the beginnings of Achilles tendonitis. I first noticed a slight pain at the back of my left foot when I was stretching before my first 5K this month. Later in the week I noticed a slight pain when walking down the stairs. After some Googling I learned that it was probably Achilles tendonitis which “tends to occur in middle-age recreational athletes.” Middle-aged?! I’m only 26, which is only middle-aged if I die when I’m 52 and I’m hoping to keep breathing for longer than that. Then I read on and saw that “long distance runners will have symptoms of Achilles tendonitis after increasing their mileage.” Oops, yeah, that’s me. I probably should have waited longer before tackling those five mile runs. It’s hard to hold myself back when I exercise because I’ve been holding myself back all my life. I want to take it to the limit and see what my body can do! However, this tends to lead to injuries and “microtears,” so I need to figure out a balance between pushing myself and harming myself. Until I figure that out, it’s the low-impact elliptical machine in my apartment’s exercise room for me. I had never used the elliptical machine before in my life, and holy quadriceps, Batman, it’s tough! I could only do a mile the first time before I needed to stop and walk my jelly legs back upstairs to my apartment.

We’ll see how all this goes, and hopefully by the end of October I’ll be down a couple pounds. The funny thing is, now that I’m a “normal” weight I take weight loss far less personally. If my adjusted diet and exercise routine doesn’t lead to weight loss, oh well! It didn’t work. It’s not a personal failure. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It just means my body did not react to that regime by burning fat. That’s all. When I was morbidly obese I was scared to try any kind of diet because I was so scared I’d fail. I wanted to be thin so badly that I didn’t know if I could handle it if I really tried to do something and it didn’t work out. Now, if it doesn’t work out, I’m still pretty darn thin. Life will be okay. There’s less at risk, so I’m not as scared of a huge disappointment. And I can still eat oatmeal.

* This is not meant to be judgmental of anyone on a low-carb diet. I know the headaches etc. are supposed to go away after a while, but I was not interested in doing low-carb for life so I didn’t see any point in continuing. It’s just not something I can do, but if it works for you, kudos! Everyone needs to find what works for them.

** I am not saying low-carb dieters are crazy, I’m saying crash dieters are crazy. Doing low-carb and losing a pound a day was as close to crash dieting as I have ever come.

So I was looking at that number, wishing I was a dishonest person and could lie about my weight or perhaps “forget” to update my sidebar with the number. Then I thought about everything I’ve been saying lately about how I don’t care so much about my weight as I do about being fit and healthy and able to roll on my back and fling myself up to a standing position. I asked myself, “Self, do you really believe all that stuff?” And I realized that yes, I do really believe all that stuff. I still want the numbers to go down and not up, since weight gain will inhibit my ability to do all those things. But as long as I am able to run and frolic like a pixie it doesn’t matter if I actually look like a pixie. So I typed the number into my template and rebuilt all my pages and logged off the computer to go for a walk.

Then six days later I weighed in at 180.

Aunt Flo came early this month and like many an unwanted relative screwed with my head. You’d think after over a decade of being of a child-bearing age I would get used to the weirdness of my cycle, but no, she gets me every time. I even use My Monthly Cycles to send me e-mail reminders three days in advance, but she launched a pre-emptive strike this month. Still, seven pounds in six days is a bit wonky even for me. I’ve read there is now a form of birth control that will let you stop having periods. There’s a part of me that would really love not having to rinse my undies in cold water every month, but another part knows that I would miss these sudden drops in weight that are so much fun even if the gains drive me crazy. I also want other people to take the pill for a couple years in case it causes them to grow a second vagina. Which is funny since I have no qualms at all about dumping Splenda all over my oatmeal and strawberries even though it’s a fairly new chemical.

I can’t blame the recent weight-loss stall completely on my cycle though. The past two months have been slow for three reasons. First, I started weight lifting at the end of February and have been developing muscles. I’ve been drinking my protein shakes and eating my cottage cheese. So now when I rub my back at work I’m feeling up hard clay instead of mushy Play-Dough. I’ve definitely gained muscle and thus weight. How much? I haven’t a clue.

Secondly, I mildly injured something my inner right thigh at the beginning of May and had to stop running for 3 weeks. I replaced it with some cycling and the occasional walk to the grocery store, but nothing gets me hot and sweaty like running does, except maybe Simon Baker. I am now getting back into running, but taking it slow so I don’t re-injure myself.

The third reason: cereal. While it has been fun experimenting with new foods, this curiosity has led me to some dangerous discoveries. I started experimenting with new breakfast foods like Kashi’s Go Lean and Go Lean Crunch. I should know better because cereals are one of my binge foods, just like muffins or breads. One bowl of Go Lean will keep you lean, but two and a half are not a good idea. I also discovered the most delicious dessert – a bowl of vanilla yogurt mixed with a mango-cornflake cereal. Oh. My. God. It was ambrosia. I would eat a bowl of it and then I’d immediately eat another. Then I’d want to eat another but I’d wait until later in the day so I wouldn’t feel like a total pig. It was so good and yet so bad for me at the same time. I’ve now banned the mango cereal from my house because I cannot control myself around it. Until they start selling it in half cup portions I’m only going to buy it on special occasions.

I think I’ve made the proper course corrections and I’ll get back to losing weight, though I’m happy to have basically maintained my weight recently. I’m happier to see the 180 on the scale because it is a new low for me. Hopefully (cross my fingers) I can hit the 170′s in June (knock on wood). If I get to 172 I will have lost 200 pounds. Two hundred freakin’ pounds. Can you believe that?

And, a bit of bad news here, yesterday I lent my digital camera to my brother. So you’re going to have to be patient waiting for new progress photos. He promised to return it in a week. Untill them I could try to sketch myself for you, but I think it’ s better just to wait. I had no idea I was going to get to 180 this quickly or else I would have just taken the pics last night.