I wish I’d quit buying from Amazon for ethical reasons, but really it was because the service turned to crap—yet one more victim of platform decay. However, it did become a whole lot easier to keep my promise over the past year when Amazon and its founder did one crappy thing after another. (Censorship! Excess! Digital repossession! ) I know it’s a bit ridiculous to celebrate NOT shopping somewhere—particularly since I was just consuming the same products elsewhere and I’m old enough to have survived an era where online shopping didn’t even exist—but it was painful at first, so I’m proud I followed through even though no one was watching me (except for my Amazon Echo, which I still use to play music and run kitchen timers and get the weather, but never to buy things!)

Not everything gets better with age

I used to adore Amazon. I had a rewards card that let me use points directly in the checkout cart and I only did surveys for my health insurance company because they paid me in Amazon gift cards that let me buy pretty much anything. I’d made my first purchase on May 14, 1999 (a VHS copy of Clerks) and as Amazon stocked more and more things over the years, I simply thought of it as the store. If I needed to get something from the store, I got it on Amazon. In my cart you might find shampoo, print cartridges, batteries, a kitchen rack, hand sanitizer, an iPad case, another iPad case I returned because the back cover felt weird, blu-rays, books, bookbinding materials, and more.

But in the mid-2020’s I noticed that more and more products were coming from mysterious third-party sellers who didn’t reveal much on their account pages as opposed to the usual small businesses looking for online customers who had their own web sites and social media. Dropshippers had become a growing presence on the platform, as had popup sellers who tried selling me sketchy goods before vanishing in the middle of the night. If you looked at those sellers’ pages, they’d be selling a weird variety of items: everything from hot sauce to training bras. Amazon was feeling less like a store and more like a parking lot where you could sell stuff off the back of your pickup truck. So, when I had three bad purchases in the course of three months, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

In June 2024, I ordered a ream of paper and received a counterfeit product whose serial numbers and name didn’t produce a single Google result. (If something doesn’t return a Google result, it doesn’t actually exist!) After I got my refund, I noticed the third-party seller had a dozen bad reviews that were crossed out with a note that Amazon had shipped the order and took responsibility for the poor experience. None of these orders had affected their overall rating, which gave them a deceptively high score. Shady! Then in August 2024, I ordered a brand new blood pressure monitor and received this:

The UPS sticker was particularly perplexing because the package had been delivered by an Amazon truck instead of a man in brown shorts. I’m fairly certain that Kevin C. from the lower east side of New York couldn’t be bothered to repackage his return, so he just slapped the UPS shipping labels directly on the product and sent it off into the world. (I have the man’s full name and address, so I suppose I could ask him myself.) I can’t say why it was resold like this—maybe the returns processor had a quota to meet? I know that returned merchandise is a serious problem for online businesses, but you shouldn’t be charging your customers full price for an item that was so obviously pre-owned, and I can’t trust an opened medical device to be accurate, so I exchanged it for a new version.

A few days later, I ordered a larger cuff to make it easier to get a reading and when it arrived—can you guess?—it had also been opened! Not only that, it was missing the adaptors, so you couldn’t plug the rubber hose into the machine.

That was my breaking point: August 24, 2024. Thank you, Kevin C., you lazy son of a bitch. You helped me end my toxic retail habits. I was done with Amazon.

Is abandoning deals such a big deal?

Okay, big whoop. A lot of people have never shopped at Amazon, and I obviously didn’t abandon capitalism or start an upcycling movement or vow not to buy anything from anyone for a year. So what’s the big deal?

Well, it meant admitting that I should have stopped shopping at Amazon years ago—because I definitely knew better. I’d heard that their workers got injured a lot, and that Amazon was accused of copying their sellers’ most popular items and undercutting them at a lower price, and that the company made a thirty-minute, animated, union busting video (probably so no one would have to show their face). But I’d looked the other way because that made my life easier.

I like to believe I’m a good person, but if you don’t act on your beliefs, they’re not really your beliefs, they’re your aspirations. I believe in unions and support worker’s rights, but I kept shopping at Amazon despite their awful business practices, so my actions didn’t really align with my self-image. When companies become more and more evil over time, it can be difficult to identify the tipping point at which you should abandon them, but mine should have come sooner. I’m sorry that I only quit because of crappy service and not because of the ways Amazon makes the world crappier, and I’m embarrassed that I sold out for something as cheap as free two-day shipping.

I know that one person’s shopping habits aren’t going to change the world, so I haven’t deluded myself into thinking I’ve altered the course of human history here. However, everything that’s happened in my country over the past ten years has made me reflect on who I want to be and what my actions say about me and how there’s sometimes a bigger gap between the two than I’d like. If quitting Amazon helps close that gap somewhat, the experience might give me the confidence to close it more in the future. Doing good things becomes a habit.

Harder, better, (not) faster, longer

In the past, I’d turn to Amazon if I couldn’t find an item locally (bookbinding supplies) or I didn’t know which local stores might stock it (my favorite shampoo). I’d also whip out that rewards card if Amazon had a better price or my local seller was more than fifteen minutes away.

It was kind of a pain to change my ways, but the inconveniences I encountered were annoying at best, particularly when compared to other dilemmas in my life. (Unrelenting chronic pain! Late stage capitalism! A world on fire!) So, I started buying more items locally even if it meant driving across town to pick something up, but when I had to buy online I faced some minor challenges.

1) Finding a reputable retailer required research and time

I wanted to avoid dropshippers and cheap Chinese crap, so Temu and Alibaba and Walmart.com were out. When I searched Google for stores, it would dangle recommended Amazon items at the top of my results like a tasty treat before I scrolled away to find an online retailer who wasn’t a scammer. I looked for small businesses or reputable chain stores, preferably in the US or Canada so shipping wouldn’t take ages. Ideally, I wanted one run by people who had at least a smidge of interest in their craft and weren’t solely in it to make money. (Private equity can piss off.)

A lot of these businesses had crappy web sites, so it was hard to tell if they were fly-by-night operations or places so old that they’d barely noticed the internet existed. Was it bad that they’d neglected their web presence or good that they’d been online since the late twentieth century? I would browse the “About” page for a founding story, peruse Google reviews from people who didn’t seem like shills, and use Google Maps to confirm that these places actually existed. I didn’t do a deep dive on anyone’s labor practices or investigate their supply chain, so hopefully I wasn’t supporting any inhumane treatment, but ultimately I had to accept that in a global world there are limits to what an average person can find out.

Once I’d compared prices and made a decision, I’d cross my fingers and hope my credit card company didn’t call me the next day about an identity thief who’d gone on a spending spree in Dubai.

Sometimes this process took ten minutes. Sometimes it took an hour. It depended on how psycho I got with my research and how hard an item was to find. Buying shampoo directly from the manufacturer was easy. Finding a good price on linen bookbinding tapes was hard.

2) Figuring out the checkout process was a game

The best thing about Amazon that I never appreciated was the predictable checkout experience. No matter what I was buying, no matter who the seller was, I clicked through the same screens to complete my purchase. All the listings had the same layout. My shipping and billing info was filled in. The receipt gave me an estimated delivery date. Buying from Amazon was easy and quick. Buying elsewhere required more attention.

Other sites usually required me to set up an account. Then I had to check my email to confirm that account. Then I had to poke around for the spot to enter my coupon code because most places give you a discount on your first order and I’m a Midwestern woman who never lets a deal slip by. The retailer would subscribe me to their email newsletter without permission, so I’d have to unsubscribe from that the next day. I learned to read the fine print on the checkout page after I realized I could have gotten free shipping if I’d spent four more dollars on ribbons. Every purchase was a game with new rules.

3) I paid equal or slightly higher prices

Overall, things usually cost the same or slightly higher than they did on Amazon. (I actually got print cartridges cheaper at Staples because they gave me 30% back in rewards, something I’d never paid attention to before because I’d defaulted to buying stuff on Amazon.) The shipping fees were the hardest thing to swallow, but I had to remind myself that a psychological trick was at play there because…

4) I had to pay shipping per purchase instead of annually

Amazon Prime is masterful at fooling you into thinking shipping is free because they charge a single annual purchase like a punch in the gut instead of jabbing you over and over again across multiple purchases. In reality, the shipping per purchase on Amazon costs $139 divided by how many purchases you make that year. In 2023, I made 19 purchases, which means I paid $7.72 per shipment. In 2022, I made 23 purchases, which averages to $6.04 per order. That wasn’t much different from what I paid for shipping on other sites. Whenever I got depressed about a $12 shipping fee, I reminded myself that between 2014 to 2024 I’d spent a total of $1307.48 on Prime. That’s a lot of bubble wrap!

5) I had to wait longer for an order to arrive

No one shipped my packages in two days like Amazon Prime did, but at least I didn’t have to feel guilty about sending a worker scurrying across a warehouse without a bathroom break because they were struggling to meet productivity goals. When I’d still been using Amazon, I’d often wished there was a shipping option that said, “It’s fine to take an extra day if you’ll just let Veronica pee.”

I never needed anything urgently, so I didn’t mind if it took a week or more for a package to arrive. One of the best parts about Christmas is enjoying the anticipation of opening your presents, so I tried to look at my shipments this way—wonderful gifts that I could look forward to receiving.

I also understood that part of the reason my packages were slow to arrive is because the new Indianapolis regional sorting facility is a black hole. Packages enter that building and go missing for weeks at a time—sometimes months. I ordered Christmas stamps directly from the post office last year and even those went missing for fifteen days. The postal service can’t deliver its own mail!

Other stores weren’t always perfect

Most of my purchases went fine, but there were a few bad encounters.

It’s brick and mortar to crush you better

I’d been trying to buy more everyday items at brick and mortar stores, figuring it would keep people employed and keep money in the community. I also thought it would be cheaper because I wasn’t paying for shipping. WRONG!

After buying a ream of paper at Staples—(It’s weird that I go there so often and buy so much paper, I know. One of the checkout ladies got worried when I didn’t come in for a few months.)—I started to wonder if the multi-purpose paper would have been a better choice than the copy paper, so I looked up the description online and practically gasped when the ream was listed fifteen dollars cheaper—almost 50% of the purchase price! Shame on you, Staples! The rewards I get on print cartridges do not excuse this bilking! I went back to the store and got refunded the difference, but only because I’d lucked into discovering their price gouging.

This was a reminder that companies that reward you are just as happy to rip you off. Amazon didn’t invent evil corporate tactics; they just perfected them. After that, I got more diligent about comparing in-store prices to online ones. That’s how I learned that Michael’s will give you better discounts if you buy online and pick up in store. It feels wrong to make the employees run around the building fetching me things—like Amazon factory workers—so I wasn’t sure if I should go for the thirty percent discount. But unlike Amazon factory workers, I assume Michael’s employees are allowed to take bathroom breaks and aren’t suffering from repetitive stress injuries because they handle a lot of different tasks, so I decided it was tolerable (though not ideal).

Delivery deception

When I was repairing some torn pages in my mom’s cookbook earlier this year, I bought some blotter paper on eBay even though it was more expensive than the rock-bottom Amazon price. Imagine my shock when this appeared on my doorstep:

An Amazon package! From eBay! And the creepiest part? It didn’t trigger my doorbell camera, so there was no video of its arrival.

THIS PACKAGE WAS DELIVERED BY A GHOST!!!

(Are they exploiting the undead workforce? Or did someone toss the envelope way too far from the sidewalk?)

My research revealed that the package arrived via Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), so even though it was listed on eBay, the product itself was sitting in an Amazon warehouse and was delivered by an Amazon driver. The listing never suggested this. It simply said “Free 2-4 day delivery” and “Located in: Bronx, New York, United States” and “We use trusted carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS.”

This was total mindf*ckery. Amazon is so insidious that they’ve entered every retail corridor like spirits passing through the walls. You can never completely escape them. I was particularly riled that I’d paid extra solely to remove Amazon from the purchase, but they’d gotten a taste of the payment anyway. Worse, I don’t see how I can avoid this in the future if a seller doesn’t reveal they’re using FBA.

This only strengthened my resolve never to buy from Amazon again. I don’t like being fooled, and the lack of doorbell camera footage from the delivery really did creep me out. It also made me more hesitant to use eBay again. (Why have all my favorite online retailers from the 90’s gone downhill? Perhaps it was best that pets.com died a swift death instead of living to disappoint us.)

The sound of failure

There was only one item that’s available on Amazon that I haven’t been able to purchase elsewhere: replacement earpads for my noise-cancelling headphones. The current earpads are flaking and they’re an odd size, so I haven’t been able to find them at any US retailers. I eventually ordered a pair on eBay that would be shipped from China, which seemed a bit risky—and I was right!

Here’s the message the seller sent me right after I made the purchase:

Dear Buyer

We are glad to receive your order and payment. We will arrange shipment for you soon

If you need any help with your order, for example, you need to return the package, or you did not receive the package, or you are not satisfied with the received package, please send us a message through ebay first, we will solve the problem for you immediately after receiving the message, please don’t worry, we will certainly solve all the problems for you until you are satisfied

Thank you very much for your understanding

Wishing you a happy life

You’ll be shocked to learn that they never sent my item. They registered a shipping label on a Chinese mail site, but the status got stuck on pending and was cancelled twenty-something days later even though the seller never notified me of that. I cancelled the order through eBay and I got my money back, but the whole thing felt sketchy.

After that, I tried buying the earpads through a third-party seller on NewEgg, a site I’ve bought electronics from before. I chose them because they have a refund policy, which is good because I had to take advantage of it when the seller messaged me that the item was out of stock and asked that I cancel the order on my end. This felt suspicious because shouldn’t they be cancelling it? I’m not sure what was up with that, but it’s all good because I never got charged.

So, I guess I have to buy new noise-cancelling headphones all together? Even if I ordered the earpads on Amazon, I’m not sure if they’d actually arrive. This is probably a doomed quest.

Living a more deliberate life

When August 24th rolled around several weeks ago, I felt a silly surge of pride that I’d sustained my Amazon retail boycott for a year. I realize that not everyone can afford to pay more money for less evil, so I’m not judging anyone who still buys from Amazon. And I can’t say for certain that the companies I bought from instead are pure of heart, but none of them were obviously nefarious. I’m glad I got my ribbon crimps at Fire Mountain Gems and Beads and my bookmark ribbon from The Ribbon Factory and my metal triangle from Blick Art Supplies and not from a bunch of shell companies with bad reviews.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve dropped some other bad online habits lately. I cancelled my Adobe subscription two years ago because I was sick of their business practices, and it was easy to ditch Disney Plus in the name of free speech recently. I’m disenchanted by streaming in general, and I wish I’d kept more of my old CD’s. I underappreciated how nice it was to own objects instead of leasing everything.

I’ve gotten pretty serious about social media sobriety too, though I still check on my brother’s cat on Instagram. I occasionally post bookbinding projects there too, but otherwise my Digital Wellness app is a strict mistress guarding my mental health. I miss knowing what my friends are up to, but I don’t miss encountering ragebait after midnight on Reddit. Besides, social media isn’t designed to catch you up on your friends anymore anyway.

Dumping Amazon went hand-in-hand with ditching social media, Adobe, and Disney Plus, and it’s all been a sign that I want to lead a more deliberate life. I’d like to choose how I spend my time instead of getting swept away in the digital currents of the day; I don’t want to be sucked into an eddy or a whirlpool of when I could be rowing a boat to somewhere I actually want to visit.

One of the best tricks Amazon pulled was training me to think I never had to shop anywhere else. It turned me into an Ama-zombie, always going there by default, but eventually I remembered there are other stores and other ways to live. I want to be more purposeful about how I spend the second half of my life, particularly as my body breaks down from middle age and any energy I have is precious. Some people dump their partners during their mid-life crisis, but I guess I’m dumping my digital dead ends instead. I’m glad I ditched Amazon, but I’m even happier that I’m living a more deliberate life, one where my actions are better aligned with my beliefs. If I make better choices about where I shop, hopefully I can make better choices about other things and just live a better life in general. That’s not something you can order on Amazon.

Photos by conceptphoto [dot] info / CC BY 2.0 and Aisaisaghost / BY-NC-SA 2.0

Author’s Note/Disclosure: I may have escaped Amazon’s retail hold on me, but not their digital grasp. Even though I’ve stopped making retail purchases on Amazon, I still use Amazon Web Services to store backups of my clients’ web sites. I’ve thought about moving them elsewhere, but the other cloud storage companies are evil too (i.e. Google and Microsoft), so I don’t think there’s a safe harbor here and it’s better to just leave the ships docked where they are.

I also bought a Kindle Paperwhite the year before I stopped shopping at Amazon, but I would have purchased a Kobo eReader instead if I’d known Amazon would stop letting us sideload books. I kept my old Kindle in airplane mode for years so Amazon wouldn’t reach in and edit or delete anything, but now you’re forced to give them that kind of access if you want to download a book. I still read library books on the Kindle, but I don’t buy ebooks from Amazon anymore.

As for Amazon Affiliate links, I’ve removed them from this site’s book pages and from the bottom of my posts, but you still might find some in old entries. It’s been years since I’ve earned enough to receive a payment from Amazon through those, so I don’t think it’s worth the time to hunt them all down for removal. If you see one, just don’t click on it, please.

Amazon really is insidious and I hope to completely escape them one day. I promise to keep trying!

The post Dumping Amazon and living a more deliberate life appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

(I have no memory of what I did to earn these. I counted to three? I folded a paper airplane?)

Last June, the YouTube algorithm started showing me videos of people re-binding their favorite paperbacks as beautiful hardbacks, and they were so shiny and pretty that I was like, “Could I do that with my books?” Half-Assed and Chocolate & Vicodin were only released as paperbacks, and there is a certain amount of prestige that comes with a hardback that I wanted to bestow upon them. So, I watched more than a dozen hours of video tutorials and got hooked. Yes, YouTube radicalized me into bookbinding (and not book burning, which would seem more likely).

If you’re looking for a quick, cheap, and easy hobby—do NOT choose bookbinding! It takes hours upon hours to complete a single book, the supplies cost me hundreds of dollars, and the precision required to prevent it from looking like crap is difficult to achieve. Millimeters matter! They matter very much! And some of the supplies can only be found at specialty bookbinding stores because where else are you going to get an awl and a bone folder? I spent weeks completing a bizarre scavenger hunt as I slowly accumulated supplies after doing comparison price-shopping.

(But don’t let money stop you from bookbinding! You can create a book with stuff you find around your house. Though if you don’t want it to disintegrate after a year, there are specific materials and methods you should use.)

I’ve made it sound like an unpleasant ordeal, but once I had everything assembled, I started to love the process. I’d also spent so much money that I pretty much had to keep binding books to justify the costs.

It’s embarrassing how little I used to know about book construction. I’ve written two memoirs, but I had no idea how they were bound. It requires a lot of different skills: designing, impositioning, determining grain direction, printing, folding, hole punching, sewing, knot tying, trimming, measuring, cutting, glueing, ironing, weeding, burnishing, and pressing. But above all, it requires glue. There is so much glue y’all. If you’ve ever wondered what’s holding a book together, it’s lots and lots of glue.

Part of the complexity comes from bookbinding’s dependence on so many different industries for its existence. You need people to chop trees and refine wood pulp to make paper for the text block and chipboard for the covers. You need people to farm flax to create linen for the thread that binds the text block together and the tapes that secure it to the cover boards. You need someone to grow cotton and transform it into super for the spine and bookcloth for the cover boards. You need someone to make the glue, and someone else to mix the ink. And then you need to cut boards for a press and find some weights to apply pressure to it.

It really makes you appreciate scrolls and tablets! I’m kinda surprised we moved on to books at all.

One of the best parts of bookbinding is that I got to use my T-square again!!! (I, too, am perplexed by my deep devotion to my T-square. I suppose I have an innate love of right angles? I often find myself straightening objects on counters to line up in a grid.) I took a graphic design course in college where we’d use a T-square, a triangle, and a fancy pen to draw our work by hand at a drafting desk. It was wonderfully meditative. It’s one of my fondest memories of college, actually. (No, I didn’t go to parties. Why do you ask?) And now I am vindicated for dragging these tools around for decades! They help me cut the cover boards at right angles so they form rectangles and not trapezoids.

I had to design new covers for my books so they’d work with a duotone color palette. The bookcloth is one color and the heat transfer vinyl is the other, which is ironed on. (When I bought the Cricut machine to cut the HTV, I knew I’d really gone off the deep end.) I also had to buy a copy of Half-Assed on eBay because I didn’t have any copies left in my closet, which made me wonder if the seller noticed they were shipping it to the author and assumed I was some weird sort of narcissist buying up old copies of my book. The receipt of purchase was still in Half-Assed, so thank you to whoever bought this book at the Barnes & Noble in Kingston, NY on December 28, 2008 for taking good care of it—and for paying full price! (I hope you enjoyed “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits” as well.) Thankfully, I still had some extra paperbacks of Chocolate and Vicodin and was spared any embarrassment hunting for those.

My brother said I should start selling these, but I have no idea if there’s any interest or what a fair price would be, considering how time-consuming they are. If you have thoughts, leave them in the comments.

I followed this up by making a blank journal with my personal logo on it.

And then a journal for my friend Katrina.

I’ve been posting my work on my Instagram account if you want to keep track of it.

Bookbinding resources

Tutorials
If you’re interested in learning bookbinding, I got most of my knowledge from YouTube tutorials.

• I started with this simple notebook project from Four Keys Book Arts that doesn’t require glue.
• Then I made a beginner’s art journal from Nik the Booksmith because it only requires one strip of cloth for the spine while the covers are decorated with paper.
• When I was rebinding my books, I relied on these tutorials by Abound Bindery that tackle HTV and basic construction of a full cloth cover.
• And I would be remiss not to mention DAS Bookbinding, the OG of the YouTube bookbinding world, who provided tons of helpful information about craft and technique. He’s created at least 100 tutorials that are particularly helpful because he shows everything he does without edits and describes what he’s doing and why. He’s just one lone man in Australia, but he’s probably taught thousands of people to bookbind. His videos have a strong PBS vibe, and I could totally see him hosting a show that comes on after a Bob Ross rerun and leads into This Old House. I joined his Patreon because it felt like stealing to take so much of his advice for free.

Supplies
I’ve ordered most of my bookbinding-specific supplies from TALAS (in New York) or Hollander’s (in Michigan). If you buy glue, make sure to check the weather first so the glue won’t freeze in transit because this is the wacky sort of thing bookbinders think about.

I’ve been buying all my fabric locally from Joann stores, so of course they’ve declared bankruptcy again and might be headed for closure just in time for me to be sad about it. (But I just joined the rewards club!)

It’s an art! There are no rules!

I hope I haven’t made this hobby seem so overwhelming that people are afraid of pursuing it. Ultimately, bookbinding is an artform, so there is no right or wrong way to do things. Just have fun! Some methods and materials are more durable than others, but if you want to make a notebook out of a box of Junior Mints and some dental floss, go for it! It’s smart to floss after you eat candy anyway.

The post I’ve learned the art of bookbinding! appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

As I stood in a long, twisty line to vote on Wednesday, I was reminded of another line I stood in way back in 2008, the one in a post titled “Early voting diary a.k.a. the road to hell is paved with campaign posters” which—wow—doubled as a rather clairvoyant description of the 2016 election. That reminded me that I had a blog and, hey, maybe I should write an entry this year? Let’s pretend we’re standing in line together because we sort of are, and I don’t know what lies at the end.

If you live outside the US, please don’t fret that the typical American voting experience resembles a line at Disneyland. On election day itself, I’ve never had to wait more than 10 minutes to vote. That’s because there will be dozens of stations open instead of just nine designated for early voting in a county of almost one million people, and they’ll be open for 12 hours instead of just 7. I endured the wait so I could bank my vote in advance and eliminate the chance of being waylaid on election day by a flat tire or a tornado outbreak or the sky raining bloody frogs. I sacrificed my creaky knees and aching feet for democracy! And when I one day need a walker as a result, they’ll let me cut line, which is nice restitution, but next time I’ll just request an absentee ballot in advance (if we’re still having elections then).

The Indy Vote Times site warned me that there’d be a two hour wait, so I came prepared with water and a book and gratitude that I wasn’t in the much longer line for Taylor Swift merch downtown. (Welcome to our fair city, Swifties! They rescheduled the I-65 construction just for you.) Some people arrived at the voting station early and set up portable folding chairs like democracy stans, so it’s too bad they didn’t get a t-shirt or a friendship bracelet, just a peppermint and an “I voted” sticker.

The parking lot was full, so I had to park on a side street where a nice man with a Trump banner on his garage helped motion me into a spot that didn’t block his mailbox.

(Oh man, I really need to clean my windshield.)

I wish all interactions between people with opposing political views went this respectfully. If they did, having a late-October birthday wouldn’t be such a curse during an election year (though that was never a problem before 2016). The overwhelming anxiety about the uncertainty of the future made it hard to celebrate. Even the ice-cream cake got into it by melting on the counter.

These last few days before the election are a strange kind of purgatory. It’s like we’ve gone to the doctor, they drew blood for the lab work, and we’re waiting for the results. The country’s definitely ill, but how bad is the disease? Is it terminal, or do we have another four years to try to solve the underlying health problems? Two radically different futures branch out from next Tuesday, yet I have no idea if I’ll get shoved into the darkest timeline or not. How is that even possible? One future is practically apocalyptic and the other is okay-ish, yet the odds are literally 50/50? No one knows how accurate the polls are! No one knows the chain of events that will follow! Should I stock up on food in case there are riots? I’ll probably fill up my gas tank. If this were a movie, I would hit pause and look up spoilers because the uncertainty is bonkers. It’s gotten me to write my first blog post in more than a year and a half, and even the total solar eclipse in my backyard last April didn’t manage that.

My anxiety has drastically flip-flopped over the past few weeks. When I’ve felt overwhelming doom, I’ve gone to Vote Forward and written letters reminding people to vote. I wrote 50 all together, which is the most objective measurement you’ll find of my stress levels. At other times, I’ve been strangely chill and taken a whatever-happens-happens view of the world, accepting that I can’t control everything; I’ll just deal with what happens the best that I can and take comfort in my white privilege. I wish my grandparents were still alive so I could ask them if they felt like this during WWII. Living through that chunk of history without a Wikipedia entry full of spoilers must have been crazy.

I kinda miss the world of 2008, the one where I took photos on a digital camera kept in my purse in case something blog-able occurred because I didn’t own a smartphone yet. During that election, the other guy was a competent war hero who made a bad VP pick. Today, it’s an incompetent con man who wants to send us into a fascist death spiral, who also made a bad VP pick (so at least some things stay the same). I didn’t realize how low-stakes our elections were back then. Wasn’t that nice?

People have been setting off firecrackers this weekend for Diwali, but every explosion makes me feel rather nervous about what lies in our future. Good luck, everybody! Looks like we’ve reached the front of the line and we’re about to find out what’s inside.

The post Early voting diary: Part 2 – The Electoral College Strikes Back appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

Two of the OG blogging queens have died in the past year, Julie Powell and Heather Armstrong aka Dooce, which has left me a bit shook. I didn’t regularly read either of their blogs when I was a fellow blogger in the aughts, but their entrepreneurial accomplishments impacted my life a great deal. They were talented writers and I’m glad they’re being celebrated as such, but people shouldn’t overlook what innovative businesswomen they were either.

Dooce was the first person I’d heard of who was making her entire living off her blog. I can’t express how groundbreaking this was in 2004. It would be like finding out your neighbor is making $20,000 a month riding her unicycle around the block every afternoon. Say what? You can do that? And if you were a unicycle enthusiast, you couldn’t help thinking, is it possible for me to make my living on one wheel as well? I never succeeded in living solely off my blog, but there was one year it was covering my rent every month, and Dooce was the one who made that seem possible.

Julie Powell was the first person I’d heard of who’d gotten a book deal from her blog. She’d grinded away for a year not only making every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook, but also blogging about it, which at least double or triples the work involved. The photo editing alone must have gobbled up days of her life. Writing a blog to get a book deal was not a business model that existed before people like Powell pulled it off, and her success made me feel like I could do it too. The fact that the book sold well incentivized publishers to seek out bloggers to produce books, as Seal Press did with me.

Heather Armstrong and Julie Powell showed me it was possible for a young woman who had a love of writing and a bit of internet expertise to earn a living via those skills. They didn’t just inspire us to write; they motivated us to get paid for it. They weren’t ashamed to go get that money and demand what they were worth in a culture where women’s thoughts are often devalued. When I was growing tired of my day job in 2009, I decided to take a mad flyer and freelance full time as a web developer specializing in blogs. I now make most of my money from web development, but the money I earned from my blog those first few years kept me afloat. Most of my first clients were other female bloggers making their living online. People like Dooce and Powell had shown us it could be done, paving the way for a lot of one-woman businesses. I was especially grateful for the freedom I got from being my own boss when I developed a chronic headache condition, something a nine-to-five job would have been far less forgiving of. I have a better quality of life because of Armstrong and Powell.

But hearing that both women passed away in their forties has emphasized to me how fleeting any type of success is. Back then, it was easy to view bloggers like Powell and Armstrong as the center of the world, but eventually their popularity waned as people turned to shorter forms of social media on platforms that made it easier to post. The wheel of fortune turns and runs us all over at some point. In the aughts, it was easy for me to get hyperfixated on how many pageviews my site got and compare that to other people’s stats. I’d love to tell my younger self that she was being silly to focus on any of that. We all need money to live, but what really matters are the small things that make you happy day-to-day, not the number of books you sold or how many comments your last post got. It’s been almost twenty years since I started my blog; I rarely post anymore and I don’t make any money from it, but the one thing that’s lasted are the friends I made along the way. (The after-school specials were right!) Sometimes I talk about the old internet with my blogger friends and it’s the memories, not the money, that have lasted.

I wasn’t friends with Armstrong or Powell, but they were kindred spirits, and I’m sorry their stories have come to an end. All bloggers will someday make their last posts and hop off this world for the whatever’s after. I’m grateful to Dooce and Julie for making the time before my final post so much better than it would have been without them.

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It was Halloween, so people were dressed as lobsters and brought family and friends to the party dressed as Velma and a ballerina and Captain America. The shindig had a happy and loose vibe that is kinda rare at work functions. I have wondered about the lobster man this week. Hopefully, he got out years ago when his stock options came through like my friend did; if he’s still in the building, Elon Musk is bound to boil him alive and crack open his claws to suck the meat out, since that seems to be his style of management.

I was going to list everything that’s happened at Twitter since Musk took over at the end of October, but…it’s impossible. If you haven’t been following it, just wait for the mini-series in a few years. Basically, he bought a social network on a whim, paid more than twice what it was worth, tried to return it in Delaware, couldn’t, and is now forced to run it; it’s the premise of a bad sitcom, but there are no cameras, just tweets.

I didn’t have a high opinion of Musk before this, but, wow, I’m stunned, STUNNED, by how blazingly incompetent he’s been. It reminds me of when I’d play Sim City and unleash all the disasters at once for fun. Earthquake! Hurricane! Big lizard! Meteor shower! How long can the city survive? It’s been so bad that I suspect any previous success he’s experienced came only because he knows how to stand next to the people who do the actual work and then take all the credit. That, or he’s trying to bankrupt the service on purpose, which can’t be ruled out when you’re dealing with such a chaotic troll.

The worst part is how casually cruel he’s been to the employees. Again, I was going to list all the sociopathic things he’s done but…it’s just too much, y’all. (Selected highlight: Managers were trying to keep the pregnant people and the guy with cancer from being fired. It was such an awful task that someone literally vomited at the thought of carrying out the cuts.) It’s been painful for me to watch the damage he’s been wreaking in people’s lives, because as I said in my post 11 years ago:

Visiting Twitter reminded me that ultimately the world is just made up of people and places. Twitter has changed my life in many positive ways, so it was interesting to view it as an office with people instead of an abstract concept or a server farm.

A company is just people. And he’s treating the people like shit.

(And OMG, I used think Twitter was a “positive” force in the world?! What the actual fuck?)

None of these people deserved this! They have adorable children, and they actually spend time with them, unlike some people.

Elon Musk will not achieve any of the goals for Twitter that he’s said to have—be it free speech, making comedy “legal” again, forcing people to pay for a blue checkmark (or is it a gray one?), paying off the annual 1 billion dollars of interest on his loan, or making the internet like him. We only like laughing at him.

But he has achieved the impossible; he’s made me sorry that Twitter is burning to the ground.

Twitter was awful, but some of the people were nice

Twitter is a toxic cesspool that should be drained from this earth, but it deserves to die of natural causes like GeoCities or AOL Messenger, its usage dwindling until it becomes socially irrelevant and hardly anyone notices it’s gone. Instead, it’s been dragged into an alley, stabbed in the gut, and we don’t know if it will bleed out or go septic first. Some people still have hope, but at this point I don’t think medical intervention can save the poor beast. If it does survive, it will be forever changed into something else.

I haven’t used Twitter in a meaningful way for years. At the end of 2017, I removed the app from my phone because I’d noticed I usually felt worse after using it, though I still visited the site in Chrome. During Thanksgiving 2019, I didn’t read my feed all weekend and was like, “Wow, that was nice, let’s do that full-time!” I still checked in on the trending topics for a few months, but when the pandemic hit, I stopped visiting that screen all together because of all the misinformation. I sometimes check hashtags during live events like the Emmy’s, or to watch people literally dance in the streets when Trump was defeated, but that’s about it. I do see screenshots of tweets on Instagram a lot, which is also where I watch muted Tik Tok videos, as a middle-aged woman does. If I tweeted at all, it was to complain about things or post links to my blog entries. So, I feel no personal sadness that the site’s burning up in a flash like the Hindenburg.

However, there is a small subset of the Twitter community that are good people hanging out in a bad place, and I hate seeing them harmed by this. Twitter’s destruction is going to damage a lot of people’s lives. Here are some ways, in increasing levels of seriousness:

1) It can hurt your career if Twitter is the place you promote your work and make friends in your industry. Twitter is a text-first platform, so it’s particularly well suited for writers, unlike Instagram or Tik Tok which emphasize images and videos. People have made connections on Twitter that have launched their careers and some writers say it’s the place where they get the most traction on articles they’ve written.

2) It can hurt your mental health if you’re someone who does most of your socialization there and you’re scrambling to find a way to stay connected to your people. (Everyone, back to Usenet!) I’ve seen at least two users express genuine distress that they’re about to lose all their friends.

3) The disability community would lose an important tool to help them connect to other sick people for support or help with rare diagnoses. Twitter has decent accessibility compliance so vision-impaired people can use the site with screen readers, but the accessibility team got fired, so any new features probably won’t be.

4) If you’re a dissident or activist in a hostile nation, Twitter’s destruction might threaten your life because you’re losing access to such an important tool. Elon Musk doesn’t seem to care much about human rights activists (he certainly doesn’t treat his employees like they’re human), so it’s possible he might hand over data to hostile countries.

Still, I will not miss that demon hell site when it’s gone, be it next month or twenty years from now. The world would be better without it, as would people’s mental health. Twitter is like a cigarette company, peddling something that’s poisonous that its customers know is bad for them, but they can’t stop using it because they need another dopamine hit. But hey, you meet some really great people on your smoke breaks!

This week, I started reading my feed again for the first time in years. After two hours of watching the fires burn, unable to tear myself away, I felt empty afterwards, like I’d eaten an entire can of Pringles crisps in one sitting. It was delicious, but not healthy, and I always wanted just one more. I was like, “Oh, right, this is why I stopped smoking cyber crack.” If we could extract all the good parts of Twitter and move them to some other service that was managed responsibly, that would be fantastic, but that’s a fantasy.

Watching Twitter implode has been embarrassingly delightful

Despite the fact that thousands of people are being seriously harmed by this…it has been super fun to watch! I’m so sorry! (Maybe I’m part of the cesspool now?) As a web developer, I’m particularly excited to see which parts of Twitter break first and how badly. A social network is not a “set it and forget it” technology. It requires maintenance and moderation to run properly. Musk literally fired half the staff, and a bunch of people have resigned, so there’s no way this thing is going to run smoothly. It never really did in the first place! It’s going to be the computer science version of Life After People.

When I heard about the impending layoffs, I knew it was going to be bonkers, so I started deleting my data while I still could. I immediately requested a backup of my account and then deleted all my tweets and likes. I had to use a third-party service to do this, and for some reason my likes came back after I deleted them, then vanished again, came back again, and have now been gone for more than a week. Yet, when you visit my likes page, it says I have 3078 likes when I actually have 3. And this happened when people were still working there!

Soon, things are going to start breaking and people won’t know how to fix them or they’ll have to fix something more important first. Also, Musk is making them push out a bunch of new features without testing them properly, so that’s going to introduce more bugs and security vulnerabilities. I wouldn’t be surprised if a news story breaks in a few months about how China downloaded every Twitter user’s phone number and email address through a bug in the API.

Oh, and the World Cup starts next week.

Firing half the staff before the world’s biggest sporting event is like firing the road crew before a big ice storm. Who’s going to salt the roads? Who’s going to patch the potholes? Cars will slide into ditches! When the streets are full of craters, people can’t use them anymore.

I’m not certain if Twitter will crash completely or not. I suspect there will be lag time. Things will get buggy. Posts might disappear. Private posts could become public. Your mentions might stop showing up. Deleted tweets could get undeleted. That person you muted might show up in your timeline again. It’ll be a mess. I’m curious if the Fail Whale will reappear, though Musk’s probably already slaughtered it and sold off its blubber by now.

Capitalism SUX!

It’s sad that all this is happening for no good reason, and that no good reason is: money. Elon Musk made a terrible business deal, so now he’s trying to get rich quick, but all he’s done is ensured he’ll never get rich slowly. He’s like a character from an 80’s after-school special who wants to tear down the community center and build a mall, and all the neighborhood kids are making it miserable for him, so now he’s bulldozing the entire town.

I don’t know how this ends, either for Twitter the company or Twitter the web service. What I do know is this: Elon Musk will be fine, which is the absolute worst. Sure, it’ll be embarrassing, but he’ll blame it on the woke mob, and his own cultish mob will still adore him. He might lose billions of dollars, but he’ll still have plenty of money. He’ll have food, shelter, and clothing. He’ll be able to pay medical bills if he gets sick. If they try to lock him up, he’ll flee to another country first. He’s going to be totally fine! The people he’s squashed will not. He really is a big lizard sweeping through Sim City, smashing everything other people built, wiping out their work without any regret, and then slogging off into the distance to do it again.

It’s sad that we live in a world where this is allowed to happen. No one person should be allowed to own something as powerful as Twitter. Which is why no one person should be allowed to accumulate enough money that they can do it. I don’t know how to change that, but if anyone has any ideas that don’t involve bloody revolution, I’m listening. (Just don’t hit me up on Twitter about it.)

When I was at Twitter, I took a picture of a poster they had framed on the wall that said, “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” It was hung upside down. I wish the new boss would take that advice, but I think from here on out it’s just one worse mistake after another.

The post That billionaire brat made me feel bad that Twitter is imploding appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

As I was engaging my core and anchoring my shoulders to the mat, I found myself wondering what Ana Caban looks like today, and felt guilty that I was wondering at all. This woman made me feel strong in my body for the first time and helped me live a healthier life when I needed it the most. What does it matter what she looks like? If anything, I hope that in a couple more decades she makes a Pilates video for older people and I can follow along as my knees crackle and pop in accompaniment to the generic background music.

Really, it’s not about Ana at all. I’m just jealous that this little version of her will be forever young, because it has become increasingly clear that I will not. I can visit Ana and her assistant Tara whenever I want, an unannounced visitor popping into their studio, and they’re still striking impressive poses that are going to take me at least 30 more sessions to hit. Yet, out here in the three-dimensional world, my skin is not quite as luminescent as is once was and at least one fourth of the hairs on my head are white, with a kinkier, dryer texture that no one warned me about. I can feel my beauty fading and it makes me wish I’d appreciated it more when I had it.

I’ve never cared much about my looks outside of not wanting to be obese, so it’s odd that I’ve become so focused on the parts of my appearance unrelated to my size over the past few years. It’s undeniable that I’m a shapeshifter, and sometimes my body shifts in ways I do not want it to. What worries me is that the older a woman gets, the more she is ignored, just like how the fatter you get, the less you are seen. It won’t be long before the world starts to discard me; my older female friends have issued reports from the frontlines confirming this. So, now I’m looking for ways to delay that process that don’t require high levels of commitment. Pilates a few times a week: doable. Dying my roots every four to six weeks for eternity: I don’t think so.

I’m not actually old yet, so I still have so many possible roads ahead of me, but it’s not as many as I used to. Some roads have been traveled and are now closed. Some opportunities are gone. I still have a lot of life ahead of me, but not my whole life ahead of me. If I start feeling depressed about it, I remind myself I’m lucky for every day I get. Three kids from my high school died senior year; one got shot at a bus stop over a pair of shoes and the other two were killed in car accidents. It rattled me back then to know we were old enough to die. (School shootings weren’t really a thing yet, so I was more naïve about my mortality than today’s teens are.) I’m sure my three classmates would all be glad to have white hair right now.

It never stops either. I recently learned that a girl I went to high school with died of cancer last autumn, one day before her forty-first birthday. It particularly shook me because Michelle G. used to sit right in front of me in Mrs. H’s English class, sixth period, senior year. Someone even took a photo of us sitting there, which I discovered on the digital CD-ROM scrapbook:

We weren’t close friends, but she was a really kind-hearted person. It’s sad to think she used to sit three feet in front of me and now she’ll always be behind me.

Not pictured are Courtney B. and Adam K., who sat to our left, got married after college, had two kids together, then some shit happened, so they got divorced. According to photos on Courtney’s Facebook, the oldest kid is in middle school now, which makes me realize—oh, yeah—we have done quite a bit of living since then, haven’t we? And actually, isn’t that point? Yes, Ana Caban never gets older on my DVD, but she’s locked inside that studio forever, doing the same thing over and over again, while I get to explore the world and try new things that will undoubtedly change me. If you stay young forever, people freeze you that way, which seems like an awful fate. It sounds like the curse a witch would put on you after you eat her gingerbread house. “Everyone will change, but not you!” That was one of the worse things about the pandemic; everything got put on hold. We were all frozen in a DVD for awhile.

But it has made me wonder, is that how people view me through my books and my blog? Am I twenty-something forever in print? Sure, I took down the weight-loss blog last year, but you can still read it on archive.org, which is fine, as long as you’re aware that it’s not a reflection of my current self. I like that my books are still out there meeting new people, but it’s more and more like they’re meeting people who are light years away who are just now seeing an image of me that was sent into space more than a decade ago. There’s not really anything to be done about this, I guess. As long as people understand that my older work is now a time capsule, I’m ok with it. It’s good to remember where you came from so you can realize how different you’ve become.

I like who I am as a person now today more than I ever did, so I’m grateful for the living I’ve done, if not the aging. I just wish my body would age at a slower rate, like a redwood tree that gets to grow for centuries, because I’d like to keep growing that long too. But for humanity to progress, I acknowledge that people do need to cycle out of the population eventually, because although we may change, we don’t always change enough.

I wish that getting older wasn’t going to make me invisible, but I always felt the most seen in my writing, and I still have a laptop and a wifi connection, so as long as my nine other fingers’ joints don’t occasionally lock up like my left thumb does, I can live on in 26 letters shuffled around. I will also keep playing on repeat this MUNA song, “Kind of Girl,” because it reminds me I still have plenty of time to write new endings. See, I just wrote a new one there.

Photo by Tony Hall / CC BY 2.0

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First, I lost 200 pounds, then I found 200 pounds. (Spoiler alert: It was in the ice cream aisle.) Then I lost 115 pounds. Things rarely happen the same way twice, so how was the weight-loss different this time?

It’s less thrilling, but that’s fine

The first time I lost more than a hundred pounds, I shouted it across the whole internet. “Whee!!! This is amazing! I’m having so much fun! Triple exclamation points!!!” This time around, I’m just quietly muttering to myself, “Please stay off. For the love of God, just stay off.”

One of the reasons I stopped blogging at PastaQueen.com was because I was all talked out about weight loss. Eleven years later, that’s still fairly true. Writing the blog and the book helped me process a lot of my hang-ups about my weight and the tricky feelings associated with it, leaving me with less to share about this experience. I didn’t even bother to take progress photos this time because I couldn’t possibly top the rotating 3D ones I used to have on my blog. (A savvy TikTokker can probably replicate those in less than 10 minutes these days, but I swear they were cool and original at the time!)

I’m much more private online in general too. The fact that I used to post my weight on the internet once a week seems borderline nuts (like a cashew, which looks like a nut, but is actually a drupe seed). The online world was a lot different in the mid 2000’s. It felt safer. I’m not sure if it actually was safer or not, but it felt that way.

I do enjoy getting the occasional positive comment from people who see me often, like my family, but otherwise I’m basically ok if no one says anything at all, like my neighbor, who must have noticed, but just keeps waving hello when I see her warming up her car. (She’s also been more friendly lately, which is nice and all, but makes me wonder why she wasn’t like that when I was bigger.)

The first time around, I definitely wanted praise and acknowledgment. Now, I’m more secure in my identity and less needy of outside approval than I was in my 20’s, so a semi-silent victory is fine with me.

It’s taking longer.

When I hit my two-year weight-loss anniversary in mid-March this year, I was down 115 pounds, which is a lot, but it’s not the 180 pounds I lost in that span the first time around. See chart below. (The gap in the orange line was when I threw out my back and was incapable of weighing myself):

As best as I can tell, the 65-pound difference is because:

1) I’m 41, not 24. It gets harder to lose weight the older you get. Plus, you tend to lose muscle mass as you get older, so your body isn’t burning as many calories as it was anyway.

2) I haven’t been exercising as much. My body is old and broken. (More on this farther below.)

3) I haven’t been as strict with my diet. I can’t recall exactly what I was eating 17 years ago, but I think I followed the South Beach Diet fairly closely. This time I’ve been more flexible and less concerned about the glycemic index. My general strategy has been to eat fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains. I’ve indulged more on the holidays than I did the first time, and I’ve written off some days as lost causes and did my best to move on from there.

I’d love to wake up tomorrow and be magically thin, but as long as the weight stays off this time, I can deal with it taking its sweet (or artificially sweet) time. I have my mobility back and the world is more accessible in general, which were the two most important things to me after my health. It’s nice that I can walk to the grocery without getting winded. It’s nice that I can fit in one seat on the plane instead of two.

Yes, it’s kind of a bummer that I’ve only lost seven pounds this year, but at least I didn’t gain seven. Even if I continue at this sloooooooooooow rate, it will eventually add up. And honestly, if I’m not able to maintain a certain weight, I’d rather not bounce down that low at all. I already have way too many clothes of various sizes in my closet. For once, I’d like to buy a sweater during the Spring clearance sale and have it fit me properly the next winter.

Also, I am gobsmacked by how quickly I lost weight the first time. I lost 25 pounds in a month! How the hell did I do that? That’s insane! Then I lost another 15 pounds in the second month. 40 pounds in two months! WTF?! It took me five and a half months to do that this time around, and I started from pretty much the same weight. I hope none of you got depressed comparing your weight loss to mine back in 2005 because that was definitely not normal. If I didn’t know I wasn’t on drugs, I would suspect I was on drugs.

My body is old and broken, so it’s harder to be active

Any physical activity I attempt these days comes with the risk of spraining another ankle, breaking another bone, or grinding the rest of my cartilage to dust. I have so many aches and pains, y’all. I’m hesitant to start any kind of physical activity without consulting a physical therapist or putting on a helmet.

Back in my 20’s, I started running on my local trail without any plan or research, which now sounds like utter lunacy! A friend of mine got invited to a roller skating party recently and we both agreed we were not putting wheels on our shoes again, not in this millennia.

All of which is to say, I am more limited in the type of physical activity I risk these days, because it does seem risky. Back in October, I got overconfident and thought I could take out the trash, walk to the grocery, vacuum the rug, and clean the bathroom all in one day. (Spoiler alert: I could not!) I threw out my back worse than I ever have before, which has made me even more hesitant about pushing myself too far. Which reminds me…

I didn’t have back problems last time

In my early thirties, I started throwing my back out at least once a year. The first time happened after I’d done a lot of walking. The next time, I simply laid down on my couch and couldn’t get up again. Another time, I was packing to move back to Indiana and had to ask my mom to come finish things up while I coordinated as much as I could flat on my back, staring at the popcorn ceiling I was glad to leave behind.

Warning: the following might be considered “too much information” so you might want to skip to the next paragraph. Because of the back pain, I got curious a few years ago and used a food scale on the counter to weigh my panniculus. (I promise I cleaned it afterwards!) The panniculus is also called the “apron belly” and is basically the pad of fat that hangs from your lower abdomen when you become obese. Anyway, my panniculus topped out at 10 pounds, the scale’s limit, so it was probably even heavier than that, which explains the back pain. Today it’s about 3-4 pounds, which explains the lack of back pain. Yay! Okay, the TMI is over now.

It brings me great joy that I’m able to stand up and cook in the kitchen for longer than 10 minutes now, which I couldn’t do at my heaviest. I still have to take an occasional sitting break when I’m cleaning out my closet or other activities when I’m bending over a lot, but I’m in much better shape than I was.

At least I didn’t have to exercise that much!

I wrote about this in my first entry, but the most depressing difference between my recent weight loss and my first time was that I didn’t have to exercise to lose weight. However, I am easing back into exercise, more for its own sake than for weight loss. Taking a walk in the middle of the day notably lifts my mood and helps me concentrate better when I go back to my desk. I also want to strengthen my back muscles so I don’t collapse on the kitchen floor again.

I’ve lowered my expectations by raising my goal weight

Back in the day, my original goal weight was 160, but I changed it to 180 because that’s the weight my body felt comfortable at when I was eating healthy and exercising regularly. This time around, my goal weight is 230, which is ten pounds heavier than some guy in a weight-loss ad weighed when he was telling his sad, sad, story. I realize I will still be obese if/when I hit this weight, and some of you are probably horrified that I would consider 230 an acceptable “after” weight. (I can hear someone tapping away on their keyboard right now as they compose their email, “Dear PQ, I’m so disappointed. You used to be great, but now you suck.” Thanks, anonymous stranger, who I didn’t know existed until you insulted me!) I chose 230 because if I get below 237, my BMI will categorize me as low-risk obese instead of moderate-risk obese. I know BMI is flawed for many reasons, but it’s a symbolic victory that I want if only because it makes conversations at the doctor’s office easier. I’m still really proud that I’m in the moderate-risk obesity range these days instead of the high-risk one.

In order to be qualified as overweight instead of obese, I’d have to get down to 203, which…doesn’t seem likely. Hell, I doubt I’ll ever get back into the 100’s unless something truly awful happens like a worldwide famine or I get thrown in a concentration camp when American democracy finally collapses. I’ve decided I’m going to let my body figure out what weight it wants to be when I’m taking generally good care of it, and I think that’s going to be somewhere around 230. Hopefully, it will be less, but I guess we’ll see! As long as I eat a fairly balanced diet, exercise regularly, and check in with my doctor once a year, does it matter what my weight is? If it starts causing an issue down the road, maybe I will have to lose more weight, I dunno. Right now, my test results have all been good, so let’s keep our fingers crossed it will continue that way.

My clothes have gone out of style

When I lost weight in my 20’s, I had some old clothes from my teen years that were still perfectly acceptable to wear. The same cannot be said for some of the clothes I wore in my 20’s. Perhaps there is a 41-year-old woman out there who can wear a pink, short-cropped, hoodie with cutesy skulls on it, but I am not one of them. I’ve also been surprised by how low-cut some of my old shirts were. Like, damn, I was showing off a lot, and I’m flat-chested, so there wasn’t that much to show off! And I wasn’t wearing sunscreen back then, so God only knows how much irreversible UV damage I did. (Do I sound like an old person yet?) I should have purged some of these items sooner instead of dragging them from apartment to apartment over the past decade.

Some clothes are unsolved mysteries

Is there a clothing edition of Unsolved Mysteries? Because I have some questions.

Why did the red coat I wore in New York in 2012 when I weighed 280 pounds not fit me in 2021 when I weighed 265 pounds? I haven’t washed it, so it didn’t shrink. Was I running around New York in a too-tight coat? Why didn’t the buttons pop off? Did I have more muscle mass back then, which made me heavier but more compact? Have I lost bone density?

Why do I own a pair of size 24 jeans with the tags still on them from Fashion Bug, a store that went out of business in 2013? I was probably larger than a 24 by then, unless the same voodoo that applied to my winter coat applies here too, so did I buy them with the hopes of slimming down again? Also, why did I buy the tall version that I had to hem? Was it a close-out sale or something?

How often should I try on old clothes to see if they fit so I don’t miss my window of opportunity to wear them again? Is discovering one cute golden sweater worth the risk of throwing out my back by moving all those boxes around?

For every 30 items I purged, why is there one item I wish I’d kept? (Looking at you, stretchy jean jacket with flower-print lining. Why did I part with you?)

The skin situation

I can’t close out this entry without discussing my skin, can I? On my old weight-loss blog, people asked about that more than anything. Right now, the skin situation is ok. I think it’s a bit worse than it was in my 20’s, but I didn’t take naked photos of myself back then, so I can’t be certain. The worst spot is my inner thighs which are drooping like wrinkled drapes. I also have batwings of fat hanging from my upper arms (which would definitely be the first thing to go if I ever got plastic surgery), but overall it’s not too terrible. I’m at least 75 pounds heavier than I was at my thinnest, so if I lose more weight it will probably get worse. My skin has less elasticity in my 40’s than it did in my 20’s, so I’m not sure how well it will bounce back as more fat disappears from my body.

The worse skin-related change isn’t the sagging, but the varicose veins I’ve developed in the past couple years. They run in my family, so I’m not surprised they popped up on my legs, but I didn’t expect so many of them to appear at once. I’ve got at least four snaking down both legs, though they’re not too prominent in comparison to what a Google images search shows me. Along with the extra skin, they’re a reminder that obesity has damaged my body in irreparable ways. (If I look like this on the outside, what’s happened to my insides?) The varicose veins don’t hurt, so I’m not going to seek treatment for them, but I doubt I’ll be doing any leg modeling in the future.

I’m more ok with being fat. I just don’t want to be severely fat.

The first time around, I definitely wanted to be thin, and I’m glad I was able to experience that in my youth. I’m also glad I took lots of photos. This time around, as long as I can move around the world comfortably…it’s fine if I stay fat. I would prefer to be thin, but I also love eating. I am like this cat who always wants more cheese. It’s how I’m wired. I’m significantly heavier than what is qualified as normal according to BMI, but I can go up and down stairs easily and fit in chairs with arms and buy clothes in a store instead of just online and I can leap out of my recliner instead of struggling to haul myself up. Those were my biggest day-to-day problems when I was over three hundred pounds.

I would love to lose another 70 pounds, but I find that unlikely. From here on out, any weight loss is more about my vanity and preventing future health problems instead of treating current ones. I’d simply like my weight NOT to be the first thing people notice about me, which it inevitably was when I was extremely obese. If it’s the second or third thing people notice instead, that would be fantastic. I’m also in this weird state where I know objectively I’m still obese, but I feel sort of thin. I’m so much lighter than I used to be that it’s hard not to feel thin in comparison to that. I’m also happy to be person-shaped again. When I was at my heaviest, the outline of my body from a side view had gotten oddly lopsided, with lots of extra in my belly and my butt, creating a shape that you probably wouldn’t draw if asked to sketch the profile of a woman.

Before I shut down my old weight-loss blog, I read some of my old entries and was shocked to learn I used to believe fat people couldn’t be happy. WTF?! That was so messed up! Why didn’t we have a Lizzo in the oughts? I hope no one reading this feels like that. Even if you weigh more than you’d like to, you can be happy. If anyone has a time machine, please write that on a note and give it to my teenage self. While society is still pretty rough on fat people, I do think things are better in the 20’s than they were in the 90’s. There’s a fairly strong body acceptance movement working to counter the damaging messages that are everywhere. I’ve also started seeing genuinely plus-sized models in ads, ones with actual fat rolls. Hopefully these trends will continue and less teenagers today will felt the way I did.

Don’t put off living your life!

If you feel like your weight is holding you back from experiencing certain things in life, let me leave you with this story. Back in the fall of 2020, I was walking my 320-pound self around the neighborhood when a man pulled up next to me and stopped his car. This same guy had asked me for directions just the week before, so I figured he was lost again. But no! Instead of asking me where the office was, he asked for my phone number.

That’s right, y’all, I stopped traffic! Literally.

I wasn’t even wearing anything particularly cute, just some sweatpants and my sweat-wicking workout top. I was terrified of COVID at the time, so I let him know I wasn’t dating, and foolishly did not give the man my digits. As he drove away, I was like, “Damn, there goes my last chance to get laid before I turn 40.”

And if that doesn’t convince you, let’s not forget that time I was solicited to do porn at the Barnes and Noble.

I don’t think you should base your self-esteem on whether others find you attractive or not, but the point is that even if you don’t like the way you look, there are other people who don’t feel the same way. Fat people can have the same experiences thin people do. Go out there and live your best life! Don’t wait until you lose 115 pounds or 200 pounds or however many pounds. If you put off living until there is less of you, you will live less of a life.

Hopefully, I will not be writing another series of post in 17 years about how I lost 115 pounds the third time. We shall see! I have no idea what the internet will even look like in 2039. Maybe they’ll have a cure for obesity by then! If not, I’ll just have to keep taking it day by day, pound by pound, and be grateful for every step I can take.

Photo by Tom Waterhouse / CC BY-NC 2.0

The post Losing more than 100 pounds…again: Part 3 – The Differences appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

(Hi! You might want to read part 1 about regaining weight first.)

Where were we? I’d lost two hundred pounds in my twenties, spent most of my thirties gaining it back, and felt stuck, unsure how to move forward–or more importantly–downward.

What made you start losing weight again?

Fear of imminent death.

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I realized obesity wasn’t going to kill me 20 years from now, it was going to kill me 20 days from now. What had once been a distant threat became an immediate danger that was closer than my next period.

As a severely obese woman, I had often wondered how I would handle disaster scenarios. If I’d been in the World Trade Center on September 11, would I have made it down the stairs in time? If I’d been stranded in Hurricane Katrina, could a helicopter airlift me out of there? If there was a mass shooting, would I be able to flee the grocery store before getting shot? (This is a mostly American hypothetical.) During all my worrying, I never once considered a scenario in which a virus killed fat people at a higher rate than thin people, and I’m kind of annoyed no one floated that possibility. I’d heard all about heart disease and diabetes and high blood pressure–yada, yada, yada–but why was there no mention of the dangers of foreign wet markets? (Or coronavirus labs, if you want to get conspiratorial about it?) It reminds me of the story of an alcoholic who got killed when he was crossing the street to get to the liquor store. Alcoholism did kill him, just not in the way everyone thought it would. That’s how I felt about my obesity at that moment.

A homework assignment had come due and despite ample time to finish the project, I hadn’t, and now I was going to get my poor grade: a D for “Dead.” But only if I got caught (if I caught COVID)! When I broke my arm several years ago, my orthopedic surgeon told me a strong heart and lungs were the most important things for surviving surgery. (Dying during emergency surgery was another one of my fat-lady disaster scenarios.) I figured that advice probably applied to COVID too, so I immediately started walking every day to improve my lung capacity and strengthen my heart.

I wanted to lose weight, but ¡DO NOT DIE! was the primary goal. I figured it was the comorbidities of obesity that were killing people anyway, like diabetes and high blood pressure, which I don’t have. Alas, I was totally wrong about this. Several months later, I Googled some studies that showed it was obesity itself that increased the mortality rate of COVID, not just the comorbidities. Fat cells don’t just sit there doing nothing. They’re metabolically active and affect other processes in your body in ways that aren’t great for surviving COVID. Large amounts of adipose tissue cause low-level inflammation via cytokines that keep your immune system on constant minor alert; fat cells contain the ACE2 receptor COVID uses to invade your cells, so your fat could become a big old virus factory; fat people tend to shed viruses more slowly than other people anyway; and obesity makes it physically harder to breathe even when you’re standing up, which isn’t great for a disease that attacks your lungs. So, yeah, it’s the fat itself. According to this study, someone with my BMI was 4.18 times more likely to die from COVID than if I had a “normal” BMI.

How did you lose the weight this time?

I stopped eating like a maniac. That’s about it, honestly.

If you were hoping for the revelation that I did keto or started intermittent fasting or something and the secrets of the universe were revealed to me, I’m sorry. One of the few nice things about being severely obese is that you can eat 2000 calories a day and still lose 1-2 pounds a week. As I long as I ate a somewhat reasonable diet, the weight came off.

I guess the real question is, how did I stop eating like a maniac?

Anxiety killed my appetite

Previous to the pandemic, the worst stretch of intermittent background terror I’d dealt with was in 2017 when Republicans kept trying to take my healthcare away over and over again. (Seriously, they did it four times!) Pandemic anxiety was so much worse. I had heart palpitations for two months, which cranked up my anxiety, which gave me more heart palpitations, all part of a horrible feedback loop. One afternoon, I felt a pain in my chest and was trying to determine if it was heartburn, a heart attack, anxiety, or COVID. Then my stomach grumbled and I was like, “Oh, right, I haven’t eaten in seven hours.” That’s how I learned anxiety kills my appetite! I would attribute at least 10 pounds of my weight loss to being too freaked out to eat in March 2020. Thankfully and somewhat tragically, anything becomes normal after you’ve lived with it for a while, so the anxiety mostly subsided by May after I’d bought a bunch of PPE and a pulse oximeter.

I only went to the grocery once every two weeks

Making the grocery store a dangerous place to visit was one of the best things to happen to me. It forced me into food rehab. I might say I’m dying for some ice cream, but I’m not literally going to die for ice cream. I only ventured outside my bubble to get food once every two weeks, and I did it at 8am when I had zero sugar cravings. If I didn’t buy junk food during this one-hour interval twice a month, it wasn’t in the house. This worked so well that I’m surprised no one ever recommended it before. If I wanted a dessert, I had to cook it myself, which was enough of an obstacle that I only did it once a month or so. (Moving to the opposite side of town from Trader Joe’s two years earlier didn’t hurt either.)

Once I got vaccinated, I was worried I might start eating cake for dinner every night, but thankfully that hasn’t happened. I’ve bought some holiday candy and other high-calorie items here and there, but it hasn’t descended into a never-ending food orgy. I’ve also come to enjoy walking to the grocery store every few days and only buying enough to carry in two canvas bags, which is weird because this was something I distinctly hated when I was housesitting in New York city a decade ago. Yay, for personal growth!

I started eating a reasonably healthy diet

The first time I lost a bunch of weight, I did the South Beach Diet. This time, I wasn’t strictly on that, but I used several of the same guidelines. Eat whole grains instead of processed ones. Go for wheat bread instead of white bread. Stick to lean meats like turkey and chicken. Eat as many vegetables as you want. Eat fruit too. Treats are fine in moderation. Don’t eat an entire box of Lofthouse cookies in one sitting and lick the frosting off the container. I wasn’t aiming for perfection here. When you’re trying to lose 200 pounds instead of just 20, you don’t need the best diet possible, just a better one.

I kept a food diary

It’s bizarre that I have a notebook that contains a list of everything I ate from March 2020 to September 2021 (when I ran out of pages and had to start a new one). If someone stumbles upon it in the future, it might be the food version of Samuel Pepys diaries, revealing the weird stuff people ate in the twenty-first century such as “Chobani” and leaving them to guess what “LC BBQ Chick” meant. (Spoiler: Lean Cuisine Barbeque Chicken meal. 230 calories!)

At first I just wrote down what I’d eaten, which helped me judge if I’d had too much or too little that day. In October 2020, I started guess-timating calories too, rounding up to the next 50 calorie increment since the math was easier and I figure we tend to underestimate calories anyway. In November of 2021, my weight loss had slowed down enough that I started using the Lose It app to track calories more precisely, but I don’t know if this is actually helping or not.

I love that I can enter the data by scanning the food’s bar code with my phone, which was not a thing back 2005. However, the math behind calorie counting never works out precisely the way it’s supposed to, leading me to gain weight when I shouldn’t and lose weight when I wasn’t expecting to. It reminds me of high school chemistry class when I’d have to fudge the numbers in my experiments so they’d be closer to what the book said they should be.

If I gain when the numbers say I should have lost, it’s easy to get demoralized and eat all four Cadbury Creme Eggs in the package at once because, why not, when math is broken anyway? When calorie counting, I also immediately start scheming ways to eat things I shouldn’t. Like, if I have a bag of M&Ms for dinner, that’s 1200 calories, so as long as I don’t each much for the rest of the day, it’s totally fine, right? In March, Panera decided to give me a free bagel every day for some reason, which would have been less troublesome if the store weren’t an eight minute walk from my front door. Instead of figuring out how to fit a cinnamon crunch bagel into my day, I probably shouldn’t be eating a 430 calorie bagel that won’t keep me full, right? But calorie counting makes it seem possible! Oh, the madness!

So, yeah. I might ditch the calorie counting and go back to writing things down without any numbers. I don’t know.

I exercised…for a while

I started walking regularly and by October 2020 I was quite proud to complete a two-mile loop around my apartment complex. Then my knee started to ache so badly that I took leftover meds from my root canal and stopped exercising because I was terrified of making things worse. I didn’t want to be forced to go to the emergency room during the first winter surge and catch COVID, indirectly dying from a sore leg. I waited until I was vaccinated in May 2021 to see a doctor who revealed I had osteoarthritis in my knees.

The most depressing thing about this (besides getting osteoarthritis at age 39) is that between October 2020 and May 2021 I still managed to lose 40 pounds. This feels like cheating, but it’s true. You don’t actually have to exercise to lose weight, just eat less. Isn’t that terrible? Fat shamers love to tell you they’re concerned about your health, but they probably would have complimented me on my forty-pound loss even though not exercising for seven months is not a healthy thing to do.

I do want to be healthy though, so I’ve been getting back into a regular walking routine now that the weather is getting nicer in Indiana. I’m still not exercising as much as I did during my first big weight loss in my 20’s though. I’ll probably have to step things up soon if I want to continue to lose weight since my calorie requirements keep dropping as I get smaller and I don’t get to eat as much.

I started working less

I started working fewer hours before the pandemic, so it didn’t cause my weight loss on its own, but being firm about work/life boundaries has helped my mental health, decreased my chronic pain levels, and led to fewer situations where I wanted to eat the world. I also try to get off the computer by 7pm at the latest, preferably closer to 5:30pm or 6:00pm, which has cured the insomnia I suffered from when I’d work at my laptop until 10pm. When my weight has been out of control in the past, it’s usually because something else in my life is out of control and needs to be fixed. Treat the problem, not the symptom, right?

I already had a pandemic-friendly lifestyle

2020 was the year when my lifestyle as a self-employed, childless, hermit really paid off. My pandemic life was about 85% similar to my pre-pandemic life, so it was easier for me to pay attention to my weight loss than it was for other people because I didn’t have to deal with as much change. There were no kids to take care of. There was no office to abandon. I was used to working 10 feet away from my kitchen without devouring its entire contents. I was also fortunate that my workload didn’t slow down, otherwise I would’ve been boredom eating like the rest of the quarantined world. I’ve always been a homebody, so I actually started leaving my apartment MORE because I was walking regularly. The world began adapting to my way of life instead expecting me to adapt to it.

I’ve mostly stopped emotional eating and binge eating…for now

I don’t think I’ve conquered the binge eating problem, but my environment has made it more difficult to exist for the past two years. It has resurfaced a few times when I needed a fix this year because my headache was acting up or Seasonal Affective Disorder got me down or a mattress purchase went horribly awry. Shockingly, these lapses didn’t make me instantly regain 115 pounds. A part of me feared that eating one bag of candy hearts would immediately turn me back into a severely obese woman like Cinderella’s carriage morphing into a pumpkin at midnight. It did not.

I did gain a couple pounds after the holidays, and feared that was a turning point from which I’d inevitably get larger and larger, but that hasn’t happened either. I was able to knock off the pounds again, which gives me hope that I am not doomed to regain everything I’ve lost as long as I keep weighing myself and don’t ignore what’s happening.

The binge eating problem will probably flare up again in the future when I’m under a lot of stress. I should probably confront this and see a therapist or something. I don’t know. I am a work in progress.

So, that’s how I did it, but what I found most interesting were the differences between losing a lot of weight the second time around compared to the first, which you can read about in part 3…once I finish writing it!

Photo by Stan Lupo / By NC-ND 2.0 CC

The post Losing more than 100 pounds…again: Part 2 – Losing Weight appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

I stopped writing about weight loss more than a decade ago because I didn’t want my body to be central to my online identity anymore. After blogging for six years, I’d said pretty much everything I had to say about weight loss anyway, so I didn’t want to dump empty calories into people’s blog readers. I’d also started to gain back weight, eventually gaining back all 200 pounds I’d lost, which I didn’t want to write about because it would undermine my strategy of ignoring the problem and hoping it would go away on its own.

When I finally started losing weight again during the pandemic, I was hesitant to mention it online because I didn’t want to go back on my promise of not blogging about weight loss, even if the numbers on the scale were moving in the right direction for once. However, losing more than 100 pounds the second time around is one of the rare weight-loss topics I haven’t written about, so I’m going to temporarily break my self-imposed ban because people did seem interested in the subject when I briefly mentioned it at the bottom of my last blog post.

This entry got super-long, which may have led you to believe I wasn’t working on it, but I was, I swear! I’ve spent at least 7 hours on it and I’m still not done! I’m breaking it into three parts: 1) How I regained weight, 2) How I lost it, and 3) How it was different the second time around.

Previously, on PastaQueen!

If you’re just tuning in, here’s a summary of the storyline so far: In January 2005, I was 24 years old and weighed 372 pounds. Over the course of two years, I lost about 200 pounds through diet and exercise. I blogged about it using the name PastaQueen and then wrote a book about it. I maintained a weight of 180 pounds for a little over a year, but then developed a chronic headache disorder, wrote a book about that, and started eating my way through the pain.

Over the next 10 years I gained back all the weight, averaging about 20 pounds a year, or 1-2 pounds a month, which is about one clothing size per year. There were three or four different spurts when I lost as much as 25 pounds, but then started gaining again. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I finally started losing weight and keeping it off. As of April 2022, I am now 41-years old and I’ve lost about 115 pounds over the past two years.

Here is a graph that depicts my weight over the past 17 years. The many large gaps are from times when I wasn’t weighing myself. The best thing about this graph is that it proves I wasn’t totally psycho to keep that computer backup from more than a decade ago that held some of this data. (I’m a digital hoarder, I admit it!):

(View full-size version of the “A History of Weight” graph.)

How’d you gain all that weight back?

I don’t know if any of us are self-aware enough to determine the sources of all our problems, but here are the ones I’ve been able to figure out, ordered by importance:

• Eating was the only thing that made my chronic pain tolerable.
• I was working too much and rewarded myself with food for surviving the day.
• I would binge eat when I was feeling down.
• I stopped exercising and cooking, particularly after the novelty wore off and it felt more like a chore than a fun new thing.
• The larger I got, the harder it was to exercise, which demotivated me from trying.
• I stopped weighing myself, which helped me ignore how bad the problem was.
• I’m human and it’s normal for people to gain back weight. Something like 80%-95% of people do.

There were times during the weight gain that things felt out of control. I distinctly remember a moment in 2014 when my weight had crossed into the 300’s again and I was lying on my bed thinking, “I really need to lose weight, but I just don’t have the energy.” I was perpetually exhausted, because of my chronic pain and because I was working too much, letting work bleed into my evenings and weekends. I know some people are able to stay thin without much effort, but my body constantly pushes me to be fat, and I just didn’t have the energy to push back anymore.

Binge eating

I don’t think I’ve written much about binge eating, but it became my main coping mechanism. I once bought an ice cream cake and ate it over the course of two days. I was also fond of Harris Teeter’s red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, though it usually took three days to eat that. Cake for breakfast! And lunch! And dinner! I wouldn’t even bother to slice it; I’d just eat it straight off the cardboard. Sometimes I’d buy a half-dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and eat all of them in one sitting. I ordered Chinese food a lot and was really confused when the guy from Subway showed up on my doorstep because he had a second job delivering food on the weekends. I also ordered Dominoes frequently, but thankfully the Subway guy did not have a third job there, otherwise he might have reported me to the food police.

I would often go to Trader Joe’s in the evening and buy something yummy as a reward for getting through the day, including: pink and white cookies, coconut chocolate covered almonds, ice cream bon bons, mint chocolate chip ice cream, pumpkin ice cream (during autumn only), s’mores cookies, cookie butter cookies, yogurt pretzels, cinnamon chip scones, vanilla bean mini-cupcakes, black and white cookies, and I think you’re getting the picture here, right?

Writing all of this down right now makes me realize this was a much bigger problem than I ever acknowledged at the time. It’s like that moment when Marie Kondo makes people put all the clothes they own on their bed as part of the decluttering process and they’re shocked by the mountain of textiles before them.

Feeling stuck and unmovable

By the time March 2020 rolled around, I had regained all the weight and was edging ever upward towards 400 pounds, a number I really, really, really did NOT want to hit. Getting out of my recliner required me to lean forward and push off with my arms. Walking a quarter mile to the grocery store was so tiring that I would drive there instead, which is absurd regardless of how high gas prices are. Exercise was even more unappealing than usual because I would quickly become out of breath. I had to buy a lot of my clothes online because the sizes weren’t stocked in brick-and-mortar stores. I didn’t want to fly anywhere and deal with the anxiety of needing two seats, so my travel aspirations were limited.

I knew I needed to make a change, but I felt stuck. My doctor referred me to a medical weight loss program run by a local hospital, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I attended the orientation (which was hosted by the surgeon who took out my gallbladder 16 years earlier, as if he were a recurring cast member in the TV show of my life). I only wanted to talk to a therapist about my binge eating, but I couldn’t sign up for just that. They wanted me to do the whole shebang, which included eating only pre-packaged meals, seeing a nutritionist, and a bunch of other stuff I wasn’t ready to commit to. So I just let it go and didn’t do anything.

Then 2020 arrived. It arrived for us all. Dun-dun!

(Coming soon: The next post explaining how I started losing weight again.)

Photo by Mike Mozart / CC BY 2.0

The post Losing more than 100 pounds…again: Part 1 – Regaining Weight appeared first on Jennette Fulda.

Vaccination, baby!

When I turned 40 last year, I was bummed that it put me in a more deadly COVID-19 cohort. Instead, my advanced age was good for my mortality because it made me eligible to get my shot two weeks earlier than if I’d been born five months later. I had to wait for the 40-45-year-olds window to open up at 8am on March 22 to schedule an appointment and I was on top of that game like a bot scooping up Taylor Swift tickets. As of May 12, 2021, I was fully vaxxed! Yay!

I still think Indiana should have let obese people jump the line instead of focusing mostly on age groups, but if they’d done that more than a third of the state would have been eligible at once. No, that’s not a joke. We’re number 5! (Thank goodness for Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana!) However, we’re also ranked 43rd in total vaccination rates, so I guess demand wasn’t that high after all.

Post-vaccination excitement

I found great joy crossing off items on my “Post-Vaccination To-Do list” which, yes, I really did write out on an orange index card.

I visited a dentist for the first time in two years and miraculously had no cavities. (Flossing daily works, y’all!) I switched to Verizon because Sprint got bought by T-Mobile who kept dropping my calls like it was the 90’s. I got the skid plate on my car reattached. And I finally got a haircut after 22 months. Yes, I did look like a cave woman!

The best moment was hugging my mom after 14 months of “air hugs” where we’d make hugging gestures from across the room like we were auditioning for mime school. The second best thing was no more 8am grocery store trips. I’d been going every two weeks at the least busy time, but the disruption to my sleep routine would trigger my headache and make me useless for the rest of the day. I also don’t miss the time it took to arrange my grocery list by aisle so I could swoop in and out as soon as possible. Ultimately though, making the grocery store a dangerous place to visit was one of the best things to happen to me since it basically forced me into food rehab, so I can’t be all that bitter about it.

When you turn 40, the warranty on your body expires

As soon as my inner odometer rolled over to forty, everything started to break. There were minor things, like varicose veins rising on my legs and my left thumb occasionally locking up. I’m also becoming far-sighted, so anything closer than eight inches from my face is blurry now, which is hilarious because before I got LASIK anything farther away from my face than eight inches was blurry. My field of vision has completely inverted!

My hair is thinning, which no one warned me it was going to do! And it looks gray in some photos depending on the lighting and what I’m wearing. I still have far more brown hairs than white ones, but they are slowly getting turned, like zombies. It’s Night of the Living Dead in my scalp, y’all.

Then there were more serious issues like the time I threw my back out, collapsed on the kitchen floor, and realized we shouldn’t have been laughing at the lady in the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” ads back in the 90’s. That was serious! I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fletcher!

I managed to slide my way across the kitchen linoleum, take a hard left through the bathroom, and then drag myself across the bedroom carpet until I reached my cell phone. I called my Mom who unlocked the door so the firemen could get me up, which took them all of 30 seconds. Thank you, fire department! I feel like I really got my tax money’s worth this year!

I then stared at the ceiling in my bedroom for four days because I for-real couldn’t get up. I even launched a web site from bed, which sounds like a fun way to do your job, but was just nerve-wracking because so many things could have gone wrong.

No more mini-marathons

The worst health news this year involved the intermittent knee pain I’d developed in October 2020, but had tolerated for seven months as I remained locked down in my hovel in fear of other people’s respiratory particles. When I finally went to the doctor in May, I was hoping she’d tell me it was runner’s knee since I’d started walking regularly after the pandemic hit. But nope, I have osteoarthritis! No, you don’t usually get that when you’re 39 and 11 months old. Yes, I think the chronic obesity had something to do with it.

Basically, the cartilage in my knees is wearing down and it doesn’t grow back. This is REALLY, REALLY, painful! The only worse pain I’ve experienced is my nine-hour gallbladder attack. There were nights in October and November when I took some tramadol leftover from a root canal so I could get to sleep.

I saw a physical therapist (though I never saw the bottom of her face) and she showed me exercises to strengthen my leg muscles to better support my knee. I haven’t had pain lately, but I’m also not walking as much as I was in 2020. Either way, my running days are over, under medical orders, which makes me a bit sad. I’m glad I completed the Indianapolis Mini-Marathon back in 2008, because that sure as hell isn’t happening again.

Java Bean is fine, but we thought he had cancer!

Visiting the vet during a pandemic sucks in general because you have to wait in the parking lot while they exam your pet inside, but I doubt it gets much worse than learning over the phone that your cat might have jaw cancer and then sobbing in your car next to three other parked people who can most definitely see you through their windshields. Thankfully, they were all distracted by their phones or pretended to be and kept any possible COVID particles in their cars instead of trying to comfort me.

In July, Java Bean had some loose teeth that had to be pulled during his dental cleaning, and the x-ray revealed what looked like cancer. During the ten days it took to get the biopsy back, I gave Java Bean as many treats as he wanted, fed him the non-diet cat food he prefers, and bought a little memorial kit to make clay imprints of his paws. I’d even selected the photo I was going to put next to it and done my best to smudge out my rosacea in PhotoShop:

Then the vet called and told me Java Bean has 18 lives instead of 9 because it wasn’t cancer after all! In the 20 years he’s been practicing, this was the first time an x-ray like that hadn’t been cancer. It was reactive bone growth which can be caused by an infection, trauma to the jaw, or also cancer, but Java Bean is still breathing and nagging me for dinner as I write this in December, so I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have cancer. Yay! (I also had to put him back on the prescription cat food, which he was less than thrilled about.)

Social media: Well, that was a horrible 14-year experiment!

Do you remember what is was like when social media was new and it was fun to find old high school friends on Facebook and watch William Shatner tweet at astronauts on the international space station? Then suddenly the Russians were using it to manipulate our elections and the Facebook algorithm promoted viral posts about virus misinformation that have probably killed tens of thousands of people. Like, damn, it went from high school reunion to mass-casualty event really quickly.

Social media was an interesting 14-year experiment, but I’ve decided it’s over now. The results: social media is awful! It does bad things to our brains and our self-esteem! Doom scrolling is bad for your mental health and doesn’t make anything better! Any positive effects are far outweighed by the bad. I am not going to swim through a river of shit to eat a delicious Krispy Kreme donut on the other side. It’s not worth it.

I’ve been slowly withdrawing from social media since December 2017 when I first removed the Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone, and this year I can say I’m 90% off it entirely. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to 100% since I still wish people Happy Birthday on Facebook and tweets are sometimes embedded in newspaper articles. I can’t seem to totally kick the habit of complaining about things on Twitter either, even though I stopped reading my feed two years ago. And of course, I posted links to this blog entry there because I know most people abandoned feed readers years ago.

To supplement my scrolling urgers, I’ve started spending 2-3 hours a week perusing Instagram like it’s social media methadone. It’s the kindest of the social media networks because it’s also the fakest one. The weirdest thing is that at least 15% of the posts are screenshots of tweets (but only the funny and nice ones), as if all the social media networks have started bleeding into each other.

Overall, this has been great for my mental health. I no longer get stressed out by whatever terrible things people are tweeting about that day. It’s a bummer that I don’t know as much about what’s going on with my friends and family, but if my friends insist on hanging out in the smoker’s lounge, I’m not meeting them there. Maybe we should all go back to blogging?

Closing another year on COVID

As the year comes to a close, the Omicron variant is eating its way through the country and slamming the healthcare system, which is depressing because I thought the worst of it had hit the hospitals last year, but no, right now appears to be the worst of it for our medical professionals. Please, please, please don’t let 2022 prove me wrong on this.

Only 8.9% of Indiana’s ICU beds are available right now, and it’s disconcerting to know that the hospital that accepts my health insurance is on diversion and my plan has no out-of-network coverage, which means if I trip over another space heater, I would be lucky to get treated at all, and I would probably end up at a place where I would be paying 100% of the bills myself, which would mean bankruptcy. Literal bankruptcy, where you have to find an attorney and file papers. Thanks, Amuricah! Maybe we should rethink this whole Capitalism thing? Like social media, it was an interesting experiment, but there must be a better way to structure society. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m open to suggestions.

That other thing

As such, I’m trying to stay healthy and accident free until the anti-vaxxers work their way out of the system and open up beds for the rest of us. The pandemic has put my health into prominent focus more than any other event in my life. When we first went into lockdown, I realized that if I got infected, obesity wasn’t going to kill me 20 years from now, it was going to kill me 20 days from now. I have obliquely referenced my weight in certain places, but to put it transparently, I’ve lost 105 pounds since the pandemic began. (The fact that I’m comfortable posting pictures of myself again should have been the clear giveaway.)

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it because I specifically left my PastaQueen site behind because I don’t want my online identity to be focused around weight anymore. I don’t want to reverse that position, but it seems weird not to mention it at all. It’s been different losing over a hundred pounds the second time than it was the first time, particularly because I felt stuck for so long and began to doubt it would ever happen. If people want me to write about this in more depth, let me know and I’ll consider it, since it’s an angle of weight loss I haven’t tackled before. That said, maybe no one cares about my ass any more, Half-Assed or not!

Here’s to 2022!

Good luck to everybody as we tackle 2022 together! I will try to blog more than once a year next time, so keep your feed readers open and for God’s sake, stop using Facebook!

The post Why blog once a day when you can blog once a year? 2021 summed up in 2211 words. appeared first on Jennette Fulda.