ladymidnight | Recent Entries

I reached 288 pounds slowly. How I got there is not all that interesting. I was a chubby kid, a fat teenager, and an even fatter adult. Gaining weight is easy. Being fat isn't easy, but getting there took almost no effort at all. (unless you count decades of yo-yo dieting, which took a lot of effort but didn't exactly turn out the way I'd planned.)

I'm not going to apologize for getting fat. If there's anyone who deserves an apology, it's me, and I am absolutely sorry for what I put my body through. But there are a whole lot of people out there who genuinely seem to believe that my size is a personal insult to them. Newsflash, folks: it's not about you. It's no great shakes to be overweight, and it quite frankly sucks to be fat. You're fee to be offended by my presence, but really, what is it changing? Maybe it makes you feel better about yourself. If it does, you're pretty much a smug jerk and should worry about your own self-improvement.

Which is not to say that I never felt like I should apologize. It's too easy to buy into the idea there's something wrong with you, that you're fundamentally wrong.

Every time I see a headline that says things like, "Even a tiny bit of flab raises heart failure risk" (Reuters, 12/22/08), my first reaction is, "Oh, that's bad." My second reaction is, "Yeah? And?" It's not like we don't already know that being overweight is bad for you. Almost everyone who's overweight would like to get down to a healthy weight, and they know all the reasons they should. Whether they're trying or have stopped trying and are focused on not gaining any more (or have stopped trying because they just don't want to put the time and energy into caring anymore), they don't need an ever-growing list of reasons why fat equals bad. We're living in America in the 21st century; you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would even question that.

I suppose it's good that science is doing these things. I won't argue that it's important to know how are bodies work and what causes them to fail. I appreciate that figuring these things out is a necessary part of finding treatments. I just don't understand why there's this belief that publicizing the results will lead to people changing their lives. It's like telling smokers, "You know that cigarettes can cause cancer? They can also cause emphysema." If they're already trying to quit, this news might make them try harder, but do they really need another reason on top of the ones they already have? If they're not trying to quit, well, they've already had all reasons they should shoved down their throats. Adding another one is just one more thing to choke on.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are people out there who've been putting off trying to lose those last ten pounds, and this kind of thing is just what it takes to kick them into high gear. It's hard for me to remember that for some people, getting down to a healthy weight is just a matter of switching to diet soda and cutting out dessert. (It's hard for me to even imagine it, let alone remember it.) I do wonder, though, which of us there are more of: the ones who find the information inspiring or the ones who are inspired to write to the editor and tell them to come back when they have something useful -- like how to lose the evil extra weight.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to start wearing more jewelry. There have been plenty of deliberate decisions; a notable one came about when I looked through my closet and then called my mother to ask, "So, have I always had this aversion to patterns?" I have to actively convince myself to purchase things other than solid colors. There are still plenty of times when I almost get there, and then have to own up to the fact that even if that particular item went home with me, I would never wear it.

Once I started thinking about the aversion to patterns (which, according to my mom, dates back to childhood), it wasn't hard to understand where it came from. My body wasn't something I wanted to call attention to, and clothes that screamed, "Look at me!" are counterproductive to that aim. It wasn't until college that I even allowed color in my wardrobe. Before that, I was a firm believer that black was slimming, and it's what I wore pretty much all the time. (Confession: Although I ultimately found friendship and belonging with the goth/poet/outsiders in high school, I initially fell in with them because of my wardrobe. The ethos fit me in a way nothing really had before, and the music was something I had never known I needed until I heard it. There are some outcomes of having been a fat teenager that I just can't regret.)

Body changes. Yeah, I knew they were happening. But there are all of these bits of me that I never really had before - okay, I had them, but they were never visible or touchable. It should feel awesome, because this is part of what I've been working toward, right? But instead, it just feels weird. Every time I touch my collarbone or feel the bumps in my spine it freaks me out a little. They don't feel like pieces of me; they don't feel like they belong in my body. This is the body I've always had, but it's slowly becoming unfamiliar, and that's leaving me feeling increasingly unsteady. It's like I can't trust my body to be what I expect it to be, and I have 50ish more pounds to lose and I know the changes are just going to get more intense.

So, Oprah has come out and said she weighs 200 pounds, and it's been all over the news. I was thinking about this earlier today, and about how Oprah has a personal chef and a personal trainer and personal advisors - and how very different that is from what most of us have. It's left me wondering if the fact that she has so many people responsible for her personal stuff has meant that she doesn't have to take responsibility for it, or at least doesn't feel that responsibility as keenly as most of us do. I don't know if this is the case, but I do know that if I could abdicate all of the cooking and meal planning, I wouldn't put nearly as much thought as I do into making wise choices. I wouldn't have to put that thought in, and making wiser choices wouldn't have become second nature for me like it has.

Oprah obviously has a lot of demands on her time, and it makes sense to hire people to take care of some things for her. And while it's probably awesome in a lot of ways, I'm sort of glad I've had to do some of this the hard way. It's forced me to spend a lot of time and mental energy on figuring out why I make the choices I do/did, and I think that's been crucial to making the changes stick.

I am not trans. I've never even considered that I might be, although I have spent a lot of time thinking about gender and what it means to be defined by a term.

I'm not trans, but I understand it now better than I ever have. Which is not to say that I understand very well. I imagine that only someone who lives it can really understand.

I'm not trans, but I know what it is to look in the mirror and realize that the person you have in your head isn't the person who really exists; that nobody can see that person but me. And it doesn't make sense to say it out loud, it doesn't make sense to try to explain that I know who I am and I simultaneously don't exist.

The irony, of course, is that this the change is objectively a good one. I've been working toward it, and the success feels good. I don't want to change that, and I really don't want to try to make my outsides match my insides. I just don't know how to fix my head. This fundamental part of who I was, who I still am, who I will maybe always be - except I'll have to *tell* people if I want them to know about it. They won't just know by looking at me, and they should. They always have.

Maybe, with time, my mental landscape will adjust. Maybe my mental picture will start approaching accuracy. That would be good. Objectively, I know that would be good. Despite the pain under my breastbone when I think about it, I know it would be good.

I haven't changed, not really. I'm still the same person, still the same me I always was - except in the ways I'm not. I somehow think those ways are going to get more important as the change gets more dramatic.

I bet there are things I could do to make this easier, to make the adjustment smoother. I'm just not sure I want to.

Yeah, it's only 9 a.m. and I'm already calling it a rough day. It's been a long time since I've reacted to stress by wanting to eat, but all I want to do right now is go get something sweet and gooey and chocolatey - and I know it won't make things better. I know it won't help, and I'll feel guilty afterwards and dumb for doing it. I know it won't help and I can't think of anything that will help. I guess I used to believe that it would help, or was willing to convince myself that it would, even if just for a little while. Even though that's no longer true, the old instincts still linger.

I just want to go home and pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep and pretend that the world outside doesn't exist. Not a solution either, I know.

I don't really have anything else to say, but I needed to remind myself that food cannot solve any problems except hunger.

I went to a concert (Panic at the Disco - it was awesome) and spent hours on my feet dancing. I didn't realize it until afterwards, but I wasn't exhausted or out of breath even once. And maybe I was a little bit self-conscious at times, but it was much more about my dancing (in)ability than my size.

I was looking in the back of my closet for warm clothes that will actually fit. I pulled out this shirt that I've had for ages, and it actually fit. Then I noticed that it had a name tag sewn into it, from when I went to sleep away camp! The last time I went I was 16!

When I was 16 I thought I was the hugest thing in the world, and now I'm thrilled to be back at that size. Life is odd.

As of this week's weigh-in, I am officially under 200 pounds. It feels great, but also sort of surreal. To tell the truth, I never really thought I would get here. It's not that I didn't think I could, it's that it never really occurred to me that it would ever actually happen. It's like walking on the moon - not something that I spend a lot of time imagining, or thinking it's realistically in my future. I've been above 200 for my whole adult life (I guess I'm going to have to stop saying that now!) and it was my norm. I guess I have a new norm now, but it hasn't really sunk it yet.

So, I got up this morning, put a brace on each ankle, and did the Walk Away the Pounds 2 mile walk. It was fine. I didn't hate it, and I felt good about having done it. In reality, it was so not a big deal. I think the longer I put it off, the bigger deal it became in my head.

I also remembered a piece of advice I read years ago: Just change into your workout clothes. Don't think about working out, just change clothes. Then once you do that, you might as well work out.

Okay, confession time: Some time in September, I stopped exercising. I didn't plan to do it, but I hurt my foot so I couldn't go walking so I was going to the gym to bike but that's a pain and, anyway, excuses are easy. The bottom line is that it's been more than a month since I've gotten any deliberate exercise.

For me, exercise is one of those things that I feel good about while I'm doing it and after it's over, but I never want to do it. I am most definitely not an, "Oh, I'm bored - I can go work out!" person. I am a dragging myself into it, every single time, person. And I was pretty good for a while.

I know I need to start again. I know it's better for me, that I'll be healthier and it will help with my weight loss. Most importantly, I know it will help my mood, which has tanked in the last month. (Coincidence? I think not.) I know all that, and yet, it's still not happening.

Last week, I saw a little girl with her mom when I was out shopping. The little girl was maybe six or seven years old, and very heavy. And I just wanted to say to her, "Do it now, change things now. Your life will be so much better and easier and happier if you do it now. I can tell you how. It can be hard but it gets easier, and you can do it."

Of course I didn't say anything. I would never say anything like that to a stranger of any age. But her mom could say it. Maybe her mom has said it; she's probably said it a lot. But that girl didn't hear it (couldn't hear it? wouldn't hear it?) any more than I did at that age.

All of the sudden, I realized that throughout my whole childhood, my mom wanted me to lose weight because she loves me. Because she wanted my life to be better and happier and easier, she did everything in her power to make me lose weight. I never got that before. I never understood that she was doing it out of caring and concern. I only ever heard criticism when she would talk to me about my weight or put me on another damn diet - I never heard love. But looking back, it's so easy to see that she wanted me to lose weight before I got any bigger, before it got even harder, before I grew up and had to do it as an adult.

I called my mom and told her this. About the little girl, and how I wanted to help her, and how I never understood that my mom felt that way all along and just wanted the best life for me. When I told my mom, she started to cry. She was so glad that I finally got it, that I knew she had done it because she loved me. It turned into the most honest conversation my mom and I have ever had about my weight, especially my overweight childhood.

Even though my childhood is gone and done, long past, I can barely describe the relief I feel. My parents may not have liked the way I looked, they may have been embarrassed at my size, they may have hated having to struggle to find clothes that fit me, but above all, they loved me.

Yesterday I bought jeans in the Misses section of Macy's. I think that it's the first time in my adult life that I've been able to shop in the Misses section. Granted, they were a size 16, but it felt so amazing not to be relegated to that little section upstairs. I was telling my mom about it on the way home and I almost started crying.

I went to see an orthopedist for the pain in my foot (which isn't going away, dammit) and he didn't tell me that losing weight would help fix it. In fact, he didn't mention my weight at all! This is a doctor I haven't seen before, so it's not like he knows I'm losing. Maybe he just doesn't mention weight to anybody, but it's the first time I've been to an orthopedist who hasn't given me the weight loss speech. It was only afterwards, when I wasn't feeling a little bit annoyed and angry, that I realized how good it felt to simply be treated.

At my last visit to the endo, she said my weight loss may have positively affected my insulin resistance, and that I could try to cut my metformin back to once a day and see if I stayed stable that way. Well, this week was the big experiment, and I regret to say that the results were not good ones. Over the last six days my weight started steadily creeping up (I'm up 1.5 pounds) and this morning my fasting blood sugar was 99.

I'm happy with the way that my overall health is improving, but I just can't help being disappointed that I'm still classed as pre-diabetic. I've been told that just a 20 pound weight loss is enough to make an impact on blood sugar, and I guess I expected that it would be true for me since I've lost so much more than that.

I'm normally pretty good about being body-positive, and I don't want to be or like to be down on myself. But the more I lose, the more I hate my upper arms. It's not the flab (although there's a lot of it) or the lose skin (a lot of that too), it's the fact that they're a size bigger than the rest of me. Instead of enjoying shopping for new clothes, I'm just getting frustrated that I have to buy all of my shirts a size too big so that they'll fit my upper arms. If I find a shirt that fits around my chest and waist, it's either unbearably tight around the upper arm, or it's comfortable but makes me look like a stuffed sausage. I know that there's really nothing I can do about this aside from what I'm already doing (cardio and tricep/bicep stuff), but it's awful. Because of the flab and the lose skin, my upper arm is pretty much hanging down to my elbow.

My big fear is that this is not going to go away, and this area will always be a size bigger than the rest of me. At this point I don't even know if there's any reason to hope that things will improve, or if I should just resign myself to it for the rest of my life.

As of Sunday, I am now at my halfway point in this journey. I have lost 71 pounds and have 72 to go, so I thought it would be a great time for progress pics. It was amazing for me to put my before and halfway pics side-by-side. I didn't realize how big the change was until I did.

According to some monkeys (and ABC news), it's perfectly natural to want to eat more when you're stressed out. The news story is here:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4900179

I think that's good to know, so I don't think I'm nuts or weak-willed for having that impulse. I also think it's good to remember that I am not a monkey, and so can recognize the impulse and realize that it's not in my best interests to act on it.

I also want to note that I just used the phrase, "I am not a monkey," in all seriousness. I feel like that somehow needs to become a part of daily conversations.

In one of her books, Geneen Roth says that she has a sign taped to her refrigerator door that says, "It's not in here." The last week has been one of the worst for me in a long time in terms of reminding myself that whatever is wrong, food is not the answer.

I've been pretty successful at reminding myself, but I can't count the number of times that I have opened the door to the fridge/cabinet/pantry, and then said to myself, "It's not in here." Then I close the door and go into another room. It's stress, I know that's why the last few weeks have been so hard. It's my thesis, and my thesis, and then my thesis some more. It's the looming deadlines and the desire to give up and my frustration at my ability to procrastinate. (If procrastination was an Olympic sport, I'd be going to China this year.)

Food is not the answer. We all know this, right? But do we ever completely lose the impulses to try to find a solution in the fridge? It's not in there, but that hasn't stopped me from opening the door and looking.

So far I've been really good about being able to reason with myself and walk away, but honestly, I'm afraid I'm not going to last much longer.

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the road to enchantment

back to the place where we began...

news articles on fat=bad

Aversion to colors/patters

Body changes

Oprah

I'm not trans

Rough day

dancing in the streets

(no subject)

under 200!

butt momentarily in gear

My butt is not in gear

A revelation about my mom

Misses

doctoring

a little disappointed

I hate my arms

halfway point

Biological basis for bingeing?

Food is not the answer

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November 2009

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