Sorry about the extreme angst in my last post. I thought that once I hit 30, I would stop being quite so angsty, but it just never happened. You should have seen me as a teenager though! That was quite a sight.
After writing that post, I spend the night thinking about diet and body image. I wondered if it would actually be that bad to go low carb again to lose weight. I mean, how many health writers have I read in the past year that have said it's not healthy to eat or exercise in order to change your body? Quite a few, actually. I've been trying to love my body the way it is now and the weight it wants to be, knowing that diets tend to make me feel more negative about myself. I actually do feel pretty good about my body most days.
But it's still true that I'm a lot heavier now than I was just six months ago, and I'm finding it harder to do things that used to be easy for me and my knees are bothering me as well. Not only that, but I grew out of most of my clothing, and I just hate that.
Poor Chad has also gained weight. Are most guys like that? When you're off your diet, they eat badly with you? Chad sure is. Every time I indulge, he's right there with me. It's nice to know I'm not the only one that wants to cram buckets of icecream in my face, but it makes me feel bad when he complains about the clothes he can't wear anymore. He wasn't very big to begin with, but he's gotten more of a belly.
So when he came down on Monday morning, saying he couldn't fit into another shirt, I took it as a sign and asked him if he wanted to go low carb again. He was all for that. I know guys aren't as sensitive about their weight as women, but I can tell it still bothers him that he's gained (I'm guessing 20 pounds).
It's been three days now! I forgot how easy low carb eating is. Luckily, I didn't really have to change much since we don't eat bread or other carbage. Basically, I cut down on the fruit, started using lower carb veggies (Brussels sprouts instead of carrots, say), stopped drinking as much milk, and cut out all sugar which includes my water kefir. I also cut out the resistant starches for now. I'm considering this as a kind of fast, kind of like the original Atkins diet that has a super low carb induction period that gets your body into the swing of things.
I'm not following a plan, just playing things by feel. I think what we'll do is eat this way for at least a couple of weeks and then see how things are going. At that point, I might add back in resistant starches, since they're important to gut health. Again, I really have no plan. I just want to lose some of this weight.
I actually decided that focusing on losing some weight might be good for my body image right now. It's not like I want to lose 100 pounds; at this point, I know that's not something I can do. I have a limit of 185 pounds. And who knows, that limit might be higher now that I'm older. I just want to lose the weight I gained this fall and winter. It was such a hard time for me emotionally, and getting rid of the weight might help me fully move on from everything that happened.
I feel really good about this! I'm definitely excited. I've gotten out for long walks everyday, including a nice long hike on Sunday. Plus, the garden calls! I went out and planted my snap peas tonight, which means it won't be long before I'm out there everyday. Oooh, and my raspberries shipped yesterday! And my apples are just about to bloom. Oh, I'm so excited.
So yes, I'm in a much better mood than I was the other day. I guess I have my moods.
Showing posts with label well-being. Show all posts
Showing posts with label well-being. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
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:
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?
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Resolution Review
So here it is, nearly half way through February. Isn't that amazing? It seems like time goes so slowly in winter, but when you look at the calendar, you wonder what on earth happened to January! Or is that just me?
I thought now would be as good a time as any to look back at the year so far and see how I'm doing with my resolution. If you can't remember, my resolution was to eat well and exercise more, treat myself with respect, and find time to do the things that I love.
I actually did really well for 2/3 of January. But then circumstances made me crash pretty badly. I'm having major issues with Depo Provera (a progesterone birth control shot). I got the shot in September, and it theoretically ran out in mid December. However, because of the nature of the shot, the effects can linger for up to a year. The effects I'm having from Depo are weight gain, moodiness, and a nearly constant period. And starting in the beginning of January, I started having a really heavy, really crampy period. The cramps come on about every other week, last for a week, and then give me a break. Ugh.
The first thing I do when I have cramps is run to the chocolate. I dunno why; it's just something I've done for a long time now. It doesn't make the cramps go away or anything. I kind of feel like, "If I'm going to feel like crap, I have the right to eat junk food". It makes sense at the time, I swear.
So anyway, there were a couple of weeks there where I was eating lots of chocolate and other junk, and it made me feel pretty junky on top of the cramps. Last Saturday, I decided that that was enough, and I needed to start caring for myself again, and thankfully I haven't touched junk since then. I'm making an exception for Valentine's day because Chad got some reservations to a nice restaurant that I've never been to, but then I'm getting back on the wagon.
Exercise has been sporadic for me. The weather has been so unpredictable that I can't really get out much, so I haven't had much chance to go walking. I do get up on my exercise bike once in awhile, but not as often as I should. I don't know why I don't do it. I think I just forget most days. I need an annoying reminder to keep me at it. Of course, if I had an annoying reminder, I would probably just disable it.
As for treating myself with respect and doing the things I love, that also took a back seat while I was cramping out on the couch through most of January. I'm happy to report that I'm busy working on finding things I love and moving toward a more fulfilling life again. I borrowed a cool book from the library called I Could Do Anything, If Only I knew What It Was. It was written to help people find their passions and what they want to do with their lives, and so far it's been a lot of fun reading it. I've discovered that I really do like doing art and working with plants, and it's ok to pursue those desires further.
Have I lost any weight? I'll admit that I did step on the scale the other day. I hadn't lost any weight, but at least I hadn't gained any from the pounds of chocolate I'd eaten, either. I weighed myself a couple days later, after eating well for a few days, and I had lost about a pound. Not a huge deal, but at least it's encouraging. I'm off the scale again for a while though. I don't want to start obsessing about numbers. What's important is that I'm feeling better.
I've noticed that since I gained a bunch of weight since last fall, my body feels different. My knees feel weak, and it's harder to get up off the floor. I don't like that feeling. I'm only 31; I shouldn't feel like an old woman. I really want to start exercising and lifting weights so I can feel strong again. It's hard to get started, though. I keep thinking about how I want to do it, but I don't actually get around to it. There always seems to be something more important to do. I have some pretty bad self discipline. It's a miracle that I even managed to stop eating chocolate.
So that's how I'm doing so far. How is everyone else doing?
I thought now would be as good a time as any to look back at the year so far and see how I'm doing with my resolution. If you can't remember, my resolution was to eat well and exercise more, treat myself with respect, and find time to do the things that I love.
I actually did really well for 2/3 of January. But then circumstances made me crash pretty badly. I'm having major issues with Depo Provera (a progesterone birth control shot). I got the shot in September, and it theoretically ran out in mid December. However, because of the nature of the shot, the effects can linger for up to a year. The effects I'm having from Depo are weight gain, moodiness, and a nearly constant period. And starting in the beginning of January, I started having a really heavy, really crampy period. The cramps come on about every other week, last for a week, and then give me a break. Ugh.
The first thing I do when I have cramps is run to the chocolate. I dunno why; it's just something I've done for a long time now. It doesn't make the cramps go away or anything. I kind of feel like, "If I'm going to feel like crap, I have the right to eat junk food". It makes sense at the time, I swear.
So anyway, there were a couple of weeks there where I was eating lots of chocolate and other junk, and it made me feel pretty junky on top of the cramps. Last Saturday, I decided that that was enough, and I needed to start caring for myself again, and thankfully I haven't touched junk since then. I'm making an exception for Valentine's day because Chad got some reservations to a nice restaurant that I've never been to, but then I'm getting back on the wagon.
Exercise has been sporadic for me. The weather has been so unpredictable that I can't really get out much, so I haven't had much chance to go walking. I do get up on my exercise bike once in awhile, but not as often as I should. I don't know why I don't do it. I think I just forget most days. I need an annoying reminder to keep me at it. Of course, if I had an annoying reminder, I would probably just disable it.
As for treating myself with respect and doing the things I love, that also took a back seat while I was cramping out on the couch through most of January. I'm happy to report that I'm busy working on finding things I love and moving toward a more fulfilling life again. I borrowed a cool book from the library called I Could Do Anything, If Only I knew What It Was. It was written to help people find their passions and what they want to do with their lives, and so far it's been a lot of fun reading it. I've discovered that I really do like doing art and working with plants, and it's ok to pursue those desires further.
Have I lost any weight? I'll admit that I did step on the scale the other day. I hadn't lost any weight, but at least I hadn't gained any from the pounds of chocolate I'd eaten, either. I weighed myself a couple days later, after eating well for a few days, and I had lost about a pound. Not a huge deal, but at least it's encouraging. I'm off the scale again for a while though. I don't want to start obsessing about numbers. What's important is that I'm feeling better.
I've noticed that since I gained a bunch of weight since last fall, my body feels different. My knees feel weak, and it's harder to get up off the floor. I don't like that feeling. I'm only 31; I shouldn't feel like an old woman. I really want to start exercising and lifting weights so I can feel strong again. It's hard to get started, though. I keep thinking about how I want to do it, but I don't actually get around to it. There always seems to be something more important to do. I have some pretty bad self discipline. It's a miracle that I even managed to stop eating chocolate.
So that's how I'm doing so far. How is everyone else doing?
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Two Ways to Look at a Woman
I'm currently reading a book called The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. It's an older book now; you might even be able to get away with calling it a classic feminist book, since it's 25 years old at this time. It talks about the backlash from society against women after the women's movement and as women gained more power and status in our culture. I won't go too into the book because it's pretty deep, but I'll say that it's worth reading even if you're not interested in feminism or the women's movement.
I do want to quote a part of the book that really moved me. She's talking about how cosmetic companies and doctors try to make a woman's normal body functions and aging process into diseases for their own profit, and that you can see a woman two ways.
I hope I can see my own aging as a beautiful thing.
I do want to quote a part of the book that really moved me. She's talking about how cosmetic companies and doctors try to make a woman's normal body functions and aging process into diseases for their own profit, and that you can see a woman two ways.
"You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that if a women is healthy she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes after decades of laughter, closing together like fans as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of "serious lesions," or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion, and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life, and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, the minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.
Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privilegde sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition."
I hope I can see my own aging as a beautiful thing.
Friday, January 15, 2016
The Dead of Winter
It's finally winter here in western New York. The snow has finally blanketed the ground and put the earth to sleep. The air is chill, and the cold winds howl through the skeletal trees. Nothing but a pine branch stirs in the grey outside world.
I always look forward to winter, because I think finally I'll have some time to work on my creative endeavors. I don't have a garden to care for or any other outside activities to do really. When it's 12 degrees outside with whipping wind, it's not that fun to go play in the snow. But the truth is, once the stillness of winter sets in, it seems like a stillness settles over my heart as well. Nothing seems to stir my interests.
Certainly, I have plenty of things I can do. I have the line drawing for my next painting all finished and ready to start painting, I have several quilts and quilting projects I'd like to work on, and plenty of other crafts and household projects that would be nice if they were done. None of those things really call to me, though. It's almost as if I just want to curl up on the couch for the rest of winter.
Maybe it's the weather. A dull grey day isn't exactly cheerful or inspiring, and the cold makes me want to never step foot out of my bed again. I do tend to get this way every year, and I don't have much luck just shaking it off.
When I'm not keeping myself busy with my creative projects, I have time to contemplate my life. Lately, I've been wondering if I've been wasting my talents. I enjoy staying home, but sometimes I feel so useless and unseen by the world. I don't want to be rich and famous or anything, but it would be nice if I could make some kind of impact.
At the same time, I'm afraid to seriously pursue any of my passions because I'm such a flake. The only serious commitments I've been able to make in my life are A) to my husband and B) to my garden. And it's only worked out with my garden because I get a six month hiatus every year. Imagine telling your boss that you're pretty sick of your job, and you'd like to take a few months off so you can go do something else for a while. Life just doesn't work around my personality.
I've had a job before, and I showed up on time for that and was an excellent worker. That's not really what I'm afraid of. What I'm afraid of is that I'll set down a career path, and a year later decide that it's not for me.
At least as a housewife, I have the option to pursue whatever creative endeavor my heart desires, even if I only get to share it with my family. I dunno. It's depressing sounding when I put it like that. It's not that I'm unhappy at home; on the contrary, I enjoy the freedom it offers me. I just wish I had a real focus or goal.
I don't know where I read it, but I remember someone calling this feeling something along the lines of the holy restlessness. Or the sacred boredom. It's when there's a deep longing in your heart for something more; an empty space in your soul that's just waiting for God to fill it. And I really do feel like that's what's happening to me. As tough as it is for me to feel bored and restless and uninterested in everything, it's creating space for something new and wonderful to come into my life. Maybe it's best that I don't just jump into anything right now. I want to leave the space open for a little while and see what happens.
Maybe I'll take a bath and read a book.
I always look forward to winter, because I think finally I'll have some time to work on my creative endeavors. I don't have a garden to care for or any other outside activities to do really. When it's 12 degrees outside with whipping wind, it's not that fun to go play in the snow. But the truth is, once the stillness of winter sets in, it seems like a stillness settles over my heart as well. Nothing seems to stir my interests.
Certainly, I have plenty of things I can do. I have the line drawing for my next painting all finished and ready to start painting, I have several quilts and quilting projects I'd like to work on, and plenty of other crafts and household projects that would be nice if they were done. None of those things really call to me, though. It's almost as if I just want to curl up on the couch for the rest of winter.
Maybe it's the weather. A dull grey day isn't exactly cheerful or inspiring, and the cold makes me want to never step foot out of my bed again. I do tend to get this way every year, and I don't have much luck just shaking it off.
When I'm not keeping myself busy with my creative projects, I have time to contemplate my life. Lately, I've been wondering if I've been wasting my talents. I enjoy staying home, but sometimes I feel so useless and unseen by the world. I don't want to be rich and famous or anything, but it would be nice if I could make some kind of impact.
At the same time, I'm afraid to seriously pursue any of my passions because I'm such a flake. The only serious commitments I've been able to make in my life are A) to my husband and B) to my garden. And it's only worked out with my garden because I get a six month hiatus every year. Imagine telling your boss that you're pretty sick of your job, and you'd like to take a few months off so you can go do something else for a while. Life just doesn't work around my personality.
I've had a job before, and I showed up on time for that and was an excellent worker. That's not really what I'm afraid of. What I'm afraid of is that I'll set down a career path, and a year later decide that it's not for me.
At least as a housewife, I have the option to pursue whatever creative endeavor my heart desires, even if I only get to share it with my family. I dunno. It's depressing sounding when I put it like that. It's not that I'm unhappy at home; on the contrary, I enjoy the freedom it offers me. I just wish I had a real focus or goal.
I don't know where I read it, but I remember someone calling this feeling something along the lines of the holy restlessness. Or the sacred boredom. It's when there's a deep longing in your heart for something more; an empty space in your soul that's just waiting for God to fill it. And I really do feel like that's what's happening to me. As tough as it is for me to feel bored and restless and uninterested in everything, it's creating space for something new and wonderful to come into my life. Maybe it's best that I don't just jump into anything right now. I want to leave the space open for a little while and see what happens.
Maybe I'll take a bath and read a book.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Downer
I want to stay focused on my health as I get going into this new year. For me, that means eating well, getting enough sleep, doing the things I love, and getting some exercise. I'm purposely leaving out any thoughts on losing weight. Why? Because it's a death trap for my self esteem. If my goal is to lose 20 pounds, then I start thinking about how fat and blobby I am, start doing some not so smart things to help me lose those pounds, and can become pretty obsessive in a bad way. It's a bad place to be, and I don't even want to try going down that road.
Which is why I'm really mad at myself for stepping on the scale the other morning. I wasn't really thinking about it. I was feeling good about myself because I've been eating well and feeling better. Until I saw how much I weighed. I hadn't weighed myself since before Christmas, so I'd gained a good 5 or 6 pounds, and it was a bit of a shock. And it made me feel really bad about myself.
I haven't weighted this much since before I was married.
Then I start arguing with myself in my head. I've been through a lot this fall; I was pregnant, I had major stress and hormones, I ate emotionally, I was deeply depressed, I got the depo shot (progesterone birth control, which they tell you will make you gain weight), it was Christmas, I've been sick.
The other side of my head is saying things like, yeah, but you didn't have to eat all that at Christmas and New Year's, you should be exercising more, you're so fat and ugly, it's no wonder you can't fit into your clothes, you have no self control, and even if you did, no diet even works for you so why try, you're going to be fat and blobby forever.
But I'm gonna do good and cut out all food that tastes good and exercise until I collapse and maybe I'll start calorie counting again and tracking every food I put in my mouth and running even though it's winter and I have cold weather exercise-induced asthma.
You'll never do any of that. You're too fat and lazy.
..............................
All that from weighing myself absentmindedly. It's a bad thing for me. It brings out the worst parts of me; I get obsessed, beat myself up, believe in miracle cures, and forget that what's important is my health and not how I look.
So maybe I'll move my scale out of my room for now. Now that I know how much I weight, I have strong desires to continue to weigh myself to make sure it's going down. It's a sickness. The funny thing is, no one really sees it as such. If it was gambling or drinking, people would say I fell off the wagon. But it's about weight loss, so of course it's good that I weighed myself. I certainly used to think so.
Now I just think it's a waste of my precious time and energy.
Which is why I'm really mad at myself for stepping on the scale the other morning. I wasn't really thinking about it. I was feeling good about myself because I've been eating well and feeling better. Until I saw how much I weighed. I hadn't weighed myself since before Christmas, so I'd gained a good 5 or 6 pounds, and it was a bit of a shock. And it made me feel really bad about myself.
I haven't weighted this much since before I was married.
Then I start arguing with myself in my head. I've been through a lot this fall; I was pregnant, I had major stress and hormones, I ate emotionally, I was deeply depressed, I got the depo shot (progesterone birth control, which they tell you will make you gain weight), it was Christmas, I've been sick.
The other side of my head is saying things like, yeah, but you didn't have to eat all that at Christmas and New Year's, you should be exercising more, you're so fat and ugly, it's no wonder you can't fit into your clothes, you have no self control, and even if you did, no diet even works for you so why try, you're going to be fat and blobby forever.
But I'm gonna do good and cut out all food that tastes good and exercise until I collapse and maybe I'll start calorie counting again and tracking every food I put in my mouth and running even though it's winter and I have cold weather exercise-induced asthma.
You'll never do any of that. You're too fat and lazy.
..............................
All that from weighing myself absentmindedly. It's a bad thing for me. It brings out the worst parts of me; I get obsessed, beat myself up, believe in miracle cures, and forget that what's important is my health and not how I look.
So maybe I'll move my scale out of my room for now. Now that I know how much I weight, I have strong desires to continue to weigh myself to make sure it's going down. It's a sickness. The funny thing is, no one really sees it as such. If it was gambling or drinking, people would say I fell off the wagon. But it's about weight loss, so of course it's good that I weighed myself. I certainly used to think so.
Now I just think it's a waste of my precious time and energy.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
A Brand New Year
I really don't like new year's resolutions. Usually people create impossible goals, and end up feeling like failures when they can't reach them. I certainly have been there, but I stopped making resolutions a long time ago.
That being said, I still think the beginning of the new year is a perfect time to stop and reflect on your life, and change directions if you notice you're not down the path that's best for you. And after a hard year like I've had, I really need some redirection.
Chad and I are going to have our traditional new year celebration soon, consisting of a movie and nachos, so I won't spend a lot of time on this post. But I wanted to write down what I want to change in my life, so it's maybe a little more concrete.
Number one, I want to start feeding myself properly. My body is an amazing gift from God, and I should nourish it with the best foods I can find. My goal is not to cut out junk because thinking in negative terms creates a vacuum that draws in the candy bars. Instead, my goal is to fill my plate with lots of good foods so that there's not much room left for foods that make me feel bad.
I also want to start exercising my amazing body so that it's strong and well maintained so I can do the things I love, like gardening and hiking. I'm going to go easy on the exercise, because I'm out of shape and I don't want to hurt myself. I also don't want to exercise so hard that I start hating it.
I want to make space in my day for the things I love, which means I have to change the way I think about my time. It's precious, and I should stop trying to find ways to waste it. This will also make space and time in my life to help me find more meaning in my days.
I want to start treating myself with the same respect and love that I treat others, because no one else will treat me that way until I do.
So how was your year? Was it good? Did you have rocky spots? Is there anything you want to change? Whatever 2015 looked like for you, I hope that 2016 is even better. Happy New Year!
That being said, I still think the beginning of the new year is a perfect time to stop and reflect on your life, and change directions if you notice you're not down the path that's best for you. And after a hard year like I've had, I really need some redirection.
Chad and I are going to have our traditional new year celebration soon, consisting of a movie and nachos, so I won't spend a lot of time on this post. But I wanted to write down what I want to change in my life, so it's maybe a little more concrete.
Number one, I want to start feeding myself properly. My body is an amazing gift from God, and I should nourish it with the best foods I can find. My goal is not to cut out junk because thinking in negative terms creates a vacuum that draws in the candy bars. Instead, my goal is to fill my plate with lots of good foods so that there's not much room left for foods that make me feel bad.
I also want to start exercising my amazing body so that it's strong and well maintained so I can do the things I love, like gardening and hiking. I'm going to go easy on the exercise, because I'm out of shape and I don't want to hurt myself. I also don't want to exercise so hard that I start hating it.
I want to make space in my day for the things I love, which means I have to change the way I think about my time. It's precious, and I should stop trying to find ways to waste it. This will also make space and time in my life to help me find more meaning in my days.
I want to start treating myself with the same respect and love that I treat others, because no one else will treat me that way until I do.
So how was your year? Was it good? Did you have rocky spots? Is there anything you want to change? Whatever 2015 looked like for you, I hope that 2016 is even better. Happy New Year!
Saturday, May 30, 2015
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.
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.
Friday, May 8, 2015
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:
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:
(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.
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 |
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.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
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.
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.
Monday, July 28, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Resolution
I know it's a little late for this, but I suppose I've always been a bit of a procrastinator. I don't generally believe that New Year's resolutions are a good idea; I think most people make the wrong resolutions for the wrong reasons. As someone who's almost 30, I can say I can't honestly remember ever making a sincere resolution in my life.
I do want to make a resolution of sorts this year, though. It's not weight related, even though I did put on some holiday pounds. It's not money related, despite the fact that I spent a little too much on new gadgets recently. And believe it or not, it's not even love related (Chad and I are still quite happy). No, my resolution this year is much simpler, though perhaps a little harder for me to achieve than any of those other ones.
I resolve to do what I believe is best for me no matter what others think; and if I come up against someone who's trying to sway my beliefs, I'm going to thank them for their time and move on. This has always been a big problem with me. When it comes to my health or happiness, I let people influence what I think. I feel embarrassed to challenge them when they tell me that my way isn't the right way, and I begin to believe that I must be wrong. But just because what they say is right for them doesn't mean it's right for me. There's only one person in this world that knows what's right for me, and that's me.
And besides, if I don't stick up for myself, I'm never going to be able to trust my own instincts.
Happy New Year, everyone! I know 2014 is going to be great. I've been so touched with the number of people leaving comments recently asking for me to start posting again or just making sure I'm ok... what a great group of readers I have! Now that Christmas is over and I can focus on my garden and my diet again, I hope to start really posting more frequently.
I do want to make a resolution of sorts this year, though. It's not weight related, even though I did put on some holiday pounds. It's not money related, despite the fact that I spent a little too much on new gadgets recently. And believe it or not, it's not even love related (Chad and I are still quite happy). No, my resolution this year is much simpler, though perhaps a little harder for me to achieve than any of those other ones.
I resolve to do what I believe is best for me no matter what others think; and if I come up against someone who's trying to sway my beliefs, I'm going to thank them for their time and move on. This has always been a big problem with me. When it comes to my health or happiness, I let people influence what I think. I feel embarrassed to challenge them when they tell me that my way isn't the right way, and I begin to believe that I must be wrong. But just because what they say is right for them doesn't mean it's right for me. There's only one person in this world that knows what's right for me, and that's me.
And besides, if I don't stick up for myself, I'm never going to be able to trust my own instincts.
Happy New Year, everyone! I know 2014 is going to be great. I've been so touched with the number of people leaving comments recently asking for me to start posting again or just making sure I'm ok... what a great group of readers I have! Now that Christmas is over and I can focus on my garden and my diet again, I hope to start really posting more frequently.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Success and Failure
On Friday, I wrote a post saying that I was going to try not eating sugar and wheat for one day, and then if that worked, do it again the next day. Well, unfortunately it didn't end up happening on Friday. I can't even remember what I ate that was bad for me, but I know I ate it. However, Saturday and Sunday were great! I ate really good food and didn't have any sugar or wheat. And I was feeling really good, too. Eating clean really makes me feel so good physically.
But, Monday came and I was bad again. I finally called up my mom and asked if we could go out and have coffee, since we hadn't really talked for a week. I know everyone who commented on my drama filled posts about how badly my family treated me has said that I should just divorce my family, and I will admit that I wish I could. But it's not easy for me. I'm not dependent on them anymore; I'm an adult and I can stand on my own two feet. The problem is that they're dependent on me. I'm my mom's support system. I'm her financial adviser, her marriage counselor, her sounding board, her crafting expert, her shoulder to cry on, her landlady (yes, we own the house she lives in), and the only sane sensible person she has in her life to keep her grounded. It makes me want to cry to think of her going through the stuff she goes through alone. So I can't divorce my family for the simple fact that I'm my mother's mother.
Anyway, we talked. Not a whole lot about the birthday incident, but normal everyday talking. It was nice, comforting. I had a breve latte, but couldn't resist the muffin in the case. Ugh! The funny thing is that the low carb muffins I had made over the weekend were way better than the carby one I ate at the coffee shop. But I'm trying not to worry too much about it. I got right back on the wagon and ate well the rest of the day.
I'm going to have a hard time staying on the wagon the next few days though. Chad's birthday is Saturday, except we're celebrating it tomorrow because I have a family reunion to go to on Saturday. Chad's request for his birthday dessert was a giant chocolate cookie, and I know I'm going to be eating some of it. I also know I'm probably going to indulge at the family reunion, since my family includes some amazing country chefs.
September is such a hard month for me to stay healthy. I had this problem last year, too. There's just so much going on in September for us. Three birthdays, our anniversary, and a family reunion, all nicely spaced out so we're eating bad things all through the month. I can't wait til October comes. The only time we're tempted to eat bad things is on Halloween, and then that's only one day.
I think another thing keeping me from eating well is my mental state. I'm sure some of you have noticed that I haven't been posting very much, and that's because I've been really pulled away from the world emotionally these last couple of weeks. It's like I'm living in my head, and I just eat whatever I'm craving. Sometimes I eat bad things hoping it'll make me feel better. But what I really need is to jump back into life. Get back into blogging, start reading my favorite low carb/paleo blogs, going for long walks, working on my garden, and not letting myself mope around so much. I always go through a bout of the blues in the winter, but it's only fall!
I do plan on writing more, even if it's just these long rambly personal posts. If I keep at it, maybe I can get back into the rhythm I had going before, and I can start feeling normal again.
But, Monday came and I was bad again. I finally called up my mom and asked if we could go out and have coffee, since we hadn't really talked for a week. I know everyone who commented on my drama filled posts about how badly my family treated me has said that I should just divorce my family, and I will admit that I wish I could. But it's not easy for me. I'm not dependent on them anymore; I'm an adult and I can stand on my own two feet. The problem is that they're dependent on me. I'm my mom's support system. I'm her financial adviser, her marriage counselor, her sounding board, her crafting expert, her shoulder to cry on, her landlady (yes, we own the house she lives in), and the only sane sensible person she has in her life to keep her grounded. It makes me want to cry to think of her going through the stuff she goes through alone. So I can't divorce my family for the simple fact that I'm my mother's mother.
Anyway, we talked. Not a whole lot about the birthday incident, but normal everyday talking. It was nice, comforting. I had a breve latte, but couldn't resist the muffin in the case. Ugh! The funny thing is that the low carb muffins I had made over the weekend were way better than the carby one I ate at the coffee shop. But I'm trying not to worry too much about it. I got right back on the wagon and ate well the rest of the day.
I'm going to have a hard time staying on the wagon the next few days though. Chad's birthday is Saturday, except we're celebrating it tomorrow because I have a family reunion to go to on Saturday. Chad's request for his birthday dessert was a giant chocolate cookie, and I know I'm going to be eating some of it. I also know I'm probably going to indulge at the family reunion, since my family includes some amazing country chefs.
September is such a hard month for me to stay healthy. I had this problem last year, too. There's just so much going on in September for us. Three birthdays, our anniversary, and a family reunion, all nicely spaced out so we're eating bad things all through the month. I can't wait til October comes. The only time we're tempted to eat bad things is on Halloween, and then that's only one day.
I think another thing keeping me from eating well is my mental state. I'm sure some of you have noticed that I haven't been posting very much, and that's because I've been really pulled away from the world emotionally these last couple of weeks. It's like I'm living in my head, and I just eat whatever I'm craving. Sometimes I eat bad things hoping it'll make me feel better. But what I really need is to jump back into life. Get back into blogging, start reading my favorite low carb/paleo blogs, going for long walks, working on my garden, and not letting myself mope around so much. I always go through a bout of the blues in the winter, but it's only fall!
I do plan on writing more, even if it's just these long rambly personal posts. If I keep at it, maybe I can get back into the rhythm I had going before, and I can start feeling normal again.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Chasing Down the Wagon
It's been a crazy ride since I left for vacation in late August. It feels like my life hasn't really gotten back to normal since then! Along with my daily routine being disrupted, my healthy eating habits have taken a back seat as well, and I can really feel it affecting me.
I haven't given up my low carb diet exactly. It's like I'm eating the way I used to, only with junk food thrown in. So I'll have eggs and bacon in the morning, but I might add in cheesecake sometime mid morning, or after a healthy dinner of taco salad, I'll go out and have ice cream.
To be honest, since having the bad experience with my family on my birthday, I haven't really felt right. I've been mopey and depressed, and I can't justify eating properly because I'm so down in the dumps. I think to myself, if life sucks so hard, why bother eating well? Of course I know that eating badly also makes me depressed, so it's a vicious cycle.
So today I decided enough is enough. No more junky foods. I had a cup of caffeinated coffee (a rarity for me) to help get me perked up so I won't be tempted to make myself feel better with sugar, and my goal is to eat no sugar or wheat just for today. If I can get through today, then I can get through tomorrow, and then the day after. But it starts with one day.
I don't like living in a dark funk like this. I mean, I used to be this way all the time, depressed, lonely, feeling like there was no reason to treat myself right. When I started eating low carb last year, I came out of that funk and I really haven't been that depressed until recently. I hate this feeling of being useless and hopeless, and I want to get out of it as soon as possible, and I know I can't do that until I start eating right and giving my body the care it deserves.
So I have to chase down that wagon, but I'm going to get back on it.
I haven't given up my low carb diet exactly. It's like I'm eating the way I used to, only with junk food thrown in. So I'll have eggs and bacon in the morning, but I might add in cheesecake sometime mid morning, or after a healthy dinner of taco salad, I'll go out and have ice cream.
To be honest, since having the bad experience with my family on my birthday, I haven't really felt right. I've been mopey and depressed, and I can't justify eating properly because I'm so down in the dumps. I think to myself, if life sucks so hard, why bother eating well? Of course I know that eating badly also makes me depressed, so it's a vicious cycle.
So today I decided enough is enough. No more junky foods. I had a cup of caffeinated coffee (a rarity for me) to help get me perked up so I won't be tempted to make myself feel better with sugar, and my goal is to eat no sugar or wheat just for today. If I can get through today, then I can get through tomorrow, and then the day after. But it starts with one day.
I don't like living in a dark funk like this. I mean, I used to be this way all the time, depressed, lonely, feeling like there was no reason to treat myself right. When I started eating low carb last year, I came out of that funk and I really haven't been that depressed until recently. I hate this feeling of being useless and hopeless, and I want to get out of it as soon as possible, and I know I can't do that until I start eating right and giving my body the care it deserves.
So I have to chase down that wagon, but I'm going to get back on it.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Keeping Perspective
Mark Sisson, in his Weekend Link Love, posted a link to a very interesting blog post that asks the question What's the point?
The author starts the essay by quoting Lewis Thomas, and the quote really spoke to me.
I think it's great that we in the paleo/primal/low carb communities are reaching for better health and a stronger body, but I think a lot of people are becoming obsessive with it. There's almost a desperate need to lose weight, gain muscle, eat and exercise perfectly, and keep complete control over their body. And when they see someone who isn't behaving perfectly like they themselves are, they think less of that person.
That obsessive behavior has always seemed somewhat disturbing to me. In some people, it's almost to the point where I'd want to call it an eating disorder. But can you call a hyper-focus on eating well an eating disorder?
Most disturbing to me, I think, is that food and exercise seem to be some people's entire lives. They think about food all day long, and if they're not thinking about food, they're thinking about exercise. And I don't mean to say people like Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, or Tom Naughton are obsessed about food and exercise; there's a big difference between being passionate about nutrition and wanting to spread that passion to other people, and being so obsessed about your body that you can't think about anything other than food and exercise.
I know first hand what this kind of obsession is like, which I think makes it easier for me to see it in others. For 5 or 6 months, back when I was on a low-calorie vegetarian diet, I was hardcore obsessed about my body. I spent every waking hour thinking about food, weighing everything I ate, obsessively dividing out meals, trying to figure out how many calories I had left in the day, trying to get enough protein (a hard thing to do for a vegetarian; I got 50-60g on a good day, but usually more like 20-30g), and tracking all the exercise I did so I could make sure I was in a calorie deficit.
It was exhilarating. I felt totally in control of my body for the first time ever. I was dropping pounds and getting active, and I felt like if I just kept controlling my body and giving it only what I thought it needed, I could finally get skinny and beautiful. But the body is a hard thing to control when you don't have the right information. Eventually, after ramping up my exercise to a point where my knees were starting to hurt, and cutting back my calories to 1300 a day (which is a level that left me truly starving), my body said "enough!". I got appendicitis, which totally left me without any resolved after the operation, and I went back to eating a lot more and exercising hardly ever.
The whole point of this long winded ramble, though, has to do with what my obsession with my diet did to the rest of my life. I didn't have one. I had a very hard time going out. I couldn't eat unless I was the one that cooked the food, because then I could weigh, measure, and divide the meal to my exacting standards. My conversations with others always seemed to be about food and nutrition, which I'm sure made me the life of the party. I always seemed to be miserable. I just thought that came with the territory.
That's why I refuse to seriously cut my carbs or try to get into ketosis, or any method that would bring back that desire to take control of my body again. I don't like being obsessed, and I really don't think it's healthy for my life. The reason I love the way I eat now, which is low carb and whole foods based, is because it's so lax. I just need to avoid grains, sugar, starchy veggies, and most processed foods. It's that simple. I don't have to count anything, and I don't have to track how many calories I've burned during exercise.
I certainly don't think all paleo/primal/low carb people are obsessed with their diets. This way of eating actually lends itself to a more relaxed relationship with food. But I do know that there are those out there taking it to the extreme and doing more harm than they are good. Just remember that your diet should never get in the way of your happiness (unless your happiness is dependent on sugar, in which case you'll just have to be unhappy until you adjust). We shouldn't be so obsessed with staving off death that we forget to live.
The author starts the essay by quoting Lewis Thomas, and the quote really spoke to me.
As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.The emphasis is mine, because I think that sentiment is so important. It's very true, at least from what I've seen. The majority of people who are obsessed with health seem to be trying to put off death, and especially to forgo aging. You can't pick up a health magazine without seeing an article about how exercise and healthy eating can make you look years younger.
I think it's great that we in the paleo/primal/low carb communities are reaching for better health and a stronger body, but I think a lot of people are becoming obsessive with it. There's almost a desperate need to lose weight, gain muscle, eat and exercise perfectly, and keep complete control over their body. And when they see someone who isn't behaving perfectly like they themselves are, they think less of that person.
That obsessive behavior has always seemed somewhat disturbing to me. In some people, it's almost to the point where I'd want to call it an eating disorder. But can you call a hyper-focus on eating well an eating disorder?
Most disturbing to me, I think, is that food and exercise seem to be some people's entire lives. They think about food all day long, and if they're not thinking about food, they're thinking about exercise. And I don't mean to say people like Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, or Tom Naughton are obsessed about food and exercise; there's a big difference between being passionate about nutrition and wanting to spread that passion to other people, and being so obsessed about your body that you can't think about anything other than food and exercise.
I know first hand what this kind of obsession is like, which I think makes it easier for me to see it in others. For 5 or 6 months, back when I was on a low-calorie vegetarian diet, I was hardcore obsessed about my body. I spent every waking hour thinking about food, weighing everything I ate, obsessively dividing out meals, trying to figure out how many calories I had left in the day, trying to get enough protein (a hard thing to do for a vegetarian; I got 50-60g on a good day, but usually more like 20-30g), and tracking all the exercise I did so I could make sure I was in a calorie deficit.
It was exhilarating. I felt totally in control of my body for the first time ever. I was dropping pounds and getting active, and I felt like if I just kept controlling my body and giving it only what I thought it needed, I could finally get skinny and beautiful. But the body is a hard thing to control when you don't have the right information. Eventually, after ramping up my exercise to a point where my knees were starting to hurt, and cutting back my calories to 1300 a day (which is a level that left me truly starving), my body said "enough!". I got appendicitis, which totally left me without any resolved after the operation, and I went back to eating a lot more and exercising hardly ever.
The whole point of this long winded ramble, though, has to do with what my obsession with my diet did to the rest of my life. I didn't have one. I had a very hard time going out. I couldn't eat unless I was the one that cooked the food, because then I could weigh, measure, and divide the meal to my exacting standards. My conversations with others always seemed to be about food and nutrition, which I'm sure made me the life of the party. I always seemed to be miserable. I just thought that came with the territory.
That's why I refuse to seriously cut my carbs or try to get into ketosis, or any method that would bring back that desire to take control of my body again. I don't like being obsessed, and I really don't think it's healthy for my life. The reason I love the way I eat now, which is low carb and whole foods based, is because it's so lax. I just need to avoid grains, sugar, starchy veggies, and most processed foods. It's that simple. I don't have to count anything, and I don't have to track how many calories I've burned during exercise.
I certainly don't think all paleo/primal/low carb people are obsessed with their diets. This way of eating actually lends itself to a more relaxed relationship with food. But I do know that there are those out there taking it to the extreme and doing more harm than they are good. Just remember that your diet should never get in the way of your happiness (unless your happiness is dependent on sugar, in which case you'll just have to be unhappy until you adjust). We shouldn't be so obsessed with staving off death that we forget to live.
Friday, July 12, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, May 24, 2013
The Problem With Farm Eggs
We live in New York. No, not The City. We live in New York state, about as far away from New York City as you can possibly get while still being in NY state. I know from experience that a surprisingly large number of people think that all of NY is like NYC, but I can assure you it's not. As a matter of fact, the area we live in is very heavy into agriculture. This area is the largest producer of concord grapes in the world, and our dairy farms produce more revenue than our vineyards if that tells you anything at all. We have three large Amish communities in our county alone, and there's lots more across the border in PA. Our dinky city of 30,000 is the largest city in our county.
So it might shock some of you to find out that it took us a while to find a source of farm eggs. The problem is that we're city folk, and we really had no idea who to contact to find out where to get eggs. Just because we're surrounded by farms doesn't mean we know anything about them. But by chance, I saw a carton of eggs in my mom's fridge with a little tag attached with the name of the farm she bought them from, and I was all like OMG TELL ME WHERE YOU GOT THESE!!! Lol, down the street from where she lived. Somehow, in all the times we'd been to my mom's house, Chad and I had never seen the sign that read "FRESH EGGS $2.50 A DOZEN".
We immediately went out and got two dozen.
They're so so so so so good. I'll admit that when we first started buying them, they weren't really that different from the eggs we buy at the store. I've decided that it's because it was the dead of winter then, and of course chickens can't really forage in two feet of snow. But now that there are bugs and grass and other delicious things for the chickens to eat, their eggs are so awesome.
The egg in the middle is a store bought egg, which, by the way, is from a brand we really like because their egg yolks are a lot darker than other brands we've tried. So that should tell you how seriously dark the yolks of the farm fresh eggs are.
I even got to meet the guy selling the eggs the other day. He was amazingly friendly, and seemed so chipper and happy. I bet he eats lots of eggs himself.
But there's a problem with farm fresh eggs. Yes, a real problem that can't be ignored. The problem is.... availability. Because farm chickens aren't machines. Because there's a limited supply. And because demand is going way up as people become more aware of how the happiness of their food affects their own well being. We went about two months without farm eggs because, every time we went out to buy them, there weren't any there. After a while, we just stopped bothering to check, because it is a little out of the way now that my mom has moved to a different house.
My mom and I recently went out to the farm at an off hour, and to my delight, they had eggs! Chad and I checked again last weekend, and managed, after checking at two different times, to get the eggs we so desired. I really don't want to bother the farmer with our problem because it's a first-come-first-serve kind of deal, and we shouldn't get any special treatment, but I do wish our supply was more consistent.
I guess I just have to wait until we move to the country and get our own chickens. I have to find out what kind of chickens lay green eggs...
So it might shock some of you to find out that it took us a while to find a source of farm eggs. The problem is that we're city folk, and we really had no idea who to contact to find out where to get eggs. Just because we're surrounded by farms doesn't mean we know anything about them. But by chance, I saw a carton of eggs in my mom's fridge with a little tag attached with the name of the farm she bought them from, and I was all like OMG TELL ME WHERE YOU GOT THESE!!! Lol, down the street from where she lived. Somehow, in all the times we'd been to my mom's house, Chad and I had never seen the sign that read "FRESH EGGS $2.50 A DOZEN".
We immediately went out and got two dozen.
 |
| I love that green-egg-laying chicken. Now I just need some green ham. |
They're so so so so so good. I'll admit that when we first started buying them, they weren't really that different from the eggs we buy at the store. I've decided that it's because it was the dead of winter then, and of course chickens can't really forage in two feet of snow. But now that there are bugs and grass and other delicious things for the chickens to eat, their eggs are so awesome.
The egg in the middle is a store bought egg, which, by the way, is from a brand we really like because their egg yolks are a lot darker than other brands we've tried. So that should tell you how seriously dark the yolks of the farm fresh eggs are.
I even got to meet the guy selling the eggs the other day. He was amazingly friendly, and seemed so chipper and happy. I bet he eats lots of eggs himself.
But there's a problem with farm fresh eggs. Yes, a real problem that can't be ignored. The problem is.... availability. Because farm chickens aren't machines. Because there's a limited supply. And because demand is going way up as people become more aware of how the happiness of their food affects their own well being. We went about two months without farm eggs because, every time we went out to buy them, there weren't any there. After a while, we just stopped bothering to check, because it is a little out of the way now that my mom has moved to a different house.
My mom and I recently went out to the farm at an off hour, and to my delight, they had eggs! Chad and I checked again last weekend, and managed, after checking at two different times, to get the eggs we so desired. I really don't want to bother the farmer with our problem because it's a first-come-first-serve kind of deal, and we shouldn't get any special treatment, but I do wish our supply was more consistent.
I guess I just have to wait until we move to the country and get our own chickens. I have to find out what kind of chickens lay green eggs...
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