Weight Just a Minute...

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled decor, art, mood lifters and general happiness to chat a moment about weightier matters.   Namely...weight.

I could write a novel on this subject.  That's not an exaggeration.  In fact, I've considered doing that.  But for today, just the highlights.

From the beginning - I was not a skinny baby or a particularly thin child.  In my childhood photos I seem to veer from normal to slightly chubby to fairly chubby to back to normal.  You'd be hard pressed to find a photo of me looking svelte.

I don't remember being particularly concerned or even all that aware of my appearance or whether it was "normal" or "over-normal" until around maybe 3rd grade.  I mean, at age 3 I am sporting a bikini rather proudly (blissfully unaware that I'll never wear one ever again...which is also why I can't see limiting little tiny girls and telling them they can't wear a bikini because it's not proper...it's probably one of the few times in their lives, regardless of their weight, that they will feel happily unself-conscious in one.  live while you can I say).  By 3rd or 4th grade I'm aware that I am definitely not skinny.  And I am aware that some girls are.  And I'm already slightly confused about why I am not skinny, and other girls are skinny, given my eating habits do not seem worse than girls who are skinny.  I'm a at a friends house and their family is eating loads of raw cookie dough their mother has kept in the fridge for them to snack on (this would never happen at my house...my mom would make the cookies, but never allow us to treat the dough as a snack).  Her mom also sometimes makes fresh bread and everyone in their family eats it with copious amounts of sugar and butter.  As much as you want!  (this also would not happen in my house - my mom occasionally made bread, but we were allowed 1 slice, maybe 2).  Not that we don't have snacks at my house.  At my house there are always cookies in the pantry, and you can pretty much grab one whenever you want.  I love them right when they come hot out of the oven - while the chocolate chips are melty - but after that, I rarely eat any.  But when my friends come over - especially my very skinny friend - they eat them by the handfuls.

Truly, my diet is fairly normal.  Very suburban 1970s childhood foods.  Yes, there are a lot of noodley casseroles.  But there are also a lot of vegetables and fruits and it's a pretty balanced meal.  We DO usually have dessert after dinner.  Ice cream, maybe a cookie, maybe pie (if you're lucky...because my mom's apple pie is the best), but more often raspberries in a bowl or strawberries or peaches.

But somehow I do stay on a curve where I am slightly larger than the other girls my age.  Or at least that is my perception.  I don't know how accurate my perceptions are any more.  (I would scan a bunch of photos into the computer so you could judge for yourself, but last time I tried using my new scanner I nearly threw it across the room in a fit of frustration so you'll have to take my word on my size as a child).

By 6th grade I feel officially worried about my weight and/or size.  One day I am at recess with these three girls I know  - one of them says she weighs 65 lbs, the other one says "oh my gosh you're so skinny!  I'm sooooo fat!  I weight 80 lbs!"  the third girl says "that's not fat - I weigh 81 lbs and my mom says that is totally normal".  I do not tell them how much I weigh because I am horrified at age 12 (I'm almost 12, actually still 11)  to weigh 100 lbs.

In retrospect I am sad that I weighed 100 lbs and felt fat.  Here is my 6th grade class photo: 

I am on the back row, light blue shirt , (between the red head and the girl in the red dress) - do I look fat?

By 7th grade I am pretty convinced I am grossly larger than every other 7th grade girl. I could go into a lot of long explanation about how my thinking got so distorted. (if I ever do write that novel, this will be a long chapter) There are a plethora of reasons. Suffice to say that I started a "diet". I also started a lot of unhealthy eating habits around the same time I started the diet. I swung between the two extremes of a VERY restricted diet of lemon chicken and an apple and some melba toast (gross) some days/weeks to other days when I walked with my friends to a convenience store for lunch where we would buy deep fat fried burritos and mint chocolate chip ice cream cones for lunch. Other days we ate at a restaurant called Arctic Circle where they sold massive artery clogging burgers (but who cares when you're 12) or we walked to a grocery store and got mashed potatoes and gravy in to-go containers from the deli. Other days we walked to a drug store and had grilled cheese and french fries, and if we had extra money, a ice cream sundae with marshmallow topping. Then I'd be back to a can of tuna and some melba toast for a few days. This kind of eating went on ad naseum. For pretty much...ever.



Here are I am in 8th or 9th grade...thinking I'm pretty large:

Okay...so I don't look like an anorexic model...but I hardly look like the fat lady in the circus I thought I was bordering on...

So this nonsense continued. And continued. When I was graduating from high school, I had perfected this system - so that one day might be a day where I had 3 hostess chocolate cupcakes and a diet coke, while the next day I had some healthy shrimp salads. Here I am at the end of my senior year:

I'm on the left end in the gray and black.  Gee I'm huge.  (seriously, I would like to go back and slap some sense into that girl...so frustrating)

So then this set in motion pretty much a life time of not understanding my limitations where food was concerned. And a lot of twisted thinking happened along the way. For a long time. For a reallllly long time. Here I am in college:





So to try to bring this up to speed as quickly as I can for you. I got married, had 3 kids, had roughly the same psychoses regarding food I always had except now I had to bring food into the house for other people. The problem with that is that it makes it really hard to stay on the kinda sorta bulimic diet I had been using to stabilize my weight. It can be done. But it's really hard to be constantly on that up and down one day you don't eat the next day you do, but you never quite get a grip on it roller-coaster when you're also trying to be a mom. I know moms who do it. But I could just never quite make it work for me as well as it had when I was younger.

So over the years of my 20s and 30s I have been up and down with my weight. Mostly up. And up. and up. With a couple of brief periods where it was noticeably down. And there have been soooooo many different diets.

Diets I tried (and was everything from completely not successful to very successful for a while):

Weight Watchers
Jenny Craig
Diet Center
LA Weight Loss
My Doctor's plan
Modified Sparing Fast
Oprah's cookbook/Bob Greene
Curves
Lemon Cleanse
Atkins
Southbeach
and any wacky weight loss technique you've ever read in a magazine (grapefruit diet? yep, tried it. soup only diet? yes. Juice only? yes)

And you know at some point it just gets so exhausting.

So I have spent more than a year in therapy. And although I have had many things to work on, one of the big things was unwrapping a lot of issues and baggage I have about food. I read a book I really liked about weight loss and that helped, but still it has just been a lot of THINKING and THINKING about how I FEEL. And FEELING for how I THINK. And it has not been easy. In the meantime, I've actually gained weight. So that's a little frustrating because it doesn't actually look like I'm accomplishing anything in the losing weight department.

But you know what? It is okay. It really is. Because one day this week I woke up and something shifted in my brain. I cannot exactly explain it to you. I cannot exactly tell you what it was - but it felt like I had all these things I've been working on and suddenly, they just fell into place in a way that made sense.

Can this work? Can suddenly seeing food differently work? I'm not sure. But so far, so good. My doctor gave me a estimate of how many calories I should eat each day and the amount of exercise I should get in order to lose 2 lbs per week. Now in the past, I can never be patient enough to only lose 2 lbs a week. I've got to be losing 5 or more lbs a week or forget it, pass me that cupcake. But suddenly I'm okay with this plan. Because it seems that every day with food is a little different than it was before.

We'll see. I'm sure people will feel that this may not really work.

But I don't really care what anyone else thinks. Maybe for the first time ever. It doesn't matter. It only matters what I think. So I'll update you from time to time and I'll keep that little ticker on my side-bar. I probably won't update about food or weight loss all that often because - well, because it's just not the most important thing in my life. It's just a thing I am doing - it's just my life. My life isn't defined by the food, or the lack of the food, or the type of the food or even the weight. It's just food. Nothing more and nothing less.

and that seems totally different.

weighing in...

No sense being on a restrictive weight loss campaign without weighing in.

But if you think I'm actually publishing my weight for all the world do see, you're dead wrong. Instead we will use this method to keep track - Today I weight XX1.5. No need to know what X and X represent in this equation!

By the way, I recently read Cynthia Hale's blog with all her fun facts about herself, Roxanne's too and now I've read Cindi Tanner's. All very interesting. No one has every tagged me though! I'm kind itching to write one. I definitely think Shando should have one.

The Diet

And now...for the much anticipated food blog.

I was going to upload photos of myself as a child and as a teen, but frankly, that would require more energy than I can muster, so I will try to be descriptive and perhaps you can use your imagination and I can follow up with some photos later. At any rate, this is my history with diets and food.

I was probably average sized as a child. Never skinny mind you, but average. I think I went through the normal slightly chubby stage around 10-12. By age 13 I was a size 7 or so. Not skinny, not fat. Somewhere around 12 or 13 my mom started freaking me out a little about my weight. I got the distinct impression somewhere in there but that my mom would really have preferred me to be thinner. She never explicitly said this - it was just implied. By the age of 14 I was a size 9 and my mom was officially a bit worried about my weight. My first official 'diet' was started by my mother. It was the diet center diet and what I mainly remember about that was that you could eat a lot of apples, chicken baked in lemon and salad. Forbidden items included red meat, bread, cottage cheese and tomatoes. It was very restrictive and I really hated it. More than hating the diet, I was super annoyed with my mom. I remember going over to my friend Kari's house and complaining about it. Kari's mom was horrified that my mom had me on a diet. I remember it made me feel so much better that Kari's mom thought I was thin. But...at the same time my mom was fairly thin, and Kari's mom was not thin. So it didn't make me feel all that much like Kari's mother knew what she was talking about - clearly she was not a very successful dieter. Eventually I became a little obsessed with food all on my own. My weight fluctuated between a size 7 and a size 12 all through high school - mostly I was a 9. And my life fluctuated between periods of extreme depravation and normalacy/borderline binges. I don't know if you could characterize it as "bulimia" but it was probably close.

By my senior year I became much more adept at 'dieting'. My weight was at my lowest, I was a solid size 7/8 and I was eating the following: Breakfast - toast with butter and maybe orange juice. Lunch either a diet coke and an apple or a frozen yogurt and a day old donut. Dinner - a small portion of whatever my mom was cooking. Oh, and you drink a TON of water.

A few times I threw up meals. Not usually though. 6 months or so of eating like that eventually got me down to a size 5. Sometimes there were days when all I ate was diet cokes (lots of them) and 1 hostess chocolate cupcake. So that was healthy. You learn to enjoy the feeling of being hungry rather than the feeling of being full or satisfied. There's a bit of a sharp edge to that hunger all the time - if you can learn to like that feeling, that's more than half the battle.

Then, through college I fluctuated between a size 5 and size 9. My body seemed to want to settle in at a 9 and I fought against that all the time. I exercised quite a bit - doing aerobics or water aeorbics.

Then I got married. And had kids. And fought my weight. Constantly. And mostly lost those battles. And everytime I lost a battle it seemed my body gained ground on me. Until a size 9 seemed so far away I couldn't even imagine it anymore.

I've done weight watchers and la weight loss and different exercise programs and atkins diet and south beach and a million other permutations and trends in eating. I've learned something fairly valuable. Well, lots of valuable things actually.

Some of us, if we try to eat like normal people, will balloon up like an abnormal person. This is not fair at all, but true. I have friends who can eat and eat and not gain weight. I have learned that many skinny people are like this - which is why I think there are lots of judgmental skinny people - because there are two kinds of skinny people - those ones who can eat a lot and therefore assume anyone fat must be eating a WHOLE lot. Then there are the other skinny people - the ones who don't eat. They look down on people who eat. For good reason. Because they are hungry.

I've learned that basically, there is no way to loose weight without major restrictions. Believe me, I've tried the whole, 'eat healthy' or 'moderation' thing. It doesn't work at all. When I do that, I stay the exact same.

I have gone back and forth at times between liking myself for who I am and not concerning myself too much with my weight and the exact opposite.

I grow really weary of the emphasis that is all around us all the time on being thin. I think it really distracts women from focusing on more important things. For many of us, it sucks every bit of energy we have. But to ignore it feels like ignoring something really important too somehow - and oddly, I do miss being thin more than I enjoy the peace of mind of not worrying about being thin.

I can't stand men who are overly fixated on thin-ness as an ideal. It's the worst kind of sexism. It's a horrible oppression. Especially because 99% of the time I guarantee you that their wife, girlfriend or daughter is already thin or at least thin enough that it shouldn't be an issue. It is like telling a woman who may otherwise be smart or talented or funny or capable that it doesn't matter - all that matters is that you are a piece of flesh.

Luckily I am not married to one of those guys. Though I know he would be happy if I did loose weight. But he has never been a jerk about it. He has never made me feel that I am not otherwise smart or funny or talented or capable.

Sometimes I am acutely aware that there are issues which lurk beneath the surface that affect my weight. But they are too complicated to get into here. Not insignificant is the aforementioned forced dieting at age 12/13.

So I have reached the conclusion that if I want to loose weight I should probably return to the high school diet I was most successful at: lots of diet coke and lots of apples. Because it seems to me that if a diet isn't going to be restrictive, there's almost no point.