We’ve got a long weekend here in the U.S. for Labor Day on Monday, and our family is taking advantage by heading East to my brother’s house in Grand Junction, Colorado. My dad has already driven north from Texas, and he’s there awaiting our arrival.

Travel, for me, has always been an excuse for crappy eating. There’s usually time to kill. There’s plenty of tasty (fried, sweet, etc.) food available in airports. There’s usually lots of stress — time pressure, worry about flight delays, concern about the boy’s well-being. It’s a recipe (har!) for diet disaster!

But, today, things are going to be better. Much better. It helps that I expect to have my hubby with me to help. (He just landed! Yay!) But I also feel like a switch has been flipped in my mind. Partly because of the daily feedback I’m now expected to submit. But also because some part of me is remembering what it’s like to eat less, and I’m recalling how it isn’t so terrible. In fact, it usually feels good. Just like exercise can feel really awesome. I think I’m ready.

Over the past few days — since my last post, I suppose — I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Between exchanging e-mails and playing phone tag with Adam, the body tutor, I’ve been wondering about whether I’m really ready to do something serious and sustained about my eating and exercise.

From moment to moment, I’ve changed my mind. One night, I went to sleep when he was a few minutes late calling me, consciously avoiding the day of reckoning. Then, I considered delaying my entry into the program, thinking perhaps I should put it off until after our upcoming Labor Day weekend trip. It’s like I know this might really work, and I’m afraid. Some of it is, I think, fear of failure. But I suspect there’s also a little fear of success, and change. But, I finally decided to go ahead. Why not start now?

Tomorrow is day 1. Every night I will write a feedback e-mail to Adam, telling him what I eat and how I exercise. And, in the morning, I will get feedback from him, and suggestions, and encouragment. It’s this whole accountability thing that seems like it will make the most difference for me. Anyway, I’ll shut up now because I know very well that the proof is in the sustained good habits. We’ll see.

I read this yesterday and started thinking seriously about joining the program. Heck, I did more than think. I even talked to the guy and said I wanted to give it a shot.

As usual, I’m having this crazy inner dialogue. I keep having people say to me “I don’t know how you do it!” and I keep thinking… well, my mental health is suffering and I’m gaining weight. So, I’m keeping a lot of balls in the air, but, at what price? My health? My sanity? Oh, and we’re probably about to move — more later — so there’s about to be a whole lot more going on around here.

So I ask myself, would having a body tutor who keeps me accountable be helpful? Or would it all be another weight (ha ha, fat pun!) on my mind. The head of the program said he was going to shoot me an e-mail but I haven’t gotten one yet (must. check. spam folder), so maybe his brief conversation with me led him to believe I’m a hopeless case (this despite his intro e-mail that said he was “1000% certain I can help you achieve all of your health and fitness goals”).

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In other news, that elusive moving date is starting to move closer. My husband got the OK from his company to take the rent they’re paying for him now, and channel that into rent payments for a house for the whole family. Then, we can keep paying the mortgage on this house while we put it on the market. It basically just gives us a lot more flexibility, because there’s no way we could pay the mortgage on this house, and pay the rent elsewhere simultaneously. It would drive us into madness, if not bankruptcy. (Notice all the references to mental illness. Is it time for me to see my psychiatrist again, since I quit taking my meds a while back?)

So, we’re basically at a point where we are out of limbo. We can plan. We can move forward. We can call movers. We can set a moving date. There IS the small matter that we don’t know where we are moving TO, but we can dive headlong into research and get the kid onto the waiting lists for preschools, etc.

Well, enough blabbing. Gotta go scour the spam folder for signs the super-cheerful body tutor thinks there’s hope for me yet.

P.S. Yup. It was in the spam folder.

The boy and I went camping this weekend with 3 people that I work with. It was quite an adventure, with the most physically exciting part being a hike that had a decent amount of incline and decline. I channeled Dietgirl as I heaved up hills. The best part? Well, let me explain thusly: if you ever thought of taking a 2-year-old on a hike, you might as well dispel the idea from your mind. Unless, of course, you are content with carrying him…. the entire way…. even while he sleeps and his head lolls from side to side, affecting your balance as you try to maintain uprightness on steep downhill sections.

My toes hurt, and my back and shoulders are a little achy, but I am generally really pleased with myself. I really enjoyed being active.

Well, it will be if I do plenty of fast walking.

I’ve been having one of those periods where, around a hundred times a day, I think “I need to blog about that,” and then, when there’s time (and I don’t usually count 11 p.m., like now, as actually being a time when there’s time), I forget all about whatever I wanted to say. Harrumph.

So I’ll do my best with what I can scrounge up in the recesses of my mind. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the concept of presence. I read that bestselling book, Eat, Pray, Love (and promptly sold it used today on Amazon - yippee!), and really got caught up in the Praying part. The spirituality she described was very palatable to me, and jibed with my own thoughts and feelings on religion. But, despite her lack of adherence to any one particular religion, she found a path to being more connected with God, or whatever life force dwells within us all. And much of it — as in the “Power of Now” book — is about just being there… being present in the moment.

You may remember, way back when, that I tried to do some “mindful” eating based upon this principle. I tried to concentrate on what I was actually doing, as I put each bite into my mouth, asking myself along the way whether I was still hungry. That actually worked amazingly well, except for the part about my being way more hooked on eating mindlessly than I realized. These days, I’m eating in the car on the way to work, eating in front of the computer for lunch, and reading or watching TV at dinnertime. It’s a bit insane, really, but it’s true. The good (?) thing that’s been happening to me lately is that I’m getting a bit of acid reflux when I eat too much (which is nearly always), so that is what’s keeping me from diving into the ice cream that’s currently in my refrigerator. (Note to online grocery delivery company: Since when did it make sense to substitute the full-fat-and-sugar version of ice cream when the requested low-fat version is out of stock?)

So, things are bad, but they are also good. I’m going camping this weekend (dragging along the kid) with some co-workers. Just planning for that has been very cool. I’m starting a new web project (shhh!) that I think will be very cool when I make some progress. And the hubby and I are talking a lot more down-and-dirty about where we want to live and when we want to move. I’ve even been giving away clothes to charity and selling books online, in preparation for a move, sort of. The most exciting thing? Two people actually commented on this blog. You ARE out there! You ARE reading! You are AWESOME!

One of the blogs I read for work has an interesting post about losing 20 lbs over the past year and what he’s learned. I’ve got a lot more than 20 lbs to lose, of course, but obviously the same lessons apply. I wonder how he’ll do over the next year…

That even “reduced fat” Grands biscuits (American-style biscuits… like scones) have 170 calories and 6 grams of fat per-biscuit? My next question? What are the regular biscuits like? Well, at least they don’t cop out by saying a serving is 1/2 a biscuit I knew I hated these biscuits… or, uh, liked them way too much.

Of everything I’ve read about this study, PastaQueen’s post today makes the most sense to me. No, fat isn’t contagious, but the ways of thinking (and behaving) that make you fat probably are. There was a time in my life, in college, when I rented a house with two overweight roommates (and a ferret, but that’s another story all together…).

Likely because we shared the same way of thinking, we thought nothing of ordering 2 large pizzas for the three of us, and polishing them off in one sitting. At the height of it all, I remember having a great fondness for ordering “bread sticks” — i.e. a sauceless pizza cut into strips — which we dipped into ranch dressing. (Now, the image evokes in me equal parts of fondness and nausea.)

So, I’m not looking to be judged for how I look or what I eat, and I certainly don’t want people avoiding me because I’m fat, but if I can put myself into situations where more “normal” thinking prevails, that will probably help me avoid fat-perpetuating behaviors. To be in an environment where my delicious fresh-tomato salad inspires delight, rather than dismissal. That’s the kind of world I need to create and inhabit. (Not only for me. For my kid, too. And other “fat” people are welcome.)