Two annoying commercials

There are two commercials that I seem to see every time the TV is on and they are driving me crazy for different reasons.

First up we have Pizza Hut featuring the return of the P’zone, a one-pound cross between a pizza and a calzone. Actually, 1.07 lbs of it. A big circle of pizza dough is mounded up with pizza toppings, folded over and the edges crimped, and then backed into a gigantic half-moon shape like an Italian empanada. Tag line: “Big enough to share. So good you won’t want to.” Price: $5.99. The commercial shows young guys snarfing down these giant pies, holding them the way you’d hold a slice of watermelon and biting into them, and refusing to share. They’re obviously that good.

Being a good little Weight Watcher, I went to the Pizza Hut website to check out the nutritional info so I could make fun of it (let’s be real). The “classic” has 610 calories, 23 gms fat, and 4 gms fiber, which works out to 15 points. The “pepperoni” has 840 calories, 43 gms fat, and 3 gm fiber, which is 20 points. The “meaty” version is somewhere in between. But wait! They define a serving size as ONE HALF of these pizza wonders, which makes an entire p’zone anywhere from 30-40 points. Uh, I think I don’t want one now, thank you.

The other commercial that is driving me nuts for a totally different reason is the Bacardi Rum Mojito commercial where everyone is wiggling their butts to the beat as the bartender is grinding down the mint. Oops, that’s a “Muddle” not wiggling or grinding. Silly me. I’m not entirely sure how how to count the mojito but that’s not why the commercial drives me crazy. It’s all the skinny women in tiny skirts all muddling their butts in synch, looking as though they’re all connected to each other and spasming with the music.

Now one commercial I actually like, although I’m never entirely sure what the product is, is the one with the music, “For Goodness Sake, I’ve got the hippy hippy shake.” There are happy, curvy women giving a hip shake with a smile and then we learn that whoever the sponsor is supports women having their own shapes and not some predefined number. Or something to that effect.

The women in the last commercial are curvy and look more like me than the women wiggling with the mojito music. They aren’t stuffing their faces with giant pizza moons, either.

Heat Wave Leads to Ice Cream

The New England definition of a heat wave is three days in a row over 90. My family in Texas thinks that’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, since they can go for 6 months with those temperatures, but we usually only have one or two “heat waves” per summer. Well, that wast Boston; perhaps it’s different here in southern New England.

Sometimes I can’t believe that I lived in the south as long as I did; the last 2o years in New England have really changed my body’s ability to deal with heat. In a nutshell, I don’t do well with it and despise being hot. Hot from working out is different than hot from walking out the door and just standing there.

So naturally I picked today to wander around my new university to get my bearings and see about getting parking sorted out. What was I thinking? It was 95 degrees with warnings about heat and air quality, warning people to stay inside or near water or other such sensible things that I ignored. Really, you’d think I’d know better. I turned into a limp dishrag that was so glowing that I was radioactive – and all I did was walk around.

It didn’t help that I started at what was lunch break for the many construction crews in the area. Walking down the street was an exercise in discipline as I walked past rows of men sitting on concrete barriers having a smoke, chugging water, and checking out the passersby. It made me think of being a college student and having to walk past the fraternity houses where the guys would hold up numbers and rate you when you went by. I found it mortifying and humiliating then and now.

Stacy and Clinton wouldn’t have approved of my outfit – black cotton shorts and a pink cotton shirt with pink Birks – since it was comfortable but not necessarily flattering. I was aware of my ugly lumpy leg (permanently swollen after the leg got stuck going through a porch 10 years ago) and that I was walking with a lurch rather than strolling to keep my legs from rubbing together. We know what that’s like on a hot summer day, that chafing that can turn the skin into raw meat.

All of that physical and mental discomfort weren’t helped by getting dehydrated and hungry, more the first than the latter, really. I passed little carts of Thai and Mexican food but the idea of anything hot was totally unappealing. I did, however, find a Gelateria and lunch of an odd assortment of a small raspberry sorbet, a small bag of Fritos (for the salt), and a big bottle of water.

Once I found the car again and headed home, I listened to my small hot inner child and pulled into Dairy Queen, which I knew was a bad idea even as I did it. I ended up getting a small Heath-bits Blizzard which sounded really good when I ordered it, and it did taste good. But to be honest, it wasn’t all THAT good; the sorbet had been better and more refreshing. Much to my own surprise, I didn’t finish the blizzard and actually fished out the Heath bits and washed the rest down the disposal when I got home.

What did I learn today?

1. Other people aren’t watching me as critically as I see myself.
2. Drink the water before I need it on hot days to stay ahead of dehydration.
3. Sometimes wanting isn’t the same as having – and once I figure that out, it’s okay to stop eating it.
4. I hate being hot. Oh wait, I already knew that.

Finding my way

I am a very visual person and as I set out this weekend to explore my new area, I went armed with maps and step by step directions. If my printer was hooked up, I’d also have had some Google Map printouts with pictures.

I found, though, that I used these detailed maps to get myself to the destination but then found my own way home, not once but on three separate excursions in different directions. Kind of interesting. Although the return trips were worth making in their own wandering way, it was a lot more efficient to travel with the maps and with a plan.

Well duh. Perhaps there is an analogy to me working my food plan. When I follow the detailed guidelines, I know where I’m going and how to get there and I have pictures along the way. I know how many points to eat, what kinds of foods are better for me, and I keep track of them as I go because I have a roadmap. When I make up The Anne Plan, it gets me somewhere but in a very wandering way that includes more ups than downs.

Somewhere in my boxes and piles are the weekly booklets for the Weight Watchers plan. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, I tended to take the booklets and then toss them into a basket without really reading them. But the booklets are part of the travel planning for this weight loss journey and provide directions that would be extremely helpful if I actually looked at them.

My WW anniversary is coming up next weekend; it will be 5 years since I joined this latest time and I’ve been going to meetings more faithfully than I followed the program sometimes. I’ve had fun kind of wandering around these last two years, complaining about my lack of progress but afraid, really, of being more successful. By going to meetings, I could honestly say I was a Weight Watcher even when I mostly watched myself stay in one place.

I know the direction I want to go and I know the basics about getting there, but reading the directions, the guidebooks, the map, will make me more productive and successful. I know I have to actually do the things and not just look at the pictures. That means making myself a priority. I’m in a new place physically and my work life will be far less stressful so this is a good time to buckle down.

This week I’m going to pull out those old booklets, read them again, and plan the next leg of the journey. It’s time.

Getting back into my food routine

I’m much better at sticking to my food plan, my healthy lifestyle, when I’m in my routine. This last week has been anything BUT routine with moving, living out of boxes, no work, and food all willy nilly at both ends. I haven’t even been pretending to try to follow a plan and my body is not happy with me. Oh, I could have been a lot worse; my idea of being out of control now is certainly different than what it used to be.

These pounds aren’t falling off now and I don’t want to see them padded back on my hips just because I’m being lazy. The three things I’ve always hung onto in the past were drinking my water, journaling, and doing my daily inventory. Well, this week I was drinking diet soda rather than water because it tastes funny here. Solution: get a Brita so I can have filtered water to make sure I actually drink more. Check.

Journaling? I do mine using eTools on the WW website and I love the combination of journal/points books all in one place so I don’t have a separate step of looking things up. Works just dandy for me when I’m actually using a computer regularly at work, or even at home when I can dash in to the computer desk and just record whatever.

Well, my big computer just got out of a box and isn’t hooked up, and even if it was, the wireless isn’t working here yet so I can’t connect to the web on that machine.  I do have net access (obviously) but the laptop is tethered by a short cable to the modem by the TV, a very unsatisfactory situation.  Solution: hook up a longer Ethernet cable until Comcast comes next week to fix the wireless.

My daily inventory is something I do on a private blog and it helps me stay focused with what I’ve accomplished, people interaction, things that made me happy that didn’t have anything to do with me (my personal favorite), etc. I’ve been doing it faithfully since February but this week it all sort of fell apart due to the previous computer issues – but also because I was feeling crappy about what I’d been eating and not recording. The combination of those made it easy to just not write anything down. Solution: inventory anyway. It’s the discipline that matters.

If I hang onto these things, I will be making better food choices without even having to force myself to think about it. I know this from experience. Having spent $140 on groceries to restock the fridge with healthy things including protein, fruits and veggies, I have the food on hand to make those choices easier.

Being out of my zone is uncomfortable for my body and my head. In the past, I lapsed into it anyway, little by little, making it even harder to pull out of the spiral. I feel good that I recognized the problems and found solutions to get myself back on track. That’s a behavior change that deserves a Bravo sticker.

Next step – going to a new WW meeting in my new location.

Settling in

The unpacking is going fairly well except I’m having a hard time finding things. The rooms and closets don’t match up exactly with the old place and I get distracted unpacking a box and then moving things around only to lose track of what I was doing in the first place. There are piles of boxes everywhere, some of them jammed full of that newsprint paper used to wrap everything within an inch of its life (think a can of tuna wrapped up in 2 sheets of it and multiply by a 2 bedroom apartment – it boggles the mind).

After three hours, $250, and many lines at the DMV, I am now the proud owner of a Connecticut driver’s license and auto registration. They do things a little unexpectedly here – the auto inspection happens before the registration rather than after, and on a newish car, they don’t even check for safety, just emissions. It seems backwards to me and to the car techs who did the inspection.

I don’t know how people managed this stuff before the web. I was able to find the DMV website with detailed instructions on what I needed to bring and what forms of identity were accepted. Who knew that I would need my passport and lease as well as title, emissions test results, old registration, old license, proof of insurance, and lots and lots of $$$?

Room 5 was full of people waiting for their licenses in assorted steps of the process. There was the line to turn in your paperwork – and you had to stand in another line to get the forms first – and then you waited and waited. Then they call you up for an eye test and then you waited and waited. Then they want your $$ and have you come back to have the photo taken – and then you wait some more before the license is finally ready. Then it’s time for the registration lines. At least it’s done even if I’m feeling poor.