What the What?

I've lamented in blogs past about my temperamental scale. In fact, I can't stand the thing. Its numbers swing so far out of the ballpark, I don't know what to believe about my weight. While I like to think this is ultimately good for me (what better way to wean myself from a scale addiction than by having an inaccurate scale), it makes it difficult to track my weight for the purposes of this site.

Today, when I weighed myself, I was hanging around 374 pounds, which is about what I expected it to be considering I've been hovering between that and 370 for the last week. With last week's sickening 100 degree heatwave making me both retain water and not stick so well to my diet, I'm pretty happy with those results. Still, I want to note that even though I have indulged in some no-no foods, I'm really happy with how I've managed to avoid eating too much. Even on my worst day on South Beach, I'm still eating a million times better than I was before.

Then, this afternoon, we went to Costco and tried out one of the scales they have there. Ken got on it and he weighed around 264, which is about what he expected. Then the kids got on and they weighed exactly what they weighed on their grandparents' scale last week. Then I step on it, and I about crapped my pants.

351.

At first, I thought it was because I stepped on it wrong. No way in hell my scale could be THAT inaccurate. So I stepped on it again. Same weight. Again. A few pounds heavier, but still well within in the 350 pound range.

How in the hell could this be happening? If the scale predicted weights accurately enough for Ken and the kids, then it stands to reason that it would accurately predict it for me. Right?

I don't know what to believe now. I would love it if I were back down in the 350 range. But I have a hard time believing that I have lost 40 pounds too. 20-25 feels about right. And I know that my starting weight of 397 is accurate, because I actually got that weight from a local weight-loss clinic the day before I started South Beach.

So this is confusing. Either I have about 15-20 pounds to go until I reach my 10% weight loss milestone, or I've already made it and I need to start setting a new milestone.

I will report back when I know more.

In other news, I just received a clean bill of health from my doctor. I had bloodwork taken just before starting South Beach, and I am happy to report that my cholesterol and hemoglobin A1C levels were perfect, in spite of my having weighed nearly 400 pounds. My triglycerides were a few points over the norm, but my doctor said that obese people tend to be 200 or more, and I was only at 165. I'll be perfect if I can get it below 150. He was very impressed when he told me, "You have very little fat in your blood."

I told him, "That's because it's all on my ass."

He also said he wouldn't worry about the fasting glucose reading I had of 102 that day, since I had just been traveling and that tends to generate a lot of stress. The bloodtest they use to check a 3-month average for glucose levels still read a firm 5.5, and this is right where it should be. Since this was all pre-diet, I anticipate seeing my levels when he checks them again in a few months. It's just good to know that in spite of how badly I've treated my body, it's still been able to bounce back.

I'm doing all of this at the right time, it seems. Who knows how hard it might be in another 10 years, though, if I don't get it right.

Doing Everything Smaller These Days...

Today's post is about small stuff, but I will have to pick another day to proselytize over how the "Mini Burger" fad is a Snack Well-like disaster poised to make America's collective ass even fatter.

Instead, I want to talk about my incredibly shrinking body (hooray!) and my new website (hip-hip hooray!).

First on the body, since it is after all relevant to the idea of this site. I seem to be in an another pound-dropping bonanza. I don't know how yet, other than to postulate that after three weeks of holding on for dear life, my body has finally relinquished the extra fluids it was retaining. My ankles are decidedly un-cankle-like and boy does it feel good! Even better is I have officially passed the 20lb loss mark today, but I won't record it until I can get a final number this weekend. I feel really good about this, despite the fact that my last week in Ohio could have been better in terms of eating. But I do have to say that even though I strayed from the diet a few times in terms of what I ate, I still didn't eat too much of it. So I won out on quantity vs quality, but it's better than losing at both.

Second, for those who know me, you know I used to write full-length movie reviews. Well, I stopped doing that awhle back due in great part to time constraints. I am proud to say, however, that I have come up with a concept that is both fun and sustainable, and something that I hope manages to take off in some small way. ReviewKu. Yes, it's movie reviews in HaiKu. Now, I am not sure if someone else is already doing this. I did google ReviewKu and it didn't pull up a whole lot. And I was able to purchase the domain Review-Ku.com. So that's good news at least.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing where this goes. I know my web presence tends to be more sprawled out than most, but such is the life of someone who tends to like to be everywhere at once.

So if you like movies, stop by ReviewKu and say hello, why don't you? I'll be adding to it frequently.

Flirting With Danger

I just returned from a 10-day trip to Ohio to visit my family. For those of you not from the Midwest, you might not realize the sorts of pitfalls that await the person attempting to remain on a healthy diet, but they are many. As such, I partook in my share of fattening local delicacies while trying to maintain a decent activity level. The first few days, I walked like gangbusters, but after the 4th, where I ate too much food and drank far too much alcohol, I had trouble maintaining that activity level, and I backslid on more days than I had planned to.

I guess the good news from all that was that my pants felt no tighter than when I arrived, and in fact, two pairs felt looser. All this in spite of the horrible edema I had (thank you flying, flip-flops, dehydration, and hot, humid weather!). I just wish I had continued to push myself the way I had before I left home. I gave myself that time off, and now I have to get back on track and stay there.

Even though I had a wonderful time, I still felt nagged by certain things. Namely by a few symptoms of diabetes that have plagued me off and on for the last half year or so, such as fatigue, blurred vision, and insatiable hunger (this last thing was particularly bad pre-South Beach, but went away once I stopped eating high glycemic-index foods. Go figure). I had gone to the doctor at the beginning of June for bloodwork, and my Hemoglobin A1C test apparently came back normal (I will find out more at my appointment this week), but still, I wondered if maybe something more was still going on with my insulin levels. If anyone should be a poster child for Type 2 diabetes, it is me. I am very overweight, I've given birth to two kids 9 pounds or larger, and I have a very strong family history for the disease.

This was compounded this morning when I awoke with the last two fingers of my right hand so numb and tingly it took about six hours for the feeling to come back. Even now as I type this, I am having some residual effects. Granted, I tend to sleep with my arms bent a lot, and it's possible I compressed my ulnar nerve. But as I read more about Cubital Tunnel Syndrome (which is when the ulnar nerve is impinged), I learned it is more common in people with diabetes. I was determined to get to the bottom of this.

My father-in-law is a diabetic, and so I asked him this morning if he wouldn't mind letting me use his glucose monitor to check my blood sugar. I hadn't eaten or had anything to drink in roughly 10-12 hours, so it was a great time to get a fasting result. I read a 102.

Now, he said that is a good normal morning level. And it is a great reading for someone who is an insulin-dependent diabetic. But it wasn't a great result for someone like me, who has yet to receive any diagnosis other than "normal" in this particular area. The more I read, the more I learned that the normal target for a fasting blood sugar is 99 or less. Anything between 100 and 125 is considered prediabetes. Anything above 125 is diabetes.

Granted, I was only two points over the threshold, and this could be due to any number of factors. I was very stressed out and tired yesterday, and I ate a lot of carbs, which is hard to avoid while spending the day in transit. But the more likely culprit is that my body is either resisting the insulin it produces, or it isn't producing enough. I am in the very, very early stages of a disease that affects and kills tens of thousands of people every year, and it's time to stop screwing around.

I only really need to lose about 5-10% of my body weight to start turning the ship around. I did it before, I can do it again, and I will. I've seen far too many people struggle with diabetes, and I want to do everything I can to keep from getting it. That blood sugar reading, no matter how minor it may seem now, was a wakeup call. It can only get worse if I don't get things under control now.

Just When You Think You're Doing Everything Right...

As of Saturday's weigh-in, I had lost almost 10 pounds on Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet, which was right in the average. Admittedly, the second week was much harder than the first one. I was beginning to feel the limits of the diet, as well as a total lack of appetite and energy brought on by the reduced carbohydrates. It was a tenuous period that I think I probably could have handled better than I did. I stepped up a great deal on exercise, going for long hikes and walks and being very careful to eat reasonable portions of food and stopping when I felt full.

The increased exercise and the eating less, if you follow that basic metabolic formula for losing weight, should have resulted in astounding weight loss, especially for someone as big as me. Everyone seems to believe that really overweight people tend to drop weight (particularly belly fat) on this diet like gangbusters, but this has not been the case with me at all. What I have lost has been little bits in my arms, legs, and butt. I have been forced to realize that even under the best of conditions, my body will do as it has always done. It will fight to hold on to every single calorie I put into my mouth. It will fight for every pound it has, even if it has far too many. It's like one of those clinical hoarders who can't even throw away the garbage and ends up living in one of those houses where dense stacks of junk pile up to the ceiling.

Essentially, my body hates me, and I am going to have to battle it into submission like I have never battled anything before. It's going to take more than two weeks to turn around a ship that has grown so big and has been traveling in the same direction for almost 30 years, and my brain realizes that. It's my heart that hurts when, after going through the motions of great change, I still have trouble finding clothes that fit and I feel like I still look every bit as huge as I did when I started. It hurts even more when I actually see the scale actually going in the wrong direction in spite of my best efforts.

I have realized, however, that there are some things I was doing in the first week that I have slacked off on lately. First, I have fallen back on my water intake again. I need to step that back up. Second, I need to add more vegetables again. I was doing great with it for awhile, but eating protein and veggies all the time was becoming increasingly hard to maintain. I need to get more creative with my cooking. Finally, I need to keep doing what I have been doing, activity-wise and add more weight training so I can build more muscle mass.

I have no choice but to believe that if I keep doing these things, my faulty metabolism will start to repair itself. And I'm going to focus on the positive changes I have seen since beginning to do this. My cravings for carbs, while not completely gone, are dramatically reduced. I am satisfied on less food again and have no urge to overeat, which has been the bane of my existence these last couple of years. My breathing and my asthma has greatly improved. I've all but given up alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine along with the sugar and starch, and I generally feel healthier. My fitness level is also improving. If the pounds are the last thing to get with the program, so be it. While I hate knowing that I have to be almost twice as dedicated as I already was in order to make that happen, it will be even more worth it in the end.

Discoveries and Rediscoveries: Wanderlust

In the last few weeks, I've made and re-made some observations about myself and the place I live, and I figured I would share them here, one entry at a time.

I've rediscovered my wanderlust. It's been missing since my teenage years, but this past week, I have done more recreational walking than I've done in over ten years. As a young child in Michigan, I had such a love and fascination with the streets and woods around my neighborhood that you couldn't have kept me indoors with if you'd tied me to a chair. When I lived in Ohio, my friends and I used to go to all of the local hiking trails and do our best to get muddy and lost. Those days ended when, ironically, I moved to a part of the country that is probably more outdoors-friendly than anywhere I have ever lived before. Washington is absolutely stuffed full of parks, hiking trails, bike trails, caves, mountains, beach, and other mostly-undeveloped, beautiful places for people who like to be outside when the weather is nice, and I'm ashamed that it's taken me so long to finally get out and appreciate some of it. And it just so happens that the temperatures here haven't topped 75 in awhile, making it the perfect opportunity to be outside.

On Saturday, we stayed pretty local. We packed Ken's backpack with water and snacks and took a 3.8 mile loop from the bike trail that runs behind our house all the way down to a park 2 miles away, and back again. The kids rode their scooters (most of the time), ran around at the park, and hardly complained at all. Later on that evening, they played outside as if they hadn't missed a beat. The next day, we went a little farther out to a park on the Budd Inlet of the Puget Sound and took a nice, challenging, stair-riddled hike down to sea level, where we hung out on the rock-strewn beach for a little while, and then climbed all the way back to the top and had a little picnic. Not quite satisfied that we were exhausted enough, we went and strolled around and in the Olympia Capitol campus and came home sufficiently beat. I took yesterday off to rest, but today, the kids and I were at it again.

I packed up the backpack, the kids grabbed their scooters, and off we set. We took the same 3.8 mile bike trail loop, only we added on a little more difficulty by completing a little shopping and ice cream trip (for them...). The kids weren't so hot on their scooters for the walk home, so I alternated carrying their Razors and a shopping bag, which added a little extra weight to the trip (probably close to the amount of weight I've lost in the last two weeks).

I think I heard the Chariots of Fire theme once we got back to our street. I made it just as my calves were starting to quiver, which tells me that 4 miles is about all I can stand right now. Not bad, considering that up until earlier this month, I was feeling worse than I'd ever felt in my life and could barely walk a mile without my sorely under-worked lungs triggering an asthma attack. Now, the first two miles is easy. I start feeling it around the third, and I'm about done in by the time I reach the fourth.

Coming back from these walks, sweaty, with warmth spreading through my quivering muscles, I feel alive and inspired. The stress and worry, which has been inundating my daily life for months, feels so much further way, and it's that which has me planning out ways I can keep moving. New places to go visit. New routes, new trails, new paths, new discoveries. If I can't change my metaphorical place in the world as easily as I'd like, I can change the way I experience the world by getting out there and actually experiencing a little more of it.

Finally, it makes me feel reassured that no matter how badly I've treated my body, it always seems to bounce back into relative fighting form after only a little bit of coaxing. I think maybe I ought to just start treating it better from now on so I don't have to coax it anymore, because the more time that goes by, the less willing it might be to respond.

I'm Melting! I'm Melting! Oh Whatta World...

Another four pounds lost this week!

That feels like a real accomplishment since I know this was not my best week, eating-wise. My appetite has been absent for most of the week, which means my caloric intake has been way below what it should be. I really want to work on that this week. I think my lack of appetite is also related to stress, and I need to learn to not let worries affect my diet.

Also, we veered off plan on Thursday and ate pasta for dinner. I like to justify this by first saying that we walked nearly 4 miles the morning of, and got in even more activity after dinner walking the kids to the park and running around there. Therefore, I gave myself permission to indulge a little bit, and I don't regret it. Also, having that little bit of carbohydrate gave me a considerable energy boost the next day, and it didn't really appear to throw me off track.

I also considered going off of Phase 1 a couple days early if it meant I was eating again. The introduction of a few more options would make a big difference, but I think I can probably hang on for a few more days. I'm heartened by the weight loss and how I'm on track to reach my first milestone by July 5. Also, I truly do want to know how much I am capable of losing for the official 2-week duration of Phase 1. I've lost about 8 pounds on it so far. I want to know that if called upon to make dietary sacrifices, I can do so.

Here's to pushing my own personal limits! No one said it was gonna be easy, but it has been so worth it.

Fatty Semantics

The other night I saw an advertisement for a new reality show on Fox called "More to Love." The show is (and I'm sure this exact line was used in the creators' pitch to the producers) The Bachelor meets Fat People.

First of all, I'm not exactly surprised that the network who brought us Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire would come up with an idea so cheap and exploitative. Were they looking to perpetuate this myth that fat women can't get dates, and if they do then it's with other fat men? And what about the ridiculous idea it perpetuates that the only women who would want to date an overweight male are other overweight women? But I suppose they couldn't have used an average-sized man in such a show, because clearly that would make him look like he has a fetish of some sort. If they had used a thin man on the show, they probably would have called it "The Chubby Chaser."

But this wasn't intended to be a social commentary on the show itself, necessarily. It's intended as a rant against euphemisms used for overweight people that are not only demeaning for their intended targets, but also for the thinner people who use them in an attempt to cushion themselves, so to speak, against the risk of offending people.

Let's start with the aforementioned "More to Love." I have loathed this phrase for years. I remember first coming across it on Myspace where, on the personal profile, you can choose your body type. There were a lot of straightforward words for thinner people. Slim, slender, athletic, average. But the higher you climbed up the fatty ladder, the more ridiculous the choices became. Topping the scales were "Some Extra Baggage" and "More to Love." Because clearly, we can't just call fat what it is. That would be mean. And a turn-off, of course. Our ears don't like the sound of that word anymore than they like the sound of AIDS or Leprosy.

What does More to Love mean to me?

It reminds me of people who, in order to make themselves feel better about their weight and hope like hell that it won't be a basis for rejection, have to cognitively trick themselves into painting a picture of contentment and comraderie with their high-40s or 50s BMI, and to imply that other people should see this as a positive thing as well. "Hey, I'm not fat! There's just MORE of me! Isn't that great?" Meanwhile, the person who wears this "More to Love" label is likely crying inside that they have to sell themselves the way grocery stores try to push their 76% lean ground beef as "More Flavorful." It's a slim minority of obese folk who really and truly enjoy and embrace being so. If you are one of those people, and you have suffered no negative side effects--either emotionally or physically--from being so, more power to you. I just urge you to pick another label, because it's condescending to all people, and it carries the egregious stink of "Political Correctness." I would like to think there was more of me to love, even if I was half my size, because I believe I have a lot of substance APART from the physicality of my being. But instead, this label is strictly used to differentiate the hefty from the svelte.

But perhaps more grating than the "More to Love" label is the one that brands women who are carrying extra weight as "Real."

Oh she's not "fat," she's a "Real Woman." The Fox show also used this brand to describe its girthy contestants. Popular Plus Size clothing retailer Lane Bryant is also quite liberal with the phrase. Of course they do it to infuse their customer base with a higher self-esteem. If you feel like a "Real Woman" buying Lane Bryant's clothes, then you might not want to lose weight and shop anywhere else. I'm sure in The Gap, they don't tell their more petite clientele that they're "Real Women" for shopping in their store. They're just buying clothes. Yet, when you're fat, buying clothes can't be a simple pick and buy transaction. It has to be a transcendental, life-affirming experience.

Furthermore, if my being fat makes me a "Real Woman," then what does that make someone who wears a size 5?

Is it safe to assume that in our overweight American culture, where 2/3 of Americans are considered overweight, the people who fall outside this margin aren't "real?" And let's leave the anorexic runway models out of this. They're an insignificant drop in the ocean, even though I would argue that someone who uses their body as the platform for their career, whether they are models, dancers, or athletes, are no less "real" than I am. We're only seeing one side of them. Are we to now say that what determines a woman's authenticity lay NOT in her intelligence or her personality, but in her bodyfat percentage? Will I lose my "real-ness" if I drop all my excess weight? What does this say about people who have busted their asses to attain good health and a body image that they're actually proud of? If someone goes from a size 24 to a size 6, are they suddenly thrust into the "Skinny and Therefore not Real" category?

And what about someone who has always been thin, but has had to fight to stay there by working out every day and eating sensibly? Should we not value that person's hard work? Or do we have to demean that person by calling them fake or superficial for taking care of their bodies simply because now 2/3 of Americans have failed at doing so?

Real Woman. What a demeaning and sexist phrase for ALL women. I'd believe myself a real woman whether I weighed 300 pounds or 130. And I don't need creative sloganeering to reinforce my worthiness while trying to sell my body type as if it were behind a butcher's counter.

It's been tolerable to hear and deal with such phrases for the last twenty years or so, but it's disheartening to see it culminate on a show whose primary objective is to tell America, with a patronizing grin and clever phraseology, "See? Fat people can find love too!"

I resent that my being fat is considered the basis for my being "Real" or that it gives someone "More to Love." I'm more real than any of the idiotic women who would exploit themselves as stereotypically fat just to be on "reality" television.