More Big Brother

I just read a blog about fat people being forced by their employer to wear pedometers that prove they walk 5,000 steps a day, or face higher insurance costs. (http://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/forced-walks-for-fatties/?utm_content=buffer169e2&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer) I find this very interesting, and not a little appalling, because when I was compelled to take the fitness screening, I said the same thing to my husband. I kept saying that I wondered if our insurance premiums were going to go up because of my numbers. He kept saying, they can't, not this year. Which is probably true...but it sure seems to me as though they're gearing up for that. I have been exercising, and eating better. Just tonight, I made quinoa. I'm not quite sure if that qualifies as better, but it does dovetail with what we're all being told is eating better. This week. This month. Right now. Of course...for years we were told that margarine was far better for us than butter, to which I generally responded, anything that makes me want to throw up probably isn't good for me. Turns out I was right. So I made salmon--I made salmon because I like it--and I made cucumber salad--because I like it--and I made quinoa, because carbs are bad! White carbs are bad, anyway. No one was keeping track of me, I just did it. Because I like praise, and I'm all about the praise I hope to be getting in October, when my numbers are more in line with what medicine tells me they should be. I also like praise at the gym. And speaking of the gym, and carbs, something interesting happened to me today. Yesterday was a "bad" food day. I put it in quotes, because I hate assigning good or bad to food, but according to how I've been told I'm supposed to be eating now, yesterday was bad. I was called in to work unexpectedly. I ate a Dunkin Donuts ham and cheese sandwich for a meal for the third day in a row, which is about one day too many. I came home tired, stressed--you'd be amazed how much stress a bead shop can generate--and with no plan for dinner and no desire at all to cook it. So what did I have? (And let me add, I'm not really proud of this). I took out a bag of frozen spaghetti, thawed some of it, and had it with butter, salt, pepper, garlic and cheese. Yeah. That was it. No broccoli florets, no this, no that, just the spaghetti. And the fat, of course. And then I feel like I ate some more carbs, in some form and maybe some more. I forget, to be honest. Amazingly, I didn't go over my day's allotment of calories, because I did log it, but I went to bed feeling full and satisfied, but like a failure. I ate carbs! I'm a bad girl! Then today I went to the gym. We started a new set of exercises last week, I think. Monday was a so-so day, I didn't have a lot of wherewithal to do anything, mostly because of the dog. Today? I killed it! I did three sets of 10 10-second planks on the hard bosu, I did this, I did that. I was great. It wasn't until much later that I thought, um, maybe I did that because I gave my muscles some readily convertible fuel? Maybe not, too. I didn't change anything else, though. We'll see what my numbers say. I've lost weight, because the scale says so, and my clothes say so. I don't know what my blood will say, and I'm not going for an interim test. But maybe, just maybe, all this carb avoidance will turn out to be this decade's margarine.

Great Diets I Have Known

Again, this is recycled from a previous blog. Not sure quite how much it has to do with the topic at hand, other than to emphasize that....oh, I don't know, maybe diets don't work? Because here I am again, trying to lose weight. But then again, if I had stuck with the changes, they would have worked. Strangely enough, for someone who's been occupied with her weight (I'm not going to say struggled, because I don't always struggle with it) almost all of her life, I haven't been on that many diets. I think that may be because for the most part, I think they're nonsense. I started gaining weight, or not looking like society's norm, in about 2nd grade. Not a clue why, really, I was as active as the other kids, rode my bike, lived with my skate key around my neck, all of it. My daughter began to gain at about the same time, so I'm going with genetic predisposition. Whatever, that's when it started. My mother was slender. Not skinny, but slender. I don't look like her, not one little bit. I'm my father all over. This drove her crazy, and either because of her own inner demons, or society's pressures or something I don't know about, she equated slenderness of body with purity of character. This isn't true, of course, but she thought so, and so that made it so. So I heard quite a bit about it over the years. Some nice, some not so...let's just say that a lot of the time my self-esteem took a beating, but I didn't lose any weight because of it. I began to lose weight the last two marking periods of my senior year. I think the gym teacher was getting bored with us--she had been our gym teacher since we were in 7th grade, and we had done just about everything possible to do in a gym. (This was in the days when you had gym--I want to say every single day, unfailingly). So, for the last part of our senior year, she let us do gym projects. They could be nearly anything, as I recall, and losing weight was one of them. For whatever reason, I chose that one. I weighted 150 pounds, and I lost 15 pounds, to weigh 135. I looked good. My classmates said things like "No one could call you chubby any more." I didn't lose it very healthily--I skipped lunch, and other things teenage girls do. I didn't go to the prom, in spite of it, but I enjoyed short skirts and platform shoes, and all that stuff. It was good. I kept the weight off through the summer, too, but fall arrived and with it college, and maybe the freshman 15, maybe more--I have never been very big on weighing myself, so I didn't. The next time I lost weight was in the spring of my junior year, as I was in the second semester of my junior year abroad. I had a schedule of classes that dragged me all over the city I studied in. The layout of the town made bus service nearly impossible, so I walked. I figured out at one point, that I was walking nearly 5 miles a day, what with one thing and another, and this is a town with big steep hills (imagine a steep hill. Now imagine one twice as steep as that, and you've probably got it. I lived at the top of one, so every trip out ended with a trudge up the hill. I do know how to conserve my energy when climbing steep hills, though--!) so the workouts were twice what they would have been. I didn't have a scale there, but I dropped about a clothing size. I bought a white denim skirt in size 42, (German) which is about a 12. Not bad for me. Various things happened to me when I came home, including a pregnancy....I gained weight. The pregnancy never came to fruition, but the weight stayed. The next time was when I moved to New York. This was absolutely not a diet, but I think New York is the world's greatest free gym. I walked everywhere in Manhattan, being way too cheap to pay $0.50 to go 10 blocks, and then the subways themselves...no elevators, no escalators, long, long platforms--I lost weight. I don't know how much. I had a bunch of size 13 skirts, I remember, and I looked pretty delectable. I was 22. Of course I looked delectable. My weight bounced around during my time in New York, but another great diet arrived in the spring (do we sense a trend here?) of 1980. I decided to lose weight. I didn't own a scale, and didn't buy one. I went exclusively on how my clothes fit me. I probably dropped twenty pounds, at a guess, because I went down two sizes. It helped that the New York City Transit Authority went on strike, and I began walking to and from work--two hours each way. It was quite nice, actually; my route took me over the Brooklyn Bridge. That ended when I got a separated tendon in my foot from all that walking, but the strike ended not long after that. I know what I weighed at the end, though, because I went to the doctor for my foot. He weighed me and the result was 165. He couldn't believe it--I didn't look like whatever his conception of 165 was. He told me I needed to lose 30 pounds. I shrugged. I was pretty damned happy with my home-made diet and my undefined weight loss. I lost weight after my first daughter was born. I was nursing; it was fairly easy. Also, I walked every night. Huh, funny how that works. I gained and lost, gained and lost, but not a lot. Then we moved to Germany, where the tyranny of thinness is truly alarming. It's different than here. Men openly say that they won't date a woman who weighs more than 50 kilos. (110 pounds). Men follow their women into dressing rooms and tell them what to buy. Fat people are sometimes openly mocked on the street. One of the biggest women's magazines has a diet that they run every January--they give you a total of four weeks of menus, shopping lists, before and after stories, the whole nine yards. I did the Brigitte Diet one year. I lost weight, quite a bit of it--I want to say about 16 kilos--better than 35 pounds. It was a restrictive diet, though, and very much, "If this is a chicory salad, it must be Tuesday." To this day, there are some vegetables I only know the names of in German, because I only bought them for the diet. The best thing was that someone else had made up the menus, so there were no leftovers. The worst things were the boredom, the brownness of the food (LOTS of whole grains) and the gas. The diet ended one Saturday morning, in town, when I ate an apricot Danish. I had followed it to the letter for more than two months, but there was no margin for error--and with the Danish, it was done. I held on to that weight loss for a while, I forget how long. Then, nearly 10 years ago, I guess, I went to Weight Watchers. It was pretty good. I lost a bunch of weight, but due to the fact that, honest, I don't obsess over my weight, I don't remember where I started, where I ended, or how much I lost. I think just shy of 40 pounds, though, because I remember buying a 40 pound bag of grass seed and thinking I used to weigh that much more. I'm not sure why I stopped, other than that I hit a plateau, got bored and very tired of counting points. Time has passed and while I've retained a lot of what I learned at WW (eat lots of fruits and vegetables, the world won't end if you eat food you like a couple of days a week) I've found that all it really inspires me to do is try to cheat the system. And that's really counter-productive, so I stopped doing WW.

What's Thin Enough?

And who decides? I have a friend who is merciless with herself. I bought her a skirt for Christmas from a flash sale site and got a European 34, which anyone can tell you is itsy, and she not only fit into it, but she said it was a little big. I believe her, because she wouldn't lie about that. But to herself, she's fat. She's a blob, she shouldn't be able to go out and enjoy the things she does, because she looks so awful. She literally feels, at a European size 34, that she should not be permitted to enjoy life. That she should keep herself behind closed doors for the good of the general population. Okay, she only thinks that sometimes, but the fact that she ever thinks it is not a reflection on her, but on us. She freely admits she has an eating disorder. She tells me what she eats and, frankly, I'd be cranky and light-headed and probably unable to drive, forced to subsist on her diet. I'm reasonably certain that the only things keeping her alive are avocados, cheese and her great love of ice cream. Other than that--I feel as though her diet is woefully low in protein. She is of Eastern European descent, with small bones, but in spite of that, a solid build. She makes me sad. She makes me sad because when she was 12 and taking dance lessons (and loving them) the teacher told her she was a "fatty little ballerina". She believed him and stayed away from dancing for oh, the next 30 years. One man's casual words caused her to deprive herself of joy for three decades. She makes me sad because she falls in love with emotionally unavailable men and then thinks that if she were thinner, they would love her. (I tell her that if only thin people deserved love, there would be no plus-size wedding dresses, but that seems not to make much of an impression). She makes me sad, because sometimes when it's hectic and I don't get a chance to eat, I see how my outlook darkens and my nature worsens and I think that if she just gave herself permission to feed herself adequately, things would look so much better to her. Not to be fat, not to be overweight....but to eat three meals a day. One day while she was lamenting about not being able to find a man, she listed as one of her virtues, "I don't eat much." That's SAD! It's sad not just that she thinks it, but that she learned to think it. No one comes up with that on their own, as a virtue. No child will tell you, I don't eat a lot and that's a good thing. And food is good. Now, clearly, I have a somewhat distorted relationship with it myself, but one problem I don't have, and that's not believing that I deserve to eat. So here we have someone who is thin. Trust me, she's thin. In fact, because she now goes ballroom dancing several nights a week, she nearly has what is considered the ideal body--flat stomach, strong, slender legs and a nice, rounded ass. (Which she hates. HATES.) And the ironic thing is, she adores ME. In an okay way, we both like boys. But me, in my 250-lb glory, she loves me and my confidence and the fashion risks I take. I wonder sometimes why she's willing to be seen with me, but it's clearly not the case. She would probably like me to be thinner for my health...but she loves me just as I am. I would like her to love herself as much. So then we get back to fat acceptance, and body acceptance and body confidence and all that stuff. AGAIN. Because it goes around and around and around. And...it used to be that men weren't that way, they looked in the mirror and said, "Damn, I look good!" no matter what, but they're doing it now too! My daughter (27) personally knows 2 manorexics. So instead of women leaning from men, and learning to love themselves and be more secure, men are learning from women and learning to hate themselves, and be more insecure. Cool.

Early Body (or something) Confidence

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away....that would be New York in the summer of 1980, specifically at Maxwell's Plum. For those of you who did not have the good fortune to live in New York in the late '70's and early '80's, Maxwell's Plum was an upscale pickup joint on the upper East Side of Manhattan. It was decorated in a hyper-thyroid Victorian theme, it served over-priced drinks and it probably kept the antibiotic companies in business. In those days...there wasn't anything that couldn't be cured with a couple of doses of penicillin. Anyway, on a hot summer night, I was there with a girlfriend. We probably were just doing a pub crawl...I don't even remember. I do remember that I had just lost a fairly significant amount of weight. I don't know how much, because I embarked on a weight loss program (my own, by the way--it was eat less, walk a lot) without owning a scale. I figure I lost 20 pounds, but who knows? So, it was crowded at Maxwell's Plum, which it nearly always was. My girlfriend and I were at the bar, and it was so crowded that we were sharing a bar stool. Is that strange? I feel like that was fairly normal in those days. After a while, the guy next to me finished his beer and got up and left. I looked around...no one was lunging for it, so I sat in his place. A short while later he came back. He said, to the woman who had been next to him, but was now next to me, "You have to be fast around here. Oh, well, she had enough to put there, anyway." I saw red. No, "Excuse me, that was my seat, I just went to the men's room," in which case I would have said, "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize," and gone back to squeezing onto the bar stool with my friend. No....it had to be, passive-aggressively, "You're rude and have a big ass.' To the other woman, so he could look like a big man to her. I realized there was nothing I could say that would not come out sounding ridiculous, but I also didn't want him to get away with it. At that moment, the bartender brought him a fresh beer, in a glass mug, and I saw a fresh, unopened pack of cigarettes on the bar next to it. (Yes....in those days you could smoke in bars, too). So I said to my friend, "Drink up and get ready to go when I tell you to," and she obediently chugged her glass of wine. .....and then I picked up the pack of cigarettes, and opened them. I shook out half the cigarettes and stuffed them in the glass of beer, and then shook out the other half and stuffed them in too. They looked very pretty, with little bubbles rising up around them. No one said a word. Not the man, not the woman. The bartender poured a fresh beer and whisked that one away, and I said, "Let's go," and we walked out, granted, at speed. Was that body confidence, or just confidence, or just stupidity? I will grant that there is no one-to-one comparison between insulting the size of someone's ass and having your cigarettes stuffed in your beer, but it felt right. I was angry because he chose to insult me rather than talking to me. He chose to insult me for something that for one thing I didn't even think was true (if anything, in those days, I had a lamentably flat ass) and he chose to insult me in a stereotypical way. So I showed him he wasn't the big man he thought he was.

Conflicted

I lost more weight. Yippee! Alas and alack! I don't even know what I feel. I feel better. I feel, wait for it, more comfortable. (Well, I do). I feel as though I've betrayed someone, some group, some people, I don't even know. I now weigh 250 pounds. This is the maximum weight where I feel decent. I know this from diets of the past....from other times. I feel as though my body can support (probably not easily, but it can support) that much weight, but above that, it's simply above its load limit. I find losing weight profoundly weird. I've said this before, to other people, and in other places. I don't find it empowering at least, I find it peculiar and as though I'm morphing. Sorry, but I do. This may be part of what makes me such so strange about losing weight. On the other hand, there are aspects I like. I specifically like feeling the muscles under my skin, which this time I have in plentitude, thanks to my workouts. Lying in bed at night, the contours of my body feel different. On my back, my stomach is flatter. When I cross my ankles, it feels different. It all feels different. Tell me that's not strange! So okay. So my little trainer (she really is little) is on one side of me, typing, "Good job!" on MFP, and giving me hugs for losing weight when she sees me. But is it really awesome? I don't know. The Nobel prize is awesome. Losing weight? Is putting less (or even just a normal) amount of food in your mouth really "awesome", in that people should be in awe of it. Awe, like standing around with their mouths open. But then, on the other side, are the body acceptance people. You were fine before, they're saying, so why change? Why not eat that hot fudge sundae? And the Big Mac, except for me it's a Quarter Pounder, which, by the way, I haven't had since I've started journaling. Enjoy life! Enjoy food! Except...except, except, except....oh God....if you enjoy too much food, then that's all of life you can enjoy because other enjoyable things become impossible. I understand that I'm not breaking new ground here. I understand that this is old news. I do feel as though it's new, though, that there's such a vocal contingent saying that losing weight is unnecessary. (Like i haven't got troubles enough). So my solution, stupid though it may be, is sort of to lose weight blindly. To do the things I'm supposed to be doing, but not think about them as having a cumulative effect. Sort of doing the stuff, but pretending it will have no result on my outer being. Every once in a while, when I feel particularly thinner, I climb on the scale. But I don't obsess about that, either, remarkably enough. I didn't even calculate how much weight I have to lose, when I joined MFP. So it came as a surprise to me that it is 118 pounds, which shows up on the little picture on your profile. It even has the halfway point marked. So I may just turn out to be the woman who accidentally lost 118 lbs. You never know. And, even at 145 (and no, I don't know what my BMI would be there) I will still be conflicted about it.

Oh, and by the way?

(That was uptalk...lol) Eat real food! I'm using myfitnesspal.com as a food tracker, and I keep seeing all these ads for what has turned into a great weight loss tyrant--Special K! For God's sake, eat real food. Don't eat bars. Have an egg. Have two, if you're really hungry. I don't claim to make the best food choices on earth, but I do try to eat real stuff if I can. I've found that gelato pops (sea salt caramel, yum!) only have, in some cases, 10 or 20 more calories than our good friend, Skinny Cow and they are infinitely more satisfying. Have a real hamburger once in a while. If you've been eating well, it'll be really filling and really satisfying. But this ties back to the whole acceptance thing. I'm not sure that every single woman is meant to be a reed, in fact, I know not. Women should be allowed to eat, too, and it should be societally acceptable. On this topic, I love Miss Platnum (a Rumanian-German hip-hop singer...sort of....) and her song and video, "Give me the Food". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJHEj2xf-Ro I feel that way. Sort of! Sometimes. Sometimes not. But whatever. Eat real food. Other than gelato pops...try to avoid anything that comes out of a wrapper. And again, there's the test: would your grandmother have known what this thing was? If not, don't eat it. Which pretty much leaves out Taco Bell....

Still wondering

So where is the line? I still don't know where the line is. I mean the line between trying to improve yourself and just accepting yourself. I'm standing squarely on that line myself, by the way. I'm doing all this stuff at the gym, I'm journaling and "making good food choices" (because I stoutly--stoutly, get it? Oh, I'm a riot--maintain that every single grown woman in the western hemisphere knows how to lose weight) and yes, I'm losing weight. Because how can I not? Even after all these years of yo-yo dieting, even being 57 years old, when my metabolism is meant to have slowed to a crawl, even with a bad knee and a hip that still pulls, I can do it. A few weeks ago, I went to a family party. This party had some very large women at it. None of them, by the way, were related to me by blood. Some were from my husband's side of the family, and some were from the other side of my husband's side of the family (ie, unrelated to my husband) and some were just friends. Of all the women there, all the grown women that is, I can only think of three who were not at least overweight. Some were on the chubby side, some were, frankly, floridly obese. They were also all shapes...that is, they carried their weight differently. I'm fairly sure that if you had talked to each one of them, they would have had their own reasons as to why they were overweight. Genetics. Job. Health issues. A combo! One of them told me what was clearly (at least to me) a carefully constructed rationale and excuse at once, for being overweight: her premise was that in order to take care of yourself, to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, you have to be selfish, and those who aren't selfish, who care for others, can't be expected to care for themselves, too, to the level they need to in order to maintain a lower weight. It's slick, I'll say that, and it's got virtue and a degree of morality wound up in it, too. And I'll even say it's a little bit true, because if you're the primary caregiver for someone aging or with a disability, then, yes, it is damned hard, both practically and from an emotional standpoint, to take time for yourself. And from purely personal experience, I can say that a pint of Ben & Jerry's a night is a lot easier (and gives more immediate satisfaction) than the gym. And I know that it's considered being a concern troll (nice phrase there, by the way) to say that someone would be more comfortable at a lower weight....but there were some cases where I absolutely thought that. Does that make me a troll for just thinking it? Or do I have to say it out loud? And does it count that I said it here? But who wouldn't think that, other than a feeder, seeing a 30-year-old woman with fat to the ankles, fat on fat on her thighs.... And I'll agree...you can carry more weight when you're young. But I'm not sure anyone ever bargained on the amount of weight that Americans are now carrying. I suppose we all have to decide where the line is, for ourselves, and ideally, stop judging other people for where they are. (And the day we stop judging is the day we can burn every single religious book that there is, not out of disrespect but because we won't need them anymore because everyone will have reached a collective state of enlightenment and we'll probably all levitate, they way we used to try to at slumber parties). For myself, I seem to have committed to going to the gym and doing increasingly more difficult workouts, while keeping a food journal and trying to make food choices that are generally considered to be "good". I know, that for myself, this will result in a lower body weight and a trimmer body all over. I honestly can't say what it will do for my medical numbers because I steadfastly avoided doctors for many, many years. What I find most difficult, I have to say, is accepting myself as I change, since accepting the changed self as good seems to imply that the old one was bad. And the old one, while not perfect, was reasonably serviceable, and I hate betraying her that way. Stay tuned....