Unsafe at Any Size

Huzzah!  I finally got a letter.

The backstory: after losing 110 lbs on Weight Watchers, I’m at a point where I’m feeling happy and healthy.  I’ve met my personal goals for weight loss.  Weight Watchers lets you come for free after you’ve maintained your goal weight for a certain amount of time.  These “lifetime” members get the support from other members for maintaining their weight loss, and can inspire them as they lose their own weight.

There are two ways to become a lifetime member: your weight can be within what the BMI says is healthy, or you can get a letter from your doctor saying a different weight is appropriate for you.

I haven’t lost enough weight to get to the BMI range for my height, and I haven’t after 2.5 years at WW.  I probably could, but I’m happy right where I am.  I’ve made a huge number of lifestyle changes, and at this time don’t feel like making more.

I thought that my regular doctor, who was on Weight Watchers himself and lost weight with the program, would be sympathetic.  But at my annual exam, he argued that based on statistics, people who are in the “normal” BMI range are healthier than those who aren’t.  Even those like me who have good cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. are more likely to hurt themselves when they fall because the weight makes them more top heavy.

Huh?

It’s hard to argue with someone who’s fully clothed when you’re wearing a paper napkin.  And he’s right, statistically speaking.  But there are statistics, and then there are the needs of individuals.  And this individual is DONE!

Fortunately, my gynecologist agreed with me!  At my visit yesterday I told her my plight, and she took mercy.  I now have a letter saying an appropriate weight for me is 170.  I finally feel like I’ve got some agency back!

As great as this news is, it doesn’t mean I can go on lifetime yet.  During my months-long hissy fit, I gained a few lbs I need to lose to get to that 170.  And Weight Watchers has you do 6 weeks on maintenance before you’re officially lifetime.  After that, if you go too high over your goal weight you need to pay.  Now THAT would be motivating for me.

So chocolate chip cookies?  Not interested.  Peanut butter sandwiches?  Nuh uh.  I’m on mission!

I used to depend on those frozen Weight Watchers Smart Ones frozen dinners, but so glad I stopped after reading this Consumerist item about a woman who found a frog in her Smart One fettuccine.  Which of course leads to the question: how many points did the frog add?  Two fried frog legs is 4 points, according to my eTools.  No set points value.  There’s two legs on this frog, but they aren’t fried.  And what about the rest of it?

And what about the frog?  Can’t they survive being frozen?  Perhaps after the woman warmed it up it could just hop on out of there?

All winter long, I love to make soup.  Heck, I eat it in the summer, too!  You get all the veggies as you do from a salad, but there’s no temptation to add high fat nastiness (I love blue cheese and almonds on my salad).

Soup can be easy to make but it does take a little planning.  Here’s my recipe for Butternut Squash Soup.  It is beyond simple, but requires two tools to make it super easy:

A really good peeler.

I use this one:

Messermeister Serrated Peeler

I got it from Sur La Table, but mine is just plain black… who knew it comes in pretty colors?

It is what you need if you want to peel your squash, and I do!  I find it much easier to make squash stuff if you peel it before cooking.  Lots of folks out there like to bake it and then take the peel off, but I find it hard to get the peel off that way.

An immersion blender.

I use this one, but don’t have any particular affection for it other than it works:

Cuisinart Immersion Blender

If you are going to make any creamed soup, an immersion blender is your friend.  You may have a regular blender, but this is worlds better.  No spooning hot soup (because who waits to cool it down) into a blender, blending it and getting hot soup sprayed everywhere because who remembers not to fill it up too much? and then repeating the process over and over until you get the whole batch done.

So, with those tools, I give to you my:

Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients

Onions (yellow or white.  Red would look funny) quantity: how much do you like onions?

1 tsp Olive oil (optional)

Butternut squash (one, two… depending how big they are)

Water

Apple juice (optional)

Salt (optional)

Fresh Sage

Chop the onion and saute under medium heat in a biggish pot until soft (I sometimes skip the sauteing if I’m using my crock pot).

Peel the squash.  Cut open and remove the seeds.  Cut into chunks; smaller cook faster, bigger are faster to cut.

Put the squash in the biggish pot with the onions and add water to cover.  You can add apple juice if you like your soup a bit sweeter, and salt if you like.  If you don’t, it counts as a weight watchers Filling Food/core food.

Cook on high until boiling, then turn down to a simmer.  Cook until the squash is mushy, about 30 minutes.

Add several leaves of the fresh sage, and continue cooking for 10 more minutes.  How much sage?  How much do you like sage?  I like it a lot, so I put in 10-15 leaves in, about half of a package.

Remove from heat and let cool 5 minutes.  Use the immersion blender to turn the chunks of squash and onion into creamy soup.  Add more water if it looks more like baby food than soup.

Voila!  Lots and lots of butternut squash soup.  It freezes well, though the visual appearance gets a little odd… looks stringy, almost.  Ignore it and eat it, as the texture and taste will be the same.

I usually get 16 cups of soup out of this recipe.

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

I knew the news wouldn’t be good today, and sure enough, it wasn’t: gained 2.2 lbs.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat that much Halloween candy; it must magically multiply in my thighs.

But the good news is, I do know what works, and that is tracking.  I haven’t done it consistently for about a year (?!? could it be that long?), and my weight has more or less drifted downward.  But now it’s drifting upwards.  I threw out all the clothes that don’t fit me, so that’s not a direction I want to go.

So thanks to DH Joel who hit me with the “Duh” stick.  Sometimes, it takes the obvious to get unstuck.  I’m back to tracking.

I realized I’m going to have to be a little less hard core when it comes to tracking.  When I was making good progress, I was doing something I called “flore”: eating mostly core foods (now filling foods on Weight Watchers) but counting points, using just my daily points and not eating any activity points or weekly points.

That worked great when I had 28 or 30 daily points, but now that I’m down to 22 daily points, it’s no wonder I found it too restrictive.  The solution is not to give it up altogether, but to do it the way it’s supposed to be: with room for life.  No program that is inflexible is something you can live with.

When you don’t hear from a healthy lifestyle blogger for a while, it’s usually not a good sign.  I’ve fallen off the proverbial wagon, and I’m having trouble getting back up.

I’ve been falling for a while… not tracking points for months and months.  I don’t track when I don’t want to know what I’m eating.  I was kinda making sure things stayed ok… in essence, I was doing Core (or Filling Foods, the newfangled term from Weight Watchers).  When you do Core, you limit your foods to certain foods and then only track the non-core foods.

I was still doing ok, though, drifting slowly down.  But then, they changed the schedule of classes at my local Y.  I had been going three times a week, twice a week to a boot camp class after work and once a week to kickboxing in addition to daily walks.  But the boot camp class moved from 5 pm to 5:30, which meant instead of going directly from work to the class, I would have to drive an additional 15 minutes home to get the kids from after school care and drive back to the Y since their after school care ends at 6:30.

Needless to say, any exercise plan that requires that much extra work (and driving in rush hour traffic) won’t work for long.  Instead of doing a class, I was trying to do some running* and then some hand weights/balance ball exercises.

Then daylight savings time ended, and with it that plan.

As darkness fell on my exercise regime, some people in my house actually went door to door and took the best kind of candy from our neighbors and stored it in big bags in our house.  Then, those people (ok, I should probably call them my children) would ask for it every night, and would very generously let me eat the Milky Ways and peanut butter cups because they were happier eating skittles and other kinds of candy that would definitely have been second or third tier back in MY day.

The good candy is now disposed of (note the crafty use of passive voice here!  Nothing here says that I disposed of it by eating it), but now I’m up a few pounds, without any kind of eating discipline and exercising irregularly.

Normally, a Weight Watchers meeting is a good way for me to get back on track, but last weekend our family celebrated a Bat Mitzvah.  For those who don’t know what a Bat Mitzvah is, it is when a girl turns 13, reads from the Torah (holy scrolls), and then has a big party and gets lots of money.

We skipped the big party, but not the delicious luncheon.  Did you know that restaurants make sandwiches with real crusty freshly-made bread (NOT sandwich thins), chicken, grilled onions (yes, with real olive oil, not Pam) AND with big slabs of brie (no laughing cow)?

It’s true.  Not only did this abomination to Weight Watchers exist, but I ate it.  Not half, the whole thing.   I also ate the chocolate cake with hazelnut whipped cream that came after it.  I would give myself credit for asking for the salad instead of the fries with that sandwich, but that meant I just ate my kids’ instead.

So I’m looking for my resolve.  Have you seen it running around your neighborhood?  Should I put up posters?  Offer a reward?

How do you get back on track?

*For the purposes of this blog, we will call the running-like motion without any appreciable speed running or jogging.  This is to humor the blogger, and by no means is an accurate representation of the activity described.