This is really the only recent picture I have of me that is full body - I tend to avoid them.
Last night I weighed myself and I am officially the heaviest I have ever been (again). I have no one to blame but myself… I spent the majority of the summer working midnights at an inbound Ontario-only call center (so we got like… 3 – 5 calls a night). There were a lot of McDonalds and pizza nights, so I ended up gaining back all the weight that I lost last year. My guess is that I weighed more before we took our trip to Italy since I came back a pant size smaller.
So, I am back on Weight Watchers and this time it’s the real deal. I’ve never been a “fat pride” girl, but I’ve always been pretty content being plus sized. I’ve never really felt the urge to be a size 4/6 or been (too) jealous of those who are. I like my curves a lot, actually. However, I want to be curvy… not lumpy. And more importantly – I want to be healthy. I am really sick of feeling heavy, and constantly scared that I’m going to die young of a heart attack or something… that’s not something a 24 year old should be thinking about! So for the sake of my love for John, our future kids and my desire to see the world for as long as possible … I need to do this properly this time.
The new WW is fantastic… you get more points overall (I don’t even use my points up in a day…) and all fruit/veggies are 0 points – which is amazing… because I love fruit. But it means that things like bread and chocolate have gone up quite a bit. But so far it seems to be working. I’ve traded in my evening munchies for grapes and light popcorn instead of …pizza, wings, candy, chocolate, peanut butter sandwiches.. etc etc etc.
I plan on doing the full on before and after shots, with updates with pictures every three months or so. My goal is to lose 100 lbs over the next year – 2 years… (my more immediate goal is to lose around 50 – 60 lbs before I go to China at the end of next May) I’m taking it slow and not pushing myself since we all know that’s how you become successful. This will really be about making better habits and life decisions to live better for the rest of my life.
иконографияПравославни икониI am taking …um 1 class. …Which is super lame. 
But it means I have time for volunteering. So next week I’m checking out 3 or 4 different opportunities to see what I want to spend my time doing. There is really less than a month left of school, so I can’t do something that needs to be long term.
For the summer I think I’m going to be back at Accu-Link. I contacted them – they didn’t really say yes, but they didn’t say no. They asked how long I’d want to stay this time, but then didn’t respond… but I’m sure it will be fine.
My summer goals are pretty solidified in my head:
- lose weight
- find a thesis topic
Losing weight should be pretty easy at my mom’s during the summer. There is an elliptical trainer that I really like going on, I can cut the grass, I’ll be walking around and they don’t have a lot of crappy food in their house. I mean – they eat really rich food… like cheese and real butter, but they don’t have a lot of things with sugar or salt. …Also, I’ll get yelled at if I buy chips or junk food.
About the thesis – …turns out my whole idea of studying these “ghost cities” of China may not pan out as planned. I don’t really think it’s as big a mystery as people make it out to be. …China needed to increase their GDP by 8% in a year… so each regional government was given the instruction to do so. The easiest way to do it was to build infrastructure. Not only would this falsely inflate the GDP by making it seem like more money was being spent but it would also employ more workers. As for why they stayed empty – investors bought out most of the housing and now are just holding onto it, waiting to sell. So what houses are left are actually really expensive. Also – no one wants to move there because there is currently no economy there. Is this all a problem? I dunno, it’s weird – but I think it’s going to play itself out in a few years. I’d rather work on something that really will help people when I get involved. …So I’ve been doing a shit ton of reading about coal mining in China and the effects on people’s health, the lack of environmental health education, the effects on live stock, farms and water… There are lots of issues with coal, it’s just not a horribly original topic. The ghost cities were original… oh well, such is life.
I still need to talk to my advisor about all this – but I haven’t gotten into York yet, so I’m not going to bother him until I do.
This is the personal statement that I wrote for York. I wrote a slightly different one for U of T but I like it a lot less… I’m probably going to get into both schools but I will definitely choose York over U of T in a heartbeat. The person who would be my advisor is amazing, the faculty is much kinder and smaller so it will be easier to make close connections and the way the program is designed gives me much more freedom to structure my graduate degree into something really good for what I’m doing. …Here’s the statement:
While in China this past summer I saw vast, empty, but beautiful and expensive cities that were being built close to very impoverished and poor areas. It is apparent that the management of planning and investment in China is off track. I want to examine how and why. My intention for graduate work is to apply systems methodology to the kinds of urban planning problems faced by rapidly developing economies like China’s. I would like my work to have a practical effect on the lives of people living today as well as provide an informed contribution to academic research. York University, with its excellent interdisciplinary option, would be an ideal choice to allow me to work towards this goal. The opportunity to work with noted systems thinkers, such as Dr. Martin Bunch, would enable me to explore these issues while applying my strong research and writing skills, demonstrated in my undergraduate work. Dr. Bunch has agreed to supervise me in addition to an agreed upon thesis committee comprised of Dr. Peter Mulvihil as well as Dr. Xueqing Xu from the Chinese Language and Literature department.
My academic career has been varied and full of interesting challenges. My wide range of professional and academic experiences gives me a unique perspective on my areas of interest. Professionally I have mainly been in management and executive positions strengthening my abilities for self-directed organization and understanding of group dynamics including people’s needs when learning to live and work together. Academically, my original focus was on environmental science and ecosystem behaviour, but at the University of Victoria I was exposed to the pressing and serious social problems in environmental studies, and decided to further study these social aspects of my field. During the second half of my degree I thus focused mainly on urban planning and economics in East Asia.
During my years at York, I was introduced to systems theory and soft systems methodology. These were integral elements in piecing together the varied academic themes I explored throughout my undergraduate studies. My diverse background had given me a solid foundation in the biophysical workings of ecosystems, the political background for understanding the need for participatory and informed action, and the economic insights to understand the motivations of stakeholders. I believe these three areas are vital for an informed approach to urban development problems and when accompanied with systems theory allows for a more holistic understanding and approach to global environmental issues in general.
Due to my strong academic past and varied professional life activities I feel prepared to explore the questions that my Chinese experience posed. As I stood staring at the empty Chinese city before me, I wondered: Who planned this city? Are there more like it? What went wrong? All the environmental planning theory I had studied stood concrete in front of me. In that moment I had an emotional as well as an intellectual experience of the material I had written, read and talked about for so many years. The York Masters of Environmental Studies, which I hope to partner with the York Graduate Diploma in Asian studies, is the right program for me because of its interdisciplinary approach, in which I will thrive as a self-directed individual with a strong work ethic and desire for knowledge.
I ordered 4 books from Chapters at the very beginning of the month. I got three of the books (My Stroke of Insight, When a Billion Chinese Jump and Wild Swans) almost immediately but only got Zapatistas by Alex Khasnabish today. I’ve never been so excited to read a book… I read just one chapter of it for my aboriginals class last semester and was totally amazed. The beautiful rhetoric and revolutionary jargon that Marcos and the EZLN is totally captivating and *almost* makes me want to become some sort of rebel standing up for something I believe in.
Unfortunately I ordered all these books at a time when I thought I’d only be taking 1 class and would thus have ample amount of time to sit around and read. Instead I’m taking 3 courses (one that has a strangely heavy reading load…) and have been hit with really bad headaches. I’m used to have headaches a couple times a week, but now it’s every single day. My doctor prescribed for me to go see a RMT…which is fine by me…but has made John continuously point out the fact that I’m too stressed out and high-strung.
My classes are: Environmental Law (oddly – not the one with a huge course load), Chinese-American Diasporic Literature (where my lectures are in Mandarin – which is fine because the slides are in English, but most of the people during discussion speak Mandarin too quickly for John to translate…so I miss most of that) and China: Path to Democracy and Modernization (the one with the extremely heavy reading load).
I already regret not leaving for Korea in a few weeks and doing classes instead… but decided that I will definitely go after grad school. DEFINITELY. As I told John: I don’t care if North Korea invades and takes South Korea over – I’m going to go and teach freaking English. I really just want to go and live in another country for a year. So maybe after grad school I’ll have enough Mandarin to go and live in China for a year doing something in line with my research … we’ll see.
Anyway – when I get around to the book I’ll post about how amazing it is.
I mentioned a while ago that I started dieting pretty hardcore. …Cutting my calories by like 65% and biking everyday. It went really well for the first month (-9 lbs!) but December was a bit of a hard one (-4 lbs …) and January isn’t looking so good (I haven’t weighed in yet). It’s hard to get in shape in the Winter, so I’m looking forward to the summer. But I’m still eating pretty good (no chips or candy or crap) and I get on the bike once in a while…
I guess the most exciting update is that I’ve lost 19 lbs! Almost my first 20 lbs! …So I’m only 51 lbs away from my weight loss goal and I have 9 months to do it. That shouldn’t be too hard.
It’s really starting to show and I’m really starting to feel the difference. My old pants fit again, my bras are gigantic on me, and my shirts are getting baggy. So, success is still here! And it really feels great. I can’t wait for summer…
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