I'm Back!

So this post is going to ramble on past just losing weight.

Well, it has been a looooong time since I posted. I just got busy so I started eating more (and badly) and exercised less. That led to me not wanting to look at the scale on a weekly basis. I had to miss one Weight Watchers meeting to go into lab and then it snowballed from there to me not even caring about what I put in my mouth. I weighed in over Christmas but I did not weigh in again until last Saturday. The problem with me is (and will always be) is that I am really incredibly busy. I usually have too much work to do and not enough hours in the day to do it so I continue to fall behind a little more and more each day before I start giving up things. Some of these things include putting off laundry until I have about 5 or 6 loads and only have my laundry day clothes, leaving my room in a general state of disarray (the same goes for the rest of the house), any exercise at all, any semblance of a social life, sleep, and concentrating on changing my eating habits.

Every time this happens, I see some bright point in the future when I won't be this busy and I tell myself it will be easy enough to put things off until I have more time. I keep telling myself that I just have to get through the next couple of months and then things won't be so crazy and I can focus on losing weight again. The even bigger problem is that time usually never comes. I have been telling myself these things since last October and I came to the realization that I am going to be insanely busy for probably the next 5-7 years of my life. Working in a research lab requires a huge time commitment and usually unorthodox hours and a constantly changing schedule. What I need to do is to stop letting work overrun my life and put me off of the things I need to do to keep myself physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy. The silly thing is that I make my own schedule pretty much. The thing is I have deadlines for completion of experiments and there are only so many hours in a day, and so many days in a week, and yada yada yada.

My big problem is in saying no. If my advisor asks if I can do something I will almost always say yes. The same goes for other lab members. I also have found myself in charge of the graduate student group (who, coincidentally have not had any activities this semester, I wonder why), organizer of a graduate student journal club, and secretary of our local chapter of Society for Neuroscience (which is also doing a book club that I will be attending). In fact I often am volunteering to do these things because I really want to be involved in them and some of them are good for my career but I need to learn how to say no. We had a visiting speaker at school recently and we were talking about high incidence of poor memory among researchers (and in my opinion, especially among those that study memory) and she was saying that she thinks it is because researchers always have too many things going on because they cannot say no.

So, I will still be overworked until May and probably through the summer (and in this instance is completely unavoidable if I want to finish grad school in 5 years) but instead of putting everything else off, I am going to make a bigger effort to make more time for myself and scale down the things that can be scaled down. I am getting better about delegating tasks in lab and I have a little army of undergrads so it should be a little easier to scale things down. So I am going to stop using the "I am too busy" excuse and just learn how to deal with it all. The career path I have chosen means I will always have a lot of work to do. Even when I finally enter into the so-called "armchair science" when I do not actually have to complete the research myself, I will still be busy with all of the other responsibilities of a faculty member. So, I need to learn how to achieve some sort of harmony in my life now because the work factor is not really going to change. It will be hard and kind of baby stepped but I am really going to try. This is something I need to do not only for my weight but also because when I get this busy I get really unhappy. I find that I start complaining A TON and if you don't believe me, just ask Maria (sorry for all the complaining lately). I also tend to get downright bitchy, depressed, and am generally not a very fun person to be around. I do not like the person that I am when I am like this. I need some positive in my life and some happy so that I can be a happier person, even when overstressed.

So, without further ado, onto the actual weight part of this entry. When I weighed in last Saturday, I was:

285.4 lbs

Sadly, that is +15.6 lbs from the previous time I had weighed in at the Plano Weight Watchers last October and about 3 lbs more than when I first started Weight Watchers. When I weighed in during Christmas break in California I was 274.8 lbs, which is actually not that bad. I really just went into a deep slide downward when I got back to Dallas. So, we will see how next Saturday turns out. I have been keeping up with tracking my points but I am still finding it a little bit difficult to get in the exercise time. I am trying to find a few more fun ways that I can do some exercise at home at any time of the day. I have a feeling that getting to the gym regularly is not going to happen right away. However, I am going skiing with some friends for Spring Break in March and I want to try and get in a little bit of shape for that. I am going to take an entire week off of work and it will be glorious. Anways, my goal for the rest of this week is to try and go to the gym at least 1 day before Saturday and to make my Mii just a little bit skinnier. I have a Wii Fit now so I am going to use that for some of those days when I really do not want to go to the gym and want something a little more fun. It will also be nice to get to the point where it does not try to guilt trip me for not using it more often :)

So I will report back on Saturday as to my success (or limited failure) and I will also post my new measurements. I was going to do that today but I could not find my measuring tape. So, that is it for now. Wow, I really have a propensity for long-windedness. I think it is because I feel like I spend more time with rats than people lately. If you are reading this part, thank you for sticking with me through all of this and I promise not to ramble so much in the future.