Hooray!!

I finally canceled the DSL today! Hooray!
Also started a gentle exercise program. Baby stepping it until I feel strong.

Past 6 days I've had a cold, and it is holding on tight. My lungs are miserable. I'm still a snot machine. It's a LOT of fun.

Had a bad day yesterday and feel like hiding out today, but I really ought to get out and get something done.

Right? Or is staying home okay?

Still Fat, but relatively fit

Hooray for me! I had my annual exam yesterday and my weight is nice and steady, but higher than it was, say, a year ago. I'm fine with it, or making peace with it at the least. It's just a number (much like age).

Anyhow, there was a tiny problem with one of my tests, so my clinician called me and gave me a few numbers over the phone, one of them being my blood sugar (80) and the other that my thyroid was just right. She didn't check my cholesterol because my numbers from last year were excellent (both kinds), and my blood pressure is the lowest it's ever been in my adult life.

Seriously, I'm in good shape, as far as blood work and blood pressure. I love having numbers like these to keep me grounded - because everywhere you turn people are telling you that you cannot have both body fat and good numbers. My BMI might be over 25, but there is no indication that my weight is adversely effecting my health.

One part of my weight gain is a new medication I'm taking to help stabilize my mood. I've not gained a lot, but some, and I feel like it's a trade off that is totally worth making (A great blog post on this very subject is here). Some psychiatric drugs really adversely effect people causing massive weight gain and blood sugar problems in a short amount of time. Because of the problems with these drugs (which really should be either taken off the market or heavily restricted), I went for an older less trendy drug, and it seems to be doing a great job without too many side effects.

I'm happy with that.

Fat, mad as hell, and not going to take it any more

Wow, I didn't know I had multiple mental illnesses. In addition to my bipolar/depressive disorder, apparently my obesity is a mental illness, to some.

To clarify, I am considered obese. At least, I think I am. I lost a few pounds so I might just be moderately overweight today. Let me go check my BMI...At 5' 8" and 203.4 lbs...30.9 - yes, I am obese today! Hooray. By 1 point. Which for me would equal 6.8 lbs. So if I ever get tired of being obese, I can just lose 6.8 lbs. AWESOME. And then I wouldn't be part of the [you know what, I'm not even going to say it - it's now Voldemort to me] anymore.

Apparently if I lost 6.8 lbs I would also cease to have the mental illness of obesity too.

All I can say to this specious reasoning is: what. the. fuck.

Fat is not a disease. Fat tissue has important jobs in the body, it is not poisonous. Some fat people have diseases. Some diseases are exacerbated by fat, some fat is exacerbated by disease. Fat is not contagious and it's not epidemic. Stop hating on fat people. Stop using us as political pawns. And stay the hell away from my children, who are healthy, growing boys.

I am sick of fat people being the butt of jokes on otherwise rational television shows (I'm looking at you BONES - stop it). I'm sick of people saying to me, "but look at all the people around" to justify the misuse of the word EPIDEMIC. I'm sick of so much time and energy being poured into shaming and mocking people under the pretense of helping them (I'm REALLY looking at YOU "America's Biggest Loser").

Anyhow, I've run out of steam (and no, it's not because I'm fat, it's because this subject both breaks my heart and makes me furious). But the fat hate has got to stop.

What the neck?

Oh, ouch. My neck hurts! My glands are swollen and my neck is super sore!
Time to call the doctor, I think. He said if I was still feeling ill in two weeks to come back in and see him (for another mono test among other things).

I'm so very tired.

I'm a hypocrite

It was a smack in the face, but I realized this when I woke up (after I had weighed myself):

As much as I say I am not in favour of Weight Loss Dieting, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Sort of (I will qualify this to death if I let myself).

I'm still adamant that what I am trying to do is be happier, and losing a bit of weight is part of what I see helping me get there. Not the only thing, and definitely not the main thing, but part of a set of things I want to change in my life.

I've just been prescribed a drug to manage my moods and anxiety, and that drug is known for causing weight loss as a side effect. I looked it up yesterday and found a lot of interesting information about it, such as it's uses off label by "weight loss" doctors (i.e. Quacks) and others as a diet drug. That was disturbing to say the least, as the drug has a handful of other very unpleasant side effects that are only worth the risk to me because of my struggles - I want to find stability (part of the being happier equation).

The funny thing is that if I stopped tracking my food and limited my calorie intake purposefully, but this drug just "happened" to make me lose weight anyhow, I'd still be cool in the FA community. But because I wanna lose weight (YES, DAMN IT, I DO. OKAY? Sorry), I'm a potential outcast.

Nevermind that I have been talking to people (including my health care providers*) about Health at Every size and other stuff, identifying myself as an Anti-Weight-Loss-Diet person and generally living FA (for everyone Except me, lol). Or that I will talk about my fat and tell people how much I weigh - 206 at 5'8". The fact that I have identified purposeful weight loss as a goal makes me less credible (or destroys my credibility completely) as part of the Fat Acceptance community.

At least to some.

To me, I'm a fat accepter as I am a feminist. With small fs, and to my own standards.
That's how it gonna be and how it's gotta be. But I thought acknowledging that yes, I have altered my eating to lose weight was important. I don't want to pretend that I'm not out to lose. I still plan to be "overweight" when I stop tracking, just less so.
And in the end, that's my damn business. It's my body, and I'm the only one who has got to live in it.

* Okay, so I've got this nurse I see for meds appointments, and she is hung up on weight and weight loss. She is an average size person, maybe slightly fat (honestly, I don't know). But when telling me about this new drug, she emphasized the weight loss side effect and said that a client of hers had lost 30 lbs, which set me off into a "That's not healthy" thing, and she go all defensive and said "well, she needed to lose 30 lbs," and I said, "It's still not healthy to lose that much in a month - most of that had to be water weight or something from changing medications." - we went around in a funny circle of her being sure it was FINE and me being certain if it happened to me I'd be in the doctor's office getting blood work done. Finally I told her that I didn't like to hear about weightloss and dieting things because I found it to be both depressing and I wanted to concentrate on health. She's always rubbed me the wrong way a bit, and that kind of thing doesn't help. Maybe one day she'll tell me she's read Gina Kolata's book (ooh, I should pick it up for her in paperback!), or just leave it out. It's weird because she's a psychiatric nurse. She doesn't even know what I weigh. Damn it. I should write her a letter.

The Author as Headless Fatty

Oh, I've been working through some body issues lately. That's been fun.

Decided to track my food intake using an online program, while also limiting myself to 2000 calories a day (which, yes, for my body type/size/weight is below my BMR - which means if I just lay around all day my body would need more calories to work properly and maintain my weight).

And I've been weighing myself every day (yes, I've lost some). But, because I started to do crazy things with food (after only 4 days I start to look at things in the good and bad categories, or suddenly I'm "not hungry", even though I haven't had a thing to eat for 8 hours...bad habits die hard), I am not weighing again until the weekend.

But I've been going to yoga and moving more and that feels good. I'm working up to more exercise slowly, slowly, because I tend to overdo and hurt myself. I really am looking forward to working out over the holidays. I give myself permission to obsess about exercise then, if only it keeps me from becoming all sullen and depressed.

Anyhow, I was feeling all sassy this morning and took a few pictures of myself, one of which was a total "headless fatty" picture. And I looked and looked at those pictures of my fat self and felt all panicky. OMG I'M FAT!!!

Duh.

Deep Breath, Lady. You'll be fine.

[Several deep breaths later]

Yep, as I've been saying here, I'm fat. Obese by the standards of my doctors. I'm a round, curvy, voluptous and fat woman. And I'd better get used to it.

Not that I'm not looking forward to being differently curvy by next year (more muscle tone, yay!), but I am never going to be skinny (for me) again. I just don't see it in the cards.

And learning to accept the Fat me will be/is the first challenge to accepting the less fat me later on.

I'll post my headless fatty picture later on, if it seems like a good idea.

You'll likely also be subjected to my rant about fat and the world of the Y(MCA), because I've been noticing some stuff. Like Fat people get treated funny when they exercise. Not all the time, not always, but DAMN, I'm inflexible AND fat, not inflexible BECAUSE of my fat.

I'd love a yoga class with some fat women in it. Even some thin women with big breasts so I'd have a companion in misery when doing poses face first. How do you modify for boobs?!?

Kate Harding, have you got any fat positive yoga contacts in Madison? Help a sister out.

I'm stuffed

Really, stuffed. So, as much as I'm into this Fat/Body Acceptance thing, there are some times when I really don't like the weight I've gained. So there's that.

What's weird is that I'm kicking the vegetarian styles for nearly every meal lately. But I don't know why I say "it's weird" as if being vegetarian and being thin were equal to one another.

Tonight I ended up making two dinners which were nearly identical. The boys and I had gone to the Co-op for food on Friday and picked up a variety of veg we needed to cook: a zephyr squash, a zucchini, some carrots, sweet onion. I sliced these up on the diagonal, took some seitan (wheat gluten), and the 8 yr old and I agreed on a green Thai curry. Once the sauce was made I realized it was going to be far too hot for him, so I added garlic and sugar snap peas to the veggie mix and made a stir fry for him. I put some Ginger People Ginger Lime sauce in it and it was GOOD.

We ate the curry/stirfry with white basmati rice and ate in the livingroom because we still don't have a dining room table. I found a perfect small table for us but won't have it until Thursday. By the weekend I hope to have a couch as well and then I can begin to think about entertaining.

School started today and we took the bus! Our new school district (along with our old) doesn't begin classes until the 4th, but my school started this morning. Both of my instructors were very kind about him being there today, let's hope they feel this way all week!

The bus was fun. The ride was less than 15 minutes, and I didn't have to park in the crazy lot! Okay, did I say it was 'fun'? It was the bus, but it was wonderful to have that time to chat and relax. It will be an adjustment (especially to the lack of control), and I did have a wee anxiety attack (just a racy heart OMG feeling for a few minutes), but overall and okay trip. We got a ride home from my fantastic buddy J, and she gave me her Algebra book (she took the same course over the summer). So the first day was pretty good. I've got a couple of hours of homework for which I am far too tired, so I'm either going to rest or go to bed early and work on it over coffee in the morning.

It feels good to have gotten so much done today (cleaned, recycled lots of boxes, baked cookies, did laundry, did dishes, plus all of the other stuff I wrote about), but I am ready to stop being busy and rest.

The non-contagious non-epidemic

I am, by standards such as the BMI, obese. I won't beg to differ with that, I just chose to ignore it. I'm well aware of my body size and composition, and I've decided to use different standards to gauge my physical health.

By now you've likely heard of the new study which "proves" that fat is "contagious". Unfortunately, that representation is just not very accurate, and it makes some annoying (and possibly harmful) assumptions.

• Being fat is avoidable
• Being fat is abnormal
• Being fat is baaaaaaad

Would I rather be less fat? I can cop to that. Should I spend my life worried about it (which is what a diet ends up doing - making me obsess about everything I eat)? No fckng way.

For some people, being fat is unavoidable - they start out in childhood with extra weight and just stay that way - for others it's medication related (example: I gained 30 lbs when I was taking lithium this past fall, the weight just PILED on, and for the most part didn't leave when I stopped the meds), or as for many women, related to a medical condition such as PCOS (Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome).

Being fat is just as normal as being skinny, being thin, being average. Over the whole of human history, there have been fat people. Look to art, folk and fine, for proof of that. Fat men and women are people, just like non fat people are. The idea that fat isn't normal is prevalent and harmful.

This last one is the toughest idea to address - that fat is bad. Fat is fat. Being unhealthy is bad, yes, but FATNESS DOES NOT EQUAL BAD HEALTH. At my heaviest my cholesterol numbers were well below 200, and my overall health good. My blood pressure was also good, although I will concede that it's got better when I was thinner, I do think my life was a lot more stressful (married life, finances), so that was likely a factor.

The "facts" (PDF) that fat people are less healthy, have greater mortality, will always be prone to diabetes and heart disease are not as iron clad as some people would have you believe. The dangers (or to be more mild, harmful effects) of repeated weight loss and gain [yo-yo-ing] are becoming very clear. And the fact is that for people who tend toward heavy, dieting can lead to a slower metabolism, and a weight loss is logically followed by weight gain as their bodies attempt to 'normalize' after a period of deprivation.

Right now in my life I am healthier and happier than I've been in years, really. AND I'm fat. Make of that what you will.

I've ready many, many excellent reactions to this study and how it's being presented (and misrepresented) in the media right now.

Always good are Kate Harding, Harriet Brown and many of the bloggers who are aggregated on this feed.

A good one stop shop for discussion of this study (lots of links) is from On The Whole, and is worth a look.

Please don't think I am not saying that diet, eating habits and other things should not be examined and tweaked to promote optimal health, because I'm not. The food in our school cafeterias alone has me hyperventilating more often than not (filled with hidden sugar, for one thing), nevermind the orgiastic portions at restaurants and the hard-sell advertising to kids and adults alike.

But to base our ideas about what is good for us by if it's "okay" or "good" or "guilt-free" instead of by common sense factors such as if we are hungry, and what are bodies need and request is only asking for trouble. We are given tastebuds and an appetite for a reason. Learning to listen to and respect your body is the best way to open yourself up to better health. I know that when I am craving an apple, I'd better get one, and that when I want chocolate shoppe zanzibar chocolate ice cream, I'm happiest when I *have* it, rather than punishing myself because I *shouldn't*.

Fat Hatred is very real, and it isn't something that fat people can easily avoid. The worst part of it is how it twists everyone's mind up, so that standards of beauty are narrow, and we spend too much time judging ourselves and others by these narrow standards. As hard as it is to re-program my thinking, I'm happy that I've starting to really engage with the struggle to love and accept myself on this level - it has unlocked self acceptance on other levels - in therapy I feel things falling into place and I'm thrilled to be leaving behind messages about food and my body which I got from my parents when I was 6. After 30 years, it's time to let them go.

And too, time to let go of the idea that there is an epidemic. There ARE problems with the way we eat in the US, the way we work, the way health care is distributed, they way we are disconnected from our bodies, but all the fat-free yogurt in the world isn't gonna change that. Free your mind, and the rest will follow.

Dualism

I am happy, in many ways, about many things.
But the opposite could be said as well.

I am hopeful, in many ways, about many things.
But hopelessness often clouds my mind.

I see opportunity, in many things, in many ways.
But sometimes I see nothing but obstacles.

---

And in this closed-circuit loop of social anxiety and isolation, I feel very very ugly (on the inside).

Still I will try, I will let laughter loose, I will try a smile when I feel I can't do it. But I need to talk about what is going on.

---

If anyone ever asks me how they can help their friend or lover or son or daughter with depression, I don't know what I will say. Maybe "take them for a walk", or "help them brush their teeth", or "recall a moment between the two of you", or "tell them they deserve to be happy, that you really believe that", or "get informed", or "talk to them" or "don't ignore their genuine requests for help".

---

Telling everyone that I can that I was feeling depressed, suicidal, scared - that didn't do anything. People trust me, that's what I choose to believe. Not people don't care, but people trust me not to kill myself. They trust me, and I trust me, too. If I didn't I'd swallow my considerable pride and check myself into the county mental health place. But I know my trust may be misplaced, I'd *know* the second I thought about betraying that trust.

---

So, am I being manipulative by saying this out loud? Because what I am trying to do is let this out. I have too many secrets, secrets which just don't matter to anyone but me, but as long as I hold them in, they work against me. WAIT! I figured it out.

I need to feel safe
I need to feel safe speaking
I need to feel safe speaking my mind
I need to feel safe speaking my mind about EVERYTHING

Because of how things are going right now (stress upon stress, social vaccuum), things which would be 'no big deal' are things I can't stop thinking about. I am feeling incredibly sensitive (especially, oddly, with sound). My appetite is suddenly dead. I am brittle.

This will change.

But right now, this is me.

I'm fat

And in love with Joy Nash, after seeing her Fat Rant (via Kate Harding's awesome blog, Shapely Prose).



Unfortunately, aside from being fat, I have gotten myself into a very bad non-moving-my-body space (depression and isolating don't help),which is exacerbated by the hours upon hours I need to be sitting at the computer each day to complete my algebra assignments.

This morning I was craving pilates, so I put in the Pilates DVD I have and cranked it up to "fully modified", and found out that I have serious pain all over my body. My FEET hurt when I was doing toe exercises. I've been wondering (for more than 3 years) if I might have fibromyalgia - I'll need to talk to a doctor about that at some point.

But now it's some stretching, then some studying, then my midterm - an later, beer and blog talk at the MadInteractive event (bf is on the panel, isn't that cool?).

Anyhow, in honor of the Fat Rant and myself, I'm taking down my weight loss meter at the bottom of the page.

What next?

Need something today, don't know what.

Have been having some pretty bad stomach aches, which I attribute to upping my fruit and veg intake by 700% this week. Perhaps I need to start making pureed soups or something to give myself a break?

I have a great recipe from the moosewood cookbook for a 'creamed' spinach soup which uses potato as a base. But it's nearly summer, so soup isn't all that appetizing.

This morning I think I'm going to try a protien shake and maybe some apple sauce.

Been so caught up in my head and yet the things I've been thinking about are so - weightless. Feel as though I'm wasting time but I think I am not.

Actually, I was just now *planning on wasting time* with a cup of coffee and a book.

But seeing as it's a plan and all, it has to be productive. Right?