Screaming Fat Girl

Rewiring Yourself

2012-01-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was thinking about the process of rewiring myself to stop certain thought patterns from continuing to run roughshod over my emotions. This is the sort of thing that you do if you happen to be me. It's something I've done four times, but never really stopped to categorize and think about the stages. I don't know if it will be helpful to anyone else to talk about it broken into parts, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that is also the sort of thing one does if one lives with my particular brain.

The whole point of this process is to slowly change your response to a particular stimulus. Most people have an experience or thought and an automatic reaction. For example, you may hear a piece of news about the cost of oil possibly going up by 25% over the winter and immediately start to stress-out and worry about affording to warm your home during the cold months. Worrying accomplishing nothing so you may want to have a response which is more level emotionally. This process would be one through which you eventually stopped having the unwanted reaction.

For me, the first time I did this was for temper. I was prone to immediate and intense anger. The second was about materialism. I wasn't especially into "stuff", but I did keep too many things around (though not like a hoarder). I had the idea that I couldn't "waste" things by throwing them away as long as they were theoretically useful. The third time was related to anxiety and spinning elaborate worst case scenarios over the an isolated incident. I'd hear that my company was doing more poorly this year than last and start to fret about my job security even though there was nothing I could do about it nor was there any direct or immediate threat to my employment status. Finally, I've been dealing with the biggest deal of all, my relationship with food.

The process is not easy and takes years for the changes to kick into automatic. You have to work at it, but it is effective. Through time, what feels like you are playing the role of Sisyphus in your life starts to feel like you're pushing that boulder up the hill and it's not rolling back all of the time. Eventually, it feels lighter and easier. Finally, you're rolling along with only minor little pushes of a manageable size rock. I won't say that things vanish, as we all have core character tendencies and they will never go away entirely, but "talking yourself down" from a response you don't want becomes much easier and much less frequent. It is worth the considerable effort.

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Stage 1: Reflection
Reflection is when you experience something, have a reaction in the manner which is typical for you, and then think back on what happened after the fact. Most people reflect with a heavy emphasis on regret and self-punishment, especially if they are dealing with food and eating something they think they should not. It is imperative that reflection be productive and supportive talk, not destructive self-punishing words. If you use reflection as a platform for self-flagellation rather than positive thinking, you will not be able to change effectively as the focus will be emotional, not rational.

The purpose of reflection is to increase awareness of the effect a stimuli has on you. For example, if I look at cooking web sites or pictures of food late at night, I become incredibly hungry. If I don't look at the pictures, I may feel slightly hungry before bed, but I tend to be able to decide not to eat anyway. Clearly, I respond to food cues with less control than would be optimal for someone who is trying to lose weight. While there is an easy solution in this particular case (stop looking at cooking at food blogs late at night), the larger issue is the response to food cues. I do not endeavor to avoid such things as there will always be the potential for food cuing. My aim is to temper my reactions to all food cues.

When you reflect, it's important to consider what elicited the behavior, how strongly the behavior occurred (in this case, how much and what it causes one to eat), and what you may be able to do in the future to alter your response. Reflection improves recognition of stimulus and response which will in turn improve your ability to move on to the next stage. Note that it is perfectly natural to have the same reaction many, many times and reflect on it dozens, possibly more times, before being able to incorporate the next step.

The purpose of reflection is to go from this:
Stimulus ----> (unaware, spontaneous, undesirable) Response

to this:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, undesirable) Response

At this point, you only need to understand your reactions, not change them.

Stage 2: Delay
Once you become aware that a given stimulus is going to elicit a certain response, you have the capacity to start controlling your reactions. The first step in that control is not to stop or alter the responses, but to simply delay having them. This is the mental equivalent of counting to 10 before having a reaction in order to form a cooler response.

When I was trying to control my temper, I knew I was getting incredibly angry and was about to have my usual hostile response. I would try to hold it at bay for a time. When it came to eating, things were a lot more concrete. When I craved a food and wanted to eat it, I resisted the urge in planned increments of time. At first, I would try to wait 5 minutes and then I would have it. If possible, I'd extend that wait another 5 minutes. When I "gave in", I didn't view it as failure, but rather felt that accomplishing the delay was a success.

Stage 3: Recognize
Delaying is essentially having the same reaction, but having it occur later. It is far easier to put aside an immediate response to a stimulus than it is to change it. Concurrent with delaying is starting to work on recognition that a response is coming and what it means. If the stimulus is a food cue (such as a pizza commercial) and my response is to want to eat the food, I need to work on recognizing that I am not really hungry, but rather being cued. I can start a process of being engaged with the stimuli rather than simply reacting to it.

People believe they are more cognizant of what is happening to them than they really are. In a discussion of food cuing and the effect of commercials, many people would recognize that they can have influence, but they don't necessarily see their responses to it. Humans are not designed to attend actively to every single experience with great attention and consciousness. We tend to sleepwalk through a lot of our lives because we are over-stimulated and can't tune into each experience fully.

At the recognition stage, you will try to pay full attention to your mental responses to particular experiences and try to explore why they occur and consider how to minimize them. For my anger issues, I recognized that my raging responses were role modeling my mother's behavior toward me. I was automatically doing what she did when she was frustrated.

When I was trying to stop being so anxious, I focussed on a variety of thoughts. I recognized that I was feeling stress about things that no one could control and it served no productive purpose. I also figured out that my free-floating anxiety was habitual. I was so accustomed to worrying about things that my mind would drift around to find things to grab onto and fret about. I recognized that this was a pattern which I needed to try and stop.

Stage 4: Interrupt
Delaying a response means that you try to control when it starts. Interrupting it means that you try to stop it in its tracks. With food, that means stopping a binge before it reaches its ultimate conclusion. For me, this started with not "finishing the bag", even if that meant leaving just one piece there. As time went by, I could interrupt earlier and delay longer. This squeezes the undesirable response at both ends.

Interrupting is a powerful stage at which you really start to feel in control. When I was dealing with anger, an interrupt would mean that I could silence my loud voice and come to my senses rather than vent and rant. When I was dealing with food, it meant I could stop eating compulsively at some point and therefore mitigate some of the damage I was doing to myself.

For anxiety, I tried to catch myself when ruminating and think about more positive things. In the simplest sense, I tried to distract myself. Interrupts were very hard at first as my mind would fall back into the groove it was comfortable with, but the more often I practiced them, the harder it was for them to get back on track. As time goes by, you can also find yourself capable of multiple interrupts. For food, this might mean eating something, stopping, and then eating it again, then stopping again. This is good progress in interrupting, even if you eat everything in the bag. The important point is practice stopping yourself.

Stage 5: Minimize/Reshape
Depending on what sort of thinking you are trying to change, the next step is to minimize responses or reshape them. Minimizing means making them smaller. For food, this means eating less in response to stimuli. For anxiety for me, it meant spending less time ruminating about things I couldn't control. With the ability to interrupt in hand, I could start to break apart the patterns in multiple ways. That is, I could both shorten them further and alter them more often.

For this part, you can consider a visual in which you have a well-worn road that your mind has traveled down that you don't want it to go down any longer so you are smashing up sections of it here and there to make it increasingly impassible. "Reshaping" is setting a new path by finding a way to respond differently.

When I was dealing with anger, my way of reshaping was to stop and consider a calmer and more productive way of expressing my feelings. At first, pieces of my frustration would come out more calmly and I would lose control and get aggressive again. Later, I would move in and out of a calm and aggressive state. Finally, I could remain calm most of the time and express my feelings in a constructive and passionate, but not angry way.

Stage 6: Effective Elimination
It's important to understand that true elimination of a particular response to a stimuli is virtually impossible. Even a calm person will occasionally have an angry outburst. Even someone who generally does not overeat will pig-out at times. Even a mellow person will feel anxiety from time to time over things they shouldn't worry about. We are complex beings and you will never banish certain thoughts entirely because the variety of stimuli and conditions under which they can occur is too vast to completely eliminate unwanted reactions.

The purpose of "rewiring yourself" is to change your destructive mental patterns such that they no longer control your life to such a great extent that they cause you difficulty or misery. "Effective" means "enough" for a balanced life, not "perfection". If you think you can be "forever" about anything, then you are missing the point. Be happy with what you can achieve and focus on gradual movement toward a better place, not on being a robot that is programmed to do the same thing every time a particular input is received.

At the end of this, you are looking to be here:
Stimulus---> (aware, expected, desirable) Response
••••••••••••••••

It's important to keep in mind that these "stages" blend into one another. You will find that you may be working on them simultaneously, but generally you will want to begin with trying them in sequence in order to ease yourself into each idea. It's also important not to "rush" the process. Trying to do it all at once is only going to make you feel like a failure when it doesn't work. "Cold turkey" isn't something that works with trying to remap the electrical and chemical responses in your brain. The goal isn't behavioral changes, but altering your thoughts so that it is easier to change your behavior.

De-centralizing Food

2012-01-27T17:41:00.000-08:00

At the start of this process of weight loss and changing my relationship with food was the decision to leave the foreign country I live in and go back home to America. That was more a "theory" than a reality for a long time. Now, it is not what might or will happen, but what is actually happening, and I'm both in a place I'd like to be and not where I thought I'd be. I thought I'd be at a certain number on the scale (150 lbs.) and I'm not there. I'm at 175 lbs. However, I'm mentally in a place where I never imagined I could be, and that place makes me care very little about that number.

One of the things I've been doing to prepare to leave is try and eliminate anything I can from my apartment which is not essential to surviving the last two months in our home. This has meant tossing away giant trash bags of things which are too old to be sold or given away like yellow plastic storage bins which have had their fair share of age-related distortion and scratching. It also has meant getting rid of what was in those bins including dishes, tools, and various apartment-related items which cannot be carried across an ocean without incurring an expense far greater than the value of those items.

It has also meant looking at the accumulated food in our pantry and trying to figure out a way to use up canned items, a big collection of various types of tea, staples (like oatmeal), and what is probably for most people a scarily large number of partially consumed bags of snacks. As my regular readers know, I eat chocolate, cookies, cakes, etc. in small portions everyday. As they may not know, I also crave novelty. I buy a bag of something and eat it for a few days then want something different. With this sort of approach, it takes a long time to get through anything and even longer to get through "everything".

Since I don't want to waste food and I need to use up what is on hand, I have found myself looking into how I deal with food and food shopping in a different light. I know that I have used food shopping as a means of entertaining myself and would go into bakeries, snack shops, and supermarkets and look at sections just to see what sort of novel thing I might want to buy. The truth is that I did this when I wasn't even especially hungry or interested in different things and had plenty of treats on hand. It's almost as if I was trying to find a way to convince myself to buy more of such things rather than acting on a true desire.

The situation with our overabundance of snacks and a need to clear everything out has lead me to change my approach and I believe it is one I should try to apply consistently from this point on. I need to question the urge and desire to look around for food for the sake of looking around for food. I've got plenty of goodies (both "healthy" and "not so healthy") on hand and I think these actions are another way of keeping food as a central focus in my daily life.

One might say that there is nothing "wrong" with this if I've got control over what I eat and continue to lose weight, but this isn't about "right" or "wrong", but rather about behavior patterns which are not conducive to a lifestyle in which food is put in its proper place in my life. Food has to be just "food" and not something I seek to fill a mental vacuum. There's no reason to go into a bakery and browse when I've already got baked goods at home, am not hungry, or have no plans for a special treat at tea time. It's just part of a pattern I've developed to keep food central in my life and my thoughts. So, unless I have a deliberate and considered need or desire (yes, desire, too!), I won't be looking at food in various shops.

I must emphasize very strongly that this has nothing to do with trying to "clean up" my eating. I have zero desire to banish any type of food from my life. In fact, I have every desire to be more inclusive of all sorts of food and to enjoy each and every bite of every one of them more and more. I've spent much of the last year going to restaurants and sampling new types of cuisine in an effort to be more expansive and fully appreciate food more. However, I want food not to be something I casually shop for just because it's what I've always done, and am grateful that moving has given me this new perspective.

One final thought, for what it's worth, I wouldn't trade the psychological changes in my relationship with food for the perfect body if it was on offer. This mental stuff is forever and leaves me at peace and not obsessed. I'd only screw up a perfect body without this sort of mental progress. If I never get any lighter, I'm okay with that as long as I don't have to be tortured by how I feel about eating and food anymore.

A Matter of Trust

2012-01-21T19:14:00.000-08:00

If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust? I ask this as a serious question because the truth is that most of us don't trust ourselves. We set up a bunch of rules for ourselves and wag a metaphorical finger in our general direction and essentially say, "don't cross these lines." This feeling that we are not to be trusted likely stems from childhood and being scolded by our parents or warned about doing or not doing things. They often did not trust us, and in my case they didn't trust when there was no reason to mistrust, so a pattern is established in which we believe we cannot be trusted to do what is best.

Recently, I talked about my half-assed approach to calorie counting because I was feeling that I didn't need this tool to know how much I was eating to the same extent as I did when I started in June 2009. I absolutely needed it when I started as I had no idea how much I was consuming (likely up to 3000-3500 calories a day, I'm sure). I only knew what I was eating and felt I ate pretty healthily. As I've said many times before, even healthy food has calories and you can get fat as easily on nourishing food as on empty calories. I realized that, unless you educate yourself fully (and that includes looking at the weight of food and weighing and measuring it to see what a portion should look like, not eyeballing it or guessing), you really can't know how much you are eating when you have the type of distorted perceptions I had.

A few days after writing that post, I decided that it was time to give it up entirely. There were several things that I realized. One was that I was using calorie counting more often than not to decide to eat more. I was looking to see how much wiggle room I had. The other thing I realized was that I was ready to test fly listening to my body more carefully rather than using artificial constructs. I have a very good idea not only of how much I need to eat, but also how much hunger I need to endure. The latter is very important for me because when I was much heavier, I never knew true hunger. I simply ate any time I was not full. A truly empty stomach was not something I often experienced. Now, I know what it feels like to wait until I'm genuinely hungry to eat.

So, with the experience and education of the past few years behind me, I thought it was time to trust myself with food to a much greater extent. It feels strange at times not to count at all (which I'm trying not to do, not even in my head), but it really isn't nagging at me as much as I may have expected. I've been in a certain food space for a long time and I have a body that is better adjusted to less food and smaller portion sizes. I also have a mind that knows what is "enough" to keep losing weight and I know when I'm eating more than necessary. Counting calories doesn't really change either situation.

This isn't exactly a transition to "intuitive" eating because my body is not one that has a sufficiently altered biochemistry at this stage such that I can eat when I'm hungry (or "think I'm hungry"). I still have to push the margins a bit and wait to be hungrier before eating or I will fall back into a pattern of habitual overeating. However, between mental and physical changes, I think it's time to fly without a net and move a little closer to a normal relationship with food by kicking out the use of a food logging program. It's time to build more trust in myself when I deal with food.

Time will tell if I'm as ready as I think emotionally and physically. At this stage, I'm looking to continue very slow losses. My initial goal was to be at 150 lbs. by the end of March of this year, but it is clear that I'm not going to get there unless I go into some sort of dramatic weight loss plan. I'm absolutely unwilling to do so because I refuse to adopt a highly dysfunctional relationship with food, even in the short term, to reach an arbitrary number. I've come too far to step back to that sort of life. I see that as more destructive than remaining fat. What is more, I do not think such measures are really necessary (and might make things worse in the long run because of metabolic slowdown

Last time I weighed myself, I was around 170-175 lbs. (at 5' 4"/164 cm. in height). From now, I'd be happy to just average a 1-2 lb. loss per month, mainly to get out of the weight ranges that qualify me as "obese". This is overwhelmingly because of health insurance costs, but I also wouldn't mind having a smaller belly apron so there was less skin on skin contact (which causes sweating and chafing, still). I also think it would help my gimpy knee and sometimes still aching back after walking to take more pressure off of both. However, I'm not going to sweat it so hard for a magic number or to fit a beauty ideal. I'm in perfect health and quite mobile. I only suffer pain under specific conditions (walking more than 4 hours or certain weather conditions). Beyond that, I just want to continue to put food in its proper place in my life by not thinking about it anymore than necessary or analyzing its composition. You know, the way people who aren't defined by their bodies live their lives.

No longer the fattest in the room

2012-01-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

A lot of women who are fat or trying to lose weight talk about entering a room and comparing themselves to the other women there to determine if they are fatter than them. This is something I have not developed a habit of doing because when I was very heavy, I was always the fattest one in the room. There wasn't even a contest. At nearly 400 lbs., I didn't need to look around to know who was fattest.

Even as I have lost weight, I haven't made those comparisons for two reasons. One is that I don't like this habit in general as it is a form of assigning value to people based on body size. I don't care how open-minded a person believes her or she might be, this screening and evaluating based on weight is a way of establishing a pecking order. One is, essentially, comforting oneself by determining one is not longer "at the bottom" (i.e., the fattest) by performing this act. It's a bad habit and reflects poorly on those who do it.

The second reason I have never done this is that, even at around 175 lbs., it is simply second nature for me to believe that I'm still likely to be the heaviest woman in the room. I'm in a culture of petit women who are not only slim 98% of the time, but small-boned and short. I'm never going to be anything, but the fattest in the room as long as I live where I currently reside.

This situation has never really troubled me because I don't care how heavy others are and I don't preoccupy myself with my body size relative to them. That being said, I can't help but realize as part of internalizing a new body image that there are women around me on occasion who are proportionally fatter than me. This isn't about ranking, but about no longer seeing myself as a lumbering behemoth that elicits of stares and nasty comments.

My thinking is more along the lines of "if there are those who are fatter than me, then there is no reason for people to treat me as some freak of nature" as I am now within a range of "normal". Since I continue to view myself as incredibly huge, this is part of a process of normalizing my body image, not seeing myself as somehow "better" than fatter women. The fact is that I see bigger women as within the range of "normal" as well, which helps me feel less like the gigantic person I saw myself to be and more deserving of being seen as "human". Such has been the damage to my self-image that I must constantly work to adjust my thinking so I feel I can call myself a regular "human", a privilege I have always afforded others but has not always been given to me.

Generally, I don't think about this "fattest woman in the room" situation, but I had a recent experience which made me consider how so many women establish a pecking order of beauty and weight. Since I was always relegated to the bottom rung both by myself and others, I don't really consider this when I talk to other women. Something happened recently to make me think that this was being done to me and that perceptions of me have altered now that my physicality is quite different.

Before I get any further, let me say that I have never subscribed to the idea that there is all sorts of jealousy that results in sniping and bad behavior because of weight loss. I don't think the other woman that I'm going to mention in this post was "jealous" of me or my fabulous beauty as I don't feel I am some gorgeous babe now. I'm also pretty sure that most people would believe me to be a fairly average woman in her late 40's with some nice features and in need of some weight loss. The person I'm going to talk about in this post never knew me except at a weight marginally higher than it is now. She had nothing to be jealous of because this was our first, only, and likely last meeting.

Some time ago, I met a friend of my husband's for the first time. He has described her on many occasions as "a sweetie". She's very positive and educated and he has been quite happy with his communication with her and the progression of their friendship. One of the reasons that he wanted me to meet her is that he felt that it would facilitate more communication with her if we both could be at social interactions with her at the same time. This is especially the case now because our time has become more limited than ever. It is extremely difficult to sacrifice time for socializing as well as spend time with each other due to work and preparations to move.

This woman is much taller than average, somewhat overweight (perhaps proportionally as much as me, possibly a bit less) and somewhat mannish in appearance. She's a native of a Western culture, though not the same one as me. She's also married and participates in the same volunteer work that my husband has been doing. The bottom line is that we didn't hit it off. She came across as reserved and answered my questions in a way which was guarded and steered topics of interest from items of depth to banal superficialities. In the end, I felt as if merely asking some questions (such as why she loved the culture we both reside in, a reasonable follow-up question to her assertion that she was so fond of it) were intrusive and put her on the spot. I didn't feel my questions were too personal or invasive, but her responses seemed to indicate otherwise. My husband was also surprised at her level of reluctance to travel beyond the surface in the conversation as that had not been his experience with her to date.

When I deal with my work, I'm content to deal in superficialities, but not when I'm dealing with people from my own culture or in social situations. I get more than enough talk about the weather, food, trivial experiences, and holidays through my job. As readers of my blog are fully aware, I'm a person who likes complexity and depth. It's a genuine joy to plumb the deeper recesses of an issue and explore facets of a topic. This woman was certainly capable of such a discussion as my husband said she'd had some communication with him on that level before, but she wasn't like that with me.

I walked away distinctly feeling that she did not care for me, but not that she formed some deep-seated hate or anything. It wasn't such a greatly negative encounter. It just didn't go very well. This actually didn't bother me at all. I absolutely do not need everyone to like me. I didn't give what had happened much thought until recently when my husband invited her and her husband along with another couple to accompany us to a goodbye dinner. We're leaving the country we're in and so are she and her husband and getting a group together seemed like a pleasant and expedient way to bid farewell.

The response that we received is what has sent me into my current reflective state. She politely refused and effusively thanked my husband for the invitation, but she also mentioned just the two of them (my husband and her) getting together for a goodbye and "anyone else" he might like to invite. I may be out of the loop on social convention in Western culture, but I believe when you have met someone's wife and actually sat down at a meal and spoken with her for over an hour, it is polite to at least mention the spouse by name rather than just say "anyone else". Even my husband felt that the wording was potentially quite meaningful as a message conveying that she might tolerate my presence, but would prefer that I not be there.

This, in and of itself, is not really a big deal to me. I don't mind that she doesn't want me around. That being said, I was perfectly fine to associate with her again with the possibility that things might go better on another occasion. However, my reflection is actually about why things didn't go so well the first time. There are, of course, plenty of reasons including the very real possibility that there was simply a clash of personalities or she simply is not interested in someone with my personality. It's also possible that I seemed too negative or aggressive for her tastes. I am not a "Debbie Downer", but I do tend to see things very much through the filter of yin and yang. I see the good side, but I also see the bad, and I will talk about both equally. This woman is more of a positive type and may find whatever focus I had on the negative unappealing.

The reason why this has made me pensive is that my experiences have generally been quite positive when meeting new people. I'm socially quite adept, but I am, and I hate to say this because it sounds like bragging, quite intelligent. My intelligence has never been anything but an asset for me throughout most of my life. In fact, I have often felt that it was one of the things which persuaded people who might simply have dismissed me based on body size that I may indeed be worthwhile to know. It is this thought which occurred to me as I mulled over the snub in her letter.

It is absolutely clear to me that I am treated very, very differently now compared to before. People are nicer to me in every way. I attract far less negative attention. When I get stared at because I'm a foreigner in another land, people no longer look my body up and down and stare at my stomach, but rather look at my face. I wondered if this situation was yet another occasion in which my changed appearance was affecting a response to me, but this time, in a negative way.

I've written before about how one of my husband's former male friends looked me up and down and then ignored me. He judged me as unworthy of his attention and behaved as though my large body rendered me invisible. Dismissiveness as a result of fatness is very common. I wonder now if achieving parity in terms of the assessment of my appearance has changed some balance whereby my speaking and display of intellect is regarded as overbearing. In the past, the state of my body dipped me so low into the negative territory that my positive attributes, whatever they may be, could be digested as welcome counterbalances. Without that glaring aspect of my physicality to make the other party feel superior, is the way in which I present my mental capabilities coming across as overbearing, smug, or too much?

Obviously, I cannot know what is going on in another person's mind, particularly in what I would guess is their unconscious reasoning. It could simply be that I am unlikable to her personally even though I tend to be quite likable to the vast majority of people I meet. I can say that after announcing that I was going to leave the country I'm in and return to America, four adults over the age of 30 broke into tears at the news. Clearly, I must not be too odious an individual or they wouldn't have been so upset about my departure. At any rate, this could also be that I'm making too much of poor phrasing in a message and "anyone else" was not a snub, but an indication of careless writing or poor social skills. I don't know what the truth is and I doubt I ever will. However, I think the possibility that people may perceive my personality differently in a manner I would not have anticipated based on having a much smaller body is one worth contemplating.

Those Mechanistic Processes

2012-01-08T16:40:00.000-08:00

I don't talk much about the mechanics of what I'm doing anymore, because I have made a strong effort through time not to focus on them. Early on, because my habits were so destructive and distorted by a sense of food relationship "normality" that was beyond what my body required, I had to educate myself and attend to what I was doing with greater vigilance. Once I got healthier habits and more understanding in place, I slowly started to kick the training wheels off and operate less artificially and somewhat more naturally.

It's important to say that, when I say "healthier", I don't mean embracing food puritanism as I eat everything (candy, cookies, cake, chocolate, salted snacks... all of the "evils" in the dieting world). I always ate healthy food like fruit, vegetables, and whole grain and continue to do so. That was never my problem. My problem was too many calories and that likely is the problem most people have when they overeat. Most people aren't fat because they're scarfing down donuts and fast food. They're fat because they eat too much of everything, including healthy food.

I've written about this before, but far too many people attach moral judgment to food choices and body size rather than address the issue rationally. If you eat cake, you will remain fat and are weak-willed. If you eat whole wheat pasta with olive oil and vegetables, you will be thin and health and have will power. This thinking contributes to obesity problems because so many people eat well and are still fat. They believe that their food purity should insulate them from fatness, and believe it is inevitable that they be fat because their pious consumption results in obesity.

You can convince yourself that you are eating well and a healthy and reasonable amount of food if you don't dig too deeply into the facts. I know I absolutely did this. Once I dug into the facts (a process that I hated doing with a burning passion), I knew that I was habitually overeating. What was worse was that I discovered just how little extra food it took to send my daily caloric intake into the stratosphere. After taking a good hard look at what I was eating, I slowly adjusted downward. After two and a half years of doing this, I have a much better idea of how much is "enough" to maintain a smaller weight without as much diligence and scrutiny. I have, in essence, created a new "normal" for my life.

To that end, I find that I count calories in a very half-assed way now. I often track breakfast and lunch and make a good guess at dinner. While many people would see this as "slipping", I see this as progress. I don't want to be clinging to calorie counting for the rest of my life to reassure myself that I'm doing "okay". I want to live "normally" on all fronts, and, if at all possible, that will include not applying artificial measurements to my food intake. At the moment, I'm not quite ready to stop entirely, but there are days when I just don't bother at all.

All of that being said, I can't emphasize enough the value of knowing food information early on when trying to deal with your relationship with food and I think that calorie counting as an educational tool has value. "Dieting" culture is so pervasive and extreme that it is easy to view all practices related to it as distasteful, obsessive and destructive, but it is not the tools that are the problem. It is the way in which they are misused, overused, and relied upon exclusively that are the issue. They are not a way of life, but a helpful way to forge a path to a new way of life.

It is this confusion that makes people obsessed with weight loss and body composition so obnoxious. They never move on to normality (life without "dieting") and cling forever to the tools of diet culture because they don't believe they can get by without those training wheels. What is more, they become angry at any suggestion that anyone can be successful without them. In essence, they are people who believe they can never walk without this crutch and grow hostile at the suggestion that anyone can as it makes them feel bad about themselves as they're convinced they can't.

Though such people give calorie counting and the tools of dieting a bad name, for people who are greatly obese as I once was, your body chemistry is so imbalanced that it is difficult (in my experience) to rely on intuitive eating. Sometimes, the only way to really understand what you're doing is to pick up some of those tools and learn. It takes a very long time for the hormones and neurological responses to realign themselves to other patterns and your body will fight you all of the way, so you can't just eat what feels right. "What feels right" is often going to be too much because that's the message a big, fat body is going to send as it will endeavor to maintain the status quo. That is what bodies do.

In fact, some short-term research indicates that bodies never adjust hormonally or neurologically once one has been fat, but frankly, I believe the studies are poorly constructed. They are based on following people for little more than a year and having put small numbers of people on severe calorie restriction (600-800 calories). In my personal experience, it takes just under a year for the first sense of realigning to occur and more years for it to continue the process. I don't have people measuring my leptin and ghrelin numbers, but I do know how my sense of hunger and satiety have changed as time has gone by. Of course, I've eaten relatively close to the edge (1500-2000 calories) and engaged in modest exercise all along. Perhaps my body was not shocked the same way study participants bodies were. Perhaps I'm simply a freak of nature.

All I can say is that, in my case, something in me at a basic level changed and changed again. It is a lot easier now than it was in June 2009. This is not mind over matter nor "willpower" (a word I detest). It's not about my superior character strength or psychological integrity. It's about the changes I've been making slowly coercing my body's chemistry into a new normal in which I am accustomed to different energy consumption patterns. I've written about this before, but patterns are not merely psychological, but biological and the mind can be slowly changed and the body will, eventually, go along with it.

So, now that my body is responding with less intensity to eating a healthier (i.e., smaller) quantity and at less frequent intervals, I've been able to strip away some of the mechanistic support structures such as careful tracking of food. I feel good about this because, ultimately, I want to be able to just go about my life knowing how to eat without having to give calories a second thought. I feel like I'm on the right road to this particular destination. I'm in no hurry to get there and that makes it all the easier to keep going, but I am pleased at the progress I'm making away from anything resembling "dieting" structure in my life.

It never ends, so it's not worth caring about

2012-01-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

My husband and I were riding the train home together from work last week and stood somewhat near an older couple (around their late 50's or early 60's) who was seated. Bear in mind that I live in a non-English-speaking country when I say that they sat there openly discussing fat Americans in their native tongue. This discussion included the husband making hand gestures to indicate a large and bloated body.

If you want to see how I look now, the picture attached to my previous post should provide a pretty good idea. Yes, I'm still fat, but hardly gigantic. I'm 5' 4" and the last time I weighed myself, I was 175 lbs. My face is actually quite thin for my weight. In fact, I've been told by multiple people that I have the sort of face that the locals "envy" because even though thin bodies are common here, many women feel they have "big" faces. I don't agree with this conclusion about their faces, as I think this is merely a genetic facial shape difference and not any sort of "fatness", but I've been told many long for a more angular, longer face. My point is that people aren't going to be thinking I've got the look of a "fat person" from my face (which is masked in the aforementioned picture). What you don't see in the photo is actually the thinnest part of me.

It's important to keep in mind that my face is an issue in this situation because I was wearing a winter coat and scarf. The only visible parts of me were my face and from mid-calf to my feet. Since I wasn't wearing tight pants, one could not tell my leg size very well. However, based solely on the vague shape of me in my coat, these people were remarking on my fatness.

The lesson I learned from this wasn't that I am still fat and therefore open to mockery, but rather that there will always be people who need to elevate themselves at your expense such that they will find something to mock or deride. This couple couldn't even see the really fat part of me (my hips, belly and thighs), but were speaking poorly of me anyway. If I had been thin, my guess is that they'd have found something else to deride us about. Of course, they figured my husband and I didn't understand what they were saying because it is so often the case that they arrogantly believe their language is beyond us (this is a common conceit here), but they weren't talking for our benefit. They were talking to make themselves feel superior to us.

One of the ways in which I finally convinced myself to start walking when I first started changing my life was to tell myself that what I did for myself, exercising to help my back pain and gain strength and stamina, was more important than anything others said about me. At nearly 400 lbs. and needing to stop every 2-3 minutes because of the agony of my back pain, this was something which took a great deal more strength than standing on a train listening to a sad old couple make fun of fat Americans. I just had to throw away caring about how they reacted to me. Each time I was mocked, made fun of, pointed at, stared at, or treated in a de-humanizing way, I repeated to myself that it was more important for me to do what was good for my body than to hide from cruel, judging eyes. I didn't really feel it at first, but after saying it enough times, I believed it. Now, I deeply, authentically and truly don't care what they say about me. It's not the, "they suck so who cares about them anyway" response that people have when angry. It is actual apathy with no emotional component.

Though certainly it is a lot easier now to brush off such bad behavior than it was at a much higher weight, the principle is the same as is the motivation of people who say such things about others. What you do for yourself to improve your quality of life is the top priority and you can't allow what others say to stop you. You have to convince yourself that your progress toward whatever your particular goals are is more important than what others think or do, because the truth is that it absolutely is.

It isn't about dismissing them though. It's not about telling them to f*ck off. It's about telling yourself that you are valuable. This distinction is very important because hating back isn't going to make you love yourself, but deciding to act in your own best interest will. It's about saying you matter and what they say or do does not with a much heavier emphasis on your value as a person each time you say it to yourself. By focusing on you and your needs rather than on diminishing your detractors, you not only gain strength to endure such comments, but a better sense of your self-worth.

Making peace with the body

2012-01-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

In my home, I do not have any full-length mirrors so most of the time I have been seeing my body in fragments. When I started a new job at the end of last spring, I started working in a place that has an enormous mirror across from the toilet. It is virtually impossible not to see my half-naked body without a supreme effort to look away. The mirror takes up half of an entire wall.

In clothes, you can't really see, but I'm a disaster underneath. This was in a fitting room when I tried on this shirt. It was the only way to get a picture of me in the mirror since I don't have a big one. You can see that I definitely have not lost any hair along with weight loss. I've got plenty.

When I first started using that bathroom, it was very hard for me to look at what my body had become as a result of weight loss. Little blobby side-cars of wrinkled flesh hang on my inner thighs. My stomach is still very big, and hangs down like a crinkled semi-full sack of potatoes. When I sit, it rests on my lap like a floppy, thick blanket. My breasts hang like an old grandma's. They are slack and lacking in fullness. When I cram them into my C-cup bra, it's mainly extra skin rather than breast tissue threatening to send me back to a D. Even my calves have wrinkles on them where the skin has slackened and is creasing.

My husband, bless his sweet, loving soul, sees the state of my body as a sign of success and never flinches, criticizes or shies away from touching or looking at me. I see it as a vast collection of battle scars from a war with food that I've fought for many, many years. This war has resulted, not in victory, but in a peace treaty that is better than an all-out win.

I never expected to be toned, taut and gorgeous at the end of all of this. In fact, I expected something not too dissimilar to what I have. You can't stretch out skin for that long and expect it to snap back, not even with very slow weight loss such as mine. No amount of exercise will change how I look without my clothes and I know that. There will likely always be sheets of extra skin hanging from my body, adding both weight and crepe-like wrinkles. I will never be thin, and I know that my weight will always be higher because of all that extra skin.

Despite the fact that I hardly expected to come out looking like a beauty queen, I have found it difficult to accept my body in its naked state. I feel like I've abused it physically because I suffered so much emotionally. Rather than feeling that my vanity is suffering because I lack bodily beauty, I feel sad that years of psychological difficulty have left these marks. For that, I forgive myself, and I have learned not to be sad at the state I'm in. I'm learning to see my stretched out and wrinkled body in the mirror and feel that it's okay. I'm starting to see that slack, wrinkled flesh the way my husband does - as a trophy of my success in repairing my relationship with food. I'm not there 100% yet, but I'm on my way.

"Bad" Thoughts

2012-01-01T19:00:00.000-08:00

As "the fat girl" growing up in the 70's, my life was one in which I could not wear the fashionable clothes of my peers. At that time, "plus size" clothes only came in a few flavors and for pants, it was mainly polyester stretch pants. While other girls wore jeans, corduroy, and velveteen, I was clad in the trappings of old ladies. What was worse, I was at the mercy of my mother's fashion sense. I would prefer a parade of dark brown and black to mask my fat thighs, hanging belly flap, and voluminous ass, but she would sometimes buy hot pink, light blue, and lime green (most likely because these were unpopular colors and cheaper - she did not buy similar colors for herself).

At some point in junior high school, I found myself capable of squeezing into a pair of the biggest jeans I could locate. I was so happy to have a chance to wear something other than stretch pants and feel like I marginally fit in with everyone else. On that day, those too tight pants split across the seam in the back and I had to walk around for the rest of the day with a sweater tied around my waist to cover up the huge rip.

One of my classmates, Julie, who was a cheerleader took no end of joy in this incident. She carried on and laughed through several classes about what had happened. Her mirth at my embarrassment was something she could not contain and when we got to Spanish class she was bubbling over in giggles. The teacher asked her what was so funny and she asked the teacher how to say "rip" in Spanish and she constructed a sentence which said, "Shari's pants ripped", and she burst into new gales of laughter at the renewal of my humiliation. I just put my head down and endured it because there was little else I could do. Needless to say, I never wore jeans again in school.

By graduation, Julie was starting to show signs of pudginess herself, though she edged away from becoming genuinely fat. In addition to her making fun of my ripped pants, she enjoyed criticizing my lack of athletic aptitude due to my weight and overall lack of grace and coordination. When she struck out while playing softball and one of her friends called her some derogatory word for doing so, she looked my way and said that being caught out on base because you were too slow to run to them made you this unkind term (which I cannot recall), not striking out. Her failure was okay, but mine was not because I failed due to my fat.

Recently on Facebook, I have been reunited with a lot of people who both were and were not my friends in school. This is a situation which taxes my ability to be mature and kind to the hilt since these are people who dealt me a great deal of damaging cruelty and contributed to the psychological burdens that I continue to carry with me to this day. I have to admit that part of me is very ugly in response to how their lives have turned out and that I am more than a little happy to see that many of them are aging far worse than I am, and that includes the formerly skinny and pretty girls who are fatter than me at my current weight.

Julie was persuaded by one of the people I am friended with to get onto Facebook, but she hasn't uploaded a picture and hasn't interacted with anyone. I'm unhappy to admit that I have a strong hope that she amply fulfilled her propensity for chubbiness through the years and that she got very fat. This is a truly awful thing for me to wish on anyone as I know extremely well how difficult and painful obesity is. The part of me that longs for karma to be real and desperately wants empathy to be bred in my former tormenters can't be denied though.

I realize that these sorts of feelings are "justifiable" in one way. I was hurt and it's not uncommon to want those who hurt me to learn a lesson in the pain I lived in by living in it themselves, but this type of thinking is poison for the soul and the psyche. I need to focus on positive motivation and my own successes and growth, not wish misfortune on others who once hurt me. As I have said before, I also realize that the people my classmates were at that age are not who they are today and I need to learn to forgive them. This sense of wanting them to be worse off than me is not conducive to that sort of mentality and something I need to work on.

Not Me

2011-12-27T20:32:00.000-08:00

After I got home from the hospital after my left thyroid lobectomy, I had a profound sense of not feeling like myself. Part of the reason for this was the way in which my body was controlled by others for the duration of my stay. Being in the hospital is not entirely dissimilar to being in prison. You can't leave until someone decides to let you go. People tell you to stay in your room, what you can do, where you can go, and what you can eat. They even watch and ask about every little thing you do including your ability to walk, talk, and what happens when you go to the bathroom.

Is it any wonder that I feel a bit disassembled as well when bits of me have been cut out and taken elsewhere. I believe that the body is an integrated whole which carries energy in every cell. When a part of it is damaged or removed, there is an energy disruption. The body knows something is gone and the energy flow has been altered. This is part of Chinese medicine, but it is also scientifically supported by problems like phantom limbs in which people still feel pain in now missing arms or legs.

That being said, upon returning home, I was flooded with more profound feelings about losing parts of myself. I've written many times about the loss of identity that comes with losing weight and part of that is leaving behind the guarded, apprehensive, or restricted person that I was. When I was heavier, I avoided medical treatment. Subjecting myself to tests and then surgery "is not me". This behavior is outside of my character and I hadn't sought any treatment for about a decade, let alone had routine testing. My character is one in which I do not seek attention unless I have a problem.

Just before entering the hospital, my husband and I went to a movie theater for the first time in over 20 years because I could now sit in a theater seat without fear of fitting or spilling into someone else's chair. We enjoyed the movie and it was a nice time, but, again, going to movies "is not me." I watch DVDs from the comfort and safety of my own home where I don't have to worry about how much space is allotted for my behind.

Yesterday, I went to a supermarket to do some routine shopping and, since it is near the holidays, there were a lot of kids around. One aisle that I wanted to walk through had three noisy kids around the ages of 8-11 jumping around looking at candy. I paused for a moment and felt a sense of apprehension. In the past, every time I saw a kid, I would try and avoid being seen because children were ruthless about making comments, staring, or saying rude things about my nearly 400-lb. body. As I stood at the end of the aisle, I realized I could walk down it without concern for mockery. I walked through and the kids didn't react to my presence. Again, walking by children without fear "is not me."

Over the past year in particular, there has been a huge transformation in how I live my daily life from small things to big things. I allow my picture to be taken and posted on Facebook. I eat in restaurants. I talk about eating and enjoying sweets without feeling self-conscious. People treat me as if I were just another person rather than some freak show to be handled carefully and with amusement. I walk for hours without pain or fear of future pain. I go to social gatherings without fear of embarrassment. I eat without guilt, but with self-control and moderation. My sister-in-law showed my picture to an acquaintance of hers and she went on and on about how "beautiful" I was. Honestly, I look in the mirror now and I don't know who that person is. I don't see her as me.

This all sounds great, but, it is not me. People treat weight loss and lifestyle alteration as if everything were just one gain in quality of life after another, but I sometimes feel as if I am a big patchwork quilt with certain patterns and squares that have been a part of me for years and now a great many of them are being torn out and replaced.

It doesn't matter that the new squares and patterns are nicer, prettier, and easier to live with. It is still disconcerting and makes me feel very separated from myself and not know who I am. A long time ago, I wrote about how I needed my husband so badly because he was a tether to who I was as my life became transformed and I've come a long way since then, but I still feel that he is the only one who knows "me" for what I really am. And I need him to tell me who that is because it's getting harder and harder for me to understand who I am with everything that has changed.

It's not that I was my limits before, but rather that the type of person I was became defined by those limits both mentally and physically. I wasn't someone who willfully went out among other people and was a homebody because the cost emotionally and physically was too high. Social timidity and an avoidance of crowds were a part of me. I wasn't someone who spent money on clothes and restaurants, because there was no joy in such pursuits due to the emotional costs and uncertainty. Frugality and restraint with sensory experiences were a part of me because of my limits. I wasn't someone who allowed her picture to be taken or posted them willfully for others to see. My disgust with my weight and appearance made me humble and modest and banished all notions of vanity.

I could go on and on, but the point is that my limits shaped my character and losing those limits is reshaping my sense of self. This isn't as hard a situation as some of my earlier identity struggles, but I still sometimes feel like I'm inside the "wrong" body and living the "wrong" life. I feel like I'm really not "me" anymore, and it's disconcerting. I have no desire to return to who I was, but I'm absolutely not sure of who I am. This will take more time and adjustment.

Normalization of Obesity

2011-12-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

"Normalizing" has several different meanings and one of them is sociological. You can find many complex meanings, but one of the most simple ones is that it is the process of making something seem natural, logical, and commonplace. The word carries no value judgment about what is being normalized, and the act of doing so should be seen as a logical and expected part of the changes to culture.

That is not to say that "normalizing" is always a positive thing in the minds of everyone who witnesses it. One of the biggest examples of normalization which has been successful and ongoing over the past half century has been the perceptions of homosexuality. In my lifetime, I have seen the normalizing of it by society in action. What was once considered deviant and abhorrent is closing in on being considered normal and mainstream. For those (like myself) who believe that homosexuality is a biological inevitability and that sexuality is not a "choice", this is good news as we view it as the end of an unfair and oppressive environment. For those who have philosophical objections and believe a true choice is being made, this particular type of normalization is upsetting and unacceptable. They feel it is removing restraint from behavior that should be held in abeyance.

Normalization comes as a result of a great many factors. One is technological advances. Another is scientific discovery. Yet another is the evolution in philosophies based on education and integration of new ideas. Very generally speaking, there is a movement in most cultures toward more liberal thinking. That is, this is the direction until there is some shift back toward conservatism based on hardship. Those difficulties can be economic, medical (such as the outbreak of disease), or brought on my aggression (e.g., war).

All normalization is resisted by a certain segment of any society. When those views act in opposition to yours, it is easy to see them as small-minded, irrational, and selfish. When they agree with your views, they seem to be "right-minded". It's hard not to apply value judgments to both sides of the equation when it comes to normalizing of behavior, but it is important to understand and accept that the perspective of others has some validity. Dismissing alternate views out of hand lowers the quality of discourse and encourages rigidity on both sides.

With this in mind, I've been pondering both sides of the equation when it comes to the fat acceptance movement's efforts to normalize widespread occurrence of obesity. As someone who has spent her entire life overweight, and the vast majority of that life over 300 lbs., I know all too well the damage that is done to someone based on body judgment. I strongly believe that punitive attitudes toward fat people only do harm whereas people who fear the normalization of fatness as an endorsement of what they view as a "fat lifestyle" and what they often erroneously conclude is sloth and gluttony believe that social censure will increase the chances that people will not engage in behaviors that result in obesity.

Unfortunately, having lived a fat life, I also know that normalizing (as opposed to accepting, which is a whole other kettle of fish) obese bodies isn't necessarily a good thing on some levels. For one thing, accepting that being fat is expected, normal, and "usual" means that people will not attend to it based on health concerns. Despite all of the HAES propaganda, being obese (as opposed to merely "overweight") will eventually impact your health. You'll find that there are few fat advocates out there over 40, and even fewer over 50, who will latch onto the notion that being obese doesn't mean being unhealthy.

When I was younger, my body dealt a lot better with obesity than it has after 40. I'm now 47, and I have the joints of a person much older than me because of the extra pressure that has been on them for so many years. I'm not sure how anyone can say in good conscience that carrying 50-200 lbs. of extra weight will not take a toll on ones joints eventually. There is also the fact, and fat advocates are in denial about this, that pressure on the glands affects type 2 Diabetes development. Weight gain can bring on this condition and loss can send it into remission. That is not to say that one does not have to be genetically predisposed to develop it, but simply that it is a fact that weight affects development of such a condition.

Because of the health issues associated with obesity, normalization of fatness is a more complex issue than other social issues, trends, and concerns. On the one hand, fatness needs to be accepted because fat prejudice is unjust and highly destructive. I am certain that, had I not been tormented as a chubby child, I never would have grown up to be an extremely obese adult. It was the disapproval which sent me from overweight to class III obesity. Dehumanizing a group of people based on superficial characteristics serves only to create a loop of neurotic behavior which creates conditions that encourage eating disorders, including compulsive eating, overeating, and binge eating. As a psychological and social issue, fatness needs to be normalized and what I mean by that is that it needs to be regarded as a normal state for some people and they should not be treated with prejudice.

On the other hand, however, normalization which discourages people from dealing with their weight when weight will affect health (which is certainly the case for many people who are obese, especially in class 2 or 3 obesity), mobility, or quality of life (especially mentally) isn't such a great idea. While I fervently believe there are some people who were "born to be fat", it is undeniable that more and more people are fat and getting fatter compared to the past. If being fat were a normal human condition brought on by genetic predisposition, we wouldn't see the recent increases in the number of overweight people nor an increase in the amount of weight they gain. I realize that BMI was shifted to statistically move a great many more people into the "overweight" category, but that does not account for the dramatic increase in obese people and especially the super obese (such as I once was).

The issue with normalization and obesity needs to be split between societal and philosophical acceptance on the one hand and medical attention which indicates it is to be viewed as an undesirable condition on the other. In societies in which fatness is seen purely as a bodily issue related to health (there are some, but just not in the West) rather than a moral or character failure, people address their weight the same way that they do other factors which affect health. If someone is anemic, has poor circulation, etc., the measures taken to look after their body given these conditions are not seen as oppressive or unfair. They are simply seen as what is necessary. The same applies to weight in such cultures. I know because I live in such a culture at present. Fatness isn't about morality or character, but about health. While I don't believe that anyone is required to be healthy, I do believe society should encourage people to act in a manner which promotes happiness and the highest possible quality of life. And if you are not healthy, you will not have a good quality of life. Do we want to normalize conditions which decrease quality of life? I don't believe this is good for society on the whole, let alone the individual.

Unfortunately, the prejudice and venom directed at fat people that society is currently indulging in is what encourages more extreme and broad efforts to normalize obesity. The harder you push people, the harder they will push back. It is similar to the way in which the NRA pushes to keep extreme weaponry legal in order to make sure they can keep their hunting rifles and hand guns.

The answer is simple, but people are reluctant to take it because they have to change their personal slant to a more objective one. Stop judging and abusing people based on their bodies. Stop encouraging the false notion that health and weight are completely different factors for most people. Deal with this like adults without injecting value judgments or personal opinions. As is so often the case, I'm not holding my breath.

The Importance of Eating

2011-12-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

I have spent the last 4 days in the hospital having half of my thyroid cut out because of a benign tumor. During that time, I knew certain things to be true about getting out of there as soon as possible. I also had experiences with food which were quite different than those in my daily life and that caused me to reflect on the mental progress that I have made.

Part of having surgery is that you can't eat for at least 12 hours before you have it. Because I've learned to be hungry and not panic (something which people who are compulsive eaters and obsessively think about food often do), this was uncomfortable, but not something I built up a great deal of tension about. In the end, I didn't eat for more than 36 hours and when I could eat, I was on a liquid diet for a further 24 hours. By the end of this period of time, I was pretty ravenous physically, but it was okay emotionally.

I contrast this with how I dealt with feeling hungry in 2009 when I first started to change my relationship with food. At that point in time, I could hardly bear hunger for an hour, let alone more than a day. This was as much a physical situation as a psychological one. When your body's rhythms are accustomed to regular and copious feeding, you have "fat hunger" and breaking that takes time. In fact, it took me over a year to lose most of it, and two years for it to vanish entirely. There was also emotional panic about not having food plans in place and obsessing about food when I felt the least bit hungry. Hunger was something I had nearly zero tolerance for. Now, I can manage it, though not in a disordered "I'm going to starve myself" way. It's merely a "I can wait until I a reasonable time to eat". Do I enjoy being hungry? Not at all. But it no longer drives me crazy because of mental and physical conditioning to learn to deal with food and hunger in a normalized fashion. It's okay to be hungry for awhile. It's okay to eat.

The thing I knew while I was in the hospital was that it was important to eat in order to be released in a timely fashion. I had no control over the content of what I ate, though it honestly was quite nutritious and well-balanced (this was not an American hospital as I live in an Asian country). The main difference between what I ate in the hospital and what I eat at home was that it was a lot more calories than I tend to consume, but I ate it all up anyway for two reasons. First of all, eating at a caloric deficit slows healing. Though I'm still working on losing weight and try to generally eat between 1500-1800 calories per day, I did not consider weight loss when eating at the hospital nor did I feel bad or guilty about it. I know they were feeding me in a way that promoted health, and even if it was more than I needed, I knew it was good for me.

For many women who are trying to lose weight, they go around the bend mentally when they are not in control of their food and wouldn't knowingly eat more calories than they do according to their "food plans". I once read a comment out there in the ether by a woman who was so happy to fast before surgery because she was getting such a huge deficit, but became angry when she learned that they were using her I.V. drip to put calories back into her before the procedure. Her desire to eat less was so obsessive that she became upset at a procedure meant to stabilize her metabolically before an invasive medical experience. This betrays an extremely distorted view of food, calories, and biology which elevates deprivation and dismisses the value of calories to the daily operation of a healthy human body. Yes, calories were put into me as well. I know this because the I.V. bags had calorie values written on them and I saw them change bag after bag. However, it didn't trouble me.

I didn't even count the calories I ate, though I could have guessed pretty accurately if I had wanted to. Sometimes it is important to be careful about what you eat, but sometimes it really is not a primary concern. Healing was my concern. Well, that and convincing the hospital that I was able to swallow without difficulty and had a good appetite. The former wasn't 100% the truth, but the latter was absolutely true. I ate what I was given with interest and gusto. I deserved it, needed it, and enjoyed it.

One of the things which I realized a long time ago was that I wouldn't be able to have a normal relationship with food if I viewed it as the enemy or separated it into "good" and "bad". I ate white bread with jam. I drank full fat milk. I ate gelatin made with sugar and custard made with sugar. I ate white rice. It was good and good for me. I needed those extra calories, and not because I'd been fasting and on a liquid diet. There was no thought that it was "okay" to eat more because I'd been deprived for two days. My thinking was only that I needed to be fed fully to heal better. In fact, my subsequent plan for the coming week as I continue to heal is to eat more than usual. This isn't "to hell with my weight loss, I'm going to binge". This is, I need to eat more calories (near what is a maintenance level) to get well faster.

Though it isn't all about food, food is an important part of healing. The other part of it is modest exercise. I know from experience that walking daily has kept me from catching a cold for nearly three years. It's all about having a strong body, and you need food and exercise for that.

The idea of strength and the relationship food has on that has been on my mind as of late because of a death in the family recently. My mother-in-law died last month, and the beginning of the end was when she stopped eating. A friend of mine remarked independently when discussing her mother's death that, when people stop eating, they are pretty much finished. Eating is about life. Not eating means death. That's not a recipe for gorging or overeating, but simply embracing the fact that food is important for life and it's important to have a positive relationship with it. Part of that is not eating poorly or eating so much that your body is compromised (with mobility or health concerns), but part of it is also not vilifying eating or seeing it as something to be tortured emotionally about.

How Soon We Forget

2011-12-09T17:22:00.001-08:00

This morning I was walking to the local subway station with my husband and mentioning to him that two and a half years ago, such a thing was impossible for me to do without excruciating back pain and frequent stops to rest. This walk is approximately 8 minutes long at a reasonable pace, but I couldn't have managed it in 2009. Even in 2010, there were doubts about my long-term ability to walk without the threat of pain and I still had backaches in the morning when I woke up.

Though I spent about 20 years in great distress with my back which limited or eliminated my ability to walk, I now take for granted that I have back-pain-free mobility. The strange thing is that I've been in this condition for a short time, but have already blocked out the longer reality of my life. While I don't believe that it's useful to dwell on the difficulties of my past, I believe it is important not to forget what it is like to be so fat that basic locomotion is fraught with pain and difficulty. This isn't important to stop me from regaining the weight I lost as the psychological issues will prevent that from happening. It is, however, essential if I'm to retain empathy for those who still live in shoes very much like those I once dwelt in.

Recently my husband had his own experience with "forgetting" or at least failing to apply empathy to someone overweight when he has had ample experience to draw upon. Despite years of living without going to restaurants, being unable to shop with me, and having to do things in a particular way to accommodate my size, he failed to consider the problems of an overweight colleague at his volunteer work and may have inadvertently contributed to some stress for her.

A somewhat large group of these volunteers were pondering how to get from point A to point B and a suggestion was made that they split a couple of cabs. There were 8 of them, so they could split two quite cheaply between them by piling 3 in the back and one up front with the driver in each of two cabs. My husband did the math and said taking a taxi sounded like a good idea rather than hiking the distance in the cold weather. The overweight colleague, who he reckons may be in the 300-lb. weight range, said that a walk sounded good. In the end, they all walked, but my husband was metaphorically kicking himself for not "getting it" as he believed he "should have known better".

This situation illustrated the inner turmoil and strife of the fat person very well. It also showed how hard it is for people who have never been that large to conceptualize the world in the same manner as a very overweight person. While this woman would have probably been fine in the cab as long as she could sit in the front with the driver, the situation is still rife with uncertainty and potential embarrassment. I'm sure she was nervously pondering the potential outcomes as the situation played itself out.

If one boisterous person playfully calls "shotgun", she is put in a position of competing for the front seat without drawing overt attention to her actual need for that space or cramming into the back seat with two other people. Having to do either of these is humiliating because either would reveal her status as the person too big to fit and therefore either requiring the special accommodation or making others potentially uncomfortable with her size. There's also the possibility that, even if she sat up front, the seat position would have been too far up and then she would have to cram in or adjust the seat such that she obviously took away leg room for her compatriots behind her. And finally, even if the others recognized her need for the front seat, knowing they were acknowledging her weight (or guessing that that was the case) is still embarrassing.

I felt for this woman when my husband told me this story because I've lived in that headspace nearly all of my adult life. I also felt for my husband who kicked himself a bit for not being more sensitive to her needs despite his years of experience with me. If I have already allowed the limits of my primarily limited life due to my weight to slip away, how could he be expected to keep them front and center?

Benign

2011-12-01T01:34:00.001-08:00

I finally got the results of my thyroid aspiration test and the tumor is benign. My worst fear appears not to be coming true. However, I still have to have the left half of my thyroid removed because it's big and isn't getting any smaller. I'm having surgery shortly before Christmas (thanks, Santa, for the early gift of a follicular adenoma), but at least this can be put to rest as an issue before I go home and live an insurance-free life.

One thing about this experience, among the many other things about it, is that it illustrates (yet again, really, this is a lesson I never needed to learn, let alone need repeated reinforcement) that losing weight solves nothing and you can't "earn" good health through virtuous lifestyle habits. Life has been a good deal harder at sub-200 lbs. than it was over 300. Crap still happens. More crap happens because I'm out there more and subjecting myself to medical tests. That's not my way of saying I shouldn't take those tests, but merely a recognition that I was happier when I was ignorant.

Another thing I can say is that at no time was my weight loss in my thoughts about this. Frankly, I was concerned about dying not continuing to lose weight. The surgeon says that enough of my thyroid will remain after surgery that I will not be hypothyroid so I'm not worried about it in any event. However, it would probably be prudent to monitor my weight more frequently immediately after surgery in case all of the slicing and dicing in the area creates an unforeseeable problem.

It was also of interest in terms of my weight loss to know that my thyroid function was not affected by the tumor. That is, I have neither high nor low thyroid function now. So, in the end, my weight was all about what I ate and did rather than my body itself. I already knew that. Now science has confirmed it.

Thanks to Rebecca for the kind note in e-mail. I'm sorry that I didn't reply, but I've been in a really dark place mentally throughout all of this. Functioning at all was difficult at times. I had to take it moment by moment until the outcome was revealed. I really appreciate your concern and that you took the time to write.

The Thyroid Test

2011-11-15T02:07:00.001-08:00

I finally had the thyroid test done, and the results were not what I had hoped for. Half of my thyroid is enlarged and has a tumor on it (a "lesion"). Because of the bureaucratic health care system in the country I'm residing in, I have to struggle to get a biopsy done quickly. Essentially, I have to call for an emergency appointment along with all of the people who have a cough or stubbed their toes and believe they absolutely need to see a doctor.

This is very stressful for me, and the worst part of it at this point in time is not knowing exactly what my disposition will be and feeling that no one in the medical system is particularly interested in how leaving me in limbo about my status causes me difficulty. The doctors won't tell me anything about possibilities and say "they can't be sure". They're more interested in covering their asses than informing the patient and answer the questions with responses which are little different from a shoulder shrug.

I'm treating this at present as a condition to be treated rather than a death sentence or an imminent diagnosis of cancer. I know that many women suffer thyroid issues which do not result in cancer diagnoses, but my fears that, if I ever lost weight again and resolved most of my issues, "God" would give me cancer seem to be headed for some sort of realization. I know this is a pessimistic attitude born of years of suffering and feeling that I am destined to be unhappy. It does not serve me well, and I will fight it.

Bits and Pieces (and girly parts exam results)

2011-11-05T18:40:00.000-07:00

While I seem to be pretty good at long, rambling psychologically-oriented posts, I'm not nearly as diligent about recording more concrete information. Essentially, I view the bits and pieces as less interesting than the deeper thoughts so I drag my feet on writing about them, but this blog is about my recording all of my progress, not just the thoughts which I think are especially interesting. Here are the odds and ends:

My mammogram and pap smear were completely clean. I gambled by not having tests for many years and won. Next time I get these tests, I won't have years of fear and uncertainty behind them.
Though my eating habits were never particularly bad (just too much of everything), they are better now in that proportionally I eat more vegetables and fruit than I once did. However, I'm still overly fond of carbohydrates relative to protein-rich food. This can cause peanut butter cravings, especially at night.
I realized that the less other people define me by my weight, the less I do so. People who were once very fat and lost weight continue to say that it is about your attitude, but it is hard to ignore the fact that I feel like a normal human because people now treat me like one. Not having to constantly battle other people's reactions to you is a psychological burden of immense weight. Not having that complicate my life has been a huge relief.
I never judge myself or beat myself up for what I eat, even when I make what I feel in retrospect are choices which are not conducive to achieving my goals. I do, however, regret those choices and wish I'd done better. I think that regret over poor choices is normal, as long as self-flagellation or scolding does not accompany that regret. Everyone drinks or eats too much (or poorly) on occasion and experiences regret. It is okay to feel this way as long as it is not a character-defining or "end of the world" experience. Understanding and reacting appropriately to this sort of thing is also a part of "normalizing". Note that I am not talking about building to a stage of denial of food pleasure, but rather about eating in an imbalanced fashion. I will always eat for pleasure.
I'm in the baby-steps stage of dealing with self-stroking with food. At the moment, I'm trying to reduce the frequency with which I do this. As I approach a piece or dish of candy with the intention of just having a small nibble for pleasure, I try to pause and reflect on why I'm doing it. Is it a craving? Is it a need for quick energy? Is it hunger? Or am I trying to soothe myself with a small bite of something pleasurable? If it's the latter, I tell myself, "it's okay, I'm okay," and I don't have it. I sometimes forget or fail to reflect, but I'm cultivating this mental habit now. I expect it to grow and help me stop using tiny amounts food as an emotional palliative.
I still believe I ruminate on food "too much". That is, it occupies my thoughts at times when I should be thinking of other things or does so based on thinking about diet or weight loss. However, it is much better than it used to be in terms of total time and the level of distraction involved. I think this is as much a function of routine as preoccupation and that I'll have to work harder to push my mental pathways in other directions if I want to stop.
(added later than the rest of this post) Last time I weighed myself (November 9), something I'm increasingly bad at and don't seem to manage even once a month, I was at 173 lbs. I realize that this may be a false low, but it is definitely lower than before.

Self-stroking: part 2

2011-10-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I am feeling frightened or insecure, I ask my husband if he will always take care of me. He always tells me that he will. At those times, my fear is that I can't make my way in life and if I fall, I'm afraid no one will be there to catch me. I need to know that he will be there, just in case I fall.

On an objective level, there's no reason to believe that I am incapable of making my way in life. For 12 years, I worked full-time and was the primary support while my husband worked part-time and was a househusband. I also worked full-time at various other jobs concurrently with my husband working full-time. About 6 years ago, after about a year of undiagnosed clinical depression (or nearly so) I went part-time, he went full-time, and I took over the household work. I have far more of my adult life under my belt being responsible for myself, but I don't think my fears are really about money or jobs.

I think my anxiety about being cared for is more generalized and I think it stems from the insecurity I spent my formative years dwelling in. Though I had a roof over my head and there was food on the table, my parents were constantly speaking about us being on the edge of insolvency. Money problems were always on the table and nothing was ever hidden from my sister and I. What was more, my parents were very absorbed in their own issues. They spent their days arguing about my father's alcoholism, my mother's spendthrift nature, and complaining about whatever trivial issues perturbed them. Neither of them was an adult in any way.

I know it may sound like an exaggeration to say neither was an adult, but they truly were not. My father refused to do anything that required even minimal interacting with other people if it didn't happen in a bar or a garage. He wouldn't go into a bank, shop in a market for food, go to my sister's and my school, or shop for clothes (not even his own). He abdicated all responsibility and my mother used the power that came with that to indulge her shopaholism and to live beyond our means. She created a loop in which she medicated her unhappiness with food and spending money and, in turn, created her unhappiness by being fat and being forced into bill juggling and loan consolidation to handle her debts. Her failure to be an adult was not in her refusal to take on responsibility, as she had it all, but it was in her inability to control her temper and the way in which she battered my sister's and my esteem to elevate her own. She heaped responsibility on us too young, shared her problems with us when we were incapable of understanding them or helping, and verbally abused us. Her failure was in not acting emotionally like a grown-up to her children.

In retrospect, I know that my mother created all of my family's financial suffering through her issues with spending. She had a vision of the life she wanted to live, and part of that was "keeping up with the Joneses". She was devastated when her siblings, especially her 3 sisters, lived a material lifestyle that was clearly superior to hers. Had my mother practiced moderate fiscal control, we would have been alright. We wouldn't have been rich, but we could have been secure and stable. Unfortunately, both of my parents were more interested in using what money we had to do what they wanted (my mother to buy junk and my father to drink alcohol and smoke everyday) than in providing a stable life for their family.

I mentioned in the previous post that food was the co-parent in my childhood, and the support that I carried with me into adulthood. It is the way I "stroke" (comfort, validate, reward, etc.) myself. Unlike my parents, food never hurt me, abandoned me, or disappointed me. It always gave pleasure and asked nothing in return. While my parents were inconsistent and my mother so mercurial at random intervals that I was driven to extreme nervousness and tension at times because of my fear of her wrath, food was the "good parent".

I realize now that my husband has taken on some of the role of a "parent" for me. I ask if he will take care of me because I was never taken care of by anyone as a child and I need to feel cared for and secure. No, I was not abused physically, nor did I starve, but I never felt secure, loved, or worthwhile. Neither of my parents gave me those things because of their own damage and immaturity. I don't blame them for it and this post is not about holding them responsible for my problems. That being said, ignoring the connection would undermine my ability to heal myself. I have to understand the roots so I know where to start tearing out the damaging weeds of my problems and planting more psychologically healthy "plants". Too many people think that "blame the parents" is what excavating your childhood issues is all about and that it's about finding reasons to be mad at them rather than change your life. It is not. It's about finding out what went wrong so that you can figure out how to make it right. My parents messed up. I forgive them. However, if someone breaks a complex mechanism (such as the human psyche), it really helps to know exactly how and where they broke it if you want to repair the damage as quickly and effectively as possible.

While my husband is functioning in part in the role my parents failed at, I know that he can't do it all and that is where the "self-stroking" that I mentioned in the previous post comes in. It's not wrong for him to do some of it because, after all, we all validate, comfort, and soothe our mates. It's part of the role they play. However, the fact that being separated from him for a finite period of time is so difficult for me means that I need to develop certain coping skills in this regard. As I mentioned previously, I used to have food to stroke me in his absence, and now I don't, so I need other things.

After yesterday's realization, I figured out, much to my chagrin, that I still use food to stroke myself and not terribly infrequently. The main difference between how I used it before and how I use it now is that I use extremely tiny portions now. Instead of eating a bag of chips, I eat 2 or 3 nuts. I don't eat a whole candy bar, but might eat 6 M & M's or a mini-candy bar. The calories are low enough to not be an issue, but the comforting still goes on.

That is not to say that every small treat I eat is an act of food-based stroking. Sometimes, it's merely that I want to enjoy these foods. Sometimes, it's a craving for a dessert after a meal (which is common for me anyway). However, there are definitely times when it is an act of stroking. It's not compulsive, but it is an act that tells me that "I'm okay". The food tells me, I'm going to be okay. Everything will be okay. This connection was forged in my childhood, and now I have to work to unravel it. This is the next stage in the evolution of my relationship with food, and I am not looking forward to the emotional fall-out which is certain to follow.

My approach to this is going to be relatively unstructured. That is, I don't plan to forever give up treats or even to swear off of them on a particular day. Rather than take some sort of rigid or Draconian view of food (which I believe is ultimately destructive and untenable), I plan to practice concrete self-stroking exercises at times when I feel I'm grabbing a tiny bite of a treat for self-stroking purposes. I'm also going to try and develop conditioning techniques to self-stroke in a higher order fashion. This is not an easy transition for someone like me, because it involves positive messages about myself to myself. This comes with difficulty because of my feelings of worthlessness, fear of narcissism or self-aggrandizement, and modesty. My mother reinforced again and again that I shouldn't form too high an opinion of myself to make sure I never thought too much of myself. For instance, when I got excellent grades and pushed myself hard in school, she made sure to tell me that I was "book smart", but lacked common sense or other intelligence. Even when I excelled academically and should have felt I was smart, she let me know that I was dumb and shouldn't be too proud no matter what I accomplished. She bragged to her friends about my sister and I, then told us we weren't so hot.

I'm also not the type of person who subscribes to hollow affirmations of my own awesomeness. A lot of people practicing self-acceptance resort to pat mantras about how "good" they are, but this simply does not work for me. My issue is not that I think I'm a really "bad" person and need to tell myself that I'm a "good" one. It is that I feel that I'm in no way special and that my value is less than that of others because my needs are less important than theirs (my mother always told me that it was selfish to put myself before others). Without my husband telling me regularly that I'm important, I can't keep the idea in my mind. I haven't internalized the notion that I am a person of particular value to anyone but him. If I am not with him, I cease to be anything because I am nothing to others. If they see me as anything, it is my feeling that they only do so because they view me as useful in some particular regard. If I cease to be of use, they will not care for me because I'm nothing special to anyone but my husband. I believe that he is the only person who will ever love me, the only one who ever could.

So, what I tell myself in affirmation has to be specific, important, and have deep relevance to me. It can't merely be that I say, "I don't need this chocolate because I'm a good person". I'm not sure what I need to say, just that I need to say some things which strike at the heart of the shortcomings of my childhood. One of those things might be simply to say, "everything will be okay," whether I eat this or not. I doubt that that will be all it takes, but it's a starting point after so many years of my youth being spent being told everything was not okay and I was not okay. As I explore this, I will post more about the process.

Self-stroking

2011-10-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

"Stroking", as it is referred to in psychological terms, can be a fairly inclusive term. It means comforting, soothing, rewarding, or validating yourself. Humans need it, more than they often like to admit. It's why we enjoy compliments or feel better after we get a good grade on a test. It's why people want to be an "inspiration" to others or receive positive and supportive comments on their blogs.

It is not a weakness to desire strokes, though people often view the need for them as a reflection of neuroses. The idea that we should receive all of our stroking from internal means is a reflection of the Western mentality that we should be 100% independent in all respects. Obviously, some forms of "self-stroking" are carried out as we grow older and find higher level means of feeling good about ourselves. People can feel good about a job they know they did well rather than rely on others to constantly tell them. We do grow more comfortable and capable of assessing our value in various respects and "complimenting" ourselves through time, but it's a peculiarly occidental notion that we should never need anyone else to be psychologically whole.

I will be the first to admit that I am extremely poor at "self-stroking". This is something that I have come to realize rather acutely over the last week or so while my husband has been abroad and I have been alone. He has gone on such trips before, and it has always been difficult for me, but this time has been much harder. I realized that this is largely because of my changed relationship with food.

My parents were not particularly good at raising my sister and I. They got married too young and for less than positive reasons. Both were psychologically damaged. My father was not demonstrative at all because he was so uncomfortable with his positive feelings. My mother offered conditional affection and had self-esteem issues which caused her to condemn, judge and criticize and she was prone to emotionally unstable reactions. Neither provided a very good environment for young psyches, and what "stroking" they offered was unpredictable and often related to concrete rewards, especially food. When you are very poor and can't express your feelings because of your own issues, buying your kids bags of chips, candy bars, and cheap sugary soda is the easiest path to giving them strokes at the lowest overall "cost" (psychological and otherwise) to yourself.

For my parents, food was a co-parent. When they couldn't say "I love you", food did it. When they wanted us to settle down or give us something to make us go away and leave them alone, food did the job nicely. I have come to realize that food took on a great importance because of the way they used it. It was the parent I carried with me into adulthood, fulfilling needs that were supposed to be filled by family.

One of the emotional transitions that I had to make when I changed my habits was transferring "stroking" myself with food to other things. This is not an easy transition. Most people know that they "reward themselves" (a shallow and inaccurate description of stroking) with food. They know they need to stop doing it, but they fail to recognize that they need to replace it with something else. While it'd be great if realizing you were doing something destructive meant you could simply choose to stop doing it, people don't work that way. You can't simply conjure up a means of self-stroking instantly to replace how you deal with food.

For me, a lot of the burden of giving me strokes has fallen on my husband. As time has gone by, I have attempted to cultivate a greater internal integrity in this regard. To do this, I've done more things which help me feel better about myself like working outside of my home and deriving satisfaction from my ability to do the job well. I've also focused more on productive behaviors and tried to gain satisfaction from accomplishing them. These include moderate exercise and writing for my other blogs (which are independent of this one and unrelated to body or food issues). I've also found that FaceBook can serve a small role in this process by acting as a social conduit. It can be gratifying to post about your life and have people express happiness at what you offer.

Unfortunately, the current progress of the internal stroking cultivation as well as the very weak stroking from other sources is quite inadequate. Either these sources are too small or the neural connections which are being built aren't strong enough yet to substitute for the far more potent strokes that I receive from my husband's presence and food. Though the ties to food as a source of stroking are much weaker than they used to be, they still whisper at me from the darkness and beckon me back. It's easy. It's instant. And, it is so satisfying on a sensory level. It also does not impose upon anyone else. I often feel terribly guilty because of the burden I place on my husband to support me.

The problem during my husband's absence hasn't been that I've gone running to the pantry for comfort, but rather than I've suffered terribly during his absence. I've had crushing sadness and the sort of depression that put me on the edge of being incapable of taking pleasure in anything. This has been hard on him because my pain manifests itself in accusations that he doesn't really want to spend time with me, didn't consider my needs before making his plans and that he is, at least in part, responsible for my suffering. This is not what I mean to convey to him, but it is how he feels. For me, this is all a reflection of my self-worth issues. I feel abandoned, and then I feel I deserve it. My anger and aggression as I act on my pain only confirms more fiercely that I am unworthy of love or care and my self-estimation plummets even lower as I hate myself more for how I act. Losing weight and adjusting my relationship with food has improved my mobility and external quality of life, but it has wrecked havoc with my esteem because I never derived my sense of value from my body. A better body didn't equate to happiness for me, just less unhappiness.

It may seem incredibly unfair to place this burden on my husband to those who are not living in my skin, but this is a reflection of my particular "sickness". My needs and the demands I place on him are no different than those of a someone who has a physical illness and needs support. The fact that they are mental changes nothing. As I have said before, if I were in a wheelchair and needed help, no one would blame me for holding him accountable for my hardship if he left for a week. We seem to think that mental issues are simply something people can choose to get over. If only it were that simple. I'm doing the best I can as quickly as I can, but it's not something I can magically grab out of thin air or pop a pill to cure.

The realization that I need to continue to develop more potent and various forms of self-stroking is a part of the solution. However, that is only a starting point. Developing them and not resorting to any form of instant gratification (like buying something) is not an easy thing. It's not only that I can't predict what actions will be effective (and I can't) but also that they lack the expediency of food. People often think that the desire for instant gratification is a reflection of childishness, impatience, and weak character, but, at least for me, it's a way of ending psychological pain. Without those emotional analgesics, I am left to suffer. The long term efforts to find and carry out higher order means of self-stroking heal the wounds at a glacial pace.

I am making progress toward being less reliant on my husband, but losing food as a way of supporting myself emotionally took away a lot. My improved physical condition didn't do much for my mental state because that was made when I was a child. My sense that I am worthless, despicable, and unlovable is recorded first and forever in my brain. Those recordings can be answered differently (refuted or supported), but they cannot be erased. I will always have to fight them. It's just a matter of finding other (effective) weapons than food.

The Bleeding Obvious

2011-10-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I read an exchange between several people attempting to lose weight. One of them said that she couldn't get through the whole thing without having treats so she enjoyed a little everyday. To this, another said, 'if you can't get through the day without a piece of chocolate, you've got bigger issues.' I didn't say it, but I thought, "no kidding, Sherlock."

People who want to lose weight, but haven't had severe issues with food don't approach food the same way as those who have. Many of us are like alcoholics that were drinking several six packs a day. Getting down to one beer a day is a monumental accomplishment. In fact, as long as quality of life is not compromised by that one beer, there is no reason to extinguish it from our lives, particularly if having that one keeps us from having 12.

Perfectionists, absolutists, and people who measure their self-worth in body weight, calories or the nutritional composition of their diet are one of the single most destructive elements in dealing with obesity. For those people, "good" is never "good enough", and they cannot accept that any other viewpoints other than their own are valid. For them, the trivial, such as whether you have 4 Hershey's Kisses a day to help you mentally deal with the changes to your lifestyle, is a springboard for a smug sense of superiority. They are "stronger" than you because they don't need this little emotional crutch.

My response to this thinking is that if your self-worth and valuation of others is measured by the composition of your respective diets or a number on the scale, then you have bigger issues. Such a shallow definition of self will ultimately undo you far faster than a few bites of chocolate to help you get through the day.

quality of life

2011-10-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

Quite some time ago, I was talking with a friend who has suffered from depression, at times quite debilitatingly so, during most of her life. She is one of the few people with whom I have discussed my weight loss clearly and frankly and we talked about how I made the mental changes to get where I have. I told her some of the things that I've written about in this blog, but the process has been so vast and complex that it was hard to encapsulate for discussion.

One of the things which we spoke about was the general notion of using psychological techniques or intervention to improve quality of life. I told her that this all started when I modified my emotional state a very long time ago. That experience, in which I went from someone who was prone to angry outbursts, haranguing my husband when we fought, and raising my voice to being relatively calm, constructive, and moving past the issue far faster, was an object lesson for other changes in my life including my current situation with food. I learned that you can forge a new mental pathway and build a bridge from who you are now to who you want to be. I think it was helpful that I benefited from this technique twice (the second time had to do with reducing materialism) in situations unrelated to food. I had a template for making mental changes over a long period of time and transforming who I was in a fundamental manner.

As we discussed this, I said that one thing I realized was that we all have the capacity to be happier and maximize our satisfaction with ourselves. People often view the person they are as inevitable and concentrate mainly on improving the mechanics of their life. They focus on objective aspects such as schooling, skills, money, and possessions. They see "improvement" as it is reflected in these things and reject that they can or need to improve their mental capabilities. I told her that I saw this as sad because I believe people can be much happier if they focus on making mental transitions rather than believing they are locked into their mindsets. My friend said, quite correctly, that most people don't realize that they can be happier. It's not even on their radar to strive for such an improved state of being.

A big part of the problem is that people are always telling us what is required to be happy, and we believe them. They tell us we need cars, houses, certain jobs, kids, spouses, or to look a certain way. No one tells us to be better people by not getting so pissed off at the guy who cuts us off on the highway. No one tells us that building empathy for our enemies can be a path to reduced personal suffering. What is more, no one tells us how to manage these things even if we want to.

A lot of what I've endeavored to do with this blog, and perhaps failed in my efforts, is to demonstrate that one can make the transition mentally and that psychological change is a slow process with many failures and successes along the way. If you make that journey, through self-reflection, deliberate, but slow behavior modification and discussion with yourself about your thought patterns such that you direct them more toward who you want to be, you can bridge the gap between who you are now and your ideal image of yourself. It's not about your body. It's about your mind, but I think a lot of people miss that message and just see what I'm saying as being about losing weight. If that's what comes across, then I've not communicated my message as well as I'd hoped. But then again, half of understanding is the message that I put out there, and the other half is what other people hear. I think a lot of people hear only what they want to hear rather than what I'm actually saying, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The Lady Bits Inspection

2011-10-17T03:42:00.000-07:00

Today I had my second round of long-neglected medical tests. The first round consisted of a standard battery of tests on blood, urine, and stool samples as well as an EKG, blood pressure, and a cursory exam by a doctor ("open up and say, "ah"). The results of those tests were all in the normal range. The one disease that most obese people fear, type 2 diabetes, was not an issue. My blood sugar was normal and my HbA_1C test was 4.4 (and 4-6 is "normal").

The tests I took today were for "lady's problems", as my mother would so quaintly put it. I had a pelvic ultrasound, a pap smear was taken, a mammogram, and a breast exam. The pelvic ultrasound revealed nothing but a benign cyst on one of my ovaries which I suspect has been there all of my life based on a certain pain I feel during ovulation. The doctor said it's no problem and is the sort of thing which changes in size based on menstrual cycles. The breast exam also revealed no abnormalities. The mammogram and pap smear have to be developed and examined by physicians and the results will come in two to three weeks, but my husband was in the room during the mammography and saw the images. While he's no doctor, he saw nothing strange on the images (no dark spots or shadows).

My sense is that all of the tests will come back fine. My last pap smear was about a decade or so ago, and I know how foolish it was to put off the test for so long. However, I'm a virgin who married a virgin and there's zero risk of HPV so I'm on the lower risk side for cervical cancer. Also, I've never taken birth control pills so there's little risk of hormonal contamination affecting my reproductive health.

The reason I resisted the test for so long was my weight, though not because of the weight itself. One of the last two pap tests I took resulted in a doctor trying to use an mechanical table to elevate me and I was too heavy for the motor to work. The doctor angrily asked me what I weighed and then scolded me because I might damage their table before scoffing in disgust and moving me to an old-fashioned table. She then hastily did the test and scurried away after an experience which she obviously viewed with distaste. I could not bear the humiliation again, so I put off the test until my weight was in a range that I felt would not yield a similar experience.

I had another bad pap test experience at a clinic in which I struggled to get there with terrible back pain only to have the doctor refuse to give the test because the speculum wasn't big enough and caused me pain. I told her to just go ahead and do the damn test and get it over with and I'd put up with the pain for the brief time she did it. She said she had to order a bigger one rather than pinch and hurt me with one that was too small. I was extremely angry that she wouldn't do the test, and even madder that the clinic attempted to charge me for the office visit when the doctor was the one who refused to follow through and do it. I refused to pay and I never went back.

This time, the experience was fine. The doctor was kind and the chair, which was different this time and incredibly comfortable, had no problems moving my 182 lb. body into position. A standard speculum was used with no pain or problem and, while not the most comfortable experience, it was not painful or negative. After reading so many horror stories on the internet from people who were harassed about their weight by gynecologists, I had myself practically whipped into a nervous wreck thinking that I might get derided for my BMI. No one said anything, though my husband did mention to the gynecologist that I had lost a lot of weight so that she would not be alarmed by the extra skin hanging off of my body.

Having this generally positive experience is the first step in healing the damage done to me from my bad experiences in the past. When all of the tests are done and (what I am sure will be) normal results are in, I feel like I can start over with my relationship with the health care system. Part of what happens when you avoid getting routine care is that the longer you avoid it, the harder it becomes to face it. You develop a mindset through time that makes you think that going to the doctor will confirm your worst fears so you live in denial of the truth about your health. You believe that finding a problem on a medical test makes it real, rather than deal with the fact it was real all along. You imagine all sorts of things, and just keep avoiding "confirmation." If you did routine checking, you'd catch them at an earlier time, but the fear of humiliation and degradation keeps you away from that and the fear compounds as the years go by.

I'm absolutely certain that if I regained weight and exceeded 250 lbs. again (or got near 400 as I was before), that I would find the experience of these health check-ups far more difficult and very likely traumatizing. People who have lost weight like to say that people treat you better because you change your outlook, but I will never believe that. I am the same except for my body. I was regarded as an object of disgust before, and now I'm treated like a human being.

These tests, which I have avoided nearly all of my life, are the next leg along the path to "normality" that I'm attempting to tread down. It's extremely hard emotionally for me to do what I'm doing even though it's the sort of thing people without my fears take for granted as necessary and an undesirable but routine task. I asked a work acquaintance how she felt approaching her annual physical (which all people in the country I currently reside in can take part in for free) and she said she felt nothing at all about them. That is, she experienced no stress, anxiety or fear because she didn't form a set of neurotic responses from being treated poorly at such times. It was just what she did as part of her normal life to catch health problems and deal with them. This is "normal", and I have to desensitize myself to the experiences of having medical tests if I want to keep moving in this direction. I'm two steps in, and have one more to go when I finally take the thyroid test that was recommended during my initial check-up.

Is it mental?

2011-10-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

One of my cousins was born with type 1 diabetes. That's the kind which reflects an innate deficiency in ones body's ability to regulate insulin rather than the type which is brought on by lifestyle. In terms of current thinking about health, it is the kind which one for which a person cannot be "blamed".

I didn't know this particular cousin especially well, but I did see him occasionally. He was about 5 years older than me and was always thin. He also seemed to have some emotional or mental difficulties. Though he wasn't in any sort of special education classes, he was not particularly bright and had some temper issues. He was capable of doing certain types of work and eventually married and had children.

Despite having grown up with his illness, my cousin was never capable of regulating his diet. In particular, he consumed candy bars and other sweets such that his diabetes was not under control. Though he never gained weight or got fat, his body was constantly being damaged by his diabetes as a result of a poor diet. In the end, he died young as a result of his inability to control his eating. He wasn't fat, but he literally ate himself to death.

There is no doubt in my mind that my cousin experienced a certain biological pressure to consume sweets. However, my uncle (not the father of this particular cousin) also was born with type 1 diabetes which he has kept under control for his entire life through medication and a controlled diet. The main difference between the two was emotional. One could not control his relationship with food and the other could.

The question that I'm throwing out there for myself after pondering their respective situations is whether or not the inability to regulate your diet when you have a life-threatening health issue is a question of mental health. Very often people approach diet as if there were a single "best" way to eat which would result in all people experiencing optimal health. Bodies don't work like that. There are people who can eat a candy bar (or two) everyday and experience no ill effects. There are those who can eat bread all day and those who can't tolerate a single slice. All processing of food by a particular body is individual with varying consequences.

This fact is one I realized long before I thought about my cousin's situation. Some time ago, I finally internalized the fact that there are people out there who can gorge on junk food and not get fat while I am likely going to have to be very careful about what I eat to simply avoid being morbidly obese. Some people will remain or get fat on 2000 calories. Some will stay thin on over 3000. That's the way it is and railing against it and the unfairness of it doesn't change the biological reality. Just as my cousin's reasonable desire to indulge in sweets that he likely saw his sister and others consuming resulted in his death, my diet, "healthy" or "reasonable" though it might be in some eyes, can result in a physical state which will make me miserable.

Getting back to the main point, however, if my cousin could not adhere to a diet which was stricter than most, was it a matter of mental health? Is the inability to control your behavior above and beyond what "average" folks are required to do because of your particular special circumstances an issue of psychology? My answer would be, "yes." Psychology isn't a matter of averages anymore than biology is. Maximum quality of life cannot be achieved by applying a template of actions or thinking patterns according to what everyone believes is best, but rather what is best for the individual. My cousin could not do what was best for him, even though similar actions would not have been destructive to someone lacking his health issues. If there had been behavioral intervention to help him master his destructive urges, he may have lived a lot longer.

There is a lot of debate about whether or not obesity is the result of a mental health problem and there are vociferous folks who rail mightily against the idea. However, I think context is very important. If someone washes their hands 30 times a day, do they have a disorder? They do, unless that person is a doctor who sees a lot of different people and washes his hands between patients and for regular routine hygiene. If someone becomes so fat that their mobility, joint health, or blood sugar are affected and their quality of life compromised by their weight and they cannot alter their habits to affect a positive change, is it a mental health issue? I say it is. If you can't make behavioral changes in your life to be happier, then it is a matter of psychology and it doesn't matter that only you need to make those changes. It's about mastering your own life, not living as an "average" person. That goes for everything, not just weight and food. If you can't control your temper, concentrate long enough to study, etc. and these conditions are particular to you, they are issues of mental health.

Note that I am in no way saying that these are psychological issues which must be dealt with. No one is obliged to deal with their particular problems at all. Just as I do not believe physical health is an obligation, I do not believe mental health is one either. People have the right to live as they please, even to their own detriment. However, I increasingly believe that thinking about our lives and choices in a relative fashion (i.e., "everyone does it and I should be able to as well") is a big part of what erodes quality of life for people. We often say fatalistically that "life isn't fair", but we don't internalize that reality and consider it when making choices in our lives. We still compare ourselves to others and feel that similar choices should yield similar results, and more so when it comes to health than many other areas. I think it's time to develop more sophisticated thinking in this regard and work out that "life isn't fair" isn't a pessimistic conclusion, but the starting point for understanding how to make the best choices for each of us as individuals.

The Acquisition of Health

2011-10-06T03:13:00.000-07:00

Unless you live under a rock, you have heard the news that former head of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs, passed away. I'm not going to turn this post into an off-topic homage to Mr. Jobs, despite the fact that I was once a Mac enthusiast and an Apple devotee and am still a dual-platform user (I use both Windows and Mac, favoring neither). There are likely thousands, possibly millions, of writers of all stripes who are doing just that, and I see no value in adding to the pile. Those who care, will say something. Those who do not, will close the browser window or tab.

What I want to talk about is Mr. Jobs's lifestyle. From all external observation and by reading what insider's said about him, he lived an exemplary lifestyle. He has been a vegetarian for nearly all of his adult life, practiced meditation, exercised regularly, and was trim and fit in appearance. Even after his liver transplant and treatment for pancreatic cancer, he walked every day and had incremental goals to improve his fitness and stamina. What is more, Mr. Jobs was someone who could afford the best medical care in the world and certainly received regular check-ups and attention for any and all health problems. Mr. Jobs did everything "right" in his life in terms of supporting good health, but he still died at the relatively young age 56.

Since fat people are constantly having their lifestyles scrutinized and they are blamed for any and all health problems they have, I think it is valuable to look at the life of someone who one might arguably be viewed as a paragon of lifestyle choices. People so often look at others and believe that, "if only" they did the right things, they would be healthy. It is absolutely true that there are lifestyle diseases which can be improved or eliminated if one makes choices which are more conducive to good health. However, we must accept that health is not something everyone can acquire with a "better" lifestyle. What is more, the degree of change necessary to improve health is not equal across individuals. One person may improve by making small changes and another may improve marginally making huge changes. Every body is different and it is only the illusion that we can control our destiny through making the "right" choices that makes people so keen to judge. If they believe Fatty McFats over there could be healthy by eating better and moving more, then they can believe that they can also acquire health by making the "right" choices.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Jobs's unfortunate and premature death illustrates, good, even stellar, lifestyle choices don't always result in the acquisition of health. We all have a different genetic make-up which influences how healthy we can be. Sometimes, it means we get cancer at a young age no matter what we do. Sometimes it means we get diabetes even if we eat well and are exercising regularly. It's important not to view sickness and disease as something people buy with their choices, and to understand that life and being healthy are a good deal more complicated than we'd like to believe.

Finding balance, but still having extremes

2011-10-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

These days, I'm so incredibly busy that I have little time to write about things which I believe are important to note on this blog. One of the things I hadn't had time to talk about was the recurrence over successive weeks of one evening of binge eating. I've written before that I had stopped binge eating for the most part, and when I did do so, it was nothing like before. However, I developed an almost routine return to compulsive eating over the past month or so. This situation, which has now abated, is important to remark upon because I want people to know that progress is not a straight line, and that this was not the end of the world or the beginning of the end of my ability to manage my relationship with food.

The fact that this occurred at all is no surprise. As I've written before, it is a biological impulse to gorge when stressed. All animals have this desire and it's one of the reasons that people often turn to food in modern life. We deal more with stress that cannot be relieved than ever before. Unlike the past when we could fight or run, we often have little choice but to stand and take it.

In my case, the stress has been brought on by various life changes. My husband has taken on more professional training work so he is around less. In the past, his commitment to these activities set off a rather scary disconnected binge incident, but this time I felt much better prepared to cope with his absence. And, honestly, I have been coping much better with it and feel less emotionally dependent on him than I have been in a very long time. However, all change is hard, and beyond his absence (which is a loss of a strong positive influence), I've been working a lot more and it has upset the schedule I have lived for awhile now. I am "catching up", so to speak, with the adjustments, but sometimes it feels like I'm tied to the back of a car and running as fast as I can as it pulls me along just a little faster than I can manage at my top speed. Occasionally, I fall (compulsive eat) and get dragged along the ground for awhile until I can scramble back up again (return to form the next day).

The "binges" I had were on Thursday evenings, one of the two nights when my husband comes home quite late due to the work he's doing. I would eat up to around 2500 calories, which isn't a monstrous binge, but often what I'd do is eat according to my usual plan and habits to around 1500-1700 calories, then binge a further 800-1000 on things like pretzels, animal crackers, lean ham or chicken, and cheese. I felt like I just couldn't manage feeling hungry at the end of the day on such days, and just gave in and ate and ate to a point of fullness (not simply satiety). The thing is, I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. This wasn't like the aforementioned incident where I was mentally split from my actions. I knowingly did this as a pressure release valve. It was the equivalent of people cutting themselves and knowing it is destructive but desiring the release enough to do it anyway. I knew it would set me back a day or two in losing weight, but the relief was so emotionally necessary that I did it anyway.

I decided after the second time that I needed to take control of the pattern that was emerging, but it had nothing to do with losing weight or fear that I was going to set off a new pattern of behavior in which I'd habitually overeat on a daily basis. Mainly, I was concerned with using food in this manner and creating a stronger psychological link between stress and eating. The actions weren't really the problem, but the repetition of them and the way in which they would reinforce and condition future compulsive eating patterns was.

To be perfectly honest, there is a bit of success that I took away from all of this, and, no, it was not that I stopped the pattern, though I did do that. The success was that I didn't freak out or think that I was going to gain weight because of this. It is an immense triumph to me that I was able to, for the most part, objectify the experience and treat it as a behavioral condition to be handled rather than lapse into an "oh my God, it's the end of the world" mentality. I knew that if I did it one day a week, I wasn't going to do it again for at least another week. I knew this wasn't going to be everyday, and I was confident that I could eventually get it under control. I also know that flagellating myself for this behavior or panicking would only make it harder to deal with.

The truth is that I'd be shocked if this pattern didn't re-emerge in the future from time to time, and I'm okay with that. It's not because I think compulsive moderate overeating in times of stress is a "good" thing which is to be blithely disregarded, but rather because I know it is a natural thing which many people do. It's not a cause for panic unless it becomes absolutely habitual, excessive, or overly frequent. If overeating is the one and only "solution", then it is a problem. If it is an occasional stress release valve, then it is natural animal behavior.

A big part of "balance" in all things is knowing that excess is as much a part of finding it as minimalism. Sometimes, you're going to do as little as possible and sometimes as much. Most of the time, you are going to stick around a range in the middle. That's what I'm looking for, not hitting some particular mark every single day under every conceivable circumstance. So, one of these days, I'm going to get into a stressful situation again and may find that I'm using food as a release valve. Some people get drunk. Some people get mad and scream at their loved ones who don't deserve such behavior. Some people sleep with strangers. Some people smoke pot. None of these things are "good" things, but if you expect to be "good" all of the time, then you're fooling yourself and setting a standard which most ordinary people cannot live up to. We're none of us paragons, and part of striking a reasonable balance in life is knowing that.

Expecting to be natural in an unnatural world

2011-09-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

I've been told that modern dogs were bred from wolves, though I'm actually too lazy to research whether or not that is a fact. Whether or not they actually came from wolves is not really important, but I'm sure that domesticated animals, and the varieties of purebred dogs that people possess in particular, trace a genetic heritage to some wild species that was far more capable of looking after its interests than the current crop of creatures that have their poop scooped up by diligent and lawful owners.

Many things in modern life have been altered through time and technology while still retaining vestiges of their original biology. Many breeds of dogs would be incapable of survival if released into the wild, but they still respond in ways that their original nature dictates. We do our best to train the more unacceptable impulses out of them, and understand that we must overlay an artificial behavioral template on top of their desire to mark their territory, bite, or eat another dog's poop. We know that basic nature does not serve the modern domesticated dog (or its owner).

When it comes to humans, we seem to have a far less logical structure to our thinking. We live in a world that is very far-removed from nature then we talk about relying on our natural impulses to help us navigate it. The confusion is very pronounced when it comes to how we deal with food.

There are people who advocate eating by nature, as opposed to doing so in accord with artificial constructs such as planned meal times, calorie counts, or diet plans (and I use "diet" here as a noun to mean - "what we eat", not as a verb referring to weight loss). They talk about how we should listen to our bodies and eat by intuition. I think if you're going to make such a recommendation, then you should be responsible enough to deeply reflect on what the nature of our bodies truly is as a result of our genetic heritage.

I'm no expert on evolution, nor on history, but I do know that humans spent a lot more time with insecure food supplies than secure ones. Even after agrarian lifestyles were implemented, it wasn't until food preservation techniques became refined and mass production common that the food supply was such that most people had food readily available at any given time. That means that the history of our biology as a species which is literally surrounded by food all of the time and capable of eating anytime anywhere is extremely brief from an evolutionary standpoint.

Most of the formative years of humanity were built around spending copious amounts of time and energy securing sustenance. In order to ensure that we felt compelled to go find food, hunger had to evolve as a potently uncomfortable force. If we didn't feel hunger pain, we would just starve because it wouldn't hurt enough to push us to go out and gather or hunt for grub.

Our "nature" in regards to food developed in accord with dramatically different circumstances than those we currently live in. Bodies respond to food and hunger as if we were living in a situation in which food was hard to get and we needed to be strongly motivated to get it. Our impulses are in complete disharmony with our circumstances at present. Hunger pains scream, "find food, now," but the severity of those feelings came from a need to motivate activity or anticipate staving off those pains and to push us to action. They didn't evolve to drive us to wander into the kitchen and open a cabinet door and eat a snack.

So, talking about our "nature" or being "natural" about food only works if you are in a natural environment. We are not. We are in a highly unnatural situation based on technology and culture. Like the domesticated dog that can't fight for it's food to survive, we no longer have to expend energy to obtain energy. Like the dogs that we train to suppress their no longer appropriate nature in light of their residence in our homes and lives as pets, we also must be "trained" to deal with food in a manner which is no longer in accord with our basic biological impulses. Simply put, it is our nature to eat when hungry, but it is not natural to be able to do so.

The first step in dealing with the poor relationship people have with food, and this applies to everyone, not just fat folks, is to stop talking about what is natural and accept that we live in an artificial world with challenges to our nature. Just as we learned to hold our bladders until a toilet is available, we need to learn to hold our hunger at bay until we really need to eat. This is a task that should be performed by cultural norms, but the time period during which food has been a casual thing which is readily at hand, cheap, and of dubious nutritional value has been extremely short. In fact, it wasn't even a challenge my grandparents would have faced. Culture hasn't had time to catch up with this development.

Unfortunately, the way in which we deal with this particular challenge has been muddled greatly by various special interests fighting to further their agendas. Everyone has a viewpoint and they are interested only in defending or advocating whatever it is. Rather than deal with the issue, they simply want to be agreed with and we exist in a state of angry chaos when it comes to food. Additionally, the focus on behavioral extremes (excessive consumption or deprivation) and the insertion of value judgments into the equation serve to polarize and politicize the situation. Unless such emotionally-charged notions are set aside in favor of an rational and objective solution, culture will never find a way to balance our nature with the artificial environment that we will almost certainly continue to exist in.

The question of what is to be done is therefore up to the individual to build a life with this highly unnatural situation which creates a healthy relationship with food. And when I say "healthy", I don't mean merely to promote a healthy body. I mean "healthy" in an inclusive sense including that which promotes joy and mental well-being. Such a balance is possible, but you're not going to land on it "naturally", nor if your notions about food are focused on joyless and punitive ideas and idealized body concepts (such as thinness) or self-deception about the consequences of life at a high weight (such as claiming the development of Type 2 diabetes is unrelated to weight when it certainly is). If individuals, one-by-one, slowly and surely moved toward such a rational and balanced mentality, culture would catch on and catch up and there would be a critical mass that might result in an overall healthy, happy, and, yes, utterly unnatural relationship with food. It would be an artificial food culture for an artificial world. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But, I'm not holding my breath.

Health Test Results

2011-09-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

Today I received the results of the first round of regular health check tests which I mentioned in the previous post. All of my results were within the range of "normal" except for one. That one was, quite predictably, my BMI which is 30.9%.

Personally, I'm not especially bothered that this number is highlighted in red to indicate that it is a problem because I planned to lose more weight anyway. However, I can't help but feel that the HAES (health at every size) movement would take issue with this. If all of my results are okay, why is weight even being tagged as an issue?

What I realize is that this isn't about any sort of personal choice on the part of the health care provider to point at my weight and say, "bad girl!". This is about bureaucracy and a system which looks only at numbers and reaches conclusions. With this type of health care, I'm essentially being judged by a machine rather than by human judgment. The machine prints out a report and if the range of numbers is outside of certain parameters, it prints it in red. If the number is high, it spits out particular advice. If the number is low, it spits out different advice.

When I learned the results, I was not overjoyed or proud or whatever. I know some of the results could likely be better in the abstract (though there is nothing "wrong" with them now). For instance, my fasting blood sugar is 94. That is on the higher end of "normal", but is nonetheless normal. This number isn't on the high side of normal because I'm overeating or eating poorly. It's where it is because I haven't been sleeping well due to knee pain and my stress levels over the past 6 months have gotten higher and higher (due to taking on a new job and various other issues such as living close to a crisis zone). Insulin is affected by these factors in addition to diet.

The bottom line is that there are things I can do which would favorably impact these statistics and things I can't do. I can't instantly cure my knee, and, in fact, my efforts to date to improve it with self-prescribed physical therapy (exercise, bending, baths) have only made it worse and I'm abandoning that line. Right now, the pain gets better if I do nothing rather than do something. If I can't fix my pain, I can't fix my sleep problems.

The other thing which I think would improve my health is engaging in more vigorous exercise. While I walk and lift weights 5-7 times a week, I can't do strenuous aerobic exercise due to my physical fragility. Mainly, this is due to my knee, which barely tolerates the walking I do everyday. My back is generally better, but if I push it too far too fast, I will pay for it. Even now, I'm having some pain from various stretching exercises which create strain on my back. I can't change the fact that I'm unable to do more challenging exercise due to physical pain and damage.

My main concern about the numbers I was going to receive was that they would be poor and I'd feel that I was already doing almost everything I possibly could to have better health. I eat exceptionally well from a nutritional balance viewpoint. Sure, I eat a few treats a day, but I think only a nut job who derives all of his or her self-esteem and a sense of moral superiority from something as trivial as food choices would believe that a few bites of something sweet a day make a huge health difference. There's no way the equivalent of eating 3-5 Hershey's Kisses per day is going to have an appreciable impact on my health when my calories are kept consistently within a range of 1500-2000 the vast majority of the time and I eat a very good balance of nutritious food.

The tests I took validated my sense that I'm generally pretty healthy now, but I had an odd sense of foreboding even getting them because I know that a person can do everything right and still fail. Health is not something you can attain merely by connecting all of the proper dots. You can increase your chances, sure, but there are no guarantees. Each person works with particular predispositions. I'm genetically lucky in some ways since my body fat is hanging off of my behind and belly instead of collecting around my organs and in areas which tend to contribute to Type 2 diabetes. There are people at my weight or lower who have more problems, not because they are making poor choices, but because their body reacts differently.

At the moment, I'm still in limbo on the thyroid concerns that I mentioned in the previous post. I wasn't permitted to make an appointment for a test until after this first round of test results arrived. I still believe this is a precaution, but a seed has certainly been planted that I have cause for concern. I'd like to dig that seed up and throw it away before it grows any further, but I can't do that until I have another test.

Beyond the thyroid test, I've still got to have a pap test and mammogram. These are other tests that I've avoided for years because of humiliating and degrading experiences due to my weight. Last time I attempted to have such a test, the doctor put me on an electronically elevated table which would not move up due to my weight and angrily asked me how much I weighed and reacted with great and overt disgust that she had to move me to an old fashioned table to conduct the exam. Since then, I haven't gone back. Of course, I know that if I don't take such tests, I'm the one who will pay the price, but I couldn't bear to face it again after that.

Even at my current weight (around 185), I approach all medical experiences with trepidation. I am going to have all of the tests that I should have done completed despite my fears and anxiety. I'm scheduled to get the pap test and mammogram as soon as possible (around mid-October). I'm saddened that it took extreme weight loss to work up the courage to do what normal people do to maintain health and I'm angry that negative experiences made me avoid them for so long. As I've mentioned before, I often wonder if the higher mortality rate among obese individuals is related to not seeking regular health care due to the shoddy treatment they receive rather than obesity-related illness. If you don't go until something is seriously wrong, it is likely too late to deal with the issue.

For now though, I'm satisfied that I'm okay on the fronts which have been measured and relieved that doing everything I reasonably can just so happens to be "enough" for all of the machines to say I'm healthy.

My Secret Fear (Played Into)

2011-09-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

I have had a secret fear related to my fatalism about life for quite some time, and I wonder if it stopped me at times from losing weight. That fear has been that, if I ever pulled me life together in any substantial way, that I would be struck with cancer and die. My feeling was that whatever force or forces of the universe conspired to make my life to date as miserable as possible by having me born to messed up, poor parents and a biology which seemed to conspire to make and keep me fat would not "permit" me to be happy.

I realize that this is irrational, but there was always this nagging fear that if I overcame all of the emotional and psychological issues and became stronger and more capable, something bad would befall me to sabotage my happiness. I formulated the idea that my destiny was to be miserable and I think I often felt I'd rather be food-addicted and self-hating than risk whatever wrath was to befall me at the end of self-repair. This is the mindset that grew from the handful of cards that fate had dealt me.

Despite this nagging feeling, I've pressed on to be a better person in every way. I try to emotionally be better by dealing with negative emotions more positively. I've spent a good part of my life trying to turn my glass is half empty thinking around to at least a little more glass is half full thinking. I've tried to gently talk down the voice in me which is all too keen to tell myself that the sky is falling. The notion that I have fewer options in life and have to remain in a bad situation for fear of being worse off if I walk away from what I have has really been hard for me to talk myself out of, but I've made progress. I've learned to be less defensive and more open after years of feeling combative toward the world which seemed to lash out and hurt me at every turn. And, of course, I've dealt a lot with my food relationship and body issues.

So, I've made a lot of progress in my life at this point. That progress pre-dated this blog by many years. Psychological changes to my outlook in life, temper control, etc. are things which were not hampered by being very fat. One of the reasons that I don't look back on my life between 300-400 lbs. with regret as many people do is that I know how much I grew during that time regardless of my weight. In fact, I think it was part of the culmination of my mental growth that I was able to lose weight in the past two years. One could not have happened without the groundwork of the other.

Yesterday, I went for a physical examination. The results are hardly in as this was just the testing stage. No concrete results will arrive for two weeks as I'm living in a place with socialized medicine which is highly bureaucratic in nature. It rushes for no one. During the cursory exam, the doctor asked me if anyone had ever suggested I had thyroid problems. I said "no" (but later remembered that someone had suggested it in another exam about 8 years ago). He spent a few seconds feeling my neck and then suggested I should have it checked because he thought it was enlarged a bit. When I asked what it would mean if it were inflamed, he hemmed and hawed and essentially said he didn't know until they did an ultrasound, but they wouldn't give me one until I had a follow-up exam which wouldn't occur until I got the test results in two weeks. After that, I left for the next test in the battery I was being given, and a nurse came out and gave me a pamphlet on cancer detection.

Even though the doctor didn't use "the C-word", the nurse's delivery of such a document sent me into a state of numbness and fear. Here it was sitting right in front of me, my deepest fear being supported by medical professionals. I spent much of the rest of the day feeling as if destiny was going to be fulfilled, then I got angry.

The doctor didn't ask me any questions about anything related to thyroid conditions or my health aside from a few broad questions about diarrhea, constipation, smoking, medication, smoking, and alcohol. His exam was extremely cursory in every way because part of the socialized medical system in this country is a free annual health check-up. For the hospital to get more money out of me, I need to come for a follow-up (which I will pay 1/3 of the expense for) and do tests which are outside of the free regimen. While I don't think the doctor was intentionally recommending a test he felt was unnecessary, I do believe he was doing a sloppy diagnosis based on my age, weight (which he did not mention in the exam at all, but I'd be shocked if it didn't come up later in the follow-up), and a vague tactile exam of my neck.

The thing is that I was at the beginning of a cold when I went in for the exam. My throat was a little sore and a lymph node under the left side of my jaw was slightly swollen. The doctor never asked if I had a cold or was coming down with something and I never thought to mention it in the brief exam as I didn't think it had anything to do with anything. My husband later did research on enlarged thyroids and noted that colds can cause that (among many other things unrelated to cancer). The doctor should not have intimated that I could have a serious problem, which he did by telling a nurse to give a pamphlet about cancer, without at least asking about underlying conditions, but this is a bureaucratic type of health care and such behavior on the part of doctors is not rare. Dire and sloppy diagnoses have been given to friends of mine, and even to me on one occasion before, and they have been wrong.

If I hadn't had my fatalistic notions about my future if I lost weight, I don't know if I would have been more level-minded about what happened. I doubt that I would, but this experience has taught me that I need to continue to work on my outlook. Unfortunately, I also have to have a test on my thyroid in the near future because nothing will quell the nagging sense of fear that I could have a serious issue if I don't. However, after thinking it through and my husband's research on the topic, I'm pretty sure that I don't have thyroid cancer and that what I did have was a doctor who is part of a system which deals with people in what amounts to a cattle call system of health checks and who has a poor bedside manner as a result of both culture and a system, which is better in many ways than America's, but is still flawed.

The Seesaw

2011-09-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

People who are "getting healthy" love to talk about all of the things they gain as a result of their "lifestyle changes". They talk about increased energy, feeling stronger, and gaining health. In many cases, it is true that changing your habits will add to your health in appreciable ways. However, it's not all sunshine and roses.

I try to be honest about what it has been like to lose weight, and part of that honesty is talking about the bad along with the good. While the benefits have outweighed the demerits, there have, nonetheless, been things which have been a problem. Sometimes I feel like I'm on a seesaw in which one problem vanishes, and another pops up on the other side. Here is some of what I'm talking about:

Walking has largely eliminated my back pain (as has weight loss), but the increased movement has left me with strong and painful knee issues. Before I started walking, I occasionally had knee pain, but what I have now is persistent and troubles me at night when I'm trying to sleep, especially if I lie on my side. Even modest exercise (just regular walking, usually for between 40 and 90 minutes most days) can cause difficulty depending on your age and history, and I have a history of two or three accidents in which my knees have been slightly damaged/twisted.
I have not caught a cold since improving my diet and exercise. I have, however, suffered from persistent cold sores on and off (one in my nose at present which I'm having problems shaking). Losing weight is very hard on your body. My husband used to catch a cold shortly after going "on a diet" in the past. It stresses your immune system, even when you are following a nutritious diet.
I have patches of an itchy rash on both of my hands. These are not contact rashes, but due to stress. I've had this sort of rash before in very small spots on my fingers during times of difficulty, but the patches are bigger and in greater number than before. This is because my increased ability as a result of decreased disability has me doing more than I have for quite some time which has resulted in stress. My body is reacting with this rash and in a slightly more severe fashion than before.
I have increased stamina, but I still experience fatigue which comes in waves and is stronger on some days than others. This is likely related to age, but it's also probably connected to weight loss since, as I said before, it is hard on your body and immune system. It takes it out of you, especially over the long run.

I'm going to have a very complete physical exam in four days. If there are any underlying issues, all will be revealed. Frankly, I don't expect any serious issues, but rather that this is all a reflection of running at a caloric reduction for a long time. Though my caloric reduction has been quite modest (1500-2000 calories most days, hitting near 1600-1700 more often than not), it's still enough to cause bodily stress.

When I see a doctor in the next several days, I will mention it, but I expect any mention of my knee issues will yield the advice that I always get, "lose weight". I think a doctor is unlikely to do anything for me until I ring a bell on the scale and "deserve" treatment, but it would be nice if I was taken seriously. Since my expectations of getting any help are so low, I'm trying to deal with the knee issue as best I can on my own. This mainly involves painful exercises in which I attempt to stretch what feels like very tight muscles over the inside of my kneecap and efforts to strengthen supporting muscles in my legs.

So far, this has resulted in more pain overall as the muscles are so sore and not really feeling any stronger, but better flexibility than before. I've been doing these exercises both in the tub while soaking in warm water and while working (I can stretch and hold muscles under the desk while talking with clients). Over time, it is my hope that there will be a reduction in pain. I've only been at it for about a week, so it's hard to tell if this is helping. It doesn't feel like it is making it any worse though.

I wanted to make this post because so many people act like weight loss is a form of refreshing rebirth. They underplay other issues, such as poor skin health or hair loss (neither of which I have suffered in any way). On balance, I'm certainly better off now than I was two years ago, but I'm not waking up every day bursting with energy and thinking how great it is to be alive. I'm waking up wishing my knee pain didn't cause me to sleep poorly and that my sinuses weren't screwed up or my hands weren't itchy. I'm going off to work knowing there will be two or three times throughout the day when I'm going to feel so tired that I'd like to lie down. Things are definitely better, but far from perfect. However, it's not like going back to things as they were is even an option.

The Wastrel's Lifestyle

2011-09-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

I have known of Hugh Laurie as an actor long before he became well-known as the stubbly, mentally disturbed and gruff Dr. House on American television. In fact, my first experience with him was as the dim-witted, jovial, and light-hearted Bertie Wooster in the BBC's Jeeves & Wooster T.V. series (based on the P.G. Wodehouse books). The setting for those stories was the 1930's and depict the lifestyle of a privileged young man of that era.

For me, one of the interesting things about the series, besides watching the chemistry between Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as their energies bounced off of one another, was the lifestyle of that time as represented in the show. Bertie is a wastrel, which is to say he's pretty useless and unproductive, but he does indulge in healthy lifestyle habits which have fallen by the wayside in modern living. He takes a constitutional (a walk) after dinner. He plays golf, tennis, and other sports on a regular, but not obsessive, basis. He does these things for amusement and socialization, not because he feels he "should". He takes baths rather than showers, drinks tea frequently, and reads the newspaper. He walks a lot when he talks to people, when he's not busy hanging out at a club drinking alcohol and playing pool.

I was reminded of the lifestyle on the show recently because after many years of being unable to take baths, I've been able to take them again. I told myself that the tub in my apartment was unusually small and that's why I couldn't fit in it. The truth is that it is short and deep, but is no less wide than a standard American tub. In fact, it may actually be a bit wider. It wasn't that the tub was too small, but simply that I was too big. I've been taking the baths mainly for therapeutic reasons, but another dimension has been added to the experience.

Back before I gained so much weight, I occasionally took a bath in that tub and never really liked it anyway. The reason for this was that I was bored sitting in the water and could not quiet my mind. I had something else I should have been doing or would have preferred to do. This experience has greatly changed. Now, I sit in the tub with the lights out and three candles lit and just enjoy the feeling of being in the water in the dim calm. Occasionally, I'll work on painfully flexing my problematic knee (as I'm trying to do some self-rehabilitation with it to improve flexibility and perhaps reduce pain), but mostly, I just drift mentally.

I realized how relaxing a bath can be if you know how to take one without allowing your thoughts to stampede over the experience. I also realized that part of what contributed psychologically to my weight gain was not laziness, but being too stressed and overwhelmed to even take 20-30 minutes and zone out in the tub on occasion. My mind was chaotic and overwhelmed then. Now, it's much more relaxed and orderly. I attribute that as much to age as my psychological conditioning and the resulting changes in my thinking, but I think it is something I built rather than fell into.

The wastrel's life of leisure and having free time is one that we can't choose to have, but some of the things old Bertie did are possible and good for the soul and body. I already like to take a walk after eating dinner (and lunch, if I have time) and think that this is a good choice for anyone capable of doing so. It likely speeds metabolism and prolongs digestion (as it redirects blood flow from digestive organs to the leg muscles), which means you're fuller longer and burning more calories. The old-fashioned habit of a "constitutional" is a good one, but we're so busy being busy that we don't set aside the time for one.

I think that a walk is a better choice in many ways than a rush to the gym. This is both because it is an emotionally better experience and because I personally think that we improve our physical condition more by engaging in real and natural activity than using hamster-wheel like machines. Note that I don't think that "burning calories" is the end-all and be-all of physical activity. I think overall condition (stamina, muscle fitness without stress that causes damage, etc.) is more important than focusing on fat burning alone.

I also now think that the occasional bath is something that should be prioritized as much as any other lifestyle change. It's good for circulation (just don't make the water too hot or you'll have an increased risk of orthostatic hypotension) and muscle relaxation in addition to providing time to clear your head. I'm not talking about some girly bath salts and bubbles thing, but just a tub of clean warm water after a shower that you can soak in. Don't soap up and wash yourself in the water because then it is associated with cleanliness instead of relaxation (and you can be distracted by the dirty water floating around you).

When it comes to food, meals are taken at a table and are satisfying and approached without judgment. Bertie eats bacon and eggs for breakfast, has white bread with the crusts cut off with butter on them, and eats meat without fretting over the nutritional content. Food is just food, but it is also confined to meal times rather than obsessed over all day. Of course, that is easier for the wastrel whose food is always taken care of for him, but most people who are trying to lose weight think about food whether they are required to do so by their dietary concerns or not.

Finally, one thing about the wastrel's lifestyle is that it isn't focused on productivity. It's a life of single-tasking. To that end, turn off the T.V., the computer, and the cell phone. Be in the moments fully when you have free ones. Like my moment's in the tub, I want to focus more and more on being in the experience fully without distraction. Before we had the possibility of being mentally in two or three places at once, we could relax into and fully inhabit the one at hand and I think were the better for it. Instead of everything in our lives being a component of an experience, it was the experience, and I think that's something we could all benefit from in many areas of our lives.

People talk so much about "lifestyle choices", but only in order to criticize. We should be talking about them as a way to improve the quality of our existence, not dissect and improve it in ways that others measure as subjectively better. I think we should toss all of that out the window and simply find a way to live which contributes to a sense of happiness and peace, and the wastrel's lifestyle may have a lot to offer in that regard.

Leave Them Alone

2011-09-03T14:46:00.000-07:00

I don't read many fat acceptance blogs these days, nor do I read many weight loss ones. There are a few I follow as long as they don't get me too emotionally invested. As time goes by, both sides display such disordered and irrational thinking at times that it starts to feel more like I'm watching contestants in a bizarre reality show rather than witnessing real people operating in real life.

One thing which I know from long experience is that fat advocates hate it when diet zealots and gurus post comments to their blogs trying to "save" them. When the free-thinking fatties don't appreciate this type of intervention, the dietarians (my term) get increasingly hostile with them for not subscribing to their dogma. The fatties just want to be left alone in most cases and spread their message to those who need it. They want to support those who have done nothing but suffer in their attempts to lose weight and need to find a path to acceptance and self-love. All they wish for dietarians to do is to leave them alone and I think this is an eminently reasonable request.

That being said, I think that the door has to swing both ways on this issue and recently I read a blog post by a HAES advocate which shows that is not necessarily so. This person joined an organization for people who wish to lose weight and part of her purpose was to spread her gospel to women who she felt needed it. She described how most of them had been in the group for years and had been unsuccessful. This information is meant to illustrate that they needed what she was going to sneak in and attempt to sell them. She may be right. However, what she is planning to do is wrong.

There is no difference between what the HAES advocate is attempting to do in a well-meaning effort to quiet the psychological suffering of people who have tried to lose weight and failed but continue to try and what diet and weight loss advocates attempt to do to fat advocates. Both sides are convinced they are "right" and that the other side "needs" their message. Both sides are attempting to shoehorn their way into another person's chosen lifestyle in an egotistical attempt to "save them" from themselves. Both are prioritizing their viewpoints and agendas over that of others.

This sort of behavior on either side shows that people need desperately to be right and to coerce, cajole, persuade, or bully others into adopting their lifestyle. Dietarians have been doing it for a long time because they have societal approval at their backs and their sense of righteousness is generally more intense. As the oppressed minority, fatties have been generally more reserved about preaching to a choir that has attended their church voluntarily rather than going out and proselytizing to those who are clearly uninterested in their message.

My advice to both groups, and to everyone in general, is to offer your message to parties who are seeking it. Once you start going around trying to "convert" people who hold opposing views and goals, you have become "the enemy" and lose all credibility.*

*Note that I do not include things like commenting on blogs in opposition to what people are doing or saying in general. There is a difference between disagreeing on method, attitude, and details of what a person is doing and subscribing to an entirely different worldview/lifestyle. For example, telling someone that drinking 6 gallons of water per day when on a diet may not be the best option when you are also interested in losing weight is not the same as saying you shouldn't lose weight and love yourself as you are. I feel compelled to say this because I don't want people setting up a strawman to knock down as an absurdist argument against what I have just said. I'm not saying, "never post a dissenting opinion."

Supply and Demand

2011-09-01T03:10:00.000-07:00

It's hard to get two paragraphs into anything written by a fat acceptance blogger without mention of how the diet industry has warped all of society's thinking about weight. They talk about how their raison d'être is to make us hate our bodies so much that we will fork over our cash to have ourselves "fixed" using their various programs. People who are comfortable with themselves aren't likely to buy as many goods and services as those who are uncomfortable, so the diet industry plays on insecurities that it manufactures according to many people who support body acceptance.

There is an assumption, and this is not only true of those who blame the diet industry for our body hatred, that "society", "government", or "business" make a decision and then indoctrinate us into their way of thinking. The feeling is that they decide how best to profit by manipulating us and then carry out a plan. As time goes by, they fine-tune that plan and play more expertly on our fears and pain to maximize their ability to cull our cash or gain power.

Here is the thing, and people don't like to accept this because a conspiracy is much more appealing than the truth, business does not create the environment of body hatred. It plays on feelings and insecurities that are already there. You are not sold something because someone tells you you should want it. You are sold it because on some level you already want it. No one can convince you of something which is absolutely not within your mind to some extent already.

The way business and government work is like building a fire. They see a spark, a flicker, or a tiny flame, and they fan it until it is bigger. If you allow them, they will create a raging bonfire, but some part of you is the origin of the inferno. They cannot make something from nothing just as you can't build a fire from nothing but a pile of twigs. This applies to government as well. If people vote for a wild political platform offered up by some crazy politician, it isn't because they are told what to do, but because it reflects what they already believed.

The grim truth is that all aspects of society are a reflection of the people who live in it. We get the government we deserve. We have a media which reflects what we want to hear. We are sold products which we want to buy. People say they feel differently, but then their behaviors and choices betray the truth. Fat women say they love their plump bodies, yet talk about how they can get thin, hot boyfriends. Why even mention this unless this is seen as a more prized condition than having a fat boyfriend? It's essentially seen as saying, "see, despite my inferior status in society, I can get someone of what is perceived to be a superior status."

So, the diet industry didn't teach us to hate being fat anymore than they taught us to hate the smell of body odor. They expertly play on our lack of love for various conditions. Despite what fat activists would like everyone to believe, being fat has been a disliked condition for centuries. Ancient Egyptians were body conscious despite having no organized diet industry or media programming. While there has been some flexibility in what is seen as an "ideal" form, that flexibility does not often extend to obese bodies.

Aside from the Venus figurines, there is very little historical evidence that grossly overweight forms were seen as beautiful even in ancient times. The Venus figurines are often held up as an example of ancient love of the rounded form, but such interpretations are wishful thinking at best. Given the emphasis on a large belly and breasts, they are much more likely to have been fertility images, not a celebration of fatness.

The bottom line is that most people don't like being fat. They've never liked being fat and the diet industry sprung up as a result of that dislike. It heard us talk. It knew how we felt about this condition and it acted to sell us something it was pretty sure we'd buy. The diet industry didn't make us hate our bodies. They simply are supplying a demand created by pre-existing hate of our condition.

Why You Press the Bar

2011-08-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

Back when I was in college, I took a course in experimental psychology. As a part of the class, we had to do classic experiments with white rats, Skinner boxes, and mazes. For those who are blissfully ignorant in the jargon of psychology, "Skinner boxes" are little cages which have a bar that a rat can press to dispense a food pellet.

Many people know the basic details of these types of experiment, but they don't know what happens to the rats in order to encourage learning. Rats, like people, are lazy and will not feel motivated to learn or change without a compelling reason. In order to get the rats to care enough about the food pellet to go to the effort of searching the cage for food and stumbling on the fact that the bar relates to getting food, you have to make them pretty hungry. Without deprivation, the rat is indifferent to getting the food pellet and will just sit around in the box being happy and contemplating rat philosophy.

The rats that are trained in psychology classes are doomed to a short existence. After they have been trained, they are rendered useless and are usually destroyed. I was told, perhaps seriously, perhaps in jest, that the way this was done was to break their necks with a flick of the wrist. Since state colleges don't have a lot of funds or veterinary expertise, it is unlikely that they are chemically euthanized. When I was told this about my rat, who has taught me so much about life that I think she deserves a better name and memory than the one I tend to give her (I named her "Rat Rat"), I chose to adopt her as a pet rather than to have her head twisted around until she expired.

My rat, who I was actually not really fond of as a pet but merely saved out of humanistic impulse, was not a normal rat after the conditioning she went through. Because she was sometimes deprived of food in order to compel her to learn, she would eat as much as she could all of the time. Since I was no expert on rat health, I just fed her whenever it seemed she was hungry. Soon, she grew very fat. I tried to feed her less, but she seemed to become anxious and paced the cage nervously looking for food when her food was reduced.

Within about a year, my rat died. She wasn't very old even by rat standards, probably no more than one and a half years old. I sometimes pondered if I fed her to death or if she simply was not healthy because she was the result of too much white rat inbreeding. My professor told us that, to save money, he had to keep breeding the same pool of experimental rats until he felt it was no longer an option because fresh rats were terribly expensive. I'm guessing she may have suffered from both too much food and her bad genetic pedigree.

My rat's situation teaches some valuable lessons about behavior that can be applied to humans. As I mentioned in the linked post a few paragraphs back, she showed the power of habit, routine, and superstition. In the case I'm currently talking about, she shows the strong effect of deprivation. Had she not been made terribly hungry in order to motivate her to learn in the Skinner box, she probably would not have become so fat later. She also likely would not have grown so anxious at any food reduction. If this is starting to sound familiar, it is because it is a classic situation that human dieters go through.

Dieting requires food deprivation over an often prolonged period of time. The more severe the deprivation, the more likely one will be to develop psychological issues with food and a disordered relationship with it. That is not to say that people can't practice caloric reduction without resulting food issues, but there is little anecdotal evidence to support the idea that they don't and ample to say that they do. Just like with my rat, food deprivation fuels anxiety about eating and not eating. It encourages overeating, and creates irrational feelings about food such as attaching moral implications to the choice to eat certain things.

Because of my understanding of these issues, I decided early on not to decide that food or eating were "good" or "bad" and not to put any food out of bounds for me. While I certainly have "guideposts" that I would like to remain in, I don't get worked up if I step beyond the boundaries. I just try every day to roughly stay within them. I view choices broadly as moving in a direction I'd like them to or in one I would prefer they not go in. I realize that making a particular choice slows my progress while making another keeps it up. It's not the end of the world if I doddle a bit on the road by eating a few hundred more calories than I view as optimal.

It is perhaps a very difficult thing for people to accept that the greatest restriction they can possibly endure is not the best path to weight loss. You can explain again and again that there are complex psychological reactions at play and they will be rejected out of hand as "excuses". It generally takes multiple failures before people even begin to consider that they may not be able to tread a severe path without consequence. My poor rat didn't choose to not eat for a few days before training nor to only be able to eat what she was smart enough to earn, but we humans have the capacity and the power to do better by ourselves. Whether or not we choose to do so is an entirely different issue.

Plateau

2011-08-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that every person who tries to lose weight reaches this point, and I have been fortunate up to this point not to have experienced one, but I'm currently in an extended weight loss plateau. My weight has been hovering in the low to high 180's for quite some time now, though I honestly have seen bodily changes which would indicate that fat loss continues but overall weight is not changing.

While this would be a point of despair for most people, and I am less than thrilled with being "stuck" (for reasons I will get to), I'm not surprised nor incredibly upset. For one thing, I know that this is natural and normal. I have no plans to do anything other than "stay the course" and wait for my body to do whatever it's going to do. Since my approach all along was to pretty much live the rest of my life this way, it's not like I'm waiting to jump back into eating more or moving less. At the end of the line, there won't be much more eating and there isn't that much moving now. I walk and do some very modest stretching and weight lifting, but the latter two are done for strength and fitness, not weight loss.

The main reason I'm not happy about the stuck scale is that I know that in about 7 months I'll have to buy health insurance in the United States and all they will care about is the number on the scale when assessing my rates. While I may not care about this number or how long it is "stuck", they certainly will. That being said, I know I can't do anything about it so there's no point in getting overly worked up about it. I know how much I eat. I know how much I exercise. I know that I am living reasonably and far more healthily than most people.

There is an interesting side note to all of this and that is that at one point I used the Dukan Diet (which I do not follow) "true weight calculator". When I did it, it said that I am at my true weight and that it was 84 kg. (about 186 lbs.), which is where it has been stuck for awhile. It said something like, 'you do not need to lose more weight and are at your true weight.' Unfortunately, the people who will be charging me a fortune for insurance are unlikely to concur.

So, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and try not to fall into the pit so many people on plateaus experience. I don't feel close to the edge of such a feeling. I'm not exactly doing cartwheels at being stuck here, but it's okay. It'll all work out eventually and I'm not struggling to live life within the liberal limits I set for myself anyway.

What a dollar a day bought me

2011-08-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

A lot of women who plan to lose weight relish the idea of taking "before" and "after" pictures. They also preserve one pair of their pants from their largest size in order to do the cliched picture of themselves at a smaller size standing in one large leg of their trousers. Personally, I find that approach to weight loss disturbing.

The reason that this troubles me is that it trivializes the entire process and skips over the hard parts. It focuses on the beginning and end, and skips over the painful and difficult middle. The pictures of the skinny person in the fat pants that is often used is a mimicry of advertising for diet aids that used to be quite common in the 60's and 70's. There's nothing that belittles the process like aping something designed to exploit your pain and insecurity. The sad part is that people don't even know what they're copying.

Because this wasn't some game to me, nor an exercise in superficial change which I would hold out to the world with a triumphant expression on my face, I never took a "before" picture in June 2009 when I made the decision to lose weight. I did have my husband take one picture of me in October of 2009 as an experiment for tracking my visual progress by using photos (as I was not using the scale). At that point in time, I had already lost between 30-40 lbs. That is the only photo I have at a high weight as I avoided pictures like the plague. I didn't continue with progress pictures because I couldn't look at them and my husband couldn't tell any difference looking at pictures taken a few months apart. This frustrated me so I gave up on tracking by photo.

I'm putting a comparison of what I looked like then and what I look like now on my blog not as some testimonial to my success nor as an inspiration. I'm doing it because I think there are some people who read blogs in which fatties talk about trying to lose weight and believe it's for vanity, societal approval, or some other vapid reason. I want people to see what I was and realize more clearly what it meant to be that person.

Being the size I used to be meant crippling back pain every time I walked or stood for more than a minute. It meant being mocked and tormented by strangers every time I went into public. It meant being unable to shop for clothing that wasn't the largest size and stretchy (and only shopping by mail order). It meant difficulty having sex and diminished pleasure for both my husband and I. It meant never going out to restaurants, coffee shops, movie theaters, or other public areas knowing I wouldn't fit into the seating and even if I fit, I was at risk of breaking the furniture. It meant difficulty moving, heart palpitations, and having my hands go numb and my back ache when I slept because of the compression of my weight. It meant not being able to fully hug my husband or have him fully hug me. It meant digestive issues, IBS, and fatigue. It meant I was afraid to get on a plane, train or bus and would not travel far.

Losing weight for me hasn't been some "hobby" that I indulged in in order to look hot or something I used to fill an empty life with talk of diets and exercise. It's something which had to happen in order to obtain the same minimal quality of life that others take for granted. In order to understand how diminished I was, it's important to know what I was before. That is why I'm putting up a picture. My "before" body, the one 30-40 lbs. lighter than my true starting weight in the photo above, was extremely hard to live in. No amount of effort to love and accept myself was going to change that reality.

The picture is very painful for me to see. It's not because I'm so huge and I disgust myself. It is because I'm afraid I could go back if I'm not careful to continue doing what I've been doing and I remember all too vividly how hard life was to live at that weight. When I talked in a previous post about dealing with food metaphorically as if I were living on a dollar a day instead of ten dollars, I was saying that that change has bought a better life for me. It didn't buy me beauty, approval, or bragging rights. It didn't give me the upper hand in some coffee klatch discussion about weight with the girls. It bought me a normal existence in which I could walk, go outside and not be afraid or tormented, and have physical contact with my husband without my body being a barrier. It also didn't buy me instant happiness or solve all of my problems, but it did bring me a lot closer to feeling "whole" again.

A Dollar a Day

2011-08-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

Perspective and context are extremely powerful factors in our perception of life. If you grow up poor, a middle class life seems "rich". If you grow up rich, a middle class life seems poor. On an intellectual level and in gross generalizations, such as the absurd situations that play out in movies or television, we understand this clearly. On a personal level, we fail to internalize or even comprehend it.

If you grew up receiving an allowance from your parents of $10 a day, your perspective about money would be different than if you got a dollar a day. A child with $10 per day to spend would be able to buy pretty much any toy, candy, or experience he or she might want either immediately or by saving for a short time. A child who got a dollar a day would view things rather differently. All things would come more slowly to such a child and the value of rewards, when they came, would be viewed as far greater compared to the child with the more lavish allowance.

Scarcity builds a different context for rewards and perspective affects how fortunate or blessed we feel. This applies to everything, but people tend to objectify such things much better when money is the topic at hand. Since most people understand money in concrete terms, "wealth" is something we can all identify with as a factor which can distort perspective. We think people with too much of it are spoiled and don't understand what it's like to live like "normal folks". Trying to help people see food from this same perspective is an order or two of magnitude harder. The reason for this is that "food wealth" is so common and harder to objectify.

One thing that I realized when I started modifying my behavior was that I was indulging in food like a super rich person indulges in jewelry. I felt it was normal and natural to eat what I ate because it was what I always had access to and could eat. Part of this was the patterns my parents foisted on me, but a lot of it was also cultural. Americans don't open a packet of Oreos and eat one or two cookies. They eat half or all of a sleeve. Americans don't order a small pizza and eat one or two pieces. They order a giant one and eat 4 or 5 of them. If they have one slice, it's an enormous one about the size of an entire small pizza.

Changing the context within which we view food is a challenge because of personal psychology, upbringing and culture. It's naive to believe that cultural forces do not come to bear on those who attempt to modify the scale of their eating. When I tried to change my eating when I was in high school, my father mocked and made fun of me for trying to more slowly nibble a potato chip so that I experienced it more. Many people who go out to lunch or dinner with coworkers are pressured to consume more and if they eat small portions, others remark on what they are doing. Such comments may range from accusing you of having some sort of eating disorder to saying that the person making the remark couldn't get by eating "so little". Though it is not the intention, the message is clear, 'you are acting outside of the norm, and it makes me uncomfortable.'

As difficult as the cultural pressures can be, personal ones are far harder. Our own idea of what is "enough" is very difficult to battle, and it's one that I've fought with for the last two years and have only finally wrestled to the mat in the past several months. I'm talking about the part of you that eats a cookie and it tastes so good that you want another and then another. That part has been diminishing in me for quite some time, but it hadn't fully been laid to rest until recently. Now, I rarely have interest in "another" after I've had one of a treat. My problem now, when the inclination to eat a lot hits (which fortunately isn't too often) has stretched out to a desire to sample small amounts of many things from nibbles of cheese, to chips, to cookies, to chocolate, to bits of meat, to olives. A cornucopia of bites generally doesn't add up to much, fortunately, so I can "get away with it", and I consider it a better "binge" than wanting to eat an entire bag of something, but it's still not where I want to be.

One thing I realized is that going from the food equivalent of $10 a day to $1 a day makes one feel impoverished on the food front. If you are accustomed to eating all of the cookies you want, then limit yourself to one, it feels like deprivation. If you grew up without an allowance and one day started getting a dollar a day, it'd feel like wealth. Back in the past, when food wasn't as plentiful and convenient, people who got a cookie once a week were delighted because they weren't used to having them anytime and everywhere.

The issue for most people isn't conceptualizing that they'd be better off with the food equivalent of a dollar a day. The problem is putting themselves on that budget. And note that I use a cookie as a convenient thumbnail for any food. The problem could be eating too much fruit, cheese, or whole wheat bread. You can overeat on any food. It doesn't have to be unhealthy or "fun" food. The point remains the same.

My point is that we see food as something like a bank of infinite funds. We don't budget because we don't have to. We're the kids with the big allowance having fun because there's no reason not to... at least not until something happens and we find out that we can't touch that money anymore. In the case of many fat people, that is health or mobility issues. It's like being super rich with a penchant for bling and finding out that you suddenly are allergic to all precious metals and gems and now you can't shop for jewelry anymore.

For me, one of the turning points was internalizing the fact that food wasn't something which I could indulge in in an unlimited fashion. The limit used to be what my stomach would hold (and even then I'd eat until I felt uncomfortable a lot of the time), but I had to understand that the limit was somewhat less than what my body could burn in a given day. People know this rationally, but they act irrationally. They tell themselves they need that metaphorical $10 a day and can't possibly live on any less despite ample evidence that plenty of people live fine on a (again, metaphorical) $1 without keeling over from malnutrition. We convince ourselves we "need" more food than we really do, and what is worse, we believe that we can't possibly be "overspending" if all we are overeating is "healthy" food. You can be fat on anything, including fruit, oatmeal and yogurt. You only need so much of anything to be healthy, but we're convinced otherwise.

I think the reason people have such a hard time losing weight is that they try to go from one extreme to another. If you think about this with money, again, it is easier to understand. Going from $10 to $1 is very hard. Going from $10 to $9 a day sounds doable. This is what I recommend people do in regards to food (hence my initial advice to eat two tablespoons less and drink slightly smaller amounts of caloric liquids at first), but the results aren't fast enough for most people so they move too far too fast without making the proper mental adjustments or allowing their body to acclimate. They then proclaim that all has failed and go back to their more expensive lifestyle (or more).

The thing is that we can get by with less food than we think just as those who live in wealth can get by with less money. It's all about slowly developing a different context and perspective rather than rigidly sticking to the current one and claiming that change is impossible. You have to let go of your old views if you want to change your life.

Keeping it Private

2011-08-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, a person who I have been doing business with approximately twice a month for the last two years said, "you lost weight". Since I have been dealing with her during the transition from 380 lbs. to around 180 lbs., it seemed like an odd thing to suddenly mention. I've said before that I live in a cultural environment which is more discrete about such things and doesn't comment as freely on people's personal lives. I wondered why she "finally" said something about a matter which I assumed was rather obvious given my transformation.

I do not mention my weight loss to anyone except my husband. In fact, I think it's very important not to discuss it with people because once you involve them in the process of your own volition, they become a part of the equation. Since I don't want their input, I don't talk about it. In fact, I've already decided when I go home that I will refuse to engage in casual discussions of my eating habits or weight. I will talk about it with people who have a problem and need or want help, but I won't discuss it from any viewpoint other than a psychological one when it comes to me. I've read far too many accounts of people having their food habits picked over and bantered about by people who are simply bored and have nothing better to focus on. This is not a trivial matter to be discussed in a coffee klatch.

Getting back to my associate who mentioned my weight, since I have never talked about it with anyone, the timing was odd. She said that she really noticed that my face had gotten thinner in the last month. Usually, she sees me every fortnight, but this time there was a longer separation. I mentioned in a previous post that, though my weight had not changed from one month to the next, I was sure I'd lost body fat because I'd see changes in my overall shape and size. Her comment bore this out as she saw new cheekbone definition in my face (that I also had believed was there) and remarked on it. She said, "your face is returning to what it was when you were young," as she'd seen pictures of me at my all-time lowest weight in 1988.

I told her that she was only the third person to mention it even though I've been losing for two years. She looked a bit blank and said, "really?" I pulled up some pictures of my face on FaceBook which coincided with when we first met to show her. She was surprised. She genuinely had not noticed that I'd gradually lost about 200 lbs. because she was in my life at regular intervals during that time.

The interesting thing is that one of the other three people who mentioned my weight loss also did so after an absence from my life of approximately 6 weeks. She said, "you lost weight", and I thought she was finally recognizing the elephant in the room. She even asked if I'd lost it because of stress. I realize now that she noticed the short-term loss, not the long-term one. At the time, I also thought this sudden utterance was odd, but now I'm beginning to understand that she really hadn't noticed the gradual changes all along.

The only one of these three people to really notice was someone who hadn't seen me for five years. She prefaced it with, "don't take this the wrong way..." at which point I said, "I've lost a lot of weight." She then said, "so much healthier" and we dropped the topic. There was no need for me to go into details about how or why I lost it.

I've been very fortunate that my weight loss hasn't been a topic of public discussion for the most part. I believe the biggest reason for this, as I mentioned before, is that the only person I discuss it with is my husband. Another is that the people who see me frequently either aren't noticing (yes, it is possible that they mind their own business or the losses were so gradual that they didn't see it) or have enough respect for my privacy not to mention it. Now that it has come up a few times, I've found that the best way to continue to keep it private is to address it minimally and move on in a polite, but perfunctory fashion.

A lot of people complain about people noticing or not noticing their weight loss. If they don't notice or say anything, they get upset that the changes aren't significant enough. I'm here to say that the changes can be huge (I've lost half my body weight now) and people won't notice if you are losing slowly. I'm also going to say that I believe that if you draw attention to it overtly, then you're going to get more interference and its best never to talk about what you're doing (including how you eat). The people who deal with me do not see what or how much I eat. When they remark on my weight, I confirm that I've lost it and they say, "congratulations" (which I feel strange about hearing) and then we move on to another subject.

Of course, some people believe that weight is a topic that should be discussed openly and frankly. I don't have a problem with this as long as the discussion is objective and impersonal. I have a problem when it turns into people kibbitzing in my business, which more often than not any discussion of weight (loss or gain) turns into. Once you open the door to people being involved in what you're doing, they feel they have been invited to comment on your behaviors and that introduces a whole new wrinkle into the process of trying to change your relationship with your body and food. And, like most wrinkles in life, it's almost always unwelcome.

It's Not About How Badly You "Want" It (part 3)

2011-08-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

part 1 is here
part 2 is here

Last night, I was talking to my husband about how I was feeling regarding my sister's circumstances, which are inextricably linked to her weight. Because of a slip of the tongue, he said that she couldn't change because she didn't "want" it badly enough. As is so often the case, we sometimes over-simplify what we mean to say with words that distort what we really mean. Even though it wasn't what he meant, it did get me thinking about how we often talk about how people have to "want" something badly enough to start taking action toward change.

A lot of people talk about "wanting" it enough to change when it comes to weight loss. I'm here to say that every fat person in the world "wants" to change. Most very desperately would like to lose weight, but "wanting" something is not the same as being able to acquire it. This is a critical mistake that people make when they either fail or decide not to even make the attempt or when they see others doing so. The reason that this is so important to distinguish from "want" is that not knowing the real cause leaves people feeling as though their motivation is what is missing rather than what is really the issue.

I discussed my sister's situation in the other parts of this sequence and I know that she would like to lose weight and speculated that she probably has secretly tried on occasion and failed. I know that I tried and failed on a small level so many times that I ultimately decided that it was inevitable that I would always weigh well over 300 lbs. Here is how it works:

You are at the bottom of a deep dark well and would like to get out. You search around for places where you can grasp the wall and start climbing out. Occasionally, you see a depression or a jutting rock and you grab at it and try to haul yourself out. Sometimes, it isn't deep enough and you can't get enough of a hold to pull your body up. At others, the rock crumbles in your hand. Sometimes, you can get a good grip and start lifting yourself out and make a little progress then you slip and fall back down again. After each effort, you find yourself back at the bottom in a sense of deep frustration and anguish. Sometimes when you fall back down, the ground gives way and you're in even deeper.

After some time has passed, you've got years of attempts under your belt. You're now an expert at recognizing what will not work. You've tried to use that stone over there or that depression here dozens of times in conjunction with other strategies and every time you have been unable to get out of the well. You are expert at what isn't going to work because you've tried and failed so many times. After awhile, you simply see no point in trying. You still want out of the well very, very badly, but can see no way to escape. Attempts to try just increase your sense of hopelessness. It's easier to simply stop thinking about escape and make the best of where you are. This includes no longer trying to get out because the failure only reminds you of how trapped and helpless you are.

This is the story of a fat person. What you "want" has nothing to do with it. Fat people want to be thinner. They simply cannot find a way out and many eventually stop looking. This analogy fails to impress thin people or successful losers of weight because they were never stuck in that well or the one they were in was one they personally could climb out of. Each "well" is mental and unique. The sides are steeper, smoother, etc. based on the life experiences and personality of each person. Judging others by their inability to escape simply because you could get out is an act of rampant narcissism and a need to elevate oneself above others. It's just not that simple. It's very complicated.

For me, I spent nearly two decades not only sliding down to the bottom of that well, but watching the ground open up under me and swallow me a little deeper each year. From 1989 to 2009, I not only could not find a way to lose weight, but steadily gained despite wanting to lose. In 2009, the thing that changed was my strategy. Being expert at what had never worked (rigidity, exercising a lot, "dieting"), I decided that this time it had to be very, very different if I wanted to escape. This time, I had to try tactics that were atypical because "typical" tactics didn't work for me.

This time, I ate chocolate. This time, I put no food out of bounds. This time, I focused on portions over food types. This time, I didn't castigate myself for eating certain foods or for eating "too much". This time, I wouldn't worry about how fast I lost as long as I was moving in a behavioral and cognitive direction which I felt was "right" for my future. This time, I was going to work hard on my psychological issues with food rather than view it all as simplistic "choices" divorced from my psyche. This time, I wasn't going to assign value judgments to how and what I ate and I was going to focus on eating "normal" rather than "healthy" or "perfect". This time, I wasn't going to hate myself thin. This time, I was going to tunnel sideways using a spoon rather than try and just climb straight up. And, this time, it worked... for me.

The problem is that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for others. That being said, I think that we can see that the "tried and true" methods do not work for many people in the long run. It is unsustainable to live the path of righteous eating and rigid control for most folks. I can't say that I'm thin (yet, and may never be), but I can say that I've done this for two years and two months now and it isn't an obsession and I don't feel trapped. I absolutely do not feel like what I'm doing is a burden anymore and can happily say I'm good to live this way forever. It's amazing how not denying yourself anything makes it easier. Of course, reframing food mentally in the fashion I have done is far from "easy". I had to learn to be satisfied with one cookie, a few bites of chocolate, or a small handful of pretzels, but the mind can be tuned to be satisfied with less once the psychological issues that compel us to "need" more are dealt with.

In my sister's case, the well she's in is deeper, darker and more intimidating than the one I was in. I like to believe that, if I were there with her, I could help her the same way I have helped myself. Deep down though, I think that's ego speaking. I think the only thing I could do for her is share my cooking and role model my eating patterns to her and she could then attempt to emulate them or not. I think the psychology of her relationship with food is too deep and hidden for anyone to access, including her, and I don't know that that aspect is something she has the capacity to address emotionally. And I understand that completely. It's painful, scary, and harder than most people can possibly imagine. And, what is more, except for the part of me that wants her to have a higher quality of life, less fear, and better health, I don't care. I love my sister no matter what and know that she's an intelligent, kind, caring, and worthwhile person. I just wish that she could have the type of life she deserves and weren't so much a prisoner of the body she's in that she will be denied the type of life a truly good person deserves.

Body Prisoner (part 2)

2011-08-13T03:28:00.000-07:00

Part 1 of this post is here.

My sister has always been heavier than me. In pictures of us as children, she was always just a little chubby whereas I spent at least a few years as a skinny child. It wasn't until around 4th grade that I started to put on weight and start my lifelong "career" as "the fat girl". Of course, in my rural town, with a class of around 30 students, there were far fewer of us fat kids than there are these days.

As she got older, my sister gained weight as well. She was "the fat girl" in the class two years ahead of me. To that end, she was tortured and tormented in the same fashion as me, though her responses were somewhat different. I acted out emotionally and tried to excel in various ways in order to prove my value. Getting straight A's, proving how smart I was, exercising my creativity in art class and being unafraid to be friends and make friends with people despite my "handicap" socially was part of my process. For my sister, the path she chose was complete withdrawal.

My sister is intelligent, but she has spent more years being crushed by her weight issues than me. It isn't only that she was fatter earlier, but that she grew larger faster. She also has never spent any time in "remission" by losing weight. I'm not sure if she has ever made a concerted effort to lose, but I'd be surprised if she didn't privately make some attempts. I know for a fact that she has never made any organized effort to exercise though, or to substantially approach food differently. That's okay. I don't judge her for anything. It's just something I note because I think that my having lost a lot of weight twice in my life fundamentally alters how I view the experience of being very overweight compared to how she may look at it.

In addition to not having had success at weight loss, my sister has also never had a boyfriend and is not married. It's pretty safe to say that she is still a virgin. She has expressed on multiple occasions that she has no interest in relationships. I don't know if that means she is asexual (I doubt it), but rather that watching so many bad relationships around her has made her quite jaded at the prospect of being in a good one. There is also the almost certain factor of her weight making her believe she would never get a decent man. I believed that was also to be my future, but things turned out quite differently for me.

My sister also continues to live with my parents, who are elderly and rely on her. Their relationship with her has always been corrosive and destructive. She has spent years in a state of depression and even now is probably in one. Her economic circumstances went from difficult to dire last year when her work was cut from full-time to part-time due to the ongoing economic issues in the United States. She is now essentially at the mercy of my childish and emotionally abusive mother and socially terrified and emotionally stunted father. They consistently demand that she exhaust herself meeting their needs, and they have her in a bind because she can't afford to move out.

I don't know what my sister currently weighs, but I'd be shocked if her weight was under 400 lbs. Chances are she's in the 430ish range, possibly a bit more. She suffers from persistent anemia, low blood pressure, and fatigue. She also has serious skin infections at the drop of a hat and is sensitive to nearly every type of soap and lotion on the market. When she still had health insurance, she was tested repeatedly to determine the cause of her problems with no results. She takes a lot of supplements and has even been hospitalized for her anemia, but nothing seems to help.

With the loss of her health insurance, which got jettisoned when the full-time job was taken away, my sister now has no means to deal with any health issues that may crop up. She can barely pay her bills and only survives because of living under my parents' roof. Today, she was telling me about the hardship of dealing with my mother when she insists my sister take her shopping. These trips involve hauling my mother all over creation (often 4 stores), pushing her in a wheelchair because she had knee replacement surgery and refuses to do therapy properly or wait to heal, and lugging around her groceries in the heat. My mother is blind and quite overweight. I believe she also suffers from Pickwickian syndrome (OHS), though it has not been diagnosed as such. She merely has difficulties with blood oxygen and has to haul around an oxygen tank to breath.

Because of my mother's special needs, these trips leave my sister physically overwhelmed and exhausted. This is certainly due to the stress in dealing with my demanding and emotionally volatile mother, but it could also be exacerbated by her weight, anemia, and the summer heat. If she refuses to help, both my mother and father scream and verbally abuse her until she capitulates.

My response to this was sympathy, and also to say I wish she'd find a job outside of the tiny rural neighborhood she lives in so that she could escape my parents. In the past, when she still had full-time work, my sister had told me she couldn't leave because my parents couldn't survive without her. Now, she can't survive without them unless she gets a better job. I told her that if something happened to her tomorrow, my parents would learn a way to cope. They could get by, but they wouldn't try unless they had to. I believe this for a fact. If my father had to pay his own bills, buy his own groceries, and make his own bank transactions, he would. If my mother had to remember when to take her own medications because me sister wasn't around to dole them out, she would. She already has some assistance to go shopping, though she demands more than is provided by social services because she is easily bored and wishes to run around outside the home as much as possible.

In the past, I have suggested for her own psychological health that she needed to look outside the immediate area for work and she said that she'd have to go at least on an hour-long commute to find work and couldn't pay for the gas. This time, when I said she may need to go where the jobs are, she said she'd have to go very far afield indeed and she couldn't afford to move. I told her that if she found such a job, I'd give her the money to move. My sister has immense knowledge about computers and networks and has been a system administrator for decades. To this, she responded by saying she couldn't get any decent job because she had no concrete certifications.

As we spoke, my sister became increasingly agitated and angry. Though I was trying to be supportive of her by saying she might want to seek an escape route and that I would help her do so and that she had good skills that would be of value, she responded as if I were personally pressuring her to do something she couldn't possibly do. I felt very bad after the conversation because my aim was to make her feel less trapped, and her responses indicated that she felt more so.

In retrospect, I realize that, though she does have skills and could seek a job elsewhere, she can't. The reason she can't isn't that she has no value as a worker, but rather that she is a prisoner of her body. She fears putting herself out there for work in an alien environment because she'd likely be rejected because of her body size. All evidence that I've read about obesity, women, and hiring (as well as wages) would suggest that her fears would be valid. For her, it's better not to try than to try and fail. She is stuck waiting for something better to fall into her lap, because she literally cannot choose to do anything else. She lacks the psychological strength to escape, no matter how hard she may want to.

A lot of people might feel that my sister has choices, but simply refuses to make the hard ones. She could do what I have done and lose weight, but that's not a choice she is capable of making. I know because it's one that I could not make for a very long time. Of course, she wants a better life, better health and a better body, but mentally, she is trapped. Her circumstances are very much worse than mine in that she has no loving, supportive environment to back her up and she has no history of success either in regard to altering her body or achieving her goals. My sister went to junior college and university and was one class short of completing her degree at either of those institutions. I have my university degree and have a body of work on various blogs (including this one) with which to recommend myself. She lacks these things and it undermines her capacity to put herself out there. I know where she is coming from mentally. I've lived there for most of my life, too. It's not that simple to change.

After my conversation with my sister, I had a profound sense of concern and a little frustration. I don't want her to be trapped and I don't want her to suffer ill health. I want her to be able to start taking baby steps to improving her life and have even recommended that taking just a little walk for 10 minutes might help her feel better. At present, she sits in the upstairs part of my parents' home, which she occupies alone almost like an apartment and avoids contact with my parents as much as possible. She essentially hides there and feels depressed and that life is stagnant.

Suggesting she get out for a walk was not meant to encourage exercise, though I'm sure that'd help her, but rather to change the circumstances a little. She said she can't because cars drive fast up and down the dirt road they live on and it's too dangerous. I suggested she try to get back into cooking to eat more healthily (which she claims she wants to do), but she says she can't because my parents will not eat what she prepares and will nag her if she goes to the downstairs area with the kitchen. She refuses to make the smallest change, or perhaps I should say, she cannot make those choices at this point in time. Her current psychology limits the number of options she personally is capable of pursuing. This is not her will, nor her "fault". It simply "is".

For the first time, I understood from the other side what it must have felt like for my husband, who loves me so dearly, to sit by and watch me destroy my body and sink into greater physical pain, depression, and negative thinking. I knew very clearly what it's like to love someone and not be able to do a thing to help them and that sometimes the best you can do is be patient, kind, loving, and supportive, and yes, possibly even contribute to their destruction by giving them things which introduce a little happiness into their misery. I went form knowing intellectually to deeply understanding emotionally what he must have felt for all of those years. That feeling is impotence and deep concern, but coming to terms with the fact that any effort to intervene will likely be more destructive than constructive.

I can't help my sister. She has to help herself when she is ready. The truth is though, that I don't think she will ever be able to change because whatever it is that it takes to turn the corner is not in her. She's suffered far too long and too deeply and I think she's given up. Life has defeated her and all she knows how to do now is to sit by and wait to see what fate's dice roll for her. I know she has the ability to make those changes, but she doesn't, and that's what really matters.

There is one more part in this sequence here.

It's Love, Not Sabotage (part 1)

2011-08-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

More than one woman who is struggling to lose weight has complained that her husband, who knows that she's trying to avoid certain foods that she "can't resist" will go out and buy exactly what she "can't" eat. Invariably, the women rave about how their significant others are trying to "sabotage" their efforts. They are angry and frustrated, but the truth is that this is an act of love, not an attempt to short-circuit their success.

For many years, my husband watched me go from around the 160 lbs. I weighed when he met me to nearly 400 lbs. During that time, he worried about my health. Sometimes, the fear that I would die and we would be denied many years of time together because of my weight bubbled to the surface and I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. It was a look of sadness, not of disgust or disappointment. It was because he loved me so much and didn't want to be denied years of life with me because of my issues with food.

Despite his fear, my husband still did what these other men did. That is, he would buy me food that made me happy and kept me fat. He didn't do it because he wanted me to stay the way I was. It's safe to say that he, more than anyone including me, wanted me to lose weight for the sake of my health and improvement in the quality of my life. He knew that the food made me happy and comforted me in my misery. He also knew that not buying things for me that I enjoyed eating wasn't going to change things because the changes that needed to be made had to come from me, not from him.

When there is someone in your life who is obese or super obese, it is easy to imagine that you are an integral part of the dynamic and that you are "enabling" them if you give them food that "keeps" them fat. This is simply not so. Anyone who makes the decision to eat a particular food in a particular quantity is doing it for reasons you have no sway over. They can't lose weight for you and you can't help them do it for themselves. That is not to say that they don't need support, but they don't need diet police. They need love, care, and attention.

One of the hardest transitions for me when I started living my life differently was not so much the loss of eating every type of food in unrestricted quantities (though that was hard) but the loss of an easy dynamic by which my husband could make me happy by surprising me with some food I'd enjoy. It was a two part process in which he demonstrated the way he thought of me and what would make me happy by giving me a gift, and then I would enjoy that gift. I lost that when I changed my relationship with food.

That loss was also multi-part. First, I couldn't eat just anything any time. I still eat treats and sweets, but the portions are very small such that it takes a long time to eat up whatever I buy. Also, since I eat so little, it's something I am careful to choose based on mood and quantity. My husband really can't be making such choices casually for me anymore. My body is not a garbage disposal that I toss great amounts of food into to get rid of it. The other loss is simply that my psychological changes mean that food is no longer the emotional comforter that I wrap around myself. I enjoy it as a sensory pleasure, but it's not a panacea for my pains anymore.

This loss has required profound adjustments in other areas of my life. My husband has had to restructure how he deals with me because he can no longer buy me food to make me happy. He's got to do more of other things, and it takes time and effort for both of us to figure out what more is required. Our relationship is important to both of us and we've worked hard on finding a new balance. I've also had to find peace and comfort through much more difficult and developed methods than simply eating. This is a profoundly difficult thing and has made me prone to depression, though that has gotten better through working more (which in and of itself has introduced other issues).

I knew for a long time that my husband suffered watching me destroy my health and mobility through my eating, but I knew on a "I know this feeling exists" level. I didn't know on the deeply empathetic level that one has when one stands in another person's shoes. Today, I got a taste of true understanding and deeper empathy when I talked to my sister. I'll go into that though in a follow-up post.

Ordered Disorder

2011-08-11T03:36:00.000-07:00

What qualifies someone to give you weight loss advice? Is it the amount of total weight they have lost? Is it the length of time they have lost weight and kept it off? Is it some certification as a dietician, doctor or mental health professional? When looking for answers, which voices do you deem worthy and why?

This is a question I ponder because I notice that the answers tend to boil down to one factor - the thinness of the person giving the advice. If that person is currently not overweight, then it is assumed he or she has a worthwhile answer. Thinness seems to be all of the evidence people require to decide that the party offering up tidbits of wisdom must know what they're talking about. Until that magical number is reached on the scale, any advice that is offered is to be regarded with skepticism or to be utterly dismissed.

I'm known this on a barely conscious level for quite some time. In fact, earlier in my blogging, some readers encouraged me to write a book since my approach is different than most. As they said such things, all I could conclude was that, "no one will listen to me until I'm "done". I know that my voice carries little weight as long as my body carries an excess of it. No matter how unique, intriguing or effective my words, I have to be able to stand out as the proof of technique. If I'm not there yet, despite over two years and two hundred pounds lost and a better relationship with food than any former or current fatty I've ever run across, my theories and ideas have no value.

I don't make that last assertion in order to say that duration and total poundage shed should entitle me to have more ears. I say it because none of that matters until I'm at a magic number and I know it. No matter how certain I am of what I think and feel, no one will take me seriously until I've rung the bell on a state of "healthy weight", thinness, or "looking good."

The problem, as I see it from my computer desk, is that there are a lot of thin people out there who are still incredibly disordered in their feelings and relationship with food. They have simply managed to re-order their disordered thinking to funnel it into maintaining a weight. They still obsess about food. They still have to avoid foods. They still have binges and are "triggered". They can't navigate life in a "normal" fashion because they have to exercise vigilance and caution to keep on that tightrope lest they fall off and regain. They have no idea how to widen the rope, let alone stop needing to walk on one. What is more, they are convinced this is the only option for them.

When I say it's not the only option, I'm not believed because I'm not thin yet. They must be right. I must be wrong. The truth is though that I think the reason most people who lose weight regain is that so very few of them would know a healthy and "normal" relationship with food if you spelled it out for them. They have no idea what it is like not to be obsessed with food and weight. They don't know what it is like to be able to navigate the world of food without viewing it as a field of land mines. The idea that they could ever just "live" and "be" with food is utterly alien to them, and to the vast majority of Northern Americans.

The problem with weight loss, and I faced it, too, is that the more you focus on it, the more disordered you become. At the outset, this is actually necessary. You can't drag yourself from not thinking about what you eat or abusing food to thinking about it and using it more constructively without becoming immersed in it for awhile. This is, however, a stage. You don't have to say in it forever, but most people do... until they don't and snap back to their former state of disorder and overeat.

For most, the stages are:

1. Overeat (defined as consuming more calories than your particular biology requires to maintain a healthy weight, not a set number of calories) and consume freely (without particular attention to food). In this state, you are not particularly obsessed with food.
2. Attempt to consistently under-eat to lose weight and become very obsessed with food.
3. Experience success and determine that this is "easy", "natural", and something you could do forever even though it requires very rigid eating, preparation and deprivation. Plan, plan, plan. This is the honeymoon when you're applying yourself to the goals and having success.
4. Experience fatigue with the obsession, effort, and consistent planning. Start to become tired of the consistent deprivation and inability to freely enjoy food.

This is then followed by one of two branches:

5. Return to step 1 and start the process over again.

Or

5. Reach desired weight and continue to live in stage 4. Fear of regain keeps you there.

For the vast majority of people, it's one or the other of step 5 because step 3 is often executed in a manner which is deeply flawed and disordered. People rarely see any other goal other than a particular weight. It's all about the number. That's why thin people's advice weighs more than mine.

Here's the progression I made:

1. Overeat and freely enjoy food with occasional self-loathing for my lack of control. Believe I was born to be fat since I've been very fat most of my entire life.
2. Under-eat and control my eating. Become obsessed with food.
3. Experience fatigue with the obsession despite my success and decide to work not on the mechanical processes but the things that drive my issues with food.
4. Work out what a "normal" relationship with food would be like. Do self-analysis and conditioning to alter my disordered thoughts. Apply mental and physical conditioning to alter those thoughts.
5. Stop obsessing about food and enter into a more natural and less controlled relationship with it. Learn to exercise prudence rather than strict control when it comes to food. Learn flexibility and eat at restaurants and in situations where I don't know what is to come. Eat everything, but attend to issues of true hunger and satiety.

and the ultimate step will be 6:

6. Learn to trust my eating such that I no longer have to monitor it but handle it intuitively.

With 4 and 5 under my belt, I'm confident that 6 will be possible with further mental work and once I'm at a normal weight and my body's energy demands are for that weight. If I eat intuitively at a greater than healthy weight, I will do so to maintain that weight. I'm still losing so I must continue to exercise some control over calories. However, that control is not obsessive. It's simply more mechanistic and less organic at this stage than I plan for it ultimately to be.

I have lived abroad for a long time and I know what a normal relationship with food looks like. I've seen it in a culture not yet fully contaminated by Western obsessions. I learned from their example and can see that food is just food to some people. They eat everything. They eat when hungry, but they also don't overstuff themselves. They aren't disinterested in food, but they aren't obsessed with it. I can see what normal looks like and it looks like this:

1. Food is just another part of life. It is not the thing your life revolves around.
2. Your body is not the primary focus of your thoughts and energy.
3. Food is not a source of anxiety or stress. You can take or leave something based on curiosity, satiety, and pleasure. It isn't an enemy and it doesn't control you.
4. Health and eating are related, but health is not the only reason to eat. However, entertainment or psychological need are also not the primary reason to partake of enjoyable food. Enjoyable food which is relatively empty calories is eaten with restraint, attentiveness and moderation. It's about the experience, not the volume.
5. Treats, salty snacks, and desserts have a place in a diet. They are not evil and one does not eat a whole bag of chips, a whole pie or cake, or a pint of ice cream because one cannot control oneself.

The worst thing about 99% of the voices out there is that they make you believe that "normal" is simply not possible because they don't even realize they are disordered. They believe that "thin" requires a sacrifice. Obsession is the price you pay and food sanity is the slaughtered lamb on the altar. Beyond those voices are the ones telling you fat is "normal" and inevitable. These two extremes bring nothing but misery to people and frankly it frustrates the hell out of me that there are no voices out there saying you can do better. You can be free. You can work it out, but it will take time and effort. And I don't mean "willpower" or exercise. I mean maturation and thought altering.

One day, you can eat anything without guilt or obsession and still not be overweight because you won't need food to occupy that mental space in your life. Because everyone is so screwed up and they have no clue what "normal" even looks like anymore, this sounds like some hollow statement which is used to sell a hack trick rather than a potential reality. That's the state of our relationship with food in the Western world, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

My ultimate goal is to become a counselor and help people with eating disorders, but I'm nearly at the point where I see it as futile. In the face of a culture-wide sickness, I don't think my voice is capable of "curing" anyone or anybody. People want simple answers and they don't want to deal with the real issues. They just want a list of things that "work" or to throw up their hands and conclude nothing will. What's the point in my even trying? Stay sick and disordered about food, if you like. It's your body, your mind and your life and who am I to try to help? I'm still fat so I clearly have nothing of value to say.

Fat Friends, Skinny Friends

2011-08-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the magic of FaceBook, I've been a voyeur to the crash and burn of a long-term friendship between two quasi-friends/strong acquaintances. I know both of them pretty well, but not as well as people who I'd call "true friends". One of these people is sweet, gentle, quiet, and cooperative. The other is nice, but loud, opinionated, and assertive. Both of them love animals, 80's celebrities, taking cruises and late 70's rock music.

During the time I have been friends with them on FaceBook, I've seen dozens of pictures of the two of them smiling together as they attend concerts, conventions, and take vacations together. They write about how happy they were and what a good time they had together. I know they have been friends for well over two decades, possibly more. One of them used to be "best friends" with a third friend, but they bonded and the third wheel was shut out. She was left by the side of the road while they walked hand-in-hand through mutual interests.

One day, one of these two women, the quiet and compliant one, posted a message on FaceBook seeking opinions about a certain situation. In essence, she asked if two people had a falling out and had had a shared hotel room planned for an event, was it her responsibility to make it clear that the plans were off. She capped the request with the fact that the person of whom she was speaking had ended their argument with the statement that their friendship was "over forever."

Given the history these two women have, I guessed that this elementary-school-style speaking about someone who is not named but is clearly known to everyone was the buddy she'd gone on so many entertaining sojourns with. I checked her friends list and, sure enough, they were no longer joined on the social network. I then checked the other party's feed, the aggressive and outspoken one, to see her carp about how people can't expect others to read their minds and they have to make their wishes known. I left them to their grade-school sniping and pondered some deeper issues.

In this scenario, if you were asked to guess which one is fat and which one is a former beauty pageant contestant, which would you assign to each (admittedly vague) character set? There are stereotypes of fat women as brassy, loud, and overbearing, but, in my experience, they are not necessarily like that with friends. In fact, most of the fat women I know are bubbly, compliant, and overtly happy. In my experience, they are more so this when with skinny friends than other fat ones.

One thing I've read again and again from fat women who are wanting to lose weight is how they don't want to be "the fat friend". I ponder what it means to be "the fat friend" to such people. In many cases, it means that you are the one who someone else stands next to to make them look better.

I've also read, with some disgust, that some fat women don't want to have fat friends because they hate the way a posse of big girls "looks". They're afraid of drawing even more attention. They're also ashamed to be with fat friends. This makes me wonder if, in a friendship in which there is a fat girl and a thin girl, and especially when the smaller woman is considered "hot", that the fat girl may feel that she must defer to her friend. That is, she may feel, unconsciously, that she is being granted some special dispensation for being allowed to pal around with thin people.

In my own personal experience, I did not defer to my friend's wishes and tended to be more of an "alpha" female when I was with friends. That being said, I did always care about other people being happy. I was raised to always place myself last. Being fat made this very easy since I so often believed it made everyone "better" than me and their needs were more valuable than mine. Since I lacked value due to my fatness, this was logical.

In the case of my very good friends, it wasn't that my friends necessarily followed me, but rather that they tended not to have many ideas or assert themselves in general. It is likely that most of the women (all thin) who became my friends were also dealing with other self-esteem issues or social problems and that is part of why they were friends with me despite my weight. One of my good friends went to a church-affiliated school, could only wear skirts and dresses, and had to follow relatively strict rules. Another was two years younger than me and had an alcoholic father who beat her mother and threatened his children. My guess is that both of them felt "inferior" for their own reasons and my weight was either not a factor or an equalizing one.

In terms of people who were not my friends in particular, I didn't defer to their wishes, but for those who I wanted to be friends with because they generally seemed like nice people or were interesting, I tended to completely suppress my wishes and tried to anticipate their needs in order to convince them to like me. All of my yearbooks were filled with how "nice" I was. "Nice" was a euphemism for "boring" sometimes, but in my case, it was because I was always trying to get people to like me despite my fat body.

All of this leads me back to the meltdown that occurred between my two quasi-friends. It's my guess that the former failed model/beauty pageant contestant friend is accustomed to everyone wanting her time and attention regardless of what she says or does merely because she is perceived as being quite attractive. On more than one occasion, she has gone out of her way on FaceBook to say things which she knows are offensive to a certain segment of her friends. I know this because she says, "I know this is going to offend some of my friends, but..." Almost certainly unconsciously, she acts only on her own interests and doesn't worry where the chips fall because even if some people run away, others will fall in and replace them. Everyone wants to be buddies with the good-looking girl.

The other pseudo-friend, who probably weighs in the 300 lb. area, has probably been such a "good friend" mainly because she's also "nice". That is to say, she's focused on pleasing others rather than on pleasing herself. Based on their public squabbles, I'm guessing that she finally got tired of suppressing her wishes and said something which pointed out how selfish she believed her compatriot is.

As a footnote to all of this, I noted with some interest that the third wheel who got kicked to the curb when her best friend (the fat girl) bonded with her new friend (the skinny girl) and has been sitting on the sidelines for the better part of 20 years is now back in the picture. The thin friend is now professing how much she loves the third wheel and they're talking about how good a time they had going to a tea shop together. The third wheel is also quite overweight (probably 230-260 lbs.). Perhaps the skinny friend really does need a "fat friend" to make her feel more attractive, or this is merely coincidence. It presents an interesting dynamic regardless of the reasons.

I can't say for certain that this is a "fat friend/skinny friend" dynamic going on here because regardless of weight, people have basic personalities. Many fat women have stellar esteem and will assert themselves freely. I do, now. I stopped people-pleasing the first time I lost weight and didn't go back to it after I regained because I got tired of having to "prove" something to others in order to gain acceptance. I just accepted that I'd be rejected and everyone be damned. Also, being married to a husband who is almost god-like in his perfection psychologically, I had acceptance from someone who no one could ever surpass. That being said, to this day, I still have to fight not to sublimate my needs to his. It's not because he expects it of me, but rather because I view him as superior to me and his interests as paramount. It's my issue, and I keep working on it.

Getting back to the point, I do believe based on my own feelings in my younger days as well as witnessing the characters of various other fat women, that we don't express ourselves in general because society teaches us that we are not equal. In fact, it instantly devalues us with a glance. To get any value back, we have to prove that we are somehow better than others in other ways. We do that by being super nice, cooperative, generous, fun, and kind, even when it causes us to sacrifice our own needs.

Diet, not that meaning, the other one

2011-08-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

Early on in this blog, I wrote down the mechanics of what I was doing more frequently mainly as a means of tracking my behavior for myself. I wanted to reflect on how I was living at various stages so that, heaven forbid, if I started to slip back into old habits and regain, I'd have a road map back. Of course, I'm hoping all of the psychological work I've been doing will leave me in a good place and that will not happen.

Since it's been awhile since I've talked about my diet, and I use the word "diet" here as a noun to mean "the food I happen to eat", not "restriction" (as in "on a diet"), I wanted to pause in my deeper musings to outline what I've been eating.

Here's today:

Breakfast (around 7:30 am):
pain au chocolat (mini chocolate croissant - about half the size of my palm)
coffee with 1/3 full fat milk
(roughly 160 calories)

Mid Morning Snack (around 10:00 am):
banana smoothie - medium frozen banana, 1/2 cup skim milk, 1 tbsp. Hershey's syrup, dash cinnamon
(roughly 200 calories)

Lunch:
steamed squash
chicken breast
(roughly 250 calories)

Afternoon snack:
6 animal crackers
1 Asian sweet
1 rice cracker
(roughly 130 calories)

Dinner:
whole wheat pasta salad with 3 slices lean ham, 1/3 roasted red pepper, diced onion, mayonnaise, garlic, black pepper
carrot
navel orange
(roughly 450 calories)

Evening snack:
peanut butter on whole wheat bread
(roughly 300 calories)

I also had about 4 cups of tea (with skim milk, calories never counted) and nibbled on the core of some fresh pineapple I was preparing for my husband's lunch. He doesn't like the cores, but I do. I'll also have a Diet Coke, possibly two, and likely drink about a liter of water. However, I don't force myself to drink boatloads of water. It just ends up like that.

The entire day will likely weigh in at around 1500-1600 calories, though if I'm very hungry in the evening after work, I may throw in a banana with the peanut butter on whole wheat. Note that all of the food was homemade except the pain au chocolat (from a bakery), and afternoon snack items (pre-packaged). Of course, the pasta was purchased dry and I prepared it, roasted the pepper and assembled my own salad. The whole wheat bread is homemade. As I've said before, this type of eating is a lot of work.

For a work day, in which I have to plan my eating carefully because of the schedule and the need to pack a lunch, this is pretty typical. You can see that there is a fairly good balance between eating for pleasure (Hershey's syrup in the smoothie, croissant, cookies, sweets, cracker) and nutrition. This is a little lighter on the vegetables than I sometimes go (usually, I have a vegetable-based soup as part of lunch) and slightly heavier on fruit, but in the summer it sometimes works out that way. I also take a multi-vitamin and Calcium supplements.

The Moving Locus

2011-08-06T05:54:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, my husband and I were invited to attend a dinner at a Turkish restaurant. The meal was the first breaking of the fast on the first day of Ramadan for a friend who happens to be a Muslim. This is a special time for those who observe this tradition and only good friends and family are asked to be a part of it.

This friend was actually a mere acquaintance to me, but quite a bit better known to my husband. I'd met him once briefly at a cocktail party (my first and only so far) and knew him via FaceBook. I knew that my husband was keen to be a part of this social occasion and I saw no reason for us not to go and we went and had a great time. The part of me that blog readers will never know is that I have excellent social skills and am able to talk freely with people I have just met. This has been the case for quite some time and is unrelated to my having lost weight.

Just this evening, almost a week after the event, I was thinking about the situation in the shower and some thoughts occurred to me in retrospect. Those thoughts relate to what I didn't think about during the dinner rather than what I did. As we ate and socialized, I thought about the topics of conversation, how to equally involve all of the assembled people (3 out of 4 of whom I'd never met before), and the delicious food.

I thought about how this occasion would have been different had I taken part in it a little over two years ago at 380 lbs. Had that been the case, I would have had nothing but fear about the situation. I would have been afraid of crippling back pain making it hard to walk from the train station to the restaurant. I may have even asked my husband if he and I could map the route there on our own before going so I could scope out places to sit and rest when my back pain hit. I also would have wanted to do reconnaissance on the restaurant to ensure that the chairs did not have arms and I could comfortably sit in them. Inspecting the material the chairs were made of to see if I felt they'd support my weight would also certainly have been a part of this surveillance.

Had every aspect of this event passed muster, I would have spent the dinner thinking about more than just the conversation. My main preoccupation would have been with not eating in front of others. As a super fat person, I would never have eaten freely in front of others because I'd "know" that they'd be judging me by every morsel I put in my mouth. There's every chance I would not have enjoyed what food I did eat and would have eaten far too little to the extent that I'd need to come home and eat to be sated. In fact, there's every chance I'd come home and binge both because I'd be starving and because of the emotional stress of the event.

I almost certainly would have spent the entire evening scrutinizing the responses to my physicality and behavior by everyone there. Did they look me in the eye when I spoke? Did they address an equal number of questions to me? Did eyes linger on parts of my body? Was there any whispering to one another which may have been talk of me? Were they going to go home and fill their dead time on the train by talking about how shockingly enormous I was?

My thoughts and actions in such social occasions when I weighed 200 lbs. more than I do now would have been drastically different than they were this time. The shocking revelation that I had as I mulled the experience over in the shower was that I hadn't had any of those thoughts at all. Though I'm still fat, I've finally decided that I'm human enough to be perceived like all the other humans instead of as a freak that people judge and scrutinize.

Most people who have lost weight would now talk about how this was a good indication that all of my thoughts about how other people are attending to me based on my body size were all in my head. That is, of course, a load of crap. Extremely overweight people do not imagine that they are judged by what they eat or that they are being talked about and judged. These things happen all of the time. The mental change I made was not one in which I failed to worry about what other people thought, but rather a shift in self-perception and locus of control.

All along, I've had issues internalizing a change in self-image. As I've mentioned before, I often feel uncomfortable dressing in a feminine manner because I see myself as a sexless lump. I still saw myself as this objectified creature that was fooling people by walking around as if I were equivalent to actual people. What I realized after this dinner was that some part of me has accepted that I'm "human", at least on a social level. This is a psychological breakthrough and an indication of progress in my identity and image.

Beyond the change in identity, I realized that the locus of control for my eating has shifted and is now internal. In the past, I would never eat in front of other people for fear of committing the crime of being fat and having food. I mentioned some time ago that T.V.'s portrayal of fat people who stuffed their faces openly all of the time couldn't be more wrong. We hide our eating. We don't flaunt it. We place power over what and how much we eat to those who surround us and only allow ourselves a choice in secret.

At the dinner, I ate what I wanted to without a thought for how others perceived my eating. This wasn't because I'm thin, mind you. I was still the fattest person at the table, but rather that my relationship with food has changed. I have stopped punishing myself for enjoying it. I deserve to enjoy food and I did. In fact, I ate too much because it was so good. Note that I define "too much" as "beyond satiety", not "too many calories". Afterwards, I knew I'd eaten more than necessary, but I didn't have any negative thoughts about it or my behavior. Sometimes people eat more than necessary. I'm a person. I did it, too.

So, my second revelation is that I'm now the boss of me when it comes to food. This may sound obvious, but it's just not that simple for fat folks. Most of us are not thinking about food as a source of joy that we are as entitled to as thinner folks. We see it as our abusive lover who beats us up and then embraces us; it is who we want to leave but keep coming back for more and more because we so desperately need it. Of course, the reason it abuses us is that we abuse it. It's hard to have a sound relationship with anything in your life when you view it through dysfunction and distortion.

At this point, I feel very far from having resolved all of my issues, but this was a time at which I could measure some major steps forward in my psychological development and my relationship with food. At the time, it was pretty effortless and natural. Now, it is remarkable in the way in which so many neurotic feelings and fear were utterly absent. That's progress.

It's Hard

2011-08-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's not even lunch time yet and today I have already done laundry (which must be hung out to dry because I have no dryer), washed dishes twice (by hand as I have no dishwasher), made whole wheat bread, made homemade soup (from scratch), made egg salad, and peeled cucumbers for lunch. I also walked my husband to the local subway station, bought a few groceries on the way back, and worked on repairing a broken hand mixer.

After lunch, I can look forward to working four hours in my home. During that work, clients come to my place so I have to tidy and clean a bit before they come as well as prepare tea to serve them and wash up after each visit. Of course, I also have to do the work itself.

This day would be considered a typical day, except that I won't be cooking two separate dinners this evening as it's a rare night when my husband will bring home food from a restaurant we both favor. On a typical day, you could add in preparing an after work drink and snack for him, cooking and cleaning up after my dinner and then cooking and cleaning up after his dinner.

None of these activities is atypical for me. Since changing things to lose weight, I've been essentially forced to choose between unhealthy, higher calorie prepared food and making my own. Most days, I spend considerable time and effort on food preparation in order to maintain the status quo. At least twice a week, I make homemade vegetable soups (carrot, broccoli, corn, tomato are the favorites) which require peeling and chopping of fresh vegetables along with a few canned ones (tomatoes and corn, because using fresh ones is too expensive). At least once a week, and often twice, I bake sugar-free whole wheat muffins or bars for breakfast and freeze them. At least once every 10 days, if not more often, I bake bread.

On top of all of this, there is preparing lunches and dinner as one might expect. Steaming vegetables, peeling and slicing fruit or vegetables and constructing healthy salads (pasta, chickpea, etc., not green ones) for lunches are a regular part of my routine. This does not make me a food saint. It makes me tired and well-nourished. It also doesn't mean I don't partake of the occasional bit of junk food (chocolate, pretzels, etc.) on a daily basis (as I've said many times before). It just means that the bulk of my eating is made up of more nutritionally dense food.

A lot of women who successfully lose weight (of which I am now one) talk about how "easy" it is to accomplish. This is absolutely not true. It's far easier to eat poorly than to eat well. The effort required for me to be satisfied and to eat in a way that helps me lose weight is substantial. There are many days when I literally spend hours in the kitchen on the weekends preparing for the week ahead and placing about a week or so worth of food in the freezer. When that runs out, I'm back to it again.

My circumstances are not typical. I live in a tiny apartment in a big city with a small freezer. I can't cook in bulk and I can't buy pre-packaged "diet" foods. However, even if I could, I don't think I'd like them as they tend to be expensive, low on quality vegetable and fruit options, and very salty. To be happy with how I eat, I have to enjoy the taste of the food I'm eating and I don't like canned soups, frozen entrees, or weird chemical tastes in my baked goods. Additionally, food police don't exactly sanction the consumption of convenience foods, even when they are of the "diet" variety.

I also realize that my circumstances are also atypical in that I am not poor and can afford all of the fresh food I might want to eat. Additionally, I don't live in a food desert in which access to certain foods is restricted or difficult. Beyond that, I also like to cook and know how to, though sometimes it exhausts me. One of the reasons a lot of poor people are fat is they don't have the time, money, or access to cook well for themselves. It's not "easy" to eat well, particularly in an environment in which women need to be employed full-time in many cases.

One of the things we need to do is stop pretending that losing weight and eating well are simple choices with easy steps in which to accomplish ones goal. People who make such assertions only contribute to the sense of failure people feel when they attempt to turn around their relationship with food and fail. If it's so easy, why can't they do it? As a society, America needs to admit that it is hard to eat well, but worth the effort. It needs to educate people on how to cook with cheap, but nutritious ingredients and how to do so in the most expeditious fashion. It needs to help people manage without special equipment (which I actually am not sure I can do) and emphasize that it is hard, but possible, to eat better.

Hunger (Revisited)

2011-08-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

You can't talk about your relationship with food and weight without addressing hunger, and it's a topic I've broached on more than one occasion in the past. For those who have not seen those posts (or have forgotten them), it's my feeling that humans were meant to deal with a little hunger and that part of modern living is that we've made it so easy to eat anytime, anyplace, and anywhere that we've increasingly lost the ability to tolerate even mild hunger. I feel that there is a "sweet spot" on hunger at which we are uncomfortable but not in actual deep discomfort and that is the time at which we should eat.

I've done hunger conditioning to help extend my ability to endure hunger, and, as I've said before, my goal is to not starve myself until I want to gnaw off an appendage, but simply to put up with feeling hungry for a little while. Ultimately, the goal is to eat when I feel concretely hungry rather than vaguely and mildly so. At best, I can tolerate (grudgingly and with difficulty) a rumbling stomach for a few hours before eating. At worst, I never even get past the "I'm a bit peckish, what's to nosh?" stage. More often than not, I'm landing on the latter and only doing the former when forced by circumstances. I don't see this as a failing, but it is something to keep in mind. The way in which I trained myself to deal with hunger is like a muscle. I haven't flexed it as much recently as I did initially, and it has grown weaker. My hunger tolerance was once stronger than it is now.

One of the things which continues to be a challenge for me is choosing to deal with hunger prophylactically. That is, I don't eat because I'm hungry, but I eat because I anticipate that I will be hungry later during a time when I have no access to food or no ability to eat (such as when I'm working). This relates to fear of hunger as I've written about before and a desire to deal with all stress in the most expeditious manner.

The discomfort for me as a lifelong fat person is acute when I feel hungry. To some extent, that has changed, but I still don't bear it as well as someone like my husband who has been thin or only moderately overweight for most of his life. He can delay his responses because the pain he suffers is less because his biochemical processes aren't screaming as loudly at him to eat. Despite weighing in the 170's-180's now, I'm hardly having skinny person reactions to food. I still have a fat person's response though not as strongly as I once did. I don't get headaches anymore or feel as weak as I did initially when hungry. I also don't have the same energy crashes, but my stomach still sends potent "pain" signals.

The reason I'm revisiting this topic isn't that I have been allowing my hunger tolerance to atrophy (though I have, to a small extent, and I feel it sometimes at work between lunch and dinner). I'm talking about it again because of a study I read about which suggests that there may be health benefits in eating only when hungry. This study, at least to me, also suggests that modern lifestyles with ready access to food may be a large contributor to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. If waiting to eat until hungry improves blood glucose numbers, then perhaps a lifelong ability to eat before one has actually become hungry is a piece of the higher incidence of diabetes puzzle.

I want to restate, quite emphatically, because so often people misinterpret the words of others, that I'm in no way advocating waiting until one is famished to eat. I do believe that waiting until one is feeling the actual discomfort of hunger is not a bad idea. Frankly, I think that waiting until you are ravaged by hunger to eat is an invitation to binge eat. Even now, I struggle when I come home from work and am very, very hungry (due to unavoidable delays based on a schedule I have zero input into) not to eat and eat and eat. It seems to take longer to gain satiety when I'm super hungry than when I'm modestly so. However, I do think that a little hunger is good, and the aforementioned study might go a tiny distance toward supporting that on a scientific level. I'm going to go back to making efforts to "stretch" my hunger tolerance, not just because of this study, but simply because I know it can be done and that it'll make my situation at work easier in the long run.

BP

2011-08-01T23:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't been to a doctor in ages, because I know that all they will tell me is "lose weight". I also haven't had any health problems that I felt could benefit from treatment (my back pain was addressed, and not helped long ago) so I've avoided doctors both because they treat me rudely and poorly (as in, they don't do anything but look at me and conclude all problems stem from my weight) and won't do anything to actually help. Telling me "lose weight" wasn't helpful, since obviously I couldn't at that time.

Today, I went to a place which happened to have a public blood pressure cuff which you could put your arm in and test yourself without scrutiny or judgement. My blood pressure was 122/67 with a resting heart rate of 78 bps. I didn't even know what those numbers meant as I'm always worried being too medically knowledgeable will just send me into some sort of hypochondriacal stress fit, but my husband said they were quite reasonable. Looking them up online, I now have no concerns about blood pressure for now.

I'm still planning to go for a full check-up in September, but this was an encouraging start and a way of desensitizing myself to the tests I'll be receiving before I actually take them.

"Magical Thinking"

2011-08-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

I've lost a substantial amount of weight twice now in my life. The first time was in my junior and senior years of college and the second time is this time. As I've mentioned in other posts, I lost in college by exercising for 90 minutes a day and adopting a Draconian attitude toward food (little fat, no sugar, no red meat), but absolutely no portion control. I ate a lot, and I ate things like cheese, chicken, whole grain bread and crackers, potatoes, turkey, fruit, and some vegetables. This got me down to about 160-170 lbs.

Because of that success, I eventually decided I was "normal" and could eat like "normal" people. I slowly started eating food that was verboten and I changed jobs and could no longer devote copious time to exercise. I regained weight and then some. I never dealt with my psychological issues and I never learned to moderate how much and how often I ate. Once one variable (my free time because of a work change) changed, my entire "system" for weight loss fell apart.

This time, I decided that I couldn't rely on exercise to aid in weight loss because of my crippling back pain. Even though my back pain has been greatly ameliorated by weight loss and regular walking, it has been replaced by sometimes agonizing knee pain. This time, I approached things from the viewpoint of how I eat rather than only what I eat and set exercise aside as an aid to weight loss.

One of the things that happened to me last time as I got to a lower weight was that I decided I was "normal" and could live like "normal" people. They ate candy bars occasionally so I should be able to. They didn't exercise for a big chunk of their free time, so I shouldn't have to. This wasn't a mistake. The mistake I made was not understanding that volume was my problem, not exercise nor the types of food I was eating.

I learned something from this and was determined this time around not to repeat that particular mistake. That being said, lately, I've started to feel that I'm on the cusp of a different mental error. Lately, I've been eating close to the line. That is, I've been eating around 1800-2000 calories and some days close to 2500. If I were at my target weight, this wouldn't be an issue, but I still have between 30-40 lbs. to lose. The question is, why am I doing this? The easy answers are:

1. I'm tired of doing this and am growing slack.

2. I'm so close to the end that I'm losing motivation.

3. I'm getting lazy.

4. I've slipped back into the same thinking I had before in which I am thinking I am "normal" and can eat like other people.

5. My circumstances may be changing and compelling me to be more casual about my eating/habits.

I say these are the "easy" answers because they're the ones most people come up with as they get closer to the end and start to be less vigilant. In my case, they also happen to be wrong. I'm not tired of doing this, lazy, etc. I'm not seeing myself as "normal" and my habits and circumstances have not changed. I also don't think I'm so close to the end that I don't have to try hard anymore.

I often encourage people not to land on the first explanation because it's often wrong, and in this case the common answers don't fit. Last night, after a wonderful dinner out with friends in which I ate more than necessary (beyond satiety, either emotional or physical), I realized what the issue was. I have had success for so long even with numerous "slips", "failures", and eating more than I planned, that I'm developing a sense of my own diet invincibility. I'm starting to think that I can continue to lose weight even if I eat more. Some part of me is thinking I'm "special" in some fashion and have built up a gifted metabolism through my choices.

This is, of course, magical thinking. I don't know how good, bad or indifferent my metabolic rate is, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't such that I can eat close to a maintenance level and still lose weight at much more than a snail's pace. While success hasn't given me any sort of ego boost about my "stellar habits", it is making me think that I "can't fail" on some level. Indeed, it seems to be leading me to believe that I can't do anything but succeed since that has been the case all along. At the very least, I'm doing some "limit testing" on my body to see what I can get away with and still lose weight.

Fortunately, realizing that I'm developing this sort of thinking is going to help me reign it in and snap back into reality. Last time I weighed myself, I had neither gained nor lost any weight. Though it would appear this is the result of my changes in habits, I actually don't believe that is so. I've seen body fat distribution changes (areas of my body have visibly gotten smaller) and I'm sure I've lost fat. I've been exercising more since fully recovering from my back pain earlier this year and that would easily account for stabilization in weight when I step on the scale. I think that the lack of a changes on the scale aren't related to my consumption, but rather other factors.

So, I'm not concerned about how I'm eating based on this lack of change. However, I am concerned on the whole about falling back into a mental trap that may send me someplace emotionally or mentally that I don't want to be. Two years of success does not mean I'm a metabolic super woman.

Thoughts on Intuitive Eating

2011-07-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been thinking about intuitive eating and how that works for some and not for others. The idea that I listen to my body and eat what I need to when I need to until a point of satisfaction (and not being "full") is an attractive one. It's not like I enjoy the tedium of weighing food and entering data into an online database in order to track calories. In fact, it's just a little task I have to do everyday like washing dishes. It's not a big deal, but it's not exactly fun.

As my weight approaches the 170's (I am probably already there - high 170's likely but, as always, I weigh myself once a month so I don't know) and have been at this for just a hair over 2 years and have lost approximately 200 lbs., I have changed to some extent in my thinking on the concept of intuitive eating. That is not to say that I felt it would have been a good choice for me in June 2009 when I started making an effort to lose weight, but rather that me around 180 lbs. is different than me around 380 lbs.

Quite some time ago, I wrote about how our cells have a memory in regards to their life and how that makes reducing the amount of food we eat (particularly if we do so dramatically) quite difficult. Our organs also have a "memory" of sorts and have to make adjustments when we change our eating habits. Your body resists change and dragging it into a new realm of eating is difficult, especially when those cells are used to a certain amount of energy everyday and you disrupt that.

Additionally, your stomach capacity is going to be larger or smaller based on your average eating habits. One of the reasons I practiced gradual portion reduction as part of my process was that I wanted to slowly acclimate my stomach to smaller amounts of food. While not as dramatic as something like weight loss surgery, this did slowly make it harder to eat a lot as my stomach shrank. My intestines also gradually changed as I'm sure many organs did.

At 380 lbs., my "intuitive" eating would have been unlikely to result in any sort of weight loss as my body would have been compelling me to maintain the status quo, not lose weight. That's what bodies do. They seek homeostasis. Additionally, at that weight, my body is operating in a damaged way. What it seeks isn't necessarily what a healthy, balanced body would seek. When you eat too much too often (and I define "too much" as more calories than necessary for me personally, and do not define that for anyone else), you alter biochemical responses to food in your brain. You need more food for the same pleasure that others get from less food. It is not dissimilar from the way in which a drug addict needs more drugs to get the same reaction.

For these reasons as well as my utter lack of faith in my psychological balance in regards to food, I rejected intuitive eating as a possibility for me. I still firmly believe that it was the right choice and will continue to count calories until I reach a healthy weight (147 lbs. is the threshold at which I am no longer clinically overweight and where I hope to land some day so that I will qualify for health insurance without punitive costs). After I reach a healthy weight, however, I think that I may be ready to attempt intuitive eating.

It is my hope that, when I reach that weight and hold at it for an indeterminate amount of time, my body will have adjusted to the energy and consumption levels it has been receiving such that it will cue me naturally to hold at that point if I attend effectively to it. Much of the last year or so of my calorie counting has been a sort of "training" in recognizing different types of hunger and how much I "need" to eat versus how much I "want" to eat. There are times when I want to eat something, but I am simply too full or not hungry enough. This is a feeling that I developed about a year ago in a vague manner, but has been something which has become more defined as time has gone by. I have been slowly tuning both body and mind so that I eat when hungry and don't get hungry as often as before. These processes (psychological and biological) go hand-in-hand and one could not succeed without the other.

This is a profound change in how I feel about eating. When I was greatly heavier, there was literally no time short of a stomach bursting sense of being stuffed that I couldn't eat. My capacity to eat was nearly unlimited at that time and I would sometimes eat myself sick merely for the sake of the pleasure food gave me. Now, I can't come anywhere near that. My body and approach have changed such that I (generally) won't eat if I'm not truly hungry because I've changed psychologically in this regard.

All of that being said, I do sometimes ignore the fact that I'm not hungry (especially if I'm also "not full") and eat if I want to. I still indulge. I still eat for pure pleasure. I still eat the sorts of foods that you're "not supposed to eat". I just eat very little of such things and I rarely binge and what constitutes a "binge" now is laughably small by most people's standards. Food continues to fall into its proper context (enjoyment, nourishment, a social and cultural experience) rather than be something I use for psychological survival. It's been a long road to this point, but I feel like it may end with being able to eat intuitively and still not regain weight.

How did health become a social responsibility?

2011-07-29T21:31:00.000-07:00

At a former job, the president of the small company I worked at once criticized workers for having to call in sick. He said that employees had a responsibility to look after themselves and not impede the orderly conducting of business with their absence. This same man used to take a half day off of work and go home if he had a headache so it was hard to take anything he said seriously given the immense level of hypocrisy that he displayed.

The underlying notion of what he said, however, is becoming increasingly more pervasive. The idea that we "owe it" to others, especially unconcerned strangers or all of society, to care for ourselves in a particular manner is not one that has always been around. Previously, I wrote about how I think that health and how we deal with our own bodies is a personal choice and nobody's business and I pondered today how we have reached a collective mentality which pressures people to attain health, as if it were something we could choose to pursue and successfully acquire (it isn't in many cases, but that is beside the point).

While rolling this notion around in my head, I thought about what life was like hundreds of years ago. Before medical science, people knew that there were certain actions or behaviors which lead to better or worse health and some lived a lifestyle which was more conducive to maintaining health and some less. They did this because health was seen as precious to them and integral to maintaining their livelihood and life. If they became sick, there was little or no confidence that there would be a treatment that would repair the damage or cure the disease.

People during that time also knew that luck played a huge role in whether or not someone was healthy. They may not have known about genetics, but they did know some people were born hearty and some weak and prone to problems. They also realized, all too well, that wealth factored into the availability of food, medicine, and education such that poorer people had a lower chance of living in good health than richer ones. During this time, I doubt that a person who became sick was "blamed" for his or her state (short of those who drank themselves into illness) and certainly was not seen as a burden on society for allowing themselves to become sick. In the past, people wanted health for their own reasons, not because they owed it to their community at large.

So, what happened to our mentality and why did it switch? How did we go from desiring health for our sake to a world which is demanding it for society's sake? I can only speculate, of course, but I think that the following may be factors:

1. The perception that medicine can cure (nearly) anything altered the perception that health was related to luck (genetics, environment, wealth) and transformed it into something we can buy. As we perceive health as something we can choose to purchase or cultivate, we see those who do not attain it as choosing to cost "us" money rather than live a lifestyle that is conducive to health.

2. Media states "you owe it to (whoever)" to be healthy, strong, etc. This notion creates a sense of being obliged to be well. Of course, these messages are commonly offered by companies selling supplements or some other product that promises health, but the messenger's original intent (commercial interests) is lost on people who remember the message but not the source as time goes by. This notion has insinuated it into the collective consciousness.

3. Egalitarian societies which allow for more even distribution of resources lead us to believe everyone has many good choices. In the past, we knew people had unequal access to food, medicine and health education. We didn't expect them to look after themselves well because the perception was they had little choice in the matter.

4. Social welfare created the mindset in which people feel they have a say in your private matters as long as they are paying taxes to assist you. The idea that those relying on public assistance to survive are akin to "employees" who the "employer" (tax-payer) can dictate to is becoming increasingly pervasive.

5. Democracy has an underlying notion of "self-determination" which indoctrinates citizens into the belief that we can do anything if we make the right choices in life. It doesn't provide any context and creates an illusion (which results in just world thinking) that all people have all choices (or at least that the "good choices" healthy people make are available to to everyone). Humans used to understand life was inherently unjust because the evidence was all around them, but that thinking has been replaced. As the material aspects of life have equalized for many people, the illusion that our lives are roughly equitable has created the notion that we all have equal access to health-related choices.

I'm not going to debate whether or not any of this thinking is valid because I've already made it clear in my posts that I think people are far less in control than we'd like to believe. The momentum of personal history drives people to do things another person might not do and our solution is not to help them slow down the car hurtling toward the precipice but to sit by and cluck our tongues in disapproval that they can't get their foot off the gas pedal. In my mind, those people aren't choosing to keep it on there, but their legs are paralyzed and they can't lift their feet. My interest continues to be to help them regain mobility so they can go in another direction rather than to point my finger and accuse them.

I realize my belief that it is far harder to change your choices is an unpopular way of viewing things because it flies in the face of a lot of the thinking I've detailed above. Nonetheless, I think it goes a lot further toward explaining why people continue to do things that hurt them than simply deciding to blame them for their choices. My intention in this post was mainly to explore the factors which I believe have lead us to the point in which we believe health is a social responsibility rather than a personal one. I don't believe that what I do with my body is anybody's business, but that doesn't mean I don't want to understand what drives them to think it is their concern.

Expanding the Capacity to "Choose"

2011-07-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

In previous posts, I talked about how I think we have far less control over our behavior than we realize and that "choices" are often shaped by our past experiences. This is my offering insight and explanation of a situation that I feel is frequently misunderstood in order to judge, blame, and simplify something which is immensely complex. In this post, I'd like to offer some ways in which I believe one can break out of the pattern of choices they are compelled to make based on how I have done this (so far). This is not a fast process, nor an easy one, but it does apply to all areas of life (not just altering your relationship with food) and can lead you to gradually becoming the person you want to be through time and focused effort.

This post is essentially a summation of posts and ideas scattered throughout this blog which I feel are useful to offer in this fashion at this time. I often feel I explain problems in my posts, and it would be useful to follow up with solutions rather than assume everyone has read and digested every post I've made in the past which have such answers scattered among them. Here is what I've done:

1. Complicate the situation.

First things first, don't try to reduce simple behavior down to simple reasoning or logic. If you overeat consistently, it isn't just because you "like food too much", "lack willpower", or are a certain type of eater (stress, boredom, etc.). There are multiple factors that play into the choices you make including genetic predisposition (emotionally, in particular), personal history, present environment, and psychological well-being. If you want to change, you have to know what compels you to do what you do and understand that insight will help you untangle the knots.

It's not enough at this stage to dig for the roots of issues and discover the lame, pat answers that are popular in the media. Analyzing your overeating and saying, "I eat when I'm bored," doesn't really mean much and is not helpful in making different choices. It's important to know why you eat when bored (as opposed to doing something else), why you are bored, and how eating fulfills your needs at such times in a manner that makes it the most favorable (or indeed, only) choice for you. The problem is more likely that you're tired and seeking the most expedient, simple, and gratifying stimulation. The root cause may be being overwhelmed or exhausted, not eating while bored. Dig deep and then dig deeper about what you have unearthed. Deal with the core issues and it'll be easier to make different choices since they won't be driving the ones you are making now.

Don't assume the core is the first answer you find. In fact, it may not even be the second, third or fourth one. Sometimes tunneling down into your motivations and understanding yourself is a years-long excavation project. It is worth the time and effort because it will free you to make different choices by removing the forces motivating your current ones.

2. Analyze "failure".

Failure is seen as a crushing defeat or the indication that one is unable to change. That is not what failure to change is all about. It's the ultimate consequence of making a choice you are not capable of at this point in time. It's too much too soon, more than you can accomplish at this time, or the result of setting things up such that you can't succeed. And the "you" in this case is very personal. I may be able to do something right now that you cannot because my life, body, and mind are different than yours. That does not mean I succeed and you fail or that I am in any way "better" or "stronger" than another person. It means we have different choices that we can make at this point in time based on individual circumstances. Make the choices that are in your current ability to make and be patient.

3. Anticipate and prepare for a psychological backlash, even for small changes.

People like to believe psychology is a ridiculous psuedo-science which has nothing of value to offer "sane" and "normal" people. Part of this is because they are ignorant of the complexity of psychological study and believe it applies only to "crazy" people or deeply effected individuals. Another is that they think only serious disorders can benefit from analysis and yet one more is that they fear that people with psychological study under their belts can see things they don't want seen so they reject psychological analysis out of hand. To this I say, "grow up and get over it". If you are so entrenched in your need to be "normal" that you reject all analysis as hooey, then you probably do have an issue.

Every action in your life happens because it serves you in some fashion. That service may be quelling a rumbling belly. It may be supporting your self-esteem. It could simply be that routine and the comfort it provides stabilizes your chaotic life. If you change your behavior, there will be a backlash from your mind and/or body. Expect it. Prepare for it. Try to figure out a way to mitigate it rather than simply buck up against it and grit your teeth. Don't think simple change means simple consequences when it comes to your mental health.

4. Be hyper-mindful of identity.

Who are you? No, really, who are you? Are you your hobbies? Your body? Your relationships? Deep down, do you really know who you are? You probably do on a superficial level, but not deeply and certainly almost certainly not if you are stripped of your exterior defining characteristics. We define ourselves largely by outside factors and forces, and having an identity is something which all people require. When you start altering outside factors, you tweak your identity and the more you change them and yourself, the more you strip away your core identity. If you don't purposefully build a new one along the way, you will go running back to your old one by returning to former choices. Losing your identity is a far more unsettling experience than people realize. Is it any wonder that people find it so hard to change when they focus on superficial changes and outcomes while ignoring this larger issue? Identity issues will hamper your ability to make different choices. Even dealing with them head-on won't make it easy, but it does expand your capacity to choose differently as you won't feel compelled to return to old patterns to keep your old identity intact.

5. Go slow, but steady.

If you don't accomplish a change successfully, then move the bar rather than keep failing to get over it. If you want to get up an hour earlier but keep sleeping in when the clock goes off, stop trying to get up an hour earlier and focus on getting up 5 minutes earlier instead and think about the value of the extra time for you. Make the choices you can make at this time rather than the ones you ultimately want to make in the future and consider the ultimate repercussions of such changes rather than focus only on the changes themselves.

Psychological studies show that small changes in and of themselves are not enough to really make much of a change, but that's because those studies focus only on the small changes as an end to themselves. It's about incremental change toward an ultimate goal, not about making a tiny change and stopping. Make a small change. Make it routine. Increase the increment after you are used to the routine. However, prepare to fall apart a few times along the way. You'll be going along fine and one day you'll feel like you can't go on anymore. Pause at this point and hold until you're ready to add in another increment. Treading water when you're overwhelmed is better than snapping back into old choices which took you places you didn't want to be.

6. Drop the punitive talk and silence the judgmental voices.

Seriously, this business of deriding yourself in order to achieve something, it's counterproductive to the point of making me wonder if the people who do it are emotionally or intellectually impaired. People who denigrate themselves in order to empower themselves to achieve are children who haven't grown past the point of needing a mommy or daddy to scold them and push them to do their homework. You don't get strong by berating yourself about how weak you are. You get strong by understanding who you are, what you are capable of and applying yourself to making small changes that you are capable of.

Be a grown up and do what can be done for now and stop thinking being an asshole, being pushy, or negative talk makes you tough or cool. It just shows how insanely insecure you are. You can't make different choices by beating yourself up about the choices you've already made. You do it by telling yourself that you can do it and choosing ones that are within your capacity to make at this point in time. If you can't free yourself from the shackles of external voices that say you need to be abused into change or tell you who you should be, then you can't make different choices in your life for good. Work on ditching all judgmental talk and just address yourself as a rational human being in a mature and measured tone.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just a follow-up to my previous post where I talk about making choices. You can make different ones, but not if you think it's a simple decision that you stick to.

Choice (Again)

2011-07-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

My father grew up in the 50's when the role of men was to earn money and that of women was to make the home and rear the children. His life with my mother started out quite like that as he worked making cars for freight trains and she stayed at home and got pregnant with my sister and I. I don't know what their life was like during those years because I was too young to perceive the dynamic between them, but I suppose at this point that they both were living the life they expected in accord with societal norms of the time.

Some time during my father's employment, he suffered an accident in which he was struck in the head with heavy equipment. This happened not once, but several times and the consequence was that he became disabled. The damage done to him would cause random blinding headaches that the most powerful pain medication at the time could only blunt, but not obliterate. He would also suddenly become paralyzed on his left side and become blind in his left eye. The doctors told him that he was going to die young and gave him 6 months to live after conducting painful spinal taps.

All of this happened to my father over 30 years ago and he did not die as the doctors predicted. He did, however, become an alcoholic who sat around the house all day watching T.V. and smoking. My mother, who didn't get the life she bargained for economically as the family was living on my fathers Social Security disability payments, had to go out and work at minimum wage jobs which she hated. While she worked, my father sat around and did little aside form the occasional handling of the trash, yard work, or maintaining our vehicles. He was home all day, and except on those rare occasions when he suffered headaches or paralysis, fit for doing household chores and child-rearing.

One of the many sources of contention between my parents was the burden imposed upon my mother with having to work and be responsible for home and kids. My father would not do these things because this was not man's work. In the end, their solution was to burden my sister and I with as much cooking and housework as they could heap on our 10- and 12-year-old shoulders. It was easier for my mother to say that her two daughters, who were in school full-time, should split the entirety of household responsibilities between them than fight with her husband to have him do some of the things he was well and truly capable of doing.

One could argue that my father made a choice in choosing not to assume the role generally occupied by the woman of the house and that he chose to sit on his ass and do what was easy for him. There may have been a time when I even believed that, but that would not be the case anymore. Now that I'm older, and hopefully quite a bit wiser, I realize that my father made a choice but not the one which seems obvious to most people.

My father was raised in another era and men who were manly did certain things and didn't do other things. When he lost his job and essentially lost his life when given a death sentence, a component of his masculinity was ripped away. He couldn't work and support the family and he wasn't strong physically anymore. Turning to "women's work" because he had the time and ability would have shredded off another large piece of his identity. My father didn't choose to be a lazy, inconsiderate husband and a bad father. He chose to preserve his fragile self-esteem and self-image over shattering what little of these things he had left.

People often talk about how behavior is a choice, and to some extent, that is true. However, we are not all operating from the same pool of options or driven by the same psychological forces to make a particular choice. I've talked before about how choices are driven by the power of individual history and I strongly believe that remains an important truth. Most of us realize this when we are the ones driven to make "bad choices" or choices that are externally judged to be poor ones. We are not so good at applying that insight to others when they make choices we don't agree with.

Thinking about my father's situation, I realize all too clearly how easy it is to judge people for the behaviors they seem to "choose". Psychological survival is a big factor in every choice a person makes and some of us are closer to the precipice and falling into oblivion than others when it comes to the final decision. For my father, he was too close to the edge to be a pioneer in men's roles. In fact, it is my belief that he hurt himself more than anyone else in my family with this choice because it only continued to reinforce his sense of his life's emptiness and lack of value.

There were times when he'd cook for himself or us or wash dishes offering up the angry excuse that "no one else was going to do it", but I think he actually enjoyed doing such things when he gave in to those impulses. His fear of being "found out" or labeled a househusband (particularly if his male friends found out) was too great, unfortunately, for him to ever continue on in such behaviors or to engage in them regularly. I think he knew he was pretty good at those things, and in fact, now, much later in life with my mother being blind and disabled, he will do such things on a daily basis without complaint. Of course, most of his friends are dead, and times have changed, so the risk of being discovered for doing domestic tasks is pretty low now as well.

I wonder how many people are driven to unconsciously make bad choices to the detriment of themselves or others because of psychological survival. From the girl in the group of "cool" kids who regrets bullying the dorky girl but goes along with it to fit in to the car full of dudes who catcall girls because they feel it's the only way to prove their heterosexuality to the people who judge themselves harshly by what they eat, I think there is a lot of "choosing" which reflects that people have little other choice.

I think that we can broaden our capacity to make choices which help us move toward being the kind of people that we want to be, and I believe it's something I've done and continue to do. It's immensely difficult and requires a high level of self-awareness and a strong desire to change the range of choices which are psychologically possible for you, but it can be done over time if one is emotionally prepared for the task. However, I don't think that we can do that until we stop oversimplifying the behavior of others (and ourselves) by saying that what we are doing is something as trivial as "making a choice".

Identifiers

2011-07-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

There is a concept in art called "negative space" which has nothing to do with being "positive" or "negative". It relates to looking at the space around the object rather than at the object itself. Imagine a wall full of framed photos. Fill the photos in with black and the wall space around them with white. The white areas that encase the silhouettes are what is referred to as "negative space".

Identity is a tricky thing, especially when so much of who you are is defined by what is around you ("negative space") rather than what is inside you. People think they are their affiliations and roles rather than human beings. Women are wives, mothers, Christians, teachers, sex objects, cooks, maids, etc. Men are husbands, fathers, yard workers, mechanics, etc. (I realize those are stereotypes, bear with me.) People think they are in relationship to other things around them, not that they simply are.

I have long pondered the metaphysical notion of who I am stripped away of all negative space considerations. If I strip away those aspects of my identity which define me as a writer, a thinker, a wife and partner, etc., what is left? What is left if I toss out all of these negative space identifiers and just look inside the silhouette of me? This isn't a question for this blog because it explores something which is not related to weight, but pondering this issue did reveal a truth for me that is of value in relation to the theme of this blog.*

That truth is that for very fat people, especially those that have been greatly obese for most of their lives (from childhood to adulthood), the negative space is a little bit bigger and a lot harder to escape. It cuts into your silhouette and carves away some of your ability to define yourself by internal aspects. Your appearance and how it is perceived by the outside world is just another negative space identifier because it has to do with how others perceive you more than how you perceive yourself. One has to wonder, incidentally, what it would be like to live life without the aesthetic appraisal of ones appearance. Would you not think about your appearance at all regardless, or would you think yourself beautiful because you were the standard by which you judged such things?

Such notions aside, I realized just how hard it is to divorce oneself from the aspects of identity that relate to appearance under these conditions. My husband, who has asserted that he is happy with his appearance because he feels he is neither stunningly gorgeous enough to be appreciated for his looks (though I find him so) nor unattractive enough to be viewed punitively for them, has made me consider the value of having a neutral outlook in regards to appearance. It is far easier for someone who hasn't received praise or censure for their looks to simply know who they are because it hasn't been tattooed deeply upon their self-perception.

I've been struggling as I continue on in dealing with my issues to strip away the effects of these negative space identifiers. That is, I've been trying to stop feeding myself mantras about how unappealing my body is and how it relates to who I am. Unfortunately, this is not so simple because I continue to have such notions reinforced. When those old tattoos start to fade, someone is ready to apply a fresh coat of ink to the ones which say "fat", "strange", "ugly", etc. I can't control the behavior of others in this regard, but I can at least recognize when I'm the one who is parroting those judgements rather than hearing them externally. A lot of this identity business as time goes by and I lose more weight is coming from inside of me rather than outside, though some of it still comes from others.

I realized today that a large part of the problem I'm dealing with right now is coming from inside, and it has to do with my age as much as my body and my weight. I'm transitioning from one negative identity which says I'm a fat, disgusting, blob, to another negative identity as I lose weight. That new identity is "old". My skin hangs off of my body in wrinkly, crepe-like sheets. My face shows more lines as body fat leaves it. I can see varicose veins that were always there but masked by fat. I realize that I'm moving from one inescapable identifier which society censures to another which society does not censure but sees as showing diminished value. This is not a happy transition.

I would like to say that I'm boldly moving away from allowing myself to be externally defined and focusing on the deeper "me", but the grim irony is that that was a lot easier when I weighed nearly 400 lbs. When your body is that big a hindrance to your life, you have to focus on who you are, not what you look like. It also helped that I avoided the world as much as possible. Losing weight has introduced a lot of new psychological variables into my life and this is just another one of them.

I can pretend it doesn't matter or assert that the world be damned in its estimation of my value based on appearance, but that in no way will change how the negative space around me interacts with me. I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned has come as a result of coming out of the cave I hid in at a very high weight and walking into the light of the real world is that you're only fooling yourself if you think you can exist as an island unto yourself physically, emotionally or psychologically. My identity shouldn't be defined by others, but I also can't escape the consequences of their efforts to do so.

*This blog isn't my only outlet for writing and in no way represents the rich and round nature of my life (which is hidden from view as much as possible to protect my anonymity). It's merely the funnel through which specific thoughts are sorted out and away from the rest of my life, which is far vaster and broader than my readers' might imagine based merely on the content of this theme-based blog.

Why the HAES movement has it wrong

2011-07-22T18:53:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been thinking about the HAES (health at every size) movement. I've run across some fairly articulate fat activists who keep beating readers over the head with their spectacular health at their high weights. This habit has been rubbing me the wrong way, but I hadn't really given it too much consideration until recently.

I realized that my discomfort with HAES as a focal point among overweight people comes from the fact that the very existence of such a movement validates the idea that we have a social responsibility to be healthy. It comes from the same mental place as people who criticize being overweight because it drains the health care system funds or who think it's okay to tell you you're fat and shouldn't eat this or that "because it's bad for your health". Health isn't an obligation we owe the world and HAES essentially acts as an answer to criticisms about weight and health. By addressing those concerns, you validate them.

My feeling is that there needs to be a different sort of movement which encompasses all people with all lifestyles. I'd call it "My Body, My Business." If you want to make it sound catchier, you could even call is "MB squared". The basic idea is that everyone has the right to treat their body, which they own and live in, as they desire. If they want to spruce it up, remodel it, or rebuild it, that's their business. If they want to wreck it or demolish it, it's also their business.

If this were the movement, the focus would be on personal rights to live in accord with ones own values and pursuit of happiness. Those rights, however, would end where they infringe on someone else's. That means smokers can smoke until their lungs turn black, but they can't inflict their smoke on anyone else. It means fat people can gain as much weight as they like, but they can't crowd someone else on a plane. It means alcoholics can drink until their livers cry for mercy, but they can't get in a car and hurt someone else.

Of course, there will always be people who argue that we harm others collectively with our bad habits and damaging our bodies, but I would say that vague and diffuse costs are the top of a slippery slope in which we police lifestyles according to "the greater good". We don't want to go there, because if we kept on that path, no one would be happy when they reached that destination. So, let's keep it to the concrete and real and stop talking about health, which is personal and nobody's business and you don't have to justify how you live to anyone but yourself, and focus on minding our own damn business.

Above Average

2011-07-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

When I read the thoughts of others who want to or are losing weight, they seem to ruminate on and be more than prepared to step into the shoes of "normality". I guess this is because I've been greatly overweight for most of my entire life and many of them may have either spent more time at "normal" or closer to it. I've spent more time at or over 300 lbs. than under it. Living like other people do isn't something I'm accustomed to and it's an emotional transition.

I've talked before about identity, and part of my identity is that of someone who doesn't fit in. Part of that is how other people have objectified me and marginalized me based on body size. Part of that is also the basic facts of existence in a world designed for people of average size when you are far above average. This includes not being able to fit where other people fit when it comes to spaces, but it also, quite obviously, includes clothes.

When it comes to clothes shopping, most people squeal with delight at the prospect of fitting into smaller clothes, shopping in another department, or looking "better" (frankly, I think most people just look "different" when they lose weight, not "better"). For me, this remains something odious and stressful. Part of the reason for this is that I don't care about clothes much and I hate wasting money on them. Part of it is old associations and new confusion associated with a changed body.

Shopping for clothes for me used to be "easy" because all I had to do was get a mail order catalog and order the biggest plus size items they had and hope they fit me. Most of the time, they did. Sometimes, they didn't. This system allowed me to stretch fabric over my form to conform with standards of modesty in a socially acceptable way, but the process was utterly utilitarian. I didn't know how I was going to look when I made new purchases, and I didn't care. Now, I have to care because I work outside my home again.

Yesterday, I went to the store at which I found my first off the shelf clothing which fit. There is no such thing as a "plus size" there, so I can only shop from the larger sizes of "normal". I hadn't planned to deal with clothes there because I don't believe I "need" anything, but I decided that I should push myself to try on some clothes. The main reason for doing this is that I don't know what size I am and doing so would give me an idea. It may shock some people to know that I'm still wearing pants I wore 200 lbs. ago. I've just progressively taken them in as time has gone by.

I realize to some extent that I hang on to my oversized clothes as part of my former image of myself and a rejection of my femininity. I wear XXL T-shirts that fit me close to being a dress and pants that are too big even after being cinched and modified. I need to let go of these habits as a way of letting go of my perception of myself as a shapeless lump. To that end, I need to try on clothes and find things that fit.

This may sound like an easy and possibly even enjoyable thing, but for me, it is fraught with stress and paranoia. I still have to find larger things among normal sizes for starters, but it's more the fact that I'm still fat and I think "everyone" is watching me paw through the clothing racks and thinking, "she's too fat for anything there." This is very likely the result of the spotlight effect error, and not reality, but my feelings are my feelings. I can't deal with them by invalidating them. They can only be dispatched if they are recognized.

Not only do I feel like I'm being judged by people who are sizing me up and determining that I have no business looking for clothes among normal sizes, but this experience also taps into my feeling of being a "fraud". I don't belong in clothes designed for women because I don't have the "right" to be portrayed in a feminine manner because I'm a valueless, gigantic wad of flesh. I'm only fooling myself by painting myself with make-up and trying on "girly" clothes. I "don't belong" in the women's clothing department.

I realize that these thoughts are irrational, though they have been reinforced during nearly all of my adult life. I didn't invent them in my own fertile imagination. They are the clear messages from society for extremely morbidly obese women and I merely internalized them emotionally, despite rejecting their validity on an intellectual level .

The irony is that I know that I am not my body. One of the coping mechanisms you acquire when you live in a body society rejects so roundly for most of your life is the notion that you are your soul, psyche, intellect, or mind. You divide "you" from the meat sack that you inhabit because not doing so would be to exist in a constant state of self-loathing because you'd evaluate yourself as society does. No one can live like that for long.

However, you know, beneath the surface, that you also cannot escape your container, nor the responses to it. No matter how hard you try to distance yourself from your physicality, it is right there with you. It's a conjoined twin with your personality. Pretending it's not a part of you only helps cope with the pain of social censure but it doesn't change the fact that it is inescapably as much "you" in corporeal reality as your mind or soul.

On the surface, I have rejected this for as long as possible, but part of healing is welcoming my body into a partnership with my mind in which it doesn't take second place and isn't regarded as my enemy. For most of my life, I've felt my body has betrayed me and I've hated it for it. My mind has to shape its thoughts toward looking after the body rather than shoving its interests aside in favor of catering to the psyche. No matter how hard you try to separate mind and body, you can't in this world. That's a task for the next one, if there is another.

So, I made myself try on clothes, but not because I'm so infatuated with my new figure or want to "look good", but because it's part of a process of learning to respect my body and view myself in a less pejorative light. I still hate shopping for clothes, and I still don't care about how I look. And, I still hate how my body looks in most things, but this is how I'm moving forward.

Not There Yet

2011-07-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, one of my clients told me that she thought she suffered heat stroke after returning from a vacation in a very hot part of the country. She said that she felt terrible and had no appetite for three days. Though she wanted to eat, she couldn't make herself do so. I had two reactions to this: I felt very bad for her that she was so sick for such a long time, and I envied her that she had no appetite for three days.

The latter response is one that I didn't think about, but several days later, as I walked in scorching heat and sweat ran down my brow and thoughts of heat stroke entered my mind, I rolled it around a bit more thoughtfully. My thought as I wondered if I had drunk enough water or been in the sun too long was not, "it'd be awful if I suffered heat stroke, too." I was thinking, "at least I wouldn't want to eat for several days." As soon as I reached the end of this line of thinking, I realized that my relationship with food, much improved as it is, is still not in a good place.

While I have very successfully divorced myself from the idea that some foods are "good" and some are "bad" and will eat whatever I want (though in controlled portions), it became clear that I still embrace the idea deep down that "eating is bad" and "not eating is good". When I was in junior high school, while sitting near one of the more popular girls, I heard her remark that she thought she might be catching a cold or the flu. She said that she hoped that she was because she wanted to lose some weight and that would expedite the process. At that time, I thought about the fact that getting sick never made me not want to eat. In fact, it only made me want to eat more and more unhealthy food.

Eating is a part of life. It's for pleasure. It's for sustenance. It's an experience that we should approach with joyous anticipation at the variety of experience and quality of nourishment that we are about to receive. It's a part of our celebrations of important events and a component of building rich memories. Instead of viewing the desire to eat in such a light, some part of me still sees having an appetite as an undesirable impulse.

Part of the reason I feel this way, I'm certain, is all of the censure I have received all of my life for wanting to eat. Fat people aren't supposed to eat at all. They should lose weight in order to gain the privilege others have to nourish themselves. If they must eat, they must only eat for nutrition and never for pleasure. For fat people, wanting to eat is "bad". Not wanting to eat is "good". Part of me, the conscious part, has no interest in being a "good fatty", but obviously some unconscious part of me still subscribes to the idea that I shouldn't want to eat.

Not all of these feelings are inspired by direct societal messages about being a "bad fatty". Some of it is also the result of a life spent fighting urges to eat things that made me heavier and failing to resist those urges. The battle fatigue I sometimes feel at not acting on hunger immediately quite naturally inspires a sense that it'll all be a hell of a lot easier if I had less of an appetite.

Frankly, I do have less of an appetite now than before, but I still feel like eating more than I do most of the time (and definitely more often than I do). The bottom line is that I think I would eat nearly all of the time some days if I didn't resist my urges. And I know that doing so would result in an ever upward spiral of eating more until I started to put weight back on again. The appetite can contract through behavior modification and gradual reduction in portions, but it can so easily expand through similar increases.

Sometimes, I'd just like to dive into a pile of food and not come up for air until I'm ready to burst, and occasionally, I do that and regret it a little because I feel uncomfortably full. Fortunately, doing so rarely lands me at consuming more than 2500 calories in a day these days, so it's not a serious problem. However, I'd still rather not want to do it at all. I need to deal with the part of me that thinks being sick and not eating might be better than being well and eating. At this point in time, I'm at the recognition stage. From here, I have to work on healing my thinking in this regard so I can form an even better relationship psychologically with food.

It's Not a Psychological Failure

2011-07-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, well, perhaps more often than that, I will run across a woman who is so frustrated with herself because she was hungry and ate and ate and ate. These are always women who have been "dieting" and are perplexed about incessant and increasingly irresistible hunger. They view eating a lot as a failure of will and are disappointed in themselves.

I've written before that I sometimes simply have to just eat, and at those times, I will eat a lot. I recognized this a long time ago as the predictable physiological outcome of consistent deprivation and that it's not about mental desire to eat more, but biological pressure. For those women who are confused, I would recommend that they view what they are doing from the body's point of view rather than their own more highly developed mental viewpoint.

From the body's point of view, it is being consistently deprived of necessary energy. It has been successfully "saving" energy as fat on your body for a long time and is pleased to have reserves on hand for need. Suddenly, it is having to use those reserves day-in and day-out. It's like a miser who suddenly finds the cash flow has utterly dried up and now he has to constantly take from savings. There is utter biological panic at the idea of being under-fueled constantly over a long period of time. The more extreme the deprivation, the more extreme the response from the body.

As far as your body is concerned, you are not getting fit and healthy. In fact, as far as your body is concerned, you are slowly dying of starvation. Its priority is to send as many biochemical cues to you as possible to get you to eat more and stop the starvation which it is reading as the current state of affairs. Unlike the miser, who may have an account book somewhere telling him exactly how much is in the savings account, the body does not know you've got energy to spare hanging off your hips and belly. It only knows that it's constantly diving into savings and is uncertain when it will run out.

So, the body says, "I'm going to die and I must act to pressure you into stopping this." That insatiable hunger is the culmination of a week, a month, or however long it has been of deprivation. The nice thing is that you can deal with this effectively by stopping with the head games and just eating once in awhile. Cue the body occasionally such that it thinks you're not starving every single day. This isn't "cheating". It isn't about "giving in." It's about occasionally succumbing to a biological need such that the body stops going into panic mode and driving you insane with hunger.

I haven't plateaued in my weight loss, and I do wonder (though can never know) if this is because I've never practiced extreme deprivation (usually eating between 1500-1800 calories) and do occasionally just respond to these super hungry times by eating until I'm full. That's right, not "just sated", not "no longer hungry", but damn good and full. Is it possible that I'm cuing my body occasionally such that it feels all is well and I'm not starving to death and there's no need to cling to fat reserves? I don't know, but it is possible.

I also wonder at times if a lot of women who have turned to fat acceptance after dieting, many of whom pushed themselves hard and cut calories far back and eventually stopped losing, wouldn't have suffered metabolic damage had they practiced more moderate behavior. As far as I can tell based on weight loss and calorie consumption values (and I've been eating consistently more since the beginning of this year and exercising no more), I have not suffered any sort of metabolic slowdown from modest deprivation.

I also know that I am careful about exercise in terms of never doing it too hard and allowing for resting periods for my modest weight lifting and stretching when the muscles are aching or the glycogen reserves seem unusually low (signaled by unusually difficult muscle movement). In other words, I'm not doing anything which would cue my body to believe more exertion and damage is going on than necessary. I'm also not pushing so hard that it would need to be consuming the muscle mass instead of the fat.

I'm not saying that my way is the right way, but I am saying that it's not a psychological issue when you deprive yourself everyday of food and then find yourself starving and wanting to eat and eat and eat. It's your body seeing what is happening to it from another perspective. Yes, you can fight it, but perhaps only to your own detriment. Starvation reactions are real and proven, no matter how many people want to deny them in order to validate the irrational notion that the body is simply a calculator into which calories in and calories out can be input and predictable results will occur. Give your body a break. Give your self-esteem a break, too, and just eat once in awhile and stop beating yourself up for it. It's not going to sabotage your weight control efforts as long as you're reading it as a real cue and not acting on emotional needs to binge.

Beauty

2011-07-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, I used to fantasize about a beautiful blonde woman I named Christine. In my fantasy, she was voluptuous, but not fat. Her hair was long, wavy and thick. She was talented and intelligent, but quiet and reserved in manner. Because of her beauty and manner, everyone was intrigued by her. Men desired her and women admired her.

Christine was an avatar of my hopes and dreams. She had the aspects of me that I liked (my hair, except blond, and my general shape, but not fat, and she had my intelligence), and the ones that I desired (good temper control, beauty, thinness). In my fantasies, people treated her and regarded her in the manner I would have liked to have been. They were interested in her, wanted to associate with her, and were keen to be in her presence. Men not only wanted her, but they wanted to take care of her. Depending on the fantasy, she had wealth or power, but was still vulnerable and needed support. She needed a lot of what I needed, despite having more than I had.

I hadn't really thought about this fantasy and the implications for quite some time, but my thoughts as of late in regards to beauty brought it back. One thing I realized is that the beauty ship has sailed for me and it's never coming back to port. I'm too old to ever be considered "beautiful", and I was too fat when I was young enough to carry the illusion of beauty as youth can do. And, don't give me any crap about how fat does not equal ugly and thin does not equal beautiful. I've already discussed that before and it's not a concept I buy into. There are many ugly thin people (I see a lot of them everyday, trust me) and beautiful fat people. However, the sort of beauty that I'm talking about is never, ever seen as a part of being fat.

Fat people can be beautiful, but the kind of beauty I'm talking about is the type that society rewards with power. My fantasy was not so much about beauty as it was about what beauty granted one in life, and no matter how gorgeous a (truly) fat woman is, she's never going to get that sort of power, not the type that people recognize as aesthetically pleasing but society at large is disinterested in. I'm not talking about the imaginary version "fat" which comes from idealizing runway models who look like human coat hangers. I'm not talking about Crystal Renn "fat", but truly fat with rolls of tissue cascading off of you and all of the skin damage (e.g., stretch marks, discoloration where skin rubs together, etc.) that comes along with it. This is not a beauty that can confer power, but rather gets some individual recognition by people who subscribe to more varied notions of beauty. It's the essence of self-acceptance and finding ones own unique beauty, but it does not give one the things I fantasized about.

Part of me mourns the fact that I'll never have the sort of power that beauty grants people, and part of me knows it's all an illusion. I've seen women who were once considered quite attractive reach a higher age and found that life is quite confounding for them. What was once given to them with ease is now retracted. They believe they earned what they were given, and struggle to reconcile the changes in the way people treat them with how they're going to live the rest of their lives. If beauty gave you power and that power is gone, what do you do now? I'm not saying such people lack skills, but rather that it's a real blow to their identity and notions of the way the world works which causes them to live in fear of how they will get by. They may have those skills, but they may not even know where to apply them having not had need of them before.

All of that being said, part of me wishes that, for just a little while, I had lived as a true beauty. It's an experience that perhaps I never had the capacity to live in because my basic physical structure may not have made any conception of me, fat or thin, "beautiful". I'll never know, because it's simply too late to ever be sure.

Nine Months

2011-06-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not pregnant. Nine months is the time between now and when I make my big move. That's the move which kicked off my change in myself and my body. When I started this, I had a goal at the end and that was to weigh 150 lbs. by early spring of 2012. Right now, my best guess is that I weigh 182 lbs., more or less. The interesting thing is that I haven't thought about the deadline or "how much longer" I have to reach my goal for quite some time.

As my husband and I were talking this morning about the looming change, and all of the logistical issues related to getting from where we are to where we'll go, I suddenly realized that my thinking had completely shifted from where it was in June 2009 to where it is today. At that point in time, my fear was that I would still weigh nearly 400 lbs., or, at best, still weigh around 300 and that my weight would impede my ability to get on a plane and sit in one seat and to get a new job when we get to where we are going. Though I'm still fat, I no longer fear my weight being a significant issue by the time we leave. What is more, I have very little concern about regaining in the future.

I considered "the math" today and I would have to lose an average of 3.5 lbs. a month from now until then to get to my goal number. The thing is, the math is irrelevant because bodies don't work that way. What is more, I'm not going to do anything differently in order to get my chin up to an arbitrary bar (150 lbs.). I'm not going to boost my exercise, reduce calories, or fret over what types of food I'm eating. I'm going to stay the course, and that course includes eating nearly 2000 calories or sometimes more on occasion (generally, once a week now). If I don't reach 150 by the time I go, it's okay. I'll get there at some point thereafter, at least if that is where my weight is meant to land on a healthy and varied diet with small treat consumption.

Though I'm still pretty fat, and I still believe it may affect my employability in some case, I'm not prepared to go off the deep end to reach a number on the scale. I'm very happy now with how I live each day food-wise (and in other ways as well). I feel good about the nutritional balance, the flavor, the smell, and texture of my entire diet (and I use "diet" correctly here to mean "the food I eat", not "dieting" as in restricting my food intake). I can not only live this way forever, but I can be pretty damn happy with it. I don't feel deprived. I don't long for things I can't have. I don't want to stuff myself stupid, at least not most of the time. And, make no mistake, wanting to stuff yourself stupid on occasion is part of human nature. It doesn't matter what your weight is, you'll want to do it from time to time. It's nothing to be upset about or hate yourself for.

Food police might wag a finger a me for "wasting" calories on a cookie, a square of chocolate, or half a piece of cake, but they can plant their lips squarely on my posterior and give me a big wet one. And fat advocates who predict my early demise because of weight loss or say I have a 95% change of regaining, there is space on my ample posterior for you to lay one down as well. There's something between the life bullying food nazis and fat advocating zealots talk about, and that's where I currently live. It's moderation and balance. I like to call it "normal". That's the place at which food stops being a source of pain and stress in your life.

The other "place" where I currently live is a mental one. That is one in which the context of weight and food in my life is becoming increasingly less neurotic. The fact that my deadline is the length of a baby's gestation away and my primary, secondary, and tertiary thoughts are not about whether or not I'm going to make my "goal" is a pretty good indicator of that. And I'm really happy about it.

Hops, Skips and Jumps

2011-06-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read even a smattering of posts on this blog knows that I don't weigh myself often, and, indeed, did not weigh myself at all for a very long time after changing my life and myself. These days, I weigh myself once a month because progress has become impossible to measure from visual or environmental indications alone. This is part of what happens as your weight goes lower and I knew that even back when I first started.

I usually weigh myself at the beginning or end of the month, give or take a few days. I always ask myself before I step on the scale if whatever number comes up, be it a little higher or a little lower, is going to frustrate or upset me. If the answer is "yes", then I don't weigh myself. The answer these days is always "no", it will not bother me.

I don't blog often about the numbers, because they are secondary to the changes themselves. If you are newish to this blog, then you may not know that I make behavioral and psychological changes my goals, not numbers or dress sizes. The numbers only ensure that my psychology and behavior are where they need to be for continued progress. They tell me if I'm going far enough, or too far too fast. They don't tell me what to think, feel, or do, however.

Last time I weighed myself, my weight had taken a pretty big drop down to 186 lbs. The time I weighed myself after that, it had "gone back up" to 191 lbs. The truth is, and I'm writing about this because I want to stress this point strongly to anyone who is struggling with weight issues, I didn't lose as much as I appeared to the first time nor did I gain any the second time. The numbers are affected by a lot of things - whether or not I have defecated or urinated recently, whether or not I have eaten and what I have eaten, the time of day, the time of month, the amount of water I have drunk, the temperature of the room and how much exercise I've been getting in. The sensitivity of the scale may also factor into it.

When I went "up" after a month, I wasn't distressed because I knew the numbers weren't a reflection of a setback or lack of progress. One of the useful things about making behavior and psychology the goal is that the outcome is a natural consequence, not the end-all and be-all. I know what I do and I know what will happen if I keep doing it. And I weighed myself today because I had noticed a physical change which looked like I'd experienced a change in size. My weight was 182 lbs. Of course, this number is also not accurate, and I may see some other fluctuation next month, but that's okay. It's worth noting that I am now just a few pounds short of having lost 200 lbs. Also, at 174 lbs., I will magically go from "obese" to "overweight". I'm not sure if my body can tell the difference between now and 8 lbs. less from now, but I'm sure a doctor will think it's a big deal.

My current body, in a big shirt, but pants that actually fit. You can see how most of my weight is down on the bottom. Those lumps in the middle aren't love handles. It's the shirt bagging out. I actually have a much smaller waist than can be seen here.

Sometimes I look at my body and just ache to get to the end of this, not because I'm itching to stuff myself with food again. I know that I'm only two or three glasses of milk away from the calorie level at which I might be eating for the rest of my life. I'm anxious simply to be seen as "normal" and to not have any concerns that I'm being judged by my weight. And I still am judged by my body size. What is more, I'm anxious to go to a doctor and have him listen to my symptoms rather than dismiss everything based only on body size. The latter is something which I will face soon as I'm going to have a full check-up in September.

This will be for the first time in many, many years that I will do such a thing. I put it off because I didn't want to face the prejudice, but now, I'm old enough to face the fear and judgement in the interest of knowing where I stand physically. Frankly, I'm not especially worried about the outcome. My guess is that my numbers will look pretty good because my lifestyle habits are pretty good with regular (non-strenuous) exercise and very balanced nutrition. That isn't to say I still don't eat a cookie or a bit of chocolate everyday, but just that I don't think a bite of such things here and there sink the health ship.

Part of me is almost keen to get tested to see if a bunch of machines will tell me I'm as okay as I think I should be. Perhaps I'm fooling myself though. Perhaps all of this weight loss hasn't done anything for me and good eating and regular exercise aren't what they're cracked up to be. It wouldn't be the first time in my life that I did everything "right" and ended up somehow being "wrong" at the end, but I can hope.

Summertime Judgement

2011-06-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I weigh at the moment because the number means very little to me. My appearance also means little to me, except to the extent that it draws unwanted attention. For awhile, I was "passing" in public as I walked around at 186 pounds. In clothing, the fact that most of my excess weight is hanging below my waist was camouflaged, especially when wearing a coat or sweater.

Summer has brought shorter pants out of the closet and had me walking around in public with my much fatter lower body drawing attention. The looks that I was spared throughout winter are back with a vengeance. People look down with gaping mouths at my super chubby calves, follow them up to my hips, thighs and stomach and finally make their way up to my face and look into my eyes with a look which I'm all too familiar with. It's the look that says I'm less than human because of my fatness. My body, which is now more fully exposed, has dictated my low value.

During the winter, people looked at my face first, not my legs. My face and upper body are pretty much "normal", and I was judged by my hair, eyes, shoulders, and chest. These met with either disinterest, or approval. As long as I hid my fatness with clothes, I could pass for human. Now that the heat has revealed it, I'm back down in the puddle with other lesser creatures.

This experience is an unnecessary reminder of how differently people are treated based on body image. I say that it wasn't necessary because it's not like the decades of being gawked at, made fun of, and openly scorned has faded from memory after a brief winter exposure to being treated roughly as "normal". It's just a more profound experience for me to be flip-flopped from one side ("normal") to the other (fat enough to be gawked at) without actually changing my body size appreciably. It also pretty clearly demonstrates how superficial such judgement is, despite the fact that most people say they are concerned with weight and health. I am at the same health level whether I'm wearing long pants and a coat or wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

It was a relief, for awhile, to be free of such openly rude and pejorative behavior. It didn't make me feel like I'd joined a new tribe though. Many people who lose weight revel in their status as "normal" and this is part of what fuels their diet and weight loss zealotry, but I've never felt that way. Part of the reason is that I'm still fat (and probably always will be - it's just a question of how fat), but a bigger part is that the tattoo of fat prejudice left on me goes down to the bone.

I won't forget how I'm regarded based merely on how the lumps and bumps of my body are visible or how large they are. I won't forget how arbitrary and mind-numbingly ignorant such behavior is. I certainly can't forget that I'm the same person now that I was before and that the approval I receive for my appearance (or the lack of censure) is actually an insult. I also won't forget how fleeting and unreliable such approval is, as I've experienced just how ethereal it is in a span of months.

Random Sadness and the Pain Seesaw

2011-06-22T00:30:00.000-07:00

When I started changing myself to lose weight, my initial problem was crippling back pain. Aside from a very painful blip earlier this year, my circumstances in that regard have greatly improved, though they are not 100% better. Surely, weight factored into the stress on my congenital spine condition and caused more pain, but losing weight hasn't made it go away. All it has done is reduce the stress and bring on better fitness and muscle strength from walking everyday.

Since late last year, I've developed an issue with my right knee which has been incredibly painful at night. My guess is that lying on my side places stress on damaged joints or resting causes inflammation of what is becoming an increasingly arthritic knee. The "cure" for this is to build up support muscles, but this is not so simple. The exercises which may help my knee are exactly the sort I was doing before my back problems temporarily surfaced.

I'm on a seesaw. If I attend to my knee, my back responds with pain. If I respond to my back, my knee becomes excruciating at night. Sometimes the pain is so intense that any mere movement while I'm asleep is agony and I wake from pain early in the morning and can't go back to sleep. The able-bodied don't know or care that some people have to live with this sort of difficulty. They just want to blame us for our weight problems.

For now, I have little recourse but to ease back into exercises for my knee at a glacial pace and hope things slowly improve without the seesaw tipping in the other direction and sending me back to my bed in terrible back pain. It's like walking a tightrope. If I step just a little too far in one direction, or move a little too fast, I will fall. This used to frustrate me back before I controlled food as a primary approach to weight loss. Now, it's merely about pain rather than weight, and, of course, that's of great consequence. I might lose weight faster if I exercised more, but I'm not convinced that the pace would be appreciably better.

Beyond the issues with pain I'm dealing with, I've had some experiences as of late with random and intense sadness. I'm not sure if these are biochemical in nature, or if they are the emotional equivalent of stopping to catch my breath after a psychological marathon. I have a strong sense that it is the latter given the frequency and duration and the circumstances.

These moments of intense and profound sadness, during which I feel so devastated that I put my head down and weep, only occur when I'm alone. They also tend to come about after I have performed a task which is atypical. The most recent one came after I cleared out a bookshelf in preparation for leaving where I'm currently living (which will happen early next spring).

Clearing this shelf was something which gave me great pleasure and even tossing out two giant bags of trash made me feel like I was making some good progress toward the inevitable paring of possession for our move. On a conscious level, all of this purging was joyful and filled me with a sense of accomplishment. As the job moved within an inch of completion, and I was sitting down and listening to some rock music, I suddenly had an uncontrollable urge to cry and was filled with fear.

It's my feeling that this is all tied up with what I have been saying about security, poverty, and fear of change. Growing up poor meant the things I had filled my life with some sort of value. Indeed, my mother was a shopaholic and a low-level hoarder who refused to throw items which had no utility and were in poor condition away. She role-modeled acquisition as a path to happiness (though it didn't make her happy) and as a way to give one the illusion of a rich life.

While I never embraced her view, I did collect things several times during my life and divesting myself of them was always difficult, even when those things no longer brought me joy. I think that, in those cases, it was because my identity was so weak that I connected it to those things rather than to the one that was forced upon me (disgusting fat girl). I wasn't the bad, ugly person people said I was, I was (fan of rock group/user of certain computer system/wife of my husband). The bottom line was that I wasn't any good, but I could attach myself to good things and elevate myself in the process. I'm not talking about the sort of raising of oneself which confers superiority, but simply bringing myself up closer to the level of other human beings. After all, I knew I was sub-human. People let me know that every day, but maybe they'd let me into the club as some sort of red-headed stepchild if I was connected strongly enough to something better than me.

I realize that leaving the place I'm in is going to bring about another extreme identity change as it has forced the status of an outsider upon me. I'm intellectually prepared for this, but emotionally, perhaps far less so. Divesting myself of useless possessions in preparation for departure is tied up in this loss, but also in change and the resulting loss of security. That loss is wider than a loss of money, though that is part of it. It is also the loss of health insurance (not that I ever go to doctors since they loath me and have nothing of value to tell me), loss of operating in a routine which I feel some mastery of, and loss of relationships that I've established. It is, in many ways, a forfeiture of power as well as identity and security.

I think these moments of profound sadness are coming on after I dive in with both feet and push toward a change I fear because of all of the losses. The inertia of the dive carries me through and success is invigorating, but all of the effort that it took to get there, and where I end up after taking the plunge relative to where I started fills me with unconscious anguish which bursts out in an explosion of tears.

There's not much I can do about this besides be aware of my feelings and work with them. These are the sorts of things that food smothered away and extreme fatness redirected. I could be sad because I was loathsome and there was nothing I could do about it. Now, I have to find out why I'm really said, as opposed to hanging it on my body issues.

Building on a swamp

2011-06-10T23:49:00.000-07:00

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England." - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I no longer read blogs written by gun-ho people (especially women) who are all about measurements. That is, if a blog is about how many minutes one has exercised, how many calories one has eaten, how many liters of water have been consumed, and how much fiber, protein, etc. one has ingested, I don't read it. These blogs are about mechanistic processes that people record because they feel the act of recording them makes them accountable. They flog themselves for "bad days" and applaud themselves for "good days".

In no way am I suggesting that this sort of monitoring of ones behavior is a negative thing, at least not up to a point. I believe that for people who want to make changes in their lives, this mechanistic monitoring is the beginning. You have to start somewhere and it is immensely helpful to begin with what can be easily understood, observed and monitored. From here though, it's important to keep going. I'm not talking about the "keep going" which is about continuously fixating on food and exercise, but about finding a way not to fixate but to still live within certain boundaries. I'm talking about understanding yourself as the next step.

I realize that some people rebel at the very notion of "boundaries" when it comes to food and exercise. They feel this way because there seem to be two extremes for many people: rigid and "in control" and free and "flexible". I believe that a truly self-actualized person lives within boundaries, but those boundaries are the type that promote growth rather than inhibit. Living constantly without structure, and yes, limits, is little more than chaos. It is not unbounded growth that one receives from infinite flexibility, but chaotic movement in unintended and unwanted directions.

True growth can be achieved only by knowing where you want to go and finding out how to go there. That direction is entirely up to the individual and may or may not include various choices of discipline, but some type of boundary will be a necessity unless you simply want to be propelled forward without regard for where you will end up. This is not rigidity or destruction. It is intentional and deliberate growth. This is the middle ground between excessive focus on mechanistic processes and straight-jacketing your life according to socially sanctioned and sometimes arbitrary rules and being propelled by a lack of boundaries into a place you may not flourish in as a person.

Of course, it's not so simple a situation as all of that. Our genetics, life experiences, and particular psychology create the ground on which we can build ourselves. We can't simply decide to make choices and follow through on them because we need to know what lies beneath. Even the best choice can result in negative consequences if there's an emotional sinkhole beneath it that swallows up our best intentions. This is something that my evolving circumstances have lead me to understand.

If you built you house on unstable ground, and it fell down, the next logical step would be to repair the ground itself rather than to build another house on the same spot. People would think you were foolish to build again without handling the structural defects that caused you to lose the fruits of your efforts, yet that is what many people with food relationship problems are doing. They believe that if they keep patching up the building, it'll stop falling down, and refuse to accept that there is any underlying issue that should be addressed.

In this metaphor, the "ground" is the psychological issues that we built our relationship with food upon. The structure is our lifestyle habits. Many people build their "house" again and again on the same swampy ground and find that it falls in (they regain the weight). They refuse to believe that the ground itself has anything to do with the problem. It's about the architecture (their failure to stick to "the plan") or the materials (the food they eat). If they just built it properly, it'd stop falling down. And, you know what, they just might be right. You can eventually build on bad ground and it won't fall down, but it's that much harder and the likelihood of repeated failure is far, far greater.

Right now, what I've come to realize is that I've fixed some of the ground, but the weaknesses have transferred to another area. This is why I lashed out at someone else rather than behaved self-destructively toward myself. It's as if that swampy area over there which was causing the part of my "house" that was creating havoc with my relationship with food oozed over to another area for awhile. It's still there though, and could migrate back over to the food issue if I don't drain the area entirely. The problem is that I'm not sure how to do it, but I do know there's a structural defect (a psychological issue) that still needs some work.

I've been pondering this situation and I know that the roots of the problem go back to my upbringing and the highly insecure and unstable life that I had. The times at which I most need to act out in some particular manner are when I feel that I am vulnerable and need protection. This is because I grew up with a mother who lashed out at me for reasons unrelated to my behavior and who constantly fought with my father. Their arguments, which often resulted in divorce threats on my mother's part, made me feel as if there was no stable existence for me. There was no one I could trust because the adults in my life behaved like children and had no control over themselves. How could they possibly protect me, particularly when they often were part of the group of people that hurt me?

Beyond this, there was the often talked about poverty and the fact that we were on the brink of losing everything. This ongoing stress caused me to seek becoming "big" and perhaps more powerful, or maybe even it fed the illusion that I could have plenty in the face of having nothing at all. It was a reassurance that I had something, a lot of something (anything) and no one could take it away once I had safely put it into my body. The satisfaction of gorging myself may have been beyond comfort.

Finally, since I have been tormented and tortured my entire life for my appearance, I have always felt like someone who walks out the door and has been beaten with sticks by anyone and everyone. I lived the life of the dog people kicked when they had a bad day or a bout of low self-esteem. I was constantly judged and absolutely powerless. Food didn't give me power, but eating whatever I wanted in whatever quantity I wanted proved to me that there was something that I could do as I wanted. The consequences were beside the point. This was something that was mine and no one could stop me.

Though it may have appeared to be an act of defiance of the wishes of society, I think it was more about living some aspect of life exactly as I wanted without regard for the feelings or wishes of others. Since the feelings of others were constantly being foisted upon me, this may have lent me a sense of personal power. You may have the power to hurt me, but I have the power to give myself what I want in this one area. After all, I had no power in any other area.

So, as I start to dig deeper into my issues, I think that the core is rooted in a lack of security, and a sense of deprivation and entitlement. I couldn't have so many things throughout most of my life and no one protected or looked after me, so I acted upon those feelings by eating. The eating served a multitude of purposes, far beyond comfort (though it was potent and effective for that). And, no, this wasn't a rational line of reasoning, but then how much human behavior is truly rational? If I am sick and my mother hugs me, does it make the sickness go away? If I am scared in the dark and I turn on the light, does it really change any threat? We accept some irrational behavior as part of our nature, but we deny it when we want to judge others for their particular line of irrational thinking.

A lot of people may think, quite rightfully, that the security I seek does not exist (in addition to it being unattainable through food). They'd be right. However, we've all heard stories of people who survived the depression and became hyper-frugal and saved every plastic tub their margarine came in and wouldn't toss anything useful away. We've heard of soldiers who starved and later always kept bags of sugar, flour, and cans of food stashed away. Doing the things they do doesn't remove the real possibility of a return to bad times, but such actions provide the illusion of security. I think we all need to have at least a bit of that illusion in order to not feel especially neurotic all of the time. I grew up without so much as an illusion of safety and emotional protection, and I think that's a piece of how my particular swamp was created.

Mental "injury", not illness (perhaps)

2011-06-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

During a recent e-mail exchange with a kind and thoughtful fellow blogger, I reconsidered how I speak of myself and my issues as "mental illness" and applied some deeper considerations to the limitations of that term. Personally, I do not see any stigma attached to the idea of being "mentally ill" because I think that people who do not possess some degree of mental illness are exceptionally rare.

There are many people who are functional, yet have emotional or personality issues. Those issues do not impede their ability to do what most people do, but tend to erode quality of life to varying extents. Because they do not realize that it is possible to enjoy a higher quality of life through therapy, they simply assume they are indelibly who they are and that we all have issues and they will live with theirs. This is something I have never subscribed to. I think that our issues are there to be overcome and that quality of life is to be improved through self-awareness, exploration, and movement toward a more self-actualized self.

It is this drive which compels me to write here, but also which may have lead me to talk about feeling I am "mentally ill". Talking about it exaggerates the sense of it. In person, people would find that I am anything but the picture of what I appear to be here. I'm articulate, outgoing, and very together. I'm also extremely frank and candid about who I am, where I came from, and where I'm going. I'm not embarrassed by my depression or despair because I know nearly everyone experiences it, much as they may try and cram it into the back of their mental closet and pretend it doesn't exist and present a veneer of "normality" to the world. They can do that, but I think that only deepens the pain, so mine is at hand and dealt with.

During my brief e-mail exchange with this lovely person, I realized that there needs to be different terminology for emotional and psychological problems in order to make people more open to improving their quality of life via therapeutic processes. Mental illnesses carries a sense of something intractable and highly aberrant. I think this is why so many women with a relationship with food that makes them miserable resist the idea that they have a psychological problem, not merely a matter of biology or trite issues such as "willpower".

"Mental illness" seems like something which is generally "forever" and must be managed with medication, like Type 1 diabetes. However, I don't believe that I am mentally ill in that way. I feel that I am "mentally injured". That is, at some point in the past, I was damaged a great deal and the broken bones of that psychological damage were never properly set. They healed improperly and I developed an eating disorder that took me up to the brink of 400 lbs. Over the last two years, I've re-broken those mental bones and am trying to get them to set properly now.

This is the source of my suffering as I find out how to find the right way to heal those injuries. I can no longer numb or comfort myself with food so I have to figure out where to cope with my pain. Half of this equation is somehow coming to terms with the pain itself and the causes. I have to try to dispel it as much as possible so that less coping is required. The other half is working out an effective means of coping that is not destructive to my health and well-being.

I'm not sure what "treatment" will lead me to heal and I'm not sure that anyone can know what would work for me since every individual must find a manner which uniquely suits his or her pain and injuries. The easy part is knowing what doesn't work. I know that substance abuse, whether it is food, alcohol or drugs, is the "easy" solution which must be avoided at all cost. I also know that the common answers are to replace those destructive coping strategies with societally sanctioned ones like exercising, social activities, etc. I also know that those are just band-aids that are slapped over the issues. At best, they are distractions.

The real answers do not lie in taking a particular action but in figuring out how to cope on the deepest levels. Just as I re-conditioned myself with food, I also need to find a way to condition my emotional and psychological responses. I need to dig very deep to the moments injury was inflicted and analyze the paths that were taken that lead to overeating. Those roads now lead to dead ends that lead to despair, but I can start building onto them so that they end in a better place.

The main problem right now is that this is a new phase in this process and I haven't started looking yet nor do I know which direction to turn in. My guess is this will start with issues in my childhood and lead to turning points. It will be painful, but I'm sure that it can be very productive and the potential for healing those mental injuries is quite great.

Food, the addiction

2011-06-07T22:49:00.000-07:00

I read a study today which supported something I have contended for quite some time, but is often doubted by many. The study compared responses in the brain to food to responses to addictive substances. It was a small study of only 48 women, and not constructed with impeccable validity, but the brain scans suggested that the brains of those who are addicted to drugs and those potentially addicted to food are having the same sorts of responses.

This isn't an "a-ha" moment for me in which I am asserting triumphantly that I was "right" because one little study lends credence to the notion that people actually can be addicted to food. Frankly, brain scans are of little interest to me in "proving" what I believe. I have always seen addiction as a psychological issue. The fact that physiological analysis can be done to back that up is gravy. It's behavior that matters, and behavior that must be changed if people want to change their lives in the directions they'd prefer to go.

I knew I was addicted to food. I say "was" but recent events make me wonder if I still am and always will be. As my last several posts indicate, I've been in a state of enormous difficulty in my life as of late. It's the result of ongoing issues which, as of about 3 days ago, are starting to be resolved. It's important to note that, for the last 5 months as things have gotten worse emotionally, I have been hungrier than ever. This could be mere coincidence, but as of the breaking point after which things started to clear up and solutions looked like they may be at hand, that constant hunger has vanished.

I've written before that we are programmed to eat when stressed, but I'd gotten past the point where normal everyday stress drove me to eat. It was only the oppressive and psychologically damaging weight of long-term emotional difficulty that set off that hunger. Even in the face of it, I wasn't overeating, but I was having to battle wanting to eat all of the time regardless of my sense of actual physical satiety (that is, there was food in my stomach and sugar in my blood stream). I was starting to feel as if I'd jumped back to the point where I'd have to spend all day thinking about food and trying not to overeat, but now I realize that was not what it was.

The bottom line was that, while I consciously do not have a food addiction and do not think about having a pint of ice cream to comfort me, unconsciously and/or biochemically, I still have the same stress responses that compel me to eat when I am under prolonged difficulty and intense stress. I didn't act on the impulses to my detriment, but it was adding another layer of emotional wear and tear to my life as I struggled with a plethora of other problems.

This reminded me all too clearly that much of my weight loss to date has occurred under relatively ideal circumstances. Those who are in far less positive circumstances than me are going to struggle more as they respond both biologically and psychologically to overwhelming urges to eat when stressed. While I didn't need this reminder to empathize with others who are trying to lose weight, I was given it nonetheless.

Breakthrough, but not a good one

2011-06-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

As my last several posts have made it clear, I've been having a very hard time of it psychologically as of late. Losing weight solved some problems, and it created new ones. It reminds me very strongly of something I once read about "even thin people have problems". I'm not thin, but I'm also no longer abusing food for emotional purposes.

Several days ago, I had a snapping point from all of the tension and problems I've been dealing with. In the past, that snapping point brought on an incident where I had a disconnect and mindlessly ate. That was a "cry for help" in which I turned to what I always turned to, self-destructive over-eating. This most recent point had me do something different because food no longer does it for me.

The "something different" was that I lashed out at someone else and did something quite inappropriate. Instead of turning my destruction inward, I turned it outward. I realize in retrospect that both the eating and the lashing out were attempts at self-protection and control. Eating protected me by adding padding to my body and provided a false sense of control because I decided I was choosing to overeat to give me pleasure and comfort. Lashing out at someone else did not comfort me, but what I did (and no, there will be no details) made me feel that I could put up a wall that needed to be in place to reduce the hurt I was feeling. I did what I did fully believing that it was an act of emotional protection and that if I didn't protect myself from this pain, no one else would. It was irrational, but I didn't see it that way at the time.

It was a bad thing to do, and caused no amount of upheaval in my life. The next day, I deeply and sincerely apologized for what I did and explained the circumstances that brought about my actions. My apology took full responsibility and revealed private information about myself and my weight loss which made me deeply vulnerable to this person. I also offered a hand in mending the damage I'd done. The apology was coldly rejected and the hand slapped away. That was fair enough, but I was surprised since I made it clear that this was a mental health issue and the person involved had mental health assistance training. I didn't deserve better, but I had hoped for a little more empathy and compassion from someone who was in a business which requires such things when dealing with people with psychological issues. However, this person was fully entitled to withhold forgiveness and to choose not to exercise understanding or empathy.

What I realize now in retrospect is that I've made a breakthrough in how I handle my stress and pain, but that it isn't necessarily a good one. Instead of hurting myself, I hurt someone else. Note that this isn't something which happens often, and occurred in the depths of deep, deep psychological pain and turmoil. Since not several days ago, I was wishing I'd just die in my sleep to escape my pain, that shouldn't be too surprising.

I've learned a lot from this and feel now that I "shattered" in a way and figured out something of value from how the pieces fell. I need to not allow the situation to get so bad that something like this can happen if it can possibly be prevented (which may not be possible, but it's important to try), but also I need to be careful about acting impulsively when in deep distress. That being said, I'm not sure that it's 100% within my control at such times, but I need to be more aware of the potential for this to happen. The truth is that it is the first time that this has happened since I was a child. I didn't expect it of myself so it was harder to stop. If you can't see the train coming, you don't know it's going to hit something until after the collision has occurred.

What I know now is that, for the first time in a long time, my anger and loathing isn't entirely directed at myself in times of pain. The reactions I had (eating) were grown from the sense of worthlessness that was bred into me since starting to gain weight in childhood. The first response to pain was to hurt myself, because I was not worth preserving. Now, I realize that I don't hate myself enough to hurt me first, foremost, and unconsciously, but have to be very careful to not lash out and hurt someone else. In the fallout of all of this, I told my husband, "this is not me," and I know that I was pushed to this place and acted in opposition to who I am as a result of all I have lost along with weight. I have never been the type of person to hurt others, and in fact have always put others interests before my own to the point of greatly harming myself.

All of this reasoning and explaining in no way makes what I did "okay", but understanding the dynamic is the only way I can grow from it and diminish the likelihood of doing something like this again. It's a new piece of the puzzle, and one that I acquired at the expense of more than one person.

Envy

2011-06-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

I envy cutters. Yes, you read that right. I envy people who harm and mutilate themselves to deal with their pain. Unlike people who eat to bury their pain, cutters are regarded with sympathy. People want to help them and realize that the scars of their destructive behavior are a manifestation of illness. Fat people receive no such sympathy for bearing the scars of their suffering, and the bigger the "scar" (the heavier the person), the less sympathy they receive.

Lately, the quality of my life has been spiraling downward. This is related to what I wrote about in my previous posts, but also an overall tendency for me to work harder at being more productive, more psychologically whole, and to be physically stronger. At this point in time, the way I've taken myself apart to stop my reliance on food to deal with my pain is something I'm not sure I'll survive intact, one way or another.

I'm that much weaker for having made this effort, but not in any of the ways which people would recognize as being "weaknesses". On the contrary, I'm sure people would see everything I've done as nothing but success - losing lots of weight, looking "better", being healthier, and assuming a more productive role in the world. Superficially, I'm looking to be a screaming success. Inside, I'm falling apart.

One thing I know in a visceral fashion but knew superficially before is that the palliative effects of overeating for someone psychologically inclined to use such coping mechanisms are profound. When that is taken away, the forces that drive one to it do not vanish. The pain that motivated the seeking of food for comfort or numbing remains. Without the food, there is nothing but profound pain with no relief. Sometimes the pain is so great that I wish I would simply fall asleep and not wake up the next day. I don't want to die and I wouldn't end my own life, but I wish to stop hurting without relief.

People who fail at their "diets" have something I no longer have. They have the capacity to return to food for comfort because they haven't conditioned the effectiveness of doing so out of them. All I have is rawness and suffering. It makes me wish there was something else to turn to, and that returns me full circle to cutters. I in no way want to elevate what they do, but I can see the appeal of seeking relief in a way that doesn't find you being labeled and judged. It's a sad fact of the world that hurting yourself in one way is ridiculed and seen as character weakness and a lack of self-control and hurting yourself in another is a cry for help. I keep crying, but find no help.

The Donut Experiment

2011-06-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

This didn't actually start out as an experiment, but it's one of those things which came about naturally and has now become a source of experimentation for me. Awhile back, my husband picked up a big box of small donuts. Each one is about 150-170 calories, but I wasn't particularly interested in them and there were more than he could eat in a short time so we froze about 12 of them. They've been sitting in the freezer for over a month now.

Three days ago, I decided that I wanted a donut for breakfast. As I've mentioned before, on occasion, I allow a sugary treat for breakfast. More often than not, said treats are bigger than these and weigh in around 200-280 calories. Since I usually eat a muffin or baked oatmeal bar that is low-fat, sugar-free, whole grain, and made with applesauce and fruit, my "regular" breakfast is around 150-180 calories, eating a donut usually means eating more calories than usual for breakfast. However, the small size of these puts the caloric value of these particular donuts squarely on the same calorie footing as my healthier alternative.

After eating my muffin with coffee made with milk, I've eaten about 200-250 calories for breakfast (depending on the type of muffin or baked oatmeal bar and if I use margarine with it or not). Usually, about 2-2.5 hours after I eat, I get hungry again and have a piece of fruit. I don't see a problem with this. I don't eat much for breakfast so I can hardly expect it to last long before I might want to eat again. I have a banana or orange usually, and then wait for lunch .

I paired the small donut with the same coffee preparation I always have for a similar calorie total, and I waited to get hungry in a couple of hours. Since the donut is sugary and fried, I expected a crash and a blood sugar spike and more intense hunger two hours after eating. Here's the thing, I was much less hungry than usual. In fact, I have had this same breakfast for the last 3 days with the same result. The donuts do not leave me hungrier. They leave me fuller.

I'm not fooling myself in any way that the donut is "better" for me at all. It absolutely is emptier calories and the homemade stuff has more fiber, protein, minerals, and vitamins. In terms of pure nutrition, I'm better off with the homemade things even when all calories are equal. However, this has confirmed something I've experienced for quite awhile, and that is that fruit and any food which contains substantial amounts of fruit makes me hungrier and the inclusion of a higher amount of fat keeps me sated. This appears to be the trend regardless of the protein content that is included with the meal.

The lesson I take away from this is not that I should eat a small donut every morning to keep full and lose weight. I love fruit, and I love whole grain baked goods as well. Frankly, though I enjoy the occasional donut, I wouldn't want to have one every morning as it gets boring, even when there are different varieties on hand.

What I have had reinforced by this is that there are no rules for eating that apply to everyone equally. I've read loads about blood sugar and nutrition and they all talk about how refined flour and sugar will have you gnawing your arm off in hunger after consuming them and that protein is the hunger-fighting warrior. Clearly, it's not working that way for me, particularly at present.

It's not as if I didn't already know that we're all unique in these aspects, but the donut experiment just brought home how vastly different a particular individual's biochemistry can be from that of another. You have to write you own book, because no one else's will apply to you.

The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done (pt. 2)

2011-05-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in the previous post that part of what I've been doing concurrent with my weight loss is expanding my boundaries - getting out more, working more, getting more things done, etc. I've been attempting to do this relatively gradually, and I have the luxury of doing so because my husband bears the burden of making enough money for us to live while my income for the last six years has been largely supplemental. Note that this is not as inequitable as it seems. For about 10 years, my income was the main one and his was supplemental. There was a time when he was a part-time worker and part-time "househusband" and I was the breadwinner, until I broke under the weight of my body and depression.

When I quit my full-time job in a state of what I'm sure would have been diagnosed as clinical depression, my husband has been supporting me in multiple ways. He not only economically supports me, but he mentally and physically did so. When I was at my heaviest and in great back pain, he'd not only make the money, but he also would go grocery shopping to spare me and spend his limited free time emotionally supporting me. I was, in many ways, an invalid he looked after emotionally. He patiently dealt with me as I ate myself deeper into disability, knowing that I couldn't change until I was "ready" and knowing that I might never be "ready", but loving me all the same and therefore doing what he needed to do.

In the last two years, as I've experienced improved health, mobility, and emotional states, there has been a slow change in the dynamic between my husband and I. We're both happy that we can go out and do things together again (as we once did very long ago), and I'm relieved that he no longer needs to do things like grocery shopping for me on top of his large workload. I'm also pleased to be contributing more to our household income, which will eventually result in his reduced working hours and more freedom for him (he chooses for the time being to work longer hours to improve our nest egg).

However, as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not emotionally whole by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I'm often on the edge of depression, despair, and simply feeling overwhelmed by the array of changes and shift in my identity. The steady push forward is at a pace I can just barely manage, but I think it's important to keep pushing ahead in order to be the person I want to be. However, this is a lot like running a marathon at just the edge of my endurance. Occasionally, I find that I've pushed myself too hard, and I have to stop and catch my breath.

The main problem is that emotionally this is harder to detect than it is physically. You don't know you've exceeded your capacity until you're depressed or have some sort of breakdown. This means I'm often in a state where I'm on the edge, and I need his support more than ever. Unfortunately, my husband sees someone who is getting much, much better and who requires less support than before, and reacts by giving me less unconsciously. Also, it is possible that (equally unconsciously), he's weary of looking after me and ready to move on to pursuing his own interests more now that the burden seems to be lifting.

The problem has been for us that I need less physical support and as much or more emotional support as my "success" continues. I've said before that I believe that people who have destructive relationships with food (relationships which result in reduced health or quality of life and are powerless to change them) have a mental health problem, or, at the very least, their eating issues are part of a manifestation of underlying issues. No one simply "likes food" to the extent of gaining up to nearly 400 lbs. without something deeper behind it. That's like "liking sex" to the point of never getting up off your back. There's something deeper there.

Getting back to the point though, as I've "gotten better" superficially, I've struggled as much (or more) psychologically, but I've gotten less support from my husband. This isn't because he doesn't want to be there for me, but because he has other interests he wants to pursue and cannot see any impediment to doing so. I also initially saw no reason for him not to do such things, but as time has gone on, we've had arguments and I've suffered because of the extent to which he wants to do them. It's taken awhile to figure out that my body changing hasn't changed my mind's need.

I'm not the woman he had to listen to crying because people were cruel to her every time she left the house and every little errand brought a world of horrible back pain. Now, I'm the woman who doesn't know who the hell she is, what she is capable of, and who becomes sad at the drop of a hat for reasons she is sometimes not sure of. I'm the woman who finds that the old compass she used to navigate life doesn't work anymore and is constantly having to create a make-shift one as she is a work in progress and doesn't know how far she can go or what direction she should head in. I'm psychologically lost, and am figuring out where I'm going and where I can manage. Unfortunately, I'm often going further than I should or into places which are not good for me.

So, I find that I need more support, but I'm getting less and my poor husband is in the middle of it. The truth is that he is my only constant. He's the only point in life for me which hasn't changed at all and I rely on him not only to give me strength, but to be a tether in what is a constant emotional storm. I don't know who I am in relationship to pretty much everything else in life, but I know who I am when I'm with him. When he's not there for me, especially in times of difficulty, I feel like a pile of broken pieces.

Given the reasonable need for my husband to have autonomy and do the things he wants to do in the face of my no longer disabled life, but my need to have more support, we've had many fights about when and how he needs to attend to my needs. I feel bad about being needy, and he feels frustrated by the inconsistency of the situation. For him, the guideposts keep moving and he's not sure what he can do without causing me to suffer and what he can't. This has made a difficult situation even worse, and it has been playing out for over a year now and stretching both of us emotionally to the limit.

Recently, I told him that if he regarded my situation as a physical illness rather than a mental one, we wouldn't be struggling so hard. Since my problems are psychological, he unconsciously believes it's okay to walk away from my neediness. If I had a herniated disc and couldn't get out of bed, he'd come home and cook meals for me without question or protest. He'd understand the need and make the sacrifice. With my broken psyche, it's easier just to "let me go hungry" while he goes out and fulfills his own psychological needs.

My husband has said that "empathy goes out the window when ones own interests are at stake", and he is right about that. It's been very hard for him to realize that his empathy for me may have been less than 100% because of this very thing. Don't get me wrong about my husband because he has sacrificed a great deal in my interests during much of our lives together. He's unconditionally loving, kind, generous, supportive, and I worship him because he is so psychologically whole and incredible, but he's dealing with a wife with psychological problems and even he, with his near saint-like capacity to be patient and caring, can't work it all out immediately (hard as he has tried).

I've tried and tried to suppress my needs, to deny my issues, and to be "better" faster for him, but the bottom line is that this isn't a road with short-cuts. No matter how desperately I don't want to be so needy, I can't change it. I've tried. I haven't beaten myself up when I've eaten more, but I've mentally thrashed myself over this. I want more than anything to give my husband the autonomy he might want to just live without having to attend to my psychological problems. There are times when I'd rather go back to weighing nearly 400 lbs. than continue to impose this burden on him. My guilt and anguish over how much changing me has placed a burden on him is so overwhelming at times that I'd rather I went back to my other kind of suffering than to inflict this difficulty on him.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), there is no going back now. It isn't the thing I'm meant to do and I know there is a better place that I'll be at psychologically in the future, but I'm not there yet and I need him to hold my hand tightly for awhile longer.

The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done

2011-05-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

A lot of people say that losing weight is one of the hardest things they've ever done. For me, having lost weight is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Nearly two years after starting to make changes in my life, I'm finding that the psychological issues continue to create difficulty in my life. Being aware of the possibility of those changes, and even anticipating them and trying to adjust for them, hasn't made them any easier. It's like knowing your leg is going to be broken doesn't make it any less painful nor heal any faster.

Part of the reason that the changes have been so profound for me is that, as a person who has been morbidly obese for nearly her entire life, the way I operate in the world and the way the world has operated (often against me) represents a lifetime of conditioning. I not only react as if I still weighed close to 400 lbs., but I have the mental composition of someone who is accustomed to living a life in accord with that. What that really means continues to reveal itself to me, and it's very hard.

One of the biggest issues that I have is that of having different expectations of myself which often place stress on me. I can work more, because I'm now more employable and I don't have excruciating back pain. I also have more stamina, and can get more done at home and work. Instead of defining myself as someone with limits, I see myself as close to "normal". However, if you have lived most of your life with particular limits, it's hard to know now where the line is drawn. No one has limitless stamina or energy either mentally or physically, and since I have changed, I have to step forward to find my new boundaries. This may sound simple (stop when you're tired or overwhelmed), but life is not so tidy in practice.

As I've been remapping my identity and changing my life in accord with my weight loss, I've been pushing the boundaries little by little and expanding my life to incorporate the types of things other people have done all of their lives without a second thought. I go into stores I avoided before because of narrow aisles. I walk without fear of crippling pain or excessive social censure (though I still get some of that). I went to work outside of my home. I'm going to attend a social function with my husband next weekend, something which I would have been too embarrassed by my body size to do before and wouldn't have considered even if I didn't have bad back pain.

It all sounds very simple when I type it out like that, but the mental journey to who I was to who I am trying to become has been very hard. Even when I willingly do the things I do and even enjoy them, it's still hard psychologically. I may not perceive it, but it grinds me down and puts stress on me. I often feel as if I've broken apart the "me" that was 380 lbs. but had a way of functioning emotionally as a super obese person for so many years and have been putting her back together into a more functional manner.

The problem is that not all of the pieces are in place yet, and sometimes some aspect that is lacking leaves me depressed, stressed, or feeling that I don't know who I am. This incomplete picture is a constant source of difficulty, because I sometimes build some aspect up only to find it's not working and have to tear it back down and figure out what to build again. Even when I superficially appear to be doing well, I feel like I'm drowning on some level. Even successful change or negotiation of a new challenge can leave me exhausted and depressed. On a psychological level, the "new me" isn't "better" than the old me. She's just different and that adjusting is hard after a lifetime of "the old me".

All of these analogies sound abstract, so I will try to give a more concrete example. The first day of work at my (now less new) part-time job was exhausting even though I only worked for about 3 hours. The last time I worked at this job, I worked for about 6 hours. In the previous post, I mentioned that the clients can choose who they deal with and that is why. New employees are unknown so they only get the people who are indifferent to who they work with. Through time, more people know me and I get more work so the hours increase.

Even though I work more hours now, I'm less tired because I'm adjusting. The thing I'm adjusting to isn't longer hours per se, though that is a part of it. What I'm working with is the idea of me being a person who has a commitment that can't easily be broken, goes out in public and deals with people in a professional environment, dresses for such rather than wearing any old clean casual clothes, has to adhere to a schedule other than her own, and who is treated close to being just "normal". It's my whole self-image that is making a shift, not merely my hours.

This all comes coupled with ongoing dealings with issues I've had which changed when I decided to lose weight - dealing with being hungry, dealing with more activity despite having pain, etc. While restricting myself in the former regard and pushing myself in the latter are not as hard as they once were, it is quite a change from before when I could eat what I want when I wanted and not have to endure the physical discomfort of hunger day-in and day-out or to push myself to walk everyday despite pain. There's also the loss of easy pleasure. I still would like to eat more for the mere enjoyment of good tasting food. I don't even want to eat big portions, but I'd like to be eating more variety on a given day, but I can't if I want to keep losing weight. I often feel like every joy in my life has to be struggled for and that nothing positive ever comes easily. The effort nullifies the value of the pleasure I receive. It's like work. The old me didn't have to suffer in these ways, but the new me knows that a paradigm shift must be pushed ahead on if I want to be a different person physically and emotionally.

In many ways, I've traded one sort of suffering for another. It's not all "I'm so happy that I weigh so much less" or that my quality of life is so much better. My quality of life is better in many ways, but not all, not by a long shot. People think "quality of life" is objective and can be measured by things like how superficially attractive you are, how active you can be, how wealthy you are, etc. This is how people succeed yet find themselves in the depths of despair and even become suicidal. Quality of life is measured internally and there are people who may appear to be complete failures with limits who are quite happy overall. My external life is better than it has been in quite some time. My internal life is often a shattered mess.