Induction
15 October 2003, 10:31 PM

So I've started the first day of the Atkins diet. I was getting fed up with watching calories so carefully and CONTINUING to gain. I've been trying (actively trying) to lose weight now for over a year and a half and the scale has only budged upward from 140 to 153. (And I should be anywhere from 118 to 125.)

I know what I've been eating and how I've been exercising - I've kept a journal all this time. The only time I've actually lost pounds is when I've eaten less than 1400 calories and also painted two entire rooms of my house every night for a week after moving two apartment's worth of boxes the previous week.

It's getting extremely uncomfortable. Buying larger and larger clothes is a pain, as is the vanishing energy. But there are also the little annoying things, like puffier arms being too close to larger breasts causing the underwire bra to eat at my arm all day. Or having to wear pantyhose because, well, otherwise thighs rubbing together could start a fire. Or at least an uncomfortable rash.

I WANT TO BE BACK AT THE COMFORTABLE WEIGHT I WAS JUST THREE YEARS AGO! I really don't have that far to go, but it'll make such a huge difference, to my general comfort, my health and my energy levels.

So, I've decided to give this Atkins thing a try, since the science behind it makes sense to me. I'm already amazed at how much food I've eaten in one day, how filling it was, and how little calories that added up to. I'm not hungry at all, but the craving for SOMETHING sweet is indeed there anyway. I want a piece of chocolate SO bad, but I'm in the induction period so, no carbs for now.

Marriage Protection Week
15 October 2003, 3:04 PM

If you don't know about it already, now you do: President Bush declared October 12-18, 2003 "National Marriage Protection Week" as part of the on-going effort to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. As others have pointed out, this week began on the anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death, giving a rather cruel and gruesome twist to an already discriminatory - and to my mind, utterly illogical - perspective.

I don't get it - churches and right-wing fundies are all up in arms about protecting the sacredness of marriage all while gays and lesbians are asking for civil and legal union rights. The hypocrisy is everywhere. It's okay for a man and a woman to get married in a purely legal sense for reasons having nothing to do with procreation, religion or love. (Money, power, immigration, business, political maneuvering.) But these don't destroy the sacredness of a christian man/woman marriage? And a homosexual couple, marrying to establish a loving partnership and legal and civil recognition of such is destroying the sacredness? When they didn't even involve religion in the first place?

Here's some news for them - I may be in a legally sanctioned, paperwork and everything, heterosexual marriage, but religion was not involved in any way. We borrowed cultural elements from our two diverse backgrounds, but there was no church, no clergy, no mention of deities, etc. Why? because, even though we are the kind of sexual orientation that these religious groups would sanction for a marriage, most religious groups would also have a fit over mixing cultures, races, an older woman with a younger man and *gasp* two different religions. That's why there's such a thing as a legal union, so we all don't have to convert to one religion that claims authority over marriages everywhere.

This whole thing just torques me. It's even very ethnocentric, since a lot of the right-wing grousing going on involves looking down their noses at aspects of other cultures concepts of marriage. And it angers me that the homosexual couple who've been together for 20 years can't get on each other's health insurance when the heterosexual schmucks who'll stay in their 4th marriage for all of maybe a year, can.

Anyway. I decided to rant a bit about this since I've seen a lot of well written things on it lately. There's a few folks on LiveJournal who've organized a LJ National protest Day. I followed the link to some of the icon images and found I like this one enough to include it here:

Congratulations to China!
15 October 2003, 2:11 PM