Flexi-Lady

You have to find the dietary choices that work well for your lifestyle as well as being satisfying and healthful to you personally.

And here’s mine (currently anyway):

Flexitarianism: Is a semi-vegetarian diet focusing on vegetarian food with occasional meat consumption. A self-described flexitarian seeks to decrease meat consumption without eliminating it entirely from his or her diet. There are no guidelines for how much or how little meat one must eat before being classified a flexitarian. Flexitarianism is distinguished from pescetarianism (i.e., one who eats only fish in addition to vegetarian foods), as well as pollotarianism (i.e., one who eats only poultry in addition to vegetarian foods).
In 2003, the American Dialect Society voted flexitarian as the year's most useful word and defined it as "a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat".

Definition courtesy of Wikipedia, found by my friend Teddi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexitarianism

When I discussed it with my doctor last week, she was amused by the term and supportive of the idea. She reminded me that as an omnivore I am meant to eat meat in certain quantities, but decreasing the amount significantly (as long as I get enough protein) is a healthful choice because of how fatty meat can be.

On average, I’m eating meat maybe two or three times per week at the moment. We’ll see how it goes.

I know it probably seems like I’m trying on program after program after program, and in a way – yes I am. It’s like trying on different shoes until I find the lifestyle choices that work best for me on a long term basis.

The Pit of Despair

So I went to my annual physical on Friday, as usual my Doctor patted me on the head and praised me for my healthy eating and exercise habits.

See, apparently I’ve got really svelte and healthy blood and way sexy blood pressure scores, and that’s the part of me that she looks at.

So while the rest of the world is peering at my fat body and going: “Yeeech! What an out of control SLOB, she must sit on the sofa and eat cheetos all day!”

My doctor is meanwhile looking at numbers on a page and going: “Wow I can really see those healthy eating habits and the fact that you go to a gym three times a week. Good work you good patient you!”

I’m like the poster child for those people who try to convince the rest of the world that slim does not equal healthy and obese does not equal death.

So why am I in the proverbial pit of despair? Why have I been hiding from my blog?

Confession time: My weight at the doctor’s office (you know the dreaded slidey scale) was back up to 274 lbs.

That’s right folks – I’ve wasted every bit of work I did since I began last October. I might as well have never tried at all.

It really wasn’t hard… a cup of hot chocolate here and a serving of French fries there, and presto! Weight springs right back up again. Since my metabolism didn’t have enough time to get out of it’s “CRAP, we’re starving to death!” mode that kicks in as soon as you lower your calorie intake, it was more than happy to pack back on every additional calorie I’ve consumed since Christmas as fat storage.

It’s like my body was going “Thank God that crisis is over… whew!”

And now this time, trying to cut, scrape and pry extra poundage off myself will be even harder. It’s harder every time. Every failure makes it harder to walk the road – which is steadily sloping uphill on me. The goal growing further and further out of sight.

We’ll see if I even get back on it. Right now I’m teetering on the brink of self acceptance as a fat girl and resigning myself to a life of having to be content with being beautiful on the inside, even though my outside looks like total and utter crap.

Itch

I find it deeply ironic that with as much as I baby my skin I’m still covered in extremely itchy hives at the moment.

It started after that extremely hot weekend I spent gardening two weekends back and hasn’t quit. At first I thought I encountered something out in the garden that my skin found disagreeable – but one of my coworkers is convinced I’ve got “stress hives.”

Great.

Too Sexy For TV

Can you spot the difference between these two women?

Allow me to clarify; the woman on the left is too sexy for a commercial airing during the 8PM prime time TV spot on ABC, the woman on the right is not.

My husband recently sent me a news report about how Lane Bryant’s new advertisement for its Cacique lingerie line was pulled from ABC’s prime time (8PM -9PM) time slot for being too sexy, while at the same time ABC left the self-groping Victoria’s Secret ads firmly in place. Both feature attractive young women in lingerie – so… what’s the difference?

My immediate response was quite different from my husbands; while Ted got angry and assumed they were saying that the LB model was “too fat” for prime time, I was wondering if the Victoria’s Secret models were offended by the idea that they were so "unsexy" they could be aired during cartoons and nobody would object.

Basically the unfair labeling of women bothers me on behalf of both my large and small sisters.

It’s just ridiculous. It’s sizeist. And it quite frankly pisses me off.

Not that I think we need ANY underwear commercials while people are trying to watch family oriented programming, but for craps sake – a skinny woman can touch herself on ABC at 8PM on a Tuesday night but a curvy woman admiring herself in a mirror is obscene?

Sometimes I want to go live in the woods and just quit this stupid society altogether.

http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/lane-bryants-plus-size-lingerie-commercial-gets-censored-by-networks/

Little Things

Weight loss is an exceptionally slow process with virtually no instant gratification. I think that’s one of the myriad reasons it’s so difficult to sustain.

I can work very hard every day for an entire month, and lets face it – I still won’t be a size eight at the end of that month. If I want to be a size eight I have to work hard every day for more like a year.

It’s really difficult to sustain that level of hard work for so long when you can’t see the difference you’re making on a day to day basis.

So I’ve been thinking about what little things I can do for myself to help my self esteem right now instead of solely focusing on results that may still be years ahead of me.

Right now for me it’s skin care.

It doesn’t take long, just five minutes or so in the morning to smooth on the three (yes I have three) different kinds of skin care lotion I use on various parts of my body every day. It makes me smell good, makes me feel good, and gives me a chance to perform a sort of daily visualization exercise.

I rub my hands over my limbs and visualize the fat and cellulite smoothing away beneath my hands, shedding off the unwanted part of me like my snake casts off his old skin every few months. I admire the smooth softness of my skin and it helps me to see something pretty about myself, even as I am right now.

It helps.

For different people this is going to be different things, but for every person there’s something you can focus on about yourself right now that’s good. Be it your hair, your face, your legs, your boobs – whatever.

Focus on that thing and give it some love and attention. It gets us a little bit closer to loving ourselves today no matter how long the road ahead may be.

Beware the Bunny

The school semester will be over in another two weeks which should herald the return of more regular posting. I’m taking a writing class which has been sucking up a lot of my creative juice, although that’s not the only reason for the dry spell.

To put it blunt: there’s a lot of crap going down right now.

My eating plan has done a pile drive into the dirt, so I’ll just go ahead and confess right now:

I’VE BEEN EATING MEAT.

Not a lot of meat, not often… but every other day or so.

Obviously I need to get back on track.

So here’s the plan: grocery shop tonight and re-stock my pantry with the healthy, tasty tools I need. Investigate and invest in some quicker vegetarian foods that I can reach for quickly so I don’t feel like I have to spend two or three hours cooking every night. And prep ahead, prep ahead, prep ahead!

Also I need to get the last chocolate Easter bunny out of the house before I devour it.

The bunny. It’s haunting me.

Free to Wear Sunscreen

There’s a line in the Baz Lurhmann song: Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) that goes:

“Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”

I’m really feeling that right now. Life is changing too fast, like trying to hold water in my hands. No matter how hard I clench it still escapes me.