Help me

I have an alien love child firmly clutching at my middle.
The only way to truly evict this alien love child is surgery.
I am diligently working on the
pre-surgery preparation.
However, I need your help to
evict my alien love child.

Tasia's Eviction Plan
Reviewed and Revised 11 February 2007

Tasia's Eviction Journal
latest entry loaded - 10 February 2007

Tasia's Weight Loss Chart
latest weight charted - 2 February 2007

What the heck do I mean by this?

Where did this alien love child come from?

Just what is an alien love child?

Why you should help me?

What do I get from your help?

What are you getting from this?

What is this site not?

How come no one has ever seen an alien love child?

Why am I asking for your help?

When did I realize I had an alien love child?

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What the heck do I mean by this?

I actually have a very funny video explaining this. This is a 1.3 M video file.

However, it was shot with the video camera turned sideways. The file size has been reduced down, but it is still sideways. Thus, the video is oriented like this:

instead of upright.

For those with slower connections, I have this sack of skin on my front that makes me look pregnant. I look pregnant but I am not pregnant. At least not with any human child. I have had this apparent pegancy for years now. I call this sack of flesh that is not me my alien love child.

Where did this alien love child come from?

One night, while I was asleep an alien love child latched onto me. I didn’t realize what had happened for quite some time. However, I have been carrying this alien love child for years now and I’m ready for it to leave! The only way to get rid of an alien love child is surgery.

Just what is an alien love child?

The alien attaches to your middle through your belly button and plants an alien love child. This alien love child attaches to you like that thing in the Alien movies. However, the alien love child that attaches to us is much smarter than the one from the movie because the one from the movie attached to the victim’s face. The real alien attaches around your middle and gains access to you through your belly button. The belly button is a better location because it can not only gain easy access to your stomach but your spinal column. It also leaves your mouth open so you can nuture it for years. The alien love child then burrows into your brainstem and alters your vision so things appear to be normal to you. It slowly eats away at your body and your life until it grows into a blob and you can’t move because of it and all of the stuff it has made you acquire. Thus, the alien love child can grow, and grow... and keep on growing.

How come no one has ever seen an alien love child?

The alien comes in the dead of the night and it is invisible until it attaches to you. Then it blends to your skin so it looks just like you. At night when you are asleep it sucks on your food and burrows into your nervous system. It convinces you that you need things you don't really need to soften you up. It convinces you to eat things that don't have any flavor so it can make you eat more and more in the false hope of actual flavor to come. It softness you up by making you spend money for things that you hope will make you happy but instead just clutter your life. By taking over your brain it can blind you to the stuff it has made you acquire for no reason. It won't let you get rid of any of the stuff because if you did you might be able to resist and discover you need even less stuff.

It is influenced by television and gains more energy from the waves, especially when you are channel surfing. Thus, it wants you to watch more and more tv.

Why am I asking for your help?

I started applying my organizational skills to loosing weight and discovered that there is more to it than just eating right and exercising.

There really is such a thing as being healthy and overweight. I have had a doctor tell me I had the heart of an Olympic athlete after an EKG.

My husband calls me a saint. He calls me this as my snack of choice is broccoli or asparagus - raw, with nothing on it.

My husband cooks most of the meals at our house. He figures out how much I want by looking at what he would consider a reasonable amount and then getting a third of that for me. I get extremely annoyed at people who don’t know me and assume that I am overweight because I eat too much. This is not true.

My being overweight is also not due to my eating "bad" food. I love broccoli with no cheese. I also love it with a reasonable amount of cheese. Not cheese in larger proportions than the broccoli. A small 8 ounce can of soda has leftovers in it for me. I eat kids meals at McDonald’s and Wendy’s because I want the milk and the fruit, not to be "good."

My favorite doctor, Dr. Marti Taba, could not understand why I was overweight when I brought her in food diaries I kept back in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, she is now in Hawaii.

The real reason I am overweight is that I have an alien love child.

When did I realize I had an alien love child?

On April 13, 2000 I had breast reduction surgery. I had two thirds of my breasts removed and got a new lease on a normal life. However, one of the side effect was complete strangers occasionally would ask me when I was expecting. My overly large breasts had pushed on my upper abdomen for years and now they were gone. I did look like someone who was pregnant. One day I utterly lost it and just said to a complete stranger, "I have no idea. It’s an alien love child." She walked away very embarrassed and I suddenly had a new perspective on life. I could love my body, as this fleshy growth on the front of me was an alien love child, thus not me.

Why you should help me? – Seven moments in time that prove Tasia's tract record.

• In the fall following my breast reduction I started training for a half marathon. I did two half marathons in 2001 – Athens, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana. I do not recommend walking around the Indy 500 track as you feel like a pea in a frying pan with all the black pavement reflecting the heat from the sun at you. I walked, as walkers do not get the injuries runners get. Plus, with the floppy sack of alien love child there was no way I could run. I tried once and it just bounced on my thighs in a most unpleasant way. Walking was much better. I did the Athens Ohio Half Marathon again in 2003 because it is such a lovely walk. I might do it again, but I cannot afford to take the time to train for a half marathon. Make a donation and we will see if I can set a new personal best time!
  
  
• I lost 55 pounds through diet and exercise before I did the breast reduction.
  My food plan was the food pyramid as it appeared on the side of a cereal box. I just took the lower number of servings on each of the ranges. I had to really push myself to get in six servings of grain a day. I just don’t tend to eat grains if given a choice. This is a total reversal of what doctors and everyone had been telling me all my life. They had said I’m overweight because I eat too much. In reality, I have been starving myself most of my life.
  
  I had to not only increase the number of grains I was eating to get the six the FDA recommended, I had to actually increase the amount of food I was eating in all but the fruits and vegetables. To follow this plan I had to eat more food than I wanted each day. Given what I know now and the FDA changing the food pyramid without the help of the grain lobby I would have lost the initial weight faster.
  
  My exercise plan I did by starting walking laps at the YMCA. Eventually I got to the point where I was swimming a mile each morning. I gave up my YMCA membership several years later due to the cost of the membership and the cost of gas to get there. Since the Y is seven miles from my house walking to and from was not really an option.
  
  I had reached the point where I was treating weight loss as my job. Every day I put in hours of time on it – obsessively thinking about it, working out for hours a day, making colored spreadsheets of what I ate and a really long graph of my weight loss by the pound. I had to tape several pieces of paper together. I hung it over my desk above my phone so I could see it when I was getting discouraged.
  
  I kept at it and reached a point where I had lost 130 pounds. I held at this weight for two years.
  
  I was a size 16 for the first time since high school, and yet I never really felt any thinner than when I started. I was definitely more fit, but when I looked at myself in the mirror all I saw was that alien love child. I was getting compliments about how great I looked while still feeling that I was fat.
  
  One day when Brian and I were on our way into our favorite restaurant, Buffalo Wild Wings, I literally stopped a conversation and turned two men’s heads. I was wearing this great short red plaid dress. It went just past my bottom, and flipped around as I walked. It was painted on above the waist. I liked it because it was a great red plaid and my husband liked me wearing it.
  
  Obviously, I looked good in clothes, but when I took them off the alien and the chicken dumplings from my breast reduction were still there. I never really saw the real amount of weight I lost because of all of the loose skin. It didn’t look like I really lost weight to me as I still had this sack of flesh, which was actually just loose empty skin. I still looked pregnant.
  
  This time when I succeed in loosing the weight I want to get all the empty sacks of skin cut off my body and evict the alien love child. Your donation can make this a reality!
  
  
• I was having really severe PMS that spread way beyond the few days before. I would become the evil demon bitch who I did not like and no one else liked her either. My mood swings were worse because I did all of that work to loose weight and get fit, but it didn’t look like I had done anything because I still saw the alien. When I felt moody before my period that made it worse to the point of being depressed about life in general.
  
  I was living on a tablet or two of over the counter pre-menstrual medication for most of the month. This took care of the demon bitch from hell but I decided that I should find out if there was a problem or medication I should be taking instead.
  
  This was the point when I let my, at that time, doctor talk me into birth control pills. By regulating my cycle it was supposed to help me get control of my mood swings.
  
  I had taken birth control pills in college for the same reason. I actually told my then doctor this and the complication that they made me suicidal in seven days. She assured me that these pills were different and had been reformulated. These pills weren’t like the ones I took years earlier.
  
  What a big mistake!
  
  I gained a pound a day while I was on birth control. My eating had not changed; my exercise had not changed. The only change was that I was taking these evil little pills. I started to feel suicidal and knew these thoughts belonged to the pills, not to me, so I stopped taking them after sixteen days. However, they had their evil influence in my system and I kept gaining a pound every other day for the next month. Then the gain slowed to a pound or so a week. Eventually I stopped gaining but not until I had put back over half of the weight I had lost. Enter serious depression and the thought of killing the doctor who didn’t listen to me. Depression to the point where when I went to see a new doctor about a pain in my heel they diagnosed me with clinical depression and got me on antidepressants that day.
  
  After eighteen months on the antidepressants I was over the depression and eased down to no medication at all. However, by this time I had gained yet more weight. I really don’t know what I weighed at this point in time, as my husband would not let me see what the scale read. In fact only he knew what the scale said.
  
  One day I sneaked a peek and got upset. He promptly removed the part of the scale that plugs into the base and hid it so I couldn’t even try to sneak another peek. While writing this he also told me he hid the cord that went between the scale and its control box in a separate place and the batteries that fit the scale in a third place still. When I wanted my weight read he could appear with all the parts. I could weigh myself, he would read the number but he would not tell me what it said, as we were not going back down that depression path.
  
  I still think the nurses at the clinic would have found my killing that doctor a justifiable homicide. They knew all the work I put in to loose the weight through diet and exercise. However, I resisted the desire while depressed and now I can joke about it.
  
  If you have enjoyed my tale so far, please consider making a donation.
  
  
• I used to have a membership to a local gym. I joined it because I wanted a place to go work out that was reasonably close to my home and not the seven miles away the Y had been.
  
  I went in first thing in the morning but the 30 minutes workout was so light I was really only warmed up and ready to start a real workout when I finished it. I am very fit even if I don’t look like it to other people. When I attended the YMCA I was out lifting a good portion of the men who worked out there. Since their 30-minute workout felt so light I would go in two times a day. They claimed "that it wasn’t healthy to work out more than once a day. I needed to give my body time to rest after a workout." So I started going in for an hour or more at one session instead of two shorter workouts. Plus, on days with nice weather I would walk to and back home from the gym as it was less than a mile from my house.
  
  The last straw for me was when the gym owner called me and claimed that other members were complaining about the way I smelled. Heck, this was a gym! You are supposed to sweat! I showered before I went in and once I was back home afterward. I had had enough of a gym that was more interested in how many people they could they push through the door in a day than in someone actually working out. I cancelled my membership.
  
  I really wanted a good, hard, regular workout and then one day it dawned on me that I could live out a childhood fantasy. I would get a paper route!
  
  I had always wanted a paper route when I was a kid. However, I grew up out in the country where you had to be able to drive a car to deliver the paper. I started my route in March 2005. I got to exercise outside. I could feel myself getting more fit as I was able to complete my route in less time. During the summer I even left my car at home and used a garden wagon to pull my entire route of papers. It saved gas and was more quality exercise. When I started it took me three hours to deliver my route. February 1, 2006 I set a new record of just two hours! Instead of paying to work out at a gym I now get paid to exercise.
  
  With the time it takes to prep the route before I deliver the papers I am basically making minimum wage. However, I am getting paid and it is three times what I was paying to the "gym" each month. Talk about your perks to keep you on track! Nothing motivates me to work out like getting paid does. Motivate me more, make a donation.
  
  
• When Brian and I go out to eat we have always split a regular meal. He orders a sandwich with an extra patty because there is no point in us ordering two sandwiches. I want the beef and the toppings, but I don’t want the bun. He eats the bun and half of the beef. I get a salad with the meal instead of the fries. I also have my traditional three sips of the soda. On rare occasions when we are feeling extra hungry we get a potato. He eats most of the innards and I have some of the innards and the yummy potato skin.
  
  In October 2005 Wendy’s changed their sour cream to reduced fat sour cream. My husband noticed that there was no flavor to the potato. He had never added two sour creams to a potato before. It was still dry and he couldn’t taste any sour cream.
  
  This is when I realized how absolutely terrible most reduced fat and fat free foods taste. I decided to purchase some real sour cream. Wow, what a difference. Instead of eating at least a 16 ounce carton of fat free sour cream in a week it was taking me a month or longer to finish off one carton. The real sour cream was satisfying. Just a little and I had the taste I was seeking. I did not have to eat more and more of it hoping to taste what I was after. I realized that low fat didn’t satisfy me, ever.
  
  We also started reading the ingredients on the fat free stuff and there wasn’t much in it that looked like food. Real sour cream has sour cream in it, not a bunch of multi-syllable chemicals.
  
  I decided to actually only eat real food, to eat what I like and just to keep track of what I was eating. Basically, I decided to stop dieting.
  
  In December I went for my annual female physical and when I stepped on the scale at the clinic the nurse announced my weight as 302. I had been thinking I was around 285, at most 290. Suddenly she made me gain seventeen pounds. Depression attempted to take hold of me again. This time my husband intervened. He said to me that doctor’s scales are not always accurate – little kids jump up and down on them. He had never seen my weight over 299 all the time he had read the scale. We went home and he weighed me that day and my weight was 297 on our digital scale. The nurse had used a mechanical doctor’s office scale reading from the side, not the back. She didn’t check the balance and zero out the scale before she pronounced me over three hundred pounds.
  
  This January, I decided to get serious about losing weight again. My best friend Amy is going to be my shoulder to cry on, ear to listen to me and my voice of reason. She came to visit and we took my before pictures. I came up with a specific plan tailored to my body with signs beyond the weight on the scale. When I weighted in I was down to 293.0 pounds. I had been loosing weight without trying! I had been eating what I actually wanted – lots of real sour cream, real cream in my tea, all the vegetables I wanted, and cheese, glorious cheese. I usually have between ten and fifteen varieties of cheeses in the house at any given time. Most meals Brian and I cook two menus, his food and my food. I only eat whatever he eats when I am actually depressed. I love green beans - he hates them. I enjoy many different varieties of fish - he won’t touch any of them, except tuna drowned in miracle whip and enough mustard he can’t taste the tuna. He says lots of onions help, too.
  
  My paper route is only one day a week and I was desperately looking for more ways to work out. I tried a yoga class and I have done both Jazz dance and Pilates. I enjoyed most of them but I want to move and work out hard for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The Jazz dance lessons lasted an hour and they were interesting but I wanted to dance not just learn a routine, do it a couple of times and spend the next several weeks learning another routine. Pilates is fun, but not really bouncy enough to satisfy me.
  
  Last fall I went to an SCA event because they were going to have dancing. I had done this before and had loads of fun. The dancing is what I am looking for too: ten minutes of instruction and three hours of actual dancing. When I am done I actually feel like I worked out.
  
  I had tried a couple of aerobics classes which I prefer to yoga because it moves faster. Aerobics is dancing the way I like it – little instruction and lots of workout. When I took aerobics classes the instructors would keep having me sit out because I "looked like I was overheating." I am very pale skinned and I don’t spend endless hours in the sun so when I work out I get a bit red. I would be getting to my target heart rate and they would make me stop and cool down so the fat lady wouldn’t drop dead on them even though I could do the workout for over an hour if they’d only let me.
  
  I prefer interactive workouts like dancing and aerobics. Things like weight lifting where it is just you is good as well. However it doesn't do as much for me because I want to work out with other people actively, not just in the same room as they are.
  
  My husband says that if I can get the income to replace my income I can become a gym rat and do aerobics all day long. Shameless plug for a donation here: PLEASE GIVE ME MONEY SO I CAN GO DO AEROBICS ALL DAY.
  
  
• The only problem I have with aerobics right now is that the alien gets in the way, so I need to get it cut off.
  
  The more weight I loose, the more the alien hangs, and hangs on. Surgery to get rid of the extra flesh from the dead alien is an absolute so I actually look like I have really lost weight.
  
  Nonetheless, I need the money to supplement my income and the membership to my dream gym: the McConnell Heart Health Center! This is within walking distance of my house. It is just under two miles, closer than the library which is two miles away and I walk to on a regular basis. McConnell has everything I could want in a gym. Yes, this is yet another shameless plug for a donation!
  
  
• Another fun exercise I have taken up this winter is dancing. Actually, I have taken it up again. I used to go contra dancing back in college in the 1980s. I discovered the local contra dance in December and had tremendous fun! Almost every two weeks they have a dance that is three hours. I go to the dances as often as I can afford to attend and dance my feet off. Help me get to go dancing more, please make a donation.
  
  
• Tasia's Weight Loss Chart shows my progress on evicting my alien love child.

What do I get from your help?

• Money for my reduction surgery when I reach my goals. Absolute eviction of my alien love child!
• Money to go dancing.
  
• Money for Amy to come visit me. We can go workout together while she is in town.
• Money for me to join McConnell Heart Health Center so I can go swimming again and take aerobic classes without having to drive across town every day.
• Money to supplement my income so that I can afford the time to work out more.
  
  

What are you getting from this?

• Encouragement and inspriation!
• Fun being silly (The journal on 3 February 2007 is highly recommended for silliness.)
  

  A good example of my silliness is my video Wiggle Your Tush - a 1.5 M sideways video file. For those with slower connections: I am being silly flopping my hair around, I made up and sing a silly song, and very seriously point out that fidgeting burns calories.

• My whole person approach to life. Food may not have anything to do with why you are overweight. My friend Amy is a perfect example of stress as the cause. She lost weight readily when she had a job and her kids were in daycare. Her weight came back when her money went south and kids were there all day.
  
• I look to the positive never the negative.
  
• If you can laugh your way to an organized home or business then you can laugh your way to an organized you.
  
  

What is this site not?

• This is not Counseling service. I am not a counselor.
  
  I am just a real person dealing with my problems in my own way. I am letting you know what I am doing.
  
  If what works for me helps you, that's great – but I make no promises and no guarentees.
  
  
• This is not Medical advice. I am not a doctor and only doctors of medicine can give medical advice.