I've got at least five posts sitting in my head waiting for me to find the time to write them down, and those are just the posts that I've pondered over the past week or two; they don't even include the "history of my weight loss" posts that i'm planning on detailing at some point.
life has taken over, i guess, briefly. but i'll be back. (and as a brief update, food is going great, i've got the carbs well and truly out of my system, and i'm now at 153lbs)
so what i actually popped in to share was one of those small, sweet joys that happen from time to time. leaving aside the true joys of retail therapy (a looong post) having lost weight, i'll just say that i had an appointment today, and once it was done, i paid a short visit to a couple of my favourite clothes shops to see if they had anything for me. i've got a wedding to go to in a month or so and i need a nice top to go with my 'wedding' skirt. anyway...i found a couple of nice things, and took them to the cash register to pay. the woman behind the till asked me whether i wanted a strappy top - one of those body-hugging lycra things that are just so indispensible as part of your wardrobe - to go underneath one of the tops i was buying. i actually had looked for just such a thing, but hadn't seen any. she said there were some, and that she'd go and find one for me. she looked at me, and asked me what size i needed, and as i hesitated, she said "small, right?"
what a difference five years makes. five years ago nothing in that shop would have fit me at all. now, the sales assistant is correct in her assessment that i need their smallest size! (i bought it - it fits perfectly and is just what i needed).
small joys that aren't really all that small, after all.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Doing It All The Time
Calianna "I don't know how you do it all the time."
(Hi Calianna! Nice to have someone who understands this particular pitfall).
I have no choice. I have to keep on keeping on, or I'll be 250lbs again within, oh, about 2 years, I'd say. There are some days when I wish I'd found low-carbing much much earlier than I did. Say when I was sixteen. That way I could have avoided the yo-yo dieting, the extra stretchmarks and loose skin, the pain of living at all at 250lbs. But then if low-carb had been the first 'solution' I'd found, maybe I wouldn't have been so absolutely sure that it actually is the *only* solution for me. And then maybe I'd have tried to experiment; to find a way to work back in things like bread and crisps as a frequent part of my diet. I know that won't work for me. But the reason I know is because I have the experience of trying to diet low-fat and I know how absolutely horrendous and impossible it was. People are always commenting admiringly on my willpower and self-control, and they did so even more when I was heavier and actively losing the weight, but to me, the only reason these past five years of low-carbing have even been possible is because they take far less willpower than anything else ever did.
Or rather, what I have to exercise now is pure emotional willpower. Fighting taste-buds, fighting circumstance, fighting the convention of 'spoiling yourself' with carby food, etc. But I'm not - or not usually, anyway - fighting insulin surges anymore.
I have a very strong respect for how strong that sucker is. Because it always, always won against me. Most of the time it won after only a few days - even at the end of day one of a "i'm dieting again" mantra. Occasionally - for only two extended periods in my life - I managed to beat it long enough to actually be consistently on a low-fat diet. Sheer torture, and *that* was real willpower. I am amazed now that I managed to stay on weightwatchers for almost a year when I was in my early twenties. Fighting those cravings and that hunger all that time? Incredible (And tragic, of course, because the rebound after I finally snapped is what took me up to my alltime high of 250lbs).
Anyway, I didn't actually come on here today to talk about that. I came on to say that I was just eating lunch. I had 2 100% beef patties, spread with some thousand island dressing made with low-fat mayo and low-carb ketchup, some slices of homemade pickled cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and raw onion, wrapped in lettuce leaves. And as I was eating it, I was really enjoying all the tastes, and it struck me that really, the only thing that the beefburger bun is good for is to make it easier to hold all that stuff together. That it really doesn't add anything in terms of taste.
And my next thought was: I must be getting over the carb cravings now, if I can think that.
Phew. It's wednesday now, and the carb blowout was friday/saturday. Over the past few days I've eaten way too much food, but it's all been low-carb. I have eaten nuts, and very high percent cocoa dark chocolate, but nothing that's not 'legal'. After 3 days, I'm beginning to feel normal again with regard to my cravings. Soon I'll start cutting calories again.
In a few hours I'm off to Pilates. I started doing it once a week a few months ago, but stopped in October when I was faced with so much travelling it wasn't worth trying to arrange a session for the few weeks I would be around. Now I'm back, solidly, no more travel for a few months. So every week, wednesday at 4pm. Every little bit helps.
(Hi Calianna! Nice to have someone who understands this particular pitfall).
I have no choice. I have to keep on keeping on, or I'll be 250lbs again within, oh, about 2 years, I'd say. There are some days when I wish I'd found low-carbing much much earlier than I did. Say when I was sixteen. That way I could have avoided the yo-yo dieting, the extra stretchmarks and loose skin, the pain of living at all at 250lbs. But then if low-carb had been the first 'solution' I'd found, maybe I wouldn't have been so absolutely sure that it actually is the *only* solution for me. And then maybe I'd have tried to experiment; to find a way to work back in things like bread and crisps as a frequent part of my diet. I know that won't work for me. But the reason I know is because I have the experience of trying to diet low-fat and I know how absolutely horrendous and impossible it was. People are always commenting admiringly on my willpower and self-control, and they did so even more when I was heavier and actively losing the weight, but to me, the only reason these past five years of low-carbing have even been possible is because they take far less willpower than anything else ever did.
Or rather, what I have to exercise now is pure emotional willpower. Fighting taste-buds, fighting circumstance, fighting the convention of 'spoiling yourself' with carby food, etc. But I'm not - or not usually, anyway - fighting insulin surges anymore.
I have a very strong respect for how strong that sucker is. Because it always, always won against me. Most of the time it won after only a few days - even at the end of day one of a "i'm dieting again" mantra. Occasionally - for only two extended periods in my life - I managed to beat it long enough to actually be consistently on a low-fat diet. Sheer torture, and *that* was real willpower. I am amazed now that I managed to stay on weightwatchers for almost a year when I was in my early twenties. Fighting those cravings and that hunger all that time? Incredible (And tragic, of course, because the rebound after I finally snapped is what took me up to my alltime high of 250lbs).
Anyway, I didn't actually come on here today to talk about that. I came on to say that I was just eating lunch. I had 2 100% beef patties, spread with some thousand island dressing made with low-fat mayo and low-carb ketchup, some slices of homemade pickled cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and raw onion, wrapped in lettuce leaves. And as I was eating it, I was really enjoying all the tastes, and it struck me that really, the only thing that the beefburger bun is good for is to make it easier to hold all that stuff together. That it really doesn't add anything in terms of taste.
And my next thought was: I must be getting over the carb cravings now, if I can think that.
Phew. It's wednesday now, and the carb blowout was friday/saturday. Over the past few days I've eaten way too much food, but it's all been low-carb. I have eaten nuts, and very high percent cocoa dark chocolate, but nothing that's not 'legal'. After 3 days, I'm beginning to feel normal again with regard to my cravings. Soon I'll start cutting calories again.
In a few hours I'm off to Pilates. I started doing it once a week a few months ago, but stopped in October when I was faced with so much travelling it wasn't worth trying to arrange a session for the few weeks I would be around. Now I'm back, solidly, no more travel for a few months. So every week, wednesday at 4pm. Every little bit helps.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Always Look on the Bright Side...
I feel horrible today.
I'm too hungry, I've got a weird headache and the hunger is the odd kind that won't go away if I eat. I am eating lots of food, too; not stinting on calories, but keeping the carbs low.
I'm in withdrawal, and it's pretty nasty. It won't be fun for the next three days or so.
But - looking on the bright side, and it really is a bright side, sort of - it makes things so much clearer. The very fact that I can recognise that my body is going through withdrawal shows how aware I am of my body - and, what's more - how aware my body now is of the various poisons/good things I put in it. That didn't used to be the case. I could eat whatever I wanted with impunity - unless you consider the fact that I weighed 250lbs. What I mean by impunity, obviously, is that other than the carb cravings which I didn't recognise as anything other than normal, I didn't have any specific reactions to different foods. But that makes it harder to make healthy choices, really, doesn't it? The very fact that I feel so awful now shows me - beyond the scale - what I was eating was not good for me. Getting through the next few days might not be easy but I know I'll do it, and I know how my body will feel afterwards. Much, much better. Light and lean. (Feel. Not look - I'm not lean yet!) Food fills without bloating, hunger is real, and satiable. This is such a different place to where I was a few years ago. My body really is a chem lab that gives me clear results.
That's good - even if the short-term experiment is making me feel crappy!
This is day one of my new 100% regimen, by the way.
Which includes:
- this week, full low-carb eating, no indulgences, but no stinting on calories until the carb withdrawal has worn off.
- from next week, calorie counting.
- drinking plenty of water
- pilates once a week and weights once a week (there'll be another post about why i can't do that much more exercise without my health suffering)
- making sure that i don't enter into a position where i'm not in control of food more than once a month (this involves care in planning shabbat)
- daily weighing of myself
- daily use of fitday for food logging
I'm too hungry, I've got a weird headache and the hunger is the odd kind that won't go away if I eat. I am eating lots of food, too; not stinting on calories, but keeping the carbs low.
I'm in withdrawal, and it's pretty nasty. It won't be fun for the next three days or so.
But - looking on the bright side, and it really is a bright side, sort of - it makes things so much clearer. The very fact that I can recognise that my body is going through withdrawal shows how aware I am of my body - and, what's more - how aware my body now is of the various poisons/good things I put in it. That didn't used to be the case. I could eat whatever I wanted with impunity - unless you consider the fact that I weighed 250lbs. What I mean by impunity, obviously, is that other than the carb cravings which I didn't recognise as anything other than normal, I didn't have any specific reactions to different foods. But that makes it harder to make healthy choices, really, doesn't it? The very fact that I feel so awful now shows me - beyond the scale - what I was eating was not good for me. Getting through the next few days might not be easy but I know I'll do it, and I know how my body will feel afterwards. Much, much better. Light and lean. (Feel. Not look - I'm not lean yet!) Food fills without bloating, hunger is real, and satiable. This is such a different place to where I was a few years ago. My body really is a chem lab that gives me clear results.
That's good - even if the short-term experiment is making me feel crappy!
This is day one of my new 100% regimen, by the way.
Which includes:
- this week, full low-carb eating, no indulgences, but no stinting on calories until the carb withdrawal has worn off.
- from next week, calorie counting.
- drinking plenty of water
- pilates once a week and weights once a week (there'll be another post about why i can't do that much more exercise without my health suffering)
- making sure that i don't enter into a position where i'm not in control of food more than once a month (this involves care in planning shabbat)
- daily weighing of myself
- daily use of fitday for food logging
A Sense of Proportion
Before I begin, I'd like to say hi to kaz and suzique! Hi! It's really great to get comments from people I didn't 'know' already when I began the blog. It's weird, because I *have* been part of online forums before and I'm used to people reading what I write; knowing it's been read and appreciated. Starting a blog isn't like that, because there's no guarantee anyone will find your little corner of the web. But I wanted to focus more fully on the weight thing, and a blog seemed a good way to go to restart my writing. So I'm really pleased it's reaching new people - thank you for letting me know!
So despite my intent to remain - for now, at least - basically anonymous on this blog, I'm going to give you some relevant info that means you'll have less than 2 billion or so women in the world to identify me from...I'll cut it down to a few million. I'm Jewish, and live in a somewhat traditional framework. This is relevant because it means that the life I live makes staying low-carb quite a unique challenge.
Why? Because beyond all the festivals which are always but always centred around food (and pretty much always high-carb food, at that), every week there is a day in which you eat two three-course meals, in company. Saturday/Shabbat is a social day, and because I'm single I really don't have the option of just staying at home and avoiding temptation by cooking my own meals for my family. I do host meals occasionally, but more often I'm invited out, or go away and stay with friends/family.
It creates a bit of a quandary. In the normal course of a week, things are very much under control. If I'm cooking for myself at home, then obviously I decide what I eat and if I 'stray' then it's only my own fault. If I go out to eat with friends in a restaurant, then I can always find a low-carb option. (The issue of how it feels to always have to choose a low-carb option even once you've lost the majority of your weight is a whole other post). For now, because I've just spent the day with close friends and have eaten mounds of carbs, I'm going to focus on the hard part - when you are invited to friends.
Imagine being faced with dealing with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner - only having to do it every week - twice. It can certainly make trying to lose weight, or stay on plan, a chore. Sometimes it's downright impossible.
There are various ways I have for coping; and this is where the title of the post comes in. I have to strike a balance between focusing on eating well, and on living well. When I say that I don't mean it because I resent having to cut carbs out of my life (that's another post). I mean that I choose not to stay home and refuse invitations because I know I will not be able to eat the way I should.
First of all, every sabbath meal begins with bread. And wine. Sometimes the wine is dry, but often it's sweet - and this is a ritual thing where it's not always easy to pipe up and say 'can i have dry wine please?' - even if the dry wine makes its way to the table later on in the meal. Take a meal I went to a few weeks ago, for example. Friends of mine invited me. Definite friends, not just acquaintances, but not close friends. There are certain friends who know me well, and when they invite me, will ask me to remind them what I can and can't eat so that they can be certain I'll have food. And I'll often take something with me - for everyone - a side dish, or salad - so I know I've supplemented the supply of 'legal' food. But when you receive an invitation to dinner and it's not a close close friend, and you're a single person who spends at least part of every week in slight anxiety as to what plans you have for the weekend, or whether you have any at all, you're not going to make things difficult for your hosts. You hope that there will be suitable food there, and wait and see. It's often easy enough to expect there will be 'legal' food around - friday night meals, for example, often start with dips like humus and various vegetable dips to go with the bread (and I just eat them without bread), followed by chicken soup, some form of roast chicken and various vegetables. So I avoid the potatoes and the dessert, have a tiny taste of the bread to fulfill the requirements, and eat healthily. But that meal a few weeks ago, we went straight from sweet bread to sweet potato and pumpkin soup - delicious but not exactly low carb - then to meatballs with rice and salad, and then dessert. That was it. For me to stay on track, I'd have had to refuse the soup and bread and sit eating nothing through first course, then eat meatballs without rice and have some salad, and then refuse dessert as well. And as it is, I took the salad, so I'd basically have only eaten one thing that the hostess made. I'd have made the hostess feel awful, and I'd have felt ridiculous myself. Also, there were only five of us for a nice intimate dinner. Not the kind of situation where you can expect people to not notice you're not eating.
In circumstances like that, I eat. I know that I'm going to eat too much, because carbs do that to me - I'm not someone who can say 'ok then, i'll have a bit of bread, a small bowl of soup and a tiny spoon of rice and focus on the meatballs and the salad. Once the carbmonster is let loose, it truly goes on the rampage.
My reasoning is thus. I have to live. I have to enjoy life. And I will not enjoy it if I refuse invitations to be with my friends and celebrate together, and stay home eating a salad, just so that I can stay thin.
It's not that this isn't an issue that I take seriously. It is. And there have been times when I *have* made decisions for the weekend based on food. I'll decide to make a meal myself, and invite friends, because I know that way I can control what I eat. And not to plan a second meal out, even if it does mean I'll spend a large portion of the day alone. Because I don't want to derail myself.
I got to my current weight 2 years ago. Since then I've been on an up-down mini yo-yo. Up a few pounds, down again. It was quite a struggle, even. Not that I can even now imagine ever getting really heavy again - the highest I got during the last two years after getting to a low of 154 was seeing 163, and that was immediately after vacation and carb splurging, and a bit of it was water weight from the glycogen load. But I wasn't happy about the fact that my 'stable' weight had become more like 158/159 than 154/155. This summer I made a concerted effort to change that, and from June till September I was strictly controlling calories as well as carbs. During the week I really was very strict, and generally stuck to approximately 1250 calories - because I knew that the weekend would never be that strict even if I did manage to control my food. And at that time, when I was being very strict at dieting, when I was invited out I *did* make sure that there would be suitable food for me. I can't remember now but I think during that 3 month period there were very very few times when I could only eat unsuitable food.
I got down to around 150. Broke the 154 barrier. Stress over a relationship in September/October even saw me down at 149ish.
Then I spent two months travelling for work, and mourning the end of the relationship. After the rigours and focus of the summer, I couldn't do it anymore. And travel makes it hard. This is another relevant matter; I eat kosher. Mostly. Which means the low-carb options that are usually available for travellers aren't always available for me because I can't eat meat/chicken etc just anywhere. (Lordy, lordy, talk about fussy, hey? Low carb *and* kosher!)
But it's back to that sense of proportion. I know there's no sense beating myself up about it. I know there are times to worry and focus on the eating and times to let go a bit.
I do mean a bit. I dont' mean go on wild forays of carb-binging. Untrammelled excesses. Because if I did that I *would* quickly be back at 250lbs, hating myself again. I've never let myself gain enough weight to even go up one clothing size, let alone the six or seven I've gone through during the past five years of transformation.
This weekend I went away to very old family friends. Parents of my best friend growing up. They - and the sister of my aforementioned best friend - live near me now. It is wonderful being with them - they are a fabulous family whose company I genuinely enjoy, and they welcome me so openly. It's comforting and comfortable. Truly relaxed. But I know that the food won't be good. Typical Ashkenazi fare. Last night was chicken soup (good) but everything else was well nigh impossible. Meatballs in a sweet and sour sauce. Chicken schnitzel not only with breading but with a sweet sauce on top. Sweet and sour cabbage. Sweetened carrots with prunes. Roast potatoes. Notice the sweet theme? At times like this there's no point worrying. I just sit back and let the carbmonster take over (we'll leave it for another post how these things actually make me feel ill and horrible afterwards).
Tomorrow is another day. After two months of travelling and letting go, I'm back somewhere around 155. Probably more after this week, with the food poisoning aftermath and then this latest freewheeling eating experience. I've got no more travelling planned for a few months. I'll stay at home next shabbat and have friends over to me. I'll visit my siblings for some weekends, when I know I can expect them to make good food for me. And I'll be back to my standard fare. This week will be difficult because I'll be dealing with the day after the day after again - which is one reason why I have to keep next weekend 'pure'. It takes a while to get properly back in the saddle again.
Sometimes, honestly, when I've been lax for a while and put on a couple pounds, I really expect to look in the mirror and see my old self again. That somehow I can't have that full-up carb-bloated feeling after a day of bad eating and not immediately see 250lbs of me in the mirror. I'm almost surprised when I still look the same. Still got a defined jawline. Still got that 29" waist (28" when I'm down at 150lbs). Even if I feel flabby and too full (well, even with the 28" waist I'm still flabby - talk about hourglass - I've got a 13" difference between waist and hips).
So - living my life - but balancing the needs of my body with the needs of my soul. I know people who never ever stray from eating low-carb. They've had enough bad experiences with being heavy that they know they just can't go off plan at all or risk sliding backwards forever. This is one of the reasons that I'm glad I came to Atkins by way of the more moderate Carb Addicts diet. It made me more aware of my abilities to 'survive' a cheat. I know that falling off the wagon isn't irrevocable; that I can get back on. I've been doing so for five years. I know when the alarms start ringing in my head and I know I can't afford to remain lax any longer. I am *always* at least 80% on plan with my eating - but I know that even 80% on plan will mean I put on weight, albeit at a slow rate. I know that to stay on track and not put on weight - and heaven help me, perhaps lose some more too - I need to be on track 95% of the time.
Tomorrow's day one again for me. It's time to be 100% for a good long while. I want to see 150 again. Then maybe I could actually see 140. Haven't been there since I was about 12 years old. I'm only 5 foot 4, and small boned (something I didn't realise till I'd lost weight). I wear a size 6 or 8 on top, but a size 10 or 12 on the bottom - and I'd really like to be an all round size 8.
Wish me luck!
So despite my intent to remain - for now, at least - basically anonymous on this blog, I'm going to give you some relevant info that means you'll have less than 2 billion or so women in the world to identify me from...I'll cut it down to a few million. I'm Jewish, and live in a somewhat traditional framework. This is relevant because it means that the life I live makes staying low-carb quite a unique challenge.
Why? Because beyond all the festivals which are always but always centred around food (and pretty much always high-carb food, at that), every week there is a day in which you eat two three-course meals, in company. Saturday/Shabbat is a social day, and because I'm single I really don't have the option of just staying at home and avoiding temptation by cooking my own meals for my family. I do host meals occasionally, but more often I'm invited out, or go away and stay with friends/family.
It creates a bit of a quandary. In the normal course of a week, things are very much under control. If I'm cooking for myself at home, then obviously I decide what I eat and if I 'stray' then it's only my own fault. If I go out to eat with friends in a restaurant, then I can always find a low-carb option. (The issue of how it feels to always have to choose a low-carb option even once you've lost the majority of your weight is a whole other post). For now, because I've just spent the day with close friends and have eaten mounds of carbs, I'm going to focus on the hard part - when you are invited to friends.
Imagine being faced with dealing with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner - only having to do it every week - twice. It can certainly make trying to lose weight, or stay on plan, a chore. Sometimes it's downright impossible.
There are various ways I have for coping; and this is where the title of the post comes in. I have to strike a balance between focusing on eating well, and on living well. When I say that I don't mean it because I resent having to cut carbs out of my life (that's another post). I mean that I choose not to stay home and refuse invitations because I know I will not be able to eat the way I should.
First of all, every sabbath meal begins with bread. And wine. Sometimes the wine is dry, but often it's sweet - and this is a ritual thing where it's not always easy to pipe up and say 'can i have dry wine please?' - even if the dry wine makes its way to the table later on in the meal. Take a meal I went to a few weeks ago, for example. Friends of mine invited me. Definite friends, not just acquaintances, but not close friends. There are certain friends who know me well, and when they invite me, will ask me to remind them what I can and can't eat so that they can be certain I'll have food. And I'll often take something with me - for everyone - a side dish, or salad - so I know I've supplemented the supply of 'legal' food. But when you receive an invitation to dinner and it's not a close close friend, and you're a single person who spends at least part of every week in slight anxiety as to what plans you have for the weekend, or whether you have any at all, you're not going to make things difficult for your hosts. You hope that there will be suitable food there, and wait and see. It's often easy enough to expect there will be 'legal' food around - friday night meals, for example, often start with dips like humus and various vegetable dips to go with the bread (and I just eat them without bread), followed by chicken soup, some form of roast chicken and various vegetables. So I avoid the potatoes and the dessert, have a tiny taste of the bread to fulfill the requirements, and eat healthily. But that meal a few weeks ago, we went straight from sweet bread to sweet potato and pumpkin soup - delicious but not exactly low carb - then to meatballs with rice and salad, and then dessert. That was it. For me to stay on track, I'd have had to refuse the soup and bread and sit eating nothing through first course, then eat meatballs without rice and have some salad, and then refuse dessert as well. And as it is, I took the salad, so I'd basically have only eaten one thing that the hostess made. I'd have made the hostess feel awful, and I'd have felt ridiculous myself. Also, there were only five of us for a nice intimate dinner. Not the kind of situation where you can expect people to not notice you're not eating.
In circumstances like that, I eat. I know that I'm going to eat too much, because carbs do that to me - I'm not someone who can say 'ok then, i'll have a bit of bread, a small bowl of soup and a tiny spoon of rice and focus on the meatballs and the salad. Once the carbmonster is let loose, it truly goes on the rampage.
My reasoning is thus. I have to live. I have to enjoy life. And I will not enjoy it if I refuse invitations to be with my friends and celebrate together, and stay home eating a salad, just so that I can stay thin.
It's not that this isn't an issue that I take seriously. It is. And there have been times when I *have* made decisions for the weekend based on food. I'll decide to make a meal myself, and invite friends, because I know that way I can control what I eat. And not to plan a second meal out, even if it does mean I'll spend a large portion of the day alone. Because I don't want to derail myself.
I got to my current weight 2 years ago. Since then I've been on an up-down mini yo-yo. Up a few pounds, down again. It was quite a struggle, even. Not that I can even now imagine ever getting really heavy again - the highest I got during the last two years after getting to a low of 154 was seeing 163, and that was immediately after vacation and carb splurging, and a bit of it was water weight from the glycogen load. But I wasn't happy about the fact that my 'stable' weight had become more like 158/159 than 154/155. This summer I made a concerted effort to change that, and from June till September I was strictly controlling calories as well as carbs. During the week I really was very strict, and generally stuck to approximately 1250 calories - because I knew that the weekend would never be that strict even if I did manage to control my food. And at that time, when I was being very strict at dieting, when I was invited out I *did* make sure that there would be suitable food for me. I can't remember now but I think during that 3 month period there were very very few times when I could only eat unsuitable food.
I got down to around 150. Broke the 154 barrier. Stress over a relationship in September/October even saw me down at 149ish.
Then I spent two months travelling for work, and mourning the end of the relationship. After the rigours and focus of the summer, I couldn't do it anymore. And travel makes it hard. This is another relevant matter; I eat kosher. Mostly. Which means the low-carb options that are usually available for travellers aren't always available for me because I can't eat meat/chicken etc just anywhere. (Lordy, lordy, talk about fussy, hey? Low carb *and* kosher!)
But it's back to that sense of proportion. I know there's no sense beating myself up about it. I know there are times to worry and focus on the eating and times to let go a bit.
I do mean a bit. I dont' mean go on wild forays of carb-binging. Untrammelled excesses. Because if I did that I *would* quickly be back at 250lbs, hating myself again. I've never let myself gain enough weight to even go up one clothing size, let alone the six or seven I've gone through during the past five years of transformation.
This weekend I went away to very old family friends. Parents of my best friend growing up. They - and the sister of my aforementioned best friend - live near me now. It is wonderful being with them - they are a fabulous family whose company I genuinely enjoy, and they welcome me so openly. It's comforting and comfortable. Truly relaxed. But I know that the food won't be good. Typical Ashkenazi fare. Last night was chicken soup (good) but everything else was well nigh impossible. Meatballs in a sweet and sour sauce. Chicken schnitzel not only with breading but with a sweet sauce on top. Sweet and sour cabbage. Sweetened carrots with prunes. Roast potatoes. Notice the sweet theme? At times like this there's no point worrying. I just sit back and let the carbmonster take over (we'll leave it for another post how these things actually make me feel ill and horrible afterwards).
Tomorrow is another day. After two months of travelling and letting go, I'm back somewhere around 155. Probably more after this week, with the food poisoning aftermath and then this latest freewheeling eating experience. I've got no more travelling planned for a few months. I'll stay at home next shabbat and have friends over to me. I'll visit my siblings for some weekends, when I know I can expect them to make good food for me. And I'll be back to my standard fare. This week will be difficult because I'll be dealing with the day after the day after again - which is one reason why I have to keep next weekend 'pure'. It takes a while to get properly back in the saddle again.
Sometimes, honestly, when I've been lax for a while and put on a couple pounds, I really expect to look in the mirror and see my old self again. That somehow I can't have that full-up carb-bloated feeling after a day of bad eating and not immediately see 250lbs of me in the mirror. I'm almost surprised when I still look the same. Still got a defined jawline. Still got that 29" waist (28" when I'm down at 150lbs). Even if I feel flabby and too full (well, even with the 28" waist I'm still flabby - talk about hourglass - I've got a 13" difference between waist and hips).
So - living my life - but balancing the needs of my body with the needs of my soul. I know people who never ever stray from eating low-carb. They've had enough bad experiences with being heavy that they know they just can't go off plan at all or risk sliding backwards forever. This is one of the reasons that I'm glad I came to Atkins by way of the more moderate Carb Addicts diet. It made me more aware of my abilities to 'survive' a cheat. I know that falling off the wagon isn't irrevocable; that I can get back on. I've been doing so for five years. I know when the alarms start ringing in my head and I know I can't afford to remain lax any longer. I am *always* at least 80% on plan with my eating - but I know that even 80% on plan will mean I put on weight, albeit at a slow rate. I know that to stay on track and not put on weight - and heaven help me, perhaps lose some more too - I need to be on track 95% of the time.
Tomorrow's day one again for me. It's time to be 100% for a good long while. I want to see 150 again. Then maybe I could actually see 140. Haven't been there since I was about 12 years old. I'm only 5 foot 4, and small boned (something I didn't realise till I'd lost weight). I wear a size 6 or 8 on top, but a size 10 or 12 on the bottom - and I'd really like to be an all round size 8.
Wish me luck!
Thursday, January 4, 2007
As I Wake...
Ok, I lied. The next post isn't going to be about the basics of low-carb. It's going to be just a little bit about hunger and cravings.
It always amuses me when I read an article about the low-carb diet, which is generally disparaging, and then they add in this little gem: "low-carb reduces hunger." Um, hello? HELLO?????? Did you just hear what you said? Dieting is about reducing the amount of food you eat. That means you tend to be a little bit hungry. Hunger is hard to ignore. That means people eat more than they should. LOW CARB REDUCES HUNGER, DUMMIES!!!
The reason they write it as this tiny little sidebar comment is - in my opinion - they don't really understand that many fat people aren't 'greedy'. They're not eating 'too much and all they have to do is cut back and exercise'. Many fat people are fat because their bodies keep demanding food of them and it's downright painful to refuse.
This morning, I woke up hungry. It's like I was saying in my last post - this is the day after the day after, and today's going to be difficult, carbwise. I ate carbs two days ago, and now I'm paying for it, because I'm hungry now. Is that such a big deal, I hear you wonder? Well, yes, actually. It's different, you see.
Before I low-carbed, I would wake up in the morning and the first thing on my mind would be food. Crappy food, at that. I never woke up with images of omelettes or salads floating in my head. No, it was crisps and chocolate. And I would often be eating those things before I started work. When I was a kid, it was on the way to school. And then in break, at the tuck shop. And then at lunch time. And then on the way home from school too. (And then I didn't want the nutritious supper on offer). Eating that way made me feel sick, often. But I couldn't stop.
Nowadays when I wake up, the first thing on my mind is either - time to visit the bathroom, or let's see what email I got overnight. I have the luxury of working from home, so often after I've paid that initial visit to the bathroom I'll head straight for my office in my pjs, and start working. I do get showered and dressed eventually, honest. At some point I'll realise I haven't had breakfast and I'll go make myself my eggs. It might be an hour after I wake, it might be two hours.
Food just isn't on my mind. And it's not in the pathways of my brain. I experience real hunger now, the hunger that 'normal' people experience, not the hunger that carb-addicted people experience. And right now, because I ate carbs two days ago, I'm experiencing a small resurgence of the carb-hunger. Which is why it's only 8.30am and I've only been up for 15 minutes, but I'm hungry and thinking of breakfast. At least it's only to the extent that I need my eggs sooner than usual. I'm not heading facefirst into a pile of chocolate.
Incidentally, I realised something about my first post that I think might be misleading to anyone who comes along to this blog and isn't already an expert in low-carbing. I said that I discovered that my weight problem was about an insulin imbalance.
That made it sound like I'm really different from other people. That there is some obvious recognisable and recognised medical condition that made me the way I am. Well, that is and isn't true. If you're overweight and you find it hard to restrict your consumption of bread and pasta, you might have that same insulin imbalance. The Hellers, who wrote the Carb Addicts Diet, think that as many as 80% of people who are overweight have this imbalance.
Nothing abnormal will show up on any regular blood tests I do. The glucose levels are measured from blood that is drawn at fasting levels, and that's not when my insulin goes whacky. I know what's wrong with me because I've read the Hellers book, and Dr. Atkins' book, and I've researched low-carb with a passion. I've lived it for five years and learned a lot about my body; a body that previously seemed designed only to spite me and frustrate me and be infinitely uncontrollable. Also, just because I 'found out' what was wrong with me doesn't mean I had an easy time losing weight.
Even when I lost 50 pounds in 9 months, that only works out as about 1.2lbs a week - and at that point I was over 100 pounds overweight - you could expect a little faster weight loss than that. And it came in fits and starts, too, even at the beginning I'd stall for over a month without losing anything, and then lose 14 pounds in two weeks. But I never absolutely knew that next whoosh of weight loss was coming. Then I stalled out at around 190 pounds and didn't lose anything at all for 8 months. And then when I switched from following the Carb Addicts Program to the Atkins program and jumpstarted my weight loss it still took another two years to lose that additional fifty pounds, which is less than half a pound a week, again in weird increments, not steady at all. During all that time I had to hang on to the hope that I'd continue to lose weight, and hang on to my diet plan in the face of temptation and difficulty. And travelling. And eating at other folks' homes, where I wasn't in control of the menu. I've had all the trials of dieting just like other people, it has not been easy. This past two years of maintenance I've seen my weight fluctuate up and down about ten pounds, as I get less and more careful about what I eat. And I still want to lose more weight; I'm still not at my goal yet. After five flipping years.
All I'm saying is that I didn't find some miracle cure and that made everything easy. I found a miracle cure and it made everything possible. And that I'm not that different from many other people out there, who may not know what the root of their problem is. Just like I didn't.
It's been the saving of me. I hope they find out too. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this.
It always amuses me when I read an article about the low-carb diet, which is generally disparaging, and then they add in this little gem: "low-carb reduces hunger." Um, hello? HELLO?????? Did you just hear what you said? Dieting is about reducing the amount of food you eat. That means you tend to be a little bit hungry. Hunger is hard to ignore. That means people eat more than they should. LOW CARB REDUCES HUNGER, DUMMIES!!!
The reason they write it as this tiny little sidebar comment is - in my opinion - they don't really understand that many fat people aren't 'greedy'. They're not eating 'too much and all they have to do is cut back and exercise'. Many fat people are fat because their bodies keep demanding food of them and it's downright painful to refuse.
This morning, I woke up hungry. It's like I was saying in my last post - this is the day after the day after, and today's going to be difficult, carbwise. I ate carbs two days ago, and now I'm paying for it, because I'm hungry now. Is that such a big deal, I hear you wonder? Well, yes, actually. It's different, you see.
Before I low-carbed, I would wake up in the morning and the first thing on my mind would be food. Crappy food, at that. I never woke up with images of omelettes or salads floating in my head. No, it was crisps and chocolate. And I would often be eating those things before I started work. When I was a kid, it was on the way to school. And then in break, at the tuck shop. And then at lunch time. And then on the way home from school too. (And then I didn't want the nutritious supper on offer). Eating that way made me feel sick, often. But I couldn't stop.
Nowadays when I wake up, the first thing on my mind is either - time to visit the bathroom, or let's see what email I got overnight. I have the luxury of working from home, so often after I've paid that initial visit to the bathroom I'll head straight for my office in my pjs, and start working. I do get showered and dressed eventually, honest. At some point I'll realise I haven't had breakfast and I'll go make myself my eggs. It might be an hour after I wake, it might be two hours.
Food just isn't on my mind. And it's not in the pathways of my brain. I experience real hunger now, the hunger that 'normal' people experience, not the hunger that carb-addicted people experience. And right now, because I ate carbs two days ago, I'm experiencing a small resurgence of the carb-hunger. Which is why it's only 8.30am and I've only been up for 15 minutes, but I'm hungry and thinking of breakfast. At least it's only to the extent that I need my eggs sooner than usual. I'm not heading facefirst into a pile of chocolate.
Incidentally, I realised something about my first post that I think might be misleading to anyone who comes along to this blog and isn't already an expert in low-carbing. I said that I discovered that my weight problem was about an insulin imbalance.
That made it sound like I'm really different from other people. That there is some obvious recognisable and recognised medical condition that made me the way I am. Well, that is and isn't true. If you're overweight and you find it hard to restrict your consumption of bread and pasta, you might have that same insulin imbalance. The Hellers, who wrote the Carb Addicts Diet, think that as many as 80% of people who are overweight have this imbalance.
Nothing abnormal will show up on any regular blood tests I do. The glucose levels are measured from blood that is drawn at fasting levels, and that's not when my insulin goes whacky. I know what's wrong with me because I've read the Hellers book, and Dr. Atkins' book, and I've researched low-carb with a passion. I've lived it for five years and learned a lot about my body; a body that previously seemed designed only to spite me and frustrate me and be infinitely uncontrollable. Also, just because I 'found out' what was wrong with me doesn't mean I had an easy time losing weight.
Even when I lost 50 pounds in 9 months, that only works out as about 1.2lbs a week - and at that point I was over 100 pounds overweight - you could expect a little faster weight loss than that. And it came in fits and starts, too, even at the beginning I'd stall for over a month without losing anything, and then lose 14 pounds in two weeks. But I never absolutely knew that next whoosh of weight loss was coming. Then I stalled out at around 190 pounds and didn't lose anything at all for 8 months. And then when I switched from following the Carb Addicts Program to the Atkins program and jumpstarted my weight loss it still took another two years to lose that additional fifty pounds, which is less than half a pound a week, again in weird increments, not steady at all. During all that time I had to hang on to the hope that I'd continue to lose weight, and hang on to my diet plan in the face of temptation and difficulty. And travelling. And eating at other folks' homes, where I wasn't in control of the menu. I've had all the trials of dieting just like other people, it has not been easy. This past two years of maintenance I've seen my weight fluctuate up and down about ten pounds, as I get less and more careful about what I eat. And I still want to lose more weight; I'm still not at my goal yet. After five flipping years.
All I'm saying is that I didn't find some miracle cure and that made everything easy. I found a miracle cure and it made everything possible. And that I'm not that different from many other people out there, who may not know what the root of their problem is. Just like I didn't.
It's been the saving of me. I hope they find out too. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
While I Rip and Burn...
CDs, that is, not clothes that don't fit, or recalcitrant scales.
I've got a new laptop and external hard drive that holds soooo much stuff that I'm sitting here organizing all my music files and burning yet more CDs so I can get *all* my music on my new 30gb ipod.
All very exciting.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck at my computer waiting for the CDs to burn - this one is taking an unconscionable amount of time - so I thought I'd take the opportunity for a post.
Right now, at the beginning of this blog, I'm taking things that are happening to me on a daily basis as a starting point for some larger discussion. So, what's happened the last couple of days?
I was ill. Went out for a very nice meal with my parents on monday night, but a few hours after I got home, I started to feel really sick, and ultimately ejected all the contents of my stomach in a rather violent and unpleasant manner. It left me feeling weak and horrible, too, I wasn't better once my stomach was empty. This meant that Tuesday became a bad food day (as well as just generally a bad day).
I'll leave the larger discussion of 'why low carb' to another time, and talk about one of the issues of low-carbing.
Who wants to eat chicken or eggs when they feel nauseous?
Nobody. Definitely not me, at any rate. Which does leave me with a problem on the days I do feel nauseous. (Seriously, I'm really concerned for what will happen if I ever get married and get pregnant).
Carbs are not good for me, at all. If I eat them, whether we're talking sugary stuff like chocolate or cakes, or complex carbs like whole grain bread or pasta, they make me feel hungry - and that feeling has effects that last for days, making sticking to plan difficult. I love them, don't get me wrong, but they do nothing good for me at all. Well, except for my tastebuds. Unfortunately those damn things still love carbs.
Still, when my stomach is off there's really no choice for me. Some people might just not eat at all until they feel better, but I'm not that much of a martyr. In the five years that I've been low-carbing I've worked out how much leeway I can give myself, and how easy or hard it will be to get back on the wagon depending on how badly I get off track in the first place.
Yesterday I ate a yoghurt, and a few slices of wholemeal bread with butter. And since I knew it was a wasted day , carbwise, and I felt miserable as hell anyway with my sickness, I also ate a couple of packets of crisps, some biscuits and some chocolate. Not exorbitant amounts, given my dodgy stomach, but on a regular day I wouldn't have had *any* of it.
It meant I stayed hungry, when if I'd eaten other food I wouldn't have been. Seriously. It flies in the face of all 'accepted' nutrition laws, but put it this way: If I eat a plate of spaghetti bolognese, well, first off, one plate won't be enough - I'll need seconds. Once I've had seconds, I'll feel full temporarily. Like, for half an hour. Then I'll start feeling peckish again. I'll have an uncontrollable urge to eat, even though really I'm not hungry. But I'll actually feel hunger. After a meal that could easily top 1,000 calories. Whereas if I ate just half a plate of the bolognese, sans spaghetti, it'll fill me up for the next three hours or so, until it's time for the next meal. No hunger, no cravings, no interest in more food; real satiety. On probably a third of the calories, at that.
Seriously. Less is more, if the less is protein and fat, not carbs.
That phenomenon has really been the key to my success at losing weight - and the reason I put on weight in the first place (double-edged sword that I'd rather not have to know about at all, really).
So, what's going to happen to me over the next few days? Well, yesterday I ate carbs, but today is another day, right? Half right. A new day always fixes part of the problem, so today it hasn't been hard to stick to my usual low-carb choices. Wanna know what I ate today? Breakfast was my usual two fried eggs (in pam spray) with some lc ketchup, lunch was burgers wrapped in lettuce, with tomato, pickle, onion and thousand island dressing made with low fat mayo and low carb ketchup, and supper was chicken breast with spicy vinegary garlicky courgettes. At various points in the day I had a couple low-fat, sugar free bio yoghurts, and a handful of pecans. Tomorrow is going to be the problem, though. The day after the day after. That's when the carbs still in my system from two days earlier make it harder to stick to the straight and narrow. I'm tempted because the carbs are still in my system; I'm hungrier than normal and I crave carbs the way I don't when they're not in my system. It takes a few days to restart the system, as it were. This is difficult when every few days comes the weekend, and socializing and group meals. But not impossible.
Anyway. I don't think this has been a particularly coherent post, but then I'm far too excited about all the new music about to go onto my ipod to really focus on this :-) So next post I'll try and do a basic, thorough explanation of why low-carb works. What the end of hunger really means.
Wish me luck to beat the cravings tomorrow without succumbing to bad eating!
I've got a new laptop and external hard drive that holds soooo much stuff that I'm sitting here organizing all my music files and burning yet more CDs so I can get *all* my music on my new 30gb ipod.
All very exciting.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck at my computer waiting for the CDs to burn - this one is taking an unconscionable amount of time - so I thought I'd take the opportunity for a post.
Right now, at the beginning of this blog, I'm taking things that are happening to me on a daily basis as a starting point for some larger discussion. So, what's happened the last couple of days?
I was ill. Went out for a very nice meal with my parents on monday night, but a few hours after I got home, I started to feel really sick, and ultimately ejected all the contents of my stomach in a rather violent and unpleasant manner. It left me feeling weak and horrible, too, I wasn't better once my stomach was empty. This meant that Tuesday became a bad food day (as well as just generally a bad day).
I'll leave the larger discussion of 'why low carb' to another time, and talk about one of the issues of low-carbing.
Who wants to eat chicken or eggs when they feel nauseous?
Nobody. Definitely not me, at any rate. Which does leave me with a problem on the days I do feel nauseous. (Seriously, I'm really concerned for what will happen if I ever get married and get pregnant).
Carbs are not good for me, at all. If I eat them, whether we're talking sugary stuff like chocolate or cakes, or complex carbs like whole grain bread or pasta, they make me feel hungry - and that feeling has effects that last for days, making sticking to plan difficult. I love them, don't get me wrong, but they do nothing good for me at all. Well, except for my tastebuds. Unfortunately those damn things still love carbs.
Still, when my stomach is off there's really no choice for me. Some people might just not eat at all until they feel better, but I'm not that much of a martyr. In the five years that I've been low-carbing I've worked out how much leeway I can give myself, and how easy or hard it will be to get back on the wagon depending on how badly I get off track in the first place.
Yesterday I ate a yoghurt, and a few slices of wholemeal bread with butter. And since I knew it was a wasted day , carbwise, and I felt miserable as hell anyway with my sickness, I also ate a couple of packets of crisps, some biscuits and some chocolate. Not exorbitant amounts, given my dodgy stomach, but on a regular day I wouldn't have had *any* of it.
It meant I stayed hungry, when if I'd eaten other food I wouldn't have been. Seriously. It flies in the face of all 'accepted' nutrition laws, but put it this way: If I eat a plate of spaghetti bolognese, well, first off, one plate won't be enough - I'll need seconds. Once I've had seconds, I'll feel full temporarily. Like, for half an hour. Then I'll start feeling peckish again. I'll have an uncontrollable urge to eat, even though really I'm not hungry. But I'll actually feel hunger. After a meal that could easily top 1,000 calories. Whereas if I ate just half a plate of the bolognese, sans spaghetti, it'll fill me up for the next three hours or so, until it's time for the next meal. No hunger, no cravings, no interest in more food; real satiety. On probably a third of the calories, at that.
Seriously. Less is more, if the less is protein and fat, not carbs.
That phenomenon has really been the key to my success at losing weight - and the reason I put on weight in the first place (double-edged sword that I'd rather not have to know about at all, really).
So, what's going to happen to me over the next few days? Well, yesterday I ate carbs, but today is another day, right? Half right. A new day always fixes part of the problem, so today it hasn't been hard to stick to my usual low-carb choices. Wanna know what I ate today? Breakfast was my usual two fried eggs (in pam spray) with some lc ketchup, lunch was burgers wrapped in lettuce, with tomato, pickle, onion and thousand island dressing made with low fat mayo and low carb ketchup, and supper was chicken breast with spicy vinegary garlicky courgettes. At various points in the day I had a couple low-fat, sugar free bio yoghurts, and a handful of pecans. Tomorrow is going to be the problem, though. The day after the day after. That's when the carbs still in my system from two days earlier make it harder to stick to the straight and narrow. I'm tempted because the carbs are still in my system; I'm hungrier than normal and I crave carbs the way I don't when they're not in my system. It takes a few days to restart the system, as it were. This is difficult when every few days comes the weekend, and socializing and group meals. But not impossible.
Anyway. I don't think this has been a particularly coherent post, but then I'm far too excited about all the new music about to go onto my ipod to really focus on this :-) So next post I'll try and do a basic, thorough explanation of why low-carb works. What the end of hunger really means.
Wish me luck to beat the cravings tomorrow without succumbing to bad eating!
Monday, January 1, 2007
Twenty-five compliments...
This post is in honour of Eri, my first commenter. Actually this is one of those strange moments of synchronicity that occur from time to time, because if I am remembering correctly, what I want to talk about is related to a sentiment that I think I first heard expressed by her, and I was planning on writing about it anyway.
The sentiment is: "It takes twenty-five compliments to supersede the effect of one insult."
Or words to that effect.
I thought that was a good segue into a look at what happens to someone's appreciation (or lack thereof) of their physical selves when dealing with the issue of obesity.
This is obviously a huge (no pun intended) topic and one post is only going to cover a small amount of it. There will be other posts. About vanity, and looking in the mirror. About accepting physicality at all. But for now I will talk in general about being treated as an attractive woman.
I'm not used to it.
I'm not sure I ever will be. If we take the twenty-five compliments route, and I estimate that I spent at least twenty years of my life feeling like Quasimodo, then I'll need roughly five hundred years of being treated like Esmerelda to actually begin to grasp that, yanno, I'm actually not too rough on the eyes.
This weekend I was spending time with my sister and her family. I'm friendly with some other people who live in her area, so I went visiting with them at various points during the day. So at one point I was talking to one of these friends - who is someone I like, but really more of an acquaintance - about my travelling for work and how fun it is, and he said something about my boss just wanting to be able to fly a pretty face around the world.
Maybe someone else would take that kind of comment as their due. I store it up in the compliments repository, marvel at it, take it out and stroke it from time to time. He thinks I'm pretty!
Later on I went to visit some other friends. These are closer friends. I was telling them about my various online dating experiences (which deserve their own posts, and will get them), and one of them asked me how often I meet people who it turns out have been less than honest in their online profiles. I told him that I meet something like 5% of the people who contact me. I told him that one of the online dating sites has something like 900 emails in my inbox. (of course i don't delete anything and it's been going for a couple years, but still). He and his wife made various comments about beautiful women and he joked that he could photoshop my photo to make me ugly, see if it would change things.
Again, they see me as beautiful. And these are people who did know me five years ago. Quasimodo-me.
My parents were visiting my sister as well over the weekend, and as it happened, an old friend of my Dad's was there too, visiting one of his children. He knows my sisters, but had never met me before. He's known my Dad since they were in their twenties. He was just a tiny bit too interested in me. Not in a really lecherous kind of way, and all very jokey. But enough that I could tell he found me attractive. When I left, and kissed both my parents goodbye, he joked about getting a kiss too.
Surely, I'm not that kind of girl. I don't get attention like that. I used to phrase it thus: If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, I must be from Jupiter. I just wasn't included in that kind of appreciation.
I got a cab home from the train station. In the cab, the driver started telling me about all the people he's had in the cab, all their stories. He told me he could tell I was single because I dress well and am warmer, more open than married women tend to be. He also guessed my age at 28 - people always assume I'm younger than I am. He then went on to discuss why people stay single, holding forth with a myriad of opinions, but during the conversation I was variously described as beautiful and obviously a quality woman. Then of course, he wanted my number.
This kind of thing has happened frequently over the past couple of years, but hardly at all before that. When it did, occasionally happen, I'd just think there was something wrong with the guy. Unless it happened during one of the exceedingly rare months when a diet had worked and I was thinner.
I didn't actually have any kind of real understanding of what I looked like, and whether it was abstractly 'good' or not. Even facially, ignoring the fat. I've always liked my eye colour, which is an unusual greeny-blue. Once I worked out how to control my hair, I knew it was the type that women often envied - but I knew all too well how rarely it actually behaved itself. And somehow knowing that in abstract I had good 'parts' didn't make up any kind of 'whole' that I could approve of.
I think the first time I began to even conceive the idea that I might have decent looks, maybe even 'above average' whatever that means (and just writing this I'm cringing that people I know will read this and think I've developed an over-inflated ego because surely it's not true...) was when I joined a support group about weight loss and put up before and after photos, and people started commenting - and complimenting.
My parents never made me feel beautiful. Or pretty. Or even acceptable. In fact, the one time I remember my mother telling me that my dad had said to her he'd seen me with my friends and I was the prettiest one there, I looked at her in disbelief because it so obviously was nothing even close to what he really thought of me. Ok, my parents and their attitude to weight is at least five posts. So let's leave that for now.
Have I mentioned yet the beautiful sister with the perfect figure who was 2 years younger than me? Of course I have to have one of those, right? Someone who embodied (embodied! exactly!) everything I wasn't. I couldn't have an average sister, no, I had to have the one with the perfect, sexy figure. At one point she was literally half my weight, and we're basically the same height. Well, she'll get plenty of posts too (right now she's actually a couple pounds more than me. but then, she's had four kids. i've had none)
So, it takes twenty-five compliments to negate the effect of one insult.
I'm still storing them up.
I need them to neutralise the years of nasty comments in the street from strangers. The years of feeling not good enough, not approved of, judged in my own home because my parents couldn't bear my being overweight. The years of being absolutely ignored by the opposite sex, of knowing that I just wasn't part of that whole romance thing. Watching as my friends were asked out and dated, and I wasn't. I still find it pretty damn hard to accept being the object of romantic attention. And yes, that's very complicated and deserves several posts, too.
What can I say I have achieved? That even though sometimes when I get looks in the street I worry that I've got a stain somewhere that I'm not aware of, most of the time I now know - even if I don't quite comprehend - that the stares are actually of approbation and not disgust.
There are people in the world that think I'm beautiful - even if I'm not one of them yet.
The sentiment is: "It takes twenty-five compliments to supersede the effect of one insult."
Or words to that effect.
I thought that was a good segue into a look at what happens to someone's appreciation (or lack thereof) of their physical selves when dealing with the issue of obesity.
This is obviously a huge (no pun intended) topic and one post is only going to cover a small amount of it. There will be other posts. About vanity, and looking in the mirror. About accepting physicality at all. But for now I will talk in general about being treated as an attractive woman.
I'm not used to it.
I'm not sure I ever will be. If we take the twenty-five compliments route, and I estimate that I spent at least twenty years of my life feeling like Quasimodo, then I'll need roughly five hundred years of being treated like Esmerelda to actually begin to grasp that, yanno, I'm actually not too rough on the eyes.
This weekend I was spending time with my sister and her family. I'm friendly with some other people who live in her area, so I went visiting with them at various points during the day. So at one point I was talking to one of these friends - who is someone I like, but really more of an acquaintance - about my travelling for work and how fun it is, and he said something about my boss just wanting to be able to fly a pretty face around the world.
Maybe someone else would take that kind of comment as their due. I store it up in the compliments repository, marvel at it, take it out and stroke it from time to time. He thinks I'm pretty!
Later on I went to visit some other friends. These are closer friends. I was telling them about my various online dating experiences (which deserve their own posts, and will get them), and one of them asked me how often I meet people who it turns out have been less than honest in their online profiles. I told him that I meet something like 5% of the people who contact me. I told him that one of the online dating sites has something like 900 emails in my inbox. (of course i don't delete anything and it's been going for a couple years, but still). He and his wife made various comments about beautiful women and he joked that he could photoshop my photo to make me ugly, see if it would change things.
Again, they see me as beautiful. And these are people who did know me five years ago. Quasimodo-me.
My parents were visiting my sister as well over the weekend, and as it happened, an old friend of my Dad's was there too, visiting one of his children. He knows my sisters, but had never met me before. He's known my Dad since they were in their twenties. He was just a tiny bit too interested in me. Not in a really lecherous kind of way, and all very jokey. But enough that I could tell he found me attractive. When I left, and kissed both my parents goodbye, he joked about getting a kiss too.
Surely, I'm not that kind of girl. I don't get attention like that. I used to phrase it thus: If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, I must be from Jupiter. I just wasn't included in that kind of appreciation.
I got a cab home from the train station. In the cab, the driver started telling me about all the people he's had in the cab, all their stories. He told me he could tell I was single because I dress well and am warmer, more open than married women tend to be. He also guessed my age at 28 - people always assume I'm younger than I am. He then went on to discuss why people stay single, holding forth with a myriad of opinions, but during the conversation I was variously described as beautiful and obviously a quality woman. Then of course, he wanted my number.
This kind of thing has happened frequently over the past couple of years, but hardly at all before that. When it did, occasionally happen, I'd just think there was something wrong with the guy. Unless it happened during one of the exceedingly rare months when a diet had worked and I was thinner.
I didn't actually have any kind of real understanding of what I looked like, and whether it was abstractly 'good' or not. Even facially, ignoring the fat. I've always liked my eye colour, which is an unusual greeny-blue. Once I worked out how to control my hair, I knew it was the type that women often envied - but I knew all too well how rarely it actually behaved itself. And somehow knowing that in abstract I had good 'parts' didn't make up any kind of 'whole' that I could approve of.
I think the first time I began to even conceive the idea that I might have decent looks, maybe even 'above average' whatever that means (and just writing this I'm cringing that people I know will read this and think I've developed an over-inflated ego because surely it's not true...) was when I joined a support group about weight loss and put up before and after photos, and people started commenting - and complimenting.
My parents never made me feel beautiful. Or pretty. Or even acceptable. In fact, the one time I remember my mother telling me that my dad had said to her he'd seen me with my friends and I was the prettiest one there, I looked at her in disbelief because it so obviously was nothing even close to what he really thought of me. Ok, my parents and their attitude to weight is at least five posts. So let's leave that for now.
Have I mentioned yet the beautiful sister with the perfect figure who was 2 years younger than me? Of course I have to have one of those, right? Someone who embodied (embodied! exactly!) everything I wasn't. I couldn't have an average sister, no, I had to have the one with the perfect, sexy figure. At one point she was literally half my weight, and we're basically the same height. Well, she'll get plenty of posts too (right now she's actually a couple pounds more than me. but then, she's had four kids. i've had none)
So, it takes twenty-five compliments to negate the effect of one insult.
I'm still storing them up.
I need them to neutralise the years of nasty comments in the street from strangers. The years of feeling not good enough, not approved of, judged in my own home because my parents couldn't bear my being overweight. The years of being absolutely ignored by the opposite sex, of knowing that I just wasn't part of that whole romance thing. Watching as my friends were asked out and dated, and I wasn't. I still find it pretty damn hard to accept being the object of romantic attention. And yes, that's very complicated and deserves several posts, too.
What can I say I have achieved? That even though sometimes when I get looks in the street I worry that I've got a stain somewhere that I'm not aware of, most of the time I now know - even if I don't quite comprehend - that the stares are actually of approbation and not disgust.
There are people in the world that think I'm beautiful - even if I'm not one of them yet.
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