Making Perfect the Enemy of Good

I can't really say what kind of eating I'm doing these days.  I mean, certainly I eat, but I don't know if my eating patterns has a name per se.  Chad and I eat lots of meat, veggies, eggs, and dairy, plus some nuts, fruit and resistant starches, as much of which is organic as we can managed.  Are we paleo?  Low carb?  Primal?  WAPF?  I dunno, honestly, and I've pretty much given up caring what our title is. 

It was fun in the beginning there, when low carb and paleo were new to us.  We got really into the community, read lots of blogs, kept up with the latest health and diet news, bought lots of books.  It gave us the drive we needed to change our diets to improve our health and well being, plus it gave us that sense of community when everyone around us thought we were weird for eating the way we ate.  (It's amazing how much has changed in four years -- low carb and paleo were still "weird", whereas now you see it everywhere.  I just bought a paleo crock pot recipe book from the checkout line in Wegmans!)

The community started to feel really stifling to me after a while, though.  It stopped being supportive and started to feel restrictive.  Everyone had opinions of what's best, and they were very outspoken about it.  You had to be careful not to enrage someone by saying something that went against their beliefs.  And then it seemed like there was a new bit of information that came out about once or twice a month, some new way to be healthy and live forever.  Certain ways to exercise, certain new foods, sleep patterns, whatever it may be.  It felt so overwhelming, like I had to learn about every new piece of evidence and add it to my already restrictive eating patterns if I wanted to live into old age.

For a number of reasons, I stepped back for a while.  We started listening to our own bodies and our own cravings and what made us feel good (or bad), and tried to live by those rules. We don't always do well at it; we splurged megatime around Christmas, and I have my chocolate days, but for the most part we eat really well.

Yesterday I was on Wellnessmama.com, reading the comments on an almond flour chocolate chip cookie recipe.  I wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts on how to make the recipe sugar free (except for the chocolate chips, of course).  That was the very first comment, actually.  The following comment suggested maple syrup, honey, or date paste.

Then the comments got interesting.  The next reply suggested ace K as a replacement, and BOOM, out come the crazies!  People were accusing one another of being ignorant, saying chemicals cause cancer, suggesting that if you didn't agree that you were really dumb and you were abusing your family and you were going to die a horrible death!  Haven't you read the literature?! 

It was shocking and disturbing to read that after being away from the community for a while now.  Why do people get like that?  Ok, so maybe ace K isn't the best sweeter in the whole world, but it's not up to you to decide what other people do with their lives. If you don't want to eat it, cool, but don't evangelize the point with threats of damnation.

And you know what else?  We're all going to die.  Eat as clean as you want to, but eventually it won't matter any more.  You'll die just like everyone else dies.  It seems to me that people heavy into the whole foods/healthy eating communities are striving to live forever through their diets, even though they'll deny it if you point it out.  I certainly felt that way when I was into it.  I wanted to eat well so I'd never get cancer/heart disease/diabetes/whatever disease.  Essentially, I wanted to die peacefully in my sleep at the ripe old age of 120, or possibly older.

Last year, my aunt died of pancreatic cancer.  At the time, I  was thinking to myself, "if only she had eaten a more clean diet she never would have gotten cancer!".  I look back at that now and think how silly that sounds.  She was in her 80s when she died.  If she hadn't died of cancer, she probably would have died of something else in short order.  And why is it so bad to go that way?  Yes, it was sudden, and it was scary, and she left us before we were ready, but it was her time to go and at least she had a chance to say goodbye.

If you're going to eat well and take care of yourself, do it for how it makes you feel right now.  Don't do it because it  will make you live longer, because no one knows what the future holds.  Scientists have recently started switching over to the idea that the number one factor in how long we'll live is genetics.  Even smoking, one of the deadliest things you can do to your body, only shortens your life by 10 years. 

Certainly eating pounds of sugar a day if you're a diabetic is going to shorten your life, but how much time do you lose on this earth by eating ace K?  Or by eating a cookie once in a while?  Once you've changed your life for the better and started eating well and exercising your body, what significance do the small changes have, really? 

We can live healthy lives without obsessing about the little stuff.  I bet being obsessed about health has a big impact on your well being anyway. 

I guess my point is, don't make perfect the enemy of good.  Or as Shakespear said:

Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?

One Week into 2016

So it's the first full week of 2016.  How's everyone doing on their resolutions?  I've been doing... ok, I guess.  It's been a rocky week for me, so considering that, I'd say I'm doing better than I thought I would be.

Chad went on a business trip this week, and I get very needy when he's gone.  The last time he went on a business trip, I ended up eating dozens of cookies.  This time, I only ate a little chocolate, so I think that's a win overall. 

I haven't been exercising as much as I'd want, because I've been sick the last few days.  I have something going on with my face.  It's clearly infected, but I don't know what's causing it.  This happens to me occasionally, and the last couple of times, the doctor/dentist told me it was like a sinus infection.  This time, my face is swollen and my jaw won't open quite the whole way.  I'm just going to wait a little while to see what happens.  It's not nearly as bad as the last infection I had, which was so painful I was crying and screaming that I didn't want to live.  I'd much rather take it easy and let my body heal itself, than go to a doctor and be told to take antibiotics.  I'll take them if I have to, but I don't want to if it's not necessary. 

This is a very clear reminder about why I want to eat better.  I don't want to continue getting these terrible infections, which I'm sure are at least partly due to bad eating habits.  I ate a lot of sugar between Christmas and New Year's, and sugar is really hard on your immune system.  I deserve better than that, right?

So I'm going to chillax today and let my amazing body do what it needs to make me better.  Then I'm going to start getting active again.  It's going to get snowy and cold again, so I'm planning on getting most of my exercise on my exercise bike.  I'm grateful I have it, even though it's pretty boring to use it.  I don't know how people get anything done at the gym; indoor exercising is so dull to me.  It's worse than washing dishes or doing taxes.  Clearly I need to move somewhere that's warm all the time so I don't have to do indoor exercise.  Or, I need to get over it and go out in the snow and cold!

A Boost to my Resolve

Have you heard the latest news?  Scientists have discovered that sugar, namely fructose, fuels the growth of cancer. 

This isn't a new idea, of course.  There's lots of studies out there pretty much pointing in the same direction, showing that sugar both increases your risk of getting cancer and makes the cancer worse once you have it.  I don't know why this isn't common knowledge by now, but I guess no one really wants to hear it in the United States.

This was a pretty interesting sounding study, though.  It's a rat study, so take it with a grain of salt; after all, humans and rats are pretty different.  Still, the results are intriguing and  I hope it leads to even better research. 

The gist of study is that a diet high in fructose (through sucrose) is correlated to a much higher rate of breast cancer than a diet high in starch.  And the more sucrose the rats ate once they developed cancer, the faster the tumors grew. 

I certainly needed a boost in my resolve to cut sugar way back in our diets.  This certainly helps.

New Life Directions

When I was a teenager, my mom and I used to go hiking in a large county park.  The trail I liked  best had a pretty well hidden head, at the very end of the camping area, tucked back in the corner.  It lead down for a long time, then through some very thick under brush.  When you finally came out of the curtain of green, you found yourself on the top of a bare hill, looking out at the calm lake, patches of forest, tall waving grasses, and dozens of trail branches leading off into the trees and down around the water's edge.  The thought of all those possibilities was so thrilling to me.  I would want to stay all day long, exploring every possibility, finding out where each branch would lead me.

Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation in life, only in an intellectual way?  You start down one path of study, some new thought that interests you, and before you know it, you've traveled down a dozen different branches and are nowhere near where you began.

Well, that's what I've been doing for the last month or so.  I started innocently enough by going to the library to pick up some gardening books, to help me figure out how best to grow my apples organically.  I went up the stairs to go to the garden section, which I've been to dozens of times before, but somehow managed to walk right past it.  I ended up going to the dieting section, and saw right away the book Women Afraid To Eat.  I was kind of intrigued, so I picked it up, then turned around and picked up some backyard orchard books that I'd come for.

As I've said in previous posts, Women Afraid To Eat really opened my eyes to the whole weight issue, and how obesity and overweight aren't really that bad for your health, and that fat prejudice is really strong in this country.  I then immediately bought Body Of Truth, a new book about the science of obesity and the health issues around it.  I felt so shocked that I had been pushed by society to hate my own body because of the way it looked and the way I was built.  I was also shocked to see that I had real problems with eating.  I wanted to keep reading and learning more, and I wanted to heal myself.  I stopped watching what I ate so much, and really tried to listen to my body.  I also tried to ignore the voice in my head screaming at me that I was going to gain weight by eating more!

I started reading all of the old Kimkins controversy again, delving deep into the sad stories of women starving themselves for the promise of a beautiful body.  How sad, I thought, reading their blogs.  I saw in them images of myself and the thoughts that have crossed my own mind from time to time.  Twisted as it is, as I read these terrible tales of starvation, I even started to envy them and their big weight losses, despite all the stories of losing hair and menstrual cycles.

I became fascinated with how this related to anorexia, and I remembered that I wanted to read Portia de Rossi's autobiography, Unbearable Lightness.  I knew that was at the library, because I looked it up once, but then never went to check it out.  So Chad and I went one night so I could get it, and while I was there I also picked up the book Fat?So!, which is about how it's ok to be comfortable in your own body, even if it's fat.  Well, as I was walking back to the stairs to go downstairs, Chad hands me this book called Women Without Children and said, "I dunno, I just thought it looked interesting,".  Since we're infertile and decided not to pursue treatment, I decided it might be a good book to read.

I started with Portia's book.  It was impossible to put down.  I was so amazed at what that poor woman went through, trying to be good enough, to live up to her public image.  It made me horrified that I was envious of the people who had done Kimkins.  I'd never wish that kind of life on anyone ever, let alone poor confused women trying to find some self esteem.  Although I truly liked Portia's book, I don't feel like I really got much personally from it, other than a strengthened conviction never to abuse my body just to meet society's impossible standards.

Next, I read Fat?So!, which was absolutely hilarious and wonderful.  It's dated, being written in 1998, but I still love it and I'm even contemplating getting my own version sometime.  I decided I need more body positive information in my life, and went out looking for it.  That's when I encountered all the hate people have for fat people, and wrote that really sad post.  Fortunately for me, I did find some great body positive sites and resources out there, and when I'm more focused, I plan on posting some links.

Reading all that body positive stuff, and seeing pictures of beautiful big women, made me start looking at myself differently.  I realized that, you know what, I really am beautiful!  It's just that normally, I'm focusing on my flaws, my thighs that seem too big, my big belly, my wrinkles, my lumps and sags.  When I stop looking at my parts and look at me as a whole, I see something that I have never seen before, not really.  I see... a curvy beauty with smooth ivory skin and rosy red cheeks, a wonderful smile and a lovely figure.  At first I was really shocked by that.  I was pretty convinced that I was ugly by this point.  Then I started getting kind of mad about it.  Why have I felt so ugly and unworthy all these years?  Why aren't I allowed to feel beautiful in my own skin?  So back to the library I went!

I had intended to get The Beauty Myth, a feminist book about society's ideal beauty and the way it's keeping women from really reaching their potentials.  However, the library didn't have it, so I decided to check out some other feminist books while I was there.  I got a classic, The Feminine Mystique, and a book called Never Too thin.

I started reading Women Without Children and The Feminine Mystique at the same time.  Both are very good.  I have to admit that The Feminine Mystique is a really heavy book.  It took a lot of effort to read that one, because it's meant for someone perhaps a little more educated than I am, but at the same time, it was too interesting to put down.  I realize that America isn't the same way it was in 1960, and women don't feel the need to stay home and be housewives, but I think some of the thinking still applies to women today.  I especially could relate to the housewives of 1960, because I dropped out of high school, never went to college, and married young.  I feel like maybe I did some of those things because I, just like the young women fifty years ago, am afraid to really grow up and make hard decisions for myself.  (I'm not sorry I got married, of course.  I think that was a life saver for me.  Chad's a great guy.)  The book really got me to thinking about the life dreams that I'd put aside to pursue my image of perfect housewife.

At the same time, Women Without Children really got me to thinking about my life without kids.  Many stories of women who, for whatever reason, didn't have kids and were happy with their lives made me wonder if I could have that too.  It talked about how infertile women ended up happier if they had something in their lives to make it fulfilling.  It also made me think about my reasons for wanting to have children, and then showed me that my expectations about kids weren't really reasonable.  It helped me to dig deep, past the hurt, to see the truth that was hiding behind the infertility.  The truth is, I never really wanted kids.  I hated kids growing up, and knew when I got married that I was never going to have them.  But at a certain age, I started to think about my life as I started to age.  I love having close family, and I want to continue to have close family once our parents are gone.  I thought I could get that with kids.  That's not a good reason to have children, though, because you can't know for sure what the kids are going to be like or what their wants and needs are going to be.  Maybe they'll want to live across the world and I'll never see them.  Maybe they'll be sick and I'll have to take care of them until I die.  I don't need my own kids to have family.  I have younger family that I could get close to, and I could make new friends to be my extended family.

Then I started to think more about those life dreams that I'd set aside, and how if I had kids, I probably would never pick them up again.  I care too much about those dreams to let that happen to them, even though I've been ignoring them for several years now.  So Chad and I had a long talk about life, kids, dreams, and what our future holds.  I found out his reasoning for wanting kids was because he always thought he would someday, and also, he wanted to be a better parent than my sister (who is a very bad mom), which he admitted were bad reasons for wanting to be a parent.  He also agreed that I need to start working on picking up the dusty old dreams and breathing life into them again.

Later that week, I ordered some female condoms to try.  I realize that we're infertile, but we've decided we really truly don't want children.  Leaving the door open like that will only cause heartache in one way or another.  I'll either start to feel my loss of not being a parent again, or I'll get really comfortable with being childfree and find myself pregnant.  I refuse to use hormonal birth control, Chad refuses to go back to male condoms, and both of us refuse to alter our bodies permanently.  So we're going to do a combination of fertility charting (something I'm pretty good at by now) and female condoms.

When we knew for sure I wasn't pregnant, Chad took the money we'd been saving for a baby and spent it on a new computer for me.  He also bought a new Wacom tablet, Corel Painter and Paint Shop Pro.  My dusty old dreams, laid aside so thoughtlessly, are to be an artist.  I am an artist, a really good artist, but for some reason, it seemed like I couldn't be an artist and a housewife at the same time.  An artist is messy, and a housewife is neat.  An artist is chaotic and unpredictable, and a housewife has dinner on the table when you get home.  And a mom, in my mind, couldn't really be an artist.  Art is free and unbound, but kids hold you down on earth.  That's not to say that there aren't great mom artists out there, just that I personally could never do them both.  And I want to be an artist.  It's my deepest calling, and I'm ashamed that I've been ignoring it's pull for so long. 

The trail that I find myself on now is bright and beautiful.  I'm not entirely sure how I got here, but I have a feeling that the hand of God has been guiding me.  I'm so grateful that I found everything I needed to find my way, and that my husband has been so supportive.  I don't know what lies ahead, just that I'm ready to meet it. 

The World Hates Me

I recently started looking for body positive and fat acceptance groups on the internet, trying to find a group of like minded people to help me navigate the slippery slope of learning to love myself the way I am and accept that I'm not perfect and will never be skinny. 

However, instead of finding fat acceptance groups when I googled for it, all I really found was a lot of hate and ugly words.  People are so angry at the body positive movement, and think that fat people have no right to feel beautiful or to be seen in public, and think the movement is moronic because of course there's no way that a fat person could ever be healthy.  So to help fat people be healthy, they throw toxic words at them, tell them they're disgusting and a drain on society, that they can be proud of their bodies but they shouldn't expect anyone to ever find them attractive, that they're just giving themselves and others like them a license to over eat.

I was starting to feel so good about myself.  When I read those things, it just made me cry.  I've never seen such hate before.  We're just people, you know.  Most of us are doing the best we can. 

The Lure of Skinny: Part 2

Skinny is such a powerful thing in our society.  If you're skinny, you have power, social power; the power to attract the opposite sex, the power to get many more jobs and have more opportunities, the power to make friends and to be seen as trustworthy, the power to tell (fat) people what they need to do to become skinny as well.  For reasons that are very hard to understand, our society today puts skinny on a pedestal and makes it the highest level of moral rightness you can ever achieve.  You're seen as trustworthy, well disciplined, highly motivated, energetic, and healthy, just by the way you look. 

On the flip side, fat people are seen as lazy, lairs, gluttonous, self-centered,  having no self control, and on the verge of death every time they put anything in their mouths that isn't a leaf of lettuce.  We're told that we should be ashamed for the way we look, because obviously we just need to eat less and exercise more and we can be just like the skinny people.  And the sad thing about it is, fat people absolutely believe that 100%.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many overweight and obese people are desperate to lose weight?  The message to lose weight has become so frantic, so terrifying, it's as if it's a highly contagious disease, and if we don't take action right now, all will be lost!  Many fat people are lead to believe that they're just months away from diabetes and heart disease, even if they're physically very healthy.  And so they take on the task of losing the weight, for themselves, for their families, for society as a whole (because everyone knows that obesity is a drain on the medical system).

 This desperation is what feeds the $60 billion dollar diet industry.  If being skinny is so good morally, socially, and physically, it's worth spending money on, right?  Well, according to recent studies, no, not really.  Only 5% of dieters keep the weight off for 5 years, and the ones that do keep it off make it their life's mission.  Several of the people who told their diet stories in the book Body of Truth said that maintaining the weight loss was a full time job, and they had to stay at it constantly.  But that's the great thing about the diet industry; they know that their business model works really well.  The dieters lose weight initially, they keep it off for 6 months to a year, then start gaining it back.  They can then say, "Hey, the diet isn't at fault; you just didn't stick to it!".  And because people are so desperate to lose weight, they believe it and come back for more punishment.

I don't know how well the low carb and paleo diets work long term.  I do know of several people who have kept the weight off with low carb for many years, but I know of even more people who have gone up and down with it.  As for the paleo diet, I don't know if what we call "paleo" today (as opposed to Lorren Cordain's paleo, which I understand is low fat and anti-saturated fat) has been around long enough to see if many people can keep the weight off long term.  As I said last time, this doesn't mean I don't think these diets are great; I think they're wonderful ways to get back to health, for sure.  What I really don't know is if they're any better at keeping the weight off compared to any other diet out there.  If anyone has any info on this, I'd love to see it.

The most damaging aspect of this whole get-skinny-to-be-healthy mindset is that it skews a person's idea of what healthy really is.  You begin to think that anything that makes you skinny is healthy, even if those methods are clearly dangerous.  Or at the very least, you use that as justification.  Truth be told, I'm fairly certain that health is only an added bonus to weight loss for most people.  Even if they don't say it out loud, I'm pretty sure that the number one reason people attempt weight loss is to look good, and to be socially acceptable.  It's so easy, when you're thinking about or doing something dangerous to lose weight, to give yourself and others the justification that, hey, you were unhealthy as a fat person, so this can't be bad for me!

A case in point of this disturbing mental gymnastics is the Kimkins disaster.  I know I've talked about it briefly before in my blog, but I never went into much detail about it.  Back then, I was fascinated by the drama of what happened, and how Heidi (Kimmer) could put herself into a situation like that.  I found myself reading the whole drama again recently, though this time, I see something a lot more disturbing.  I paid special attention to the blogs of people who went on the diet and were deep into it, but because of the fraud, they left the site and started talking about their experiences.  I see people who were so desperate to lose weight and be beautiful, that they rationalized a 300-600 calorie low carb/low fat diet as a way to get healthy.  They believed, despite being intelligent well educated people, that this was enough food to fuel them for the whole day:

594 calories

And if that wasn't doing it for them and they found themselves in a weight stall, they could try this for their daily intake instead:

376 calories

 (Both pictures are from Mariasol's anti-Kimkins blog.  I highly suggest reading through their blog and those they link to if you're interested in this fascinating side of low carb history.)

The most disturbing part about this epic tale of self-deception and desperation is the long term effects.  Many people (mostly women) who stayed on this diet for months started to have side effects; losing hair, brittle nails, feeling nauseated, dizziness, blacking out, heart flutters, and in some cases, serious heart problems.  And yet, despite all of these issues, they were brushed aside as if they weren't a problem, not just by the owner of the site and her admins, but also by the members.  They were told, and believed, that there was no such thing as starvation mode, that the side effects were normal, and that whatever they were experiencing was temporary and worth it to be skinny and healthy. 

But there is such a thing as starvation mode.  It's called YOU'RE STARVING!  Anyone with a functioning brain should know that eating very tiny amounts of food is what starvation is.  By definition, it's to "die or suffer from lack of food."  SNATT is a term that was used frequently on the Kimkins website; it stood for Semi-Nauceous-All-The-Time, and it was a state you wanted to be in.  If that's not suffering from lack of food, I don't know what is. 

The other side effects aren't normal, by the way; they're signs that your body is suffering.  You lose hair  because your body is in shock.  Your nails become brittle because you're not providing your body with the proper amount of nutrients and good fats and protein.  You get dizzy and black out for several reasons, including low electrolytes, hypoglycemia, and low blood pressure, all of these things linked to the starvation diet.  As for heart problems, well... when you're on a very low calorie diet, your body starts to eat away at your muscle tissue just to keep you alive, and of course your heart is a muscle.  It's not a secret that many anorectics die from heart problems.

That's the lure of skinny.  Intelligent, healthy people, who perhaps have more padding than society deems proper, put their lives at stake just to fit into the crowd.  The really sad part is that it's usually all for naught.  Scientists have not only shown that 95% of dieters regain the weight, but that yo-yo dieting is very bad for your health and leads most people to an even higher weight than when they started.  I don't exactly trust scientists, not after reading many of the scathing reviews of studies done by the low carb/paleo community, but there's a cultural component to this idea of yo-yo dieting.  The fact that so many people have lived through the up and downs of weight cycling and ended up heavier than before should tell us that there's at least some truth to it. 

So why do we, as a society, continue to promote dieting to people who are otherwise healthy?  I think the idea of weight=health is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it's impossible to believe a fat person is perfectly fine.  It doesn't help that "health experts" are out there vehemently rejecting the idea of healthy obesity, screaming that this plainly wrong idea is costing us all money and making people sick and dead, despite the mounting science that shows that obesity isn't really that big of a health risk (or one at all, in the case of overweight).

I wonder sometimes if this will ever change.  Will doctors ever promote a good diet and exercise as ways to get healthy rather than skinny (and then be satisfied if the patient gets healthy but doesn't lose weight)?  Will women's magazines have cover stories about how to get healthy in 30 days with a beautiful round woman showing off her incredible biceps (as opposed to a tiny skeletal woman standing in one leg of her former pants)?  Will we ever be told by our government the truth that dieting is actually very bad for us, and encouraged to eat wholesome, natural, real food for whole body health? 

I suppose only time will tell.

The Lure of Skinny

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, about weight and food and what it means to be healthy.  I read Body of Truth, which is a scientific look at obesity and how it affects health.  I've been doing some soul searching.  What I've discovered, through all of that searching and thinking and reading, is that our society and their longing for thinness is pretty messed up. 

It actually makes me pretty mad, if I had to be honest.  Mad at scientists, at doctors, at women's magazines, diet gurus, Hollywood, the weight loss community, and myself.  I've been trying for a couple weeks to get these feelings into words, but I've been struggling with it.  My emotions are so raw and tangled up.  It's almost the way I felt when I first watched Tom Naughton's Fathead documentary and found out that the low fat/high carb standard American diet was a sham that was making us all sick.  Only this time, it's somehow worse. 

Why am I mad, exactly?  I talked about it some in a previous post, but I didn't go into a bunch of detail there.  And since I wrote that, I've read Body of Truth, which is just fascinating.  I read it in two days, I think, which is very quickly for me, and I plan on reading it again soon with highlighters in hand.  It all goes back to weight and health, with one equaling the other in the collective mind of our society.  A skinny person is healthy, and a healthy person is skinny.  You're fat because you're unhealthy, and you're unhealthy because you're fat. 

When I joined the low carb scene back in 2012, I was totally revved up to get going on this plan.  I was a diehard believer, and I knew that in just a short while, the weight would start falling off of me.  So I buckled down, ate as low carb as I could manage as a vegetarian, and watched the scale.  However, aside from an initial 7 pound drop the first week, the scale never moved.  I started eating meat a few months later (because vegetarian low carb is really really hard), and waited for the scale to move.  Again, it never did.  I tricked myself into believing I was getting smaller, losing inches, but looking back at it now, I don't think I actually did.  I have a way of making myself believe something when I really want it. 

Then Chad and I started cutting out the junk and went more of a paleo bent.  Again, I waited for the pounds to drop.  I started lifting weights and I was running.  No change.  I gained a little while on vacation, and lost it again when I went back on the diet, but that was the extent of it for me.  Meanwhile, Chad was losing weight and it made me feel bad that he could do it but I couldn't.

That's not to say I don't think these ways of eating are bad.  While I was watching the scale, waiting for a miracle to happen, my health was improving tremendously.  I had more energy, I was feeling stronger and happier and more clear headed, my ice pick headaches went away, my menstrual cycle normalized, my fingernails started getting stronger, my moodiness went away (mostly; I am human, after all). 

But because the weight wasn't coming off, and everyone in the low carb/paleo crowd said it should be, I thought I was a failure.  I kept all of these feelings inside, though.  I didn't want anyone to know that I was feeling like that, or that I couldn't lose weight even though everyone else seemed to have no problems with it.  In my mind, I was clearly doing something wrong.  It felt like my dirty little secret.

Then, like I explained in another post, I gained 10 pounds over the 2013 holidays, and then another 5 pounds over the 2014 holidays, and no matter how hard I try, how many carbs I cut, how small my portions are, how much fat I eat, how much I exercise, how much I watch sugar and grain consumption, how much I cut calories, no matter how much I desperately I want it, I can't lose that weight.  I've literally tried everything I can think of to lose this weight, to the point where I got obsessed with it.  I would look at myself in the mirror and get so angry at myself and swear that I would do better the next day.  My binge eating got worse, and I felt so out of control.  I'd be so good for weeks, but nothing changed on the scale, so I would binge, and that would make me feel even worse about myself.  I cried because I feared that I would continue to gain the weight and there would be nothing I could do about it. 

(To be clear, a binge eating episode is different for everyone who has the problem; some people consume 5000 calories, while others only eat 100.  The real sign that it's a binge is that you can't stop yourself from starting, you feel like you have no control over yourself while you're doing it, and once you're done you feel absolutely terrible and guilt stricken.  For me personally, a typical binge is probably 400 calories, and since I don't drive, it's almost always food in the house which is all whole natural foods, usually of a fatty nature.  Not that I'm trying to justify what I binge on; I just want to make the picture clearer.) 

And then by chance, I found the book Women Afraid to Eat, read it through, then bought and read Body of Truth shortly after.  Weight isn't equal to health, these books said.  Weight loss is incredibly hard to maintain (yes, even for some low carb/paleo people).  Your body fights too much weight loss.  Dieting is bad for you!  The effects of dieting are far worse than the effects of being overweight as far as health goes.  Actually, being overweight (bmi of 25-29.9) is a pretty healthy place to be, as far as longevity goes.  And the terrible thing about this is, scientists have known all of this since the 60s.  More modern science only confirms what these earlier researchers found. 


I have totally cut out the schemes to lose weight.  For one blessed month now, I have had no get-skinny-quick plans.  I have eaten mostly very healthfully; lower carb paleo WAPF style foods; veggies, eggs, meat, dairy, raw milk, fruit, good oils and fats, resistant starches.  I have mostly tried to eat at meals (breakfast at 7am, lunch at 12pm and dinner at 5:30pm), and only until I'm satisfied.  However, I'm not being strict about it, either.  I've eaten cake and ice cream at a party, I've made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, I munch on candy when I visit my mom's house, and Chad and I have gone out for ice cream a couple of times.  Thirty blessed days of no binging and no emotional eating.  Thirty days!  And I haven't felt guilty eating the junk, either.  I try to keep it low, because of course I know it's not good to eat sugar all the time, and I know that it will make me feel bad and be tired and moody. 

I'm trying not to think about weight at all.  I'm trying to eat for health and wholeness, and let the scale fall where it may.  I do check my weight occasionally, though, because of my intense fear that I'm going to start gaining a bunch of weight.  After a month (a month!) of eating whatever I wanted, and eating sugar and other junk whenever I wanted (within reason), I haven't gained any weight at all. 

I've read a lot about set points and how your body wants to be at a certain weight.  Not many people in the low carb/paleo community seem to like this idea (for that matter, I don't know any diet group that does, and why would you?  That's basically saying dieting is going to fail).  I have a bunch of reservations about it myself, but I can't help wondering if it's really true.  Is my set point 200 pounds?  When I weight 275 pounds, was it because I ate so much junk that I forced my body to gain all that weight against its will?  When I got down to 175, I was absolutely miserable and couldn't stay there for more than a few weeks.  I was happy at 185, but it's been five years since I  got to that weight, and that's the amount of time when a dieter starts creeping back up to their starting weight.  Am I going to get back up to 215, where I was before going on a low calorie diet?  I hope not.  I'm having trouble fully accepting these extra 15 pounds and loving my body with the extra roundness.  But if I do gain the other 15 pounds, it won't be because of my diet or lack of self control.  I know that now.  I also know that the extra 15 pounds won't make me unhealthy, either.  I bet I'm healthier than most thin people eating a SAD. 

The real reason I started writing tonight was because I wanted to talk about the lure of skinniness and what it can do to a person.  Since I've spent so much time rambling tonight about everything else, I think I'll save that post for another time.

Single Focus

As I said recently, I've been reading an interesting book called Women Afraid to Eat.  I don't agree with it 100%; it was written in the late 90s, so there are suggestions to go low fat and low sodium sprinkled throughout, but the rest of the book is fascinating.  It's a shocking exposure of what our society's focus on weight really does to women.  It's definitely opened my eyes.

The author, Frances Berg, talks about a lot of things; the shocking long term results of dieting both physically and mentally, the fact that 70% of women don't get enough of the nutrients they need to be healthy, how people unfairly judge women based on their appearances, and the surprising fact that the health benefits that you get from dieting and losing weight are very tiny compared to the health risks.  I haven't quite gotten through the whole book yet, but I'm finding it to be pretty inspiring and I plan on looking into these subjects more soon.

The last point there is the most annoying to me.  People that are obese or overweight are, yes, statistically at more risk for many health problems, such as hearth disease and diabetes.  The risk, according to Frances, isn't as high as you might think, considering how loudly health experts are yelling about it.  In some ways, it's actually healthier to be overweight or even obese; some recent studies have shown that overweight people actually live longer than normal weight people, and are less likely to get dementia.  And race plays a big role in it, too.  Apparently, black people can be healthy at slightly higher BMIs than white people, and Native American people can have much higher BMIs than white people and still be healthy.

So what's the deal?  Why is skinny "ideal", anyway?  I just don't get it.  And I certainly don't understand those people who are in favor of public fat shaming to get people to lose weight.  As a person who has never been a normal weight, I can tell you for sure that fat shaming doesn't work.  It rips a deep scar into your heart that never goes away.  I'll never forget being called hippo hips, or thunder thighs, or being barked at and called a dog.  I think the one that hurt the most when two boys came up to me, and one said, "I think you're pretty, but my friend thinks you're ugly.  That must mean you're pretty ugly."  It's hard to look in the mirror and see a beautiful woman; all I see is an ugly fat person.  And there are health experts out there that want to promote this kind of treatment!

 A recent study really got me riled up.  It was a cohort study that tried to see if there were different kinds of obese people.  And, apparently they found six types, though because this was focused on a group of people in England, they suspect there are even more groups globally than they found.  I think this kind of study is awesome; they're actually looking at obesity as a set of different types of people instead of fat vs. skinny.  I went into the article with high hopes, thinking yes, now they'll see there are some healthy obese people.  And they did find healthy obese people!  Obese young women, and obese older affluent adults.  Great, wonderful, glad to hear them say they're healthy.

But then they go on to say that these two groups, the healthy obese women and healthy obese affluent older adults still need to lose weight.

Why?!  Why do they need to lose weight if they're healthy?!  That makes no sense!  If they're healthy, and living a health promoting lifestyle, why does it matter if they lose weight or not?  Shouldn't health be the first priority?  RRR!

We're all individuals.  I can never be skinny; my genes won't allow it, and I'm not just blowing smoke here.  My mom was a beautiful woman when she was younger; she lived on a farm, in the days when everyone walked everywhere (she walked to town most days, a five mile hike up and down a huge hill), and she ate real whole food her parents grew and that grandma cooked with love.  But she was still a size 18 at her smallest.  All of my maternal female relatives (seven aunts and many cousins) were like that; we're a family of strong, tall, big boned, robust, and voluptuous women.  Grandma  was never skinny (though never fat, either), and she was vibrant and healthy until her death at 102.

I tried to find the data behind the news article for that study about types of obesity, but apparently you have to email the lead scientist for it.  Although I'm interested to see what it says, I'm not really that good at sorting through the data.  Besides, I doubt they'd send it to me for a blog post a few people are going to read.

I came across an article on the New York Post's website, with an excerpt from a book called Body of Truth.  After reading the article and the reviews of the book, I had to order it.  It's a serious look at the science of obesity and what it honestly says about the health risks of being fat and also of dieting.  I feel like I need to get to the bottom of this.  I want to read about the real science behind obesity, rather than just what the health experts are screaming.

So that's my rant for the day.  Hopefully, when I read more into the book, I'll have something more interesting to say than RRRRR! 

Update: Part 2

As I was saying in the first part of my update, after a cookie-filled Christmas and a home improvement project from hell that was fueled by sugar and caffeine, I had made myself extremely sick.  After I recovered, I decided it was time to cut out sugar and wheat completely, and really get serious about my low carb diet so I could lose the 10 pounds I'd put on (that put me at 195 pounds).  But after 60 days of no sugar or wheat, low carb eating, and even a week or two of low carb low calorie dieting (which left me feeling terrible, by the way, and Chad reminded me might not be good for my chances of getting pregnant), the weight didn't budge an inch. 

I was feeling terrible about myself.  It seemed like nothing I could do would make me lose the weight I'd put on.  I knew in my heart that low carb eating should make it come off pretty quickly, especially since it was all the carbs that made me put it on in the first place.  I wondered if it was the illness that made me hold onto the weight, that maybe I needed the extra weight to continue healing.  But all the weight I'd gained was sitting right on my stomach, and I'm certain that that's unhealthy fat that doesn't do you any good.  Maybe I wasn't low carb enough!  But I was fairly low carb, ranging between 50g and 80g a day, mostly from veggies and dairy.  I thought about doing a Fat Fast, the technique that Dr. Atkins would use to help his low carb patients get a jumpstart on weight loss; the problem with that is that it's 1000 calories a day of mostly fat, and as someone who has no gall bladder, eating large quantities of fat with nothing mixed with it makes my stomach pretty upset.  Plus, as I said before, Chad and I are still trying to conceive a baby, and I believe with all my heart that I shouldn't purposely cut calories (even though I did there for a short while; I was pretty desperate). 

I was pretty much giving up at that point the idea that I'd ever get back to 185, a weight that I was comfortable at.  I wasn't skinny in any sense, but I was healthy.  I had big round hips and thighs, giving me a pretty good pear shape, but I liked that about myself.  I looked feminine, robust, a daughter of the earth, a vessel of fertility.  But then I gained 10 pounds, and it went straight to my stomach, and now I feel truly fat.  Plus, when I got sick, I lost a lot of the muscle mass that I had gained when I started eating meat.  I felt weak, flabby, and fat, and I really hated it.  But still I ate low carb, because I was convinced that it was the only true way. 

By total chance, I decided to check out Tom Naughton's blog for the first time in a few months.  He's someone I really trust when it comes to nutrition.  He's smart but also sensible, and  his documentary Fat Head is actually what got us to go low carb in the first place.  So when Tom started writing about resistant starch, I paid attention.  Yes, I'd heard about RS before, and like everyone else I'd rejected it out of hand.  I mean, it was a starch, right?!  Everyone knows that starch is bad for you!  But Tom's post really made me think. 

I mean, at first I was very against it.  It seemed so against everything I'd been reading for, gosh, two years now on my low carb journey.  Suddenly it felt like everything I'd read was wrong.  It was almost like when I found out that sugar and wheat and carbs were what made me fat!  It was like my world turned upside down.  Which is funny, because RS isn't that big of a deal!  It's a small thing, but it's an important small thing.

As an experiment, Chad and I decided to start incorporating small amounts of real food RS into our diets.  Cooked and cooled potatoes and rice and occasionally beans, plus some green bananas here and there.  At first it was kind of awful.  My reaction was to get uncomfortably gassy, and Chad's was to get constipated.  I worried most about Chad, because that's a symptom I hadn't heard about in all the comments and talks about what to expect.  He was persistent, though; he wanted to make sure he gave it a good long trial before quitting. 

I think it was two or three weeks before we started feeling normal again.  Actually, I started feeling more than normal; I was feeling genuinely great.  When I was stuffing myself with sugar and caffeine, I felt terrible; when I started eating low carb again, I felt ok.  It wasn't until I got used to the RS that I started to actually feel great.  I was happy a lot, I had energy, I was motivated.  Some days I'd write in my journal that I couldn't believe how happy I was. The only genuine change we'd made at that point was the RS in the form of a potato or cup of rice a day plus a green banana every other day.

The story from here gets a little fuzzy because I started devouring information as much as I could.  I was very intrigued about RS, but suddenly I knew there must be more out there too.  I'd always had a nagging feeling that strictly cutting carbs long term might not be good for your health, especially for women.  So when the RS experiment went so well, it reawakened that thought and I began researching.  Tom Naughton interviewed Paul Jaminet on his blog about both his book Perfect Health Diet and also the whole RS topic; some of Paul's answers really surprised me.  For the most part in the past, I'd ignored Paul's ideas because it seemed to fly in the face of most of my low carb ideas, and try as I might to be open minded, I just didn't want to think about it.  Admittedly, it's really hard to digest so many food and nutrition ideas when no one is really sure about any of it and everyone has their own version of the truth.

The part of the interview that was most amazing to me was how Paul says on a low carb diet, you can become carb starved and that's when the cravings kick in hardcore.  That the reason your body can make glucose (through gluconeogenesis) is because you need it so much, and that maybe we should eat more starches to help our bodies out (in the same way that our bodies need cholesterol so much that it makes it, but we should still eat it so we don't overtax our bodies by having to make it all).  It made me wonder if that's why I was falling off the wagon so often in my years as a low carber.  I mean, I could certainly eat low carb and feel pretty happy, but eventually, once or twice a month, I'd eat something I knew I shouldn't and felt pretty powerless to stop myself.  Was I carb starved?  Did my body just crave glucose?  It certainly rang true with the nagging doubts I'd had about being low carb long term.

Then, kind of by the grace of God, I came across a book called Cure Tooth Decay just as I found a hole in my tooth, so I bought it that day.  And this book was largely inspired by Dr. Weston A. Price's book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (you can read the first edition for free at Project Gutenberg; however, his second edition, which has many additional chapters, isn't available free and must be purchased), which I then just had to read.  Both are very good reads, but I would suggest Nutrition and Physical Degeneration first because it's highly scientific and informative whereas Cure Tooth Decay, though a very good book, seems more emotionally based (at least to me). 

I ended up reading through Dr. Price's book in a few days because it just fascinated me enormously.  He traveled the world for ten years in the 1930s and 40s, searching for groups of people with naturally healthy teeth.  Specifically, he searched for societies where he could compare those people who were eating their traditional diets and those who were eating modern foods of civilization to act as a control.  What he found was amazing; not only did their traditional diets protect them from tooth decay, but also from disease and deformities, and it made them happier, less prone to crime, and they had easy fertility and women had very easy births.  Something in my heart knew this was the way for me.  I found the Weston A. Price Foundation's website, and started reading everything I could about their dietary recommendations. 

Now it's not like the principles of the WAPF diet are too different from how I was eating on a low carb diet.  It's still heavy on animal products, it believes that saturated fat is healthy, there's lots of veggies and some fruit, it doesn't like you using refined sugar, vegetable oil or white flour, and the way I'm eating it is still technically low carb (100g-150g carbs a day).  The biggest difference is their focus on nutrient density, which, honestly, was something I never thought about on a low carb diet.  If it was low in carbs, well, I ate it.  But now, I try very hard to make sure we eat the most nutrient dense foods first and fill the rest out with whatever low carb foods we like. 

The first thing we added was Fermented Cod Liver Oil and High Vitamin Butter Oil (yes, in all caps, because it's that important), which provides lots of natural vitamin A, D, and K2, which are fat soluble vitamins that are surprisingly hard to get enough of in our society.  The next thing we added was liver and marrow at least once every two weeks; marrow is pretty easy to eat in soups, but liver is an ongoing struggle for me being a super taster and general picky eater.  I'm working on it, though.  I wish I could add more organ meats, but unfortunately we don't have much access to anything else.  We also started eating as much organic as we could afford to. 

I started fermenting vegetables.  I just finished my second batch of sauerkraut yesterday.  It also takes some getting used to, but it's delicious and, along with the RS, I know it's helping to feed my gut.  I make lacto-fermented mayonnaise as well, and have even started a ginger bug to make lacto-fermented drinks soon.  After a lot of searching, I managed to find a source of raw milk relatively locally and we're drinking a large glass each every day, plus raw cheese whenever we can afford it.

There is one big change we made that will probably make low carbers and paleo folks both gasp in shock and horror; I started baking bread again.  Not just any bread, though.  Once a week or so, I mix up a batch of traditionally soured bread dough, either spelt, rye, or a low gluten whole wheat.  Then I make it into whatever we're feeling like that week, either bread, English muffins, or, Chad's favorite, pizza dough (you haven't lived until you've tried sourdough pizza!).  I didn't do this lightly; I've read Wheat Belly and I understand the problems with wheat and other gluten containing grains.  But I've also done my homework and understand that when you traditionally sour dough, you not only deactivate the phytates, you break down the gluten as well as some of the other nasty bits found in wheat.  There's even at least one study, although possibly more by now, that showed that celiacs can eat a sourdough bread without any damage to their intestines the way a conventional bread would.

I can attest to the difference between the two.  Conventional bread makes my heart pound, makes me feel all hot and uncomfortable, and riles up my IBS symptoms, whereas my sourdough bread doesn't do any of those things.  Plus, unlike most Americans, we're very careful not to eat too much of it; we generally eat only a small serving a day. 

This whole change in eating has been really interesting, exciting, and a lot of hard work.  Whereas I thought I worked pretty hard in the kitchen when I just ate low carb, now I literally make almost everything from scratch.  Bread, condiments, pickles, wraps, yogurt, jam, soup, bone broth -- you name it, I make it.  It's a labor of love, though.

So what's the result of all this hard work?  Well, the first thing that I noticed was a slow but steady reduction in weight.  Now, Chad's brother just came home for his yearly visit, which includes eating out as much as possible and as much junk food as you can get in your greasy pie hole.  Chad and I tried really hard to stay on track, with healthy low carb breakfasts and lunches most days, but it's hard to behave the whole time when you're in that environment for a week (especially because we spent four days in Pittsburgh during his visit and had to rely on restaurant food).  But before his brother came back, I was down to 190, a 5 pound weight loss in maybe a month and a half of WAPF style eating!  I gained a couple of pounds during the bro-in-law's visit, but it's already dropping steadily again, and I suspect by the end of this week I'll be back to 190.  The weight loss amazes me, because I'm higher carbs than I was before when I couldn't get the scale to budge an inch.  Add sourdough, potatoes and rice, and suddenly the weight is coming off. 

But other than weight loss, I have a deep feeling of being nourished for the first time in a long time.  I can't say I'm exactly happier or more energetic, at least not yet.  I feel like it's going to take a while to heal, not from the low carb diet but from years and years of being on a SAD vegetarian diet.  My nails, which were the first things to improve when I started eating meat, are suddenly even more awesome.  I actually look like I have a French manicure despite never wearing nail polish, because the nails are so smooth, and the tips are so thick and opaque. 

When I mentioned my nails before on my blog, people asked if I noticed my hair being different.  Back then, there wasn't any change at all, but now there's a true difference.  It's growing like weeds, for one thing; I managed to grow back three inches in just a couple of months, whereas wikipedia says hair usually grows at about half an inch a month.  I also lost about three white hairs.  Don't laugh!  I had five white hairs on the top right part of my head, and my hair being so dark, they were pretty visible.  Now, however, I seem to only have one or two up there, and I can't seem to find the others at all.  And although it could be the way I've been managing it, my hair seems curlier lately, too. 

Chad says he doesn't feel any different, but I can tell you for sure that he's happier, has more energy, he's more patient, and he's even managed to completely kick his caffeine habit.  And, yes, for those perverted people out there who must know, his libido seems to have increased.

I think the most important part about this whole change has been how connected it makes me feel to my food.  It's not just something I cook and eat; food is sacred, and you should be grateful for it every time you sit down to eat it.  Now I'm so much more involved in creating it, and truly understand that I'm feeding my body and not just my tongue.  I feel connected to the past, knowing that my grandma and her mother and all the mothers before her knew these exact principles and did everything they could to nourish their children with wholesome traditional foods.  I want to be a part of that tradition, and should Chad and I ever be blessed with children, I hope I can pass it along to them, too. 

Much Needed Update!

So...  It's been a while since I last posted.  What's funny about that is that one of the last things I posted was a resolution to try to write and post more authentic stuff.  But I think the truth is that I just got bored of writing, and it was starting to feel like work rather than something I did because I enjoyed it.  I'm funny that way; I have many hobbies, because after a while the one I'm doing begins to bore me and I move on to something else.  I'm currently making earrings.  Last week I was sketching.  And next week I'm going to be quilting.  Who knows what August will bring.

I felt like I should write something though, because 2014 has brought a lot of change to our household as far as food goes.  I guess I'll start from the beginning, and hope I don't put you to sleep!

In November of 2013, I decided I should allow myself to make cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies.  For friends and family!  I'd make a batch of cookies every week and freeze them so I would have lots of cookies to give away at Christmas time.  I made everything.  I think I ended up making maybe 10 kinds of cookies, and had at least two gross of cookies in my freezer. 

Except I couldn't just make the cookies and put them away.  I started to eat them, secretly.  Every time I'd make cookies, I'd eat cookies.  And sometimes I'd sneak some out of the freezer.  I figured I had more than enough for all my friends and family, and I didn't think one or two cookies would hurt. 

Well, I'm here to tell you that two months of one or two cookies lead to 10 pounds of weight gain.  I was pretty upset at myself.  I swore that, come the new year, I'd get right back on the low carb wagon and lose that weight lickety-split. 

The only problem with this theory was that, shortly into January, Chad and I embarked on a pretty epic remodeling project.  I get overly excited about stuff, and started wanting to do everything and right now. It started as a project to fix the texture that was peeling off our 100 year old plaster walls, but quickly turned into repainting the whole downstairs and replacing the carpet while we're at it.  Like a fool, I ordered to have the carpet put in three weeks from when we started this thing, which means we had three weeks to scrape, retexture, and paint most of our downstairs.  Since Chad has to work, that meant that the majority of the work fell on me.  It was an intense three weeks. 

We managed to just pull it off in time.  I told Chad that the only thing keeping me going at the end was sugar, caffeine, and pain pills.  I was beat up pretty badly.  And two days after the new carpet was installed, I found out exactly how badly I'd hurt myself.

I started to develop a really curious problem.  When I sat down after being up and moving around for a while, the right side of my face would hurt.  At first it was mild and could be remedied by getting back up and  moving around some more.  The next day, the pain was worse and I had to get up and do really vigorous exercise to make the pain go away.  That night, when I had to lay down to go to sleep, was torture.  Eventually the pain went away, though, and I finally got to sleep. 

The next day was the worst day of my life.  The pain was endless.  If I moved around, the pain was bad, but if I sat down, it felt like my face was being stabbed by red hot knives.  The pain went down to my jaw and neck and ran up to my ear and eye.  I cried uncontrollably.  I had my mom take me to the urgent care place; unfortunately, I totally stumped everyone there.  The doctor finally told me that the only thing she could think it was was a condition where the nerve in the face is damaged and there's nothing that can be done for it.  I asked her if she could at least give me a strong pain medication, because ibuprofen and Tylenol weren't doing anything for me.  She sent me off with a prescription for a strong antibiotic and hydrocodone.  I hated taking both of them, but I was desperate. 

I kept crying and telling Chad that I just couldn't live like this.  I was terrified that the problem was what the doctor thought it was, though I really doubted it.  She told me to make an appointment with my regular doctor, but I decided to get into my dentist instead on the suspicion that it had something to do with my teeth.  At this point, I had realized that the pain was being caused by changes in temperature, and that's why sitting down after moving around made it hurt.  It's also why, at this point, I couldn't eat anything at all.  The hydrocodone seemed to help a little bit, but it took about an hour to kick in.

The next day, I started to feel a little tiny bit better, though I was still in a lot of pain, crying, and generally miserable.  I couldn't move without bringing on a wave of pain.  I knew I had to eat, but I couldn't eat anything cold or warm or anything I had to chew.  I ended up having Chad blend up room temperature soup so I could suck it through a straw, plus I drank room temperature milk.  I was just glad I could get something in my stomach.

The visit to the dentist was extremely interesting.  She took some x-rays and examined my mouth.  She said my teeth looked fine, though the gums were swollen.  The x-rays revealed something really curious.  I had a huge pocket of fluid right above one of my top molars (at this point it had even gone down a little).  There was nothing wrong with the tooth at all.  She asked me if I had sinusitis, but I wasn't having any issues with my sinuses.  She thought it was probably brought on by the flu or a bad cold and told me to just rest and continue taking the antibiotics the doctor had given me. 

It took me about a week to fully recover from the pain, and another week to start feeling normal again.  It actually took me a month or more to get my strength back.  And unfortunately, the infection had slightly damaged the sight in my right eye so now it's a little near sighted, and occasionally the difference between the vision in my two eyes makes me feel disoriented.  I got some glasses to help with the problem, but I'll never have my perfect vision back.

After that incidence, I was pretty sick with myself.  I knew the infection was caused by the sugar, caffeine, pain pills, and excessive amounts of hard physical work.  How could I have done that to myself?  I knew sugar was toxic, but I shoveled it in anyway because it gave me quick energy when I had nothing left to give.  I decided to go completely sugar and wheat free, for real.  No cheating.  No treats.  Just good low carb food.  I decided to give myself a reward if I made it to 30 days of being sugar and wheat free; I let myself buy $60 worth of spring bulbs to be planted in the fall.  I figured going back to being low carb, sugar free, wheat free would help me to drop those 10 pounds I'd gained, too.

And I made it to 30 days.  Then 60 days.  But the weight wasn't doing anything.  I may have even gained a couple of pounds.  I felt better, but not as good as I felt when I first switched to low carb.  I was feeling really desperate to move the scale and make myself feel better, to the point where I was starting to experiment with low carb calorie counting.  I tried to cut my calories back to 1600 a day, but that made me feel even worse.  At that point, Chad gently reminded me that it's probably not healthy to cut back on my intake if I'm trying to support a baby (which we're still trying to conceive). 

I think we'll stop this post there since it's already pretty long.  The rest of the story is much happier, and even though I can't say for sure that it ends well because life doesn't have neat little endings the way movies do, I can say that Chad and I are doing much better and feeling wonderful.  So then, see you next time!

Personal Update

I'm actually writing this Thursday the 22nd, so it's not exactly up to date, but it's pretty close. 

I wrote a while back about how sometimes I really really want to lose more weight.  I've been stuck at 185 for, gosh, years now.  I did manage to get down to about 176 on a low calorie vegetarian diet, but because I was literally starving myself to get to that point, it didn't last very long.  I thought I would try cutting out more carbs from my diet and to stop eating snacks between meals.

That didn't last long.  It just wasn't natural for me, and it felt way too rigid.  The reason I chose to live this way for the rest of my life is because it makes me feel good and because it's so super easy.  The moment it becomes hard to stick with it is the moment I stop being able to live this lifestyle.  And plus, I'm not a whole person and I can't eat like some others might be able to.  I don't have a gall bladder, which makes it hard for me to go long periods without food without feeling sick. 

I have cut out a lot of the treats and desserts, though.  I used to make low carb desserts all the time.  I'd probably eat them once a day (or more).  I'm not sure why I haven't been making them lately.  Maybe I'm lazy?  Or maybe I don't have such strong cravings for sweets like I used to.  I also don't make low carb breads much anymore, either.  Again, I don't know if it's because I'm lazy or because I'm simply not craving bread. 

I also decided to start really reading Mark Sisson's blog Mark's Daily Apple, and really trying to incorporate his ideas and teachings into my life.  I've been walking a whole lot more, and I picked up weight lifting again (Chad and I both do Fred Hahn's Slow Burn, which is intense!).  I fully intend to try incorporating sprints someday, but right now I'm focusing on lifting and walking and making sure I do them regularly.  Once I get that down, I'll try some sprints.  Sprinting actually sounds awesome.  Chad and I used to run three times a week, and even though I hated the thought of going out and doing it, I actually loved running.  I would wax poetic to Chad after running about how awesome running was and how much I loved it and how I wished I could do it more.  Then the next time we'd go to run, I'd be grumbling the whole time because I hated the thought of it.  Lol! 

So I stepped on the scale about a week ago for the first time in probably a month, and also decided to take my body measurements for the first time in, oh, maybe six months.  The scale said....  181.4!  Woo!  I haven't been that low in a long time, and I'm not even trying to lose weight.  It's gone up a little since then because it's my fat time of month, but it was encouraging to see that.  My goal really truly isn't to lose weight, but I wouldn't mind if it happened. 

The really cool thing, though, was my measurements.  I lost an inch around my waist, an inch around my hips, an inch around my thighs, AND I GAINED A HALF AN INCH AROUND MY ARMS!  If that's not proof that I'm making progress, I don't know what is.  And I can really see that my arms are getting bigger.  Not like huge or anything, but toned.  I told Chad that I have to be careful; the women in my family are very muscular by nature, and if I'm not careful, I'll end up super buff, lol.

My goal it to find ways to be active every day and to get strong and fit.  I'm not like unfit or anything right now.  Like I said, I used to be a regular runner, I go walking and hiking all the time, garden for hours a day, and my usual way of climbing stairs is by running up them.  But I want to be strong.  And I want to get a routine down now while I'm young so that I can be strong even when I"m old.  I don't want to end up like my mom, who is 65 and has trouble walking around the block.  I also want to keep up with Chad, who is continuing to get stronger every time he lifts.  He can now pick me up and carry me without complaining that it hurts his back!  And I weigh more than he does!

So that's how I'm doing.  The longer I travel on this low carb whole foods path, the easier it gets.  It's my lifestyle now.  I've come to accept all that it entails.  I don't get upset at the fact that I have to cook everything we eat practically from scratch, because I know that means we're eating the healthiest food we can.  To be honest, I actually really feel good about making everything we eat from scratch.  Sure, it's a lot of work, but I've always had trouble, as a housewife, feeling like I'm contributing to the household.  Now I know for sure that I am.  Chad goes to work and earns the money to pay for our food, and I put forth the effort to make it into something delicious, nutritious, and life-giving. We wouldn't have gotten as far as we have with low carb if it wasn't for all the hard work I've put forth in the kitchen. 

Now I guess I'd better end this rant before it gets too long.  I'll continue to track my weight here and there, but like I said, it's not really my main goal.  I've come to accept the fact that I'm never going to be a "normal" weight, and it's actually kind of freeing.  Now I can focus on my health and getting stronger, which is way more important anyway.

Some Thoughts

I ranted a little bit the other day about how I really wanted to be skinny sometimes, but that I'm afraid to try anything extreme to actually get there for fear it would hurt my body or, should I get pregnant, my baby's body.  I got a lot of advice and some well wishing from folks, and I thank you all for your concern.  That was really touching.

I've been thinking about it a little bit, and I decided that even though I don't want to do anything extreme, such as cutting calories or trying to get into nutritional ketosis, I think I will make some changes.  I'll admit that I've gotten a little lax in my eating habits.  I don't mean to say that I've started eating bad foods regularly; I'm still grain, soy, gluten, seed oil, and sugar free most of the time.  But there are times where I find myself emotional eating, or worse, boredom eating.  Yes, I'm eating good foods, but the fact that I'm eating when I'm not actually hungry?  That's probably not good, right?

My thinking is that I'm going to try doing the No S Diet again, which basically means no snacks between meals, no seconds, and no sweets; of course, I'll still be eating the healthy low carb, whole foods that I already eat, only less often.  I tried this method before, and it does seem to help.  I only stopped doing it because I had a lot of emotional stress at one point that sent me right to munching between meals.

What I like about this plan is that if I get hungry between meals, I drink a glass of water or seltzer, which is very good.  I oftentimes get so full at mealtimes that I don't have room left for water, and I don't always remember to drink it between meals.  And drinking lots of water, aside from aiding digestion and being cleansing, also helps with a woman's fertility by increasing fertile cervical fluids.  There's your fertility lesson for the day.

I also am going to try having a 0 carb breakfast to keep the natural morning ketosis going until lunchtime.  I told a commenter that I already eat 0 carbs for breakfast, but I remembered later that this isn't actually true.  I usually have 1/2 a cup of plain full fat yogurt, or 1/3 a cup of cottage cheese with my eggs and bacon.  So I'm going to cut the dairy out in the morning and see if that makes a difference.

I do want to lose more weight.  At 185 pounds, I'm not skinny; I'm not exactly fat (I wear size 14 pants and large shirts), but I have rolls and flab I would love to get rid of.  But at the same time, I don't want food to become an obsession.  I actually enjoy the carefree relationship I have with food right now.  I know what I can and can't eat, and I eat what I want.  I don't lose any weight, but I'm certainly not gaining back any of the 90 pounds I lost.  So that's why I don't want to go into full diet mode.

When I look back at the time I was on a low calorie diet, it's worrying.  I was so obsessed with food at that point that it was all I did all day long.  Reading articles, tracking food, counting calories, denying my deep gnawing hunger.  When I think about it now, it almost seems like an eating disorder, or at least the beginnings of one.  The last thing I ever want to do is become so obsessed with food that I start hurting myself or my family.

That's why I'm only taking small steps.  I'm healthy right now; I'm fit, active, happy, and strong.  I don't want to do anything that might jeopardize that.

Little Things

Since seriously going low-carb and whole-food in about September of last year, I've seen a lot of changes in my body.  Lots of things improved that I didn't even know I had a problem with.  It's these little things that astound me the most, because now it's like, I could never go back to living with all the little problems I used to have.  That would be unbearable now that I'm feeling like a whole person. 

So I thought it would be fun just to list all the little things that have changed since last September, in both me and Chad.

First, mood.  Chad's mood has evened out remarkably.  He used to be kind of emo and often had a short temper (and he's a big guy so he's a little bit scary when he's mad).  It's kind of like this:

Only now I have to be like "Chad, eat some bacon." 

My mood has evened out as well.  I used to be very easily depressed, constantly worrying, insecure, and the littlest thing would offend me and make me cry.  I still get that way once in a while, but now it happens in a predictable time frame, as in when I'm PMSing.  Yes, I'm now officially a cliche.

Next, sleep!  I used to be an extraordinarily light sleeper.  I was tossing back and forth all night because even the littlest thing woke me up.  It usually took me at least a half hour to get to sleep in the first place, and then I was up pretty early.  The summer was the worst, because the birds start singing about 4 in the morning, and once they start, it was hard to get back to sleep.  But now, I sleep much more soundly.  I still have the occasional night where it seems like I'm tossing and turning all night, but for the most part, I sleep pretty well all night long. 

I used to have a problem with digestion.  I don't know what to call it, honestly, but I guess the best description would be IBS.  I was never diagnosed for anything.  Honestly, I didn't know I even had a problem until I stopped living that way.  I don't want to go into any details, so I'll just say that I went to the bathroom a lot, and sometimes my stomach got really upset.  I thought I was healthy because I never got constipated, but it wasn't a pleasant way to live.  Now that I'm eating better food, I see that the way my body was acting is not the way things should be.

I don't drive, and that's because when I was a teenager, I had a very serious problem, and the thought of having this problem while driving a car scared the living crap out of me.  The problem?  Severe wrist pain.  It wasn't exactly carpal tunnel syndrome, although everyone wanted to believe that's what it was.  It was similar, but the pain affected different areas than carpal tunnel does (I'm pretty sure, anyway).  The pain radiated around my wrist and sometimes, when it was really bad, would shoot down my arm.  On the worst days, I couldn't use my hands for much of anything.  Writing hurt, sitting hurt, walking hurt, everything hurt, and I couldn't lift anything heavier than a couple of pounds.  I went out practice driving once when I had this pain, and I almost drove the car right into a five foot ditch.  That, along with another couple of incidences, is what convinced me that I should wait until I had this problem under control before trying to drive again.

But you know what?  I haven't noticed the pain in a long, long time.  Like it just occurred to me one day that I don't hurt hardly at all anymore.  It's only when I really strain myself that I have a problem, like the day I spent carrying around about a dozen 40 pound bags of compost and building a new garden.  This is shocking to me, because I always assumed it was my excessive computer use that caused me to be in so much pain.  I

It's pretty funny, actually, that now when I look up carpal tunnel syndrome, they say that some of the main causes are diabetes and obesity, whereas I'm pretty sure back when I first had my problem, most people said it was caused almost exclusively by repetitive movement. 

Chad also improved in this way.  He's a programmer, and so spends all day typing.  He didn't have severe wrist pain, but he would sometimes mention that by the end of the week, his thumb and maybe his fingers would hurt.  But now, I'm pretty sure the problem is all gone.  I can't say for certain, because he's a guy, and guys don't like to tell people about their weaknesses. 

Energy is another improvement.  Chad especially has seen lots of improvements here.  He used to get worn out so easily.  He said that he used to only be able to get about 4-6 hours of work done a day because he just couldn't focus, or couldn't find the mental energy to finish his work.  But now he's consistently working 7 or even 8 hours a day, with the occasional off day (because we all have those).  I think I'm just as lazy as I was before, but now when I do go to do the work that needs done, I'm not like physically exhausted the way I used to be.  I have all the energy to do it, it's just that I sometimes lack the ambition, lol. 

Our outlook is better!  We're both so much happier now, seriously.  I used to be very depressed, couldn't find happiness in almost anything, crying at least a couple times a week just because the sadness was so heavy on my shoulders.  Chad would sometimes dream about leaving everything behind and just driving across the country because, I think, he felt trapped in an unhappy job and a small town.  Neither of us had any goals or ambitions in life, no dreams of the future.  There were times when we couldn't even imagine what our lives would be like in five years.  But shortly after changing our diets, our outlook started to change too.  Pretty soon, life didn't seem so dismal.  We started dreaming about the future, or at least I did.  We're really happy in the life we have now, Chad's happy with his job, life is just so pleasant.  The future is full of hope now.

I probably shouldn't bring this up (Chad's going to kill me)...  But in the spirit of Super Size Me and also Fat Head (where Chereva asked Tom if he was a moron when he brought this up), I have to mention our sex life.  In a word - awesome! 

Hmmm, what else?  Oh!  I started putting on muscle like no one's business, and so did Chad!  The difference between me and Chad, though, is that Chad regularly lifts weights, whereas I sit on my butt watching him lift weights.  Yes, friends, that's right; I put on muscle while being a lazy bum.  How's that for cool? 

Then there's my fingernails.  I've said this before, but I think it's totally worth mentioning.  I used to have really terrible nails.  I could probably pass them off as normal through the summer, but once winter came, that charade was over.  My nails were always very thin and brittle no matter what time of year it was, but the dryness of winter made things even worse.  They started breaking at the sides, and then peeling, layer by layer, off the top.  I couldn't grow them at all. 

This was actually the first change that really caught my attention, because it wasn't something subjective.  It wasn't some wishy washy "oh, I feel better".  It was real, physical proof that something positive was happening.  Suddenly one day I noticed, holy cow, my fingernails are super long!  I never really had to trim them before because they constantly broke, but now I have to actually actively cut them or I start looking like catwoman.  And they're not just long; they're also very strong.  I used to be able to bend my thumbnails in half (when I had enough nail to bend, that is).  Now I try to do that and it's just too solid.  It doesn't budge.

I'm sure there are a lot of other little things I'm missing, but those are the ones that really stick out in my mind.   Plus, we've only been low-carb whole food for 8-9 months, and who knows what changes will continue to happen?

Man, I just can't concentrate tonight.  I have a large art commission to get finished, but I can only work on it for about five minutes at a time before my mind starts wandering and I find myself on google looking up things like "Marilyn Monroe's BMI" (about 20, by the way).  I couldn't even focus long enough to finish that sentence before going back to google, lol.

What's mostly on my mind tonight is an ad I saw today while flipping through RedBook.  I don't read many magazines anymore because I'm trying to divorce myself from the "everyone knows" type articles and the you-have-to-be-perfect-and-beautiful-all-the-time mentality that makes up practically every part of almost all the magazines I used to read.  I had to start throwing away my Shape magazines as soon as I got them because they were making me depressed (just eat less and  move more and you'll look like this supermodel!!!!!!!).  And don't even get me started on Cosmo.

The ad I saw in Redbook was for Slim-Fast.  Yes, Slim-Fast is annoying in general.  "Just drink our carbalicious drinks and then starve yourself and you'll lose weight!"  Don't you just want to kick them where it counts sometimes?  Yes, we all do.  But this ad is different.  And apparently, it's just part of a huge ad campaign.  The tv commercials, I hear, are really bad (NC-17, seriously).  But I'll stop rambling and just show you what caught my attention.  Click on it to read the small stuff.

Yeah, ok.  Who amongst us hasn't tried to lose weight because we kind of hated the way we looked when we were fat?  I know I have.  When I went on a low calorie diet, it was to look better because I hated the way my body looked.

The reason this ad bothers me so much is because it adds fuel to the self-loathing fire that most women (and men) live with.  No, it doesn't say, "Hey gals, you should hate your body so that you'll want to buy our product," but it does try to make you think that by losing a couple of pounds, maybe you'll get everything you want in life.  A sexy bikini body that will attract that hot guy you like who will love you so you don't have to love yourself.  It was almost scary to read what Ashley from Massachusetts said her real reason was...  To be the skinniest mom in her group.  Not just one of the skinniest, or the healthiest, or the strongest or even the prettiest, but the skinniest.  There's something wrong with this picture.

I don't think it's healthy for women to focus on skinny.  That's not what really matters, at the end of the day, because we're not all designed to be skinny like that.  Some of us are designed to be chunky, curvy, strong or big boned.  And there's nothing wrong with that.

My grandma lived to just shy of 103.  She wasn't a skinny woman.  She wasn't fat by any means, but she was big boned, thick, muscular, well built, even into her 100s.  She worked hard all her life raising 12 children, about half of that time working on a large farm and the other half working as a school lunch lady (back in the day when they made every meal from scratch).  She didn't get skinny until shortly before she died. 

I wish the media wouldn't focus so hard on weight.  It seems like practically everything said about a star is about their weight.  Look at how great she looks in a bikini (and here's how you can looks that great too!!).  OMG this celeb is skin and bones!!!  WOW this celeb is a beautiful plus size lady!  And that celeb lost all her baby weight in TWO DAYS!

Let's just stop with the weight thing already.  It's not as important as we make it out to be.  Yes, I think it's really cool when people celebrate plus sized stars, and I also think it's a needed wake up call when they point out how ridiculously skinny some celebs are, but I think spending that much time focusing on weight is dangerous.  Pretty soon, everyone is saying how losing weight is the only way to be happy, the only way to be healthy.  Instead, let's focus first on health and finding our body's natural balance.  If we're treating our bodies right, they'll get to the weight that we're supposed to be at.  That may mean we're very skinny, like my 6'5 175 pound bean pole husband.  Or that might mean we're chunky, like me, a curvy 5'7 185 pound girl. 

The nature connection

Nature is beautiful.  I just love spring, because I get to be outside again after a long winter away from my beloved mother earth.  It's not that I can't go out in winter; I certainly could go shovel snow, or go snow shoeing, or just go for walks.  But c'mon...  who, in their right mind, actually enjoys being outside in 5 degree weather, with whipping winds, four feet of snow on the ground, and where it's not snowy it's a sheet of solid ice just asking to be slipped on?  Besides kids, of course.

So when spring comes, and I mean really actually shows up (we don't get real live spring until at least the end of April, sometimes May), I like to spend as much time outside as I possibly can, doing whatever I can think to do.

Like hanging laundry out to dry.

Checking the garden (it looks much different now, just a week later).

Turning my compost.

Picking some overwintered greens...

 

...to add to some homemade soup.

And opening the front door so the cat can bask in the sunshine that spills through the storm door.

I think spending time in nature is important for everyone, no matter where you live or what kind of life you lead.  It keeps you grounded, it calms you, and it heals your heart.  There have been studies about this sort of thing, but it's late and I'm lazy.  I just thought I'd share a little bit of nature with you, and maybe inspire you to get outside and enjoy whatever nature you have access to.