My Easter Resolution

So I missed New Year’s (actually I guess I missed a whole year) so I’m going to try for an Easter resolution. In a way that makes more sense as Easter is a time for rebirth and that is about how I feel right now. I’m being reborn as a new person.

A lot has happened since my last post, a year ago. I mean a LOT! And yet weight-wise I am within a pound of where I was one year ago today. That makes you think, right? All the ups and downs, diets and binges, athletic achievements and health crises, and I’m basically where I was, except a year older.

So I’m going to see what I can do about starting up again. I’m going back to meetings and I’m tracking, which is always the make or break for me. I’m starting some activity, but since I am under strict doctors orders, it is only walking for now. No running, definitely no ab work, and no weights.

In addition, I’m going to try to get back to this blog. It gives me a place to air out my thoughts and make sense of this journey. I also appreciate all the comments I’ve gotten over the years. I’m going to shoot for one post per week, which might be tough considering it took me three days to get this post published.

My, Your Hair Looks Terrific!

I haven’t posted to my blog for a while, but not for the usual reasons. Historically neglecting my blog usually means I’m off track and don’t want to face it, but this time that is not the case. If you’ve been following my twitter account (@fatnforty) you will see two types of posts regularly updated: weight loss (consistently since October) and exercise (less consistently but definitely there). So what gives? Why no posts?

Actually I don’t really have much to say. I still feel like I’m at the very begining of a long journey and this part of the trip is like driving through Oklahoma. (Once upon a time I drove cross country. The trip starts off interesting, and it gets interesting in places but driving through some of the middle states it gets boring… Miles and miles of cornfields, flat straight roads, and nothing to look at.)

I haven’t even gotten to the good part of the trip: when people start coming up to you and noticing how much you lost. I’ve lost 46 lbs (nothing to sneeze at) but so far no one who didn’t already know I was dieting has said anything about how I look. I’m not feeling sorry for myself; just statig a fact. I have sooooo much to lose yet, and it just hasn’t become apparant yet. I’m thinking when I get closer to the 200 lb mark people might notice.

What I am getting is lots of compliments on my hair. It is weird. I don’t do anything special to my hair. I haven’t had a special cut or color. But lately I’ve gotten lots of people telling me how good my hair looks and did I change it. This is my theory: people are noticing something different. They think I look better but can’t quite put their finger on it. No one ever want s to comment on a fat woman’s weight unless they are sure it is that. (Imagine if I were to say,
“No, I actually gained a ton!” Too embarrassing.
Too risky)

So the compliment my hair I do have nice hair. You can’t go wrong telling someone they are having a good hair day. So my hair is getting all the attention my hard working body deserves.

We who struggle with our weight need validation. It isn’t just me. I see it at my weight watchers meetings all the time. People can’t wait to share their weight loss. It is a problem for the members who make goal because they don’t have fabulous losses week after week. I’m trying to give myself internal validation. Hopefully if I can appreciate myself, I won’t need the external support to keep me going.

No answers today. Just lots of hmmmms.

2011 in review

WordPress.com created this very cool annual report for my blog. The info graphic is awesome. I learned I need to post more, but that I have awesome, loyal followers!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I Am Fat. Hear Me Roar…

First, there’s a story to this post. (There’s always a story) Yesterday, my daughter and I were having one of our endless discussions. If you don’t know, she is autistic, so an endless discussion is one in which I try to explain to her how so-called neuro-typical people think, and she endlessly argues how stupid our approach to life and the world is until I want to bash my head into a wall. You can tell it is an endless discussion when you hear her say, multiple times, “That doesn’t make sense….”

So I was trying to explain how her penchant for jumping into relationships (romantic or otherwise) can often scare people away, to which she responded, “I’m just a Speedy Gonzalez. It’s just who I am.” And I knew we were about to start another endless discussion.

Since she likes analogies, I tried to come up with one that would help her make sense of this.  Here is what I came up with:

“I am fat. That’s what I am. I can work at changing the shape of my body, through diet and exercise, but if I stop working at it, even for a while, my body will automatically revert to fat. Because that is what I am.”

There was a lot of follow-up discussion to this revelation. We found that, regardless if you were talking about weight, social awkwardness, or even left-handedness, the big issues were the same. Here are some highlights:

• You can’t just decide to change, make that decision, and then it is over. When you are changing something fundamental about yourself, you have to constantly work on it and pay it attention. Over time you might develop some new habits, that help you, and some coping strategies, but if you stop paying attention and stop working, you will eventually revert to your primary state.
• You have to decide if it is worth it. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. If the psychic and physical energy expended to overcome your natural state is more effort than the rewards, then don’t bother changing. Just stay how you are.
• You can make different decisions about how much energy you are willing to expend on changing yourself at different times in your life. When life is good, you have a job, people that love you, a strong support system, and good mental health, you have more energy to work on change. When your world is collapsing around you, you have less energy. It doesn’t mean you can’t change. It just means you need to be aware that there is more effort required.
• One of the most important elements to personal change is having people to support you. People to cheer you when you do well and commiserate when you struggle; people who understand why you are doing what you are doing and how hard it is for you; people who can give advice when you need it, but don’t try to boss or bully you into changing.

There was more, but these are the things I took from the conversation. I felt that, as New Year’s Day (with its requisite resolution-making) approaches, the discussion was well-timed. I’m resolved this year to keep working on my personal change. I’m eating healthy, and toying with the idea of adding some exercise this year. It will take me at least a year to get to my personal goal, which isn’t a skinny-skinny, but livable goal.

But there was one more thing I’m taking away from this conversation.
I am fat. That’s what I am.

No matter what shape my body is, I am a fat person. The last time I lost a lot of weight (over 100 lbs) I thought that this had changed me somehow. That I transformed from being a fat person to a thin person, but now I don’t think so. Now I think that it is something I am inside. I might change the shape of my body from time to time, sometimes even resembling a thin (or at least normal) person, but it doesn’t change me, who I am inside, and it doesn’t change my life. I still have to live with me.

Putting on a diamond tiara doesn’t make you a princess anymore than going into a garage makes you a car. You are who you are. You can change what you do, you can change what you say, and you can even change what you look like, but you can’t change who you are. Does this sound depressing? I don’t mean it to be depressing, but rather I hope this understanding helps me deal with the long-term component of my journey. An alcoholic who hasn’t had a drop of liquor in 30 years, still identifies herself as an “alcoholic;” it is who she is.

I am fat. I hope I never forget or pretend to deny that. If I do, please remind me to read this post. Thank you.

Competition

I am not a very competitive person. Okay, I am, but not as competitive as some of the other people in my life. But lately I’ve been doing very well on my health kick and I’d like a little credit for it.  Not from the people who are always supportive but for the world in general to notice that something amazing is happening to me.

First, I have been diligently attending and participating in Weight Watchers for the last 12 weeks. I have lost over 30 pounds in that amount of time. And not by chance but through careful and specific and strategic decisions. 30 pounds is huge! Sadly, at my weight, there doesn’t seem to be much physical difference in appearance. My pants are looser but I still wear the same size. My face to me looks thinner but few people who don’t know I’m dieting have noticed yet.

I’m not sure why the validation matters so much to me. It is nice to get compliments encouraging words from my family and close friends. And I tell myself that the only validation I need is from myself. This is about empowering me. But who am I kidding…

So this week I’m spending a little bit extra time with my business partner. He’s an older gentleman who has in the past year lost 80 pounds himself. Which is amazing. But he doesn’t follow the Weight Watcher’s method. According to him this miraculous weight loss has been achieved by just not eating anything fattening for the last year. (Actually he says it took four months to lose the weight but I know differently. Here is some of his diet talk:

• I just cut out all the sweets and cakes and cookies and candies in my life.
• I eat a lot of salads with either fat free dressing or balsamic vinaigrette.  I eat a salad every day.
• All I eat is lean chicken no skin or turkey or fish. No butter, no oils, nothing fattening.
• I’m not the kind a guy who can have just one small piece of brownie or one small piece of cake. If I have a taste I want to eat the whole thing. So I just cut it all out.

There isn’t anything wrong with what he’s saying. It’s obviously working for him. So why does sitting next to him in a restaurant make me feel like crap? I’m losing weight and I don’t have to eat that way. I can enjoy food. I can eat things other than salad and still be successful. But he’s the one who’s lost 80 pounds and everyone “oohs” and “ahhs” over it. And I feel like I’m just the fat girl sitting next to him.

After the business meetings were over he told his wife that I was trying to lose weight again. (Emphasis on again.) She looked at me a little quizzically. Oh, are you doing that Weight Watchers again? There didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence in her tone. Or maybe I’m just reading things into it.

It seems weird to me that I can be more undermined by somebody whose weight-loss journey is successful yet different from mine then someone who has not yet begun the journey or even considering it.  As empowered as I feel much of the time, I still have a lot of work to do to get there.

My Donut Life

WARNING: this post has graphic descriptions of food. Don’t read if this is a trigger for you!

 

 

 

FAT: In Sickness…

This post is about 10 days old, but I haven’t really been up to writing anything because I’ve been sick. This is an unusual predicament for me because despite my weight, which all the “experts” claim is the cause of untold illness and a drain on the healthcare in our country, I am an extremely healthy person. I have LOW cholesterol, LOW blood pressure, and my body does a good job of handling sugar.

I have a high stress job, I have bad sleeping patterns, I am more than 150 lbs overweight. According to every health article I’ve read and every medical report on TV, I should have about 17 fat-related maladies, from diabetes to gall stones, but I don’t. I’m pretty healthy for a 45-yr old woman and I don’t have to take any medications. My only physical complaint is intermittent pain on my ankle, caused by a car accident in my 20s.

So when I got sick two weeks ago, my instinct was to just ignore it. I had sever pains in the abdomen, but I figured they would go away after a few days. I was wrong about that. When I stopped eating, the pain did get less severe, but I still felt a lot of pain. Finally my mother convinced me to go to the “Doc-in-the-box” which is our short-hand for the walk-in clinic.

Side note here: My regular doctor, the one I’ve been seeing since I was 18, retired this past year. I pretty much haven’t found anyone else yet. Being relatively healthy I don’t really need a doctor that much. I’m starting to think that might be a mistake. Also, I stopped going to the gynecologist when the one I was seeing told me I was essentially too fat to take birth-control pills. That’s a long story, but I will get to it later.

When I showed up at the clinic, and discussed the pain with the doctor on duty, she immediately said I needed to go to the emergency room. The placement, frequency, and intensity of my pain could be many things, she said, but she didn’t have the equipment to find out what. *Sigh* I really didn’t want to go to the emergency room. Luckily for me I have a brother-in-law who works in the ER, so he was able to get me seen without a long, long wait. I know how rare this is for someone who isn’t having chest pain or bleeding profusely.

The first doctor who looked at me asked me the usual questions about preexisting conditions, and when I said I had none, he gave me the typical doctor’s WTBW look. Obviously I was crazy or lying. How could someone so fat, at my age, be in good health?

Am I projecting? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I’ve had enough medical professionals tell me to my face that I was too fat to be healthy, despite any medical evidence to go along with that diagnosis.

Anyway, I was in the ER for 10 hrs. During which time they gave me morphine (what a lovely drug) to quiet the pain, and every test known to medical science to figure out what was wrong with me. Oh, first they scared the beejeebers our of me by letting me think I had pancreatic cancer (I don’t) or kidney failure (nope, my kidneys are fine). In fact, all the hospital professionals could do was tell me I had a lovely gall bladder (seriously, at least three people looking at my CT scans told me what a lovely gall bladder I have) and that while I was in intense pain, there was nothing wrong with me. My kidneys were good, my liver was fantastic, from the blood they drew, everything (everything) was in the normal range. I was about as healthy as a 40-something yr old woman could be. Well, except for the sharp, persistent pains, of course.

It took about two days more for a diagnosis to come in, and it is a relatively benign one. I have a hiatal hernia. Of course this is another ailment that is attributed to obesity, but it is not life threatening and usually managed with medicine and changes to diet. So now in order to keep from being in excruciating pain I get to give up caffeine, chocolate, carbonated beverages, citrus, acidic foods, fatty foods, and all that is holy and wonderful in the world. Lovely….

Of course there is an irony here, that this “disease” suddenly appears just when I’ve gotten my eating under control for the first time in 6 years. I mean I lose 16 lbs and  have already given up most fatty foods and big meals anyway, and then I get this weird stomach deformity? Figures.

Of course the real problem (in my warped mind)  is that this is totally messing with my diet:

• First, the one thing keeping me on Weight Watchers the past month was enjoying what I am eating. I limit the portions and focus on really enjoying my food. But now 80% of what I like to eat is no longer on the menu.
• Second, while I was sick I was actually fasting for about four days. When I did start to eat it was only about half my points for the first few days. This caused “fake fat loss” which means now that I’m back to eating my full points, things are going to even out. My head knows this, and that it will even out eventually, but in my heart it will feel like a sucker-punch. I’m dreading weighing in tomorrow. Even though I’ve been really, really on program this week, I know I will have a gain.
• Third, getting this “fat-person” disease has been a blow to my ego. I don’t care how many people think I have a lovely gall-bladder, I was just starting to feel empowered. People talk about will power, but I think that is a lot of crap. For me, I need to feel self-confident and empowered to be able to lose weight. This experience just makes me feel small.
• Finally, I’ve always used any excuse to get off-track before. I don’t want this to become my latest excuse, which is why I am blogging about it. Trying to dare myself to get past this.

Ok, so this was a long post. If you got all the way to the end without getting bored, Thank you. I hope to have more to report soon.