Jamie Oliver and me

I had long resisted Jamie Oliver -- his shows and his cookbooks.

The whole "Naked Chef" thing irritated me. The fact that he seemed to be trading on his hunkiness annoyed me. Or at least the fact that everybody focused on that made me resistant to him.

(Confession time: I am very, very hard on cute boys. I find it annoying when people get away with stuff based on their charm and looks. It's, of course, ironic and fitting that I gave birth to a son who does exactly that. But that has at least made me more empathetic to the situation.)

But I finally watched the TV show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" and I'm hooked -- on his unprocessed food. His recipes are great -- and many of them work with my eating plan. So I've been cooking lots of them this week. A full report will be coming.

Getting out of the habit

It's amazing how easy it is to get out of the habit of fitness. I feel like most of 2010 has been sort of a slow slide. Even though I "ran" a marathon, I haven't been as active as I was throughout most of 2009. I just haven't made it a priority.

Today, though, I did get a 30-minute run in. I was thinking about doing an hour, but I had some time constraints as well some concerns about doing an hour after not running at all since Saturday and not running anything longer than a half hour for a month or so.

I also need to take better advantage of my swanky gym membership. It is really, really nice -- but it also makes me a bit uncomfortable, just because I'm really not used to doing a lot of public exercise. Which, of course, is a good reason to do it -- I'm all for pushing my comfort zones.

Facebook weirdness update: I think I've successfully stopped the semi-virtual-stalking behavior I had going on on Facebook. The reality is that I can be a Really Annoying Internet Presence when I really want to be -- and I'm particularly good at being intentionally unattractive when that serves my needs. So I pulled out all the stops -- and I'm not getting anywhere near the quantity of contact or the level of weirdness.

Size issues

No, I don't think heavy people are evil. Or lazy. Remember -- I've been morbidly obese. I'm happy not to be right now, but I was a happy obese person. I had a little bit of self-hatred going on, but not a lot -- I was too busy. And there is a numbing effect that comes from overeating.

I didn't feel bad about myself (other than my appearance) when I was heavy, and I didn't really feel all that bad about my appearance, even.

I do feel better now. I don't think it would've been possible to explain how much better I could feel.

My 39th birthday ...

... is sort of a scary "before" picture. Tiffany came across it a few weeks ago and had to send it to me.

The worst part, of course, is that I wasn't even at my top weight in this pic, as my wedding ring still fit. There was a period of time where I could not wear my wedding ring, as it was too tight. (I'm actually not able to wear my ring right now, though, as my spacer broke, and I don't want to lose the ring.)

So, I should post a current picture as well, as today is my 43rd birthday, but I'm just getting this lovely one up there for now.

Things to do before I turn 44

Part of me thinks that having a "bucket list" is sort of stupid; part of me thinks it's brilliant.

At this point, I have only one big bucket list thing I want to do -- and that's to do the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage across northern Spain. There are little hostels every day's walk along the top of Spain, hostels that catered to pilgrims in the Middle Ages. My reasons would be more academic than religious, although there's an element of that there as well. I'm hoping my kids and I can do it some summer, preferably when my youngest is more focused and my eldest still lives with me.

But, with my birthday this week, I've been thinking not so much about Things To Do Before I Die, but Things to Do Before I Turn 44 (in 2011).

Here we go:

1) Run the L.A. marathon again.
2) Get my weight under 150 pounds. And maintain it.
3) Learn to swim well enough that I can do it for fitness.
4) Get the whole family eating only unprocessed foods. (I'm personally really close, but the family is not there.) That means a lot more planning time and time in the kitchen for me.
5) Get the house organized and maintained to the point where I'm fine with people dropping by. We just have too much in too small a space; I've already purged a lot of things -- moving from a 4-bedroom house with a garage to a 3-bedroom apartment with no storage to speak of forced me to -- but I could do more.

Of course, I look at this list, and so many of those items are really, really time-consuming. So we'll see.