Frustration

Well, I'm super frustrated with weight loss. I have been gaining and losing the same 5 lbs for months now. In fact, I've been at this weight for nearly a year and it's making me crazy. I've tracked my calories, and I'm paying attention to urges for mindless eating. I'm NOT getting regular exercise, because I still haven't figured out how to fit it into my schedule, but I am working on it (looking at biking to work, and I'll be going to shorter shifts soon so I'll have a bit more time on work days). But I think exercise is a fairly small part of the problem. My stress is probably a big part of it.

One of the big stressors is the house hunt. In June, we signed a 1-year renewal on our lease of the house we are in. In August, our landlord announced he was selling the house. A few weeks later, we got the foreclosure notice from his bank's attorney. Needless to say, this threw us into a tailspin. We had wanted to buy a house, but were planning on a year from now. We just spent all of our money on treatment, and we have huge amounts of debt. But, when we looked at the situation, we realized that going to another rental is likely to end up the same way, since so many houses for rent right now (especially the nicer ones) are first homes of people who bought something else and couldn't sell their first place, and many of these end up in foreclosure.

There actually turns out to be a lot of upside to our situation. We consulted a couple attorneys (our landlord is an attorney, so we wanted to be sure of our position) and found that current federal law protects us because of the foreclosure. In fact, in many ways we seem to have more rights than the owners. Once foreclosure proceedings began, our lease became protected even if the house is sold or auctioned. Also, we were able to use our deposit--all of it--towards rent, because in either a sale or auction there is nothing compelling the original owner to return our deposit for any reason. Many people have told us we can "squat" here, not paying rent at all now, but that isn't true unless we don't care if we are evicted. And we do care, because we are using this time to look for and purchase a home, and we want to have this place to live in until we close on a house.

So, it's good--we are buying a house!--and we will end up paying less for the mortgage than we do in rent, but it's quite stressful nonetheless. We might buy the house we are in, since we love the location so much, but that is not a certainty by any means.

We are accustomed to having a lot of stress in our lives, and we are trying to learn how to cultivate serenity instead of chaos. I am hopeful that this process has a side effect of helping me to change whatever behavior is keeping me from losing this weight.

A couple weeks ago, our Lucy turned 1--I can't believe it. We had her first birthday party, and it was much bigger than we had intended, and it was exhausting for all of us, but fun. It was a pretty traditional party--kids, presents, cake, chaos--but we decorated with Indian elephants, to celebrate her heritage. She had fun, although she was frequently overwhelmed by everything happening around her. We dressed her in the cutest baby sari that I found online. Super adorable. When I get the pics off the camera, I'll post some.