The Weight Thing

In case you didn't already know, I used to be fat.  Like, really fat.  Like, I was literally morbidly obese.  At 5'7, 275 pounds, my BMI was 43, which classed me as morbidly obese.  The worst part was that I was a sweet and naive 17 year old and I didn't understand how sick I was.

I did managed to lose weight, though.  Slowly, in steps, it came off.  Some came off when I fell in love with Chad and started treating myself better.  Then we started going out and being active together, and more came off.  I moved in with him and took over cooking almost all the meals, and more came off. 

In 2010, I went on a low calorie diet, started running three days a week and lifting weights once or twice, and within five months, I had lost another 30-35 pounds.  By then, I was down to 185.  I wanted so badly to lose another 10 pounds so I could shout from the roof tops that, HEY WORLD, I'VE LOST 100 POUNDS!

But low calorie dieting is terrible.  I'm sure anyone who has tried it can understand what I'm talking about.  I was eating about 1500-1700 calories a day, and later once I'd lost 30 pounds, I shifted to 1300-1400 calories a day to try to lose more weight.  My goal was 160 pounds, which would just get me into the "normal" BMI range.

I was hungry all the time.  Like, hungry to my core.  I couldn't eat enough to satisfy the hunger I was feeling unless I ate over my calorie range.  I didn't shun fat, but I also knew that fat was 9 calories whereas carbs and protein were 4, so I tried to avoid it so I would be able to eat more food, because I was so hungry.  And being a vegetarian, it was remarkably hard to get enough protein.  On days where I was trying really hard, I'd eat about 60g of protein, but it was mostly from soy, low fat dairy, and wheat gluten.  

The worst part was the food obsession.  I would think about food every moment of the day.  I would carefully weigh each and every item.  I had to specially formulate recipes and carefully divide the results to make sure I was getting the right amount of calories.  I spent hours a day typing in the foods I'd eaten in Sparkpeople.com's food diary.  And at the end of the day, I would go and check how many calories I had left and try to get as much extra food as I could.  Food was my life.  I dreamed about it.  Meals were the centers of my day. 

That's why I loved the idea of low carb dieting so much, when I finally opened myself up to the science behind it.  I wanted to just eat what I wanted of low carb food, stay away from the higher carb items, and watch myself effortlessly get skinny.  I did lose some weight.  I was 195 pounds when I started, and managed to lose 10 pounds in a month, bringing me back to 185.  But I haven't really lost anything since then.

I know this system works, because I've seen what it's doing for Chad.  He was lean before we started, but he managed to lose about 20 pounds while also putting on muscle.  So I know it's not that this low carb idea is wrong.

Some days I struggle mentally with this.  Sometimes all I want to do is lose 20 more pounds and I think I'm willing to do anything I can to get there.  But then I remember actually being 175 at one point while low calorie dieting.  I had to starve myself to an incredibly uncomfortable level to get there, and then my will power just broke and I couldn't stop myself from putting those 10 pounds back on.  Maybe my body is trying to tell me that this is the weight I'm supposed to be at.  Losing 90 pounds in very respectable.  And I can't expect my body to work the same after being at 275, either.  I don't think it's actually capable of being very lean after that.

But that doesn't stop me from wanting to be skinny.  I know I've written in the past about how sick it is for us to want to be skinny, that we should be striving for health instead, but I can't help it.  I still want it.  I want to be one of those beautiful models who looks great in a bikini.

To what lengths am I willing to go to lose weight?  I've thought about trying nutritional ketosis, like Jimmy Moore.  I've thought about a low calorie low carb diet.  I've thought about cutting out dairy and eggs to see if that helps.

But I worry.  This doesn't seem safe.  Pushing my body to extreme lengths to lose weight that probably isn't causing me any problems.  I worry about nutritional ketosis.  There are people in the paleo crowd that claim that women need more natural carbs (from  fruit and veggies) for their fertility.  I worry about low calorie low carb diets, because Chad and I are trying to conceive.  What if I got pregnant and I didn't know it?  A low calorie diet doesn't just starve me; it starves the baby, too, and the first couple of weeks are when the nervous system are developing.  As for cutting out dairy and eggs?  What the heck would I eat if I couldn't eat dairy and cheese?

Some days I want so badly to be skinny.  So, so badly.  But most days I long for something simpler.  To be healthy.  That's the real goal here.  To feed my body.  To build up muscle I lost as a vegetarian.  To correct the harm I did on a low calorie diet.  To be whole.  To never be hungry to my core. 

I wonder if there's some in between road, where I can respect my body and  feed it what it needs, but at the same time start shedding the leftover bulge.  I just don't know.  I really don't know if it's a fight worth fighting.

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.