Unsafe at Any Size

When I was heavier, I couldn’t eat enough sugar.  Cookies, chocolate, cake, fudge were part of the daily plan.  No matter how much sugar I ate, I was never satisfied.  Like many of you, I truly felt addicted to sugar, and worked hard to get off of it.  I read Potatoes Not Prozac: Solutions for Sugar Sensitivity, and despaired about getting rid of it altogether.

As I’ve lost weight, I’ve been incorporating more and more whole foods, and have been slowly reducing the sweets.  I think the bread and white rice that were also big favorites back in the day were triggering sugar cravings and binges. I eat very little food with added sugar nowadays.

So I’m not surprised that the average american eats the the equivalent of 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day. mostly from soft drinks and candy, adding an additional 355 calories to their diets.  Women should eat no more than 6 teaspoons, according to the American Heart Association, and men no more than 9.

If you eat them, removing soft drinks and candy bars as a way to reduce your sugar intake is a good place to start.  But how many of us know how much sugar is in the food we eat?

It isn’t easy to know.  Nutrition labels tell us a lot, but they don’t separate out the amount of natural sugars in food and the added sugars, and it’s those added sugars we need to watch out for.  And nutrition labels give you amounts in grams.  I can’t really envision a gram (damn that metric system), so it helps me to know that 5 grams=1 teaspoon.

Sure, we know that doughnut has lots of added sugar, but you’d be surprised where else it shows up.  Frozen foods, for example.  You have to read the ingredient list to know what’s really in there, and you may feel like you need a degree in chemistry to figure it out.

The Harvard School of Public Health recommends in this article that sugar not be in the first 3 ingredients (I would say 5, if at all), and provides this list of sneaky sugars:

• Agave nectar (yes, it’s a sugar!)
• Brown sugar
• Cane crystals
• Cane sugar
• Corn sweetener
• Corn syrup
• Crystalline fructose
• Dextrose
• Evaporated cane juice
• Fructose
• Fruit juice concentrates
• Glucose
• High-fructose corn syrup
• Honey
• Invert sugar
• Lactose
• Maltose
• Malt syrup
• Molasses
• Raw sugar
• Sucrose
• Sugar
• Syrup

Anything that ends in “ose” or “itol” is a sugar, too.

What other sugars have you found lurking in your food?

Bonus video: Stephen Colbert reacts to the news that we may be facing a sugar shortage.

So I didn’t loose this week, but I didn’t gain, either.  Overall, I consider that a win.

It was a tougher week than I expected with the kids going to 1st grade.  Nate was having a really hard time adjusting to the mixed grade playground, which is also much larger than that for the kinders.  He wasn’t able to find his friends for some reason, and felt very lonely.

Unfortunately, being a six year old, that’s not how he expressed it at first.  Instead, he blamed it all on having to wear a brace on one leg, and was inconsolable because it was no fair, and no one else had to wear one.  On top of that, he always loses races.

It was a lot worse than it sounds: night after night of crying about the injustice of the world.  I thought it was parents who were supposed to drive the kids to therapy, not the other way around.  How do you explain a disability to a kid when you don’t know the reason why yourself?  It really isn’t fair, and knowing like I do that it could have been a lot worse doesn’t make it any better. I’m glad my first instinct this time wasn’t to push down those feelings of being inadequate.

It turns out the disability was a scapegoat for these other feelings of being left out.  We were able to come up with a plan where he’d talk to a friend before going to recess about where he’d be so he could find someone.

I’m not quite a vegetarian.  I still eat meat occasionally, though when I do buy meat I do my best to get happy meat–meat from animals that weren’t raised entirely in a metal box eating the animal equivalent of Soylent Green.

Whether or not you believe that the meat you’re eating really did come from humanely raised, organic feed, free range, grass fed animals, you can’t help but notice that eating happier meat definitely eats away at your grocery budget.  It’s a lot easier and cheaper to go vegetarian.

It’s better for weight loss, too, it turns out.  The vegetarian versions of your favorite meats won’t trick you into thinking they’re the real deal, but some of them are plenty good.

Would've looked better with grilled onions and peppers

Take the Morningstar Farms Italian sausages.  They look reasonably like a sausage, and taste good, too.  And only 120 calories?!? That’s 3 WW Points, for those who are Pointy like me. Heck, I can go crazy and eat it on a bun!

Compare that to a pork Italian sausage, with 286 calories and a whopping 8 Points. Yikes!  Gimme fauxage any day.

Stats

Serving Size:1 link

Servings per Package:4

Calories: 120
Fat: 6 grams
Sodium: 350 mg
Fiber: 1 gram
Protein: 10 grams
WW Points: 3

I was surprised that a blog I follow for healthy kid’s foods wasn’t categorically against vending machines in schools.  In her Healthy Food Ideas for Super Healthy Kids, Amy says she doesn’t oppose putting vending machines in schools because we need to teach kids how to resist temptation and make healthy choices.  She argues that there will always be unhealthy foods, at work, at the autoshop… and our kids need to know how to stay away from it.  We won’t stop obesity by legislating away junk food because it will always be there.

Fortunately, making these choices at school are a long way away for my 6-year old twin boys, because if they had change and there was a vending machine with candy they would so not be making healthy choices.  It would be nice if vending machines even had healthy choices, but they generally don’t.

So no vending machines in elementary schools with Dorito happy 6 year-olds.  I think we’re all ok with that.

But when do we start trusting kids to make healthy choices?  We don’t trust them with the choice to buy cigarettes until they are 18, and alcohol until they are 21.

Now, is junk food analogous to cigarettes and alcohol?  Perhaps more the latter, as it’s possible to drink responsibly and sociably, but it’s more likely to be abused by the young which is why we limit their access to it until they are more responsible.  Drinking a six-pack is more immediately dangerous than eating a box of Ding Dongs (mmmm…. Ding Dongs), but both present serious health dangers over time.

Yes, our kids need to learn how to make healthy choices, but do they have to have these challenges everywhere, including school?  There are plenty of other places where they’ll have to exercise their healthy choice muscles.  Unfortunately, many are already addicted to unhealthy choices, as I was.

What’s your take?

One of the worst things about being fat is the lack of affordable, attractive clothing.  I’ll never forget the sinking feeling I had as a kid when I could no longer get clothes at the “normal” stores.

My only options were Lane Bryant, which wasn’t all that fun back then, and Women’s World.  You’d think a World for large women’s clothing would be, well, larger, but it was a small world, after all.

Shopping for clothes was so miserable I wouldn’t go; instead, my mom would buy clothes, and would return them if they didn’t fit.

As I got older, shopping got easier… and harder.  Plus sizes started showing up at more stores, but their definition of plus sized wasn’t keeping up with me; I was past their limit of size 24.   At my heaviest, I was even pushing the limit of plus sized stores; I needed a wider Avenue.

There were so many great catalogs, though, and I did most of my shopping through catalogs or online.  I didn’t have to go Roaman through stores looking at my Silhouette.

The surprising thing about losing weight was how long I could still wear the same clothes.  But once even the dresses started to look like burquas, it was off to the store.

And then I lost more weight, and it was back to the store again.

And AGAIN.

Now, many of you are saying, what a great problem to have!

Yes, well.  I’m not keeping any clothing around that doesn’t fit, so that means there is a big bag for Goodwill in the bedroom at all times, waiting for more donations.

Do I buy a wardrobe even though I may not be able to wear it in a few months? The expense!

And then there’s the variety.  One thing you didn’t need to worry about at Women’s World was being overwhelmed by the variety.  Now, not only do I have endless numbers of stores to choose from, but an endless variety of clothes in each.  Thrift stores and discount stores are the worst: no two pieces are alike.

I’m just overwhelmed.  I need one of those makeovers.  Or a personal shopper.  Or….. Mom!

It is a good problem to have, but it’s another way losing weight has taken me out of my comfort zone.  I understand better why I’ve relapsed in the past: the changes in my life extend beyond my food and my exercise, but to just about everything I take for granted.

By being conscious of these changes, I can have the courage to face them.  Right?

Now, someone give me courage to face the fall fashions!