Unsafe at Any Size

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?