Watching Our Weight Diaries
By Carol Gorelick and Kathleen Daelemans

Carol, June 2007
A Turn Around?
Good news! I am back on track.  I even managed to loose a pound and a half on the "International Bakery Tour" in New York City.  Will wonders never cease?!  My sister Kathleen and I walked all over that city.  I hear they have fantastic public transportation in that town but you wouldn't have known it from our trip.  If the place we needed to go was on Manhattan why not walk, was Kathleen's philosophy.  If there were bags to be carried back, "Don't worry, you can handle it!"  "Maybe we'll take a cab if we get tired or end up having to carry too many things."  "What?  Why take a cab now?  We're only 10 blocks from the hotel!" 

She was relentless but there always seems to be a method to her madness and it usually relates to retail, travel or food not necessarily in that order. If you walk you see so much more of the city. Cab it and you drive by all the great places to eat. Hoof it and you get to stop in. There are bakeries for every ethnicity you can think of in the city and we visited every one we came across but first, we stopped at the Farmers Market near our hotel.  They had local bakeries with everything from dark chocolate brownies to stacks upon stacks of cookies. It was like Willy Wonka and the Baked Goods Factory. The only thing missing were the heavenly scents drifting about actual bakeries.

Not to worry, our second stop was at a French bakery a little further down.  They had Pan au Chocolate, Palmiers, all sorts of tarts, as well as Organic Venezuelan Dark Chocolate Brownies to die for.  More goodies than we could try in our lifetime. Best of all the entire shop smelled of baking butter goods.  It got in your pores.  It wrapped around you like a blanket and made everything good.  Schedule a meeting with a potential client at this place and I guarantee you will get the account.  Who can't be happy and agreeable with all that real butter in the air.   Luckily for me, many of the items came in petite sized so I could try a few without going up a few sizes myself.

After that it was a Belgian bakery, a Chinese bakery in China town and of course, an Italian bakery in Little Italy.  In between I think we also passed Japanese, Korean, Jewish, Polish, Russian and an entire United Nations of bakeries!  What a great way to get to know the world.

Still with all of the walking we managed to balance things out and actually come out ahead.  We both dropped a few pounds and gained a renewed appreciation for local bakeries. (This is Kathleen speaking. I edit Carol's pieces because we're a Mom, sister, sister, sister, Paul, Pop operation. For the record, I never lost my appreciation for local bakeries. The end.)

But what have you done lately?
I've been busy with the end of the school year and wrapping up all of the kids activities so I have been very bad about adding my 2 cents to the Watching Our Weight Diaries but rest assured I've been doing the work. My first week back on the wagon was the best.  I found a new walking partner and managed to walk 3 pounds off. 

My old walking partner moved 30 minutes away.  This makes it very difficult to get together and walk every night after dinner.  Somehow we still manage to make time to get together and go out for cocktails or wine and cheese but that's another story.

I've found that it's vital to my weight lose success to have a good walking partner.  It's also very beneficial in other ways.  Both of us are more motivated to get out there and get walking if someone else is counting on us and both of us get free therapy while we walk.  What could be better? 
My new walking partner has children around the same age as mine so we have a lot in common to gripe about.  Our husbands have learned the trade off for having to put the kids to bed on their own like we do most of the time without complaining is they have wives who are more fit, more relaxed and generally better adjusted.  We go for about an hour sometime in between dinner and bedtime. 

Before school got out we had to juggle dinner, homework, after school activities and bedtime.  All that made it harder to get together but it helps that we live 3 houses away and can just run out on a moments notice.  Now with the new ever-changing summer schedule of two children, a husband with a new job (not to mention anything I might schedule for myself. Ha!) it will be a different but not necessarily bigger challenge to get walking in.

It has been a slow but steady decline on the scale since I got started again.  I need to get a good jump start but I am happy that at least I'm headed in the right direction.  Who knows?  Maybe with all of the free therapy with Betsy, my new walking partner, I will get the kick in the pants I need!

Kathleen, June 2007
The great thing about having a spinal cord injury is you that can't exercise after procedures. Doctor's orders. There are lots of bad things that go with having spinal cord injuries but the beauty of one of the atrocious behaviors that led me to stretch pants and size 22's is that I ate like a mother hog preparing to give birth to the world's largest litter but if you asked me what I had to eat on any given day I'd say "hardly anything." Can you say denial?

I'm usually on some sort of medication after these procedures so I blame everything out of the ordinary on the medication. Depression, ice cream cravings, insomnia, ice cream cravings, missed deadline syndrome, ice cream cravings, lethargy, ice cream cravings, scale wandering in the wrong direction, ice cream cravings. All drug side effects. All out of my hands. Denial. I was losing weight at a healthy pace. Now I'm stuck. It's the medication. I swear. Denial, denial, denial.

Denial can work for or against you. I'm denying the sadness I feel at not being able to "play outside like the other kids" because really is that anything to be sad about in the first place? And I'm denying myself the liberty of quitting and giving up. I've been dealing with this spinal chord injury for over a year. A year of pain, procedures, physical therapy and medications. I'm quite sure there's no blood running through my veins anymore. It's Three Mile Island gravy. It's a constant battle to not give in to being depressed about it and eating myself out of house, grocery store and home. Selfish I know.

My sister and her husband are going to Lake Tahoe next week on all expense paid trip. Carol needed a bathing suit and Nordstrom's was having its Half-Yearly sale. We haven't missed that sale since we were old enough to pronounce Nordstrom's so as usual we were there when the store opened. When we were tired of looking at everything we couldn't afford and picking up the necessities we couldn't live without we threw back a flask each of vodka and went to the bathing suit department to look at the suits.

Are you kidding? You don't believe we walk around with flasks of warm vodka do you? But it was funny wasn't it?

Once we got over the shock of how much more Nordstrom's bathing suits cost than the ones at Costco (like ten times more) we tried to narrow the search. As soon as we saw the Miracle Suits we ignored the rest of the offerings and grabbed all the Miracle Suits that didn't plunge down to her navel.

A Miracle Suit "guarantees it will make you look ten pounds thinner." There's another brand of suit that guarantees to make you look seven pounds thinner. "If I wear them at the same time does it mean I'll look 17 pounds thinner?" "Of course" I said matter of fact. "Wear a Spanx Slim Cognito Seamless Bodysuit too and the paparazzi will stalk you. You'll get the best chaise lounge at the pool, warm tortilla chips and real margarita glasses. No plastic cups for Catherine Zeta Jones. People will demand your autograph. Miss Jones, Miss Jones, I loved you in Chicago. Will you sign my cocktail napkin?  You'll have to do something about Marc. He doesn't look like Michael Douglas. Tell everyone he's your gay.

Since Carol was brave enough to try on Miracle Suits and since I had lost some weight I decided I should try some on too. After all in my mind I had the body of Sharon Stone. Denial. I slipped on a suit. And witnessed the second coming of a second pair of hips. Some would call that a miracle. I do not! I had new hips sticking out from the sides of the bathing on top of my old hips. All these years I thought they were barren. Unable to give birth to more fat. It looked like a mother Panda giving her baby panda a piggy back ride.

Long story short I'm suing the Miracle Suit sewers for 54 million dollars for false advertising. Not only did I not look ten pounds thinner they failed to live up to their advertised claim of "satisfaction guaranteed." I don't know anyone who would be satisfied birthing twin hip-ohs in a dressing room.

My trip to Nordstrom's did nothing for my psyche. You'd think seeing the twins would motivate me to stay on track and work harder. To work more focused and put more effort into eating right and exercising but my first instinct was to head for the ice cream store on the way home. It's hot. I love ice cream. I could eat it all three meals in the summer.

I got home and grabbed the mail before I went into the house and sorted it over the recycling bin in the garage. An appropriate place to read yet another rejection letter from yet another Publisher. I'd just finished reading a lovely stack of rejection letters from some of the leading editors in New York sent to me by my agent the day before.

The letters were the nicest rejections I've received. "Deeply moving", "Hilarious", "Lovely", "Touching." But they're still rejection letters. Which means the editors are very polite and have a lot of respect for my book agent. She's the one who does the actual pitching of the books so the letters aren't even addressed to me. They're just about me.

The letters were so nice I'm sending them out to all my ex-boyfriends with initial and sign here stickers and self addressed stamped envelopes. It's never too late to learn how to let a girl down easy.

Panda fat and New York size rejections and the Black American Express card ice cream store charge card equivalent will arrive via fed ex before you can say Hot Fudge Sundae. Hurry. And make it a double.

But instead of binging on dark chocolate chocolate chip coconut almond hot fudge sundaes (plural wasn't a typo) I'm pouring all my passion, rage, energy and hunger into the book proposal I'm re-writing for the twelfth time. I know it will be a best seller and a movie. You know when just know something deep down in your heart? I just know this. And I'm not giving up. On the proposal. Or myself.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to starve the twins. Not in an unhealthy way mind you. They just won't get their preferred food of choice; chocolate dipped vanilla cones from DQ.