Unsafe at Any Size

Once I decided I wanted to lose weight, the next question was, HOW?  I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, and fairly well-read on all things diet.  One could even consider me a diet expert, given the number of times I’d been on one.

Granted, the peanut butter diet I tried when I was twelve was not terribly effective.  (The idea: One big spoon of peanut butter a day.  I was supposed to just lick at it all day long).  Fat camp was not fun, and they don’t make fat camps for 40 year olds anyway (do they?).  Hiding food from me or bribing me to lose weight didn’t work out, as my parents discovered.

And as I had read, diets don’t work.  Even the super supervised diets, people only lost a few pounds.  People tended to gain it all back, and then some, after a year or two.

So, I started to think about gastric bypass.  It seemed the easier way out (though I hadn’t at the time read about the horror stories)  I had gotten a small inheritence from my grandmother, who was obsessed with weight her entire life, and it seemed like something she would more than approve of.

So why didn’t I?  Five reasons:

1. I didn’t consider my weight to be life threatening.  Sure, according to the charts, I was “morbidly obese” (don’t you love that term?  It’s like I could expire at any moment!).  But I didn’t have diabetes, high blood pressure, heart issues.
2. Surgery is life threatening.  Even the most benign surgery could have a “negative outcome”.  I had too much to live for–a husband and two kids who needed me.
3. Do I really need to chop up my body to stop eating?  Eating is ultimately something I could control.  I could, if I really tried, stop pushing food into my mouth.
4. What would the long term effects be?  I hadn’t done the research, to be honest, but malabsorbtion of food seemed a real possibility.  What if it came undone?
5. Even with surgery, I’d still have to eat less.  Surgery might make it easier to do so, or it might just make it more inconvenient.  If I didn’t learn life skills, I could see myself as one of those people drinking milkshakes or eating frosting out of the can to get my fix.

It’s not that I had ruled out gastric bypass or banding or another surgical option; it just didn’t seem like the most sensible Plan A.  For me, it would be an attempt at a shortcut.

Now, I don’t doubt that weight loss surgery is the right route for many people.  I know those who have WLS work plenty hard, so no flames, please!   But most try other solutions first.  For me, it was just wishing for something magical that didn’t require any work, and I don’t  believe in magic.

Next week: How I chose Weight Watchers

Boy, that pedometer was a great investment.  Though I can’t blame the pedometer for gaining .4 this week.  I’ll take it over last week’s gain, but still, moving in the wrong direction!

Being kind to myself, it has been a stressful week. Work has been rough, and we’re still in the midst of casting Nate’s leg.

But still, there’s no reason to chow down on as many Cheerios as I did.  I thought they would make me sick, but I thought wrong!

The meeting this week was on motivation, a timely topic, and not just for weight loss.  A useful exercise was to list what we don’t want and what we do want.  Frankly, part of the problem I’m having is I’m bored with trying to stay focused and motivated all the time.  I’d like to focus on more fun things.  But when you’re frustrated with your life, it’s a great exercise to list out what you do want.

So, here’s my List.  Not just weight loss, but for life!  And I’m only putting down what I DO want, because I don’t want to waste time even thinking about what I don’t want.

What I Want to Be

• Engaged
• Excited
• Energetic
• Exuberant
• Effective
• Comfortable
• In control
• Practical
• Mobile
• Calm
• Popular (? Do grown women still want this?)
• Cute as hell

I’m a lot of these things a lot of the time.  But lately I’ve been frustrated, bored, and helpless.  So, I’m going to focus on one thing each day I’m doing that is the way I want to be.

Speaking of Cute as Hell, here’s a pic my photographer husband took of me at the park with the kids:

After my crappy weigh-in Saturday, I splurged and bought a Weight Watchers pedometer.  Why?  I have no idea.  As my husband points out, we have pedometers (though who knows which crap drawer they live in).

What makes the WW pedometer special is that it tracks activity points.I feel like I already do pretty well in the exercise department, but figured having a new toy wouldn’t hurt.

I knew that most people overestimated the amount of exercise they got, but even though it’s discouraging.  Yesterday, I only earned 3 AP, including a 5 mi “run,” and today only 4–and that’s from 6.25 miles of walking!  Sheesh.

I’m hoping it will give me a little bit of motivation at work to take my breaks walking instead of goofing on the computer or blogging.  Even though I can take stairs no problem now, the stairs to my office still provide a little mental barrier.  Memories of huffing and puffing and sore knees…

Deciding to lose weight is a big deal; it requires commitment, and a desire to do things differently than you’ve done it in the past.  Given the low success rate long-term for diets, I’d avoided going on them in the past since I thought it’d just make things worse.  But almost two years ago, I decided to take the leap.  Here are my reasons by the numbers, with apologies to Harper’s Index:

300 lbs: The weight I was closing in on.  I had been there before.

286 lbs: The weight I was actually at.

201: My cholesterol.  Borderline, but ok: I didn’t need to lose weight or modify my diet to keep my cholesterol down.

120/80: My blood pressure.  Again, not an issue.  It wasn’t likely that my weight was affecting my metabolic health.

60 inches: My hips.  I’d need an extended measuring tape to measure them before long.

40: The age I was turning.  We don’t like to think about 40 being middle-aged, but we don’t know what our middle age was be until we die (and then it doesn’t matter).  I wasn’t encouraged what the next 40(?) years might look like if I kept getting bigger.

28: The size pants I was wearing.  Everyone knows about “plus” size clothes, but did you know they actually have sizes above plus-sized?  They’re called super-plus, and it’s damn hard to find,  pay for, or like them.

9: The number of chicken nuggets my husband served up for one of our boys.  He didn’t know that was a large serving for an adult, much less a preschooler.  What kind of food lessons were we giving our children inadvertently?   The nuggets are bad enough, but 9 of them?

8: The number of months previously I had read Michael Pollan’s NYT Magazine article Unhappy Meals.  This is the  article that morphed into his book In Defense of Food.  In it, he discussed how we stopped eating food and started eating nutrients, with the result that we eating “right” but getting fatter all the time.

4: The age of my twin boys.  They were getting faster and more active, and I was having a hard time keeping up with them.  I am on the older side of momhood, and wanted to live long enough to see what their lives would be like as adults.

3: The number of sore joints I had.  Two knees, one hip.  I thought these sore joints were due to carrying my increasingly heavy children (two at a time, yikes!).  But as my children got more mobile, I was carrying them less.  It was getting to the point where I was avoiding going up and down the stairs in our house.

2: The number of bowls of cereal my husband had at a time.

1: The number of husbands I hoped to have, life-long.  While my health numbers weren’t alarming, his definitely were, and he was taking a cabinet full of pills to manage it.  I told him I’d make a crappy widow, but strangely enough, nagging him didn’t do much to change his behavior.  When I told him that two (big!) bowls of cereal was a really large serving, he would look upset but not change his behavior much.

I realized I couldn’t change him, but I could change myself, and I had ample reasons to make changes for my own health, and for the health of my family.

Next week: Why Weight Watchers?

The faster they lose, the faster they gain. I gained 4.2 lbs this week, and I definitely didn’t have 4.2 lbs of fun and food, believe me.

All I can say is, argh.

On the good side, I got my beans, and my bean cook book, and the Hungry Girl 200 Under 200 cookbook, and The End of Overeating.

So far, the bean cook book has inspired me to make beans, and to buy bacon.  Given that I’m basically a vegetarian now, the bacon is a big deal.  I bought “humanely raised” bacon, meaning I hope that the pig was reasonably well cared for, at least until they stuck it in the throat.  The Hungry Girl book seems like it depends on some fairly freakish ingrediants, but has some good ideas.

I’m most interested by The End of Overeating, which discusses how food has been engineered to be addictive.  I’ll write more as I read more.

Hope everyone had a better week than I did!