Pre-Diabetic

It’s that time of year again, time for our annual physicals.  My Doc now works with a health care network that lists all of a patient’s blood work numbers on a website so that if you want to, you can go over them yourself.  Honestly all I really needed to hear from her was, “everything looks fine,” and I didn’t obsess over each number like I used to.  Primarily I wanted to know that my liver levels were normal a year after my liquid diet induced liver failure scare, and happily – they are.  I seem to have recovered completely.

My husband didn’t fare quite as well.  Although every other number for him was textbook normal, his fasting blood sugar came back high, earning him the “pre-diabetic” label.  His Doctor wants him to work on his diet and check back in three months, so we’re planning on reversing this situation with dietary changes so that he doesn’t have to take an oral medication.  He already walks two to three miles about four times a week, which I’m sure is helping the situation a lot.  We’ve both been walking that much for over a year, and annoyingly he can still walk faster than I can jog.  I’ll always be jealous of his long, gorgeous legs.

I digress…

As I’ve mentioned previously, my husband has had a medically “normal” body weight his whole life, so he is now a living contradiction to the assumption that fat = diabetic, and thin = healthy.  He has an unlucky genetic predisposition toward the disease since his Mom has it, and like Ted my Mom-in-Law has never been overweight a day in her life.  That being said, my husband is a healthy eater but has also spent his entire life eating pretty much whatever tasty thing he wants when he wants it.  Fortunately he often wants healthy things, but he also adores anything made from meat, fat, flour, and cheese (heck, who doesn’t?) Looking at a food he wants and telling himself that he can’t have it isn’t going to come easily to him.  Me, I’ve been practicing that behavior since I was 12.  Although a person might always be naturally thin, as time passes they’re still not going to get away with indulgence eating the way they could as a twenty-something.

After discussing the idea of dietary changes with him, I decided to take a look at my own fasting blood sugar number from my recent test.  Turns out it came back as 68.  The ideal range is 65 – 99, so mine is about as perfect as it can get even though I’m still classified as obese.  When I mentioned this to Ted he said I just had, “good genes,” but I know in previous years that score has come back as high as 102, so I believe it’s my current eating patterns that are causing the number.  I sat down and thought about what it is about my eating that would contribute to the effect based on my own nutritional research, trial and error.  For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with:

1)      I eat about 2-3 cups of raw vegetables at least four times a week.  This isn’t really salad since I skip the lettuce and dressing parts and just cut up a bowl of whatever looks fresh and good at the grocery store, focusing on getting a variety of colors and textures: cucumbers, celery, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, etc.  I rough chop them into a bowl, sprinkle on some seasoning like 21 Season Salute from Trader Joe’s and a little salt, and I’m good to go.  A word of warning: if you choose to do this it will give you gas until your stomach adjusts to that amount of raw fiber.  At this point I’m so accustomed to it I could probably digest the front lawn with no gastric distress.

2)      Minimal white foods.  A friend of mine who is an avid runner once told me that she eats nothing that is white.  At first I thought that sounded crazy, but she was pointing out that things like processed cane sugar, bleached white flour, and white potatoes really aren’t the best nutritional choices.  I absolutely cannot live a happy life (or permanently stick to any eating plan) that doesn’t include bread, pasta and pizza, so I don’t adhere to this rule as religiously as she does, I just keep it in mind as a guideline.  It includes having swapped mashed potatoes with sweet potatoes at dinner time and substituting spinach and steamed broccoli instead of pasta when I’m having pasta with meatballs.  Vegetarians will disagree with me on this one, but if I have to choose between pasta or meatballs, I’ll take the meatballs every time.  The protein gives me good fuel, is satisfying, tasty, and keeps me full a lot longer.  I also eat limited bread.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore bread and I’m not an anti-bread, gluten free by choice, no-carbs person by any means – I just acknowledge that floury breads and pasta are high in calories for a low volume of food, and I know that the white flour converts very quickly to glucose in the blood, causing blood sugar spikes, so I stay aware of how much of it I’m eating and keep it limited.

3)      This is the really hard one for me: I ditched daily desserts.  I have a single serving of white flour, fat and cane sugar-based dessert about once every two or three weeks.  This means saying no, on a daily basis, to doughnuts, cake, candies, cookies and pies that appear at work for general consumption.  With very few exceptions, I’ve flipped a switch in my brain that says if it’s in the office and I didn’t bring it with me, it’s off limits.  Period.  I’ve had to, because trying to mitigate the damage done in the office environment by a constant influx of refined sugar was just too difficult.  Although I do eat one to two pieces of fruit on most days, I’ve had to let go of the beloved tradition I grew up with that dessert always follows dinner.  Fructose (the sugar found in fruit) and sucrose (white cane sugar) act very, very differently in the body.  One is perfectly fine for me to consume on a daily basis, and one is unfortunately not.  It’s hard at first, but gets easier over time as it becomes a habit.  When I do have dessert (and I absolutely DO still have desserts), it’s out in a restaurant, or to celebrate a special occasion, and I make sure ahead of time that it’s always exceptional and always totally worth it.

Since my husband isn’t much of a sweet eater it’s probably number 2 that he’s going to need to work on.  He adores soft pretzels, potato gnocchi, mashed potatoes and chewy hoagie rolls like a true Philadelphian.  These are all fine, tasty foods that I wouldn’t ask anyone who loves them to live a life without – I incorporate all of them into my own diet after all.  It’s just going to be a lowering of volume while simultaneously increasing the things that don’t cause a person’s blood sugar to spike like Old Faithful going off.

This is going to be a challenge.

On Being Average

Today I got a great compliment.

I’m addicted to Wegman’s produce department, which manages to have a high degree of both variety and freshness regardless of the time of year.  Today I stopped in for my weekly fix, which amounted to a heaping huge pile of fruits and vegetables.  That’s all I had in my cart, since I get the rest of my groceries at a cheaper establishment.

The woman ringing me up said something to the effect of, “wow – you eat healthy!”

I smiled at her wryly and replied, “I follow a high volume, low calorie diet.”

Although I was using the word “diet” in that sentence simply to refer to what I ate, not deliberate calorie restriction, she took it to mean a weight loss attempt through calorie restriction.  She blinked at me, then leaned over the counter to get a better look at the rest of me, and upon looking back up at my face said, “you’re on a diet?  You don’t need to be.”

Essentially, I passed as “average”.

One of the things that started me on this path was being crushed by the hydraulic lap belt on an amusement park ride, which forced the realization that I no longer fit into the world.  I still have fifty pounds to lose, but I already fit into the world again.  When I was at my heaviest I daydreamed a lot about being slim, but I also just daydreamed about being unnoticeable.  About being a size that people do not pay much attention to because it’s a size that a lot of other people are.  To some people (not all) I now look like an ordinary sized human being, and it took a total stranger to point that out.

To myself, I still seem very large.  So when I got home I made a list of things about my prison of fat that I so desperately wanted to escape from:

• Walking into most clothing stores and knowing that if anything in there fit me at all, it wouldn’t be anything I thought was pretty.
• Constantly readjusting and pulling at my shirts so that they covered my belly as thoroughly as possible.
• Pathological avoidance of putting my sweaters and pants into the clothes dryer because I was afraid they would shrink.
• Walking down the street and cringing every time a group of teenagers passed by in a car or on foot because I was expecting cow and pig noises to be screamed at me.
• Avoiding stadium seating, theatre seating, and chairs with arms on them because they pinched and crushed my hips and thighs.
• Having to allow extra time to stop breathing hard and sweating when I was rushing to arrive somewhere I wanted to look presentable.  Particularly if it was located on a building’s second floor.
• A generalized, vague feeling of apology and embarrassment that plagued me almost all the time out in public.  As though I felt that inflicting my size and appearance on the people around me was a terrible imposition.

I have escaped these things.  And I promise I will never, ever take these freedoms for granted.  And I’m going to try my hardest to hold onto them.

Body Positive Film Review - The Heat

I adore movies, and have had something of a love-hate relationship with Hollywood (Hollyweird?) for some time now.  Obsessive nerds like me will argue endlessly over the merits and flaws of our entertainment pursuits in a way that is understandably baffling to mundies, but being obsessive and a bit bonkers over the things we love is, in my opinion, what makes us nerds.

That being said it’s become more difficult over time to get me physically into a movie theatre when a film is first released.  It’s spendy to see a film in theatres, so I reserve my movie-going dollars for films with special effects that make the big screen experience worth it.  Big explosions, aliens, winged creatures, anything with “Trek” in the title, that sort of thing.

For this reason, despite being interested when it first opened, I did not see the movie The Heat until this past weekend.

To give credit where its rightfully due: The Heat is in many ways exactly the movie I’ve been asking (okay maybe yelling at and begging for) Hollywood to make for some time now.

But first, the negatives:

1)      The film has a well deserved ‘R’ rating due to profanity.  I’m not a fan of cursing, but I understand the writer’s desire to make tough, Boston cops sound like tough, Boston cops.

2)      The movie has a high level of casual, comedic (non-gory) violence.  Not quite slapstick, more like the way Lt. Riggs would bash a bad guy over the head (repeatedly) in one of the Lethal Weapon movies in order to obtain the information he was looking for.  There’s a lot of pulling firearms on people for highly unnecessary reasons.

If any of those things will bother you this is not the film for you.

Now for what they got right:

1)      I believe this is the first ever female-lead action hero with a body shape and size that is atypical from the Hollywood standard.

2)      The plot and every character in it make absolutely zero reference to the aforementioned hero’s body shape and size.  This film contains a fat character with no fat humor or angst whatsoever, and from all evidence presented the character has a positive self-image and is not dieting.

And that is exactly the thing I’ve been asking for.  Overweight characters have been in movies for almost as long as there have been movies, but their plots inevitably revolve around stereotypes regarding their body shape and size.  Some examples:

·         She’s beautiful and sexy… despite being fat.

·         She’s completely hideous… because she’s fat.

·         All fat girls are funny!

·         She’s fat so she must be freakishly strong too.

·         She’s fat so she’s desperate for sex with anyone who will have her.

·         Of course she’s trying to lose weight!

·         Of course she has bad self-esteem!

·         You think she’s just a silly fat girl but no, she’s smart and likable too!

·         She’s obsessed with food… because she’s fat.

·         She will eat any and every food available… because she’s fat.

·         She’s unhealthy by default, inherently lazy, and can’t perform physical tasks well.

·         And my personal least favorite – let’s all laugh at the fatty’s expense.

A lot of these tropes are negative, but some are positive too.  Regardless, they have one thing in common: they make characters with non-Hollywood-standard body shapes into walking plot points that revolve entirely around their non-Hollywood-standard body shapes.  They aren’t people, they’re FAT people.  This adds to the pervasive and dehumanizing cultural mentality that a fat body is abnormal, non-standard, and a thing to be reviled, ridiculed, constantly focused on, and most importantly brought under control.

Melissa McCarthy’s character in The Heat is both tough and strong, but it’s because she’s a cop, not because of her weight.  She is physically capable, ready and willing to run after a suspect, vault over a fence and climb right out the window of an offending vehicle.  Far from lagging behind slimmer characters she is portrayed throughout the movie as charging fearlessly ahead of them.  Although the bad guys do insult both her and her partner (played with nerdy gusto by the always delightful Sandra Bullock) there isn’t a single insult or joke that’s directed at her weight.    She isn’t seen eating or obsessing about food a single time, and she is portrayed as attractive to men, sought after, and not desperate for any attention.

As a comedic action hero, I’m not going to say the character is an accurate representation of a normal person, but everything abnormal about her has nothing whatsoever to do with her weight.

This movie was so funny it gave my husband a laughter-induced asthma attack.  It had an interesting plot, strong supporting cast, and the chemistry between McCarthy and Bullock was really fantastic.  If you enjoy humorous buddy/cop films like Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon and Rush Hour, you will like The Heat.

My Shopping Dollar Vote

A few years back I expressed my um… irritation, with the advertising practices of the Victoria’s Secret Corporation and posted my ensuing email to them expressing this displeasure.  An email which, it became quickly and abundantly clear, no one at the company bothered to read before sending me a stock, kiss-off reply.  They continue their unfortunate advertising choices with the below ad, featuring women who are beautiful to begin with being photo shopped to the point where “perfect” bodies like theirs only exist in computer pixels.

Due to the understandable backlash, VS quickly revised the ad to this:

 

I guess it’s good that they’re capable of responding to the public’s wishes in some ways.

That being said, I have a confession.  A year ago when they were having their big annual sale, I bought some of their underwear.  As products go I have no complaint with it.  So long as your lower half can squeeze into a size 18, you can wear their product and it feels good, is cute, fits comfortably and stays where it’s supposed to.  However shopping there left a bad taste in my mouth that remains to this day.  I don’t like myself much for financially supporting a company whose ideas about which bodies are allowed to be called “perfect” I so fundamentally disagree with.

So this year comes around, and once again VS is having their big annual sale.  And I once again need some new underwear.

A friend of mine awhile back recommended Aerie to me.  Although as a 36 DDDD bra size I stand virtually no chance any longer of being able to shop in any brick and mortar store for bras, I figured their underpants would probably fit somewhat similar to VS’s and suit my size 18-20 bum.

On top of that, I remembered Aerie for this ad campaign…

Don’t get me wrong, that is still a beautiful woman with a figure the vast majority of us can only dream of having, but I absolutely love their no-retouching advertising.  “The real you is sexy”?   Yes please.

So today, I checked out the store.

The sale that Aerie had going on was quite comparable to VS’s annual one, and I was able to get 8 pairs for a very reasonable $3.75 / pair.  The staff was friendly and helpful, and gave me absolutely no side-eye glances whatsoever for being an obese, 40 year old woman in a store with lithe, teenaged models plastered all over the walls.

My only complaint is that they don’t carry briefs (my favored style).  So I got boy shorts because they offered the most coverage.  Trying them on at home, I can tell you that although the fit is perfect, the low rise of these in the back is something I’m going to have to get used to.  I think they're designed that way so that your underwear can’t say, “hello!” to the world in the back when you sit down.  Since I’m paranoid as heck over that happening, I can get behind the design concept, I’m just going to have to get used to the sensation.

The sales staff told me that the company is very open to consumer suggestions, so I’m going to email them requesting they start making briefs and carrying size quad-D bras too (although I don’t hold out too much hope on the second request, too niche of a market).

Still, it was an overall really positive and pleasant experience.  And most importantly, I don’t feel like a traitor to my cause for having shopped there.

Conquering One Shame, Still Living With Another

The other day I was listening to two people discuss the benefit of smaller apples because the bigger ones are difficult to finish.  I gave what has become my usual response to such conversations, “not being able to finish my food is really never a problem for me.”

Which caused me to realize, much to my delight, that I am no longer ashamed of my appetite.

I’ve written before about how admitting to any hunger whatsoever, let alone the substantial size of mine, has caused me great shame and embarrassment throughout childhood and young adulthood, persisting even into last year.  Although it's true that a big appetite in women is sometimes considered sexy, it is only so if the woman in question is also very slender and/or athletic.  If it's a bigger girl with an appetite she's just gluttonous/lazy/undisciplined, etc.  I'm still trying to figure out the cultural thought process going on behind that one.  When I was younger, even saying the word ‘hungry’ caused me embarrassment and I hid away in private to eat my lunch at school.  Despite still not fitting the body type for sexy women with big appetites the shame over having one has gone away.

I don’t know if it’s being a grown up that did it (ie. old enough not to care so much what other people think), or if it happened through desensitization.  Whenever I’m in a conversation with someone who is elaborating about their tiny, delicate appetite (I’ve only ever met women who do this, but I would imagine there are men who do too) I’m always quick to point out that my appetite would probably be more appropriate for an NFL linebacker than an average woman, but it is what it is.  It’s what I was born with and what I’m working with.  I certainly didn’t choose it, so being ashamed of it is very silly.

I think I reiterate this to other people so often because I want both them and particularly myself to embrace the idea that having an appetite, being hungry, and even (gasp!) eating are okay things for us to be and do.  The sense of morality that’s been assigned to food choices and eating in our culture is both ridiculous and incredibly harmful.  Although I’ve conquered my shame over possessing a big appetite and feeling hunger, I still suffer from awful feelings of self-hatred and failure when I tip over eating 2,000 calories per day.  If I eat 1,200 I feel virtuous and triumphant and if I eat over 2,000 I feel like a horrible person.  If I fall somewhere in between (which I usually do) I’m morally neutral that day.  That is incredibly messed up.  I can see it going on intellectually and get how stupid it is, and yet I’m still helpless to keep that tidal wave of shame from washing over me at the end of a day when I’ve succumbed to a binge.

I guess I just have to keep repeating these things to myself over and over until I get them to sink in too.

And hot dang… I’ve managed to lose 75 lbs. while dealing with the voracious appetite of an NFL linebacker on a daily basis.  It doesn’t make me more moral or virtuous than the next person, but it is a pretty awesome accomplishment.

The Disappearing People

We live in a society which teaches us daily that one of the highest accomplishments people can achieve is to essentially disappear.

Recently I was having a conversation with my Mom-in-law about weight loss and something occurred to me; I cannot say that I’m losing weight, “for my health.”  I can’t do that because it’s a straight up lie.  Yes, the functionality of my joints has absolutely improved with weight loss, that makes simple mechanical sense – something load bearing which bears less of a load is going to last longer.  Other than that I had no health issues whatsoever when I was 75 lbs. heavier, and in fact in one very real way the year of persistent starvation conditions have made me less healthy.  I always had very slight heart arrhythmia issues, now it’s something I have to live with daily (yes, my Doctor is monitoring the situation).  Also, I used to have perfect blood pressure and now I do not.  Now it's slightly high.

The more I research, the more I learn how many of the studies detailing the health benefits of weight loss are created and funded by people who financially benefit from the weight loss industry.  It's looking more and more credible that the reason many people have health problems is because they have spent a lifetime yo-yo dieting which is, demonstrably, quite extremely bad for you.  To say I'm feeling lied to and disillusioned by the whole thing, not to mention beyond fed up with the supposed "obesity epidemic" would be something of an understatement.  The reason I want so badly to get to my goal weight at the moment is so that I can stop starving my body and let it finally recover from this awful roller coaster.

I've said it before and I will again: except for people on either extreme end of the scale, I believe that being a stable body weight, regardless of where you fall on the BMI, is always healthier than losing or gaining significant amounts of weight.  Bodies hate change.  Bodies will fight you, punish you and give out on you attempting to maintain homeostasis because homeostasis is precisely what is the most effective at keeping you alive.

I know the obvious answer here is to stop.  Stop right where I am.  But I can’t.  I cannot let go of the ingrained, conditioned, social desire to keep on disappearing.  The rewards are too intoxicating, too deeply written in the roots of my psyche since the day I was born.  I want more and more of beautiful clothes, compliments, and fitting effortlessly into everywhere and anywhere.  I am beyond ashamed to admit this, but even the smug, idiotic feeling of superiority that comes from turning down desserts over and over and over again – I am addicted to all these things.

This week a lovely, loving woman I know said to me that her best motivation for weight loss is having to look at herself naked in her full length mirror when she gets dressed in the morning.  I could have cried.  Not just cried, but sobbed.  This is a woman who has told me over and over how beautiful I am (and she absolutely meant it), and who is currently at her goal weight.  Meaning she weighs at least 50 lbs. less than me.  In her eyes, I’m beautiful and she’s essentially monstrous because she still hasn't disappeared enough.

When will it ever be enough?

I wish I had some happy, hopeful note to end this on, but that’s just not the head space I’m in at the moment.  I want to tell my friend over and over that she’s beautiful just as she is, and just as she was before she lost 100 lbs.  I want to tell her that it doesn't matter what anyone anywhere thinks of her appearance so long as she is content with it.  I want her to believe me, but I know that she won’t.

We can believe that for each other but no one ever does for themselves.  Not even me.

Packing on the Pounds

Think about that phrase for a moment.  What does it do to you?  Does some part of you inwardly cringe when you hear it?  When it’s applied to a person, what do you think of that person?

I really dislike the phrase, “pack on the pounds.”

It crops up often in news media.  Gossip magazines will squeal with delight over celebrities who have gained a little weight, possibly because they’ve had a baby or some other silly little life altering event, screaming out headlines like: “so-and-so is visibly fatter, they’ve really packed on the pounds!”

The other place I frequently notice it buried is in articles about the obesity “epidemic” or how life changes and the passage of time can cause our body weight to increase.  For example articles that say things like, “women over 40 can really pack on the pounds,” or, “after women get married, they really let themselves go and pack on the pounds.”

The phrase itself brings to mind something I used to do on the beach as a child.  I would sit in the sand and pack it all around me until my legs and the lower half of my body was encased in it.  Then if I’d struck water in one of the holes I had dug, I’d make dribble castles all over my thighs.  I did this because the sand felt cool and good and because it was fun – I was packing on the sand all around myself.

Here’s why I have a problem with it in regards to weight gain: “packing on the pounds” implies an intentional, deliberate action.  I was deliberately packing sand around my body because it was fun, and using the phrase with regards to weight says that the person doing it is trying as hard as they can to gain as much weight as they can.  It brings to mind mental images of people gleefully grabbing up globby, greasy handfuls of fat and smacking them onto their own thighs and stomach in an effort to see just how big they can intentionally make themselves.

With very few exceptions, people don’t gain weight on purpose.  Most of us don’t even fully realize when it’s happening.

I got up to 290 lbs. very gradually over the course of thirty-some years.  Even though I’ve been suffering from binge eating disorder since I was around twelve or thirteen (I think it began around the time I began my first calorie restrictive dieting effort) I have never put on weight very quickly.

Since I journal everything I eat I now have a good working knowledge of how many calories a lot of foods contain, but I believe that most people do not.  A single tablespoon of butter or mayonnaise contains 100.  A tablespoon of olive oil is 120.  On top of that, when someone is eyeballing a portion instead of measuring, they don’t really have a clear understanding of just how small a tablespoon or even a cup of something actually is.  It is not difficult to gain weight in a culture of convenience food and vehicular travel, and you don’t have to be a lazy glutton to make it happen. A few high energy food choices or a single cup of full fat hot chocolate a day is more than adequate to do the trick.

Pervasive and negative language choices like this are another facet that I believe contributes to fat hatred and bias in the United States.  Much like my previous post about the way overweight actors are used and portrayed, this is another subtle negativity that works its insidious way into people’s brains.  It teaches us to see a fat stranger or even a friend who’s gained some weight and automatically think, “woah – they’ve really packed on the pounds!”

It implies deliberate self-neglect, a slovenly nature, and lack of care for personal health that is in most cases both unfair and untrue.