The beginning is not a very good place to start...

because it'd be long. I mean, long. When it comes to written babbling, I'm a master. That's one of the reasons why I'm not on Twitter. Keep it to 140 characters? Bah. I'd spend so much time trying to figure out what bits of punctuation I could leave out or whether I could bring myself to txt type that by the time I finished my tweet, it'd be time to post another 400 to catch everyone up with what I've done in the meantime.

Plus, Twitter strikes me as a little stalkerish and creepy. I honestly don't care whether my friends have just stepped out of the shower or groomed their nose hair or whatever.

Anyway. I'm sure I'll get around to logging the beginning of my fitness journey or what-have-you, but for now I'm starting with where I'm at. And where I'm at right now is working to get my caloric intake up because it turns out I was undereating for a while.

It's always interesting to see people's reactions when I tell them I was undereating. This reaction is usually an utterance of "Oh" followed by an awkward silence. Then I'll get solicitiousness: "I'm so sorry!" or "I hope you get better soon!" Or maybe it's incomprehension: "I don't think I could ever live without food."

Well, of course not. I didn't either. It was undernutrition, not starvation. Idiot.

But I don't say that. I usually smile and insert some sort of feeble joke.

I don't think I had a bona fide, DSM-IV-certified eating disorder. I just moved out on my own (food is expensive, yanno), experienced some skin issues I attributed to carbs (another topic I'll probably babble about in the future), and then stopped eating carbs without replacing them with more protein or fats (see this paragraph's first parenthetical. I like parentheticals, BTW). Then I got to the point where I didn't feel hungry on 1000 calories and it was normal, albeit irritating, to get all these bruises that took forever to heal. I should note the 1000 figure is a guess, since I didn't measure/weigh food at the time--but I learned I was undereating when I went on a 1200-calorie "diet" that had me eating more than I did previously. Like an idiot, I stayed on the "diet." Big shocker that I ended the 12-week program at the same weight I started.

That was the first bout.

I'm realizing now I'm going further into my history than I planned. Meh.

The 1200-calorie diet was around Jan-March of 2008. I worked a little bit to increase calories after that, but it wasn't until buying Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle early this year that I truly became convinced that I was undereating. Based on his calculations, I was burning around 2400 cals/day, whereas I'd been eating around 1400 with no weight/fat loss. So I worked my way up to 2200, stalled out, thought maybe staying at 2200 for a couple of weeks would be "good enough," did that, and then dropped to back to 1400, sometimes going up to 1600.

Enter Leigh Peele. I happened upon her blog in mid-March of this year, read through some of her posts, also listened to some of her podcasts. One thing I love about her is how much she emphasizes rest. I joined Lifetime Fitness in early March and was making use of it being open 24 hours to head in and work out before I started work at 7:15. Not a good idea when one doesn't sleep well to begin with. So I stopped that but decided to start her OPT for Fat Loss Program. But then the ugly ghosts of amenorrhea past (also last year and likely also a result of undereating) raised themselves up when my cycle went from 24 days to 37. Before my episode with amenorrhea last year, I averaged 29 days. Still haven't gotten quite back on track.

"Quite back on track." As if a 13-day difference in my cycle is just a minor, inconvenient blip. A two-week difference is a big deal, and honestly if this keeps up, I should head to my doctor.

But that's yet another post. The point for this post is that the incredibly late period got me reconsidering my "good enough" 2200 calorie stint. I decided that before embarking on a fat loss program, I need to truly get to my maintenance level calories or, better yet, above to make sure my metabolism's humming along like it should, and that my body is getting all the nutrients it needs.

My current plan is to restart OPT on June 8. This week I'm scheduled to eat 1800 calories, but I've been hitting closer to 2000 since since I'm working out again after a two-week training break, and I'm feeling hungrier. According to my GoWear Fit I'm still in a caloric deficit of about 400 cals/day, but my weight's staying the same.

So yeah. Starting at the beginning would've meant an even longer post. Or post series. Which, again, I'll likely get to at some point since I'd like to write something more entertaining than this, but for now this is where I'm at. Overcoming underating.

Perhaps I should've picked another name

Yeah it's Latin, but I still keep thinking "mantis corpse" when I see it. But I am going for the mind-body thing, truly.

More details to come, but I suppose the details don't truly matter, since this blog is mostly for myself.