The Female has Officially Lost it.

Dear humans,

Do you see this can?

The female walked over a mile for this can. “If I exercise for 20 minutes, I can have a v8!” she exclaimed. With much excitement. This can, this thing filled with vegetables, somehow has raised itself up to be the equivalent of catnip or something.

She has 48 bribes of these cans, 1 of which she has earned. She walked over a mile for a can of dead vegetables preserved in salt.

Humans are strange.

The female has talked a lot about health, disabilities, and mental illness lately. This is continuing that trend, but oddly.

For Valentine’s Day, the male purchased the female a iWatch Series 6. She immediately named it Wrist Satan. (Satin if you prefer. She’s been going with Satan because she does NOT like the torturer all that much right now. It hurts, so he doesn’t get nice playful Satin. He is Satan, and he makes it hurt. Ouch. Poor female.)

We are questioning why the male got the female a torture implement for Valentine’s Day. We’re also questioning why the female was so happy to receive a torture implement.

Humans! Could they do something normally for once? Like pet our bellies exactly two and a half times?

So, the female has been struggling a lot lately. Walking and eating have been two major struggles. The female just doesn’t feel hungry much, so she wasn’t eating. This meant her body was inflicted with starvation mode. If she looked at food, it was stored as fat her body would have something to burn later. So the days she ate normally, she turned it all to fat.

Yeah. Starvation mode sucks. Not recommended.

For most, red is bad, but red is good for the female, who struggles to get near the tiny little orange line that says “this is the number of calories you need to lose approximately a quarter of a pound of fat a day, without exercise.” (It will move the marker if you exercise and calculate the calories you need to add to stay on target and not accidentally bounce back into starvation mode.)

The app is called Lose It! and it’s basically been a lifesaver for the female.

Wrist Satan plugs into Lose It! to make sure the female is on track. If she exercises, it often grants her extra budget. Which, honestly, is a problem when you’re already struggling to reach budget.

The female came up with a solution.

Twenty minutes of exercise equals a can of v8. (This was after being successfully taunted by spouse into walking for 20 minutes for v8; see her commentary below.)

(We would like to report an attempted murder… several attempted murders. First, the male making the female walk at his pace for 20 minutes, then Wrist Satan bullying her into doing another 20 minutes today! It literally prompted her to check her rings, and that she could do it! And she fell for it. Weak female.)

Here is her walk for today. It hurt. A lot.

The v8 is 60 calories. The walking is 105 active calories, so she will have to deal with 45 calories elsewhere somehow. Whatever.

Health problems suck, and fixing the health problems is a lot of fucking work. But seriously, if you want to follow along with her health improvement struggles, you can follow her personal profile on facebook here. Just don’t be a dick, because her reaction to being a dick is to block on both personal profile and her page, because she does not have the mental energy to deal with bullshit. So, if you can’t keep it civil or resist name calling because you disagree, we recommend just remaining quiet. (And if that comes to the blog to, the female will try to figure out how to issue server bans, even if it means asking the programmer male for help.)

In other words, please don’t push that button. Nobody will be happy with the results.

This is what the female posted on her personal facebook profile on this subject yesterday:

It has been 31 days since I started eating healthier.

I have permanently shed 7 pounds. I am set for a calorie budget of losing a quarter pound a week. I need to get healthy and fed properly before I try to even THINK about cutting an extra hundred or so calories from my day.

7 pounds lost, just because I ate more. Not better. Not healthier. Just more. Like, I am struggling to hit my budget of 1,853 calories per day. I REALLY want to be on budget or slightly over. (Slightly over is better because I’ve been starved for so long.)

It was an accidental starvation, but my body was in starvation mode all of the same. As such, when I ate, I HOARDED fat. All of the fat, it must cling to my bones! Thus, weight gain. Body is storing reserves for those days when I didn’t give it enough. Which was most days. So on the days I DID eat enough, it all became fat.It took about a week for my body to realize it was being consistently fed and decide it was time to start burning those reserves and NOT pillaging fat.

I’m struggling with this. Honestly, I’m still further below the calorie budget than I would like to be. I bought two huge cases of V8 to help with this, and I have little smoothie packs to help as well.

So, what has 31 days of eating the proper amount changed?

1: My fatigue levels are significantly better. It took 2-3 weeks, but the fatigue levels are much improved. I hardly have any temptation to nap anymore. This is a big deal, since before I made this change, I wanted to nap All The Fucking Time. (I didn’t, but I wanted to.)

2: It hasn’t done fucking jack shit for my pain levels. If anything, because I’m exercising, they’re worse. (And don’t you even think of daring to come here and tell me it will get better, because that’s not how chronic pain works. I’m doing the exercise because I need to to try to be healthier, not because it will help my pain or anxiety. It doesn’t, and it has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever doing so. So, keep your opinions to yourself on this one.)

3: My pants fit better. The seven pounds permanently lost has been a bit of a yo-yo because while the fat is dropping like fucking MAD, I’m building muscle like what the fuck at the same time.

I’m down 6.4% body fat since I first started. I was at 45.7% with my first weigh-in a month ago. I am now at 39.3 percent.

My muscle mass was at 91.4 pounds, and now I am at 99 pounds of muscle mass.

My body water percentage is up by 4.8% as well, which also brings weight to the table.

But the big deal is, I have lost a LOT of fucking fat. A LOT of fat. I feel it in my clothes, I feel it in how much my knees are working (though the pain STILL sucks, it is a difference in the weight bearing I can legitimately feel, especially when going up steps, when every pound matters.

My lean body mass is up almost 8 pounds. My bone mass has also increased by almost half a pound.

I have lost 7 pounds of actual weight.

Just from eating the appropriate amount of food a day and limping for 10-15 minutes a day.

Apps used: Lose It! and Wyze (my weight scale. My scale can be a temperamental little twat sometimes, so I take 2-5 readings in a row, and when the scale consistently reports the same reading, I use one that matches the rest consistently. I almost always discard the first reading since the scale seems to have to wake up LOL. I understand you, scale! I have to wake up, too, and it’s haaarrd.)

Gimmicks are just that. Gimmicks. You need to be eating an appropriate amount of food a day for you. Losing slowly is frustrating, but it’s much healthier for you in the longterm.

It can be done. Just take your time, be persistent, and try to make your body feel less like garbage. I mean, I’m never going to feel better, but I will take less like garbage whenever I can.

Under by only 694 (for the week) is a huge accomplishment for me. Ideally, I will be within 50 calories of my daily budget (Under) and call it a day. 50 calories under is a safe and comfortable place and won’t trigger me going back into starvation mode.

My metrics make it pretty clear eating the right amount is HUGELY important… and I’m sure that 10-15 minutes of brutal walking a day is helping, too.

Though today, Wrist Satan and The Spouse colluding to make me walk for over twenty… RUDE. So rude.

And daring to use V8 to make it happen… double rude!

And that is all the female wrote on her facebook on this subject. Perhaps it will be useful for somebody out there who is also struggling with trying to get healthy (when struggling to get healthy is just generally a losing proposition.)

In other news…

The kobo transition is underway. It should be completed this week. No, the Kobo stuff has NO influence on any other vendor. It is moving royalty earnings from a third-party distributor to directly working with Kobo.

No one is coming for your kindle editions of my books, and as evidenced by my latest preorders, they’re still available over at Amazon. (Seriously… if you don’t use Kobo, this has nothing to do with your general reading experience.)

Reviews, purchasing, etc might be down for a day or two while everything gets merged. And there might be a few minutes where there are two versions of the same book online. Which can be confusing, so we recommend if you’re looking to buy, wait for the merge to be done around Thursday or so.

We’re sorry for the temporary disruption, but it’s much better for the female’s sanity to make this change.

Beyond that, life goes on. Nothing has changed in terms of book releases, meaning Unawakened will be the next release in late April.

Happy reading, folks!