abbeysaucesome

[abbeysaucesome]

Now that I’ve cleared my head a little, I’d like to give everyone a little update about my life, or rather, I’d like to update everyone who still reads my brain vomit.

I am 25 now. As I mentioned, I am in a serious relationship with a man I have known for years. We were best friends before we were dating and it was a pretty easy transition. We will have been together for two years in September. Even though it’s generic to say this, I’m going to say it anyway: I can’t imagine my life without him. I was still living in Edinburgh with my sister and being a nanny to my nephews when he and I reconnected after not really talking much for a year or two. we started texting each other every day, then we started hanging out every once in awhile, then we started hanging out a few times a week. Everyone said we were dating, but we insisted we were just friends, because we were at that time. He was the only friend I still had in Indiana. Eventually, we started dating and pretty much from day one of our relationship, I started staying over. I would leave Edinburgh when my brother in law got home to drive to greenwood (about 30 mins) so I could have dinner with him when he got home from work and I would stay the night and then get up really early in the morning to drive back to Edinburgh to be there when my sister left for work. I did this for 3 months. I had also been working weekends and some week nights at Walgreens for awhile at this point because I needed the money. Eventually, I was given the opportunity to get full time hours so I made the tough decision to move back to Indy.

I say Indy, but really, the majority of my stuff was at my parents house in Indy, but I kept a lot of clothes and other things with Mike in Greenwood and that’s where I really lived. Mike’s lease was up in July so we were trying to figure out what we were going to do about that. Mike pretty much adopted my dog, Mozzy, and Mozzy was not allowed in his apartment as the complex was pet free. We had some stow away nights with him there, but it was too hard to be sneaky. My grandma used to live in the apartment that she had built onto our house, but she had passed away (then) two years previous. I talked to my mom and she agreed that if we fixed it up and cleaned it out (most of her possessions were still up there), that we could move in. Seemed simple enough except that my grandma was a heavy smoker for most of her life and everything was covered in nicotine. It was a very long process in each room to go through her things (which was very hard to do in and of itself because it still felt so fresh that she had died), then clean the walls with industrial cleaner/degreaser, then put 1-3 coats of stain blocker/odor blocker on each wall, then paint each wall. Not only did the walls need the stain/odor blocker, but the ceiling did as well. She had carpet in every room except the kitchen and the bathroom, so all of that had to be ripped up. The cabinets in the kitchen were particle board and a professional told us that those would have to go. We had to degrease EVERYTHING. There wasn’t a surface that didn’t have nicotine on it. Windows, oven, doors, light fixtures, baseboards, door frames, window frames, everything had to be cleaned. We got floor laid in both bedrooms, the hall, and the living room right before we moved out of the Greenwood apartment. The bathroom wasn’t usable, the kitchen barely was (we kept the bottom cabinets that held the sink because the cleaning would be 15 times harder if we had to go downstairs for the water every time), and our life was pretty much all in boxes except for the clothes and our bed and other furniture.

While all of this was happening, before we moved in, my other grandma was struggling, though previous to this we weren’t aware of how bad it was. My grandma had two mini strokes back in 2013. She has since become an expert at pretending she is more “there” than she actually is. It started off with small things. At the holiday get togethers, she would ask you to check her car a few times for something she thought she forgot. At christmas, she would check, double check, and triple check (sometimes more), that she had given everyone their gifts. She’s got a bleeding heart for people and this one family in particular kept trying to move in with her to take advantage. She kicked them out once, forgot about it, and then let them move back in. When my dad had to basically have them removed from her home, we finally realized that something wasn’t right. She drove herself to the hospital downtown once and then called us in a panic because she said she thought we were picking her up, but she really just didn’t remember driving downtown, so we had to go drive around until we found her car. Soon, the doctor revoked her driving rights, so my dad would make weekly grocery trips. Sometimes, she would hardly eat, sometimes she would eat a weeks worth of food in 3 days. Her, by herself, would suck down at least 3 gallons of milk a week. Eventually, I started helping him grocery shop and take care of her. Each time we went to her house, we started to notice a smell. She had two dogs and she let them potty in the house on puppy pads so at first, we just thought that was it. Then, both of her dogs passed away and the smell persisted and eventually got worse. Then we started noticing mouse poo in some places. So we moved her into my parents house to stay while we cleaned her house. THEN we realized how bad things actually were. She was maintaining on surface levels for so long and then she stopped doing that. Her house and nearly everything she owned was destroyed and we realized she couldn’t live alone anymore. So she has been living with us for over a year now. 

She moved it before Mike and I did so we were rehabbing our apartment while also cleaning out my grandma’s house. A couple months before she moved in, I stepped up into a managers position at work. After she moved in, paired with two houses that needed work, PLUS full time school, I decided that I had too much on my plate. For the first time in years, my school was paid for by financial aid so since I didn’t need to pay out of pocket for the last 2 full semesters, I decided to quit my job this past November. I entered into a period of laziness where I didn’t work on our apartment, in fact I didn’t really work on anything except for my grandma’s house from time to time and school. That’s when some weight came back because I stopped being active. 

When grandma first moved in, she insisted on doing the dishes, which everyone here loved because they were on a rotation with doing the dishes weekly between each other and no one liked it. Everything was fine at first, then she started to forget where things went. Then she started to accidentally reorganize the kitchen to the point where we couldn’t find anything. Then she started to forget to use soap. She stopped using a wash rag, so essentially she was taking cold water and her hand and just rinsing the plates off. Everything would still have food or drink on it. She also started feeding herself almost hourly because she wouldn’t remember eating and seemed incapable of noticing if she was hungry or not. She started to feed the dogs a few times a day because she didn’t know they already got fed in the morning by my dad and she couldn’t remember feeding them herself. We went through a lot of dog food really quickly and all the dogs got fat. We soon realized that she couldn’t be left alone. Being that I was the only one who could be home all day, I decided to spend the entire day with her all week instead of just periodically checking on her. It is really, REALLY hard. I have a lot of patience as a person, but she has tested that (to no fault of her own). I have the same 5 conversations with her 100 times a day. She’s still my grandma, but she’s also not the grandma I’ve known and it’s hard and it’s exhausting. She doesn’t have a concept of time. She still thinks it’s 2013. Sometimes, she doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t remember how bad her house was (the biggest mouse infestation I had ever seen) and blames us for how bad it got because she said they all moved in when we took her out of her house. She always asks what is going on with her house (that we have since finished cleaning out, cleaning up, and selling). It’s a moral dilemma to decide if it’s better to tell her the truth or to lie to her so she doesn’t get stuck in a loop of asking every 3 minutes. We told her the truth about her mini strokes and her dementia, and eventually that started to stick and she vaguely remembers, so we opt to tell the truth in the hopes that she will eventually remember. I graduate officially in a couple weeks and I’m getting ready to start applying to jobs. She can’t live with us when no one is here during the day to stay with her (this is mostly because she wants to use the stove and has turned it on and forgot about it at her own home enough times that it is a concern). My dad has been looking into getting her assistance so that she can get into an assisted living facility that can give her what she needs. We found a really nice place and she is on the waiting list, but we found another place that she can stay at while she waits to get in and we are waiting to hear back from that. It is a guilty feeling, for sure, to know that I can’t handle being her caretaker all day every day. I am just not equipped. She needs to be somewhere where she can be more active and have more independence (supervised, of course). This has been one of the hardest things I have ever gone through. She’s getting worse and we aren’t able to give her what she needs, but we also don’t want to see her go to a home, but it’s like our hands are tied. Some people have told me that it’s not right to put her in assisted living and that someone just needs to sit with her every day, but it’s just not possible. We all have bills. I am going to have huge student loan payments in six months that I will not be able to pay without a job. No one else is in a position to quit their job to be here with her every day. We cannot afford in house care. This is the option we are left with, so the only thing we can do is make sure that she is in a good place. The place we found is super clean, the people there look happy (both care takers and care givers), the food looks good, and there is a church (which is super important to her). They have activities and programs and much more to do. We have to get her into a program that will help pay for it because even the crappier homes are super expensive, let alone the nice ones. It’s not about putting her somewhere and forgetting about her, it’s about making sure that she gets the best care we can give her through what ever means it can be provided. I think it is easy to look at this from the outside and think that we look selfish, but until you know someone personally who has dealt with this or gone through it yourself, you don’t really get what it’s like. 

So there you have it. A condensed update of everything that has been going on in the last couple years.  

[abbeysaucesome]

It’s really fucking weird to be where I’m at right now. 

You always hear about people who think a great relationship will fix what’s broken in them. I’m sure that there are some people out there that this works for. I am in a great relationship with the man of my dreams and within that relationship, I am supremely happy. But I am not happy with me. He loves me for me, he doesn’t care what my outsides look like because he thinks all of me is beautiful, and I am completely myself with him. I believe him when he tells me these things, but I always question it. It doesn’t feel false, it’s just hard to reconcile my image of myself with how he sees me. 

I still get depressed. I still binge eat. I still have anxiety. 

I’m finally feeling secure in my relationship, something that I didn’t feel for a long time. Fear that he would leave me consumed me daily, but he reassured me every time I needed it and we finally got there. I’ve never been in such a serious relationship, but I get both what I want and what I need from him and he does from me as well and it’s great. It’s not like the movies though, where the relationship saves you from yourself. My struggles are still there, and they get bad from time to time, but I will say that it is a little easier to go through these issues with someone who loves and supports me no matter what, and more importantly, he understands.

So here I am. For the last few years, I’ve been on this journey with my weight and self-image. I lost about 35 pounds and then the weight stopped coming off. I started to reward myself. I kept most of it off for a long time, but old feelings started to creep in. I thought I kept them at bay. I started to insist on being body positive, and I still do. I think people are beautiful no matter what shape or size and the fact that the fashion industry is slowly but surely starting to make it ok for people who aren’t just thin is amazing. It’s weird to feel so strongly about letting people feel comfortable in their own skin, but to also not feel comfortable in my own.

I am now even heavier than my previous heaviest weight. The clothes I own don’t fit great anymore because they are clothes bought after I lost weight. So I have a closet of clothes that I cannot wear and I struggle to find things that I like in my size when I go to stores. My self-esteem is in the crapper. All the confidence I gained in myself is gone. I feel like a ghost. This, paired with a lot of struggles I’m having that DON’T involve my weight, has kept me in a very dark place for the past 6 months at least. I never thought I would be here again.

However, I have made it back here. It cannot be denied. I can’t wallow in it any longer. In fact, I refuse to. It’s not even so much the weight as it is how the weight makes me feel. My diet of constant over-indulgence just makes me feel sluggish and slow and disgusting on the inside. It’s like I can feel my insides slowly rotting. I don’t feel like this body belongs to me. I don’t think I need to be skinny to love myself or feel confident, but the way things are going, the way that I am eating and drinking, something needs to change. I just want to feel better. I need to find the balance again. 

The good thing about being where I’m at right now with my self-acceptance and self-love (or lack thereof) is that I’ve done it before. I felt like this years ago, constantly. This used to be the only feeling I’d ever known. This used to be the only way I knew how to be. Then I worked really hard and I achieved what I didn’t think was possible: I loved myself. I was happy with myself. I wasn’t skinny, but I didn’t care because I had the balance. I didn’t think that feeling was possible for someone like me when I originally started this journey. Now that I’m back at the bottom, I’m not as scared to fail because I KNOW I can do it because I’ve done it before. 

I’m tired of hiding in the house. I’m tired of avoiding public places. I am ready to start again and I’m going to give it as much patience as someone like me can muster. 

In typical Abbey fashion, I have rambled through this as the thoughts have come to my head, so this may not make a whole lot of sense. BASICALLY, I have realized that it’s up to me to fix me. I won’t believe my boyfriend completely when he says I’m beautiful or that he loves me regardless of what the scale says or what clothes I can wear until I believe it (again) for myself. My goal is not to meticulously track my progress on the scale, but to start recognizing that the grotesque being that stares back at me from the mirror is not who I am, but something that is just in my mind. I am a human and I deserve better from myself. I want to be healthy, inside and out. So I’m starting again. 

[abbeysaucesome]

Holy Moly

It has been quite the while. 

I don’t even know how long it’s been since I last posted. I find myself needing the outlet once more. I tried to do it without it. I did pretty well for awhile, then I started doing not so well. I’ve been on an upswing for the last year or so. I gained back all but 10 pounds of the weight I lost, but that’s nothing compared to the confidence and love for myself that I lost in the process. It’s not the number that bothers me, it’s the feeling. I don’t want to be there again. So I’m going to start the tumblr process up once more and try to get back to who I am.

[abbeysaucesome]

Back in the grind today! Last week, I didn't do much of anything. My doggy wasn't feeling well so I was looking into vet offices to get him checked out. Wasn't able to get an appointment until this past Saturday so the whole week was me sitting in anxious anticipation of the appointment. I had a mound of homework on top of that. I could have found time to exercise, but honestly, I just couldn't make myself do it. Gotta get more tests done on my dog, but it looks like he is more or less okay. Still got a long week of midterm studying and homework, but in making myself do this now. I can handle 30 mins a day. Still trying the insanity max 30 program. Sticking to the modifier track and taking more time to focus on my form seems to be helping my back. So I got that going for me at least!

[abbeysaucesome]

[abbeysaucesome]

I've not gone anywhere guys, I promise! I'm still here fighting the good fight and all that! I've just had a bad back lately which has prevented me from doing anything extraneous. I have a back injury from a year or so ago that seems to go away and then come back and it's been gone for awhile until I started insanity. I'm not sure if its related or not but I might be sending it back if its going to be something that agitates this injury because that's not really helping me either. decisions, decisions.

[abbeysaucesome]

Today was a challenging dvd. It didn't start that way but I had a tough time finishing. Lots of push up variations and lunges and burpees. I did the modifier and that makes it sound less challenging than it is. This picture doesn't do my sweatiness justice. I will be feeling this one tomorrow.

[abbeysaucesome]

Had a fitness buddy today in the form of my 4 year old nephew who wanted to exercise with me, which was weirdly motivational! Every time a hard move would come on I would want to quit and he would just say "come on abbey! Try it! Try it with me!" And who could say no to that? Still on the fence with the insanity program but I'm happy to be doing something at all. Need to get control of my food again though. I lost sight of my goals for a little bit but I'm fighting to get back on track.

[abbeysaucesome]

Guess who's back?

[abbeysaucesome]

Bad day. Didn't exercise. Didn't eat TERRIBLE but didn't eat GREAT either. grumpy. stressed. anxiety ridden. sad. 

bleh.

I'm going to go sleep this funk off.

Hope your guys' days were better.

[abbeysaucesome]

Why is exercise hair so beautiful? Upon completing the day two DVD, I'm not thinking I'll be doing another tonight. I was able to do most of the exercises thanks to the modifier. I'm feeling pretty noodley in the arm and leg department, so I'm not going to push my luck with doing too much at once. I'll just get back on track next week and cut out one of the rest days this week to make up for the day I missed. I can dig it so far!

[abbeysaucesome]

so after monday's exercise (I'm not sure that it's related though), my back started killing me and my right calf felt like I had a charlie horse in it in the middle of the night so I wasn't able to exercise yesterday as intended. Today, I'm thinking about doing yesterday's dvd when the boys take a nap and then today's dvd after dinner maybe. I don't want to push my luck though so we'll see. I don't feel like I did anything on Monday that could cause muscle strains, but it could also just be from poor form. Or my back could be because of my mattress because I could not get comfortable Monday night for multiple reasons, including, but not limited to, the fact that my sister's 90 lb dog likes to sleep in my bed with me. I probably got stuck in one position and as a result got stiff. I feel better today after sleeping with a heating pad on my back last night so we'll see how I feel after the first dvd. I want to do this the smart way!

Wish me luck! Hope everyone else is having a good Wednesday!

[abbeysaucesome]

Last night I made chicken avocado burgers, which are some of my favorite burgers ever. It may sound weird, but other than being totally tasty, the avocado serves as a good-for-you fat replacement in the chicken similar to the bad-for-you fat in beef. It's 1 pound ground chicken, 1 avocado chopped into smallish pieces, 1/2 cup of bread crumbs, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, and salt and pepper (all seasonings to taste). Throw the chopped avocado in a large bowl, add the bread crumbs and seasonings and shake around and mix gently until the avocado pieces are well coated. Add the chicken and mix with your hands then form into patties. Then throw them in the pan until done! I'm sure there's a better, healthier option for the bread crumbs, but I haven't experimented with anything yet. Depending on how big you like your burgers, this can make 4-6 burgers. They're pretty good by themselves, but you can dress them like a regular burger too! Just mind the cheese and sauces ;)

[abbeysaucesome]

Well folks I did the first round of Insanity Max 30. The exercises didn’t LOOK that difficult but they were. There were a few that I can’t do (YET) that I’m gonna have to practice. There is no stopping to explain how to do a move. There is no teaching or hand holding. You get in and get it done! Being my first time, I spent more time trying to figure out the moves than actually doing them, so I’m not nearly as sweaty as I hoped I would be, but what I was able to do totally winded me, hence the facial expression. This has also opened my eyes up to just how uncoordinated I am. But, I’m going to get better! Even the people on the DVD had to take breaks and that makes this whole thing feel more approachable. As the week goes on, I’ll see how I feel about it. Hopefully tomorrow’s installment will be a little better.

[abbeysaucesome]

It's here *gulp*. The plan starts on Monday and I'm super excited and also quite terrified because I have no idea what I got myself into. Worth a shot though, right? Also, I have fallen back into old "up too late" habits. Time to get that shit under control again. I gotta get better about posting more too. I know I don't have a very large audience here, but even if only one or two people read the things I post, it makes me feel accountable. I need some accountability. So to whomever actually reads this, thank you! You are helping me more than you know!

[abbeysaucesome]

Friendly reminder that I needed to see.

You don't have to justify your body.

If you’re thin, you don’t have to say ‘but I eat all the time!’/’I have a fast metabolism!’

If you’re fat, you don’t have to say ‘it’s genetic!’/’I’m trying to lose weight!’

You don’t need to explain to anybody why your body is the way it is. Your body is YOUR body, and that’s all the justification you need.

[abbeysaucesome]

So fitness buddies, I made a big decision today.

I bought Insanity Max 30. Should be here by Friday!

My thought is to go at this as an all or nothing kind of deal. I know some people who have done Insanity and for them, it has lead to a healthier lifestyle that they have continued on their own when the program is over. I'm almost always 100% against spending large amounts of money on commercial exercise products, but I need some guidance and some structure with the whole exercise thing and there aren't gyms around here in the middle of nowhere. So I'll give it a go. I like the idea of a 30 day money back guarantee. So this is a trial period and as with everything else, I'm gonna post about it all as I go! I'm hoping that this will be a door that I can open that will lead me to liking exercise. 

I'm still gonna continue with what I've been doing until it gets here! No breaks for me!

Hope everyone is having a good start to the week!