Silver Lining

Hello friends.

So it’s been a while. I’ve got a pretty solid excuse for my lack of attention to my little patch of cyberspace here, but since this is (in theory anyway) a weight-loss blog and not a talk-about-my-crazy-and-sordid-little-life blog, you’re just going to have to trust me that my energy and focus was needed elsewhere for a while. In my quest to get my life back (or just get one, period) I’ve been thinking about the things that make me happy, that define who I am and what’s important to me. On the list of places I’d like to divert my newly freed up time and attention to, it turns out that I’m still surprisingly passionate about this whole weight loss thing, and to putting that passion into print. So away we go!

Again.

If there is a silver lining to this little storm cloud that’s been following me around, it’s that it’s given a real boost to my weight loss. I’m not recommending crushing depression as a reliable diet plan, nor do I endorse panic attacks as a particularly effective form of cardio, but it’s hard to look at a 13-pound net loss this month and feel like it’s a bad thing.

The phenomenon of “emotional eating” is something that is bandied about in weight loss circles, and the concept that we cannot hope to control what we’re eating until we define just what’s eating us has become conventional fat fighting wisdom. I think that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that there are a myriad of reasons people overeat that have nothing to do with actual hunger. I’ve engaged in a few (read: a zillion) of them myself. So it’s somewhat strange to me that this most recent round of emotional distress has all but extinguished my desire to eat. Anything. At all. And on the off chance that there is something that the thought of chewing and swallowing doesn’t sound abhorrent to me, it turns out that I’m not terribly interested in more than the first few bites.

I know this probably isn’t going to last. And if the cost of a severely diminished appetite is abject sorrow, then I’m not willing to pay that price long term. I’ll take fat and marginally happy over slightly less fat with a side of massive despair any day. I figure that when I start to feel like myself again I’ll probably have to accept that my intrinsic set of food issues is part and parcel with the deal and get back to the business of beating them back with a whip and chair.

But just for today, I’m going to stop asking the gift horse to open up and say “ahh!” and be thankful that I’m not chasing down my problems with peanut butter brownies, chili cheese dogs and #25 enchilada platters…yet.

Which "one" are you?

I sometimes think my life is a great big study in contradictions.

For instance, I am a relatively emotionally intuitive person. I read a room, and the people in it, pretty well (if I do say so myself). Even when there is every appearance of contentment I can usually sense if something’s not quite right and alter my approach to the situation given the mood of the other players involved. It’s a trait that served me well in my life (and one that, as I read it back now, I suppose can either be seen as a useful instinctive gift or an indicator of sociopathic tendencies, but that’s a pretty fine line of distinction, don’t you think?) and that basic intuition helps me to see how I can best fit into the world around me.

But when it comes to judging the physical nature of that same world, it’s a totally different story. Let’s just say that if I decided to ditch my life and become a carnie that they’d better not let me man the “Guess Your Weight!” booth unless their goal was to give away big inflatable hammers, plush sponge-bob toys, and decorative mirrors etched with AC/DC album covers to just anyone who happened to pass by. I’m notoriously incapable of accurately judging things like height, or weight, or even age in other people. I can’t count how many times I’ve judged someone to be a certain size only to find that I’m WAY off in my estimation—in either direction. I find myself consistently surprised when other people reveal their weight, finding that my own estimation of that number is usually wildly off from reality. I also suffer from the delusion that everyone on earth is the same height I am, and am often amazed when I look at the person standing next to me and realize that I can clearly view the top of their head or when I see my own shoulders standing well above the crowd in photographs. It can be a little disorienting.

I’ve often said that I suffer from fat-blindness, a condition characterized by an astonishing inability to see myself as I appear to others, but as my body has changed (in both directions) over the last few years I’m getting better at seeing myself more accurately. Yet there are still times when I’m unprepared for cold hard reality.

For example, I have a friend I’ll call Jennifer (because that’s her name, and all) who is about as big as minute. She’s an adorable little pixie of a thing that stands all of about 5’2” (And you can trust me on that since I just verified that via the source—though she did try to get me to say she was 5’5”. We all want to be something we’re not, don’t we?) and I could carry her around in my pocket if I was so inclined. A few months ago, Jennifer and I were out running a few errands over our lunch hour in her sparkly little mint green Prius (which she’s named “Julep” how cute is that?). Apparently a friend of Jennifer’s told her that they’d seen her out and about that day and asked “Who was that gigantic person in the car with you?” She went on to tell me how they thought it was funny to see the contrast between Teeny-Tiny-Jenny and the Big Broad Giantess in the seat next to her. She did not tell me this to hurt my feelings, and I suspect that the contrast between us was striking to see…but I confess that it’s been rattling around in my brain like a BB ever since she told me.

Intellectually, I’m not unaware of my stature. At 5’11” in bare feet (and given my propensity for wearing heels most days) I’m already going to stand out from the crowd. Add a lifetime of being overweight and a strong personality to the mix and I can imagine that many people (and some Japanese cities) could be startled by my approach. And yet I forget that because my size is the single most identifiable thing about me that it’s naturally the first thing people notice about me, and that’s totally normal. I do the same thing, and I bet you do too. In just the last 24 hours I’ve described other people as the “tall guy in IS” and the “pretty curly red-head in legal” and that “little blond kid in your class” without hesitation. All that hooey we pass around about how we’re not defined by our bodies is more or less touchy feely BS, really. It’s just that some descriptive traits are more emotionally charged than others, being the “fat one” (or any less obvious derivative thereof) is one that—true or not—stings a little.

As I look over the last few years and why I am still committed to continuing the life-long battle against the fat, I am reminded that the holy grail of weight watchers everywhere is not the desire to someday be something that we’re not, but to finally be seen for all the things that we are. If we can take the fat out of the mix, then we just might get the chance to be the “tall one”, or the “blond one”, or the “one with the green-eyes”, or smart, or pretty, or anything but the “fat one”.

Which one are you? Which one do you want to be?

F'ing Skinnies! (or: I love the smell of hatred in the morning...)

What the hell is with all the anorexic people in this world?

I see them sometimes when I’m out and about. I watch their frail bodies stagger uncertainly through aisles, watch them strain while pushing shopping carts that probably weigh more than they do. I see their sharp elbows poking through the sleeves of their shirts, their size zero pants hanging off of emaciated pelvises, their withered cheeks hollow and gaunt. I watch them stand in front of the frozen food cases in the supermarket, see them obsessively checking the calorie content of one low calorie item against another and I can’t help but roll my eyes and think “Yeah, like you are really going to eat either one of those, you bony freak!”

I even see them on TV, crying to Oprah or Dr. Phil about how hard their lives are. Some of them even say they have a disease that makes them starve themselves, and I want to scream at the screen “Here, I’ve got a cure for your ‘disease’, it’s called a SANDWICH. Try one, you skeleton-headed witch!” They sit there and talk about how hard it is for them to eat, how they think they’re fat, when the truth is that they’re just stupid. Everyone knows if you actually EAT food, you don’t end up weighing 88 pounds and dying of malnutrition. I mean, they KNOW they should eat, and yet they don’t do it. It’s not that hard, moron. Open your mouth, insert food, chew, swallow. For Christ’s sake, babies and farm animals can do it without being taught. I, for one, have never had any problem eating food so I don’t see why they can’t do it like everyone else.

I think they should round up all the people with this so called “disease” and put them on an island where they’re all chained to a 24 hour buffet so then maybe they’d be forced to eat something for a change. Then we wouldn’t have to look at their disgusting wasted bodies or listen to how we should feel sorry for them because they can’t seem to get their shit together already. Why don’t you quit your whining, get your head out of your non-existent asses, and GAIN SOME WEIGHT, you skinny freaks!

(Cue the angry mob with the torches and pitchforks.)

Ridiculous, right?  Who in their right mind would ever say that and think it was appropriate?  Anorexia is a serious, debilitating, life altering eating disorder.  Rewrite it to rail against obesity, though, and that's A-OK.

(I know, I know. Understated, I’m not. But I’ve never claimed subtlety as a strong point.)

I was doing a bit of research early this morning for the blog entry I meant to write today, when I happened upon a web page that’s been burned into my retinas ever since. I hesitated at first to even post the link, but in the end I decided that when you have the choice between ignoring hate and looking it in the face, it’s always better to know your enemy than not. There are some very angry people out there, and I'm pretty sure they’re just the tip of the iceberg. These are just the folks who took the time to put fingers to their keyboards and post their deep thoughts for the world to see, and for every one of them there are thousands of others who are thinking exactly what these people said out loud. I bet that there are more sites out there (like, say, hundreds) that are full of exactly the same kind of sentiment.

At least I assume there are, but the truth is that I just couldn’t bring myself to actively search for them. I didn’t read every entry on that page. I didn’t even read a tenth of them, but I suspect I didn’t really need to. Despite my general stance that I am rubber and they are glue, the hate behind the words (atrocious grammar and spelling aside) clings to my skin with a sticky familiarity, and as hard as I’ve been trying to brush it off all day I just can’t.

I’ve been fat my whole life. I have also been smart my whole life, too. I am not ignorant of how the world sees obesity any more than I’m unaware of the conventional formula of “eat less + move more = smaller ass” for weight loss. But since fat is my reality, and one that I’ve been both fighting against and examining closely over the last few years, it’s hard for me to fathom how a world that has found so much compassion and understanding for nearly every other behavior-related affliction on earth can still muster up the kind of CAPS LOCK HATRED that sites like that one encourage.

Obesity threatens people in a way that few things in this world do. Our extra bulk reminds people of their darkest fear that self control is tenuous at best, and that we are what happens when weakness of character is allowed to run rampant. Believing that the fat is a simple foe that strong people can keep at bay helps to remind the people who hate us that, whatever else they might be, at least they’re not fat. It must be a comforting thought.

I believe that my obesity is complex in nature—and that for every logical and simple factor that contributes to it there is something that defies easy explanation at play as well. I also believe that, for the time being, they world at large doesn’t believe that…yet. So I won’t let those people be the only voices that break the silence surrounding obesity. Will you?

Victory, Victory, that's our cry....

Last year, in a fit of self-help pique, I gave my email address to a company that specializes in workplace professional development literature publications. On purpose. In exchange for this information, they agreed to send me a daily email (and they were seriously about the “daily” part, like EVERY freakin’ day. No holiday, weekend, or international tragedy is going to keep them from depositing a little electronic sunshine in my inbox, lemme tell ya.) that begins with an inspirational quotation which, miraculously, always segues perfectly into a sales pitch about their featured pamphlet du jour that’s just a click away from being mine-all-mine. I don’t look forward to this daily bit of wisdom with the same leap of joy that fills my heart when my favorite weekly excel newsletter pops up in my unread items, but I’ve come expect a little nugget of wisdom waiting for me every morning.

Interestingly, this is not quite as lame as it sounds. Sure, there have been (many) days when the quote seems a little trite, or peculiar, and once even totally inscrutable (it was in what I assume to be Mandarin, with no translation beneath it. I shit you not.), but every once in a while I find myself nodding after reading it, and maybe even right-click copy/pasting it into a file I keep on my desktop for just such material. So when the familiar address appeared in my inbox this morning, I double clicked and read this:

“Consider keeping a Victory Journal. Just like a photo album, your Victory Journal can become a great collection of snapshots of positive experiences and a living reminder of your power to achieve. And with such a clear record of all your daily wins, successes, triumphs, and achievements, you’ll slowly build a strong sense of self-worth and a foundation for expecting success.”     --Pat Croce

Naturally, my first thought was: LAME. Like I’m going to sit down and write all about my goals and what I’m doing to achieve them, or reflect on what’s gone well in my life, on the little “victories” that I’ve claimed, or what I’ve learned from my failures, or how I can apply those lessons to what comes next. Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? What are we supposed to do then, huh? Type it all up, post it on the internet, and let everyone we know (and everyone we DON’T know for that matter) read it and tell us what they think of it so we can go and read their war stories and…umm…wait a second…

Well color me lame.

I’m not saying that this blog is exactly a “victory journal” (mostly because I don’t know if that phrase is copyrighted and I don’t have the bank at present to fend off an infringement lawsuit, and partly because I think “victory” might be overstating the nature and quaility of the content most of the time) but I suppose it is a record of the wins I’ve earned in my battle with the fat. It’s also a record of the losses, and even of the draws. And writing about my journey has been an overwhelmingly positive experience, a way to break the deafening silence that surrounds obesity. Even when it isn’t pretty, writing it all down seems like a victory all it’s own.

So just for today, I’m letting my lame flag fly and declaring that for January 25, 2010, this blog is officially my Victory Journal, and I claim the following victories in that spirit:

Today, I didn’t lick out the inside of my yogurt cup to make sure I got every damn calorie I accounted for out of that container.

Today, I admitted that what I’d been telling myself was a teaspoon of powdered coffee creamer was more like 3 of them. Or 5, even. I logged the extra calories and got on with my life.

Today, I stopped being a wuss and didn’t reach for the slacks that are getting embarrassingly too large just so I wouldn’t have to find out for sure if the smaller slacks fit me yet (FYI, they do!).

Today, I remembered that celebrating even the smallest of victories leaves a better taste in my mouth than wallowing in my defeats ever has. Yum.

So how about it, folks? What victories are yours to claim for today?

*please don't look up, PLEASE don't look up....*

Have you ever been out and about, minding your own damn business, when out of nowhere—walking directly towards you—is someone you haven’t seen in a while? Someone you might have been avoiding at one point but it had been so long since you’d bumped into them that you were pretty sure that you never would so your guard was down and you didn’t even consider that maybe this day (of all days), when you hadn’t even bothered to put on mascara or make sure your sweatpants du jour weren’t the one’s with the hole in the crotch that was only noticeable when you were taking purposeful strides across the room kind of like you are right now, and your brain is all silently screaming “PLEASE don’t look up and notice me” and then (probably because you just wished they wouldn’t, because the universe is a bitch that way) they totally look RIGHT AT YOU and you try too look all surprised while you greet each other with forced cheeriness and exchange excited “Oh my God, it’s been so long! How ARE you?” greetings that lapse into an awkward silence that lingers on for a minute while neither one of you can figure out exactly what to say next?

This is totally like that.

I’ve been away for a while. I’ve got reasons (some of them really good ones and some of them like pages out of a “Mad Libs: The Excuses Edition!” activity book), but for the moment I won’t bore you with them (because hey, a girl’s gotta keep a little something back for future material, right?).

I will tell you, though, that I’ve tried going this fight alone. I’ve tried keeping my silence under the auspices of keeping my head, tried holding my thoughts and while I held my breath…and it doesn’t work for me.

I’ve started this entry about 30 times only to wuss out and walk away from the keyboard because at a time when I wasn’t really sure of anything what I DID know was this: If I was going to come back, then I was REALLY going to come back. I wasn’t going to say I was coming back only to crawl back under the covers and go back to sleep again. I wasn’t going to pull out my six-guns and aim them at the fat girl staring back at me from the mirror unless I was prepared to pull the trigger. I wasn’t going to do this all half-assed until I could be sure that I was ready to get off my whole ass and get back to work.

It took a long time, but I’m back.

Internet! I haven’t seen you in so long. How ARE you?

Over The Hill

This past February, I turned thirty eight years old (in the Happiest Place on Earth© and with Tom Cruise by my side. No kidding, I swear!). People tell me that being in my late thirties hardly qualifies me as elderly, but I confess that I don’t really believe them. To me, the litmus test for “old” is simple: You are old as soon as you no longer understand the young people—and I don’t. I don’t particularly care for much their music, I don’t get their clothing choices (how do they even keep their pants up when the ‘waist’ falls below their butt cheeks? Is this the reason for the triangle stance they’re always lounging in?), I can’t STAND texting lingo, and I think most of them could use a haircut for God’s sake. If that doesn’t qualify me as old, nothing does.

But even if 38 doesn’t qualify me for the senior citizen coffee discount at the local Burger King (which my 63 year old parents take unholy advantage of, I might add. My mother has actually gotten up early and driven to BK to pick up coffee for herself and my Dad all the while ignoring the perfectly good coffee maker in her own kitchen. I suspect it’s because the local grocer doesn’t give her 25% off of her bag of coffee beans just because she happened to be born in 1946.), there are still some venues in which I’m definitely not a kid anymore. One of them is right here in the blogosphere.

I started my website (http://www.skinnysara.com/) in late 2006, and that means that as weight loss bloggers (or “floggers” as we’re sometimes known) go, I’m practically a geriatric. Do a web search for weight loss related blogs, and you’ll turn up approximately a kajillion sites. Start clicking on them, however, and you’ll soon realize that the vast majority of them fall into two categories:

1. Relatively new blogs by people who are in the first several weeks or months (or days, even) of their current weight loss effort, and

2. Pages long abandoned with their last entries a static reminder of better times.

Given that weight loss is generally impermanent in nature, it makes sense that the websites it inspires are equally so. If statistics say that only about 3% of us will ever achieve the holy grail of weight watchers everywhere by taking (and keeping) the weight off, then it’s probably safe to assume that some 97% of weight loss bloggers will disappear along with the success they had at the scale. I understand this, but it still makes me sad.

One of the most insidious side effects of obesity is often the loneliness that comes along with it. The internet broadened the definition of community to a global scale and helped to bring people with common interests together in a way that has never been possible at any other time in history. It’s been an especially welcome tool for the weight loss community, I think. Since the fat is off limits for discussion in nearly every venue of polite society, it can be really hard to feel like you’re not the only person on earth who is dying beneath the weight of that silence.

For me, the internet finally gave me a place that I could look out over the crowd and see my own face staring back at me. I have taken so much solace, inspiration, and solidarity from reading the blogs of other people battling obesity. I revel in their successes, I am angry for the injustices they face, and I am heartened by the fact that they’re out there writing down all the things that we’ve never really had a place to say out loud before. And when they fade away, it makes me sad.

Most blogs are started in the early stages of the journey, in those first heady days of success when it feels like we’ve finally got this whole weight loss thing figured out and we’re anxious to share our secrets of success with the world—to tell them that if WE can do it, so can they! In our weight loss childhood we’re full of the hubris of youth, the certainty that our goals are in sight. It’s a force to be reckoned with, one that is powerful simply by virtue of the fact that it hasn’t been tested by reality yet. But when the fall comes (and make no mistake it WILL come), it often catapults us right into the next phase—a little something I call the weight loss “adolescence”. Our bodies are changing, often faster than our minds can catch up to them, and of a sudden what was once so easy feels a little awkward. What we once knew for certain, suddenly doesn’t seem so simple anymore. It’s a rough period. One that, frankly, most of us never make it out of. And it’s been the death knell for many a weight loss blog. When we stumble, when the high we’ve been riding (and writing) out starts to wane, many of us just stop talking. Our blogs become ghost towns, our past successes frozen in time and our silence speaking volumes about the present.

I understand how it happens, how we’d rather say nothing than admit that all those things we were so very sure about turned out not to be as fool proof as we thought. I’ve taken a hiatus or two myself over the last three years because it’s hard to admit when we struggle, especially when we’ve been so sure that we never would again…and said as much, to the whole world. It’s sometimes easier to fade away than to admit that we just weren’t as infallible as we thought we were. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, though. I wish there was less shame tied up in stumbling and that our setbacks and spectacular wipeouts could feel less like failure and more like progress. I wish we could learn the lessons of adolescence and finally grow up and realize that there is truly no end to this journey, no final battle to be won.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a well written, if somewhat pointed, post on a newer weight loss blog filled with broad stroke assertions and the hubris of youth with a note that said “I’ll check back in a year and see how they feel then”. It made me smile. I regularly read some young blogs and all the hope and joy and certainty…and I don’t resent it. I do envy it sometimes, though. I try to soak it in. I use it to remind myself what power there is in new success, and how easily it can slip away.

When I started blogging, I promised myself that I wouldn’t do what so many of my heroes had done before me. I wouldn’t fade away when things got rough, and I’d do my best to try and accept that if I’ll be battling my obesity the rest of my life then it’s a pretty safe bet that the fight isn’t always going to be an easy one. So here I am, bruises and all, still fighting. Over the hill? Maybe. But I can see another one in the distance, and another after that—and I want to make my way up and over all of them.

(Read today's other Theme Thursday posts here)

Theme Thursday: Trying Out a Different Drummer

I am not a morning person.

I do not say this in the annoying, kitschy, self-deprecating cartoon-strip thought bubble way with a dramatic roll of my eyes and a wacky expression (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Cathy--“Ack!” indeed.), but with the quiet certainty of fact. In my 38 years on earth I can say without exaggeration that there has never been a single morning (Nope, not even Christmas morning or the first day of summer vacation) where my eyes popped open with the sun and I immediately bounded out of bed with a smile on my face and a can-do attitude ready to greet another bee-you-tee-full day!

My day invariably begins with the jolt of the alarm clock and the subsequent shushing of that clock via the flop-armed slap of the snooze button (though a lifetime of this habit has given me an extraordinarily firm grasp on all mathematical operations involving 9 minute increments) followed closely by a groan and/or a sigh and the eventual settling in of a grumpy resignation that laying in bed for just one (or nine) more minutes isn’t an option and I haul myself out of bed to begin just-another-damn-day.

But although I know this about myself, it doesn’t stop me from occasionally believing that I can work against a lifetime of droopy eyelids and train myself to greet the pre-dawn hours with not only vigor and glee, but a healthy dose of cardiovascular activity as well.

While I am an evening exerciser by nature, every so often I’ll read the accounts of those who wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and lace up their running shoes and meet the sun and all about the benefits in energy level, metabolism, weight loss (and sex appeal, and intellect, and income level, and magical powers…) and I’ll decide that I’ve been doing this all wrong. I vow to change my ways, to fight my nature and set the alarm for an hour far earlier than any self respecting night owl should ever see upon waking, and to get out there and reclaim mornings as MY time. I vow to start a new routine of early to bed and early to rise…and I sometimes (read: hardly ever) even make it past the first day!

I’m on week two of my current morning exercise experiment (which is amazing, since I rarely make it to DAY two) and I have to say that I’m finally realizing that all those promises about my body getting used to the change in it’s regular rhythm and beginning to appreciate the many benefits of A.M. activity is pretty much a load of crap. Ok, maybe it hasn’t been a TOTAL loss, but it hasn’t been exactly enriched my life much either. The time I’ve ‘saved’ for other activities in the evening is mitigated by the fact that I’m too tired to do any of them because if I’d like to sleep for more than three hours in a row I actually have to go to bed earlier. All the extra energy I was promised doesn’t seem to be materializing either. So tell me, morning people--Where’s my payoff? Huh? HUH?

One of the best things about this weight loss game is that there is an abundance of information out there from various experts and fellow fat-fighters about all the ways in which we can make ourselves more successful in our quest for better health. Unfortunately, one of the worst things about this weight loss game is that the aforementioned abundance of info can sometimes be a minefield of contradiction and complication. It seems like everyone’s got an opinion about, well, everything. When we should eat, what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat, what exercise works, IF exercise works, what supplements to take, why we should avoid supplements, surgery that might help, why that same surgery is a tool of Satan, drink green tea, don’t eat fruit, pray to the skinny gods, stand on your head, swallow this pill, balance on this ball, wear this magnet, cleanse your colon, blah, blah, BLAH. It can be a bit mind-boggling at times. If I tried to incorporate all the diet advice I’m bombarded with on a daily basis you’d eventually find me curled up in a ball in the hall closet tangled up in rubber resistance bands babbling incoherently about high fructose corn syrup through acai berry stained lips and crying because I ate a handful of cheerios after 7PM.

Ask 100 successful losers for their very best weight loss advice, and you’re likely to get just as many different answers. How do you know which one is the right one? Hint: They ALL are. This weight loss stuff is intensely personal, it’s complicated and multi-faceted and what one person adopts as gospel just might be blasphemy to the person fighting the fat along side them. Since all that shtick they’ve been handing us for years about they key to permanent weight loss being permanent lifestyle change has turned out to be totally true, it makes sense that we might not all march to the same drummer. The longer I do this, the more I believe that the key to finding what works is to keep trying things until you find what works for YOU, that magical combination of elements that helps you find your own routine, helps you settle into the rhythm that feels right to you.

Me? I’m still working on finding my groove, and for now that means that my iPod is charged, my shoes are laced, and the dog is leashed up by 5:30 AM so that I can leave the house and put one foot in front of the other, up hills, down slopes, and over the land until my feet settle into a beat that makes me forget that how damn early it is. I stand on the front porch and look out into the dark and get ready for the day.

Rhythm? Check. Music? Check. Could I ask for anything more?

How about 9 more minutes of sleep…

(This was my take on the Theme Thursday topic of "Rhythm".  You can read the other posts here)